Loreanna could watch Leupould trying very hard not to think about the alternatives.
“However,” Arran was explaining for the benefit of Phoebus and his wives, “the Oplyte Slaver culture was vastly rottener and more fragile than any among us quite appreciated. Apparently it was upon the verge of collapsing when we arrived—a direct result, in itself, of their decadent bad judgment—and Bretta Martyn’s depredations managed to disrupt it far worse than even she anticipated.”
“I do thank you, Father,” Bretta put a hand up, “but, as you say, it was their incredible stupidity of sending all of their effective forces out-system that was responsible for their destruction, certainly nothing I managed to accomplish.”
“ ‘Father,’ is it, now?” Arran asked her with raised eyebrows. “What of ‘Daddy’?”
“ ‘Daddy,’ then.” She pretended to pout, looking up at him through her lashes.
“Compliant and modest,” Phoebus observed suspiciously. “Are you sure that this is your daughter and none other who has returned to you from the dead?”
Bretta punched him in one massive arm, while Tillie and Tula clucked at him.
“Well,” answered Tarrant, “she’ll have something truly to be modest about if we manage to warn Anastasia in time. The Oplyte invaders will be thwarted in their desire to consume the Coordinated Arm like the dire-locusts they are, because it will take them three whole years to get there, whereas it will take Bretta and me only three weeks, once I build us a new starship out of what my colleagues and I can salvage—uninhibited by the Aggregate—in this cursed system.”
“Make that, we, Hanebuth.” Bretta leaned toward the little man, her eyes shining and full of ideas. “I do love sailing, but I want to learn new technology!”
“Nor are you the only one, medear, surprise you though it may.” Phoebus nodded at Tarrant. “Then the armada can be destroyed, thanks to the Moon’s superior ship-technology, in the interstellar Deep, far from the Coordinated Arm.”
“I do not know about this, myself,” Arran shook his head, “sending my own daughter Bretta off with a virtual stranger to treat with this Anastasia person—”
“My sister, I will remind you, the Galactic Coordinator!” Anastasia, and what she had made of herself was becoming the brightest spot in Leupould’s life.
“Your darling sister, Brother Leo—and warn her that a billion Oplytes happen to be on the way to visit her—when I have only just gotten Bretta back.”
“I resent that, Autonomous Drector-Hereditary,” Tarrant protested. “I am no mere virtual stranger; my strangeness is completely real, I assure you! And besides, all the girl really wants is to meet her heartthrob, Nate Blackburn.”
“Hanebuth!”
Arran was the first to laugh, for the reservations he had expressed had been at least partly feigned. He loved his daughter and would miss her while she was gone, but he was proud of her, as well, and would be happy to welcome her back, a diplomat, as well as his political heir, better prepared for her future.
“And beside that,” Loreanna spoke, blushing at her own forwardness, but eager to make a certain point with a certain uncle of hers, “Arran will be occupied in his daughter’s absence, preparing for the arrival of his seventh child—”
“Ceo’s name!” The old man’s reaction was as expected. “Can you not control your—”
“Whom Loreanna and I had thought,” Arran grinned, adding his part to the conspiracy, “always provided, of course, he turns out to be a boy, to name ‘Sedgeley.’ ”
“You prefer ‘Frantisek’?” asked Demondion-Echeverria raising his own eyebrows.
“Or ‘Leupould’?” the former Ceo demanded.
Arran addressed Tarrant. “Hanebuth, I would be the last to deprive you and Bretta of the pleasure of constructing your own starship. I have seen the hologram of your late lamented Windhover, and she was unmistakably quite um, yar.”
Bretta grinned at her father.
“However, having learned a few things recently concerning the technology of sailless vessels—not to mention the murderous treachery of nine-hundred-year-old assassins—I believe that I should summon my good old friends and allies the nacyl, instead, whom, I believe, I can persuade to lend you one of their ships!”
From orbit, it appeared that Hanover had been blackened from pole to pole.
When they had come within proper range of the Monopolitan capital world, Arran had not been able to resist taking one of his speedy “new” auxiliaries out ahead of Osprey for a look at the planet, satisfied, if not precisely happy, to leave his starship in the large, capable hands of his trusty first officer, cheerfully breaking in many new hands fresh from the Vouhat-Letsomo System.
Nor had Arran been able to resist the demand of his beloved wife that she accompany him, worried as she was for Lia’s sake. Having come close to losing her, he did not believe he could ever refuse her anything, ever again. Since the high-speed fighter-launches were comfortable only for a single individual, they had spent several hours in intimate contact, but unable to do anything enjoyable about it, since it was imperative that they remain watchful for the enemy.
At the sight of Hanover, baked like a marshberry over a campfire, Arran was grateful—and did not feel guilty for a moment about it—that his home and the remainder of his family were safe upon moonringed Skye, far away. He was certain that Phoebus would be equally grateful that Fionaleigh had taken his ship the Tease out of Hanoverian orbit, into the Sisao-Somon System.
The planet below was empty. There was not even a hint of life upon its surface.
