by Ben Jeapes
Joel was subdued at the sight and Gilmore knew why. The Roving’s St Helena had been given the name of its Earth counterpart for a good reason – a final place of exile, somewhere that the centre of attraction would never leave alive. The difference between the St Helenas was that visitors to this one didn’t just witness the end of a short-lived empire, they got to meet the last of an entire species.
‘You’re sure he’ll see us?’ Joel said.
‘He’ll see us,’ Gilmore promised grimly as the aircar banked for its final approach. They were on autopilot and Gilmore’s authorization from the Admiralty for this trip was taking care of the frequent requests beamed at them for identification.
‘I just understood he refused all your requests for an appointment . . .’
‘That’s why I stopped requesting.’
‘Ah.’
The aircar was slowing, the noise of its engines rising. They were over the cliffs and suddenly St Helena looked much more attractive – a verdant plateau, plentiful plant and bird life, a sparkling lake at the centre. A complex of low, white buildings spread out from the north shore; the organic, curved shapes of classical Roving pridehalls. The aircar landed on the clear strip of grass between the water and the main building.
The doors winged open and they climbed out, wincing in the bright sunlight and the heat. They slipped their shades on, and stood and looked at the dark glass front of the building. It was shadowed by an overhanging roof and nothing could be seen through the plate glass windows.
‘You think he’s in?’ Joel said.
‘He’s certainly not out visiting the relatives, and that’s the main residence. Come on.’
Gilmore took three steps forward and the ground at his feet erupted in a burst of fire. He staggered back.
‘Go back,’ an amplified voice boomed. ‘You are not welcome here.’
Gilmore raised his voice, careful not to let it shake. ‘I have authority from Arm Wild,’ he called.
More plasma fire, a line of exploding turf that snaked quickly towards him across the grass. Gilmore swallowed his pride and jumped behind the aircar, for whatever shelter it could provide.
‘We know you have authority from Arm Wild. We do not recognize Arm Wild’s authority. Leave here.’
‘Do you see them?’ Gilmore muttered.
‘Uh-huh. There’s at least two of them, in the bushes, either side of the entrance.’
Gilmore frowned at the unattainable entrance lobby, barely a hundred feet away.
‘OK. Get in.’ He raised his voice again. ‘We’re leaving! Don’t shoot!’
They stood, slowly, tensed and ready to duck the moment shooting broke out again. Nothing happened. They stepped into the aircar and the doors shut over them. Gilmore powered up the engines.
‘So now what? We leave and come back with Donna and her friends?’ Joel said hopefully.
‘Damn,’ Gilmore muttered. ‘Sorry, Joel. If I’d known it was dangerous I’d have left you behind.’
Joel gave a nervous laugh. ‘Well, I’ve faced worse.’
‘True,’ Gilmore growled, and the aircar shot forward across the grass. Joel yelled and covered his eyes as the glass front of the hall loomed, and then the aircar had smashed through and was skidding to a halt in the lobby.
The doors flew open again. Joel sat in his seat and gibbered.
‘Come on!’ Gilmore snapped. He glanced back outside; armed Rusties were jumping out of the bushes and running towards them.
‘Which way?’
‘Forward.’ Gilmore hauled him out of his seat and through the nearest door.
They skidded to a halt in the room beyond, because there was the one they had come to see.
March Sage Savour was surrounded by its life support bubble. It lay, frail and withered, on a couch within the bubble, with a clear view of everything around it. A small control unit rested by its head.
It was looking straight at them.
‘That was unnecessary,’ it said. ‘I had already given the orders to let you through, once I saw who you were.’ The words were forceful, coming straight out of a translator unit; they belied the feeble appearance of the speaker.
‘You thought we were an assassination squad, didn’t you?’ Gilmore said.
‘I’ve often wondered when my First Breed will lose their patience with my continued existence. But they wouldn’t send you, Michael Gilmore, the man who had power and gave it away.’
