"Heritage of instinct, I suppose," McCormac said. "Our race began as an animal that hunted in packs."
"Training can tame instinct," the dragon answered. "Can the intelligent mind not train itself?"
Alone in his cell, Hugh McCormac nodded. I've at least got that damned monitor to watch me. Maybe someday somebody—Kathryn, or the children Ramona gave me, or some boy I never knew—will see its tapes.
He lay down on his bunk, the sole furnishing besides washbasin and sanitizer, and closed his eyes. I'll try playing mental chess again, alternating sides, till dinner. Give me enough time and I'll master the technique. Just before eating, I'll have another round of calisthenics. That drab mess in the soft bowl won't suffer from getting cold. Perhaps later I'll be able to sleep.
He hadn't lowered his improvised curtain. The pickup recorded a human male, tall, rangy, more vigorous than could be accounted for by routine antisenescence. Little betrayed his 50 standard years except the grizzling of black hair and the furrows in his long, lean countenance. He had never changed those features, nor protected them from the weathers of many planets. The skin remained dark and leathery. A jutting triangle of nose, a straight mouth and lantern jaw, were like counterweights to the dolichocephalic skull. When he opened the eyes beneath his heavy brows, they would show the color of glaciers. When he spoke, his voice tended to be hard; and decades of service around the Empire, before he returned to his home sector, had worn away the accent of Aeneas.
He lay there, concentrating so furiously on imagined chessmen which kept slipping about like fog-wraiths, that he did not notice the first explosion. Only when another went crump! and the walls reverberated did he know it was the second.
"What the chaos?" He surged to his feet.
A third detonation barked dully and toned in metal. Heavy slugthrowers, he knew. Sweat spurted forth. The heart slammed within him. What had happened? He threw a glance at the viewport. Llynathawr was rolling into sight, unmarked, serene, indifferent.
A rushing noise sounded at the door. A spot near its molecular catch glowed red, then white. Somebody was cutting through with a blaster. Voices reached McCormac, indistinct but excited and angry. A slug went bee-yowww down the corridor, gonged off a wall, and dwindled to nothing.
The door wasn't thick, just sufficient to contain a man. Its alloy gave way, streamed downward, made fantastic little formations akin to lava. The blaster flame boomed through the hole, enlarging it. McCormac squinted away from that glare. Ozone prickled his nostrils. He thought momentarily, crazily, no reason to be so extravagant of charge.
The gun stopped torching. The door flew wide. A dozen beings stormed through. Most were men in blue Navy outfits. A couple of them bulked robotlike in combat armor and steered a great Holbert energy gun on its grav sled. One was nonhuman, a Donarrian centauroid, bigger than the armored men themselves; he bore an assortment of weapons on his otherwise nude frame, but had left them holstered in favor of a battleax. It dripped red. His simian countenance was a single vast grin.
"Admiral! Sir!" McCormac didn't recognize the youth who dashed toward him, hands outspread. "Are you all right?"
"Yes. Yes. What—" McCormac willed out bewilderment. "What is this?"
The other snapped a salute. "Lieutenant Nasruddin Hamid, sir, commanding your rescue party by order of Captain Oliphant."
"Assaulting an Imperial installation?" It was as if somebody else used McCormac's larynx.
"Sir, they meant to kill you. Captain Oliphant's sure of it." Hamid looked frantic. "We've got to move fast, sir. We entered without loss. The man in charge knew about the operation. He pulled back most of the guards. He'll leave with us. A few disobeyed him and resisted. Snelund's men, must be. We cut through them but some escaped. They'll be waiting to send a message soon's our ships stop jamming."
The event was still unreal for McCormac. Part of him wondered if his mind had ripped across. "Governor Snelund was appointed by His Majesty," jerked from his gullet. "The proper place to settle things is a court of inquiry."
Another man trod forth. He had not lost the lilt of Aeneas. "Please, sir." He was near weeping. "We can't do without you. Local uprisings on more planets every day—on ours, now, too, in Borea and Ironland. Snelund's tryin' to get the Navy to help his filthy troops put down the trouble . . . by his methods . . . by nuclear bombardment if burnin', shootin', and enslavin' don't work."
