FOR A LONG minute the Cap’s eyes held the Regent’s, eye to eye in a subtle exchange, a kind of measuring of each other. The Regent, whose name was Gunnar Tor Branthak, pulled his beard thoughtfully, and his color went back to its normal ruddy hue.
“I do not expect any attacks by unnamed parties, but I fully understand your meaning. Those are your terms, and I accept them. Your pay will be regular battle pay equal to that received by my native supporters of equal rank. Naturally you will receive a share in the loot, which should amount to a fortune. But, you are aware I am not contracting to protect you against any resentment your lack of enterprise under fire might arouse?”
It was Captain Alain’s turn to flush with repressed anger, and his big fist came up in a gesture that said more than any words. Just the same, he supplied the words to go with the fist. “If any man finds cause to reproach the Warspear for cowardly actions during battle, I will claim no share of any prize won by the forces of Konapar. The name of Captain Gan Alain should be warranty enough of the value of this ship to your project!”
“Agreed then!” the Regent snapped. “The Warspear will fight under my personal direction, and take orders from no other officers whatever.” The ‘visor went blank and Gan Alain turned and gave Chan a wink.
Chan grinned inwardly. What had happened was an example of the cool wits of his commander. The Warspear had jetted into an imperial war fleet staffed with jealous nobles and officers of royal blood, and contracted to guard the Regent from treachery from anyone of them. Chan would have bet that there were a dozen sub-potentates who were at this moment boiling violently around the collar and unable to do anything about it but sizzle. Who but the Cap would realize and take advantage of the fact that every ruler has his enemies, and that they would be looking for an opportunity such as might occur in battle to blast the Regent’s ship by “mistake”.
Gan Alain had learned by sad experience that a mercenary takes an unequal chance in battle beside allies, many of whom are relatives. They will send a hireling to his doom every time in preference to a brother or a cousin or a rich neighbor. The Tor’s deal gave him a ship, which could have no ulterior motive, as the Warspear’s crew stood to gain nothing unless the Tor remained alive.
ALL THIS time little Elvir sat silently in the control cabin perched on top of the file cabinet, her knees holding the chart book where the course to Konapar was scrawled out in red ink. She closed the big folder of charts and pushed it into the cabinet between her knees without getting down. Her eyes were half-shut, and the mate figured she was thinking about the women who ruled Phira and what was going to happen shortly to them. He chucked her under her pretty, round chin and asked: “Are you worried about the Amazons, chicken? We won’t hurt them if they behave themselves.”
She shook her head, gave him a peculiar smile. Then she qualified the gesture with a confidential whisper the Cap couldn’t hear. “I’m really thinking about the women, but it’s because I’m worrying about what will become of Captain Alain when he gets mixed up with a city full of nothing but old women.”
To Elvir, any woman over eighteen was old.
The inference behind her words tickled Chan so that he laughed. She grinned too, her eyes sparkling up at him, woman-wise in a child’s face. It hit him suddenly. “Don’t worry about the Cap where women are concerned. He can take ‘em or leave ‘em alone.” He eyed her with wonder in his gaze. The scamp was actually jealous, and not with any childish jealousy, either.
She shook her curls again. “You don’t know about the Priestesses. I do! I was to be a slave in the Temple of Myrmi-Atla, the glorious All-Mother. The other slaves talked about them all the time. They’re not ordinary women; they’re sorceresses.”
The mate pooh-poohed the idea. “There’s no such thing as sorcery, child. Not on Phira, anyway.”
“You’ll see,” she predicted direly, knowingly with the all-wisdom of a child. “They’ll wind the captain around their fingers. And I don’t want to see it. I like him too much to see him made a fool of. If I was elder, I’d do something about it.”
Chan wanted to say bluntly: “What?” but sight of her serious face made him think better of it. Instead he said: “Tell you what, Elvir; you and I can look ahead a little. We can plan to outfigure them. If some of the Matriarchs get under his skin, we’ll fix them, eh?”
