by B. V. Larson
“Chief Inspector,” Turov interrupted in her sweetest tone, “if McGill has decided to mend his ways, wouldn’t it be best if we all encouraged him on this new path?”
Xlur looked back at her. “You speak to me as if I were a child. I’m not offspring—I’m an adult Mogwa. Are you aware of this?”
“Of course, Great One,” she said.
She looked flustered, and all our easy talk died.
Xlur turned back to me. “I know who you are now. I’ve been reading reports with my off-brain while we consumed this meal. You spoke to Grand Admiral Sateekas personally, when the battle fleet came to erase your planet.”
“Um… yes, I might have.”
“You were in his reports. Some passages were glowing, others were highly derogatory. Anyone reading those after-action reports would think the McGill ruled this bush-kingdom.”
“No sir,” I said. “I’m just a soldier. Sometimes, I get into spots where I’m in over my head, that’s true, but I’m not that important.”
“So… Sateekas lied? Is that the nature of your accusation? What would be his motivation to do so?”
“Uh…”
“Chief Inspector, please—” Turov began.
“Do not speak!” Xlur boomed at her suddenly, loudly. “I’m now suspecting a great secret lurks here. I’m not sure what it is, but I have verified that this being was present when I last visited this dirtball and died. He was also instrumental in the turning back of the Empire’s local battle fleet. Today, he is here again at my table. Did you somehow believe these events would go unnoticed?”
Turov froze, her eyes wide. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t make a sound. She’d been ordered to be silent in the same breath she was asked a question, and it looked like she was going to play it safe.
Xlur seemed satisfied with her freaked-out stare. He turned back to me.
Armel, for his part, watched the proceedings with a mixture of interest and concern. He’d set up all this, of course, but I didn’t think he’d meant for things to get so serious. He wore the expression of a man who tossed hot ashes over a hated neighbor’s fence, only to see flames licking at the roof an hour later.
Sensing the shift in mood at our table, the rest of the mess hall had fallen quiet. Two dozen high-ranking officers were all craning their necks, staring and worrying.
“I’ve yet to hear the McGill-creature’s response,” Xlur said. “Explain yourself.”
“Um… what was the question again, exactly?”
The truth was, I’d had quite a bit of wine. Worse, I’d been sailing high on pain-meds when I came in the door. What I wanted most right now was a soft bunk and hard nap.
Turov’s hand came up to cover her eyes. She looked between a web of fingers, and her eyes pleaded with me to fix things.
“Idiocy,” Xlur said, and he turned back to Turov. “I’m reading an odd data stream on my tapper as I scan the McGill.”
“He is indeed an odd one, Lord,” Armel murmured.
“Before daring to return to this barbaric planet,” Xlur said, “I took certain precautions. A new app measures beasts of all sorts for mental acuity, truthfulness, obedience ratings and general health. McGill is providing unique input. The app is baffled.”
“Yes!” Turov said, seizing on the opportunity like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. “We’ve had similar confusing measurements. We test our recruits, and McGill has always been an enigma. He seems at one moment ingenious, and the next dimwitted.”
“This explains so much,” Xlur said, leaning back and seeming to relax. All around the mess hall, dozens of others sighed in relief with him. “Why he is not promoted. Why he acts erratically. Why you have endured him without permanent execution.”
“All that, and more,” Armel said quietly.
Xlur looked at him. He ruffled his limbs. “You, creature, have never performed an action of import to the Empire. I tire of your misplaced comments. Speak again in my presence, and I’ll demand that your organs are removed.”
Armel froze. He didn’t look happy, but he did shut the hell up.
Xlur turned back to Turov. “I thank you for this experience, servant,” he said. “I’ve always had questions concerning this place. Dark events have unfolded with unnatural frequency on this lonely stretch of the frontier. Can you tell me why I shouldn’t request the McGill-creature be put down? As a chaotic mutant, he might be dangerous to all of us.”
Galina blinked, surprised by the question. She looked at me, then at Armel. Neither of us spoke, as the question had been directed to her.
“We have found him useful at times, Lord,” she said simply.
“I can see that. Intriguing…”
“My comment was in no way meant as a refusal, Chief Inspector,” she said. “Would you like him to be permed? You have only to make the request.”
Armel came back to life at this shift in the conversation. His face brightened, and it seemed to me that his mustache curled a little higher at the corners of his mouth.
Xlur pondered for a moment.
“No,” he said at last. “I will leave the choice up to you. Earth has done amazing things for such a small power on the edge of the endless night. As I haven’t been personally affronted, I have no cause to order such a thing—not today, in any case.”
“Excellent. Shall we retire for the night?”
“Yes,” said the Mogwa, “but I will not be staying on your cold little planet another night. I’m going up to my ship immediately. Are you prepared to deploy your delegation?”