"War on our own people," McCormac whispered, "when outside the border, the barbarians—"
His gaze drifted back to Llynathawr, aglow in the port. "What about my wife?"
"I don't . . . don't know . . . anything about her—" Hamid stammered.
McCormac swung to confront him. Rage leaped aloft. He grabbed the lieutenant's tunic. "That's a lie!" he yelled. "You can't help knowing! Oliphant wouldn't send men on a raid without briefing them on every last detail. What about Kathryn?"
"Sir, the jamming'll be noticed. We only have a surveillance vessel. An enemy ship on picket could—"
McCormac shook Hamid till teeth rattled in the jaws. Abruptly he let go. They saw his face become a machine's. "What touched off part of the trouble was Snelund's wanting Kathryn," he said, altogether toneless. "The Governor's court likes its gossip juicy; and what the court knows, soon all Catawrayannis does. She's still in the palace, isn't she?"
The men looked away, anywhere except at him. "I heard that," Hamid mumbled. "Before we attacked, you see, we stopped at one of the asteroids—pretended we were on a routine relief—and sounded out whoever we could. One was a merchant, come from the city the day before. He said—well, a public announcement about you, sir, and your lady being 'detained for investigation' only she and the governor—"
He stopped.
After a while, McCormac reached forth and squeezed his shoulder. "You needn't continue, son," he said, with scarcely more inflection but quite softly. "Let's board your ship."
"We aren't mutineers, sir," Hamid said pleadingly. "We need you to—to hold off that monster . . . till we can get the truth before the Emperor."
"No, it can't be called mutiny any longer," McCormac answered. "It has to be revolt." His voice whipped out. "Get moving! On the double!"
Chapter Two
A metropolis in its own right, Admiralty Center lifted over that part of North America's Rocky Mountains which it occupied, as if again the Titans of dawn myth were piling Pelion on Ossa to scale Olympus. "And one of these days," Dominic Flandry had remarked to a young woman whom he was showing around, and to whom he had made that comparison in order to demonstrate his culture, "the gods are going to get as irritated as they did last time—let us hope with less deplorable results."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
Because his objective was not to enlighten but simply to seduce her, he had twirled his mustache and leered: "I mean that you are far too lovely for me to exercise my doomsmanship on. Now as for that plotting tank you wanted to see, this way, please."
He didn't tell her that its spectacular three-dimensional star projections were mainly for visitors. The smallest astronomical distance is too vast for any pictorial map to have much value. The real information was stored in the memory banks of unpretentious computers which the general public was not allowed to look on.
As his cab entered the area today, Flandry recalled the little episode. It had terminated satisfactorily. But his mind would not break free of the parallel he had not uttered.
Around him soared many-tinted walls, so high that fluoro-panels must glow perpetually on the lower levels, a liana tangle of elevated ways looping between them, the pinnacles crowned with clouds and sunlight. Air traffic swarmed and glittered in their sky, a dance too dense and complex for anything but electronic brains to control; and traffic pulsed among the towers, up and down within them, deep into the tunnels and chambers beneath their foundations. Those cars and buses, airborne or ground, made barely a whisper; likewise the slideways; and a voice or a footfall was soon lost. Nevertheless, Admiralty Center
stood in a haze of sound, a night-and-day hum like a beehive's above an undergroundish growling, the noise of its work.
For here was the nexus of Imperial strength; and Terra ruled a rough sphere some 400 light-years across, containing an estimated four million suns, of which a hundred thousand were in one way or another tributary to her.
Thus far the pride. When you looked behind it, though—
Flandry emerged from his reverie. His cab was slanting toward Intelligence headquarters. He took a hasty final drag on his cigarette, pitched it in the disposer, and checked his uniform. He preferred the dashing dress version, with as much elegant variation as the rather elastic rules permitted, or a trifle more. However, when your leave has been cancelled after a mere few days home, and you are ordered to report straight to Vice Admiral Kheraskov, you had better arrive in plain white tunic and trousers, the latter not tucked into your half-boots, and belt instead of sash, and simple gray cloak, and bonnet cocked to bring its sunburst badge precisely over the middle of your forehead.
