Agent of the Terran Empire df-5

by Poul Anderson

  However — attack that far within the sphere? No! Individual ships could sneak between the stars easily enough. But a war fleet could never come a hundred light-years inward from the farthest Imperial bases. The instantaneous “wake” of disturbed space-time, surging from so many vessels, would be certain of detection somewhere along the line. Therefore—

  “Those ships were built within our sphere,” said Flandry slowly. “And not too many parsecs from Vixen.”

  Fenross sneered. “Your genius dazzles me. As a matter of fact, though, they might have come further than usual, undetected, because so much of the Navy is out at Syrax now. Our interior posts are stripped, some completely deserted. I’ll agree the enemy must base within several parsecs of Vixen. But that doesn’t mean they live there. Their base might be a space station, a rogue planet, or something else we’ll never find; they could have sent their fleet to it a ship at a time, over a period of months.”

  Flandry shook his head. “Supply lines. Having occupied Vixen, they’ll need to maintain their garrison till it’s self-sufficient. No, they have a home somewhere in the Imperial sphere, surely in the same quadrant. Which includes only about a million stars! Say, roughly, 100,000 possibilities, some never even catalogued. How many years would it take how many ships to check out 100,000 systems?”

  “Yeh. And what would be happening meanwhile?”

  “What has?”

  “The Vixenites put up a fight. There’s a small naval base on their planet, unmanned at present, but enough of the civilian population knew how to make use of its arsenal. They got couriers away, of course, and Aldebaran Station sent what little help it could. When last heard from, Vixen was under siege. We’re dispatching a task force, but it’ll take time to get there. That wretched Syrax business ties our hands. Reports indicate the aliens haven’t overwhelming strength; we could send enough ships to make mesons of them. But if we withdrew that many from Syrax, they’d come back to find Merseia entrenched in the Cluster.”

  “Tie-in?” wondered Flandry.

  “Who knows? I’ve got an idea, though, and your assignment will be to investigate it.” Fenross leaned over the desk. His sunken eyes probed at Flandry’s. “We’re all too ready to think of Merseia when anything goes wrong,” he said bleakly. “But after all, they live a long ways off. There’s another alien power right next cloor … and as closely interwoven with Merseia as it is with us.”

  “You mean Ymir?” Flandry snorted. “Come now, dear chief, you’re letting your xenophobia run away with you.”

  “Consider,” said Fenross. “Somebody, or something, helped those aliens at Vixen build a modern war fleet. They couldn’t have done it alone: we’d have known it if they’d begun exploring stellar space, and knowledge has to precede conquest. Somebody, very familiar with our situation, has briefed the aliens on our language, weapons, territorial layout — the works. Somebody, I’m sure, told them when to attack: right now, when nearly our whole strength is at Syrax. Who? There’s one item. The aliens use a helium-pressure power system like the Ymirites. That’s unmistakable on the detectors. Helium-pressure is all right, but it’s not as convenient as the hydrogen-heavy atom cycle; not if you live under terrestroid conditions, and the aliens very definitely do. The ships, their shape I mean, also have a subtly Ymirite touch. I’ll show you pictures that have arrived with the reports. Those ships look as if they’d been designed by some engineer more used to working with hydrolithium than steel.”

  “You mean the Ymirites are behind the aliens? But—”

  “But nothing. There’s an Ymirite planet in the Vixen system too. Who knows how many stars those crawlers have colonized … stars we never even heard about? Who knows how many client races they might lord it over? And they travel blithely back and forth, across our sphere and Merseia’s and — Suppose they are secretly in cahoots with Merseia. What better way to smuggle Merseian agents into our systems? We don’t stop Ymirite ships. We aren’t able to! But any of them could carry a force-bubble with terrestroid conditions inside … I’ve felt for years we’ve been too childishly trustful of Ymir. It’s past time we investigated them in detail. It may already be too late!”

  Flandry stubbed out his cigaret. “But what interest have they got in all this?” he asked mildly. “What could any oxygen-breathing race have that they’d covet — or bribe them with?”

