Flandry of Terra df-6 Read online

  “The name I know him by is A’u,” said Flandry. “He isn’t human. He can breathe water as well as air-I suppose his home planet must be pretty wet, though I don’t know where it is. But it’s somewhere in the Merseian Empire, and he, like me, belongs to the second oldest profession. We’ve played games before now. I flushed him on Conjumar two Earth-years ago: my boys cleaned up his headquarters, and his personal spaceship took a near miss that left it lame and radioactive. But he got away. Not home, his ship wasn’t in that good a condition, but away.”

  Flandry trickled smoke sensuously through his nostrils. It might be the last time. “On the basis of what I’ve seen here, I’m now certain that friend A’u made for Nyanza, ditched, contacted some of your malcontents, and started cooking revolution. The whole business has his signature, with flourishes. If nothing else, a Nyanzan uprising and Merseian intervention would get him passage home; and he might have inflicted a major defeat on Terra in the process.”

  A mumbling went through the crewfolk, wrath which was half terror. “Sic semper local patriots,” finished Flandry. “I want to be ruddy damn sure of getting A’u, and he has a whole ocean bottom to hide on if he’s alarmed, and we’ll be too busy setting traps for the Merseian gunrunners due next week to play tag for very long. Otherwise I’d certainly have waited till we could bring a larger force.”

  “Thirty men ‘gainst one poor hunted creature?” scoffed Tessa.

  “He’s a kind of big creature,” said Flandry quietly to her.

  He looked at his followers, beautiful and black in the sunlight, with a thousand hues of blue at their backs, a low little wind touching bare skins, and the clean male shapes of weapons. It was too fair a world to gamble down in dead Uhunhu. Flandry knew with wry precision why he was leading this chase-not for courage, nor glory, nor even one more exploit to embroider for some high-prowed yellow-haired bit of Terran fluff. He went because he was an Imperial and if he stayed behind the colonials would laugh at him.

  Therefore he took one more drag of smoke, flipped his cigaret parabolically overboard, and murmured: “Be good, Tessa, and I’ll bring you back a lollipop. Let’s go chilluns.”

  And snapped down his helmet and dove cleanly over the side.

  The water became a world. Overhead was an area of sundazzle, too bright to look on; elsewhere lay cool dusk fading downward into night. The submarine was a basking whale shape… too bad he couldn’t just take it down and torpedo A’u, but an unpleasant session with a man arrested in Altla had told him better-A’u expected to be approached only by swimming men. The roof of sunlight grew smaller as he drove himself toward the bottom, until it was a tiny blinding star and then nothing. There was a silken sense of his own steadily rippling muscles and the sea that slid past them, the growing chill stirred his blood in its million channels, a glance behind showed his bubble-stream like a trail of argent planets, his followers were black lightning bolts through an utterly quiet green twilight. O God, to be a seal!

  Dimly now, the weed-grown steeps of Uhunhu rose beneath him, monstrous gray dolmens and menhirs raised by no human hands, sunken a million years ago… A centuries-drowned ship, the embryo of a new reef ten millennia hence, with a few skulls strewn for fish to nest in, was shockingly raw and new under the leaning walls. Flandry passed it in the silence of a dream.

  He did not break that quietude, though his helmet bore voice apparatus. If A’u was still here, A’u must not be alarmed by orders to fan out in a search pattern. Flandry soared close enough to Derek to nod, and the giant waved hands and feet in signals understood by the men. Presently Flandry and Derek were alone in what might once have been a street or perhaps a corridor.

  They glided among toppling enormities; now and then one of denser shadow, but it was only a rock or a decapus or a jawbone the size of a portal. Flandry began to feel the cold, deeper than his skin, almost deeper than the silence.

  A hand clamped bruisingly on his wrist. He churned to a halt and hung there, head cocked, until the sound that Derek had dimly caught was borne past vibrator and ocean and receiver to his own ears. It was the screaming of a man being killed, but so far and faint it might have been the death agony of a gnat.

  Flandry blasphemed eighteen separate gods, kicked himself into motion, and went like a hunting eel through Uhunhu. But Derek passed him and he was almost the last man to reach the fight.

