Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

by Smith, L. Neil

  This morning it was a most fetching pair of kefflar trousers of the style customarily issued to common hands aboard the warships of the various imperia-conglomerate. Loreanna’s chagrin had been mollified by her taste for wearing men’s clothing—which she liked chiefly for the freedom of movement it engendered, and which, like many another woman of strong character, she seized upon every possible excuse to indulge. He smiled inwardly, reflecting upon their experiences together over the past decade and a half. For some reason, what Loreanna had decided to call “The Adventure of the Komanian Monorail” came to mind this morning, perhaps because of what had transpired afterward. If he recalled correctly, that was when their second eldest child had been conceived.

  Even now, he could contemplate the moment with considerable satisfaction. Still, a part of him had been listening to her all along—a skill particular to married men—and following her line of thought perfectly. “I do believe that I know you better than that, my dear, speaking of ‘an adventurous turn of personality’ and ‘as curious as a youth.’ I think me that the gravest danger would lie in attempting to keep you out of it, were I foolish enough to essay it.”

  They laughed, Arran’s laughter being shut off a trifle prematurely by a yawn. Although it was not the first such sleepless episode in his life, his present view was jaundiced to a slight degree by the seemingly endless night he had spent alone in the ringlit tower room. Moment by moment, he had to struggle a bit to keep from being cross with her for no reason she was guilty of.

  “Triskelling off.” Arran shrugged now, and shook his head. “Be that as it may, what it actually amounts to, I’m afraid—this laundry list of highly dubious qualities which you impute to me and Phoebus—is next to nothing.” He sipped at his cup and smiled pleasantly as a young servant girl appeared at the head of the spiral staircase, bearing the main portion of their breakfast upon a polished steel tray. Arran remembered clearly when her father had been that young, a fieldhand who had stepped upon the sharp and poisonous tail of a glass lizard and still limped upon that foot to this very day, lucky to be alive.

  “Thank you, Evvie; that will be all, I think,” Loreanna told the girl, who curtsied and returned downstairs. Loreanna turned to her husband. “How so?”

  Choosing the cup-mounted, soft-boiled egg of a common domesticated Skyan waterfowl—the heart-shaped delicacy was the size of both his fists clenched together—along with several slices of shrub-buttered toast, Arran glanced up at his wife, who was busying herself replenishing his cup. “Well, to begin with, my dear, let us consider the case of our good friend and trusted comrade Phoebus Krumm, who at the time of his boyhood—according to the man’s own telling of the affair—was nothing more than a humble and ignorant baker’s apprentice.”

  “ ‘Nothing more’?” Loreanna had taken an egg and toast of her own off the tray and was pouring herself another cup of stimulant. “That scarcely sounds like Phoebus—or you, my dear, for that matter. Does the galaxy not require bakers’ apprentices just as badly as it requires ships’ captains and Drectors-Hereditary?”

  Arran was about to deliver a retort, when he noticed the mischief in her eye.

  She paused, grinning. “I know the story well.”

  “So you do.” Arran laughed.

  For years the mighty Krumm, along with his plump wives Tula and Tillie, had been a frequent and very welcome guest at the Holdings-upon-Skye. Arran’s old first officer had never been averse to recounting his manifold and varied experiences of life to the invariable delight of the Islay children, who by now knew each of his stories by heart, and could recite them with him, word for word.

  “So do we all, my dear, right down to your three-year-old namesake. So there he was, me hearties, our young worthy Krumm, commendably at work already in the cool, quiet twilight hours before dawn, innocently mixing and kneading and baking away—when along came that rare planetary ‘recruiting’ raid which the Oplyte slavers were carrying out upon the densely settled surface of his homeworld.

  “And a very foolish raid it proved to be,” Loreanna nodded solemnly and tried her best to imitate their friend’s distinctive voice, “in which Phoebus narrowly escaped becoming a mindless warrior-slave himself, by the grace alone of an enormous, razor-sharp oven implement referred to as a ‘peel,’ with which he beheaded no fewer than thirteen—a literal ‘baker’s dozen’—of their evil number.”

