The men were cheering. It was more like the yelp of a wolf pack. The snarl died from my own face and I felt a little sick with the ruin. Our enemies, yes. But there were many dead. Kathryn wept, slow silent tears running down her face, shoulders shaking.
Manuel reached over and took her hand. “It’s done, Kathryn,” he said quietly. “We can go home now.”
He added after a moment, as if to himself: “Hate is a useful means to an end but damned dangerous. We’ll have to get the racist complex out of mankind. We can’t conquer anyone, even the Gorzuni, and keep them as inferiors and hope to have a stable empire. All races must be equal.” He rubbed his strong square chin. “I think I’ll borrow a leaf from the old Romans. All worthy individuals, of any race, can become terrestrial citizens. It’ll be a stabilizing factor.”
“You,” I said, with a harshness in my throat, “are a megalomaniac.” But I wasn’t sure any longer.
It was winter in Earth’s northern hemisphere when the Revenge came home. I walked out into snow that crunched under my feet and watched my breath smoking white against the clear pale blue of the sky. A few others had come out with me. They fell on their knees in the snow and kissed it. They were a wild-looking gang, clad in whatever tatters of garment they could find, the men bearded and long-haired, but they were the finest, deadliest fighting crew in the Galaxy now. They stood there looking at the gentle sweep of hills, at blue sky and ice-flashing trees and a single crow hovering far overhead, and tears froze in their beards.
Home.
We had signalled other units of the Navy. Some would come along to pick us up soon and guide us to the secret base on. Mercury, and there the fight would go on. But now, just now in this eternal instant we were home.
I felt weariness like an ache in my bones. I wanted to crawl bear-like into some cave by a murmuring river, under the dear tall trees of Earth, and sleep till spring woke up the world again. But as I stood there with the thin winter wind like a cleansing bath around me, the tiredness dropped off. My body responded to the world which two billion years of evolution had shaped it for and I laughed aloud with the joy of it.
We couldn’t fail. We were the freemen of Terra fighting for our own hearthfires and the deep ancient strength of the planet was in us. Victory and the stars lay in our hands, even now, even now.
I turned and saw Kathryn coming down the airlock gangway. My heart stumbled and then began to race. It had been so long, so terribly long. We’d had so little time but now we were home, and she was singing.
Her face was grave as she approached me. There was something remote about her and a strange blending of pain with the joy that must be in her too. The frost crackled in her dark unbound hair, and when she took my hands her own were cold.
“Kathryn, we’re home,” I whispered. “We’re home, and free, and alive. O Kathryn, I love you!”
She said nothing, but stood looking at me forever and forever until Manuel Argos came to join us. The little stocky man seemed embarrassed—the first and only time I ever saw him quail, even faintly.
“John,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you something.”
“It’ll keep,” I answered. “You’re the captain of the ship. You have authority to perform marriages. I want you to marry Kathryn and me, here, now, on Earth.”
She looked at me unwaveringly, but her eyes were blind with tears. “That’s it, John,” she said, so low I could barely hear her. “It won’t be. I’m going to marry Manuel.”
I stood there, not saying anything, not even feeling it yet.
“It happened on the voyage,” she said, tonelessly. “I tried to fight myself, I couldn’t. I love him, John. I love him even more than I love you, and I didn’t think that was possible.”
“She will be the mother of kings,” said Manuel, but his arrogant words were almost defensive. “I couldn’t have made a better choice.”
“Do you love her too,” I asked slowly, “or do you consider her good breeding stock?” Then: “Never mind. Your answer would only be the most expedient. We’ll never know the truth.”
It was instinct, I thought with a great resurgence of weariness. A strong and vital woman would pick the most suitable mate. She couldn’t help herself. It was the race within her and there was nothing I could do about it.
“Bless you, my children,” I said.
They walked away after awhile, hand in hand under the high trees that glittered with ice and sun. I stood watching them until they were out of sight. Even then, with a long and desperate struggle yet to come, I think I knew that those were the parents of the Empire and the glorious Argolid dynasty, that they carried the future within them.
