by John Dalmas
The man thrust out a hand to him, and he shook it. "My name is Alivii Simnasaveesi. I understand you were with the Klestronu marines in the alien empire."
Veeri's mood shifted cautiously from boredom to tentative interest; he wondered if this man knew anything else about him. "That's true," he said.
"I'm with Headquarters Regiment of the Capital Division. A friend of mine, Major Tagurt Meksorfi, is giving a party at his town place in the outskirts." The captain paused to see what Veeri's reaction might be to the major's gentry name. When nothing showed, he continued. "He gives one almost every Sevenday evening, for a dozen or two officers and occasionally a guest. He'd heard there was a Klestronu colonel here who'd been in the fighting, and asked me to invite you. Interested?"
It didn't even occur to Veeri to decline.
***
For nearly fifteen centuries there'd been no distinction in law between a "Greater" and a "lesser" nobility. The formal categories had been erased when the empire had become the Kalifate, part of an agreement that had gained Kalif Yeezhur the military backing of the lesser nobility. Backing that made him the first emperor Kalif.
But in fact the distinction remained, a distinction based mainly now on wealth and tradition. And while the senior male in every noble family, Greater or lesser, held a vote, members of only certain families were eligible to serve in the Diet.
Most of the old Great Families were still so regarded, even those whose earlier wealth had declined somewhat. Their extensive plantations gave them the potential to recoup, meanwhile living like true aristocrats. Occasionally of course, one of them would be disgraced and lose its status, or simply die out.
The Great Families had been joined from time to time, almost surreptitiously, by one and another family of the lesser nobility who'd become especially rich and influential. The Greater Nobles might then begin treating them like one of their own. An example was the Lamatahasu family, of which Lord Fakoda was presently the head.
The military, however, truly recognized no distinction, either in the imperial services or in those of the individual worlds. A son of the poorest noble family, perhaps with only a confectioner's shop to support it, could become a general if he had the necessary skills. In fact, the sons of lesser families made up a sizeable majority of the officer corps, from top to bottom, in every branch, even the navy. Thus, in the armed forces, if a Greater Noble was prejudiced against the lesser nobility, he'd do well to keep it to himself.
Gentry were a different kind of phenomenon, a legally defined class of different origin intermediate between the nobility and peasantry. Gentry made up the entirety of noncommissioned officers, the so-called "sergeantcy," which included corporals. And for a very long time, occasional gentry had entered the officers corps during war by promotion from sergeant. But only over the last three centuries had they been accepted into the service academies and grown to an appreciable minority of commissioned officers.
As officers, gentry met a certain amount of discrimination both socially and on promotion rosters, the amount depending on ability, personality, and the unit's commanding officer. Among gentry, excellence was usually necessary to attain a captaincy, short of one's final years; it was essential to rising higher.
Though wealth also helped.
At age thirty-one, Tagurt Meksorli was already a major. Kulen Meksorli, Tagurt's paternal grandfather thrice removed, had been hired as a stevedore foreman at a spaceport on Varatos. The young foreman, who was paid a percentage of his job contracts, had paid his peasant laborers on the basis of production. Under the table, of course; the practice was illegal, there being a set pay scale for peasants. Soon he bought the crew contract and developed a virtual fief, his fast, efficient crews having gobbled up much of the local cargo-handling business. The more profitable part of it.
Then, in a wild, high-stakes card game, Kulen had won a small hyperspace merchantman, a tramp freighter. He'd paid professional ship inspectors to go over it for him, then plunged most of what he owned and could borrow into getting it overhauled.
Its ownership stimulated Kulen's already active sense of adventure. He left his brother in charge of the cargo-handling business and went into space as an apprentice to his own captain and chief engineer. Within two years he was a full-time smuggler, and through the exercise of considerable cunning, professional ethics, attention to detail, and at key junctures further daring, he compiled a considerable fortune. Which, before he was an old man, included seven ships, none of them smugglers. Having avoided arrest, prison, and confiscation, he'd gone straight as soon as he could afford to.