  Arran guffawed. “You tell the story remarkably well, my dear—and so much more succinctly than Phoebus has ever managed to do. Nonetheless, he was only my first example. Let us move on to consider the case of my own late father—”

  “The celebrated war hero, Robret Islay.”

  Arran understood his wife and knew that she meant this literally, without the slightest hint of sarcasm or disrespect. She had never known the man, but was closely acquainted with hundreds upon Skye who had. To the common people of the planet, who could be somewhat naive with regard to the intricacies of interstellar cartography and politics, Robret had begun as nothing more than another of a long series of Hanoverian conquerors. That the man had somehow won the heart of the rebel woods-runners’ most famous beauty nevertheless, had been sufficient to make him a legend in his own time. That he had, in the end, willingly sacrificed his own life for the sake of a light-handed and intelligent governance of this world had transformed him into its most beloved hero.

  “The same,” Arran answered, “whose alacrity and valor during an otherwise obscure war earned for him—and his family—the hereditary Drectorship of our beloved moonringed planet Skye. No more than a humble, noncommissioned conscript, with aristocratic officers dead and dying all round him, he seized the battlefield command of an entire regiment of Oplyte warriors and won the day.”

  Loreanna nodded, understanding. One of the aristocratic officers Robret had saved that day had become, by turns, his best friend, then, as the Black Usurper, the betrayer of his life. This story, too, was one that she knew well.

  Arran continued. “And yet, alas, entirely unlike the title he bequeathed to me, whatever my father’s knowledge was, of the bizarre creatures we know as Oplytes, it was by no means hereditary. Alas, too, like a great many ‘citizen soldiers’ of his day, he had not been much enamored of fighting when he was in the thick of it—in fact, he had despised it as thoroughly as it is possible to do, wishing only that it would end—and cared even less to speak of his wartime experience after he had survived it. Also, I believe that he greatly feared recounting it might encourage his three sons to follow the drums of war themselves, or, at the very least, be perceived as unseemly boasting upon his part.”

  Loreanna observed her husband closely as, with an apparent frown lowering his brow, he peeled the shell from his egg and began to eat it with the toast. “Your father, my darling, was a man of peace. You speak, somehow, as if you disapprove.”

  A rueful Arran reflected upon her words: “Not at all. For one thing, he could acquit himself remarkably well in combat, if he saw the need for it, as he proved upon more than one occasion. ‘Each to his own’ is the proper order of things. My father simply happened to have been endowed with a different range of interests and aptitudes than I. For one thing, he actually liked farming.”

  Loreanna grinned. She knew her husband. Arran liked to watch others farming.

  He went on. “It was, apparently, by the merest of chances that I happen to be well suited to combat and excel at it. I began with no greater choice in the matter than my father had. But for the most part—and upon the most honest of self-examination—I confess that I rather enjoy it. As you know, I have trained each of my children to fight in turn, and I am by no means ever reluctant to discourse upon the subject at length and detail with the proper individual.”

  She nodded. “You taught me to fight.”

  “Upon the contrary, Loreanna my love, I only taught you the way to fight more efficiently. When I first laid eyes upon you, you already possessed the rarest and most requisite quality of fighting, a game will
ingness. For my own part, I think me that I have missed a good fight in a righteous cause and might well benefit from a return to the rigors and discipline of shipboard life.”

  “What?” In truth, it came as no surprise to her. She had been expecting something like this for several weeks. She turned now, so as to display her figure—in flattering profile. “And leave all the comforts of home behind?”

  With a dramatically lecherous flamboyance, he laid a hand upon her thigh. “Upon the contrary, medear. Like many another intelligent ship’s master, I should contrive to take all the comforts of home with me!” His expression suddenly grew serious. “And yet now we must force ourselves, no matter how delightful our present ruminations, to return to the original subject of our conversation.”

