VII
The Hooligan snaked out of Terran sky, ran for a time on primary drive at an acceleration which it strained the internal grav-field to compensate for, and, having reached a safe distance from Sol, sprang over into secondary. Briefly the viewscreens went wild with Doppler effect and aberration. Then their circuits adapted to the rate at which the vessel pulsed in and out of normal space-time-energy levels; they annulled the optics of pseudo-speed, and Flandry looked again upon cold many-starred night as if he were at rest.
He left Chives in the turret to make final course adjustments and strolled down to the saloon. "All clear," he smiled. "Estimated time to Vixen, thirteen standard days."
"What?" The girl, Catherine Kittredge, half rose from the luxuriously cushioned bench. "But it took me a month the other way, an' I had the fastest racer on our planet."
"I've tinkered with this one," said Flandry, "Or, rather, found experts to do so." He sat down near her, crossing long legs and leaning an elbow on the mahogany table which the bench half-circled. "Give me a screwdriver and I'll make any firearm in the cosmos sit up and speak. But space drives have an anatomy I can only call whimsical."
He was trying to put her at ease. Poor kid, she had seen her home assailed, halfway in from the Imperial marches that were supposed to bear all the wars; she had seen friends and kinfolk slain in battle with unhuman unknowns, and heard the boots of an occupying enemy racket in once-familiar streets; she had fled to Terra like a child to its mother, and been coldly interviewed in an office and straightway bundled back on to a spaceship, with one tailed alien and one suave stranger. Doubtless an official had told her she was a brave little girl and now it was her duty to return as a spy and quite likely be killed. And meanwhile rhododendrons bloomed like cool fire in Terra's parks, and the laughing youth of Terra's aristocracy flew past on their way to some newly opened pleasure house.
No wonder Catherine Kittredge's eyes were wide and bewildered.
They were her best feature, Flandry decided: large, set far apart, a gold-flecked hazel under long lashes and thick dark brows. Her hair would have been nice too, a blonde helmet, if she had not cut it off just below the ears. Otherwise she was nothing much to look at—a broad, snub-nosed, faintly freckled countenance, generous mouth and good chin. As nearly as one could tell through a shapeless gray coverall, she was of medium height and on the stocky side. She spoke Anglic with a soft regional accent that sounded good in her low voice; but all her mannerisms were provincial, fifty years out of date. Flandry wondered a little desperately what they could talk about.
Well, there was business enough. He flicked buttons for autoservice. "What are you drinking?" he asked. "We've anything within reason, and a few things out of reason, on board."
She blushed. "Nothin', thank you," she mumbled.
"Nothing at all? Come, now. Daiquiri? Wine? Beer? Buttermilk, for heaven's sake?"
"Hm?" She raised a fleeting glance. He discovered Vixen had no dairy industry, cattle couldn't survive there, and dialed ice cream for her. He himself slugged down a large gin-and-bitters. He was going to need alcohol—two weeks alone in space with Little Miss Orphan!
She was pleased enough by discovering ice cream to relax a trifle. Flandry offered a cigarette, was refused, and started one for himself. "You'll have plenty of time to brief me en route," he said, "so don't feel obliged to answer questions now, if it distresses you."
Catherine Kittredge looked beyond him, out the viewscreen and into the frosty sprawl of Andromeda. Her lips twitched downward, ever so faintly. But she replied with a steadiness he liked: "Why not? 'Twon't bother me more'n sittin' an' broodin'."
"Good girl. Tell me, how did you happen to carry the message?"
"My brother was our official courier. You know how 'tis on planets like ours, without much population or money: whoever's got the best spaceship gets a subsidy an' carries any special dispatches. I helped him. We used to go off jauntin' for days at a time, an'—No," she broke off. Her fists closed. "I won't bawl. The aliens forced a landin'. Hank went off with our groun' forces. He didn't come back. Sev'ral days after the surrender, when things began to settle down a little, I got the news he'd been killed in action. A few of us decided the Imperium had better be given what information we could supply. Since I knew Hank's ship best, they tol' me to go."