Arran watched carefully, and employed what instruments he had, but there were no other ships in orbit, only wreckage. The Ceo’s Eye, the asteroid used to anchor a permanent lift cabelle down to the surface, had vanished without a trace. Nothing, not even Oplyte armies, moved across the war-scorched face of Hanover.
Loreanna sat, half in her husband’s lap, doing her best to hold back her tears.
“I recall the coordinates,” he told her, “of the Daimler-Wilkinson house. Phoebus wanted to play pilot that day, but I pulled rank with him, and now I am glad. They will have to do, I fear, as I have no other reference to land by.”
“I do not care about the house, Arran—oh, of course I do, it is where I grew up. I care more for what may have become of Brougham and his people. But mostly, I wish to know what has become of Lia, and so, I believe, will her father.”
“The Residence, then, estimating from the coordinates of your uncle’s house.”
Protected from atmospheric heating by her §-field, the launch made quick work of the landing, and Arran’s estimate of the co-ordinates proved accurate. Although everything they saw had been utterly flattened and covered deeply in ashes, as if some monstrous volcano had erupted, shaken every building to the ground, and buried an entire world alive, from lower altitude, he and Loreanna could just make out the city street plan they remembered. Within minutes, he had set the launch down in what they both believed to be the Ceo’s private garden.
“A billion Oplytes, you say? I can believe it. They fell upon our world and razed it to the charred ground you see all about you. We were not quite helpless. Our fleets in orbit annihilated one another and the Oplytes themselves were totally wiped out in the process of attempting to eradicate us.”
Lia smeared the ashes round upon her battle-soiled face, found a cast-metal lawn chair that had survived somehow, righted it, and sat down, setting her weapon butt first upon the ground and letting it lean against the arm of the chair. She had found it, she explained, in one of several museums within the Residence. Loreanna realized that it was an automatic battle rifle, very roughly contemporary with the weapon her husband had so gladly returned to her pocket.
Behind Lia, three thrustible-armed survivors from her personal guard cast their eyes about warily, unable to believe their terrible struggle might be over. But the capital planet of the great Monopolity of Hanover itself, they knew, had been utterly destroyed by t
he next-to-last army of Oplytes in history. And in a very real sense their struggle—to survive—had only begun.
Brougham, who had arisen out of the ashes in much the same way Lia had, when Arran had hopped over briefly to inspect what was left of the family mansion, had brought bottles of wine from the Daimler-Wilkinson cellars, where he and his family had hidden themselves. There were no glasses, and nobody cared.
The first thing that Arran and Loreanna had seen, upon landing, had been an angry and tearful Lia Woodgate, emerging from below, into the nightmarish landscape. Deep within her underground command post and blast shelter, she had told them, she and her household had barely survived the hand-to-hand fighting. There were entire corridors, choked with the dead bodies of Oplyte soldiers.
Just now, she shook her fist at what somebody had once called the enemy stars.
“But I know—I suppose that I always knew, but I have finally been made aware—that what made this possible had little to do with this Aggregate you speak of. They were merely the handiest instrument. The real cause was simply our accumulation of power and the illegitimate steps we took to retain it.”
“What do you mean?” It would be amusing to hear her father’s reaction to this.
“You know exactly what I mean, Arran Islay—or rather, Henry Martyn. The Hanoverian civil populace, just to identify our single most egregiously self-destructive stupidity—have been forbidden to own or carry personal weapons for almost as long as there has been a Hanover. I suppose that is one of the reasons that our ancestors were expelled from Earth’s moon, as you have told me, in the first place, because they advocated policies like that. But, if we had all been armed, we might still have a planet. We might still have a civilization.”
“You still might, yet, Lia,” Loreanna told her. “Skye will be willing to help, and the Coordinated Arm has experience in transforming uninhabitable planets.”
Lia nodded grimly. “Then with help, we shall try. And I believe that my aunt Anastasia will be able to instruct me in something more fundamental than ‘terraforming.’ ”
“That could well be,” Arran agreed.
“Arran, Loreanna, I swear to you now upon my life that, do we succeed, we shall take steps—large, irrevocable steps, in the direction of unfettered individual liberty—to assure that a disaster like this will never happen again!”
EPILOGUE:
THE GALACTIC COORDINATOR
YEARDAY 162, 3O27 A.D.
AUGGE 30, 519 HANOVERIAN
PRIMUS 19, 1597
A YOUTH THERE WAS, LATE OF HANOVER,
WHO COURTED A BEAUTY SO GAY.
AND ALL THAT HE COURTED THIS BEAUTY FOR
WAS TO STEAL HER VIRTUE AWAY.
“COME GIVE TO ME OF YOUR FATHER’S GOLD,
LIKEWISE OF YOUR MOTHER’S DOWRY,
AND THE BEST SHIP THAT CIRCLES YOUR FATHER’S WORLD,
WHEREABOUT STAND TWENTY AND THREE.”
AND ALL THAT HE COURTED THIS BEAUTY FOR
WAS TO STEAL HER VIRTUE AWAY.