  “A’u,” he said aloud, uselessly, through the bawl of men and the roil of bloodied waters. He remembered the harpoon rifle slung across his shoulders, unlimbered it, checked the magazine, and wriggled close. Thirty men-no, twenty-nine at the most. A corpse bobbed past, wildly staring through a helmet cracked open-twenty-eight men swirled about one monster. Flandry did not want to hit any of them.

  He swam upward, until he looked down on A’u. The great black shape had torpedoed from a dolmen. Fifteen meters long, the wrinkled leather skin of some Arctic golem, the gape of a whale and the boneless arms of an elephant… but with hands, with hands… A’u raged among his hunters. Flandry saw how the legs which served him on land gripped two men in the talons and plucked their limbs off. There was no sound made by the monster’s throat, but the puny human jabber was smashed by each flat concussion of the flukes, as if bombs burst.

  Flandry nestled the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Recoil sent him backward, end over end. He did not know if his harpoon had joined the score in A’u’s tormented flanks. It had to be this way, he thought, explosives would kill the men too under sea pressure and… Blood spurted from a transfixed huge hand. A’u got his back against a monolith, arched his tail, and shot toward the surface. Men sprayed from him like bow water.

  Flandry snapped his legs and streaked to meet the thing. The white belly turned toward him, a cliff, a cloud, a dream. He fired once and saw his harpoon bite. Once more! A’u bent double in anguish, spoke blood, somehow sensed the man and plunged at him. Flandry looked down a cave of horrible teeth. He looked into the eyes behind; they were blind with despair. He tried to scramble aside. A’u changed course with a snake’s ease. Flandry had a moment to wonder if A’u knew him again.

  A man flew from the blood-fog. He fired a harpoon, holding himself steady against its back-thrust. Instead of letting the line trail, to tangle the beast, he grabbed it, was pulled up almost to the side. The gills snapped at him like mouths. He followed the monster, turn for turn through cold deeps, as he sought aim. Finally he shot. An eye went out. A brain was cloven. A’u turned over and died.

  Flandry gasped after breath. His helmet rang and buzzed, it was stifling him, he must snatch it off before he choked… Hands caught him. He looked into the victory which was Derek Umbolu’s face.

  “Wait there, wait, Terra man,” said a remote godlike calm. “All is done now.”

  “I, I, I, thanks!” rattled Flandry.

  His wind came back to him. He counted the men that gathered, while they rose with all due slowness toward the sun. Six were dead. Cheap enough to get rid of A’u.

  If I had been cast away, alone, on the entire world of a hideous race… I wonder if I would have had the courage to survive this long.

  I wonder if there are some small cubs, on a water planet deep among the Merseian stars, who can’t understand why father hasn’t come home.

  He climbed on deck at last, threw back his helmet and sat down under Tessa Hoorn’s anxious gaze. “Give me a cigarette,” he said harshly. “And break out something alcoholic.”

  She wrestled herself to steadiness. “Caught you the monster?” she asked.

  “Aye,” said Derek.

  “We close to didn’t,” said Flandry. “Our boy Umbolu gets the credit.”

  “Small enough vengeance for my father,” said the flat voice of sorrow.

  The submarine’s captain saluted the pale man who sat hugging his knees, shivering and drinking smoke. “Word just came in from Rossala, sir,” he reported. “The Sheikh has yielded, though he swears he’ll protest the outrage to the next Imperial resident. But he’ll
let the constables occupy his realm and search as they wish.”

  Search for a number of earnest, well-intentioned young patriots, who’ll never again see morning over broad waters. Well-I suppose it all serves the larger good. It must. Our noble homosexual Emperor says so himself.

  “Excellent,” said Flandry. His glance sought Derek. “Since you saved my life, you’ve got a reward coming. Your father.”

  “Hoy?” The big young man trod backward a step.

  “He isn’t dead,” said Flandry. “I talked him into helping me. We faked an assassination. He’s probably at home this minute, suffering from an acute case of conscience.”

  “What?” The roar was like hell’s gates breaking down.

  Flandry winced. “Pianissimo, please.” He waved the snarling, fist-clenching bulk back with his cigarette. “All right, I played a trick on you.”