"I see." Flandry determined to keep this as dry as possible, for her sake. "I've a copy of the report your people made up, of course, but you had all the way to Sol to study it, so you must know more about it than anyone else off Vixen. Just to give me a rough preliminary idea, I understand some of the invaders knew Anglic and there was a certain amount of long-range parleying. What did they call themselves?"
"Does that matter?" she asked listlessly.
"Not in the faintest, at the present stage of things, except that it's such a weary cliché to speak of Planet X."
She smiled, a tiny bit. "They called themselves the Ardazirho, an' we gathered the ho was a collective endin'. So we figure their planet is named Ardazir. Though I can't come near pronouncin' it right."
Flandry took a stereopic from the pocket of his iridescent shirt. It had been snapped from hiding, during the ground battle. Against a background of ruined human homes crouched a single enemy soldier. Warrior? Acolyte? Unit? Armed, at least, and a killer of men.
Preconceptions always got in the way. Flandry's first startled thought had been Wolf! Now he realized that of course the Ardazirho was not lupine, didn't even look notably wolfish. Yet the impression lingered. He was not surprised when Catherine Kittredge said the aliens had gone howling into battle.
They were described as man-size bipeds, but digitigrade, which gave their feet almost the appearance of a dog's walking on its hind legs. The shoulders and arms were very humanoid, except that the thumbs were on the opposite side of the hands from mankind's. The head, arrogantly held on a powerful neck, was long and narrow for an intelligent animal, with a low forehead, most of the brain space behind the pointed ears. A black-nosed muzzle, not as sharp as a wolf's and yet somehow like it, jutted out of the face. Its lips were pulled back in a snarl, showing bluntly pointed fangs which suggested a flesh-eater turned omnivore. The eyes were oval, close set, and gray as sleet. Short thick fur covered the entire body, turning to a ruff at the throat; it was rusty red.
"Is this a uniform?" asked Flandry.
The girl leaned close to see. The pictured Ardazirho wore a sort of kilt, in checkerboard squares of various hues. Flandry winced at some of the combinations: rose next to scarlet, a glaring crimson offensively between two delicate yellows. "Barbarians indeed," he muttered. "I hope Chives can stand the shock." Otherwise the being was dressed in boots of flexible leather and a harness from which hung various pouches and equipment. He was armed with what was obviously a magnetronic rifle, and had a wicked-looking knife at his belt.
"I'm not sure," said the girl. "Either they don't use uniforms at all, or they have such a variety that we've not made any sense of it. Some might be dressed more or less like him, others in a kind o' tunic an' burnoose, others in breastplates an' fancy plumed helmets."
"Him," pounced Flandry. "They're all male, then?"
"Yes, sir, seems that way. The groun' fightin' lasted long enough for our biologists to dissect an' analyze a few o' their dead. Accordin' to the report, they're placental mammals. It's clear they're from a more or less terrestroid planet, probably with a somewhat stronger gravity. The eye structure suggests their sun is bright, type A5 or thereabouts. That means they should feel pretty much at home in our badlands." Catherine Kittredge shrugged sadly. "Figure that's why they picked us to start on."
"They might have been conquering for some time," said Flandry. "A hot star like an A5 is no use to humans; and I imagine the F-type like yours is about as cool as they care for. They may well have built up a little coterminous kingdom, a number of B, A, and F suns out in your quadrant, where we don't even have a complete astronomical mapping—let alone having explored m
uch... Hm. Didn't you get a chance to interrogate any live prisoners?"
"Yes. 'Twasn't much use. Durin' the fightin', one of our regiments did encircle a unit o' theirs an' knock it out with stun beams. When two o' them woke up an' saw they were captured, they died."
"Preconditioning," nodded Flandry. "Go on."
"The rest didn't speak any Anglic, 'cept one who'd picked up a little bit. They questioned him." The girl winced. "I don't figure 'twas very nice. The report says towards the end his heart kept stoppin' an' they'd revive it, but at last he died for good... Anyway, it seems a fair bet he was tellin' the truth. An' he didn't know where his home star was. He could understan' our coordinate system, an' translate it into the one they used. But that was zeroed arbitrarily on S Doradus, an' he didn't have any idea about the coordinates of Ardazir."