She put her child’s hand in the mate’s horny paw and shook. “It’s a deal, Chan.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE PHIRANS must have had plenty of warning of the attacking fleet, for their armada was sighted some four hours out of their solar system. Their ships were old, a style obsolete for half a century, which is a long time in the growth of galactic science. However, they had obviously been recently refitted and newly engined, for those blunt, clumsy power hogs were fairly splitting the ether when Konaparian telescopes identified them.
They split their forces right and left, which could be taken either for feminine thinking or stupidity, for no man would have divided his power that way. Tor Branthak took immediate advantage of the weakness and blasted his forces into the opening between and poured fission bombs and detonator rays right and left into the Phiran fleet. It looked to Chan as if the battle were ended before it had begun. The women had lost.
Gan Alain kept the Warspear right on the Regent’s tail where he could see what was going on and be ready to repel attack as per agreement.
Then the Phirans, old and dilapidated as their fleet seemed, sprang a surprise. They had opened in the center just wide enough to get out of the way of a huge dark shape coming up from their rear. They had kept a screen of ships between it and the Konaparians or it would have been seen before. Now it was too late. Chan recognized her after a minute and sang out a warning.
“That’s a Mixar ship, Cap! She carries potent stuff!”
Chan knew Mixar was on the outer rim of the Dires cluster, and that this ship must have been a year making the trip to Phira; thus her presence here must be due solely to chance. But that chance looked like disaster to the Konaparians. This thing was a super-dreadnought in size, and no one really knew what a Mixar ship packed in armament. The cult of Myrmi-Atla had originally come from the planets of the Regulus group, where the Mixar Amazons had kept out all intruders since the earliest days of space travel. When he said she was potent, Chan had understated the case. Tor Branthak’s heart must have bounced in his boots when he saw her.
The big ship opened fire at once. A ray came out of her nose turret that must have been three feet wide at the orifice, and it broadened its path. It struck the nearest of its enemies, a Konapar cruiser, then lanced swiftly right and left while Konaparian ships zoomed frantically right and left and up and down—any way to leave the vicinity of that dread, dark shape. The ships the ray had touched seemed unaffected as they drove straight on in their courses, through the Phiran fleet; but the fact that they did not fire a shot revealed the truth—they were manned by dead men.
Chan took a look at the visiscreen to see what the fleet was doing as a whole. The Warspear and the Regent’s, big master-class cruiser were almost the only force now left in range of the Mixar threat, the rest of the valiant Konaparians rapidly vanishing to the rear. Space torpedoes were blossoming into fire against the Mixar hull, but the men who had fired them had left the scene.
The torpedoes didn’t seem to effect her armor. She boomed on inexorably nearer the Regent’s ship, and it struck Gan Alain that the Regent was only waiting to see what his new employee could do about it—which was silly, as the Mixar was at least ten times the Warspear’s size. Actually, the Regent was probably stunned with surprise, and had unconsciously looked to his newest ally for a possible salvation of the situation.
The Cap had a tight grin on his grim face, and Chan watched him pull the graviton-sphere hatch lever, watched the glowing sphere of charged metal drift out into space. Gan Alain was revealing one of his special weapons, and probably with it, its range. Perhaps the Regent would be surprised in a dis
agreeable as well as a pleasant way.
GAN FLICKED a repulsor ray against the sphere, and it moved sluggishly off toward the Mixar ship. Then the Cap spun the Warspear end-for-end and gave the rear jets to the deadly sphere. The Warspear went away fast, but the rough iron sphere of red hot metal bobbed equally fast, though more clumsily, on its way toward the big stranger, looking about as harmless as a hunk of asteroid rock.
The maneuver was probably as incomprehensible to the Mixars as it was to the Regent, who turned tail too, and fled after the Warspear. The graviton sphere is a device that is unknown in the Dires system. The Warspear had gone far to pick that up.
The sphere went humping along toward the enemy, who seemed to watch it contemptuously. They swerved the Mixar gently aside to avoid it, no more than necessary. The sphere swerved too, and now picked up speed. The Mixar took alarm then and, like the Warspear, spun around and gave it their rear jets.