  “A trick I could have ‘waited from a filthy Impy!” Tessa Hoorn spat at his feet.

  “Touch me, brother Umbolu, and I’ll arrest you for treason,” said Flandry. “Otherwise I’ll exercise my discretionary powers and put you on lifetime probation in the custody of some responsible citizen.” He grinned wearily. “I think the Lightmistress of Little Skua qualifies.”

  Derek and Tessa stared at him, and at each other.

  Flandry stood up. “Probation is conditional on your getting married,” he went on. “I recommend that in choosing a suitable female you look past that noble self-righteousness, stop considering the trivium that she can give you some money, and consider all that you might give her.” He glanced at them, saw that their hands were suddenly linked together, and had a brief, private, profane conversation with the Norn of his personal destiny. “That includes heirs,” he finished. “I’d like to have Nyanza well populated. When the Long Night comes for Terra, somebody will have to carry on. It might as well be you.”

  He walked past them, into the cabin, to get away from all the dark young eyes.

  A Message in Secret

  I

  Seen on approach, against crystal darkness and stars crowded into foreign constellations, Altai was beautiful. More than half the northern hemisphere, somewhat less in the south, was polar cap. Snowfields were tinged rosy by the sun Krasna; naked ice shimmered blue and cold green. The tropical belt, steppe and tundra, which covered the remainder, shaded from bronze to tarnished gold, here and there the quicksilver flash of a big lake. Altai was ringed like Saturn, a tawny hoop with subtle rainbow iridescence flung spinning around the equator, three radii out in space. And beyond were two copper-coin moons.

  Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, field agent, Naval Intelligence Corps of the Terrestrial Empire, pulled his gaze reluctantly back to the spaceship’s bridge. “I see where its name came from,” he remarked. Altai meant Golden in the language of the planet’s human colonists; or so the Betelgeusean trader who passed on his knowledge electronically to Flandry had insisted. “But Krasna is a misnomer for the sun. It isn’t really red to the human eye. Not nearly as much as your star, for instance. More of an orange-yellow, I’d say.”

  The blue visage of Zalat, skipper of the battered merchant vessel, twisted into the grimace which was his race’s equivalent of a shrug. He was moderately humanoid, though only half as tall as a man, stout, hairless, clad in a metal mesh tunic. “I zuppoze it was de, you zay, contrazt.” He spoke Terrestrial Anglic with a thick accent, as if to show that the independence of the Betelgeusean System-buffer state between the hostile realms of Terra and Merseia-did not mean isolation from the mainstream of interstellar culture.

  Flandry would rather have practiced his Altaian, especially since Zalat’s Anglic vocabulary was so small so to limit conversation to platitudes. But he deferred. As the sole passenger on this ship, of alien species at that, with correspondingly special requirements in diet, he depended on the captain’s good will. Also, the Betelgeuseans took him at face value. Officially, he was only being sent to re-establish contact between Altai and the rest of mankind. Officially, his mission was so minor that Terra didn’t even give him a ship of his own, but left him to negotiate passage as best he might… So, let Zalat chatter.

  “After all,” continued the master, “Altai was firzt colonized more dan zeven hoondert Terra-years a-pazt: in de verry dawn, you say, of in-terztellar travel. Little was known about w’at to eggzpect. Krazna muzt have been deprezzingly cold and red, after Zol. Now-to-days, we have more aztronautical zophiztication.”

  Flandry looked to the blaze of space, stars and stars and stars. He thought that an estimated four million of them, included in that vague sphere called the Terrestrial Empire, was an insignificant portion of this one spiral arm of this one commonplace galaxy. Even if you added the other empires, the sovereign suns like Betelgeuse, the reports of a few explorers who had gone extremely far in the old days, that part of the universe known to man was terrifyingly small. And it would always remain so.

  “Just how often do you come here?” he asked, largely to drown out silence.

  “About onze a Terra-year,” answered Zalat. “However, dere is ot’er merchantz on dis route. I have de fur trade, but Altai alzo produzes gemz, mineralz, hides, variouz organic productz, even dried meatz, w’ich are in zome demand at home. Zo dere is usually a Betelgeusean zhip or two at Ulan Baligh.”

  “Will you be here long?”

