by C. J. Ryan
Sanjit Blagodarski, the Imperial Governor, stepped forward and extended his right hand. Kenarbin clasped it in both of his.
“Welcome to Denastri, Lord Kenarbin,” said the Governor.
“Thank you, Governor. Good to see you again, Sandy. You’re looking well.”
His first lie, less than a minute after setting foot on the planet. In fact, Blagodarski looked awful. Drawn and frazzled, he seemed to have aged twenty years during the ten since they had last met. The Governor shrugged off the obvious falsehood with a weak smile and introduced his Imperial Secretary, a Level XII Dexta functionary named Freya Benitez, and the commanding officer of the Occupation Task Force, General Steven Ohashi. The general gave Kenarbin a crisp military nod along with a firm handshake. “Glad you’re here, Milord,” said Ohashi. That, in itself, struck Kenarbin as an ominous note. Marines were seldom happy to see diplomats on their turf.
“And now,” said Blagodarski, “it is my privilege to present the Premier of Denastri. Honored Premier, may I present Lord Kenarbin?”
The alien stepped forward and extended a four-fingered hand, which Kenarbin took in his. Its flesh felt cold.
“Vilcome to our furled,” said the Premier, with obvious effort.
“Thank you, Honored Premier,” Kenarbin replied as he stared into the dark vertical slits of the alien’s eyes. The creature was vaguely humanoid—two arms, two legs, nearly as tall as Kenarbin. But its face was narrow and noseless, with large, drooping triangular ears, sallow skin, a sharp, pointed chin, and a mouth that would have looked at home on a rainbow trout. The vertical almond-shaped eyes seemed to be all pupil, and looked like the entrances to shadowy, unexplored caverns. From a narrow, bony crest at the top of its head sprouted a long shank of blue-black hair, braided and bound with thin colored threads. The Premier’s clothing consisted of a belted saffron-colored robe that fell nearly to the ground.
Kenarbin released the Premier’s hand and touched a stud on his tunic, activating the translation software on the computer pad in his pocket. “Honored Premier,” he said, “I bring sincere and heartfelt greetings from His Imperial Highness, Emperor Charles V.” He paused to let the Premier’s own pad translate his words into the fluid, tonal language of the Denastri, then continued. “The Emperor has asked me to convey his deep personal gratitude for your service to the Empire, and to your world. He expresses his confidence that, working together, we shall restore peace and prosperity to his loyal subjects on the rich and beautiful world of Denastri.”
He paused again as the Premier absorbed the translation. Kenarbin studied the Premier’s face carefully, but could detect no identifiable reaction. After a moment, nictitating membranes closed in from the sides of the Premier’s eyes in an approximation of a blink. Then the Premier spoke in a flowing, almost musical passage that was pleasant but incomprehensible to human ears.
The computer rendered the translation in a soft, precise, androgynous voice. “You are mostly kind to be here, generous Lord,” it said. “The words of Imperial Highness Fifthborn Charles are registered in deep appreciation by this humble Thirdborn. Peace and prosperity inspire all to high wishfulness. It is a goodness.”
Kenarbin frowned and furrowed his brow. He had been warned that the translation software was still a work-in-progress, but he had hoped for something better than this.
“A goodness, indeed, Honored Premier,” Kenarbin said. “I look forward to working with you to make it so.”
“Yes,” the Premier responded. “Work will make good. We will build again that which has fallen and return—unknown word—to Denastri and the felicitations of Fifthborn Charles and his grasping Empire. Yes.”
Kenarbin glanced at the Governor, who tilted his head a little and offered a wan smile. “You’ll get used to it, Milord,” he said.
“I think I know what he’s saying,” Kenarbin said. “I just wish I could be sure that he knows what I’m saying.”
Blagodarski shrugged. “We manage,” he said. “For the most part. We should be on our way now, Milord. We’ll have you safely into the Compound in a few minutes. It’s not wise to linger too long in an exposed position like this.”
“It isn’t? Why not?”
“Because we make too good a target, Milord,” General Ohashi explained.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Blagodarski hastily added.
