“My people—” he began.
observe:
The sphere blinked. Raj saw himself standing under the great dome of the Cathedron that Barholm had built. A wedding was being held, a man and a woman standing in shimmering robes before the Patriarchal Arch-Sysup of East Residence, their hands entwined and bound with the sacred Cable. The man was Thom Poplanich; the woman was dark and round-faced, plain, with intelligent black eyes that sparkled with excitement. Raj saw himself step forward to give the groomsman’s responses. It was obviously a great occasion of state; besides the nobles and clerics, his Companions were there, and Suzette . . .
Tewfik ibn’Jamal stood on the other side of the couple, in the place reserved for the father of the bride. His eye met the image-Raj’s for an instant, and winked.
observe:
Chancellor Tzetzas stood and contemptuously turned his face to the pockmarked brick wall. Behind him the officer of the firing squad raised his sword. The rifles leveled and vomited smoke . . .
observe:
Raj stood in a testing room in the Armory, examining a rifle. He was older, his hair mostly gray. The weapon in his hands was one the younger self did not recognize; chunky and short, with a box-magazine protruding below the stock and a cocking-lever at the side. He raised it and fired at the target downrange. The rifle fired again and again, spitting spent brass to the right, without any motion but pulling the trigger. And there was no smoke from the barrel . . .
observe:
A crowd of gaping peons stood at the edge of a wheatfield—somewhere in the Central Provinces, from the flat terrain and broad treeless horizons. Behind them were the mud hovels they dwelt in; in front of them a huge clanking machine snorted and backed, then surged out into the ripe grain. It moved slowly, a whirring contraption like a skeletal cylinder of boards bending down the heads of the stalks. Beside it went an ox-wagon, and threshed grain poured out of a spout into it as the machine chewed its way into the wheat. As Raj watched, it reaped as much land as a dozen peons could do in a day; from the sun, scarcely an hour had passed.
observe:
Sullen, shaven-headed Skinner nomads surrendered their huge sauroid-killing rifles to an officer in Civil Government uniform. A huge engine on linked treads of steel stood behind the officer, quivering with mechanical life; the twin trails of its passage stretched off into the distance, and weapons bristled from its armored hull. Overhead a flying machine circled, with stiff wings like a soaring pterosauroid and a buzzing propeller at the rear.
observe:
An older Raj stood in the Cathedron once more. Suzette was with him, older as well, but smiling. The groom walked to his place beneath the dome; for a moment Raj thought it was Thom, but then he saw the differences, the darker complexion and the beak nose. Thom’s son, he realized.
The image of a Raj twenty years older stepped forward, the bride’s fingers resting on his arm. The young woman’s green eyes glowed.
observe:
Bartin Foley as an old man, in a nobleman’s formal civil clothes. He stood in the presentation room of the Palace, and bowed his head as an official Raj didn’t recognize placed a gold-chain medallion over his head. Beside him on the table rested a book. On the cover, embossed letters read: Raj Whitehall and His Times.
observe:
He was looking down from the roof of a great shed. The dust motes in the air shook with the force of the energies below. Incomprehensible machines crawled by on a conveyor-belt. Men and women in overalls swarmed about them, fastening on parts with tools that hummed and screeched and whirred and sent showers of sparks across the concrete floor.
A siren whooped. The noise ended as if cut off with a knife, and the workers downed tools and turned to troop out of the huge building.
observe:
A crowd gathered around a plinth in East Residence. They were just familiar enough to be disturbing, men with their hair in pigtails, women in skirts scandalously short, to their knees. A poster read: Elections to the Consultative Senate to be held. Beneath: Vote Reform! The Anti-Peonage Act needs your support!
observe:
A train streaked by. Raj thought it was a train. It floated above the tracks with no visible support, and the locomotive was shaped more like a rifle bullet or an artillery shell than anything he recognized. The hum of its passage lingered in the air long after it had passed the horizon.
observe:
An avenue in East Residence, with a view down to the harbor. Raj could recognize a few of the buildings: the Cathedron, the Palace. Most of the rest had changed, in styles totally foreign. Before him was a mausoleum. The viewpoint swooped closer. The walls around the base were sculpted in bas-relief, and they showed his troops. Marching, making camp, charging with leveled bayonets. The central column held high-relief bronzes; here he recognized faces, Gerrin, Bartin, Kaltin—all his Companions, and Suzette. Their clasped hands ringed the broad pillar.
