Kossara fell asleep imagining that Mihail was beside her.
III
It was official: the Emperor Hans would shortly leave Terra, put himself at the head of an armada, and personally see to quelling the barbarians—war lords, buccaneers, crusaders for God knew what strange causes—who still harassed a Sector Spica left weak by the late struggle for the Imperial succession. He threw a bon voyage party at the Coral Palace. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry was among those invited. Under such circumstances, one comes.
Besides, Flandry reflected, I can't help liking the old bastard. He may not be the best imaginable thing that could happen to us, but he's probably the best available.
The hour was well after sunset in this part of Oceania. A crescent moon stood high to westward; metrocenter star-points glinted across its dark side. The constellations threw light of their own onto gently rolling waves, argent shimmer on sable. Quietness broke where surf growled white against ramparts. There walls, domes, towers soared aloft in a brilliance which masked off most of heaven.
When Flandry landed his car and stepped forth, no clouds of perfume (or psychogenic vapors, as had been common in Josip's reign) drifted from the palace to soften salt odors. Music wove among mild breezes, but formal, stately, neither hypersubtle nor raucous. Flandry wasn't sure whether it was composed on a colony planet—if so, doubtless Germania—or on Terra once, to be preserved through centuries while the mother world forgot. He did know that a decade ago, the court would have snickered at sounds this fusty-archaic.
Few servants bowed as he passed among fellow guests, into the main building. More guardsmen than formerly saluted. Their dress uniforms were less ornate than of yore and they and their weapons had seen action. The antechamber of fountains hadn't changed, and the people who swirled between them before streaming toward the ballroom wore clothes as gorgeous as always, a rainbow spectacle. However, fantastic collars, capes, sleeves, cuffs, footgear were passé. Garb was continuous from neck or midbreast to soles, and, while many men wore robes rather than trousers, every woman was in a skirt.
A reform I approve of, he thought. I suspect most ladies agree. The suggestive rustle of skillfully draped fabric is much more stimulating, really, and easier to arrange, than cosmetics and diadems on otherwise bare areas of interest. For that matter, though it does take more effort, a seduction is better recreation than an orgy.
There our good Hans goes too far. Every bedroom in the palace locked!
Ah, well. Conceivably he wants his entourage to cultivate ingenuity.
Crown Prince Dietrich received, a plain-faced middle-aged man whose stoutness was turning into corpulence. Though he and Flandry had worked together now and then in the fighting, his welcome was mechanical. Poor devil, he must say a personal hello to each of three or four hundred arrivals important enough to rate it, with no drug except stim to help him. Another case of austere principles overdone, Flandry thought. The younger brother, Gerhart, was luckier tonight, already imperially drunk at a wallside table with several cronies. However, he looked as sullen as usual.
Flandry drifted around the circumference of the ballroom. There was nothing fancy about the lighting, save that it was cast to leave unobscured the stars in the vitryl dome overhead. The floor sheened with diffracted reflections from several score couples who swung through the decorous measures of a quicksilver. He hailed acquaintances when he glimpsed them, but didn't stop till he had reached an indoor arbor where champagne was available. A goblet of tickle in his hand, roses around him, a cheerful melody, a view of pretty women in motion—life could be worse.
It soon was. "Greetin', Sir Dominic."
Flandry turned, and bowed in dismay to the newcomer beneath the leaves. "Aloha, your Grace."
Tetsuo Niccolini, Duke of Mars, accepted a glass from the attendant behind the table. It was obviously not his first. "Haven't seen you for some while," he remarked. "Missed you. You've a way o' puttin' a little spark into a scene, dull as the court is these days." Shrewdly: "Reason you don't come often, what?"
"Well," Flandry admitted, "his Majesty's associates do tend to be a bit earnest and firm-jawed." He sipped. "Still, my impression is, your Grace spends a fair amount of time here regardless."
Niccolini sighed. He had never been more than a well-meaning fop; but in these last years, when antisenescence and biosculp could no longer hold wrinkles, baldness, feebleness at bay, he had developed a certain wry perspective. Unfortunately, he remained a bore.
