“My father was on fleet duty then,” he went on talking to himself now, communing with the dead. “He commanded a five kilo-tonner, the old ZEALOT; she was lost off Pluto on a routine recon run, gunned out of space by the Niss. Three hundred years ago that must be now. I was just a lad, then, on border duty in the north. I was to have been with him on his next sweep. He was a bold one; too bold. Who else would penetrate all the way to Sol’s edge? Nobody!” Starbird pounded his chair-arm and looked at Roan. “None of these sniveling garrison sailors you see disgracing the uniform today! They’re a cruel lot, young man! And gutless!”
Roan sat silently, waiting.
“Revenge,” Starbird said. “I swore I’d have it! But no suicide run, by God! Plenty of smirks and snickers thrown my way. All talk, they said. Talk! But I wasn’t jumping off halfready. I needed the rank first. Then reorganization, weeding out the corruption, the twisted element that was choking the service like Venusian tangle-weed! Measure a man’s genes instead of his guts, that was their way! Damn his genes! It’s the dream that make a man, not the number of his toes!”
Starbird fell silent, his face twitching with the pain of old memories.
“I had my star at last,” he said suddenly. “I put my plan before the general staff. The plan I’d worked out over all those years. Five hundred ships of the line, a million picked men. We were to move in two echelons, blast our way past the Niss picket lines beyond Pluto, strike with our full power all the way in past the Neptune and Jupiter orbits. Then—when they massed to meet us—split! Our probes had given us plenty of information on the Niss defensive patterns! I analyzed their data, and saw the answer: We’d split beyond Mars, break up into two hundred and fifty pairs, and carry a running fight right in past Luna. Then regroup in a beautiful maneuver I’d worked out as carefully as a ballet—and hit the Niss inner blockade line with a spearhead that could blast its way through the walls of Hell!” The old Man’s eyes blazed with a fierce light; then he let out a long breath and leaned back. He raised his hands, let them fall.
“They laughed at me,” he said flatly. “We weren’t ready, they said. The Niss were too powerful, we didn’t have the firepower to stand against them. Wait, they said. Wait!” He sighed. “That was almost two hundred years ago. We’re still waiting. And four lights away, the Niss blockade of Terra still stands!”
Roan was sitting bolt upright. “Terra?” he said.
“Ah, the name still has magic for you, does it lad?”
“Only four lights from here?”
Starbird nodded. “Sol’s her sun. The third planet. The double world. Terra the Fair. Locked up behind a wall of Niss!” Starbird’s fist slammed the desk. “I’ll never live now to see my plan used! We waited too long; somehow, the fire that we carried died while we talked—and the dream died with it.”
Roan sat forward in his chair. “Admiral, you said you weren’t worried about Trishinist. What if he had outside help?”
Starbird’s eyes narrowed. “What outside help?”
“A man named Blan.”
“Blan? That warped imp out of Hades? Is he still alive?”
“His forces are due here in four months.”
Starbird was sitting erect now, the force back in his voice. “How do you know this, lad?”
“Trishinist mistook me for Bran’s emissary. He’s ready to make his move now. Today. He thinks one of my crew is assigned to assassinate you. I’m here now to size you up for the killer.”
Starbird rose and walked across to the door. He was a tall, once-powerful man with square, bony shoulders and lean hips. He flipped a lock, threw a wall switch that snicked locks on outer doors. He came back and sat behind the desk.
“All right, young fellow. Maybe you’d better tell me all you know about this plot.”
“That’s as much as I was able A to get out of him,” Roan said. “With half the men backing him, he’s in a strong position, even without Blan’s reinforcements.” Starbird stroked the side of his jaw thoughtfully. “That timetable suits me very well. Let Trishinist go ahead with his plans. When he discovers his allies are missing, he’ll collapse.”
“I can’t stay much longer, sir.” Roan got to his feet. “Trishinist will begin to suspect something. What do you want me to do?”
Admiral Starbird thumbed his chin. “When’s the assassination scheduled?”
“Tonight, after the banquet.”