By the time his great-great-great-grandson had grown to manhood, the Meksorli Line included one of the system's largest fleets of sweepboats, seven refinery ships, a large fleet of bulk carriers, a dozen hyperspace package freighters, and three luxury liners. The Meksorlis were richer than even most Great Families, but no gentry on Varatos had been elevated to the nobility for nearly three millenia. And none of the Meksorlis, the men anyway, aspired to it; they were proud of what they were and what they'd accomplished.
Tagurt aspired to be the first gentry general-a general instead of an admiral because generalcies were more numerous. He had the agreement and appreciation of both his father and grandfather. In that regard, his great-grandfather, old Kulen's sole surviving grandson, had told the young cadet that he was lucky to be gentry instead of nobility. "It'll make the rank more meaningful," he'd said, "and getting it more interesting. "
On graduation from the academy, the new sublieutenant and would-be general had volunteered for an assault regiment, which marked him as ambitious-ambitious or a glutton for hard work. Once assigned, he volunteered to command a maintenance platoon, maintenance platoons being notorious for everything happening at once, for all-night duty, and the need for ramrod officers who were resourceful and quick. And results were hard to fake; the equipment either functioned or it didn't.
Tagurt stayed there long enough to get a reputation and a full lieutenancy. Then, at his own request, he'd been transferred to a notorious and dreaded post, the prison planet Shatimvoktos. Furthermore, he signed for two imperial years there, when the normal tour of duty was one. Simply to request service on Shatimvoktos was virtually unheard of, so that by itself made him a watched man. If he screwed up, his prospects would be seriously impaired.
And if he excelled, that would be noticed, too, gentry or not. Which was, of course, his reason for doing it.
Shatimvoktos was the most dangerous duty the peacetime military offered. Most of its enlisted personnel, the guards especially, were hardbitten, veteran misfits who'd been assigned there as a form of unofficial punishment. The gravity was 1.38-grueling-the atmosphere toxic, the summers almost lethally hot, the winters brutally cold. And if the guards were hardbitten, the prisoners were mostly worse-dangerous men, many of them more or less psychotic-who expected to the there and had nothing to lose. They worked with hammers, drills, blasting gel, crowbars, and hand shovels, digging iron ore from open pits. Even in an economy like the empire's, such an operation was grossly uneconomical, feasible only with unpaid, throw-away labor. Its purposes were the punishment and disposal of criminals, and to serve as a threat to troublemakers.
Deadly fights were common among the prisoners, and they acted quickly when they saw a chance to kill a guard. When a captain of the guard died in what might or might not have been an accident, Tagurt succeeded him, and in time was given the rank to go with the job. Then, as the most qualified available officer, he extended his tour another half year, to fill in for the provost marshal, who'd gone home for a family emergency.
From Shatimvoktos, he'd been assigned to the Capital Division, an elite heavy infantry division stationed only thirty miles outside Ananporu. The division personnel officer mentioned him to the division CO., who examined Tagurt's personnel file and appointed him deputy division provost marshal, a virtual vacation after the prison planet. When the general was satisfied that the young man could handle an easy
post with a discriminating hand as well as he had a terrible post requiring an iron fist, he recommended an early promotion to major for his gentry protege-promotion without the standard minimum of three years in rank. The Kalif approved it, and the new major became the general's aide.
No member of the gentry had ever made major so quickly in the imperial service. Most nobles didn't.
Despite his naked ambition, rapid rise, and lack of noble forebears, Major Tagurt Meksorli was not widely resented among the ambitious young officers of the division, mostly nobles. Partly it was his matter-of-fact personality, blunt but friendly. And partly it was his parties.
***
Tagurt Meksorli's town place was in the rugged Anan Hills, which overlooked Ananporu from the west. Veeri Thoglakaveera had never been there before. Hovercar roads twisted over and through them like goat trails, past homes expensive but mostly not large, cantilevered from plunging slopes on shelves. The headlights of Veeri's taxi flashed across the trunks of great trees, frequently vine-clad, that shouldered and overhung the roads. Their beams swept thick growths of lustrous ground vines protecting the slopes. Flowering shrubs scented the night, overriding the constant undersmell of moist and loamy mould. Insects and other small creatures peeped, buzzed, ratcheted; sprinklers hissed quietly in the darkness. An occasional bird chirped aimlessly as if half awake, or tried a vague and tentative half bar of song.
