Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire

by Poul Anderson

  A shiver went through the huge body. Derek stepped back one pace; teeth caught at his lip. "Say nay more," he muttered.

  "I'd have come looking for you today," said Flandry. "We still have a lot to talk about. Such as the man who tried to kill me last night."

  Derek spat. "A pity he didn't succeed!"

  "Your father thought otherwise, seeing the attempt was made on his own rock. He was quite indignant."

  Derek's eyes narrowed. His nostrils stirred, like an angry bull's, and his head slanted forward. "So you spoke to my father after all, did you, now? I warned you, Impy—"

  "We had a friendly sort of talk," said Flandry. "He doesn't believe anything can be gained by shooting men in their sleep."

  "I suppose all your own works would stand being refereed?"

  Since they would certainly not, Flandry donned a frown and continued: "I'd keep an eye on your father, though. I've seen these dirty little fanaticisms before. Among the first people to be butchered are the native-born who keep enough native sense and honor to treat the Imperial like a fellow-being. You see, such people are too likely to understand that the revolution is really organized by some rival imperialism, and that you can't win a war where your own home is the battleground."

  "Arrgh!" A hoarse animal noise, for no words were scornful enough.

  "And my would-be assassin is still in business," continued Flandry. "He knows I did talk to your father. Hate me as much as you like, Captain Umbolu, but keep a guard over the old gentleman. Or at least speak to a certain Rossalan whom I don't accuse you of knowing."

  For a moment longer the brown eyes blazed against the glacial gray blandness of the Terran's. Then Derek clashed his helmet down and returned to the water.

  Flandry sighed. He really should start the formal machinery of investigation, but—He went back to the house with an idea of borrowing some fishing tackle.

  Inyanduma, seated at a desk among the inevitable documents of government, gave him a troubled look. "Are you certain that there is a real conspiracy on Nyanza?" he asked. "We've ever had our hotheads, like all others . . . aye, I've seen other planets, I 'listed for the space Navy in my day and hold a reserve commission."

  Flandry sat down and looked at his fingernails. "Then why haven't you reported what you know about Rossala?" he asked softly.

  Inyanduma started. "Are you a telepath?"

  "No. It'd make things too dull." Flandry lit a fresh cigaret. "I know Rossala is arming, and that your nation is alarmed enough about it to prepare defensive weapons and alliances. Since the Empire would protect you, you must expect the Empire to be kicked off Nyanza."

  "Nay," whispered Inyanduma. "We've nay certainty of aught. It's but . . . we won't bring a horde of detectives, belike a Terran military force, by denouncing our fellow nation . . . on so little proof. . . . And yet we must keep some freedom of action, in case—"

  "Especially in case Rossala calls on you to join in cutting the Terran apron strings?"

  "Nay, nay—"

  "Under such circumstances, it would be pathetic." Flandry shook his tongue-clicking head. "It's so amateurishly done that I feel grossly overpaid for my time here. But whoever engineered the conspiracy in the first place is no amateur. He used your parochial loyalties with skill. And he must expect to move soon, before a preoccupied Imperium can find out enough about his arrangements to justify sending in the marines. The resident's assassination is obviously a key action. It was chance I got here the very day that had happened, but someone like me would surely have arrived not many days later, and not been a great deal longer about learning as much as I've done. Of course, if they can kill me it will delay matters for a while, which will be helpful to them; but they don't seem to expect they'll need much time."

  Flandry paused, nodded to himself, and carried on. "Ergo, if this affair is not stopped, we can expect Rossala to revolt within a few weeks at the very latest. Rossala will call on the other Nyanzan nations to help—and they've been cleverly maneuvered into arming themselves and setting up a skeleton military organization. If the expert I suspect is behind the revolution, those leaders such as yourself, who demur at the idea, will die and be replaced by more gullible ones. Of course, Nyanza will have been promised outside help: I don't imagine even Derek Umbolu thinks one planet can stand off all Terra's power. Merseia is not too far away. If everything goes smoothly, we'll end up with a nominally independent Nyanza which is actually a Merseian puppet—deep within Terran space. If the attempt fails, well, what's one more radioactive wreck of a world to Merseia?"

  There was a stillness.