What they didn’t know was that the sphere was carrying a motor generator creating gravitons, which was fueled by a fission metal, which was also its warhead. It manufactured gravitons so fast that its artificial gravity was by now nearly equal to a big planet like Phira, and it was so close that all the blasts in the Mixar fuel tanks couldn’t drive it away. They were trying to escape a thing that nothing ever escaped, unless, like Cap, they got away before the generator really got up speed. Since the sphere had no genuine inertia or mass of its own, its artificial gravity drew it toward any object inexorably, in spite of all attempts to escape.
The jets had no effect upon the sphere, for it wasn’t the same chunk of iron it had been when the Warspear’s jets started it on its way. Now it was a vast contact bomb, homing on the Mixar ship, and its graviton generators were stepping up more revolutions by the second.
The only effective defense against the thing now was to bomb or torpedo it so that it wasted its explosive force in space, but its size was so small that this was a virtual impossibility in the short time remaining. The Mixar had made the mistake of trying to blast it away with its jets, as it had seen the Warspear do.
The explosion blew a hole in the Mixar’s rear into which the Warspear could have driven and parked, with room for a theater besides.
The Mixar dreadnought lost way, drifted slowly in a circle, her jets guttering as she tried vainly to get going again. Then she blew up, giving off a glare of light like a little star as her fuel fissioned.
The disaster took the heart out of Phira and put it back into the Konaparian fleet. The invaders appeared again from out of the blue yonder. The Phirans smashed into them, fighting heroically, but with no apparent tactic but desperation. They were well weaponed, but outnumbered. With better tactics, they might have counted heavily, but it was evident they had based their hopes on the big ship from the neighboring solar system, and that it had contained their tactical brains, too.
The Cap grinned as he eased his big body from the control seat and motioned Chan to replace him. “It looks as if the Matriarchs are going to have to take masculine orders for awhile,” he said to Chan, but the mate didn’t smile.
“I don’t like it, Captain,” said Chan. “What have you got against the Phiran females you should knock their pins out for Konapar? How do you know it wouldn’t have paid better to fight for the women, as it is natural for a man to do?”
Gan frowned, shook his head. “You’ll find out, DuChaile. Wait until you understand the Matriarchs; then you’ll agree.”
The Phirans fled, reformed, tried to meet Konapar again on the edge of their solar system. But it was no good. They lost two to one in a brief, raging encounter. They fled again, a fifth of the fleet that had come out to meet the invaders. The rest drifted, hulls riddled, along the route they had so recently covered.
It was the only resistance to the invasion. When a scout party jetted down over Alid, a white flag of surrender floated over the spire of the Temple of Myrmi-Atla—and the Temple of Alid rules all Phira.
CHAPTER FOUR
CELYS, high priestess of Myrmi-Atla, stood peering from the ornate leaded panes of her sanctum in the temple. She watched the orange sky where one by one the great warships of Konapar loomed out of the flaming horizon, grew huger, settled to a landing on the plateau above the valley where the Holy City stretched along the high, curving banks of the sacred river Kroon.
There were tears in the lovely emerald-flecked gold eyes of the priestess. Her long lashes were wet, and her slender hands upon the black and gold of the drapes trembled with anger. She knew quite well why Gunnar Tor Branthak had broken treaty with Phira. It was not for gold, not for loot, not for power. What the Tor wanted was the secret!
Beside the window the dark stones slid silently aside, revealing an opening and a passage within the seemingly solid wall. In the darkness a tall, pale figure moved like a cold flame, silent as a ghost. Celys turned as the figure reached out and touched her shoulder. The two stood with eyes fixed upon each other, then, as if moved by identical emotion, joined in close embrace. The one who had entered from the wall murmured: “It had been so very long, dear. The Mother has sent me to replace you. You are to return to Avalaon. She needs to take council in this crisis, and you should be there.”