Atop it was a statue. A rider, on a great black hound. He was armed, but his outflung hand was empty, pointing to the sky. Below in gold letters was set:
raj whitehall. the conqueror of peace.
Beyond, from the bay where East Residence’s harbor lay, something huge was lifting toward the heavens on pillars of pale fire.
Pigeons rose in a massed flutter of wings about the statue as the thunder of the starship’s drive rolled across the plaza.
Drangos Map
Forge Map 1
To Jan, with love.
And to Steve’s dad, who did a good job.
GET USED TO IT . . .
Jackboots walked over the kitchen floor above Jeffrey and Lucretzia, making the planking creak and sending little trickles of dust down into the cellar. To Jeffrey, the dark basement slowly took on a flat, silvery tone as Center boosted his perceptions.
The voice of Raj echoed in Jeffrey’s mind: to the right of the door.
Jeffrey’s hand reached out to the knob, moving with an automatic precision that seemed detached and slow. He jerked it backward, and the Land soldier stumbled through. A grid dropped down over his sight, outlining the enemy. A green dot appeared right under the angle of the man’s jaw. His finger stroked the trigger, squeezing.
Crack. The soldier’s head snapped sideways as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Jeffrey was turning, turning, the pistol coming up. The second soldier was leveling her rifle, but the green dot settled on her throat.
Crack. The woman fell back and writhed, blood spraying. The soldier behind her was jumping back, out of sight, almost, but the green dot settled on his leg.
Crack. A scream, as the third soldier tumbled out of sight. The grid outlined a prone figure against the planks of the entranceway, and an aiming point strobed. Jeffrey squeezed the trigger four times. But there was one more soldier, and the bark of the rifle was much deeper than Jeffrey’s pistol. The nickel-jacketed bullet ricocheted, whining around the stones of the cellar like a giant lethal wasp.
Jeffrey tumbled back down the stairs, snapping open the cylinder of his revolver and shaking out the spent brass.
“Christ,” Jeffrey muttered, staggering. I just killed four human beings.
this is what the world will be, for the rest of your life, Center said.
CHAPTER ONE
Visager
1221 A.F. (After the Fall)
305 Y.O. (Year of the Oath)
Commodore Maurice Farr lifted the uniform cap from his head and wiped at the sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief. He was standing on the liner docks on the north shore of Oathtaking’s superb C-shaped harbor. Behind him were the broad quiet streets of Old Town, running out from Monument Square behind his back. There the bronze figures of the Founders stood, raised weapons in their hands—the cutlasses and flintlocks common three centuries ago. The Empire-Alliance war had ended an overwhelming Imperial victory. The first thing the Alliance refugees had done was swear a solemn oath of vengeance against those who’d broken their ambitions and slaughtered ever yone of their fellow
s who hadn’t fled the mainland.
After three years in the Land of the Chosen as a naval attaché, Farr was certain of two things: their descendants still meant it, and they’d extended the future field of attack from the Empire to everyone else on the planet Visager. Perhaps to the entire universe.
West and south around the bay ran the modern city of Oathtaking, built of black basalt and gray tufa from the quarries nearby. Rail sidings, shipyards, steel mills, factories, warehouses, the endless tenement blocks that housed the Protégé laborers. A cluster of huge buildings marked the commercial center; six and even eight stories tall, their girder frames sheathed in granite carved in the severe columnar style of Chosen architecture. A pall of coal smoke lay over most of the town below the leafy suburbs on the hill slopes, giving the hot tropical air a sulfurous taste. A racket of shod hooves sounded on stone-block pavement, the squeal of iron on iron and a hiss of steam, the hoot of factory sirens. Ships thronged the docks and harbor, everything from old-fashioned windjammers in with cargoes of grain from the Empire to modern steel-hulled steamers of Land or Republic build.
