The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  I said, “Ariane. Remember when we first encountered this thing in Delphinus--and I went aboard?”

  “I remember, Starkahn.”

  “You said something to me while I was in the life-support chamber. You said that something was happening to the ship.”

  “Yes. The cores began to function after you’d gone aboard.”

  “Isn’t it possible the sensors took me for the Watcher?”

  “That seems a farfetched chance, Kier,” Erit said.

  I looked at Marissa. Her gleaming eyes regarded me from the bulk of the suit helmet. “Is it possible, Marissa?”

  “I don’t know, Kier,” the girl said.

  “How selective can life sensors be? How selective would it be necessary to make them? After all, the builders didn’t expect anyone ever to be aboard the Death but a Watcher. Surely they wouldn’t be able to differentiate between one human being and another.”

  “But Marissa is not a human being. Not in the same way you are,” Ariane protested.

  “Near enough,” I said, with an assurance I didn’t feel. ”And the ship began to move after I had boarded it. I barely had time to get off before it went translight. You remember, Ariane. We even tried to hold it with a torpedo, but it was too far along with the core lighting. It just went.” I drew a deep breath and said positively, “It took me for its Watcher.”

  “That is a dangerous assumption, Kier,” Ariane said.

  “It is the only one we can make,” I said. “I’ll go aboard again.”

  “Kier!” Ariane said sharply. “I have a Fleet contact.” She holographed the expanding space where the black starship curved into Sirius’s inner zone. An Imperial battleship and three cruisers had materialized out of translight mode. Their intentions were unmistakable. They might have had battleflags flying, so obvious was their intention to attack the giant.

  “The commo station on Sirius Fifteen has been sending out a distress call. They must have detected the Death coming in,” Ariane said.

  Marissa looked at me with frightened eyes. “S-Fifteen is the outermost habitable planet in the system,” I said. “We are approaching from the night side, so we can’t see it. But they must have radar contact with the Death.”

  Marissa’s voice was horrified. “Are there people on the planet, Kier? Many people?”

  “It is a water world,” Ariane said. “Larger than Earth. Seven large islands in a planetary ocean.”

  “But people? Cities?”

  “A population of seventeen millions,” I said flatly. “Would the Death attack a planetary body?”

  “Yes,” Marissa said. “It could do that.”

  I turned back to the holograph. The battleship and its englobing cruisers were moving at sublight speeds, but they were driving hard to intercept. A gallant gesture--and a futile one.

  “Ariane,” I said. “Tell those ships who we are, and say that they are to veer off.” I drew a deep breath and then gave the order, “Close in on the Death. I am boarding her again.”

  In that moment, for the first time in my life (and quite possibly the last, I realized), I felt like the Starkahn of Rhada.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Book of Warls says that there are demons in the Cloud which one may see in the southern skies of Earth and that these demons lived on the Earth, and on Vyka, and on all the worlds of men. Now, I have been to Earth, and to Vyka, and to many worlds, and I find it most curious that the only demons I have met there are my fellow men.

  Attributed to Navigator Anselm Styr, burned for heresy at Biblios Brittanis,

  early Second Stellar Empire

  The death of the Royal Vulk Gret, coming as it did when his participation in Triad with the Magellanic invader would have disclosed the impossibility of effective action against the marauding Death Three, is ironic. The truth, as the invader knew it, would have made any attempt to neutralize the great starship useless. But the Rhadan Starkahn, a precipitous youth, did not discover until too late that the Magellanic’s presence could not quiet the threat, and so he acted in a spirit of self-immolation. Thus, even in death, the Vulk Gret served the state.

  Vulk Varinius (Academician of the Council of Ministers, 625-870 New Galactic Era),

  My People, middle Confederate period

  Once again I found myself in space approaching that great metal planetoid. I had instructed Ariane to retreat to a thousand kilometers, and there, invisible to me, she matched the Death’s orbit and waited.