“The hell it isn’t,” Ohashi mumbled under his breath. The Governor gave him a sharp, reproving glance, but Ohashi looked away, focusing his gaze on the far side of the river, as if searching for snipers.
Kenarbin nodded. “I see,” he said. “In that case, gentlemen, ladies, Honored Premier, perhaps we should continue our discussion in the Compound. I look forward to seeing your capital city, Honored Premier. I understand that it is older than any on Earth.”
“Earth is young,” the Premier agreed. “Denastri is blessed with the continuing wisdom of all our time. Perhaps you will learn—unknown word—from us, Lord Kenarbin. A goodness.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Kenarbin. “A goodness.”
The party began moving along the dock. Kenarbin noticed that the dock was flanked by squads of armed, helmeted Marines, who snapped to attention as he passed. Ahead, surrounding a small fleet of limo skimmers, the Marines were accompanied by what appeared to be native Denastri troops, hefting Terran plasma rifles. They were noticeably taller than the Premier and their skin was more orange than yellow.
“Fourth- and Fifthborns,” Blagodarski said as they walked. “Warrior caste.”
Kenarbin nodded. “Fine-looking troops,” he said to the Premier, who seemed momentarily confused by the comment and didn’t respond immediately.
After a few moments, the Premier said something that the computer rendered as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Kenarbin, surprised, looked at Blagodarski. “The software has trouble with clichés,” the Governor explained. “Garbage in, garbage out, I suppose. Not that what you said was garbage, Milord.”
“Perish the thought,” Kenarbin replied with a chuckle.
At that instant, a dazzling burst of intense white light blinded him. A split second later, he was deafened by the thunderous crack of a concussion device. Stunned and all but senseless, Kenarbin felt hands grabbing at him, clutching his arms, and dragging him, then lifting him. He flailed out uselessly and shouted something equally useless, then felt himself being thrown bodily into what must have been the backseat of one of the limo skimmers. Someone shoved him down onto the floor of the vehicle, and he felt it lifting and moving.
Security, he thought. They’re getting me out of here.
Sound and sight gradually returned. He tried to turn over and push himself up, but found himself being pushed back down against the floor. “What’s happening?” he demanded, his own words sounding faint and distant. He could hear no response, and saw nothing but a blurred smudge of maroon carpeting, an inch from his nose.
Kenarbin calmed himself. There had been other attempts on other worlds, and he knew the routine. Security people would treat him like a sack of highly valuable potatoes until they were certain that the threat had passed. Annoying but necessary. He could hear the high-pitched whine of the skimmer now, competing with the ringing in his ears. He wondered if the Governor and the Premier were safe.
Minutes went by, and he felt the lurching, darting progress of the skimmer. It seemed to him that they ought to have reached the Compound by then. He managed to twist around a little and turned his head to look up. He expected to see burly Marines on the seat above him. Instead, he found himself looking into the narrow, orange-tinted face of one of the Denastri warriors.
“What’s happening?” he asked again. “Where are you taking me?” The Denastri offered no response. Possibly, he had no translation device and didn’t understand.
Kenarbin again tried to push himself up from the floor, but the warrior rudely shoved him back down. The first tickle of fear and suspicion began to dance at the edges of his
mind.
“Dammit, what the hell is going on here?”
The Denastri leaned forward a little and stared down at him. The alien eyes looked placid and unsympathetic. “You is ours,” it said in Empire English.
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“Vord is ‘hostage,’ yes?” the warrior asked.
Comprehension flooded into Lord Kenarbin in a cold, unwelcome wave.
“Yes,” he said at last, “that’s the word.”
THE SUN GLARED IN NORMAN MINGUS’S FACE, bright enough to be annoying, even through the polarized panoramic dome. Poised just above the irregular peaks on the north rim of Shackleton Crater, its unrelenting radiance was an imposition on an old man’s eyes, and gave Mingus yet another reason to resent the necessity of these semi-annual excursions to the South Pole of Luna. He envied Charles, sitting opposite him on the far side of the three-tiered circular amphitheater where the Imperial Oversight Committee was pleased to hold court. The solar inferno was comfortably positioned behind the young Emperor’s right shoulder, and he had to face only the less constant, if much closer, fires of angry Parliamentarians.