Out in the middle of the harbor a circle of islands linked by causeways marked the site of an ancient caldera and the modern navy basin. Near it moved the low hulking gray shape of a battlewagon, spewing black smoke from its stacks. His mind categorized it automatically: Ezerherzog Grukin, name-ship of her class, launched last year. Twelve thousand tons displacement, four 250-mm rifles in twin turrets fore and aft, eight 175mm in four twin-tube wing turrets, eight 155mm in barbette mounts on either side, 200mm main belt, face-hardened alloy steel. Four-stacker with triple expansion engines, eighteen thousand horsepower, eighteen knots.
The biggest, baddest thing on the water, or at least it would be until the Republic launched its first of the Democrat-class in eighteen months.
Farr shook his head. Enough. You’re going home. He raised his eyes.
Snow-capped volcanoes ringed the port city of Oathtaking on three sides. They reared into the hazy tropical air like perfect cones, their bases overlapping in a tangle of valleys and folds coated with rain forest like dark-green velvet. Below the forest were terraced fields; Farr remembered riding among them. Dusty gravel-surfaced lanes between rows of eucalyptus and flamboyants. A little cooler than down here on the docks; a little less humid. Certainly better smelling than the oily waters of the harbor. Pretty, in a way, the glossy green of the coffee bushes and the orange orchards. He’d gone up there a couple of times, invited up to the manors of family estates by Chosen navy types eager to get to know the Republic’s naval attaché. Not bad oscos, some of them; good sailors, terrible spies, and given to asking questions that revealed much more than they intended.
Also, that meant he got a travel pass for the Oathtaking District. There were some spots where a good pair of binoculars could get you a glimpse at the base if you were quick and discreet. Nothing earthshaking, just what was in port and what was in drydock and what was building on the slipways. Confirming what Intelligence got out of its contacts among the Protégé workers in the shipyard. That was how you built up a picture of capabilities, bit by bit. He’d been here three years now, he’d done a pretty good job—gotten the specs on the steam-turbine experiments—and it was time to go home.
For more reasons than one. He dropped his eyes to the man and woman talking not far away.
What did I ever see in him? Sally Hosten thought.
Her husband—soon to be ex-husband—stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. Karl Hosten was a tall man even for one of the Chosen, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, as trim at thirty-five as he had been twelve years ago when they married. His face was square and so deeply tanned that the turquoise-blue eyes glowed like jewels by contrast; his cropped hair was white-blond. He wore undress uniform: gray shorts and short-sleeved tunic and gunbelt.
“This parting is not of my will,” he said in crisp Chosen-accented Landisch.
“No, it’s mine,” Sally agreed, in English.
She’d spoken Landisch for a long time, her voice had been a little rusty when she went to the Santander embassy to see about getting her Republican citizenship back. She’d met Maurice there. And she didn’t intend to speak Karl’s language again, if she could help it.
“Will you not reconsider?” he said.
Twelve years together had made it easy for her to read the emotions behind a Chosen mask-face. The sorrow she sensed put a bubble of anger at the back of her mouth, hard and bitter.
“Will you give John back his children?” she said.
A brief glance aside showed that her son John wasn’t nearby anymore. Where . . . twenty feet or so, bending over a cargo net with another boy of about the same twelve years. Jeffrey Farr, Maurice’s son.
Karl Hosten stiffened and ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. “The law is the law; genetic defects must be—”
“A clubfoot is not a genetic defect!” Sally said with quiet deadliness. “It’s a result of carriage during pregnancy”—a spear of guilt stabbed her—”which can be, was, corrected surgically. And you didn’t even tell me you were having him sterilized in the delivery room. I didn’t find out until he was eleven years old!”
“Would you have been happier if you knew? Would he?”
“How happy would he be when he found out he couldn’t be Chosen?”