  In the end Inyanduma said grayly: "I don't know but what the hazard you speak of will be better than to call in the Terrans; for in sooth all our nations have broken your law in that we have gathered weapons as you say. The Imperials would nay leave us what self-government we now have."

  "They might not be necessary," said Flandry. "Since you do have those weapons, and the City constabulary is a legally armed native force with some nuclear equipment . . . you could do your own housecleaning. I could supervise the operation, make sure it was thorough, stamp my report to headquarters Fantastically Secret, and that would be the close of the affair."

  He stood up. "Think it over," he said.

  It was peaceful out on the rock. Flandry's reel hummed, the lure flashed through brilliant air, the surf kittened gigantically with his hook. It did not seem to matter greatly that he got never a nibble. The tide began to rise again, he'd have to go inside or exchange his rod for a trident. . . .

  A kayak came over drowned skerries like something alive. Derek Umbolu brought it to Flandry's feet and looked up. His face was sea-wet, which was merciful; Flandry did not want to know whether the giant was crying.

  "Blood," croaked Derek. "Blood, and the chairs broken, I could see in the blood how he was dragged out and thrown to the fish."

  Hollowness lay in Dominic Flandry's heart. He felt his shoulders slump. "I'm sorry," he said. "Oh, God, I'm sorry."

  Words ripped out, flat, hurried, under the ramping tidal noise:

  "They center in Rossala, but someone in Uhunhu captains it. I was to seize control here when they rise, if Inyanduma will nay let us help the revolution. I hated the killing of old Bannerji, but it was needful. For now there will be nay effective space traffic control, till they replace him, and in two weeks there will come ships from Merseia with heavy nuclear war-weapons such as we can't make on this planet. The same man who gaffed Bannerji tried for you. He was the only trained assassin in Jairnovaunt—and a neighbor gave you alibi—so I believe none of his whinings that he'd nay touched my father. His name was Mamoud Shufi. Cursed be it till the sun is cold clinkers!"

  One great black hand unzipped the kayak cover. The other hand swooped down, pulled out something which dripped, and flung it at the Terran's feet so hard that one dead eye burst from the lopped-off head.

  VIII

  Elsewhere on Nyanza it growled battle, men speared and shot each other, ships went to the bottom and buildings cracked open like rotten fruit. Where Flandry stood was only turquoise and lace. Perhaps some of the high white clouds banked in the west had a smoky tinge.

  A crewman with a portable sonic fathometer nodded. "We're over Uhunhu shoals now, sir."

  "Stop the music," said Flandry. The skipper transmitted several orders, he felt the pulse of engines die, the submarine lay quiet. Looking down gray decks past the shark's fin of a conning tower, Flandry saw crewmen gathering in a puzzled, almost resentful way. They had expected to join the fighting, till this Terran directed the ship eastward.

  "And now," said Derek Umbolu grimly, "will you have the kindness to say why we steered clear of Rossala?"

  Flandry cocked an eyebrow. "Why are you so anxious to kill other men?" he countered.

  Derek bristled. "I'm nay afraid to hazard my skin, Impy . . . like someone I could name!"

  "There's more to it than that," said Flandry. He was not sure why he prattled cheap psychology when a mon
ster crouched under his feet. Postponing the moment? He glanced at Tessa Hoorn, who had insisted on coming. "Do you see what I mean, Lightmistress? Do you know why he itches so to loose his harpoon?"

  Some of the chill she had shown him in the past week thawed. "Aye," she said. "Belike I do. It's blood guilt enough that we're party to a war 'gainst our own planetmen, without being safe into the bargain."

  He wondered how many shared her feelings. Probably no large number. After he and Inyanduma flew to the City and got the Warden to mobilize his constables, a call had gone out for volunteers. The Nyanzan public had only been informed that a dangerous conspiracy had been discovered, centered in Rossala, that the Sheikh had refused the police right of entry, and that therefore a large force would be needed to seize that nation over the resistance of its misguided citizens and occupy it while the Warden's specialists sniffed out the actual plotters. And men had come by the many thousands, from all over the planet.

  It was worse, though, for those who knew what really lay behind this police operation.

  Flandry mused aloud, "I wonder if you'll ever start feeling that way about your fellowmen, wherever they happen to live?"

