by Gardner Fox
There was a little silence.
Then Peganna asked wistfully, “Do you hate me so very much, Bran? If it weren’t for my mouth, we wouldn’t be in this trouble.”
He laughed and came to sit beside her, touching her silver hair with a gentle hand. “Achushla, you are a queen. As a queen you answered him. I was proud of you—even while I cursed the tongue that put us in his power.”
She snuggled closer to him, saying, “A lesser man would rant at me, Bran Magannon.”
His only answer was to kiss her.
In his quarters, Commander Alvar Drexel lay in sleep while a surgeon patched his broken face. A neurasthetic had killed the pain that greeted his first waking moments. His nose was broken and his cheekbone had been splintered, so that he would lie here for most of the voyage, helpless. A captain would assume command in his absence.
From time to time, long after the bandages had been wrapped about his head, he would rouse from the induced slumber in which he lay, and stare upward through the bandage slits at his ceiling. He could see only a small section of the ceiling, but it was enough. It was his anchor to reality, to the fact that the Taliesin and the war fleet were hurtling through hyperspace toward Earth and his own ultimate victory.
Under the bandages his lips would smile.
He had a stranglehold on his old enemy. Photographs of the mysterious objects in the weapons vault—now locked against the coming of Empire scientists, with the blue egg placed securely in the ship’s safe—were to be exhibit one in the case against Bran Magannon.
This was one time the Wanderer would not wriggle free.
There was no way out of the trap.
TEN
WORD HAD gone on ahead of the Taliesin.
By ultranibeam, the communications center of the flagship had alerted the High Council of the Empire that it was bringing back ex-Admiral Bran Magannon and the queen of the Lyanir to stand trial. They had uncovered the lost secrets of an unknown master race in the stars, and with it had intended to make war on the Empire. The swift action of Fleet Commander Alvar Drexel had nullified all their plans.
In substance, this was the message which Alvar Drexel had dictated from his sick bed. It was flashed from the Taliesin to the receiving sets of a thousand Empire worlds. All space knew almost at the same moment that Commander Drexel had saved the people of those worlds from a holocaust of destruction.
The gratitude of these billions was only to be guessed at, Drexel knew. He would be feasted and honored from now on, everywhere in space.
The warmth of that knowledge helped to heal him.
When the Taliesin approached Luna, a fleet came out to meet him, flashing its colors in tribute, ranging alongside the flagship and acting as escort to the unloading platforms on the moon. A hundred newsmen from the star papers, a score of television cameras, were on hand to record the landing of the arch-traitor and the woman for whom he had renounced allegiance to the star cluster.
As they walked side by side across the domed platform, a target for eyes and lenses, Bran Magannon told himself that they cut a sorry picture. His garb was the ocana-fur kilt and broad leather belt which had been the companions of his wanderings. Peganna, though she walked like the queen she was, was in despair at her grimed skirt and jersey.
“We look like half-drowned pups,” he told her.
She nodded through the tears of impotent shame and anger in her eyes, following the escort detail into a launch-site where a small spacer waited to carry them to Earth. Glancing up, she could see the blue-green bulk of Earth and pick out its oceans and its continents. This was the world which had defeated her, this the planet which had sent its sons and daughters into space to form colonies and then the Empire. It was her bitterest enemy.
There would be no mercy on the Earth for Peganna of the Silver Hair, nor for the man who walked beside her. Guiltily, remembering it had been her tongue that had brought them here, she glanced at Bran Magannon.
His face was hard, as though chiseled out of mahogany. Forgotten was the fact that this man had once saved the Empire himself. Remembered only was his present guilt.
They entered the metallic launch building. Their footsteps rang with hollow insistence on the ramps and stairways taking them up to the sleek spacer. Men in the white uniforms of the Empire Fleet were everywhere. There was no emotion on their faces, other than a kind of awe when they looked at the Wanderer. He was a legend in his own lifetime, and now that more and more of his story was being told, the magnitude of what he had done was being assessed and slowly understood.
A spaceman took them into a lounge and left them. The spacer had been insulated with contra-gravitic strips so that it could come and go from Earth with no more unpleasantness than that of a motorboat pulling away from a quay.
Peganna walked to the viewing screen and watched as the motors rumbled to life. The great domes of Luna, of transparent plasticene, enclosed the great compound of moonsurface which had been covered over in the centuries since man had first made a landing here by acres upon acres of buildings and cultivated gardens.
She would not have liked to live here all her life, but she understood from what Bran had told her that Moon-base personnel was shifted every three months. It made a return to Earth all the more pleasant after such a time of breathing manufactured air and walking within a restricted enclosure.
Earth grew larger in the screen. It became mammoth against the backdrop of black space and pale stars, until it filled the screen and the haze of atmosphere replaced sharp outlines. In the far distance the horizon made a curve where Florida jutted across the sea toward the island of Cuba. Then they were sweeping lower, across the green bulk of Central America and Mexico, the retro-gravitic plates warming to their task of slowing the swift glide.
Fliers lifted to meet the spacer, to escort it toward a vanedown at the astroport. As the ground grew into buildings and slim, high towers, Peganna turned from the screen to bury her face against Bran’s chest.