The Empire was in trouble. Mingus had known it for decades, but had hoped—naively, perhaps—that the inevitable reckoning could be postponed beyond his time. Let the next generation deal with it. His own generation had seen enough sorrow and tumult and, Mingus believed, deserved a respite. He had labored to see that they got it, and his efforts had resulted in a half-century of relative peace and prosperity.
But the Terran Empire, like others before it, was a victim of its own success. With the conquest of the Ch’gnth Confederacy in 3174, the last remaining external threat to the Empire had been removed. For a thousand light-years beyond Imperial space, in every direction, no existing power was capable of thwarting the continued expansion of the Terrans. There were, to be sure, a few minor impediments, like the fledgling Gumnaki Hegemony, waiting a couple of hundred light-years beyond the Frontier in Sector 4. The Gumnaki—a race of vast pretensions and minimal subtlety—had carved out a mini-empire of forty or so worlds, but they posed no immediate threat. The Empire would have to fight them someday, Mingus presumed, but probably not on his watch. The outcome, in any case, would be a foregone conclusion. The same applied to the handful of other races that might object to the onward march of Homo sapiens.
Paradoxically, it was the very absence of an external threat that now imperiled the Empire. Many historians, Mingus knew, held that it had been the rise of Islam in the seventh century that had forced the consolidation and forged the power of modern Europe. It was not until after the temporary decline of Islam that the Europeans, deprived of a strong external enemy, fell upon themselves in two centuries of fratricidal insanity, polluting the historical record with names like Napoleon and Hitler, Verdun and Auschwitz. The later fall of the Soviet Union had much the same effect on the Americans, who built their doomed empire without ever admitting to themselves what they were doing. The Terran Empire, at least, harbored no illusions about what it was and what it meant to achieve.
But without the balance and focus provided by external powers, the whirling centrifugal forces inherent in so vast an empire were bound to tear it apart someday. Mingus, a lifelong student of history, knew that the larger an empire grew, the harder it was to govern. He also understood mathematics. The old Earthly empires only had to deal with two dimensions, but the Terran Empire was condemned to grapple with three. Thus, the Empire, 2,000 light-years in diameter, comprised some 4.2 billion cubic light-years of space, with a surface area on the Frontier of 12 million square light-years—all of which had to be patrolled and policed. If the task was not inherently impossible, it was certainly daunting.
Mingus accepted the implications of the unforgiving math but Charles, alas, did not. Charles was the third Emperor he’d had to deal with during his time in office, and by far the most difficult. Bumbling old Darius had paid little attention to the niggling little details of his realm, which was probably just as well. Gregory hadn’t been around long enough to make any difference. But Charles, now in his seventh year as Emperor, was young, arrogant, and ambitious. At thirty, he was finally showing some signs of maturity; perhaps the recent birth of Henry, his son and heir, had something to do with that. Yet his essential character was unlikely to change, and Mingus knew that at his core, Charles was a cold, ruthless son of a bitch. Takes one to know one, Mingus wryly conceded. Age might mellow Charles, but it was not likely to improve him.
As the meeting droned onward with the dramatic speed and force of an oncoming glacier, Mingus focused his attention on Charles, who wore an expression of intense and genuine pain on his handsome face. Emperors, like other men, were capable of the most basic of human emotions—even love.
Two years earlier, Charles had attempted and failed to win the return of his ex-wife, the glamorous and popular Dexta official Gloria VanDeen. Mingus didn’t know the details of her rejection of his offer of remarriage and elevation to Empress, but he had sensed a profound change in Charles following the episode. He could have any woman in the Empire except for the one he wanted most, and the realization must have seared his soul in some deeply painful way. The private man, Mingus supposed, must have surrendered some essential part of himself to the public figure; Charles had been thwarted, but Charles V could not be. Under pressure to produce an heir, he had wanted Gloria for his Empress and the mother of his son. Denied his desire, he had swiftly turned in another direction and taken Lady Patricia Kenarbin as his Consort. Not Empress, but Consort. Some Emperors never married at all, and were content to sire their successors with a Consort; Charles, it seemed, would be one of them. He didn’t need an Empress; he didn’t need Gloria; he didn’t need love.