"Memory blank." Flandry scowled. "Probably given to all the enlisted ranks. Such officers as must retain full information are conditioned to die on capture. What a merry monarch they've got." He twisted his moustache between nervous fingers. "You know, though, this suggests their home is vulnerable. Maybe we should concentrate on discovering where it is."
The girl dropped her eyes. She lost a little color. "Do you think we can, my lord?" she whispered. "Or are we just goin' to die too?"
"If the mission involves procedures illegal or immoral, I should have no trouble." Flandry grinned at her. "You can do whatever honorable work is necessary. Between us, why, God help Ardazir. Incidentally, I don't rate a title."
"But they called you Sir Dominic."
"A knighthood is not a patent of nobility. I'm afraid my relationship to the peerage involves a bar sinister. You see, one day my father wandered into this sinister bar, and—" Flandry rambled on, skirting the risqué, until he heard her laugh. Then he laughed back and said: "Good girl! What do they call you at home? Kit, I'll swear. Very well, we're off to the wars, you the Kit and I the caboodle. Now let's scream for Chives to lay out caviar and cheeses. Afterwards I'll show you to your stateroom." Her face turned hot, and he added, "Its door locks on the inside."
"Thank you," she said, so low he could scarcely hear it. Smoky lashes fluttered on her cheeks. "When I was told to come—with you—I mean, I didn't know—"
"My dear girl," said Flandry, "credit me with enough experience to identify a holstered needle gun among more attractive curves beneath that coverall."
VIII
There was always something unreal about a long trip through space. Here, for a time, you were alone in the universe. No radio could outpace you and be received, even if unimaginable distance would not soon have drowned it in silence. No other signal existed, except another spaceship, and how would it find you unless your feeble drive-pulsations were by the merest chance detected? A whole fleet might travel many parsecs before some naval base sensed its wake with instruments; your one mote of a craft could hurtle to the ends of creation and never be heard. There was nothing to be seen, no landscape, no weather, simply the enormous endless pageantry of changing constellations, now and then a cold nebular gleam between flashing suns, the curdled silver of the Milky Way and the clotted stars near Sagittarius. Yet you in your shell were warm, dry, breathing sweet recycled air; on a luxury vessel like the Hooligan, you might listen to recorded Lysarcian bells, sip Namorian maoth and taste Terran grapes.
Flandry worked himself even less mercifully than he did Chives and Kit. It was the hard, dull grind which must underlie all their hopes: study, rehearsal, analysis of data, planning and discarding and planning again, until brains could do no more and thinking creaked to a halt. But then recreation became pure necessity—and they were two humans with one unobtrusive servant, cruising among the stars.
Flandry discovered that Kit could give him a workout, when they played handball down in the hold. And her stubborn chess game defeated his swashbuckling tactics most of the time. She had a puckish humor when she wasn't remembering her planet. Flandry would not soon forget her thumbnail impression of Vice Admiral Fenross: "A mind like a mousetrap, only he ought to let some o' those poor little mice go." She could play the lorr, her fingers dancing over its twelve primary strings with that touch which brings out the full ringing resonance of the secondaries; she seemed to know all the ballads from the old brave days when men were first hewing their home out of Vixen's wildness, and they were good to hear.
Flandry grew slowly aware that she was the opposite of bad-looking. She just hadn't been sculpted into the monotonously aristocratic appearance of Terra's high-born ladies. The face, half boyish, was her own, the body full and supple where it counted. He swore dismally to himself and went on a more rigorous calisthenic program.
Slowly the stars formed new patterns. There came a time when Aldebaran stood like red flame, the brightest object in all heaven. And then the needle-point of Vixen's sun, the star named Cerulia, glistened keen and blue ahead. And Flandry turned from the viewscreen and said quietly: "Two more days to go. I think we'll have captain's dinner tonight."
"Very good, sir," said Chives. "I took it upon myself to bring along some live Maine lobster. And I trust the Liebfraumilch '51 will be satisfactory?"