Veeri noticed it all only absently. Mostly he was thinking about what this party might mean to him; something, he was sure. And wondering whether anyone there would know of his purported impotence.
For a minute the road ran along the top of a ridge, the houses on both sides with their backs to it facing outward. Houses and trees allowed Veeri only glimpses of the overviews-on one side eastward over the city, on the other westward across a span of night-hidden plantations that spread to the horizon, broken at intervals by the concentrated lights of villages and towns. Behind one home, half a dozen cars were parked tightly to conserve space. A post bore the address, the symbols a vertical column beneath its small light.
"That's it, sir," the cabbie announced as he pulled up and stopped.
"You'll wait," Veeri said.
"Of course, sir," the man replied, then added almost apologetically, "per the rate schedule you've noticed on the back of my seat, sir."
He'd turned as he'd said it, and Veeri noticed now the small mark on his forehead. Even on Varatos, Veeri knew, more than a few of the lesser nobility were down on their luck. But seeing one of them like this irritated him. It seemed indecent of the man to display his ill fortune in public.
The house was one story high in back, but getting from the cab, he could see that that one story was the topmost of at least two on the downhill side. The party wasn't loud; he couldn't hear it at all as he walked to the door. A man wearing corporal's insignia stood guard there, eyeing his Klestronu Marines uniform with its gold colonel's hammers on the collar, the insignia used by imperial as well as the separate planetary forces.
"Good evening, sir," the corporal said. "Let me announce you, if you please, sir."
"Colonel Veeri Thoglakaveera."
"Thank you, sir."
The corporal spoke it into a small grill on the doorpost. Within four or five seconds the door opened, and now Veeri could hear quiet music and the murmur of voices from somewhere inside. A sublieutenant stood there, looking impossibly young. "Colonel! Do come in! It's a pleasure to greet you. Major Meksorli and the others have been looking forward to your arrival."
He ushered him down a hallway. At the other end they entered a room as wide as the house, which was fairly wide. It was nothing special, nor were its furnishings; it was the view that made it expensive. The east-facing wall was glass, opening onto a narrow strip of balcony. Beyond its polished bronze railing, Ananporu and its suburbs spread below them like a field of scintillant, multi-colored jewels. The cab had climbed higher than he'd thought, Veeri realized-they had to be more than a 1,000 feet above the city. He pulled his eyes away, to the major and captain who'd gotten to their feet. The captain he knew-Alivii Simnasaveesi, who'd delivered the invitation. The other, a rather small major who projected an unusual sense of power, had an unmarked forehead, and Veeri realized that this man was his host.
The captain introduced them, and Meksorli shook Veeri's hand. "Colonel Thoglakaveera! It's a pleasure to have you here. Would you care for a drink? We can cover most tastes."
Veeri chose whiskey on ice. He preferred to stay in control of his mind and tongue, and with whiskey on ice he could better monitor and limit his intake. While the serving man got his drink, Veeri glanced around at the other guests. They were all looking at him, but with no sign of sympathy or amusement. Only interest.
One, the oldest, wore colonel's gold hammers, like his own. Two others were majors, both older than Meksorli. The rest were captains and full lieutenants, except for the sublieutenant who'd served as door greeter. There were no women. Apparently no more guests were expected; at any rate Veeri'd been guided to the last of the chairs arranged in an oval.
It occurred to him that he was not only a guest; he was the program. His chair was at one end of the oval, and everyone was facing him.
"So, Colonel," said Meksorli, "what was it like on the alien world?"
Veeri was a willing liar, but not a compulsive one. This time he told the truth pretty much as he knew it. "Basically," he said, "it isn't so different from Varatos or Klestron. The gravity's stronger, but not oppressively strong for a man in decent condition. And planetwide it's cooler, rather like Kathvoktos or Chithvoktos, but we were practically on the equator, so the climate was quite comfortable.