And I didn’t give a damn.
Thus Manuel Argos, a hero as unconventional as van Rijn, traded the iron cellar of slavery for the vitryl ring of mastery. He found the imperial signet a perfect fit for his heavy hand.
The. Terran Empire he proclaimed was eagerly welcomed as a force for interstellar peace. Both ravaged worlds and those that had escaped harm chose to join the new imperium. Terra’s protection brought security without loss of local autonomy. At its zenith, the Empire ruled 100,000 inhabited systems within a sphere four hundred light-years in diameter.
But size and complexity could not avert the doom that ultimately faces any human enterprise. The original worthy goal of security became a crippling obsession, especially after Terra collided with, furiously ambitious Merseia. Worries about foes without masked decadence within. Knaves and fools sought to preserve their threatened authority by unjust means. To many thirty-first century citizens, the vaunted Pax Terrena had become a Pax Tyrannica.
Yet despite the impossible odds against them, the stub bornly independent settlers of Freehold vowed that Terra would not make of their world a desert, and call it peace.
Outpost of Empire
“No dragons are flying—”
Karlsarm looked up. The fog around him was as yet thin enough that he could glimpse the messenger. Its wings sickled across nightblue and those few stars—like diamond Spica and amber Betelgeuse—which were too bright and near to be veiled. So deep was the. stillness that he heard the messenger’s feathers rustle.
“Good,” he murmured. “As I hoped.” Louder: “Inform Mistress Jenith that she can get safely across open ground now. She is to advance her company to Gallows Wood on the double. There let someone keep watch from a treetop, but do not release the fire bees without my signal. Whatever happens.”
The sweet, unhuman voice of the messenger trilled back his order.
“Correct,” Karlsarm said. The messenger wheeled and flew northward.
“What was that?” Wolf asked.
“Enemy hasn’t got anyone aloft, far as Rowlan’s scouts can tell,” Karlsarm replied. “I instructed—”
“Yes, yes,” growled his lieutenant. “I do know Anglic, if not bird language. But are you sure you want to keep Jenith’s little friends in reserve? We might have no casualties at all if they went in our van.”
“But we’d have given away another secret. And we may very badly want a surprise to spring, one of these times. You go tell Mistress Randa the main body needs maximum cover. I’m after a last personal look. When I get back, we’ll charge.”
Wolf nodded. He was a rangy man, harsh-faced, his yellow hair braided. His fringed leather suit did not mark him off for what he was, nor did his weapons; dirk and tomahawk were an ordinary choice. But the two great hellhounds that padded black at his heels could only have followed the Grand Packmaster of the Wind-hook.
He vanished into fog and shadow. Karlsarm loped forward. He saw none of his hundreds, but he sensed them in more primitive ways. The mist patch that hid them grew tenuous with distance, until it lay behind the captain. He stopped, shadow-roofed by a lone sail tree, and peered before and around him.
They had had the coastal marshes to conceal them over anst of their route. The climb by night, however, straight up Onyx Heights, had required full moonlight if men were not to fall
and shatter themselves. This meant virtually no moon on the second night, when they entered the cultivated part of the plateau. But with a sidereal period of two and a third days, Selene rose nearly full again, not long after the third sundown, and waxed as it crossed the sky. At present it was hardly past maximum, a dented disk flooding the land with iciness. Karlsarm felt naked to the eyes of his enemies.
None seemed aware of him, though. Fields undulated away to a flat eastern horizon, kilometer after kilometer. They were planted in rye, silvery and silent under the moon, sweet-smelling where feet had crushed it. Far off bulked a building, but it was dark; probably nothing slept within except machines. The fact that agriculture took place entirely on robotized latifundia made the countryside thinly populated. Hence the possibility existed for Karlsarm of leading his people unobserved across it after sunset—to a five-kilometer distance from Domkirk.