‘Just can’t wrap your brain cells round that one, can you? But you’re right. I’m not here to kill you. You’ll die soon enough anyway.’ Gilmore walked up to the bubble. ‘I’m not even here to charge you with treason, though God knows you deserve it.’
‘Treason?’ Life-support equipment began to beep gentle warnings. ‘Treason? I once ruled this planet! How could I commit treason against it?’
King Charles the First, Gilmore mused, had probably said something similar.
‘Treason against the Commonwealth,’ he said. ‘Conspiracy against it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Rhukaya Bakan,’ Gilmore snapped. ‘That woman just didn’t add up. No-one, not even a loyal servant of the Confederation, could have been quite so paranoid as she appeared. She didn’t honestly believe the XCs would get the step-through generator working so quickly. But, she did believe she could engineer a situation in which Pathfinder committed xenocide and returned home with that amount of blood on its hands. The Commonwealth would split wide open and an obstacle to the Confederation’s expansion into space would be neatly removed.’
He put his face to the bubble and jabbed a finger at March Sage Savour.
‘And you gave her the wherewithal. That’s conspiracy to commit treason. You’re a traitor, March Sage Savour.’
‘An interesting theory,’ March Sage Savour said. The tones of the One Who Commands’ translator unit had gone flat; always an ominous sign of extreme emotion. ‘Have you put it to her?’
‘No. She took the next ship home. But I did send a note to her superiors by separate ship. They’ll know she’s been blown, they’ll know she failed. I don’t think her career prospects are good.’
‘I see.’ Tone began to return again as March Sage Savour switched subject. ‘Now, the one with you is Joel Gilmore. I recognize his image from the reports. I deduce you wish to discuss the recent events.’
Gilmore stepped slowly back from the bubble, but continued to glare at the One Who Commands. ‘You commanded the ship that surveyed the Dead World and reported no survivors,’ he said. ‘You can’t have drawn a blank. Why did you lie?’
‘Oh, we landed on the Dead World,’ March Sage Savour agreed. ‘We weren’t well received, but we helped as best we could and eventually they came to trust us.’
‘And?’ Gilmore shouted. ‘And you just left them to stew? You can’t have been that scared of the XCs. They were Atomic Age. They’d only just got to grips with spaceflight. You could have—’
‘The decision wasn’t mine. It belonged to Sigil Measure Lantern, who was in charge of the whole mission, and his seniors on the Roving backed him up. But I concurred with it.’
The bubble turned, glided away from Gilmore. It headed for a small pedestal where a single data crystal gleamed.
‘You’re right,’ March Sage Savour said. ‘I’ll die soon and then I won’t be able to prevent you from getting this. It’s all in the archives anyway, spread out and distributed here and there to make it hard to find. But this is the full data gathered from our expedition.’
A grasper slid slowly out and operated a control by its couch. The lights dimmed and a holo appeared between the One Who Commands and the two humans. Two abstract, spiralling shapes, side by side.
‘Item,’ March Sage Savour said. ‘On the left, DNA taken from a Dead World native. On the right, DNA taken from the body of one of the crew of the XC suicide ships. There is a close match. Like ourselves and the First Breed, they have a common ancestor.’
Father and son took
a moment to absorb this.
‘Unlike us,’ said March Sage Savour, ‘their relationship is almost symbiotic. Joel Gilmore, you were correct in your supposition that the Dead Worlders somehow sap the sentience from the XCs. What you didn’t realize, and what they didn’t know either, is that they don’t need to go so far. They do require the sentience from an XC to energize their own minds, but they can get all they need from a single Shareberry. When you go back to their system, you could let them know this. I imagine there will be some mutual relief in the knowledge.’
‘But . . . why?’ Joel frowned. ‘There must be some point in that relationship. How did they evolve, what was—’
‘They didn’t evolve,’ Gilmore murmured. ‘Any more than the First Breed did.’
