Tarrant nodded. “You see, now, Princess, why I wished to show you this hologram of my little ship, so that you might have some reason to believe that I have been telling you the truth, as many another individual has not, to my dismay. Despite appearances, her basic operating principle is not dissimilar from that of our vessels. She surrounds herself with a §-field, as our ships do—”
Bretta nodded. “In order to cancel her inertia, that aspect of her mass which prevents her traveling faster than light. And in order to compensate,” the starsailor within Bretta continued, almost automatically, “for some of the more inconvenient side effects of vile Relativity. Believe me, Father made sure that I was well acquainted with that all-important principle at a very early age. I know of an alien race, Hanebuth, the nacyl, who have ships like this one, although they look rather more like bananoids, I think, than boomerangs.”
To Tarrant’s obvious astonishment, and unlike anyone else he had told his tale to, she had believed him at once, without need for further evidence or persuasion. It was only another step to believe in an entire civilization that traveled about in ships without sails. And why should she not believe him, knowing, as she did, of her father’s friends the nacyl and their speedy vessels?
Nevertheless, Bretta was almost impossibly grateful that he had brought her this picture to look at. At this particular moment of her life, she felt the need of something beautiful to contemplate, and with all due respect and gratitude, it was neither Tarrant nor his friends. Nor was she likely to find it, just now, in any mirror. Of a sudden, she felt herself becoming strangely excited. She adored sailing vessels, but this was something novel, something perhaps more personal. No wonder Tarrant had come to prefer these magical vessels of the Coordinated Arm. She wondered what the larger ones could be like.
“Indeed, Princess. She was given the name—although not by me—of a little predatory bird that can accomplish some highly unusual maneuvers in the air. Or could; it is most likely extinct by now, having died with ancient Earth. What made Windhover different from the sail-driven vessels of what we Hanoverians smugly refer to as the Known Deep—indeed, what makes all of the starships of the Coordinated Arm different—is that, instead of awaiting the whims of the tachyon currents of the Deep, she generated her own stream of tachyons—”
“Action and reaction—Newton’s Third Law—like a child’s balloon, blown up but not tied off, and released from the fingers so as to blast its noisy way about the room!” The idea had flashed instantly through her mind. “Rather like a steam launch, except that it uses particles instead of whole molecules. Tachyons come out of these aftersurfaces, right here, do they not?”
With a nod, she indicated the flat, upright portions of the starship’s wings.
“You’re passably quick, Princess. If I don’t mistake myself, I’ve seen your like but once before. I trust you’ll not take it amiss if I say, from the first, despite any difference in age or appearance, that you’ve reminded me of Anastasia Wheeler. And you’re quite correct. Windhover drove herself along at many multiples of the best speed our poor tachyon-jammers are capable of. The arduous journey that took more than three years of our lives aboard the Lion required less than three weeks to retrace aboard my swift little vessel.”
“Hooray!” Bretta’s outburst was entirely spontaneous, for Tarrant as much as for the Windhover. Here was a little man—or perhaps a not-so-little man—who apparently thought nothing much of sailing the radius of the galaxy, alone. His ardor for his late, lamented vessel was catching. He must have loved her greatly, as who could resist doing, simply laying eyes upon her?
Even now, he laid an affectionate finger upon her image in the hologram. “She was a racer when I purchased her, which accounts for her pleasing shape. She was designed for the pleasure of her turn of speed alone, and for nothing nobler or more significant than an afternoon of galloping out to the Centauris and back again, over and over, endlessly, in lovely little nine-light-year loops.”
Bretta raised a skeptical eyebrow. It was one of the few gestures that she was presently capable of making. “People do that in the Coordinated Arm?”
Tarrant laughed and nodded with the remembrance of a better time in his life. “With a war on, and all, do you mean? Indeed they do, upon Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, Princess. It is an extremely popular pastime for both participants and spectators. They also race genetically reconstructed horses upon the grassy maria and shoot metallic game silhouettes with pistols at a thousand paces.