Sackcloth and ashes would be more appropriate, Flandry mourned. Three, count 'em, three gorgeous girls, ready and eager to help me celebrate my birth week, starting tomorrow at Everest House with a menu I spent two hours planning; and we'd've continued as long as necessary to prove that a quarter century is less old than it sounds. And now this!
A machine in the building talked across seething communications to a machine in the cab. Flandry was deposited on the fiftieth-level parking flange. The gravs cut out. He lent his card to the meter, which transferred credit and unlocked the door for him. A marine guard at the entrance verified his identity and appointment with the help of another machine and let him through. He passed down several halls on his way to the lift shaft he wanted. Restless, he walked in preference to letting a strip carry him.
Crowds moved by and overflowed the offices. Their members ranged from junior technicians to admirals on whose heads might rest the security of a thousand worlds and scientists who barely kept the Empire afloat in a universe full of lethal surprises. By no means all were human. Shapes, colors, words, odors, tactile sensations when he brushed against a sleeve or an alien skin, swirled past Flandry in endless incomprehensible patterns.
Hustle, bustle, hurry, scurry, run, run, run, said his glumness. Work, for the night is coming—the Long Night, when the Empire goes under and the howling peoples camp in its ruins. Because how can we remain forever the masters, even of our insignificant spatter of stars, on the fringe of a galaxy so big we'll never know a decent fraction of it? Probably never more than this sliver of one spiral arm that we've already seen. Why, better than half the suns, just in the micro-bubble of space we claim, have not been visited once!
Our ancestors explored further than we in these years remember. When hell cut loose and their civilization seemed about to fly into pieces, they patched it together with the Empire. And they made the Empire function. But we . . . we've lost the will. We've had it too easy for too long. And so the Merseians on our Betelgeusean flank, the wild races everywhere else, press inward . . . . Why do I bother? Once a career in the Navy looked glamorous to me. Lately I've seen its backside. I could be more comfortable doing almost anything else.
A woman stopped him. She must be on incidental business, because civilian employees here couldn't get away with dressing in quite such a translucent wisp of rainbow. She was constructed for it. "I beg your pardon," she said. "Could you tell me how to find Captain Yuan-Li's office? I'm afraid I'm lost."
Flandry bowed. "Indeed, my lady." He had reported in there on arrival at Terra, and now directed her. "Please tell him Lieutenant Commander Flandry said he's a lucky captain."
She fluttered her lashes. "Oh, sir." Touching the insigne on his breast, a star with an eye: "I noticed you're in Intelligence. That's why I asked you. It must be fascinating. I'd love to—"
Flandry beamed. "Well, since we both know friend Yuan-Li—"
They exchanged names and addresses. She departed, wagging her tail. Flandry continued. His mood was greatly lightened. After all, another job might prove boring. He reached his upbound point. Here's where I get the shaft. Stepping through the portal, he relaxed while the negagrav field lifted him.
Rather, he tried to relax, but did not succeed a hundred percent. Attractive women or no, a new-made lieutcom summoned for a personal interview with a subchief of operations is apt to find his tongue a little dry and his palms a little wet.
Catching a handhold, he drew himself out on the ninety-seventh level and proceeded down the corridor. Here dwelt a hush; the rare soft voices, the occasional whirr of a machine, only deepened for him the silence between these austere walls. What persons he met were of rank above his, their eyes turned elsewhere, their thoughts among distant suns. When he reached Kheraskov's suite of offices, the receptionist was nothing but a scanner and talkbox hooked to a computer too low-grade to be called a brain. More was not needed. Everybody unimportant got filtered out at an earlier stage. Flandry cooled his heels a mere five minutes before it told him to proceed through the inner door.
The room beyond was large, high-ceilinged, lushly carpeted. In one corner stood an infotriever and an outsize vidiphone, in another a small refreshment unit. Otherwise there were three or four pictures, and as many shelves for mementos of old victories. The rear wall was an animation screen; at present it held an image of Jupiter seen from an approaching ship, so vivid that newcomers gasped. He halted at an expanse of desktop and snapped a salute that nearly tore his arm off. "Lieutenant Commander Dominic Flandry, reporting as ordered, sir."