‘Exactly.’ March Sage Savour almost sounded pleased. ‘The reason for the relationship? That would be known only to the ones who carried them across space in the first place. When they stopped, the supply of Shareberries dried up and the Dead Worlders needed to resort to their more drastic methods.’
Another pause.
‘How recent would that have been?’ Gilmore asked.
‘Not for many thousands of years. We looked but found no evidence of spaceflight on the Dead World. Nor is there any evidence of it in the legends and mythology of either world. It was a long time ago.’
‘But now we know there’s someone else out there,’ Gilmore said. ‘Whoever set this whole thing up.’
‘Or was,’ Joel added.
‘Indeed,’ March Sage Savour agreed.
Joel shrugged. ‘So, a vanished alien race. What about it? That still doesn’t explain why you lied. And why you actually wanted to use Device Ultimate.’
’Did you ever wonder,’ said March Sage Savour, ‘how we found Earth?’
‘It’s . . . it’s easy to find,’ Joel said, baffled. ‘Stepthrough to Sol system. It’s the one with the big moon.’
‘But why should we step-through there?’ said March Sage Savour. ‘It’s over a thousand light years from the Roving. There are dust clouds between us; your sun isn’t even visible in our sky. We can see the XCs’ sun from here and we could deduce the existence of at least one inhabitable world by simple astronomical observation. Why should we seek out a world around a sun that we can’t even see?’
‘Go on,’ Gilmore said carefully.
March Sage Savour’s head moved slightly; another holo picture appeared.
‘This is exactly the size of the original,’ March Sage Savour said. ‘We found it in one of the Dead World’s astronomical centres.’
‘Seen it,’ said Joel. He and his father moved forward to study the image. It was a circular, concave bowl of stone, pitted with small dots and faded patterns. Here it stood on its edge but the last time he had seen it he had had to crane his neck back and stare at the roof. ‘This was on the ceiling at the top of the tower on the Dead World.’
‘Stars!’ Gilmore said. He had finally worked it out. ‘It’s a star map.’
‘You are both right. One of these was in the ceiling of each of the astronomical towers we visited,’ March Sage Savour said. ‘Now look more closely.’
Points of light appeared on the carving; yellow holo circles surrounding some of the stars.
‘Our astrogator recognized it as a star map,’ said March Sage Savour. ‘But it could not possibly have been carved by the Dead World natives. You might notice there are a great many stars – many more than would be visible to the naked eye from the Dead World. Now, look at these yellow circles. These particular stars are all marked with a certain symbol. We matched them with our own records and we found that each of these stars that we already knew about has at least one Roving-type planet. We are one of them. There were also a lot of them that we didn’t already know about, and one of those –’ one of the holo circles began to blink, towards the edge of the slab – ‘is Sol. Earth’s sun.’
The two humans stood and stared at the map, taking in the implications.
‘They knew about us,’ Joel said.
‘You humans fondly believe you are the solution to every problem. Absolute masters of your own destiny,’ March Sage Savour said. Even through the translator unit there was disdain. ‘Just as we believed we were the rulers of the Roving. So let me tell you this. We had our supremacy on this world, and you on yours, because whoever carved this map let us. Once there was a race who spanned the stars in an empire a million times greater than your precious Commonwealth could ever be. They left behind their legacy on the Dead World and the XCs’ homeworld like a child might discard a toy. Now, do you see why I wanted to use Device Ultimate?’
‘No?’ said Joel, making it a question.
‘Yes,’ Gilmore said quietly. ‘I do.’ Joel looked at him, hands held out, eyebrows raised in supplication. Gilmore nodded at March Sage Savour. ‘This one here was a fairly typically unpleasant member of an unpleasant race. They were the masters of the Roving, they had their own ready packaged slave race in the form of the First Breed, they had it all. Then they realized that there was someone much greater, much grander out there and, like any bully, they feared it because it’s stronger than them. They put their own motives into the strangers’ heads. March Sage Savour’s instinct is to rule and control anything weaker than him, so obviously, that’s what these strangers would want to do too. When the SkySpy thing blew up, March Sage Savour knew that if we landed on the Dead World, or got too involved with the XCs at all, we might find out about the strangers. And he knew we would go looking for them.’