  At a distance of eight thousand kilometers, the night side of the planet Sirius Fifteen blotted out a large part of the sky. The double star lay behind the planet as seen from my location, and I could clearly make out the star’s diamond-bright corona. It shimmered like an aurora, a vast stellar wind of glowing particles that dimmed the more distant stars.

  In the bulky armor I felt hot and clammy. There was a hard knot of real fear in my belly, for I fully expected to be met with a blast of destroying defensive energies as I approached the Magellanic vessel. Marissa had briefed me as well as she could concerning the rudimentary controls available within the ship. They consisted mainly of several methods of reducing the power inputs to the various systems within the giant: defensive armaments and propulsion. The offensive weapons were far beyond Marissa’s comprehension, having been designed by the malign genius of an entire civilization’s most brilliant minds.

  As I approached the massive ship, I was struck once again by its derelict appearance. The projecting cones of the intersystem drive, the extensions of the main cores, still scintillated faintly with the residual energies it had expended to slow from faster-than-light speeds to a mere crawl--the twenty-seven thousand kilometers per ESH needed to establish an eccentric orbit around the watery planet below. In that flickering glow I could see that the knobs and protrusions I had noticed on the ship’s surface previously were now fully extended, and the blunt muzzles of energy projectors, rhomboidal in shape and alien to the eye, projected far above the black, curving surface of the ship’s skin. It was difficult to be certain in the dimness, but it did seem to me that grids that appeared to be search radar were scanning rapidly, bobbing and weaving like fans as they probed space all around. I wondered, dry-mouthed, if one of those hundreds of antennae were scanning me, sending its pulses down through the kilometers of circuitry to the addled positronic brain of the robot and asking whether or not the tiny mote it had discovered were a threat and should it spare a small portion of destruction to wipe it out. It was not a comforting notion.

  I heard Ariane through the E-phone: “You are within six kilometers, Kier. I cannot detect any rise in radiation. Perhaps you are too small to be noticed.”

  I didn’t believe that for a moment, and I didn’t think the cyborg did. She said it for the same reason small children whistle when passing burial grounds at night.

  “Have you been able to raise the battleship?” I asked. Ariane had sent pulses to the Imperial vessels before I went EV, but the range was great and the situation aboard the warships tense, I had no doubt. Our signals had apparently not been received--or they had not yet been passed through the absurdly complicated chain of command that has become deadly common practice in the Grand Fleet after all these years of peace.

  “I am trying now. I’ve told them they must hold their position and under no circumstances attempt to attack because we have someone EV in the area of the Death.”

  Since Ariane’s messages would contain our commo code identification symbols, there was no doubt the commander of the Imperial squadron would know who was extra vehicular near the marauder. That might slow them down some. If what I knew of high commanders in the Fleet held true in this case, the lord nobleman on the battleship’s bridge would soon be burning up the long-range commo beacons with pleas for special instructions. Our Imperial officers did not reach flag rank by being rash.

  I turned my attention once again to the great starship. The rhomboidal muzzles were moving--there was no doubt of it. They were training around so
that those that were not masked by the bulk of the vessel were pointing at the planet--or at the star beyond. I felt a shivering terror mingled with a reluctant admiration for Marissa’s people of the communes. What sort of men could, in a few short decades, develop a technology like this? And an understanding of stellar-phoenix reactions so complete that they could apply a mote of power in the right manner to puncture the photosphere and destroy the equilibrium of a star! What could such minds have done if they had devoted themselves to something other than revenge and weaponry? For that matter, the time scale was all wrong: perhaps in the millennia that had passed they had done just that and turned inward to explore their own galaxy--and others. And why was it that we in the main galaxy had only this messenger of death, launched thousands of years before, to speak for the communes of Magellan?