Even this near, the city looked small. It was the least of the Nine, housing only about fifty thousand, and it was the second oldest, buildings huddled close together and much construction underground in the manner of pioneer settlements. Aside from streets, its mass was largely unilluminated. They were sober folk here who went early to bed. In places windows gleamed yellow. A single modern skyscraper sheened metallic beneath—Selene, and it too had wakeful rooms. Several upper facets of the cathedral were visible above surrounding roofs. The moon was so brilliant that Karlsarm would have sworn he could see color in their reflection of it.
A faint murmur of machinery breathed across the fields. Alien it was, but Karlsarm almost welcomed the sound. The farmlands had oppressed him with their emptiness—their essential lifelessness, no matter how rich the crops and sleek the pastured animals—when he remembered his forests. He shivered in the chill. As if to seek comfort, he looked back westward. The fogbank that camouflaged the center of his army shimmered startingly white. Surely it had been seen; but the phenomenon occurred naturally, this near the Lawrencian Ocean. Beyond the horizon, barely visible, as if embodied, floated the three highest snowpeaks of the Windhook. Home was a long march off: an eternal march for those who would die.
“Stop that, you,” Karlsarm whispered to himself. He unshipped his crossbow, drew a quarrel from his quiver, loaded and cocked the piece. Hard pull on the crank, snick of the pawl were somehow steadying. He was not a man tonight but a weapon.
He trotted back to his people. The fog was thickening, swirling in cold wet drifts, as Mistress Randa sent ever more of her pets from their cages. He heard her croon a spell—
“Shining mist, flow and twist, fill this cup of amethyst.
Buzzing dozens, brotherlings, sing your lullaby of wings.
Ah! the moonlight flew and missed!”
He wondered if it was really needed. Why must women with Skills be that secretive about their work? He heard likewise the tiny hum of the insects, and glimpsed a few when Selene sparked iridescence off them. They kept dropping down to the ryestalks after they had exuded all the droplets they could, filling up with dew and rising again. Soon the cloud was so dense that men were almost blind. They kept track of each other by signals—imitated bird calls, chirrs, cheeps, mews—and by odor, most of them having put on their distinctive war perfumes.
Karlsarm found Wolf near the red gleam of one hell-hound’s eyes. “All set?” he asked.
—Aye. If we can keep formation in this soup.”
“We’ll keep it close enough. Got a lot of practice in the tidelands, didn’t we? Very well, here we go.” Karlsarm uttered a low, shuddering whistle.
The sound ran from man to man, squad to squad, and those who knew flutecat language heard it as: “We have stalked the prey down, let us leap.”
The fog rolled swiftly toward Domkirk; and none in the city observed that there was no wind to drive it.
* * *
John Ridenour had arrived that, day. But he had made planetfall a week earlier and before then had crammed himself with every piece of information about Freehold that was available to him—by any means necessary, from simple reading and conversation to the most arduous machine-forced mnemonics. His whole previous career taught him how little knowledge that was. It had amused as well as annoyed him that he ended his journey explaining things to a crewman of the ship that brought him thither.
The Ottokar was a merchantman, Germanian owned, as tautly run as most vessels from that world. Being short of bottom on the frontiers, the Imperial Terrestrial Navy must needs charter private craft when trouble broke loose. They carried only materiel; troops still went in regular transports, properly armed and escorted.
But Ridenour was a civilian: also on time charter, he thought wryly. His job was not considered urgent. They gave him a Crown ticket on Terra and said he could arrange his own passage. It turned out to involve several transfers from one ship to another, two of them with nonhuman crews. Traffic was sparse, here where the Empire faded away into a wilderness of suns unclaimed and largely unexplored. The Germanians were of his own species, of course. But since they were a bit standoffish by culture, and he by nature, he had rattled about rather alone on what was to be the final leg of his trip.
Now, when he would actually have preferred silence and solitude, the off-duty steward’s mate joined him in the saloon and insisted on talking. That was the , annoyance—with Freehold in the viewscope.
“I have never seen anything more… prachtig more magnificent,” the steward’s mate declared.