  “Which was what? I quite forgot, the moment you placed your hand upon my thigh.”

  He cleared his throat, not daring to reply to her remark, out of fear of further digression. “Which was that, if anything, what old Phoebus managed to achieve was to avoid learning as much as he might have about Oplytes. And while it is true that Oplyte warrior-slaves were once used in moderate numbers here upon Skye, with one notable exception—when I killed an Oplyte myself by thrusting it in its eye with that ancient cartridge pistol of yours—mostly what I managed to be was elsewhere during that unfortunate period of time.”

  This had been during the short-lived but terrible occupation of Skye by the old Ceo’s vile surrogate, Tarbert Morven. Even after all these years, Arran shuddered as he thought about the man—who had once been his father’s best friend—remembered afterward in Skyan song and story as the Black Usurper.

  “A wise choice it was.” Loreanna had seen the cloud passing momentarily across her husband’s visage. She had not corrected him when he had claimed never to be reluctant to discuss his war experiences. No one knew better than she of the menacing void his storytelling to the children left unbridged. He was coming uncommonly close to speaking with satisfaction of achievements that his memory of the deaths of four hundred innocent individuals tarnished so badly. This couldn’t last, she knew, although she hoped it would. “Besides, you were busy at the time, as I remember, raiding planets, robbing ships, kidnaping and ravishing me, and generally becoming known to the galaxy as the infamous Henry Martyn.”

  He blushed. “Girl, you are the absolute death of any dignity to which I aspire.”

  “Pray, Arran Islay, when did you begin aspiring to anything resembling dignity?”

  “Ah, madame, again ye’ve sighted in upon the only imperfection in me argument.”

  For a while they sat steeped in a warm, comfortable silence, enjoying the uncharacteristically brilliant Skyan morning and each other’s welcome and familiar presence. For her part, she was happy to have diverted their morning conversation from a topic that might have spoiled it, and the morning with it. Meanwhile, Arran never ceased to be astonished at how much he loved the woman sitting across from him, or at the astonishing fact that she loved him, as well.

  Some individuals in a state of acceptable mental and spiritual health (he often told himself with what he hoped was an objective comprehension) actually enjoyed combat. And yet, for the sake of civilization itself, he understood that it was vital to avoid one temptation almost invariably associated with war. As a ship’s captain, this truth was underlined for him by the fact that even the most technologized warfare usually turns out to be a labor-intensive undertaking.

  Such “individuals in a state of acceptable mental and spiritual health” must at all costs be prevented from involving involuntary others in their struggles. He himself would never conscript or press-gang another person as long as he lived—and he would willingly kill to prevent anybody else from doing it.

  “At any rate,” he told Loreanna, returning to the original topic, “in the end, the notorious villain who blighted our lovely world with the presence of Oplytes (not to mention his own) died at the bloody hands of his own warriors, along with his evil, incestuous, and inhumanly beautiful daughter, Alysabeth.” Like his own middle brother Donol, Arran had long suspected, that traitorous wretch of vile reputation. He had a long-standing wager with himself that this was due—and well justified—to the many unspeakable mortal outrages Donol had inflicted upon Mistress Lia Woodgate during her captivity here, although she always declined to discuss the matter with him, as who would not in her place?

  “Your point, sir?”

  “Merely a question: how familiar does one have to be with Oplytes to understand them? Certainly more familiar than either Phoebus or I can claim to be. And whatever understanding Morven had did him but little good in the end.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it, recognizing by the gesture that he would require a nap later that day. Momentarily forgetting his sleepless night, the idea of requiring an afternoon nap suddenly made him feel rather old.

  “But I am remiss, my dear. Lia had another reason for having sent this urgent message of hers from the ’Droom to Skye, and we have scarcely discussed it.”

  CHAPTER XII:

  RUMINATIONS UNDER GLASS

  Their breakfast dishes had long since been cleared and a final cup of stimulant infusion consumed, but the Islay family conference was far from concluded.