“But we were speaking of the Windhover, were we not? Naturally, her winglike architecture had nothing to do with flying. It provided long-armed leverage for tight turns demanded by the course. I’ve seen three- and four-winged racers, but they’re obsolete, the general experience being that they cannot be manufactured lightly enough—that’s not quite correct, but it’ll do—to take full advantage of newly improved propulsive systems. A matter, I’m reliably informed, of the squares not being able to keep up with the cubes.”
Intense as it had been, Bretta’s concentration suddenly doubled as she completed a logical connection she felt she should have made minutes ago. “Tell me all you can of her propulsive system Hanebuth, and I mean all about it.”
He grinned. “It cannot be seen in this picture without an instrument I no longer have—perhaps I can find a magnifying glass for you this afternoon if you desire—but, as I told you earlier, your surmise was right. These aftersurfaces here were covered edge to edge with powerful tachyon-generating cells.”
Bretta leaned forward. “Now tell me all about the lethal radiation these things shower upon their unlucky crewbeings, or spew behind them in their grim wakes. Why is their use tolerated? I have it upon the best of authority that strong men will sicken and expire horribly from only a few hours’ exposure to them.”
He blinked. Bretta knew he must have expected many an ardent question from her with regard to his little ship—indeed, he had finally grown almost accustomed to her curiosity about technical subjects—but never one such as this.
He shook his head in a continuous denial. “Why, none whatever that I am aware of, Princess. Believe me, I have logged hundreds of thousands of hours aboard such vessels. Of course the §-field boundary is instantaneously lethal whenever it is intersected—which happens to be the case with any vessel capable of interstellar flight—but that is much less of a difficulty with this sort, where both pilot and passengers remain safely within a protective hull.”
But instead of satisfying her curiosity, all of Tarrant’s reassurances only encouraged Bretta to press her victim the harder—and by his puzzled expression, unaccountably—for a considerably different sort of information than he had apparently believed she would be eager to receive regarding the Windhover.
She realized that by now she must appear very nearly hysterical to the poor bemused fellow, but she had the most excellent of reasons for it, and there was so much at stake—provided, of course, that she ever managed to return home. “I want to know, Hanebuth—I desperately need to know—about deadly emanations of a variety possibly never heard of before within the Monopolity.”
He shrugged helplessly. “How can I tell you of something I know nothing about?”
“I’ve recently met a whole planetful of people whom that would not deter in the least.” Without any further hesitation, Bretta told Tarrant everything that she had ever managed to learn about the alien energies that her unhappy father believed responsible for killing his twentyscore of pressganged Jendyne naval cadets.
Having absented himself from the Monopolity, indeed from all of the Known Deep, for several decades, her new confidant had understandably never heard of the exploits and adventures of Henry Martyn. He had to be discouraged firmly several times from steering their conversation toward a direction that Bretta presently regarded as irrelevant. So abjectly did she miss her father—her mother, as well—so firmly had she suppressed it until now, that it taxed her resolve severely, simply to complete her account
without bursting into tears. After she had finished, he thought a while, and then asked, “These alien starships—you are quite certain that they were constructed and operated by flatsies?”
“It is true, Hanebuth. Your turn to believe me. I have autothilles, at home.”
He joined her in her somewhat rueful laughter. “Well, they sound to me as if they’re propelled by physical principles identical to those I’ve long been familiar with. Do I appear to be dead of radiation poisoning? Look at me—rather, trust that I remained relatively healthy and regular of feature until the damned Aggregate got hold of me. I swear, Princess, I know nothing of such dangers inherent in the ships of the Coordinated Arm. Such dangers don’t exist, as I ought to know, having had a lifetime’s experience with their technology.”
Bretta sat silent for a long while, desperate to think clearly, wrestling for self-control against overwhelming pangs of home-sickness. Then, because she needed to trust someone, and having earlier chosen to believe Tarrant, she changed the subject. “How is it you still retain a likeness of your little Deepcraft?”