Gilmore grinned. ‘And he’s right. The only difference is we’re not afraid of them. He thinks we’ll stir up a hornet’s nest, bring them down on top of us. I don’t think they’ll care.’
‘You’ve seen the size of their rule!’ March Sage Savour said angrily. He flicked a grasper at the map. ‘As they grew in size, so they must have grown in power . . .’
‘Or wisdom,’ Gilmore said quietly.
‘Why did they grow at all? Why not stay on their home planet? Because they wanted more. They wanted to take, to conquer . . .’
‘To explore,’ said Gilmore. ‘To spread out. To witness the wonders of the universe.’
‘Your own words condemn you.’ March Sage Savour’s tone was translated as a furious hiss. ‘You talk about the wonders of the universe while this race could wipe you off the face of the galaxy.’
‘Yeah, right. So could the first technologically superior race that my species encountered, if it wanted, but it didn’t want, and the Commonwealth was the result. March Sage Savour, I’ve had the First Contact experience and it doesn’t scare me any more.’
‘Then you are a fool,’ March Sage Savour said.
‘No,’ said Gilmore, ‘I’m just better than you. Come on, Joel, we’re leaving.’
‘You know what really makes me angry?’ Gilmore said as the aircar skimmed across the ocean. He held the data crystal in two fingers, twirled it, peered into its depths. ‘His paranoia became official policy, and we just inherited it without asking. I could have looked deeper and changed it, but I just took it for granted and carried on in the old way.’
‘He, um . . .’ Joel said. Gilmore looked away from the crystal and at him. ‘ . . . could have a point?’ Joel finished.
‘The mysterious strangers,’ Gilmore said. ‘Mystical and benevolent beings of power or crazed imperial galaxy-smashers? Well, which do you think?’
‘Maybe neither.’ Joel looked straight ahead. ‘But if they’re still around, and if they wanted to stay in touch, they’d have done it. It’s like . . . look, if I dump a girlfriend then as far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I don’t want her turning up on my doorstep again and I won’t necessarily be friendly to her if she does.’
‘You dump your girlfriends, do you?’ Gilmore said with a grin.
‘Stick to the point, Dad! You don’t know that looking for them will be a good idea.’
‘No,’ Gilmore admitted after a pause. ‘I don’t.’
Jo
el sighed. ‘But you’re going to anyway, aren’t you?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘When do you leave?’
Gilmore chuckled. ‘I can’t just set off into the blue, Joel. There’s plans to make, research to do. First stop has to be the Dead World. See what other clues there are. And then set off into the blue.’
Joel gave a weak smile and didn’t say anything for a while. Then: ‘When you get back, do you think the Commonwealth will still be here?’
Gilmore didn’t answer immediately. ‘We uncovered a lot of tensions in this mission, and they won’t just go away,’ he said. ‘But the Rusties need us and we need them . . .’
‘But we don’t need them,’ Joel said. ‘Not any more. They gave us their tech. Supposing we decide to drop them?’
‘You’re quite right,’ Gilmore agreed. ‘Except that we wouldn’t drop them. We’d turn on them instead. Enslave ‘em. Make them second-class citizens. If we humans ever get aggressive and imperial, the Rusties will be the first to know it.’
Joel looked appalled. ‘And that’s a good thing?’
‘Yup. Because as Boon Round showed, the Rusties won’t stand for it. They want us as leaders but they can also stand up for themselves. They’ll always be a constant check on us. We’ll have to work together, or not at all.’
‘Unless more prides, maybe even whole clans, start going over to other alien powers?’
‘Which is always a possibility,’ Gilmore admitted. ‘So, to answer your question, I think there’ll be something called the Commonwealth for a long time. Other than that . . . I can’t say.’
The aircar flew on. After a while, Admiralty Island appeared on the radar.
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