Shadows of petals stirred across a peacock robe as he lifted his drink. "D'you think I should go to my ancestral estates and all that rubbish, set up my own small court along lines I like, eh? No, m'boy, not feasible. I'd get nothin' but sycophants, who'd pluck me while they smiled. My real friends, who put their hearts into enjoyin' life, well, they're dead or fled or sleepin' in an oldster's bed." He paused. "'Sides, might's well tell you, H.M. gave me t'understand—he makes himself very clear, ha?—gave me t'understand, he'd prefer no Duke o' Mars henceforth visit the planet 'cept for a decent minimum o' speeches an' dedications."
Flandry nodded. That makes sense, flickered through him. The Martians [nonhumans; colonists by treaty arrangement in the time of the Commonwealth; glad to belong to it, but feeling betrayed when it broke down and the Troubles came; dragooned into the Empire] are still restless. Terra can best control them by removing the signs of Terran control. I suspect, after poor tottery Tetty is gone, Hans will buy out his heirs with a gimcrack title elsewhere and a lot of money and make a Martian the next Duke—who may not even know he's a puppet.
At least, that's what I'd consider doing.
"But we're in grave danger o' seriousness," Niccolini interrupted himself. "Where've you been? Busy at what? Come, come, somethin' amusin' must've happened."
"Oh, just knocking around with a friend." Flandry didn't care to get specific. One reason why he had thus far declined promotion to admiral was that then he'd be too conspicuous, too eagerly watched and sought after, while he remained near the Emperor. He liked his privacy. As a hanger-on who showed no further ambitions—and could therefore in time be expected to lose his energetic patron's goodwill—he drew scant attention.
"Or knockin' up a friend? Heh, heh, heh." The Duke nudged him. "I know your sort o' friends. How was she?"
"In the first place, she was a he," Flandry said. Until he could escape, he might as well reconcile himself to humoring a man who had discovered the secret of perpetual adolescence. "Of course, we explored. Found a new place on Ganymede which might interest your Grace, the Empress Wu in Celestial City."
"No, no." Niccolini waggled his head and free hand. "Didn't y'know? I never go anywhere near Jupiter. Never. Not since the La Reine Louise disaster."
Flandry cast his mind back. He couldn't identify—Oh, yes. It had happened five years ago, while he was out of the Solar System. Undeterred by civil war, a luxury liner was approaching Callisto when her screen field generators failed. The trapped radiation which seethes around the giant planet, engulfing its inner moons, killed everybody aboard; no treatment could restore a body burned by so much unfelt fire.
Nothing of the kind had happened for centuries of exploration and colonization thereabouts. Magnetohydrodynamic shields and their backups were supposed to be invulnerable to anything that wouldn't destroy a vehicle or a settlement anyway. Therefore, sabotage? The passenger list had included several powerful people. A court of inquiry had handed down the vaguest finding of "cumulative negligence."
"My poor young nephew, that I inherited the Dukedom from, was among the casualties," Niccolini droned on. "That roused the jolly old instinct o' self-preservation, I can tell yon. Too blinkin' many hazards as is. Not that I flatter myself I'm a political bull's-eye. Still, one never knows, does one? So tell me 'bout this place you found. If it sounds intriguin', I'll see 'bout gettin' a sensie."
Flandry was saved by a courier in Imperial livery who entered the arbor and bowed. "A thousand pardons, your Grace," she said. "Sir Dominic, th
ere is an urgent message for you. Will you please follow me?"
"With twofold pleasure," Flandry responded, for she was young and well-formed. He couldn't quite place her accent, though he guessed she might be from some part of Hermes. Even when hiring humans, the majordomos of the new Emperor's various households were under orders to get as many non-Terrans as was politic.
Whoever the summons was from, and whether it was terrible or trivial, he was free of the Duke before he could otherwise have disengaged. The noble nodded a vague response to his apology and stood staring after him, all alone.