"That's the advantage of having a Shalmuan for your batman," remarked Flandry to Kit. "Their race has more sensitive palates than ours. They can't go wrong on vintages."
She smiled, but her eyes were troubled.
Flandry retired to his own cabin and an argument. He wanted to wear a peach-colored tunic with his white slacks; Chives insisted that the dark blue, with a gold sash, was more suitable. Chives won, naturally. The man wandered into the saloon, which was already laid out for a feast, and poured himself an aperitif. Music sighed from the recorder, nothing great but sweet to hear.
A footfall came lightly behind him. He turned and nearly dropped his glass. Kit was entering in a sheer black dinner gown; one veil the color of fire flickered from her waistline. A filigree tiara crowned shining hair, and a bracelet of Old Martian silver coiled massive on her wrist.
"Great hopping electrons," gasped Flandry. "Don't do such things without warning! Where did the paintbrush come from to lay on the glamour that thick?"
Kit chuckled and pirouetted. "Chives," she said. "Who else? He's a darlin'. He brought the jew'lry along, an' he's been makin' the dress at odd moments this whole trip."
Flandry shook his head and clicked his tongue. "If Chives would accept manumission, he could set himself up in business, equipping lady spies to seduce poor officers like me. He'd own the galaxy in ten years."
Kit blushed and said hastily: "Did he select the tape too? I always have loved Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto."
"Oh, is that what it is? Nice music for a sentimental occasion, anyway. My department is more the administration of drinks. I prescribe this before dinner: Ansan aurea. Essentially, it's a light dry vermouth, but for once a non-Terran soil has improved the flavor of a Terran plant."
She hesitated. "I don't—I never—"
"Well, high time you began." He did not glance at the viewscreen, where Cerulia shone like steel, but they both knew there might not be many hours left for them to savor existence. She took the glass, sipped, and sighed.
"Thank you, Dominic. I've been missin' out on such a lot."
They seated themselves. "We'll have to make that up, after this affair is over," said Flandry. A darkening passed through him, just long enough to make him add: "However, I suspect that on the whole you've done better in life than I."
"What do you mean?" Her eyes, above the glass, reflected the wine's hue and became almost golden.
"Oh... hard to say." His mouth twisted ruefully upward. "I've no romantic illusions about the frontier. I've seen too much of it. I'd a good deal rather loll in bed sipping my morning chocolate than bounce into the fields before dawn to cultivate the grotch or scag the thimbs or whatever dreary technicalities it is that pioneers undergo. And yet, well, I've no illusions about my own class either, or my own way of life. You frontier people are the healthy ones. You'll
be around—most of you—long after the Empire is a fireside legend. I envy you that."
He broke off. "Pardon me. I'm afraid spiritual jaundice is an occupational disease in my job."
"Which I'm still not sure what it—Oh, dear." Kit chuckled. "Does alcohol act that fast? But really, Dominic, I wish you'd talk a little about your work. All you've said is, you're in Naval Intelligence. I'd like to know what you do."
"Why?" he asked.
She flushed and blurted: "To know you better."
Flandry saw her confusion and moved to hide it from them both. "There's not a lot to tell. I'm a field agent, which means I go out and peek through windows instead of sitting in an office reading the reports of window peekers. Thanks to the circumstance that my immediate superior doesn't like me, I spend most of my working time away from Terra, on what amounts to a roving commission. Good old Fenross. If he was ever replaced by some kindly father-type who dealt justly with all subordinates, I'd dry up and blow away."
"I think that's revoltin'." Anger flashed in her voice.
"What? The discrimination? But my dear lass, what is any civilization but an elaborate structure of special privileges? I've learned to make my way around among them. Good frogs, d'you think I want a nice secure desk job with a guaranteed pension?"
"But still, Dominic—a man like you, riskin' his life again an' again, sent almost alone against all Ardazir... because someone doesn't like you!" Her face still burned, and there was a glimmer of tears in the hazel eyes.
"Hard to imagine how that could be," said Flandry with calculated smugness. He added, lightly and almost automatically: "But after all, think what an outrageous special privilege your personal heredity represents: so much beauty, charm, and intelligence lavished on one little girl."
Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra Page 17