  Was it possible my human mind was too rigid to really understand? Was it possible, for example, that time itself was something different outside the Milky Way? Did each galactic system have its own particular time flow? Perhaps Marissa wasn’t a ten-thousand-year sleeper at all in her own environment of the Cloud. Perhaps the builders of the Deaths were still living--Perhaps--My mind spun with the vast and limitless options that would remain unanswered until more men and women make the long voyage--took, as Marissa said, the Long Death. And none of this would ever come to pass if the Death Three continued its destructive journey.

  In this fight the stakes were nothing less than the future of man: peace and exploration of an increasingly wondrous universe--or very nearly everlasting war and fear of further incursions by “the demons of the Cloud” who seemed sprung from the pages of the ancient Book of Warls, black bible of the Interregnal warlocks.

  The sun was rising. Not the sun, but Sirius, the brilliant double star of legend. It appeared in a scintillating flare of hot bright light over the dark horizon of Sirius Fifteen, the planet below. Its rays were turning “the wine-dark sea” of the ancients into a restless silver. The swirling clouds made a pattern that caught the red rays of the growing daylight and held them for a time. Then the inexorable motions of the celestial mechanics that governed the immense masses of star and planet caused them to move on in their long cycles, and far above, in the night of space beyond the stratosphere, the first white light struck the alien starship, and it seemed to take on form and substance, mass and dimension. I watched it and felt minute, miniscule, infinitesimal. What, I wondered, can one single man do against the ponderous and unthinking powers of the great beings involved? In my dread I was beginning to revert to the mysticism of the Rhad: we are thought a melancholy people, filled with barely contained wonder. Natural enough, I think, for a nation born on the edge of the known galaxy, with a window, as it were, on the truly infinite.

  With its relatively dark companion at apastron, Sirius appeared to fill much of the sky, even though the first and nearest of the planetary companions revolved around the system at a distance of more than one hundred astronomical units. Sirius Fifteen’s orbit lay a thousand times farther away from its primary than did the orbit of Neptune from Sol; yet so large was the great Dog Star that the planet below was subtropical--a paradise of islands and warm sea. On this lambent world lived seventeen millions of my fellow human beings--persons I had never seen, but who had suddenly, in my mind at least, become my brothers and sisters.

  I touched the thruster controls and moved toward the Death. I was suddenly filled with a sense of fate. Perhaps

  I was finally beyond ordinary fear.

  Ariane said, “The battleship is the Intrepid, Captain Lord Chal Proc-Ouspensky commanding. He says he will hold his position for one hour--no longer. Also he says that we are under arrest and may not leave Sirius district without his express orders.”

  The marvelous way our noblemen’s minds worked, I thought with a touch of hysteric gaiety. If they were tossing coins, they would contrive to have them land always on edge.

  “Acknowledge his transmission, but tell him we do not accept his authority,” I said. “We take our instructions directly from the Fleet Survey Wing. It won’t stop him, but it will confuse and immobilize him for at least that hour.”

  ‘There is something else, Kier,” Ariane said. “One of the cruisers is a Navigator’s ship with a completely ecclesiastical crew. He will not speak for them. They are Zealots to a man.”

  “What ship?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “The Glory of the Name from the Theocracy. Navigator Peter commands her.”

  Of course, I thought. It had to be. The Zealots would insist on being in at the death of the Death. But his lack of understanding of what was involved here could be fatal to all of us. Nav Peter had never before seen the Magellanic vessel. His devil-ridden mind was too rigidly religious to conceive of such a craft being built without the sanction and blessing of the Order of Navigators. Now, what would the sight of the monster do to that irrational man’s powers of reason?

  “Can you relay me through to the Glory, Ariane?” I asked.

  “If they will take a call. They may not choose to talk to a blasphemer and heretic.”

  “Try it anyway.” As I exchanged messages with Ariane, I kept drawing cautiously closer to the Death. I was within five kilometers now, and the small of my back was tingling with warning messages, and the expectation of sudden blasting extinction.

  So Nav Peter had joined the chase, and probably it was his authority as nuncio of the Theocracy that had brought poor Lord Ouspensky and his squadron to this deadly place. Unfortunate man, I thought drily. He should have had a good and simple life as lord of his estates in the Procyon worlds. Instead, he now commanded a small detachment of Imperial ships in imminent danger of vaporization.