His Imperial Majesty, High Emperor Hans Friedrich Molitor, of his dynasty the first, Supreme Guardian of the Pax, Grand Director of the Stellar Council, Commander-in-chief, Final Arbiter, acknowledged supreme on more worlds and honorary head of more organizations than any man could remember, sat by himself in a room at the top of a tower. It was sparsely furnished: a desk and communicator, a couch upholstered in worn but genuine horse-hide, a few straightbacked chairs and the big pneumatic that was his. The only personal items were a dolchzahn skin on the floor, from Germania; two portraits of his late wife, in her youth and her age, and one of a blond young man; a model of the corvette that had been his first command. A turret roof, beginning at waist height, was currently transparent, letting this eyrie overlook an illuminated complex of roofs, steeples, gardens, pools, outer walls, attendant rafts, and finally the night ocean.
The courier ushered Flandry through the door and vanished as it closed behind him. He saluted and snapped to attention. "At ease," the Emperor grunted. "Sit. Smoke if you want."
He was puffing a pipe whose foulness overcame the air 'fresher. In spite of the blue tunic, white trousers, and gold braid with nebula and three stars of a grand admiral, plus the pyrocrystal ring of Manuel the Great, he was not very impressive to see. Yet meditechnics could not account for so few traces of time. The short, stocky frame had grown a kettle belly, bags lay beneath the small dark eyes, the hair was thin and gray on the blocky head: nothing that could not easily be changed by the biocosmetics he scorned to use. Nor had he ever troubled about his face, low forehead, bushy brows, huge Roman nose, heavy jowls, gash of a mouth between deep creases, prow of a chin.
"Thank you, your Majesty." Flandry settled his elegance opposite, flipped out a cigarette case which was a work of art and, at need, a weapon, and established a barrier against the reek around him.
"No foolish formalities," growled the rusty, accented basso. "I must make my grand appearance, and empty chatter will rattle for hours, and at last when I can go I'm afraid I'll be too tired for a nice new wench who's joined the collection, no matter how much I need a little fun."
"A stim pill?" Flandry suggested.
"No. I take too many as is. The price to the body mounts, you know. And... barely six years on the throne have I had. The first three, fighting to stay there. I need another twenty or thirty for carpentering this jerry-built, dry-rotted Empire into a thing that might last a few more generations, before I can lay down my tools." Hans chuckled coarsely. "Well, let the tool for pretty Thressa wait, recharging, till tomorrow night. You should see her, Dominic, my friend. But not to tell anybody. By herself she could cause a revolution."
Flandry grinned. "Yes, we humans are basically sexual beings, aren't we, sir? If we can't screw each other physically, we'll do it politically."
Hans laughed aloud. He had never changed from a boy who deserted a strait-laced colonial bourgeois home for several years of wild adventure in space, the youth who enlisted in the Navy, the man who rose through the ranks without connections or flexibility to ease his way.
But he had not changed either from the hero of Syrax, where the fleet he led flung back the Merseians and forced a negotiated end to a short undeclared war which had bidden fair to grow. Nor had he changed from the leader who let his personnel proclaim him Emperor—himself reluctantly, less from vainglory than a sense of workmanship, when the legitimate order of succession had dissolved in chaos and every rival claimant was a potential disaster.
A blunt pragmatist, uncultured and unashamed of it, shrewd rather than intelligent, he either appalled Manuel Argos or won a grudging approval, in whatever hypothetical hell or Valhalla the Founder dwelt. The question was academic. His hour was now. How long that hour would be, and what the consequences, were separate puzzles.
Mirth left. He leaned forward. The pipe smoldered between hairy hands clenched upon his knees. "I talk too much," he said, a curious admission from the curtest of the Emperors. Flandry understood, though. Few besides him were left, maybe none, with whom Hans dared talk freely. "Let us come to business. What do you know about Dennitza?"
Inwardly taken aback, Flandry replied soft-voiced, "Not much, sir. Not much about the whole Taurian Sector, in spite of having had the good luck to be there when Lady Megan needed help. Why ask me?"
Hans scowled. "I suppose you do know how the Gospodar, my sector governor, is resisting my defense reorganization. Could be a simple difference of judgment, yes. But—now information suggests he plans rebellion. And that—where he is—will involve the Merseians, unless he is already theirs."
Flandry's backbone tingled. "What are the facts, sir?"