“Until now it has been only a nightmare to me,” she whispered. “This is the waking-up part, the reality.”
“It will seem endless for a few weeks,” he said. “Then it will be over.”
She smiled up at him through her tears. Her face was the dream that had filled his own mind in the past years, since he had known her. These quivering lips he had kissed, this long silver hair, disarranged now so it hung down her back, these brave eyes behind their tears, were all he asked of life. Now even this was to be denied him. A black rage filled Bran Magannon.
Almost instantly it disappeared, replaced by as terrible a despair. The only hope for the Lyanir, for this woman and himself, lay in the metal treasure vault of the Crenn Lir. And that was in the hands of the Empire. A fleet would be dispatched there—was even now on its way through hyper-space with the blue egg, no doubt—to rifle its contents, to load them on huge space traders and bring them back across the gulfs of emptiness to Earth.
Nothing was left to them. Nothing!
The Lyanir might fight but they could not hold out long against the Empire, especially if Empire got its hands on the weapons in the Crenn Lir vault. Without Peganna, without her brother to take command in her place, they were a beaten people.
And Peganna, leaning against him, was a beaten woman.
He could sense the defeat in her bonelessness, in the apathy with which she reacted to his squeeze. He told her, “There is always hope.” As if to deny it, she shook her head and turned away toward the opening door.
The spacer was setting down on Earth soil now, its gravitic plates humming softly, sending a throb through the ship. Peganna straightened her shoulders. She would go to her doom as befitted a queen of the Lyanir.
Chin high, she moved ahead of Bran Magannon.
There were a thousand reporters at the astroport, lined up and relaying back their stories by special wave-length, with microphones strapped to their chests. Televiewing cameras dollied in on the man and woman emerging from the spacer hatch. H
and cameras clicked steadily, like the pulsebeat of metallic hearts.
The thousands of men and women behind the silvered chains were silent, just staring. There were no hisses or catcalls, nor boos and jeers. It was as though the crowd realized the danger it had been in from the Lyanir and, now that the threat was over before it had really begun, wanted to see those who had caused it.
There was only one incident. They were almost at the waiting air-car that would whisk them above the traffic lanes on official business, when a woman cried out to Bran Magannon.
“Forget her, Admiral. We haven’t forgotten how you saved us from her kind, years ago. She is a witch! Renounce her!”
The cry was echoed all across the field.
“Renounce her! Renounce the witch!”
Ahead of him, Peganna squared her shoulders. Bran chuckled, moved up beside her, and put his arm around her. The crowd fell silent at his action. And so, like that, they came at last to the air-car and stooped to enter it. A guard in another compartment with an a-gun trained on them was to ride as escort.
The air-car slid from the astroport twenty miles above a crowded highway, where magnetic grids kept the automatically controlled ground-cars at a steady sixty miles an hour. Through the transparent roofs of the cars below, they could see people looking up at them, noticing the star cluster engraved on the underbelly of the air-car, knowing them for the traitor and the Lyanir temptress come to Earth for judgment.
As if those upturned eyes were an intolerable weight, Peganna whimpered in protest. Bran touched her hand, let his fingers contract on it. She was not so regal now, for the frightened woman below the crown was showing clearly.
Her plight stabbed into his heart.
There must be something he could do, even now! Bran the Lucky had a reputation to live up to. Always, he had found the one way out of any difficulty. It was a kind of trademark.
His lips curled wryly. There was no escape from this dilemma. The jaws of the trap were sprung too tightly. Somebody had thrown away the key and left them here.
Yet he said softly, to Peganna, “Easy, now! Things are always blackest before the dawn.”
The green eyes darted at him as the bloodless lips smiled. “Bran, Bran! As you love me, no false hopes. I—couldn’t stand to have them lifted and then broken. As it is, I’m resigned.”
The air-car slid on, smoothly, effortlessly.
Five hours later, in the white uniform of the Fleet Admiral he had been, Bran Magannon told himself that the Empire did not intend to try a ragged wanderer of the starways, at least. They meant him to go out as Admiral Bran Magannon, former High Admiral of Space, with all his campaign ribbons and his many medals splashed across his broad chest. His mirror told him he made a handsome, imposing figure. A hero image.
It was this notion of the hero that Empire wanted to destroy.
The old itch for battle surged into his blood, sending it along his veins in a tidal wave of vitality. Die? The Wanderer? The Lucky One? Ah, no. There was a way out. Somehow, in some manner, there existed the narrow passageway, the legal loophole, through which he and Peganna might slip free. At least, he hoped so.
In his uniform and medals he went to see his counsel.
He found a young man waiting in the hotel suite that was his prison, a pretty girl at his side. The girl was bent over a recording device, a new model with which Bran was unfamiliar, having been so long in the stars. Both the man and the girl rose to their feet when he entered.
Twice the young man cleared his throat. Then he said, “I have been assigned to defend you, Admiral. My name is Randolph Creel. This is Joyle Arrons, my dictographer.”
Bran bowed and sat down.
The young man could hold out no hope for acquittal. All he could do was advise Admiral Magannon that he and Queen Peganna must throw themselves on the leniency of the Tribunal. Plead guilty, and make a plea for mercy.