And yet, he seemed to have found it anyway. Mingus could not gauge the depth of Charles’s feelings for Lady Patricia, but he suspected that it was considerable, and had probably come as a surprise even to Charles. It happened that way sometimes, for some men. And whatever his feelings for Patricia, there was no doubt about his intense attachment to young Henry.
The last time Mingus had seen them together, the Imperial Heir had cutely puked on the shoulder of his Imperial Dad. Charles had merely laughed, and Mingus, a veteran of five marriages and many children, considered it the most human moment he’d ever seen Charles experience. For a moment, Mingus almost liked him.
Now Lady Patricia was in anguish over the fate of her father, and Charles the man was clearly at odds with Charles the Emperor. What Charles would gladly do for the woman he loved, Charles V could not do. Man and Emperor were trapped together in a golden web that circumscribed his actions as surely as it bound his heart. Charles was no less a hostage than Kenarbin, and no conceivable negotiation could free him.
AS THE MEETING FINALLY BROKE UP AND PEOPLE drifted off to the buffet, one of the Emperor’s aides approached Mingus; Charles wanted to have a word with him. Mingus found him standing alone on the upper tier, staring down into the perpetually shadowed depths of Shackleton Crater. Ice-mining machinery was moving around on the floor of the crater like aimless glowworms.
“How is Lady Patricia holding up?” Mingus asked him.
Charles glanced up. “She tries to put on a brave face, but I know it’s killing her. She’s not used to this sort of thing. She always led a pretty sheltered life at Court.”
“She’s Bill Kenarbin’s daughter,” Mingus pointed out. “She’ll be as strong as she has to be.”
Charles nodded. “She’s only twenty-one,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I did her a favor by choosing her.”
“I’m certain that she thinks you did, Charles. What’s more, you did yourself a favor.”
The Emperor smiled a little. “Even a blind hog finds the occasional acorn,” he said. The smile faded. “Norman? I need to ask you for something. Something difficult.”
“I’m at your service, Highness.”
“Maybe not this time. I want him back, Norman. I want my son to have
a grandfather, and Trish to have a father. This is tearing me up inside. I’ve never…” He trailed off and shook his head.
“It’s different when you have a family,” Mingus said.
“Isn’t it just? I had no idea, I truly didn’t. I never really knew my own parents. Just as well, probably. My father was an idiot, and my mother…well, you knew her.”
“It isn’t easy, being a Hazar. They meant well, Charles.”
“I don’t want somebody telling Henry the same thing about me someday, Norman. He was a bastard, but he meant well. Spirit! It’s not enough just to mean well. I want to do well. For both of them.”
“What do you want from me, Charles?”
The Emperor looked the Dexta Secretary in the eye and said, “I want you to send Gloria to Denastri and get him back.”
Mingus was genuinely shocked by the Emperor’s words. He wanted to ask if he was serious, but there was no doubt that he was.
“I know what you’re going to say, Norman. You can’t do it officially. I understand that. But, dammit, Gloria gets results!”
“She does,” Mingus agreed.
“I wouldn’t ask this if there were any other way. You know that.”
“I do.” Mingus returned Charles’s steady gaze, and for a few moments, neither of them spoke.
Charles ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair and shook his head. “She’s infuriating and impossible, but somehow she always gets the job done. She wouldn’t do it if I asked her, but maybe you can find some appropriate excuse to send her to Denastri. From what I hear, the Dexta staff there are at one another’s throats. Isn’t that the kind of thing she’s supposed to handle? Strategic interventions, and all that?”
“It is,” Mingus said, giving a small nod. “To tell you the truth, I’ve even considered it myself. She might be able to knock some heads together and at least get everyone on the same page. But as for Kenarbin…I can’t ask her to do that, Charles. Not officially, and not even unofficially.”