  Spread before him upon the transparent top of the table at which they sat lay Arran’s favorite pair of thrustibles—rather the parts of which they had been constructed. Unlike the highly antiquated internal-combustion device—a love-gift from her husband—upon which Loreanna was accustomed to relying for self-protection, Arran’s weapons, almost a millennium more recent in their design and manufacture, contained not one moving part, depending, as they did, upon the subtle interplay of the principles of §-physics. Nevertheless, they did acquire dust and grease from their environment which could severely impair their deadly function, and it was this that their owner was in the midst of removing.

  He had offered to clean her pistol, as well, the ancient walther modell pp twentytwo he had restored as a boyhood project and intended as a present, ironically enough, for Lia, upon her wedding to his brother, Robret. However history, as it will, had had its own way with his intentions. The wedding had been interrupted by the Black Usurpation and Arran had taken the little pistol with him—having killed with it an Oplyte who had seized him—when he and his two brothers had made good their escape. In the end, he had given it to Loreanna; with it, she had saved their lives and liberty upon more than one occasion.

  Loreanna sniffed at what she maintained was a double insult: that her weapon was not preserved at all times in an immaculately perfect state; and that she was incapable of preserving it in that state, by herself. The truth, she knew perfectly well, was that Arran’s weapons were always well maintained as well. It was just that their moment for talking was all but over, and the time for forward motion of some kind was nearly upon them. This last-minute tidiness was simply his way of conveying those truths to her, as well as to himself.

  Arran, upon his part, was thinking that if there happened to be a limit to how many times an autothille could be used, they would discover it within the next few times this particular specimen was replayed. His thoughts, he believed, should be upon the ordinary business of the Holdings this morning, especially if he were to be called away upon the Ceo’s service. Yet he stayed beside his wife, comforting her, and attempting to decide what was best to be done.

  “The Ceo Lias dear friend Loreanna Islay,” the official portion of the autoenthilled message continued as they watched it once again together, “will certainly wish to be advised and informed that her long-lost mother, the Lady Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson, has recently come forth and identified herself. It is likewise presumed that Loreanna will also be interested to learn that she has an unexpected, fully grown half brother, known only by the name of ‘Woulf.’ ”

  The grip that Loreanna took upon her husband’s hand—interrupting his unnecessary busywork—was not a whit less forceful than the first time they had let this autothille
play its message. Arran knew well that the loss of his wife’s mother at an early age had indelibly marked her life, although she had gracefully risen above whatever spiritual damage it might have done to any individual who customarily exhibited less moral character than she.

  “I appreciate the compliment you pay me, darling,” Loreanna replied once her husband had spoken this thought, “And yet, even if it is true—however commendable it may be—it does not help me feel the loss any less, I greatly fear.”

  He nodded his understanding, having lost his own mother at an early age and suffered accordingly. “And to be precipitously informed of a sibling, when one has grown up as an only child, must surely be one of life’s greater surprises.”

  “In truth, it scarcely feels real to me. Why should it? I know nothing more at the moment than the naked fact of it and—speak of surprises—have not quite absorbed the news that my mother lives.” She turned to embrace her husband, sighing (not in an unhappy way) into his shoulder. “Yet life itself—as anyone with more than half of an occasion to associate with the Islay family quickly discovers—seems often to consist of nothing but surprises! I say, does not that interociter coil, there, belong in your other thrustible, dearest?”

  Arran laughed. “My darling, you are far from the first to stumble upon this singular phenomenon—I mean with regard to those who associate with my family. You know that, as a younger woman, originally hired merely as the family tutor, Mistress Lia Woodgate was at one time happily affianced to my eldest brother, Robret fils. This, of course, was long before she was unexpectedly named by her father, Leupould IX of notorious memory, to succeed him—”

  Loreanna nodded. “His still-mysterious abdication having been equally unexpected . . .”

  “—as the mightiest ruler in the Known Universe, Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover. From the outset, the relationship between Lia and Robret appeared to everyone to be serious, and passionate into the bargain, at least upon her part.”