“Make it late. I’ll be ready. Just follow my lead. In the meantime, arm yourself. How many men do you have with you that you can trust?”
“Three;”
Starbird nodded a smile was growing on his seamed face. His hand slammed the table. “Young fellow—what was your name again?”
“Roan. Roan Cornay.”
Starbird was cackling. “Terra excites you, does it?” The old man turned to a wall safe, punched keys with trembling fingers. The door swung open and he took out a sheaf of many-times-folded papers.
“My attack plan,” he said. “The ships are ready—over four hundred of them, in concealed docks on the other side of the planet! I’ve kept them ready, hoping. I needed a leader, Mister Cornay. Trishinist has supplied the men. Let him try his coup! Let him send his killer to me! Then, when he comes along a little later to see for himself, I’ll be sitting here, laughing at him! And the orders will be waiting! I have a few loyal officers; they’ll command the five squadrons of the flotilla. And you, lad! You’ll take command as acting Admiral of the Fleet! Do you understand?”
“You’d trust me, Admiral? You don’t even know me.”
“I’ve known many men in my years, boy. I can judge a fighting man when I see one. Will you do it?”
“That’s what I came here for,” Roan said softly. “That’s what I’ve lived the last thirteen years of my life for.”
XXXIV
Roan’s thugs clustered about him in the windy bronze-and-mosaic hallway outside the Grand Dining Chamber. They were splendid in new clothes of bright-colored silky cloth spangled over with beads and ornaments of glass and polished copper, and they smelled incongruously of flowers.
“Keep your guns out of sight,” Roan ordered. “Keep your hands off the females and don’t kick the slaves. That’s a privilege we’ll leave to our hosts. No rough stuff unless I give the word, no matter what happens. And any man that drinks so much he can’t shoot straight will deserve whatever he gets.” He settled his palm-sized power gun against his stomach under the wide scarlet cummerbund that had been wound around him by his assigned slaves in the dust-covered splendor of his quarters.
“Let’s go,” he said and pushed through the high mother-of-pearl inlaid doors. The clang and thump of noise-makers burst out; dancing girls sprang into motion, whirled forward strewing flower petals. A thousand tiny colored lights gleamed from chandeliers and winked from tiny fountains that sparkled on long tables spread with dazzling white cloths almost hidden under gleaming plates, polished eating tools, slender glasses as fragile as first love. There were hundreds of Terrans seated at the table, and they rose, clapping their hands. Commodore Quex came forward, his eyes, set at the extreme edges of his face, flicking over Roan and past him at his crew. He took Roan’s arm and tugged him toward the nearest table. “You’ll sit with me at the head table, of course.”
Roan held back without seeming to. “What about my men?”
“Oh, they’ll be well taken care of.” Quex smiled. He kept his upper lip pulled down to cover his teeth, but Roan caught a glimpse of widely spaced points. A crowd of humanoid females with slender bodies and immense eyes and huge bare breasts were crowding around the men, taking their arms possessively, giggling up into surprised Gook faces that broke into vast, bristly, snaggle-toothed smiles.
“Belay that.” Roan snapped. “You men will sit with me—or I’ll sit with them,” he amended, turning back to Quex. “I have to keep an eye on them,” he explained.
“Ah, but yes, as you wish, Lieutenant.” Quex dithered for a moment, then signalled, and c
rouching slaves darted in, shuffled chairs and place settings about. Roan took the deep armchair Quex waved him to and looked around.
“Where’s the admiral?”
“He is unfortunately indisposed,” Quex toed a slave aside and took the chair opposite Roan. “Chavigney ’85 or Beel Vat?” he inquired brightly.
“Chavigney ’85,” Roan said, because he’d heard of it. “Indisposed how?”
“Admiral Starbird is getting on. He can’t stand much . . . excitement,” Quex showed his pointed teeth again and watched the slave pour ruby liquid into goblets. He picked his up, flicked a libation on the marble floor and nosed his glass. Roan drained his and thrust it out for a refill. No doubt the Chavigney ’85 had a magnificent bouquet, but at the moment he didn’t care.
