“But you are passengers! Not even of Saturn—” Then he turned his head and spied the laser bearing on his right eye. He got out of the seat.
Hope jumped into it. The ship’s controls were unfamiliar in detail, but he understood the principle well enough. In a moment he had the drive started.
Meanwhile, Spirit was marching the pilot out of the chamber. Hope knew where she was headed. He spoke into the intercom. “Captain, I am assuming temporary command of this vessel,” he said in Russian. “Acknowledge, and relay the directive to your crew.”
“This is impossible!” the captain sputtered. Spirit heard him on the intercom. She did not know Russian, but the tone gave her the general nature of the man’s exclamations. Hope was also speaking Russian, but she knew what he would be saying in a case like this. He was distracting the captain, to give her time to complete her part. Meanwhile she was silently marching the pilot to the captain’s office.
It was all coming back: her pirate and Navy experience. She felt a fierce rush of the passion of battle, mixed with the dreadful tension of danger. She loved the one and hated the other, but both came together. She felt more fully alive than she had in some years.
“Captain, we don’t have time for debate,” Hope said, and she heard him also on the intercom. “I am taking evasive action, but very soon the pirate will reorient and tag us with another shell.”
“This is piracy!”
“Captain, do you know who I am?”
“No, they did not inform—”
“I am the Tyrant of Jupiter, deposed.”
The captain made a gasp of surprise, but it was not entirely because of what Hope had said. Spirit had just entered his office and covered him with the pistol.
“Chamber secured, sir” she said on the intercom. “Orders?”
The captain, realizing that he had no choice, yielded. He agreed to serve the new captain. He gave the information Hope demanded.
It turned out that the ship had been converted for passenger use. It was extremely fast, but had no real weapons. Meanwhile, the attacking ship was showing pirate colors on the communication screen. This was real trouble.
“Spirit,” Hope said.
“Have to try chicken,” she said in Spanish. If any of the Saturn personnel knew that language, they might still miss the implication. That was the intent. If they caught on, there would be a counterrevolution aboard ship. Chicken was when two foolish kids got into transport bubbles and headed straight for each other. Collision course—and the first to swerve was “chicken.” The game had been played in one form or another for centuries, and had accounted for its share of injuries and deaths.
Hope oriented the ship, then jammed up the drive. Suddenly they were accelerating, in the relative framework of the two moving ships, toward the pirate.
It took a moment for the pirate to realize what was happening, for this was completely unexpected. It was like a wounded rabbit charging the pursuing hound.
That was the first surprise. Then Hope sprang the second one: he fired the ship’s lifeboat at the pirate. It rammed the ship and holed it. The pirates were dead.
Hope and Spirit led a boarding party. They discovered that the pirate crew was of the Middle Kingdom, nominally an ally of the Union of Saturnine Republics. But this seemed to be a frame, intended to implicate an innocent party.
“So we are left with only the mysteries of who is the real assassin, and how the ship spotted us.”
“I don’t like such mysteries,” Spirit said.
“Neither do I. Yet it is like old times.”
She smiled. “Like old times.”
He put his arm around her, and she melted into him. Those old times had been horrible, but not without their redemptions. They had suffered grievously at the brutal hands of pirates, but had been closer to each other than ever since.
Chairman Khukov was a busy man, but he made time for them. Within an hour of their arrival they found themselves in his private suite. He had aged visibly, with what hair remaining to him turning off-gray, and he had put on weight. They conversed in English, for Spirit did not speak Russian and Khukov’s knowledge of Spanish was never advertised. Hope and Khukov trusted each other because each understood the other in a way no other person could. Differences of language or culture or politics became insignificant in the face of this fundamental understanding.
“You know the origin and motivation of the attack?” Hope asked.
“The nomenklatura.”
They looked blank.
Khukov smiled. “Brace yourselves for a small lecture on Saturnine internal politics. You know that we are theoretically a classless society, unlike you of the decadent capitalistic planets. But we have classes, and of these the most privileged is the nomenklatura, the bureaucratic stratum of the Party. Those in all the key positions of the Party, the military, and the secret police belong to this hereditary class. I belong. They pass themselves off as mere civil servants, but they are the true rulers. Our society is stultified, because the nomenklatura wants no change; it wants only perpetuation of its own power. This is your enemy—and mine. I sought to reform our system, to eradicate corruption, to make of Saturn a truly superior power.” He shook his head. “The task was more difficult than I had suspected.”
“Infinitely,” Hope agreed ruefully. It seemed that the nomenklatura wanted to stop the reform, and knew that Hope might be an instrument of reform. Khukov, it turned out, had a dream: The unification of the species in harmony.
“An excellent dream,” Hope agreed wryly. “But difficult to implement.”