  “That I don’t know,” said Fenross. “I could be dead wrong. But I want it looked into. You’re going back to Jupiter, Captain. At once.”

  “What?”

  “We’re chronically undermanned in this miserable stepchild of the service,” said Fenross. “Now, worse than ever. You’ll have to go alone. Snoop around as much as you can. Take all the time you need. But don’t come back without a report that’ll give some indication — one way or another!”

  Or come back dead, thought Flandry. He looked into the twitching face across the desk and knew that was what Fenross wanted.

  IV

  He got Chives out of arrest and debated with himself whether to sneak back to Ruethen’s party. It was still going on. But no. Aycharaych would never have mentioned his own departure without assuming Flandry would notify headquarters. It might be his idea of a joke — it might be a straightforward challenge, for Aycharaych was just the sort who’d enjoy seeing if he could elude an ambush — most likely, the whole thing was deliberate, for some darkling purpose. In any event, a junior Intelligence officer or two could better keep tabs on the Chereionite than Flandry, who was prominent. Having made arrangements for that, the man took Chives to his private flitter.

  Though voluptuous enough inside, the Hooligan was a combat boat, with guns and speed. Even on primary, sub-light drive, it could reach Jupiter in so few hours that Flandry would have little enough time to think what he would do. He set the autopilot and bade Chives bring a drink. “A stiff one,” he added.

  “Yes, sir. Do you wish your whites laid out, or do you prefer a working suit?”

  Flandry considered his rumpled elegance and sighed. Chives had spent an hour dressing him — for nothing. “Plain gray zip-suit,” he said. “Also sackcloth and ashes.”

  “Very good, sir.” The valet poured whisky over ice. He was from Shalmu, quite humanoid except for bald emerald skin, prehensile tail, one-point-four meter height, and details of ear, hand, and foot. Flandry had bought him some years back, named him Chives, and taught him any number of useful arts. Lately the being had politely refused manumission. ("If I may make so bold as to say it, sir, I am afraid my tribal customs would now have a lack of interest for me matched only by their deplorable lack of propriety.")

  Flandry brooded over his drink a while. “What do you know about Ymir?” he asked.

  “Ymir is the arbitrary human name, sir, for the chief planet of a realm — if I may use that word advisedly — coterminous with the Terrestrial Empire, the Merseian, and doubtless a considerable part of the galaxy beyond.”

  “Don’t be so bloody literal-minded,” said Flandry. “Especially when I’m being rhetorical. I mean, what do you know about their ways of living, thinking, believing, hoping? What do they find beautiful and what is too horrible to tolerate? Good galloping gods, what do they even use for a government? They call themselves the Dispersal when they talk Anglic — but is that a translation or a mere tag? How can we tell? What do you and I have in common with a being that lives at a hundred below zero, breathing hydrogen at a pressure which makes our ocean beds look like vacuum, drinking liquid methane and using allotropic ice to make his tools?

  “We were ready enough to cede Jupiter to them: Jupiter-type planets throughout our realm. They had terrestroid planets to offer in exchange. Why, that swap doubled the volume of our sphere. And we traded a certain amount of scientific information with them, high-pressure physics for low-pressure, oxygen metabolisms versus hydrogen … but disappointingly little, when you get down to it. They’d been in interstellar space longer than we had. (And how did they learn atomics under Ymirite air pressu
re? Me don’t ask it!) They’d already observed our kind of life throughout … how much of the galaxy? We couldn’t offer them a thing of importance, except the right to colonize some more planets in peace. They’ve never shown as much interest in our wars — the wars of the oxygen breathers on the pygmy planets — as you and I would have in a fight between two ant armies. Why should they care? You could drop Terra or Merseia into Jupiter and it’d hardly make a decent splash. For a hundred years, now, the Ymirites have scarcely said a word to us. Or to Merseia, from all indications. Till now.