A YOUTH THERE WAS, LATE OF HANOVER,
WHO COURTED A BEAUTY SO GAY.
EPILOGUE:
THE GALACTIC COORDINATOR
“Hanebuth?”
“Well, Princess,” Tarrant told her as he let the door slide closed behind him, “I’ve told them all about you, that you’ve been commissioned, indirectly but officially, by the Ceo of the Monopolity of Hanover, Lia Woodgate Wheeler—Anastasia’s own niece, ain’t it a small galaxy—to establish diplomatic and trade relations, and a military alliance against what’s left of a common enemy, with the Coordinated Arm. They’re both in there now, waiting to meet you.”
“Oh, dear.”
Bretta put down a magazine reader she had not been looking at anyway and, before she could control the reflex of a nervous warrior, checked the lavishly embellished thrustible she wore upon her right arm, a parting gift from her mother and father, spreigh-formed within the Overmoms’ asteroid using a program written by Arran and machinery just repaired by their new friends Andboard and Yiingboard.
Tarrant clambered up onto the plastic-covered couch to sit beside her. “They can kill you, but they can’t eat you, Princess, it’s against the Geneva Convention.”
“What in the Ceo’s name are you talking about, Tarrant?” She shook her head.
“Nothing, Princess, nothing at all. An old joke, and I can see now that you’re not in the mood. It’s just that there’s no reason to be frightened of these folks. Don’t think of her as the Galactic Coordinator. Think of her as a little old lady impatient to see her grandchildren later on this afternoon. It might also help you to understand that she sees winning the War against the Clusterian Powers—our old friends the Aggregate—as only her second priority.”
This interested a future Autonomous Drector-Hereditary of Skye. “And her first?”
“Acting as a kind of ‘political place-holder,’ preventing her own people from using the war as an excuse to do what wars have almost always done to civilizations, obliterate each one of the individual liberties that make the war worth fighting. She’s been doing just that for thirty years, and she’s almost done.”
“And what of Captain Blackburn?” Here was the real reason for all of her nervousness. Blackburn had been her hero since the moment she had seen his hologram.
“Well, time is a funny thing, Princess. He’s older than I remember—I guess I don’t get the same cues with regard to the passage of time whenever I look in the mirror that other people do. I think my personal clock stopped when they gave me that big hypo in the neck out in the Vouhat-Letsomo System. Nate’s some older than I remembered, and you might as well hear this from me: he’s got a wife and three daughters of his own, each of them older than you are. There now: the sonofabitch owes me a big favor; he’d dreaded telling you, himself.”
Bretta nodded. “I had done a little bit of adding and subtracting upon my own. Captain-Inspector Nathaniel Blackburn would be forty-nine years old by now and—”
“And Anastasia’s likeliest successor.” The little man was now certain of what he had long suspected anyway, that nothing could ever destroy—or even seriously damage—Henry Martyn’s daughter. “What the news we bring Blackburn chiefly means is that the Galactic Arm he coordinates will be one that’s at peace. Everybody wants to see Rakush and Marengo when we bring them from El Six—it’s happy I am we held out for a nacyl ship big enough to transport them. Give these folks a year, they’ll be racing lamina from here to the Centauris!”
They sat together a while, quietly, just as they had done when she was recovering.
“Well,” she answered at last, “in a way I guess it is better that Captain Blackburn is spoken for. I would not care to be disillusioned. I have always maintained that any man I give myself to had better be a better man than I am, and—”
“And at least half the man your father is, I know.” There came a long pause as Tarrant scratched his chin. “About how tall would you say Arran is, anyway?”
“What?” She shook her head. She seemed to be understanding her old friend less and less well with every day that passed here upon the homeworld’s Moon.
“Nothing. While I was in there, the Coordinator made some calls. She’s offered me an experimental course of gene therapy which not only may undo the damage done me by the vile Oplyte Traders, but restore my youthful vigor, as well!”
Bretta laughed and clapped. “Wonderful, Hanebuth! And what will you do then?”
“Oh, I have an idea or two in the back of my mind.” Turning it this way and that, he pretended to examine the back of his hand, startlingly green in the sunlight streaming through the office windows. “Beware, Princess, I was once considered quite a handsome fellow; you may discover that you’ve kissed a frog!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L. Neil Smith has won the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Fiction two times, for his first novel, The Probability Broach and for Pallas. He is the author of more than a dozen novels,
including The Crystal Empire, The Lando Calrissian Adventures, Pallas, The Wardove, and Henry Martyn. A Life member of the National Rifle Association since 1973, founder and National Coordinator of the Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus, and publisher of an online magazine, The Libertarian Enterprise, he has been active in the libertarian movement for thirty-five years and is its most prolific and widely published living writer. He is also an essayist and radio commentator. Smith lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife, Cathy, and their daughter, Rylla, and can be reached via the “Webley Page” at http://www.liberty.com/home/kholder/lneil.html.
Bretta Martyn is a sequel to Henry Martyn, an interstellar pirate novel in the tradition of Rafael Sabatini.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 44