  “I hope not. It iz a tediouz plaze for a non-human. One pleasure houze for uz haz been eztab-lizhed, but-” Zalat made another face. “Wid de dizturbanzez going on, fur trapping and caravanz have been much hampered. Lazt time I had to wait a ztandard mont’ for a full cargo. Diz time may be worze.”

  Oh-oh, thought Flandry. But he merely asked aloud: “Since the metals and machinery you bring in exchange are so valuable, I wonder why some Altaians don’t acquire spaceships of their own and start trading.”

  “Dey have not dat kind of zivilization,” Zalat replied. “Remember, our people have been coming here for lezz dan a zentury. Before den Altai was izolated, onze de original zhipz had been worn out. Dere was never zo great an interest among dem in re-eztablizhing galactic contact az would overcome de handicap of poverty in metalz w’ich would have made zpazezship building eggzpenzive for dem. By now, might-be, zome of de younger Altaian malez have zome wizh for zuch an enterprize. But lately de Kha Khan has forbidden any of his zubjectz from leaving de planet, eggzept zome truzted and verry cloze-mout’ perzonal reprezentatives in de Betelgeu-zean Zyztem. Dis prohibition is might-be one reazon for de inzurrectionz.”

  “Yeh.” Flandry gave the ice fields a hard look. “If it were my planet, I think I’d look around for an enemy to sell it to.”

  And still I’m going there, he thought. Talk about your unsung heroes! Though I suppose, the more the Empire cracks and crumbles, the more frantically a few of us have to scurry around patching it. Or else the Long Night could come in our own sacrosanct lifetimes.

  And in this particular instance, his mind ran on, I have reason to believe that an enemy is trying to buy the planet.

  II

  Where the Zeya and the Talyma, broad shallow rivers winding southward over the steppes from polar snows, met at Ozero Rurik, the city named Ulan Baligh was long ago founded. It had never been large, and now the only permanent human settlement on Altai had perhaps 20,000 residents. But there was always a ring of encampments around it, tribesmen come to trade or confer or hold rites in the Prophet’s Tower. Their tents and trunks walled the landward side of Ulan Baligh, spilled around the primitive spaceport, and raised campfire smoke for many kilometers along the indigo lakeshore.

  As the spaceship descended, Captain Flandry was more interested in something less picturesque. Through a magnifying viewport in the after turret, to which he had bribed his way, he saw that monorail tracks encircled the city like spider strands; that unmistakable launchers for heavy missiles squatted on them; that some highly efficient modern military aircraft lazed on grav repulsors in the sky; that barracks and emplacements for an armored brigade were und
er construction to the west, numerous tanks and beetlecars already prowling on guard; that a squat building in the center of town must house a negagrav generator powerful enough to shield the entire urban area.

  That all of this was new.

  That none of it came from any factories controlled by Terra.

  “But quite probably from our little green chums,” he murmured to himself. “A Merseian base here, in the buffer region, outflanking us at Catawrayannis… Well, it wouldn’t be decisive in itself, but it would strengthen their hand quite a bit. And eventually, when their hand looks strong enough, they’re going to fight.”

  He suppressed a tinge of bitterness at his own people, too rich to spend treasure in an open attack on the menace-most of them, even, denying that any menace existed, for what would dare break the Pax Terrestria? After all, he thought wryly, he enjoyed his furloughs Home precisely because Terra was decadent.

  But for now, there was work at hand. Intelligence had collected hints in the Betelgeuse region: traders spoke of curious goings-on at some place named Altai; the archives mentioned a colony far off the regular space lanes, not so much lost as overlooked; inquiry produced little more than this, for Betelgeusean civilians like Zalat had no interest in Altaian affairs beyond the current price of angora pelts.

  A proper investigation would have required some hundreds of men and several months. Being spread horribly thin over far too many stars, Intelligence was able to ship just one man to Betelgeuse. At the Terran Embassy, Flandry received a slim dossier, a stingy expense account, and orders to find what the devil was behind all this. After which, overworked men and machines forgot about him. They would remember when he reported back, or if he died in some spectacular fashion; otherwise, Altai might well lie obscure for another decade.

  Which could be a trifle too long, Flandry thought.