  “And yet I glanced at the pictures taken out near Vixen, just before we left. And Fenross, may he fry, is right. Those blunt ships were made on a planet similar to Terra, but they have Ymirite lines … the way the first Terran automobiles had the motor in front, because that was where the horse used to be … It could be coincidence, I suppose. Or a red herring. Or — I don’t know. How am I supposed to find out, one man on a planet with ten times the radius of Terra? Judas!” He drained his glass and held it out again.

  Chives refilled, then went back to the clothes locker. “A white scarf or a blue?” he mused. “Hm, yes, I do believe the white, sir.”

  The flitter plunged onward. Flandry needed a soberjolt by the time he had landed on Ganymede.

  There was an established procedure for such a visit. It hadn’t been used for decades, Flandry had had to look it up, but the robot station still waited patiently between rough mountains. He presented his credentials, radio contact was made with the primary planet, unknown messages traveled over its surface. A reply was quick: yes, Captain, the governor can receive you. A spaceship is on its way, and will be at your disposal.

  Flandry looked out at the stony desolation of Ganymede. It was not long before a squat, shimmering shape had made grav-beam descent. A tube wormed from its lock to the flitter’s. Flandry sighed. “Let’s go,” he said, and strolled across. Chives trotted after with a burden of weapons, tools, and instruments — none of which were likely to be much use. There was a queasy moment under Ganymede’s natural gravity, then they had entered the Terra-conditioned bubble.

  It looked like any third-class passenger cabin, except for the outmoded furnishings and a bank of large viewscreens. Hard to believe that this was only the material inner lining of a binding-force field: that that same energy, cousin to that which held the atomic nucleus together, was all which kept this room from being crushed beneath intolerable pressure. Or, at the moment, kept the rest of the spaceship from exploding outward. The bulk of the vessel was an alloy of water, lithium, and metallic hydrogen, stable only under Jovian surface conditions.

  Flandry let Chives close the airlock while he turned on the screens. They gave him a full outside view. One remained blank, a communicator, the other showed the pilot’s cabin.

  An artificial voice, ludicrously sweet in the style of a century ago, said: “Greeting, Terran. My name, as nearly as it may be rendered in sonic equivalents, is Horx. I am your guide and interpreter while you remain on Jupiter.”

  Flandry looked into the screen. The Ymirite didn’t quite register on his mind. His eyes weren’t trained to those shapes and proportions, seen by that weirdly shifting red-blue-brassy light. (Which wasn’t the real thing, even, but an electronic translation. A human looking straight into the thick Jovian air would only see darkness.) “Hello, Horx,” he said to the great black multi-legged shape with the peculiarly tendrilled heads. He wet his lips, which seemed a bit dry. “I, er, expect you haven’t had such an assignment before in your life.”

  “I did several times, a hundred or so Terra-years ago,” said Horx casually. He didn’t seem to move, to touch any controls, but Ganymede receded in the viewscreens and raw space blazed forth. “Since then I have been doing other work.” Hesitation.

  Or was it? At last: “Recently, though, I have conducted several missions to our surface.”

  “What?” choked Flandry.

  “Merseian,” said Horx. “You may inquire of the governor if you wish.” He said nothing else the whole trip.

  Jupiter, already big in the screen, became half of heaven. Flandry saw blots march across its glowing many-colored face, darknesses which were storms that could have swallowed all Terra. Then the sight was lost; he was dropping through the atmosphere. Still thee step-up screens tried loyally to show him something: he saw clouds of ammonia crystals, a thousand kilometers long, streaked with strange blues and greens that were free-radicals; he saw lightning leap across a purple sky, and the distant yellow flare of sodium explosions. As he descended, he could even feel, very dimly, the quiver of the ship under enormous winds, and hear the muffled shriek and thunder of the air.

  They circled the night side, still descending, and Flandry saw a methane ocean, beating waves flattened by pressure and gravity against a cliff of black allotropic ice, which crumbled and was lifted again even as he watched. He saw an endless plain where things half trees and half animals — except that they were neither, in any Terrestrial sense — lashed snaky fronds after ribbon-shaped flyers a hundred meters in length. He saw bubbles stream past on a red wind, and they were lovely in their myriad colors and they sang in thin crystal voices which somehow penetrated the ship. But they couldn’t be true bubbles at this pressure. Could they?