“What mercy?” wondered Bran, and the young lawyer flushed. A moment Bran sat, studying him. “Counsellor, many years ago I learned that while the truth may not necessarily be a defense at law, it is better than any lie, no matter how well concocted. We will tell the truth.”
“I was afraid you would say that, sir. It’s what the queen said, too, when we visited her. I am to defend you both.”
“The truth may not be enough,” Bran admitted. “It depends on whether we are believed, and even if we are believed, whether it will make any difference in the long run. Now as my lawyer, and as lawyer for the queen, this is what you must do…”
Two hours later, a little stiff, the young man rose from his chair. The girl nodded at him, folding up her portable recorder. He would do as the Admiral asked, sending men to Miranor and to Kuleen and to Yvriss, to make depositions and subpoena witnesses.
“Am I to be kept from the queen while we wait trial?” Bran wondered when his visitors were in the corridor doorway.
“Oh, no,” the girl said in a rush of words. “Your suite connects with hers through a door at the far side of the fireplace.”
“We are not barbarians, Admiral,” Creel said with a smile.
The door closed behind them.
The door near the fireplace opened. Peganna came into the room, in a black mist gown set with little seed pearls, her silver hair coiffed on top of her head and framed by a low golden coronal. She was so lovely Bran could only stand and stare at her.
They shall never kill you, Peganna of the Silver Hair! This I vow! As I have saved you on Makkador and on Miranor, so I shall do on Earth!
She gave a little cry and ran into his arms.
When she could speak, she whispered, “They’ll have a spacebeam hookup by laser to the solar worlds and by hyper-spatial rays to the star colonies. Ten billion people will see and hear us condemned to death.”
“Good,” said Bran.
“Good?” she wondered, staring up at him.
“Safety lies in numbers, acushla. The more who hear our story, the more there are who may believe it. Public opinion is a mighty force.”
Instinctively, Peganna knew public opinion was against them.
One month they waited while Empire gathered its witnesses.
They were treated like royalty, wined and dined in their suite with the richest liqueurs and finest foods the Empire could afford. A variation on the theme of the condemned man eating his hearty last meal, Bran knew, but he drank and ate what they sent him with honest enjoyment. Even Peganna ate when he cajoled her.
From time to time, Randolph Creel would visit them, advising them of his success or the lack of it in securing the witnesses they would need for their defense. It became clear to them, as the month hastened toward its close, that whatever defense he intended to make would not be adequate.
“Empire is very determined to see justice done,” he said.
“Justice?” asked Peganna.
“Let me say that Empire is determined to secure a judgment of guilty, then. On all counts, with a mandatory death penalty. They have a battery of counsellors, the finest in the whole solar system, working on the case.”
“While you work alone,” Bran noted.
Creel nodded, looking injured.
“I expected no less,” Bran said thoughtfully. Then, “Tell me, how is Commander Drexel doing these days?”
The lawyer grinned. “Up and about, with his nose jammed far over to one side of his face. He’ll go to plastic surgery, of course—but not until after the trial. I think there’s a bit of the vulture in Commander Drexel.”
“It could be he’s merely worried,” Bran remarked. “He thinks I’m something of a wizard, capable of pulling live rabbits out of a wolf’s lair.”
Peganna leaned forward, torture in her eyes. “The vault of the blue egg? Has Empire taken all the objects inside it?”
Creel drew a deep breath. “For ten years men will work on the vault. It’s been sealed off and is guarded now by a complete squadron of the Fleet. They’re building a town around it, calling it Treasure City.
”
“Yes, they would. It will advance their technology a million years. It’s the greatest discovery ever made, in the memory of man or Lyanirn.”
“Your discovery, your highness,” Creel exclaimed eagerly. “I intend to point out to the Tribunal that fact, and suggest that in recompense for the vault, you and Admiral Magannon be allowed your freedom.”
Bran shook his head. “It will never work. Empire has the vault. And gratitude is a chancy thing after the gift is made.”
Peganna looked at him with death in her face.
The month was at an end.
In an air-car on which was focused the space-vision lenses of ten thousand planets, Peganna of the Lyanir and Admiral Bran Magannon were flown to the Hall of the Star Worlds, to face trial by a jury of their peers, in front of the High Tribunal of the Empire.
They walked through the great rotunda, in the curved walls of which was set a titanic astrarama, with the stars as seen from the northern and southern hemispheres of Earth framed behind glass panes. It seemed to the onlooker that he stood on the rim of space when he looked into those transparent plates. An engineering genius had set tiny pinpoints of radiant matter on magnetic beams, arranged in such a way that the universe lay open for viewing.
The thought touched Bran Magannon that with this trial, all those stars and their worlds hung in the balance. Something greater than the lives of a man and a woman was at stake, perhaps even the lives of ten billion billion people.
A fey concept, he told himself, but he was troubled.
They came out of the rotunda into the High Court itself, the seats of which were packed with the rich and famous, here to see judgment done on the man and woman who had threatened their security. One could almost feel the antagonism as their eyes studied the defendants when they came side by side down the aisle and to the raised seats behind the counsel table.