Quex was staring at him; he remembered his smile when Roan looked at him: “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen hair just like yours before,” he said. “Quite . . . ah . . . striking.”
“We all have our little peculiarities,” Roan said shortly, and let his eyes rest on Quex’s. They seemed to sit at the comers of his head and bulge.
“No offense,” Quex said. “One sees a mew face so seldom.”
“How many Terrans are there here at HQ?” Roan asked, glancing at the obvious Gooks along the table.
Something touched his shoulder. His hand went to his gun; and then there was a choking cloud of perfume and a lithe, blue-trimmed girl was sitting on his lap. She had soft, round breasts with blue-dyed tips that poked through her beads, and she squirmed up against Roan’s chest and nudged his wine-glass against his lips. She looked a little like Stellaraire. For an instant Roan felt a lost emotion clutch at him, but he took the glass and put it firmly on the table and palmed the female gently from him.
“Stand over there,” he said sternly. “If I need anything, I’ll call you.”
The girl looked stricken, and then she looked at Quex and shrank back. The commodore slapped his hands sharply together, and the girl turned and was gone.
“I don’t want her to get in any trouble,” Roan started. “It was just—”
Quex hissed. The points of his teeth showed plainly now. “We do our best with our Geeks,” he said. “But they are so abysmally stupid.”
Slaves came with the food then. It was marvelous, and Roan forgot his problems for the moment, savoring the first real Terran-style cooking he had ever tasted. The wine was good too, and Roan had to force himself to sip it carefully. Along the table, his men spooned in the delicacies, and then when they grew impatient with the small bites, used their hands. Their girls kept up a constant shrill giggling, slopping wine against big alien teeth, spilling it down across stubbled jaws. Beside Quex, Askor took a glass from his neighbor’s girl’s hand and poured the contents down his girl’s throat. She choked and sputtered, and Askor caught Roan’s eye and winked.
The noisemakers kept up their cacaphony. Roan watched them, arranged behind a screen of bushy potted plants sawing and pumping and puffing at the gleaming, complicated noisemakers.
“You like music?” Quex asked, leaning across the table. There were purple, juicy stains at the corners of his mouth and his eyes bugged more than ever. He had loosened his collar, and Roan saw red scars down the sides of his neck where something had been surgically removed.
“I don’t know,” Roan said, because he had never heard the word before. “Is it something to eat?”
“The sounds,” Quex said. He waved a hand at the orchestra, bleating and shrilling in the corner behind their screen of foliage.
“It’s all right, I suppose,” Roan said. “Back in the ’zoo, they were louder.”
“You want it louder?”
“I remember a sound I heard once,” Roan said, thinking quite suddenly of the deserted park in the Terran city on Aldo Cerise. “Real Terran sounds. Pretty sounds.” He was feeling the wine, he realized. He took a deep breath and sat up straighter, and felt for his gun with his fingertips.
“Terry music?” Quex clapped his hands and a slave popped up and leaned close to get Quex’s instructions, then slipped away.
Roan glanced at his men. They were still chewing with their mouths open, reaching across each other’s plates for juicy gobbets almost out of reach, wiping thick fingers on now-greasy silks. Henry Dread had picked his Gooks for size, not beauty, Roan was thinking, when he became aware of a sound penetrating the bellowed talk and laughter. It was an elfin horn, picking its way slowly above the uproar. Then it was joined by other sounds, deep and commanding, like the tramp of marching armies, and now the horns darted and flickered like the lightnings of a coming storm while a bugle called demon troops to the attack. Roan pushed his glass aside, listening, searching for the source, and his eyes saw the noise-makers behind the flower boxes.
“Are they doing that?”
“A clever group, eh, Lieutenant? Oh, they know any number of tricks. They can make a sound like a wounded dire-beast charging—”
“Shut up,” Roan said, not even noticing he’d said it. “Listen!” Now a lonely horn picked out a forlorn melody of things beautiful and forgotten, and Roan remembered the glimpse he’d almost had, once, of how life must have been in the days of the Empire.