"Probably the biggest difference was the population; there wasn't much. The biggest town had only about fifteen thousand, something like that."
The reactions were mixed; some looked surprised, some puzzled, some eager. "How do they get by with so few?" someone asked. "How do they maintain their technology? Their civilization?"
Veeri began to warm up at that: he enjoyed being looked to as the expert. "It seems that the world we found-it's called Terfreya-is a very minor planet. Not even a minor associate in the Confederation; it's what they call a 'trade world.' They raise a single export crop there, a spice, and beyond that some livestock and food crops for local use. Most of the planet's a wilderness, complete with large beasts of prey."
"Damn!" said another. "We could make a lot better use of it than that."
There was voiced agreement. Then the Vartosu colonel spoke. "I heard you had some hard fighting. What was that like?"
"It's-not easy to describe, but hard is an understatement. Of course, we were only a light brigade. And there's a lot we never did learn about the forces we fought. Even the local officials knew very little about them. Some, the initial force, were cadets who'd been training on Terfreya. They were fearless and full of tricks, but their weaponry was inferior. We'd killed a lot of them, and markedly reduced their attacks, when another force, not cadets, arrived from somewhere. This was after a couple of months. These were also extremely good troops, but they were a very light force-no weapons a man couldn't carry, except gunships. They did have gunships, though not as fast or as powerful as ours.
"We'd made captives of some local officials-had them on the flagship under instrumented interrogation for months-and they knew nothing at all about this new force. We pretty much decided they must have landed from outside the system-the new troops, that is. Maybe for training, like the cadets. Though how they did it without being noticed is a bit of a puzzler. The assumption is that they entered real space far enough out in the system that their emergence waves were too weak to pick up. That sort of thing can happen, with careless astrogation. Meanwhile the navy'd impounded Terfreya's homing beacon to study its technology, and its absence could have warned the Confederation ship that something might be wrong. Then they could have used a blindside approach, and with enough luck, landed undetected.
"Unfortunately, the
captive officials were provincial-the whole world was-and not as well informed as we'd expected. None of them was what you'd call knowledgeable about military or technical matters.
"We did learn somewhat about their ships from them, of course, and more from examining some message pods we captured on the ground. Their hyper-space generators are a lot like ours-operate on the same principle. I suppose it's the only way. And a ship that we know arrived in-system while we were there produced typical emergence waves. Our flagship detected it at once, and when it arrived within range, we blew it up with no trouble at all."
Veeri shrugged. "As for general information: They have a lot more worlds-twenty-seven main worlds and about twice as many inhabited tributary worlds. All told about seven times as many as we have." He was aware of the impression-even shock-that this caused among the imperial officers. "But apparently," he went on, "their population doesn't outnumber ours nearly that much. And while they have some very good troops, the Confederation isn't warlike. Their individual worlds have no warships at all.
"The major points are, their fleet is little or no bigger than ours-that's pretty definite-and they don't seem even to know about force shields. Which means they wouldn't stand a chance against an imperial fleet in a fight. And if we destroyed their fleet, it wouldn't make much difference how good their ground forces are. We could concentrate overwhelming attacks wherever we liked, and mop them up piecemeal."
Veeri fielded a number of questions over the next half hour, but mainly his answers just elaborated what he'd already said. When it became apparent that they'd pretty much exhausted his data fund, the conversation drifted to other matters. Then a captain asked why their war prisoners hadn't answered some of the unknowns and uncertainties. "I can understand civilian officials not knowing some of these things," he said. "Especially on a minor, backward world. But a military officer should have."
Veeri nodded. "And no doubt would have. But as I said, they refused to surrender; fought to the death. And early on, our men discovered that what looked like a wounded and unconscious enemy was likely to be one feigning unconsciousness. With an armed grenade ready to release when someone got close. So-Well, you know peasants. Our troops routinely shot up any enemy casualties not obviously already dead. Sometimes even those that were."