He waggled a finger at them. “A dream without substance is worthless. I have a mechanism, if it can be implemented. Do you remember how the society of ancient Earth was ready to explode, to destroy itself by internecine warfare, until the onset of the gee-shield?”
“That gave man the Solar System,” Hope agreed. “The pent-up energies were released positively by the expansion into the new frontier, rather than turning destructively upon themselves.”
“And now that frontier has been conquered, and the energies are turning destructive again, exactly as before. But with a new frontier—”
“To divert man’s destructive energies,” Hope said, beginning to visualize the dream.
“And provide man a common challenge,” Spirit added. “But what could that frontier be?”
Khukov made an expansive gesture. “What else? The galaxy.”
“But the gee-shield can hardly do that,” Hope said. “Gravity is not much of a problem in interstellar space, so shielding it doesn’t make much difference. For that kind of travel, we need sustained thrust that could take us up toward light speed, and even CT drive isn’t enough. Even so, it would take a decade or so just to reach the nearest star-where there might not be anything worthwhile for colonization anyway. It’s not enough just to get there; there have to be resources to exploit. Just the problem of growing new bubbles to house increasing population—that requires planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The answer always comes out the same: There is no solution in interstellar space.”
“Ah, but there is,” he insisted. “If we can find those suitable stars for energy, and suitable planets for material resources, and get to them. Five, six new systems to start, more when required. We know they exist; our problem is locating them. Reaching them.”
“Confirming them,” Spirit said. “To make the enormous investment and risk of decades-long travel to them worthwhile.”
“But a light-speed drive would make this feasible,” he said. “Go, explore, return, report—within our lifetimes, late as our lives are getting. Discovering the galaxy.”
“A light-speed drive is a fantasy,” Hope said. “A relativistic impossibility. Only radiation does it.”
“Just suppose, Tyrant, that there were a breakthrough of this nature. A mechanism to convert a physical object to the equivalent of light, without destroying it. And to restore it to solidity on demand. What then?”
“If
a spaceship could be changed to light, travel as a beam, then be solidified at the far reflector—”
“With living things. Human beings, complete city-bubbles, perhaps. Largely self-contained units. But if the city becomes light, time within it becomes infinite, and for the passengers, nonexistent. They could travel four years, and to them it would be not even a moment, no time at all. It would feel like instant matter-transmission. No supplies used, no energy expended, merely a new star beyond.”
“Suspended animation,” Hope said. “That might make it feasible, indeed.” He sighed. “But since there is no such device ...”
Khukov smiled. “Ah, but there may be. Tests are commencing, and we shall shortly know whether this is a drug dream or reality. If reality—”
“Then it would be worthwhile to seek the political breakthrough,” Hope finished. “To get our entire species organized for the great new frontier. For it would have to be done on a System-wide basis, as it was done on an Earth-wide basis before. The new diaspora of mankind.”
“The new diaspora,” he echoed. “That is the dream.”
“When Earth colonized the Solar System,” Hope said, “the need was desperate and the leadership inspired. No nation gave up its share of the pie. Thus the political and economic and military situation of Earth was reestablished in the System—with all its problems. We have been flirting with the same disaster as before, on a larger scale.”
“But the same solution offers. Except that the galaxy is vast beyond the aspiration of man to fill. It would take a hundred thousand years merely to cross it, and much longer to colonize it. I think we would not soon again see a crisis of confinement.”
“The colonization of the galaxy,” Hope repeated, feeling Khukov’s Dream take hold. “You really believe the challenges can be met?”
“I am prepared to supervise the scientific challenge,” he said. “I believe it can be met, if there is cooperation by the other planets. First we must develop a large-scale demonstration project, to prove that it works, and to establish its feasibility in a fashion that all men will believe. That will cost some hundreds of billions of rubles, and I think Saturn could not do it alone. That places it in the camp of the political challenge. If we can unify the planets—”
“Who could do that?” Hope asked, realizing his thrust.
“Who but the Tyrant of Space?”
Hope looked at Spirit. She nodded; she was ready for this.
Hope extended his hand to Khukov. Thus began the former Space Tyrant’s political and economic service at Saturn. He was given a personal secretary, who of course reported everything to her superiors. Her name was Tasha. She was young and attractive and intelligent and even-tempered. She was amenable to Hope’s sexual interest. In short, the ideal secretary.
She was also, as it turned out, a mole: programmed to kill Hope when he had sex with her. She did not know this; it was a buried program. So when Spirit was away, and Hope took Tasha to bed, she caught him in a strangle hold. Only the fact that she wanted him to complete the sexual act before he died gave him time, and only his knowledge of nerve attacks enabled him to escape her. At which point she reverted to her normal state, with no memory of the experience.
Spirit learned about it when she returned. “I accepted her seduction, and she tried to kill me,” Hope said simply. “She’s a mole—an assassin mole.”