Karl swallowed and looked very slightly away. He is my son too, he didn’t say. Aloud: “There are many fine careers open to Probationers-Emeritus. Johan is an intelligent boy. The University—”
“As a Washout,” Sally said, using the cruel slang term for those who failed the exacting Trial of Life at eighteen after being born to or selected for the training system. It was far better than Protégé status, anything was, but in the Land of the Chosen . . .
“We’ve had this conversation too many times,” she said.
Karl sighed. “Correct. Let us get this over with.”
She looked around. “John!”
John Hosten felt prickly, as if his own skin were too tight and belonged to somebody else. Everyone had been too quiet in the steamcar, after they picked him up at the school. He’d already said good-bye to his friends—he didn’t have many—and packed. Vulf, his dog, was already on board the ship.
I don’t want to listen to them fight, he thought, and began drifting away from his mother and father.
That put him near another boy about his own age. John’s eyes slid back to him, curiosity driving his misery away a little. The stranger was skinny and tall, red-haired and freckled. His hair was oddly cut, short at the sides and floppy on top, combed—a foreigner’s style, different from both the Chosen crop and the bowl-cut of a Proti. He wore a thin fabric pullover printed in bizarre colorful patterns, baggy shorts, laced shoes with rubber soles, and a ridiculous looking billed cap.
“Hi,” he said, holding out a hand. Then: “Ah, guddag.”
“I speak English,” John said, shaking with the brief hard clamp of the Land. English and Imperial were compulsory subjects at school, and he’d practiced with his mother.
The other boy flexed his fingers. “Better’n I speak Landisch,” he said, grinning. “I’m Jeffrey Farr. That’s my dad over there.”
He nodded towards a tall slender man in a white uniform who was standing a careful twenty meters from the Hosten party. John recognized the uniform from familiarization lectures and slides: Republic of Santander Navy, officer’s lightweight summer garrison version. It must be Captain Farr, the officer Mom had been seeing at the consulate about the citizenship stuff.
I wish she’d tell me the truth. I’m not a little kid or an idiot, he thought. That wasn’t the only reason she was talking to Maurice Farr so much. “John Hosten, Probationer-hereditary,” he replied aloud.
A Probationer-hereditary was born to the Chosen and automatically entitled to the training and the Test of Life; only a few children of Protégés were adopted into the course. Then he flushed. He wasn’t going to be a Probationer
long, and he could never have passed the Test, not the genetic portions. Not with his foot. He couldn’t be anything but a Washout, second-class citizen.
“You don’t have to worry about all that crap any more,” Jeffrey said cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the liner Pride of Bosson. “We’re all going back to civilization.”
The flag that fluttered from her signal mast had a blue triangle in the left field with fifteen white stars, and two broad stripes of red and white to the right. The Republic of Santander’s banner.
John opened his mouth in automatic reflex to defend the Land, then closed it again. He was going to Santander himself. To live.
“Ya, we’re going,” he said. They both looked over towards their parents. “Your mother?”
“She died when I was a baby,” Jeffrey said.
There was a crash behind them. The boys turned, both relieved at the distraction. One of the steam cranes on the Bosson’s deck had slipped a gear while unloading a final cargo net on the dock. The Protégé foreman of the docker gang went white under his tan—he’d be held responsible—and turned to yell insults and complaints up at the liner’s deck, shaking his fist. Then he turned and whipped his lead-weighted truncheon across the side of one docker’s head. There was a sound like a melon dropping on pavement; the docker’s face seemed to distort like a rubber mask. He fell to the cracked uneven pavement with a limp finality, as if someone had cut all his tendons.
“Shit,” Jeffrey whispered.
The foreman made an angry gesture with his baton, and two of the dockers took their injured fellow by the arms and dragged him off towards a warehouse. His head was rolled back, eyes disappeared in the whites, bubbles of blood whistling out of his nose. The foreman turned back to the ship and called up to the seamen on the railing, calling for an officer. They looked back at him for a moment, then one silently turned away and walked towards the nearest hatch . . . slowly.
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