The man aft of the desk was likewise in plain uniform. He wore none of the decorations that might have blanketed his chest, save the modest jewel of knighthood that was harder to gain than a patent of nobility. But his nebula and star outglistened Flandry's ringed planet. He was short and squat, with tired pugdog features under bristly gray hair. His return salute verged on being sloppy. But Flandry's heartbeat accelerated.
"At ease," said Vice Admiral Sir Ilya Kheraskov. "Sit down. Smoke?" He shoved forward a box of cigars.
"Thank you, sir." Flandry collected his wits. He chose a cigar and made a production of starting it, while the chair fitted itself around his muscles and subtly encouraged them to relax. "The admiral is most kind. I don't believe a better brand exists than Corona Australis." In fact, he knew of several: but these weren't bad. The smoke gave his tongue a love bite and curled richly by his nostrils.
"Coffee if you like," offered the master of perhaps a million agents through the Empire and beyond. "Or tea or jaine."
"No, thanks, sir."
Kheraskov studied him, wearily and apologetically; he felt X-rayed. "I'm sorry to break your furlough like this, Lieutenant Commander," the admiral said. "You must have been anticipating considerable overdue recreation. I see you have a new face."
They had never met before. Flandry made himself smile. "Well, yes, sir. The one my parents gave me had gotten monotonous. And since I was coming to Terra, where biosculp is about as everyday as cosmetics—" He shrugged.
Still that gaze probed him. Kheraskov saw an athlete's body, 184 centimeters tall, wide in the shoulders and narrow in the hips. From the white, tapered hands you might guess how their owner detested the hours of exercise he must spend in maintaining those cat-supple thews. His countenance had become straight of nose, high of cheekbones, cleft of chin. The mobile mouth and the eyes, changeable gray beneath slightly arched brows, were original. Speaking, he affected a hint of drawl.
"No doubt you're wondering why your name should have been plucked off the roster," Kheraskov said, "and why you should have been ordered straight here instead of to your immediate superior or Captain Yuan-Li."
"Yes, sir. I didn't seem to rate your attention."
"Nor were you desirous to." Kheraskov's chuckle held no humor. "But you've got it." He leaned back, crossed stumpy legs and bridged hairy fingers. "I'll answer your questions.
"First, why you, one obscure office
r among tens of similar thousands? You may as well know, Flandry, if you don't already—though I suspect your vanity has informed you—to a certain echelon of the Corps, you aren't obscure. You wouldn't hold the rank you've got, at your age, if that were the case. No, we've taken quite an interest in you since the Starkad affair. That had to be hushed up, of course, but it was not forgotten. Your subsequent assignment to surveillance had intriguing consequences." Flandry could not totally suppress a tinge of alarm. Kheraskov chuckled again; it sounded like iron chains. "We've learned things that you hushed up. Don't worry . . . yet. Competent men are so heartbreakingly scarce these days, not to mention brilliant ones, that the Service keeps a blind eye handy for a broad range of escapades. You'll either be killed, young man, or you'll do something that will force us to step on you, or you'll go far indeed."
He drew breath before continuing: "The present business requires a maverick. I'm not letting out any great secret when I tell you the latest Merseian crisis is worse than the government admits to the citizens. It could completely explode on us. I think we can defuse it. For once, the Empire acted fast and decisively. But it demands we keep more than the bulk of our fleets out on that border, till the Merseians understand we mean business about not letting them take over Jihannath. Intelligence operations there have reached such a scale that the Corps is sucked dry of able field operatives elsewhere.
"And meanwhile something else has arisen, on the opposite side of our suzerainty. Something potentially worse than any single clash with Merseia." Kheraskov lifted a hand. "Don't imagine you're the only man we're sending to cope, or that you can contribute more than a quantum to our effort. Still, stretched as thin as we are, every quantum is to be treasured. It was your bad luck but the Empire's good luck . . . maybe . . . that you happened to check in on Terra last week. When I asked Files who might be available with the right qualifications, your reel was among a dozen that came back."
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