He grimaced. “You mean, having been so ignominiously stripped of all my clothing and possessions, and funneled through the Oplyte process? A shrewd question.” She would have shrugged. “Some years ago, Princess, following my escape and having made a place for myself here, I offered modest rewards for any fragment of the Windhover the community might happen across. Such goods are a staple of commerce among us. Just now, we’re all looking for a particular doll—I don’t want to know why. Ultimately, I received several items, the most welcome being this carton of holograms I brought with me this morning. I first made them to display to family and friends when I returned to Hanover. Would you care to see more of them?”
Although his bearing remained dignified, Bretta could see that Tarrant was pitiably anxious to share these tattered remnants of his former life with someone he believed might appreciate them. For her own part, increasingly, she was interested in seeing something tangible of this Coordinated Arm he described.
“I would greatly enjoy doing so, Hanebuth,” she told him sincerely. She pointed to another hologram. “Now who is this? Would this be Anastasia, herself?”
She was finding (although for now she had decided to keep it to herself) that, from one of the longest “afars” in recorded history, she had begun to admire the Coordinated Arm, and respect the ideals it stood for. It sounded like everything her father had fought for all his life. The more she learned, the more it seemed to be an entire civilization composed of woodsrunners. She wondered how Uncle Sedgeley and his establishmentarian colleagues would like that!
“Indeed, Princess, it is—upon the overceremonialized occasion of the simultaneous launching of a thousand unbeinged scout probes toward the Cluster. For reasons that will be clearer later, it was, for all that, an important event. I was present, myself, soliciting patriotic donations from beside her upon the platform.”
The Coordinator appeared just as Tarrant had described her, older in this likeness, taken decades after she had stolen her brother’s yacht. She was a bit grayer and stouter than Bretta had imagined. Her hair was just as the girl had imagined, cut off sharply all round, a few siemmes above the woman’s shoulders, the squared corners curving forward along her prominent cheekbones. In one slim hand she held the long narcohaler that Tarrant had said was her trademark.
“And who might this be?” Bretta pointed to a tall, dark figure in the background—standing protectively just behind the Coordinator—that of a handsome young officer in military uniform, wearing a weapons belt, plaided kilt, and leather sporran. With his left hand, he seemed to be leaning upon a cane.
“Now, let me see . . . I seem to recall being introduced to this young man, a Captain Nathaniel Blackburn—‘Nate’ I think she called him, her only full-time Intelligence op. He lost that leg, and probably his girlish laughter, in some particularly awful battle somewhere. It was Blackburn who tidied up the mess with that little music entertainer, Chelsie Bradford, and later on, those delightfully nasty serial killings of the network anchors.” Tarrant went on chuckling at the idea of murdered newspeople. After her recent experience with the media upon Hanover, Bretta could hardly find it in her heart to blame him.
But for some reason she could not put a finger on, she found this young man interesting. She realized that she felt the same way toward him—toward his broad shoulders and well-drawn jawline—that she had upon first sight of the Windhover. The feeling was most embarrassing, uncomfortably warming odd parts of her body beneath her bandages. She hoped it was not discernable to Tarrant.
Perhaps not: “I took this just before my speech. I’m no speech-maker, so it was a memorable day all round. I’m unsure whether I regret that I have no likenesses of myself before I was—” He cleared his throat, having revealed more of his feelings than he intended. “You understand—or perhaps I failed to mention it—that in this war Anastasia fights, the Arm suffers a serious disadvantage?”
“And what is that?” It seemed to her the Coordinated Arm was fighting a rather leisurely war if it could afford such diversions as starship and horse races.
“Unfortunately,” Tarrant replied, “the Clusterian Powers know just where to find the nerve center of the Coordinated Arm: Earth’s moon, Anastasia’s office.”
She smiled abruptly. “The second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
“Yes, Princess,” he returned her smile, remembering, “They have retained Barrie, too, but for some obscure reason Peter Pan is invariably portrayed by a—”
“You were saying?” They had digressed; there were things Bretta wanted to know.