Celys released herself from the arms of the newcomer. As they turned about each other, the illusion of one slipping into the place of the other was magically perfect. Anyone watching would have sworn some mystery of identity was here, for the two women seemed to have changed places, yet Celys still stood by the window. One glided into the wall, which returned to its seeming solidity, and the other moved into the identical posture in which Celys had stood, peering through the lifted drapes over the conquered city. And there was no change in her. It was Celys, high priestess of Myrmi-Atla, the supreme power over all the planet Phira until today.
Celys turned from the window, letting the dark drape fall and shut out the hated sight of the conquerors. She stood, a pale flame in the temple gloom, a lance of green in her diaphanous robe—the green that symbolized the lifeblood of the All-Mother—topped by the ruddy hue of her rich red-gold hair, curled and coifed high, bound in a net of emeralds. She stood, weeping silently, her face stiff from the effort to keep from sobbing aloud.
Across the polished stone paving of the temple chamber came a swiftly running white-robed figure, one of the acolytes, a girl of perhaps fourteen. She swept to a half-salaam before Celys, then clasped her about the waist, her voice choked: “Dear Mistress, I know how your heart twists in pain. But let us go—the Empress in Mixar offers asylum. The ship waits, why will you not go to safety? We do not matter, but you bear the very torch of the true religion in your breast. You must save it, to light the fire where it will not be snuffed out again.”
Celys put her hand on the girl’s head and raised her face. “No, little friend, I may not shame the Mother by running away. I, before all others, must face the conqueror without fear.”
The girl clung to her silently for a moment, then as in an afterthought, said: “There is a little messenger come to you, a tiny wisp of a girl. She says she comes from an enemy ship and bears a secret message. I thought she lied, or was mad, for it hardly makes sense.”
“Send her to me,” said Celys.
LITTLE Elvir stood before Celys, somewhat abashed by her regal beauty and the sadness in her face. But her pretty chin squared with determination, and her child’s heart beat madly, her mind spinning with plans.
She began: “I slipped away when no one was looking, to see for myself the city of Amazons, where women rule men, and men are but servants.”
Celys’ eyes went chill, and she half turned away. “If that is all the child wants, take her and put her outside the temple gates.”
Eloi, the acolyte who had shown her into the sanctum, took Elvir firmly by the arm, but the little slave girl twisted free and darted behind the tall form of Celys.
“That isn’t all. I bear an important message that Captain Gan Alain would trust to no one but me.”
“What is the message, sparrow?” asked Celys coldly, withdrawing slightly from the somewhat grimy hand that clutched her immaculate skirts.
“Not Gan Alain, the pirate?” queried Eloi, pausing in her circling attempt to catch the quick little child.
Elvir shrieked at her, horrified at her words. “He’s not a pirate! He’s a privateer, and the bravest fighting man in all space.”
“The difference is found only in the spelling of the word,” commented Celys, smiling in spite of herself at the loyalty on the pert face.
Eloi’s eyes caught those of Celys, both of them realizing that here might be some kind of a lever, some tiny opening in the conqueror’s armor. Gan Alain was a mercenary, mercenaries can be bought, and here was contact with one in the pay of the enemy. Celys bent, then, her eyes searching the child’s face for character, to know whether her words would be lies or not.
“Tell me quickly, child. Did your master send you, and is he in the employ of Tor Branthak?”
“That he did, and that he is. He wants you Amazon women to hide yourselves, to have no contact with the enemy in any way. Otherwise a terrible fate will befall you.”
Celys laughed, suddenly perceiving the real mind behind the message. “And did your master truly say those words, little sparrow, or did you yourself get them from some storybook?”
But now, Eloi, who had again caught hold of Elvir’s slender wrist, suddenly raised it so that Celys could see and cried out: “She has the sign of the Mother upon her forearm! She is one of our own temple slaves!”
Celys looked startled, bent and peered at the little blue scroll and enclosed symbol of Myrmi-Atla upon Elvir’s arm.
“Where did you come from, imp? And what do you want? Answer truly, or I’ll have you thrashed until you tell the truth!”
Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) Page 2