  A city came into view, just beyond the dawn line. If it was a city. It was, at least, a unified structure of immense extent, intricate with grottos and arabesques, built low throughout but somehow graceful and gracious. On Flandry’s screen its color was polished blue. Here and there sparks and threads of white energy would briefly flash. They hurt his eyes. There were many Ymirites about, flying on their own wings or riding in shell-shaped power gliders. You wouldn’t think of Jupiter as a planet where anything could fly, until you remembered the air density; then you realized it was more a case of swimming.

  The spaceship came to a halt, hovering on its repulsor field. Horx said: “Governor Thua.”

  Another Ymirite squatted suddenly in the outside communication screen. He held something which smoked and flickered from shape to shape. The impersonally melodious robot voice said for him, under the eternal snarling of a wind which would have blown down anything men could build; “Welcome. What is your desire?”

  The old records had told Flandry to expect brusqueness. It was not discourtesy; what could a human and an Ymirite make small talk about? The man puffed a cigaret to nervous life and said: “I am here on an investigative mission for my government.” Either these beings were or were not already aware of the Vixen situation; if not, then they weren’t allies of Merseia and would presumably not tell. Or if they did, what the devil difference? Flandry explained…

  Thua said at once, “You seem to have very small grounds for suspecting us. A mere similarity of appearances and nuclear technology is logically insufficient.”

  “I know,” said Flandry, “It could be a fake.”

  “It could even be that one or a few Ymirite individuals have offered advice to the entities which instigated this attack,” said Thua. You couldn’t judge from the pseudo-voice, but he seemed neither offended nor sympathetic: just monumentally uninterested. “The Dispersal has been nonstimulate as regards individuals for many cycles. However, I cannot imagine what motive an Ymirite would have for exerting himself on behalf of oxygen breathers. There is no insight to be gained from such acts, and certainly no material profit.”

  “An aberrated individual?” suggested Flandry with little hope. “Like a man poking an anthill — an abode of lesser animals — merely to pass the time?”

  “Ymirites do not aberrate in such fashion,” said Thua stiffly.

  “I understand there’ve been recent Merseian visits here.”

  “I was about to mention that. I am doing all I can to assure both empires of Ymir’s strict neutrality. It would be a nuisance if either attacked us and forced us to exterminate their species.”

  Which is the biggest brag since that fisherman who caught the equator, thought Flandry, or else is sob
er truth. He said aloud, choosing his words one by one: “What, then, were the Merseians doing here?”

  “They wished to make some scientific observations of the Jovian surface,” said Thua. “Horx guided them, like you. Let him describe their activities.”

  The pilot stirred in his chamber, spreading black wings. “We simply cruised about a few times. They had optical instruments, and took various spectroscopic readings. They said it was for research in solid-state physics.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Flandry. He stroked his mustache. “They have as many Jovoid planets in their sphere as we do. The detailed report on Jovian conditions which the first Ymirite settlers made to Terra, under the treaty, has never been secret. No, I just don’t believe that research yarn.”

  “It did seem dubious,” agreed Thua, “but I do not pretend to understand every vagary of the alien mind. It was easier to oblige them than argue about it.”

  Chives cleared his throat and said unexpectedly: “If I may take the liberty of a question, sir, were all these recent visitors of the Merseian species?”

  Thua’s disgust could hardly be mistaken: “Do you expect me to register insignificant differences between one such race and another?”

  Flandry sighed. “It looks like deadlock, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “I can think of no way to give you positive assurance that Ymir is not concerned, except my word,” said Thua. “However, if you wish you may cruise about this planet at random and see if you observe anything out of the ordinary.” His screen went blank.

  “Big fat chance!” muttered Flandry. “Give me a drink, Chives.”

  “Will you follow the governor’s proposal?” asked Horx.

  “Reckon so.” Flandry flopped into a chair. “Give us the standard guided tour. I’ve never been on Jupiter, and might as well have something to show for my time.”