"A wretched planet in Sector Arcturus. Diomedes, it's called. Natives who want to break away and babble of getting Ythrian help. Human agents among them. We would expect such humans would be from the Domain, likeliest Avalon—not true? But our best findings say the Ythrians hold no wish to make trouble for us. And our people discover those humans are Dennitzan. Only one was captured alive, and they had some problems with the hypnoprobing, but it does appear she went to Diomedes under secret official orders."
Hans sighed. "Not till yesterday did this reach me through the damned channels. It never would have before I left, did I not issue strictest orders about getting a direct look at whatever might possibly point to treason. And—Gott in Himmel, I am swamped, on top of all else! My computer screens out lèse-majesté cases and the rest of such piddle. Nevertheless—"
Flandry nodded. "Aye, sir. You can't give any single item more than a glance. And even if you could pay full attention, you can't send the big clumsy Imperial machine barging into Tauria, disrupting our whole arrangement there, on the basis of a few accusations. Especially in your absence."
"Yes. I must go. If we don't reorder Sector Spica, the barbarians will soon ruin it. But meanwhile Tauria may explode. You see how an uprising in Sector Arcturus would be the right distraction for a traitor Dennitzan before he rebels too."
"Won't Intelligence mount a larger operation?"
"Ja, ja, ja. Though the Corps is still in poor shape, after wars and weedings. Also, it has much other business. And Dominic, just the Corps by itself is too huge for me to know, for me to control as I should. I need—I am not sure what I need or if it can be had."
Flandry foreknew: "You want me to take a hand, sir?"
"Yes." The wild boar eyes were sighted straight on him. "In your olden style. A roving commission, and you report directly to me. Plenipotentiary authority."
Flandry's pulse broke into a canter. He kept his tone level. "Quite a solo, sir."
"Co-opt. Hire. Bribe. Threaten. Whatever you see fit."
"The odds will stay long against my finding out anything useful—at least, anything the Corps can't, quicker and better."
"You are not good at modesty," Hans said. "Are you unwilling?"
"N-n-no, sir." Surprised, Flandry realized he spoke truth. This could prove interesting. In fact, he knew damn well it would, for he had already involved himself in the affair. His motivation was half curiosity, half kindliness—he thought at the time—though probably, down underneath, the carnivore which had been asleep in him these past three years had roused, pricked up its ears, snuffed game scent on a night breeze. Was that always my real desire? Not to chase down enemies of the Empire so I could go on having fun in it, but to have fun chasing them down?
No matter. The blood surged. "I'm ha
ppy to accept, sir, provided you don't expect much. Uh, my authority, access to funds and secret data and whatnot... better be kept secret itself."
"Right." Hans knocked the dottle from his pipe, a ringing noise through a moment's silence. "Is this why you refused admiral's rank? You knew sneaking off someday on a mission would be easier for a mere captain."
Flandry shrugged. "If you'll tip the word to—better be none less than Kheraskov—I'll contact him as soon as may be and make arrangements."
"Have you any idea how you will begin?" Hans asked, relaxing a trifle.
"Well, I don't know. Perhaps with that alleged Dennitzan agent. What became of her, did you say?"
"How can I tell? I saw a précis of many reports, remember. What difference, after the 'probe wrung her dry?"
"Sometimes individuals count, sir." Excitement in Flandry congealed to grimness. I should think the fact she's a niece of the Gospodar—a fact available in the material on her that my son could freely scan from a data bank—would be worth mentioning to the Emperor. I should think such a hostage would not be sold for a slave, forced into whoredom except for the chance that I learned about her when she was offered for sale.
Better not tell Hans. He'd only be distracted from the million things he's got to do. And anyhow... something strange here. I prefer to keep my mouth shut and my options open.
"Proceed as you wish," the other said. "I know you won't likely get far. But I can trust you will run a strong race."
His glance went to the picture of the young man. His face sagged. Flandry could well-nigh read his mind: Ach, Otto! If you had not been killed—if I could bring you back, yes, even though I must trade for you dull Dietrich and scheming Gerhart both—we would have an heir to trust.
The Emperor straightened in his seat. "Very well," he rapped. "Dismissed."
Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra Page 31