  "Enough!" rapped Derek Umbolu. "Say why you brought us hither and be done!"

  Flandry kindled a cigaret and stared over the rail, into chuckling sun-glittering waves so clear that he could see how the darkness grew with every meter of depth. He said:

  "Down there, if he hasn't been warned somehow that I know about him, is the enemy."

  "Ai-a!" Tessa Hoorn dropped a hand to her gun; but Flandry saw with an odd little pain how she moved all unthinkingly closer to Derek. "But who would lair in drowned Uhunhu?"

  "The name I know him by is A'u," said Flandry. "He isn't human. He can breathe water as well as air—I suppose his home planet must be pretty wet, though I don't know where it is. But it's somewhere in the Merseian Empire, and he, like me, belongs to the second oldest profession. We've played games before now. I flushed him on Conjumar two Earth-years ago: my boys cleaned up his headquarters, and his personal spaceship took a near miss that left it lame and radioactive. But he got away. Not home, his ship wasn't in that good a condition, but away."

  Flandry trickled smoke sensuously through his nostrils. It might be the last time. "On the basis of what I've seen here, I'm now certain that friend A'u made for Nyanza, ditched, contacted some of your malcontents, and started cooking revolution. The whole business has his signature, with flourishes. If nothing else, a Nyanzan uprising and Merseian intervention would get him passage home; and he might have inflicted a major defeat on Terra in the process."

  A mumbling went through the crewfolk, wrath which was half terror. "Sic semper local patriots," finished Flandry. "I want to be ruddy damn sure of getting A'u, and he has a whole ocean bottom to hide on if he's alarmed, and we'll be too busy setting traps for the Merseian gunrunners due next week to play tag for very long. Otherwise I'd certainly have waited till we could bring a larger force."

  "Thirty men 'gainst one poor hunted creature?" scoffed Tessa.

  "He's a kind of big creature," said Flandry quietly to her.

  He looked at his followers, beautiful and black in the sunlight, with a thousand hues of blue at their backs, a low little wind touching bare skins, and the clean male shapes of weapons. It was too fair a world to gamble down in dead Uhunhu. Flandry knew with wry precision why he was leading this chase—not for courage, nor glory, nor even one more exploit to embroider for some high-prowed yellow-haired bit of Terran fluff. He went because he was an Imperial and if he stayed behind the colonials would laugh at him.

  Therefore he took one more drag of smoke, flipped his cigaret parabolically overboard, and murmured: "Be good, Tessa, and I'll bring you back a lollipop. Let's go chilluns."

  And snapped down his helmet and dove cleanly over the side.

  The water became a world. Overhead was an area of sundazzle, too bright to look on; elsewhere lay cool dusk fading downward into night. The submarine was a basking whale shape . . . too bad he couldn't just take it down and torpedo A'u, but an unpleasant session with a man arrested in Altla had told him better—A'u expected to be approached only by swimming men. . . . The roof of sunlight grew smaller as he drove himself toward the bottom, until it was a tiny blinding star and then nothing. There was a silken sense of his own steadily rippling muscles and the sea that slid past them, the growing chill stirred his blood in its million channels, a glance behind showed his bubble-stream like a trail of argent planets, his followers were black lightning bolts through an utterly quiet green twilight. O God, to be a seal!

  Dimly now, the weed-grown steeps of Uhunhu rose beneath him, monstrous gray dolmens and menhirs raised by no human hands, sunken a million years ago . . . A centuries-drowned ship, the embryo of a new reef ten millennia hence, with a few skulls strewn for fish to nest in, was shockingly raw and new under the leaning walls. Flandry passed it in the silence of a dream.

  He did not break that quietude, though his helmet bore voice apparatus. If A'u was still here, A'u must not be alarmed by orders to fan out in a search pattern. Flandry soared close enough to Derek to nod, and the giant waved hands and feet in signals understood by the men. Presently Flandry and Derek were alone in what might once have been a street or perhaps a corridor.

  They glided among toppling enormities; now and then one of denser shadow, but it was only a rock or a decapus or a jawbone the size of a portal. Flandry began to feel the cold, deeper than his skin, almost deeper than the silence.