“What was I saying? That the forces of the Coordinated Arm appear not to have the foggiest idea where these Clusterians are to be found. Their best guess is that the Powers—the Arm’s name for them; nobody knows what they call themselves—are located here, among these very stars. That would place them not far—relatively speaking—from the Monopolity and other imperia-conglomerate.”
“This ‘best guess’ having to do with past history?”
“It might well be one of the imperia-conglomerate we know, as far as that goes. They send guided missiles, full of germs and nuclear explosives, and whole shiploads of prefrontally lobotomized suicide troops—not Oplytes—who never expect to return home and have been conditioned to expire whenever captured.”
Not warrior-slaves, Bretta mused to herself, and yet the moral signature, the distant, impersonal cruelty of the style, nevertheless appeared familiar.
Bretta’s weapons had been returned to her just that morning. The axis of her thrustible had been broken in her fight with Woulf. Her knife—little could damage that; she believed that he had never even noticed it—hung now upon an unwindowed wall, along with tatters of her clothing found within the canister.
She would have liked to see her thrustible repaired, as she was planning to have a use for it. Tarrant had informed her, however, that the leaders of the Aggregate insisted upon an hysterical weapons-destruction ritual, whenever their own heavily armed minions—instructed to scour the asteroid system for them constantly—happened across such objects. Which meant that thrustibles—or even any replacement parts for them—were virtually impossible to come by.
She would never give up looking, of course, and in the final analysis, she knew just where to find all the weapons she needed. She would simply take them, from an enemy utterly unprepared to resist her. For upon no better evidence than her feelings (her parents would have lectured her sternly about this) she had decided that the enemies of the Arm, and of Anastasia—and of handsome Captain Nathaniel Blackburn—were her own: none other than the Aggregate.
Tarrant arose. “Rest, now, Princess. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes, Hanebuth, hand me paper and pencil, if you will. I believe I can make these fingers work well enough to sketch something you could have made for me.”
“Indeed?” As the drawing took shape,
Tarrant grinned, his expression one of wonder that no one here had ever thought of this before. “This we can do. We suffer no lack of materials for that sort of thing. It should play hell with a Deepsuit if the arrows are hollow-shafted. How strong do you want the bow?”
“It’s called a prod,” she answered, admiring the picture she had drawn of the crossbow she had left behind at home. “And the ‘arrows’ are bolts. Or quarrels.”
“I see,” Tarrant answered, a hand upon the drawing, the other resting his chin.
“I believe that just now I prefer the latter.”
“Then so do I, Princess, so do I.”
PART FIVE:
LOREANNA ISLAY
YEARDAY 34O, 3O26 A.D.
MAYYE 19, 518 HANOVERIAN
TERTIUS 15, 1596 OLDSKYAN
HE FELL INTO THE §-FIELD,
AND FLASHING, CEASED TO BE;
NO LIVING THING WEPT A TEAR FOR I IIM
LEAST OF ALL HIS BEAUTY SO FREE.
SHE PUT ON ALL HER MILK WHITE SAILS
AND SHE ORDERED HER SHIP UNDER WAY,
AND SHE SAILED TILL SHE CAME TO HER FATHER’S WORLD
AN HOUR BEFORE IT WAS DAY.
SHE ALIGHTED UPON HER GOLDEN CABELLE
AND BOARDED A FAST-TRAVELING DRAY,
AND SHE RODE TILL SHE CAME TO HER FATHERS GATE
AN HOUR BEFORE IT WAS DAY.
CHAPTER XXX:
THREE TACTICAL ELEMENTS
“See t’that mizzentier stays’l!”
Given no more than an instant’s warning, Arran and Phoebus cast all else aside, ordering idlers below and their well-drilled crews to battle stations. Arran’s first words of command set the Osprey turning like a top, albeit at a rather sedate pace. He had several good reasons for doing so, worked out fifteen years earlier in circumstances nearly as dire and pressing as these now appeared to be.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 31