The music faded to silence. The players mopped at their faces with soiled handkerchiefs and reached for clay mugs. They looked tired and hot and ill-tempered and frightened, all at once.
“How could a crew of ugly Geeks make sounds like that?” he wondered aloud.
“You like it?” Quex said coldly. He was fingering the braid on his sleeve rather pointedly.
“I’m sorry, Commodore,” Roan said. “I was quite carried away.”
Quex managed a sour smile. “It’s some ancient thing about a Prince called Igor,” he said. “Would you like to hear another? They do a rather clever thing called Jivin’ Granny.”
“No.” Roan shook his head to clear away the vision.
Quex chose an attenuated cheroot from a blue-and-orange inlaid box a cringing slave offered him. The slave lit it, and when the lighted match fell on the floor from the creature’s trembling hand, Quex planted a solid kick in its side. It grunted and crawled over to Roan and he took a cigar and watched the slave crawl away. When it thought it was out of sight, it patted its injured side and wept silently.
“Now Lieutenant.” Quex blew out smoke impatiently, as though he enjoyed knowing he was smoking a rare weed, but was annoyed with the actual process. “You’ve just reported in from a long cruise. You deserve to relax.”
“I don’t want to relax,” Roan said. “I’d like to know about the Niss. What kind of fleet can they put in space?”
“Surely all that can wait,” Quex said blandly. He waved his glass. Wine slopped on the floor and a slave scrambled to lick it up. There were other slaves under the table, eating scraps, and still more crowded in, offering finger bowls. Another girl had gotten into his lap somehow, and she was breathing erotica into his ear. Roan was aware that he was dizzier than he should be. and he pushed the slaves away and forced his eyes to focus.
“I’ve waited long enough,” he said. He could feel the thickness of his tongue, and he worked on getting angry enough for his temper to boil the lethargy away.
A slave shoved a vast pile of foamy stuff in front of Roan. Quex was clapping his hands again and there was a stir, and two immense dull-faced ITN troopers were hauling someone small and struggling into the open space at the center of the square of tables.
“Sorry if I seemed to have been dilatory in handling this matter,” Quex was saying, “but I always think executions go better with the dessert.”
Roan blinked while the two troopers held the girl down on a short bench with her head over one end.
He recognized her as the one who had first gotten into his lap. Her gold-dusted hair was in disarray now, and her thin pantaloons stuck to her legs. One of the men holding her down got out a knife with a foot-long blade and casually thrust it into the side of her neck.
She screame
d once, and then she was slack, and the trooper was sawing away, holding the head by the hair. He got it free and held it up. There was blood on his hands to the elbow, and more was spreading out on the floor. Roan got to his feet, and his girl pulled him back, laughing.
“Clumsy oxen,” Quex said. He picked up his cigar and drew on it, and then tossed it into the soup tureen. “You’d think they were butchering swine. Try our ice cream. It’s rather good, considering.”
Roan’s men were staring at the body of the girl. They were used to bloodshed, but they’d never seen anything like this. The executioners trooped off, one with the head and the other with the body, and a slave came with a bucket of water and a nauseous looking rag.
“What—what—” Roan stuttered.
Quex raised his plucked eyebrows. “The creature annoyed you. That’s something we Terrans don’t tolerate in slaves.”
Roan got to his feet, and the girl on his lap squalled and slid off onto the floor.
“All right, men! Up!” He bawled. “The party’s over! We’re leaving! Let’s march!”
In the sudden silence, Askor laughed foolishly. The ITN personnel stirred at their places, glancing toward Quex. Roan went along the table to Askor and slapped him so hard it hurt at the other end of the room. He jerked him to his feet, and turned, and Quex was holding a long-barreled nerve-gun in his hand. It was aimed at Roan.
“Not so fast, Lieutenant—or whatever you are,” the commodore said in a voice like chipped glass.
“You made a poor choice of identities.” The identity disk Roan had produced dangled from his finger. He tossed it to the floor. “Lieutenant Commander Endor was lost in action some six thousand years ago. You’re under arrest for mutiny in Deep Space and the murder of Commander Henry Dread.”
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