Then why not shut your mouth and watch it? grumbled Ridenour to himself.
“But this is my first long voyage,” the other went on shyly.
He was little more than a boy, little older than Ridenour’s first son. No doubt the rest of the men kept him severely in his place. Certainly he had hitherto been mute as far as the passenger was concerned. Ridenour found he could not be ungracious to him. “Are you enjoying it… ah, I don’t know your name?”
“Dietrich, sir. Dietrich Steinhauer. Yes, the time has been interesting. But I wish they would tell me more about the port planets we make on our circuit. They do not like me to question them,”
“Well, don’t take that to heart,” Ridenour advised. He leaned back in his chair and got out his pipe—a tall, wiry, blond, hatchet-faced man, his gray tunic-andtrousers outfit more serviceable than fashionable. “With so much loneliness between the stars, so much awe, men have to erect defenses. Terrans are apt to get boisterous on a long voyage. But from what I’ye heard of Germanians, I could damn near predict they’d withdraw into routine and themselves. Once your shipmates grow used to you, decide you’re a good reliable fellow, they’ll thaw.”
“Really? Are you an ethnologist, sir?”
“No, xenologist.”
“But there are no nonhuman on Freehold, except the Arulians. Are there?”
“N-no. Presumably not. Biologically speaking, at any rate. But it is a strange planet, and such have been known to do strange things to their colonists.”
Dietrich gulped and was quiet for a few blessed minutes.
The globe swelled, ever greater in its changing phases as the Ottokar swung down from parking orbit. Against starry blackness it shone blue, banded with blinding white cloudbanks, the continents hardly visible through the deep air. The violet border that may be seen from space on the rim of any terrestroid world was broader and more richly hued than Terra’s. Across the whole orb flickered aurora, invisible on dayside but a pale sheet of fire on nightside. It would not show from the ground, being too diffuse; Freehold lacked the magnetic field to concentrate solar particles at the poles. Yet here it played lambent before the eye, through the thin upper layers of atmosphere. For the sun of Freehold was twice as luminous as Sol, a late type F. At a distance of 1.25 a.u., its disk was slightly smaller than that which Terra sees, But the illumihation was almost a third again as great, more white than yellow; and through a glare filter one could watch flares and prominences leap millions of kilometers into space and shower fierily back.
The single moon hove int
o view. It was undistinguished, even in its name (how many satellites of human-settled worlds are known as Selene?), having just a quarter the mass of Luna. But it was sufficiently close in to show a fourth greater angular diameter. Because of this, and the sunlight, and a higher albedo—fewer rnottlings—it gave better than twice the light. Ridenour spied it full on and was almost dazzled.
“Freehold is larger than Germania, I believe.” Dietrith’s attempt at pompousness struck Ridenour as pathetic.
“Or Terra,” the xenologist said. “Equatorial diameter in excess of 16,000 kilometers. But the mean, density is quite low, making surface gravity a bare ninety per cent of standard.”
—“Then why does it have such thick air, sir? Especially with an energetic sun and a nearby moon of good size.”
Hrn, Ridenour thought, you’re a pretty bright boy after all. Brightness should be encouraged; there’s precious little of it around. “Gravitational potential,” he said. “Because of the great diameter, field strength decreases quite slowly. Also, even if the ferrous core is small, making for weaker tectonism and less outgassing of atmosphere than normal—still, the sheer pressure of mass on mass, in an object this size, was bound to produce respectable quantities of air and heights of mountains. These different factors work out to the result that the sea-level atmosphere is denser. than Terran, but safely breathable at all altitudes of terrain.” He stopped to catch his breath.
“If it has few heavy elements, the planet must be ex tremely old,” Dietrich ventured.
“No, the early investigators found otherwise,” Ridenour said. “The system’s actually younger than Sol’s. It evidently formed in some metal-poor region of the galaxy and wandered into this spiral arm afterward.”
“But at least Freehold is old by historical standards. I have heard it was settled more than five centuries ago. And yet the population is small. I wonder why?”
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