This was alarming news. Spirit had never anticipated such a ploy. “And you don’t want to eliminate her?” she inquired with raised eyebrow.
Hope explained that Tasha was now a known threat, safer than the unknown threat that might replace her. “But it’s dangerous,” he concluded. “She still tempts me.”
“You always were a fool about women,” Spirit said. “Fortunately, they always were bigger fools about you.”
“Not this one. If I touch her again I may not survive.”
Spirit nodded. “We shall have to get you a woman we can trust. I will ask Megan.”
“Megan!”
“She knows your tastes, I suspect.”
And so Tasha remained temporarily, while Spirit sent Hope’s message to Megan: “Send me a woman.”
Meanwhile, they got to work on the corrupt, inefficient Saturn farming system. They decided to introduce some free enterprise, veiled as “progressive socialism.” In the guise of eliminating corruption, they deported the agents of the nomenklatura. There were soon positive results.
Hope continued to hanker after Tasha, and Spirit knew that they would have to find a safe way for him to have her, before he risked an unsafe way. So Spirit pretended to depart on another business trip, but actually remained close, so she could watch and if necessary intervene. She did not like being a voyeur, but this was necessary.
Hope explained to Tasha that he desired her, but that his taste ran to bondage. She readily agreed, as her normal self had only the desire to please him. They stripped, and he tied her hands and feet to the bedposts. He caressed her, then mounted her sexually. Then it got interesting.
Abruptly Tasha’s personality changed. Spirit had expected this, but it was far more dramatic than she had anticipated. Tasha tried to reach for his neck, but could not, and tried to bring up her knees, but could not. “What’s this?” she spat.
“This is known as consenting sex,” Hope replied, thrusting deeply. Spirit thought of Thorley, and suffered.
“I’m tied!” Tasha exclaimed indignantly. Evidently she had no memory of the activities of her normal self.
“Why, so you are,” Hope agreed, nuzzling her right breast.
Her torso bucked. The breast slammed into his face, but of course a weapon like that could do no harm. “I’m glad to have you responding so well,” he said, licking her nipple.
She made a sound like an attacking pig, an ugly squeal, and wrenched her nether section violently about. This had the effect of hastening his climax. “Thank you!” he gasped amidst it. Spirit suffered further.
Tasha snapped at his face, but he held his head away and completed his enjoyment of her body.
“I’ll kill you!” she hissed.
“With kindness, perhaps,” he said, pausing to savor her breast one last time. Then he dismounted. “Thank you for a unique experience.”
She spat at him, literally, but even that missed.
Hope cleaned up and dressed, evidently uncertain when it was safe to untie her. Spirit was nervous about that too. They needed to know exactly when the threat abated.
When Tasha saw Hope clothed, her manner changed. “Aren’t you going to do it?” she asked.
“I think I am older than I believed,” he said regretfully. “You are beautiful, but perhaps another day?”
She shrugged as well as she could in her bonds. “I am disappointed, of course. But I understand.”
So they had found a way. But Spirit hoped that Megan would send a safe woman soon.
The enemy was getting impatient. There were other attempts on Hope’s life. These were not Tasha’s doing; in fact when he was poisoned, she rushed him to the hospital, perhaps saving his life. Still, harm had been done, and that was later to have a dire consequence.
Then Hope acquired an extinct saber toothed tiger. The animal had gotten loose in a biologic facility he was visiting; it might have been another attempt on his life. But he used his special power to tame it, amazing all who saw it happen. Thus Smilo came to join his personal retinue, enhancing his immediate safety and his reputation. Hope had uncanny luck in such matters.
It took six months for the woman Megan chose to arrive. Her name was Fortuna Foundling, more simply called Forta. Khukov was later to dub her “the muddy diamond” with no disrespect intended; he appreciated her value immediately. A good deal faster than Hope did, actually.
Forta was tall and trim and of mixed blood; there were touches of Mongol and Saxon and Negroid derivation in her. Her dark hair was bound back into a bun, and her face was shadowed by a feminine hat that might have been six or seven centuries out of date. She w
ore a suit that was almost military in its stern cut. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She was definitely no showgirl.
That was not the worst of it. Forta’s face was so badly scarred as to make it hideous. It looked as if she had put her head in the blast of an accelerating spaceship. Patterns of scars matted her forehead and cheeks, and the eyebrows were lost in the ruin. Her ears hardly showed; perhaps they had been cut off. Her mouth seemed to be little more than a slit amidst the tortured tissue.
“Childhood accident,” she said matter-of-factly, evidently used to the very kind of stunned reaction Hope was evincing.
Something was wrong. Spirit knew Megan would not play either a cruel joke or take any kind of obscure vengeance on her husband; neither type of behavior was her way. Virtually all of his women had been beautiful, herself included; she knew his taste in that regard. How could she have done this? There had to be a rationale.
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