  I heard a harsh voice say in the E-phones: “This is the Gloria Nomini, heretic. Speak.” Latin, I thought with irrational irritation. In this time and this place, Latin. A language dead even in the middle years of the Dawn Age. But these were the men who had kept knowledge alive through the Dark Time. For that, I owed them respect. Even such as the Zealots. I replied, “I hear you, Nav. I would speak with Peter of Syrtis.”

  “Then speak.”

  “Nav Peter,” I said, as respectfully as I could under the circumstances, “I ask that you remain with the squadron and make no sudden moves. It could be extremely dangerous.”

  “The Order fears no dangers, heretic. The spirit of the Star is with us.”

  I racked my brain trying to think of some way to make even a minimal breakthrough of understanding with the fervid priest. It was vital. I remembered that the Zealots were probably the last adherents to what, in Nav Kynan of Rhada’s time, was called the Stellar Heresy. In the middle years of the Empire’s development, certain Navigators put forward the theory that stars were in and of themselves holy, and objects of veneration. The more extreme star worshipers propounded the hypothesis that the stars were not simply celestial bodies (and as such works of the Universal Spirit or God), but rather aspects of God: living, sentient beings. And just as the priests of the Dawn Age had wrangled to the point of bloodshed over “how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,” the Navigators of the early Empire split into angry factions over the Stellar hypothesis, or as some called it, the Stellar Heresy. If Nav Peter of Syrtis were, in fact, a stellarite, then the destruction of a star was the most heinous crime imaginable: not because it destroyed the works of man, but because it was a direct assault on the body and person of God Himself.

  “You can see the danger on your own instruments, Nav,” I said. “It is a starship from the Cloud. A vast vessel, but only a ship. There is no religious question here. Let me--”

  “Everything that happens is a religious matter, Starkahn,” the priest’s rasping voice went on, tense and near to hysterical rage. “Is there no end to your presumption?”

  “Nav,” I said, “there is no need for the Order to become involved in this. It is a matter for the Fleet. I beg you, stand clear and live.”

  “To threaten a Navigator of God is to ri
sk damnation, Kier of Rhada. Don’t imagine your patrician birth will help you in this.”

  The millennial prejudice of the humbly born for the noble was in his words, and I realized that here was a basically simple man, a peasant, with the power of the clergy (no, of God, he thought) in his hands. The meek to humble the mighty. The man born of the soil to put down the Starkahn. It was too bitter, too sadly hopeless. I could not touch the man’s small nucleus of sanity. His prejudice and vaulting arrogance were too great.

  “I am not threatening you, Nav,” I said. “Only let me do what I must, and I will submit myself to an ecclesiastical court on Rhada--on Mars, if you like! A court of damned Zealots--!”

  “Blasphemy and heresy. You bargain with God’s will!” In the darkness of a distant starfield I saw the familiar scintillation of a starship’s hull glowing with ionization. The Navigator’s ship was getting under way. I almost screamed into the E-phone: “Stay where you are, Peter! On peril of all our lives, don’t come closer!”

  “That abomination of demons has murdered stars. It must submit to the Order or be destroyed,” Nav Peter shouted.

  Insanity. Religious fanaticism would be the end of us all here in the Sirian sky, I thought hopelessly. Now I could make out the shape of the Navigator’s cruiser. It was patterned on the ancient vessels, so like the monster before me. Yes, insanity and irony. How bitter it was!

  I pleaded as I rotated slowly in space like a miniature spaceship. “Nav Peter. Give me an hour. One hour, that I can try to board this thing and immobilize it--!”

  “Do you think I will allow a heretic to grasp the demon’s power? I excommunicate you, Kier of Rhada!” He cut off communications, and there was nothing in my E-phone but the hiss and crackle of stellar static from the blazing blue-white sun.