  A hand clamped bruisingly on his wrist. He churned to a halt and hung there, head cocked, until the sound that Derek had dimly caught was borne past vibrator and ocean and receiver to his own ears. It was the screaming of a man being killed, but so far and faint it might have been the death agony of a gnat.

  Flandry blasphemed eighteen separate gods, kicked himself into motion, and went like a hunting eel through Uhunhu. But Derek passed him and he was almost the last man to reach the fight.

  "A'u," he said aloud, uselessly, through the bawl of men and the roil of bloodied waters. He remembered the harpoon rifle slung across his shoulders, unlimbered it, checked the magazine, and wriggled close. Thirty men—no, twenty-nine at the most—a corpse bobbed past, wildly staring through a helmet cracked open—twenty-eight men swirled about one monster. Flandry did not want to hit any of them.

  He swam upward, until he looked down on A'u. The great black shape had torpedoed from a dolmen. Fifteen meters long, the wrinkled leather skin of some Arctic golem, the gape of a whale and the boneless arms of an elephant . . . but with hands, with hands . . . A'u raged among his hunters. Flandry saw how the legs which served him on land gripped two men in the talons and plucked their limbs off. There was no sound made by the monster's throat, but the puny human jabber was smashed by each flat concussion of the flukes, as if bombs burst.

  Flandry nestled the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Recoil sent him backward, end over end. He did not know if his harpoon had joined the score in A'u's tormented flanks. It had to be this way, he thought, explosives would kill the men too under sea pressure and . . . Blood spurted from a transfixed huge hand. A'u got his back against a monolith, arched his tail, and shot toward the surface. Men sprayed from him like bow water.

  Flandry snapped his legs and streaked to meet the thing. The white belly turned toward him, a cliff, a cloud, a dream. He fired once and saw his harpoon bite. Once more! A'u bent double in anguish, spoke blood, somehow sensed the man and plunged at him. Flandry looked down a cave of horrible teeth. He looked into the eyes behind; they were blind with despair. He tried to scramble aside. A'u changed course with a snake's ease. Flandry had a moment to wonder if A'u knew him again.

  A man flew from the blood-fog. He fired a harpoon, holding himself steady against its back-thrust. Instead of letting the line trail, to tangle the beast, he grabbed it, was pulled up almost to the side. The gills snapped at him like mouths. He followed the monster, turn for turn throu
gh cold deeps, as he sought aim. Finally he shot. An eye went out. A brain was cloven. A'u turned over and died.

  Flandry gasped after breath. His helmet rang and buzzed, it was stifling him, he must snatch it off before he choked. . . . Hands caught him. He looked into the victory which was Derek Umbolu's face. "Wait there, wait, Terra man," said a remote godlike calm. "All is done now."

  "I, I, I, thanks!" rattled Flandry.

  His wind came back to him. He counted the men that gathered, while they rose with all due slowness toward the sun. Six were dead. Cheap enough to get rid of A'u.

  If I had been cast away, alone, on the entire world of a hideous race . . . I wonder if I would have had the courage to survive this long.

  I wonder if there are some small cubs, on a water planet deep among the Merseian stars, who can't understand why father hasn't come home.

  He climbed on deck at last, threw back his helmet and sat down under Tessa Hoorn's anxious gaze. "Give me a cigaret," he said harshly. "And break out something alcoholic."

  She wrestled herself to steadiness. "Caught you the monster?" she asked.

  "Aye," said Derek.

  "We close to didn't," said Flandry. "Our boy Umbolu gets the credit."

  "Small enough vengeance for my father," said the flat voice of sorrow.

  The submarine's captain saluted the pale man who sat hugging his knees, shivering and drinking smoke. "Word just came in from Rossala, sir," he reported. "The Sheikh has yielded, though he swears he'll protest the outrage to the next Imperial resident. But he'll let the constables occupy his realm and search as they wish."

  Search for a number of earnest, well-intentioned young patriots, who'll never again see morning over broad waters. Well—I suppose it all serves the larger good. It must. Our noble homosexual Emperor says so himself.

  "Excellent," said Flandry. His glance sought Derek. "Since you saved my life, you've got a reward coming. Your father."

  "Hoy?" The big young man trod backward a step.