“Yes,” Turov said. “We’ve chosen our champions. We will send them immediately.”
“See that you do. We aren’t prepared yet for hostilities. They must be appeased—for now.”
“I understand, Chief Inspector. Good night.”
The Mogwa left, and everyone watched him go.
After he’d exited the room, the dinner broke up, but I don’t think most of the humans who attended were able to sleep well or digest their food easily that night.
That was a shame, really, considering how good the meal had been.
Fortunately, I was an exception to this rule. I was stress-free. The Mogwa I’d murdered years ago had met me, and I’d survived. By my accounting, that made the evening just about perfect.
-12-
In the morning, I was unsurprised to see a blinking red message on my tapper. I’d been called into Turov’s office.
That involved a very long elevator ride to start off with. When I’d gone about a thousand floors up and the doors dinged open, I found myself squinting in a gush of honest-to-God sunlight.
Walking down a long, quiet hall lined with offices full of hog brass and their underlings, I finally reached the end and started to tap on the door.
The door melted away, and I stepped inside.
“Neat trick door,” I commented.
A sour Winslade sat like a secretary in the front office. He jerked his thumb at the next door behind him, where Turov must be holding court.
I paused on my way past his desk.
“Hey,” I said. “They put you back to work already? Flying a desk?”
“Apparently,” he said, without looking at me.
Winslade and I had a terrible past. We’d killed one another with a vengeance on many occasions. He was, in fact, a weasel of the first order.
But despite all of that, when we got into the real shit together, and the bullets and the blood were flying, we typically found we could rely on one another. Our last few days in elevators and pit-fights had proven that.
“Hey,” I said. “For what it’s worth, you did good down there. Just as good as any of my team. You’re a Varus man, in my book.”
Winslade looked up at me. His eyes were full of suspicion for a second. I could tell he was thinking I was making fun of him somehow.
But I wasn’t, and he saw that pretty quickly.
Shrugging like he didn’t care, he looked down again.
�
��Thanks,” he said.
And that was it. There were no hugs, tears, or sloppy kisses. I didn’t know if we were friends now or still enemies, but then I didn’t much care, either. I always call them as I see them about stuff like that—stuff that matters.
Barging into Turov’s office like I owned the place, I gave her a big smile.
“McGill,” she said. “Do you know how hard it was to sleep last night?”
“Was something bothering you, Imperator?”
“Yes, something was bothering me! We almost got erased again! That damned Armel—he just had to go and pull a prank at dinner.”
“Armel is a funny guy,” I said. “He’s got quite the sense of humor.”
“That wasn’t funny!” she said angrily. “He was out of his depth. Snide, drunk, and out of control. Even you know when you’re in real trouble—and you’re better at getting away with stunts.”
The thought occurred to me that I could egg her on right now. Maybe, if I pushed like Winslade enjoyed doing, I could work her up into a frenzy and get Armel flogged or demoted or something. The idea was tempting, but I didn’t like playing the weasel just for fun, so I shut up and stopped stoking her flames any higher.
“Imperator,” I said, switching topics, “I’m getting some bad vibes about this mission. Where, exactly, are we going?”
She didn’t meet my eyes. She looked down instead, fooling with her tapper.
“That’s classified.”
“Oh, come on. I’m a centurion, and I’m going on this mission, apparently. Where am I headed? Some people are talking about the Wur, about there being a problem out in the far corners of the Cephalopod Kingdom.”
Turov huffed, shaking her head. “The Wur are a problem, that’s true. They’re like a deep cancer, a rot at the core of the Cephalopod sector of space. But we’re not deploying against them this time.”
“Who then? Don’t I have a right to know?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure I can trust you to keep your mouth shut until the transport leaves Earth.”
“You trusted me to kill a Mogwa for you,” I pointed out. “You trusted me to give you your Galactic Key back. Both are big perming violations—”
“All right, shut up,” she said, and she turned back to her tapper, working on it in earnest.
“What are you doing on your tapper, anyway?” I asked. “Got a new boyfriend?”
“Ha! I wish. Here, look at the wall.”
My eyes followed her gesture to the largest, blankest wall in her over-sized office. A shade lowered covering the window, filling the office with gloom.
For just a moment, I figured maybe she was going to make a surprise pass at me, and I looked in her direction again.
Galina looked good, as always. Her outfit was a size too tight, and her body moved like that of a graceful dancer—but she wasn’t reaching for me.
The wall she’d indicated lit up. I felt a pang of disappointment, but that quickly faded and I became interested in the image on the wall. It began to transform as I watched. The lights dimmed further as the wall brightened, and I found myself staring at a high-resolution star map.
“This is our slice of the galaxy,” she began, “viewed from just outside its edge. Remember that our galaxy is really a very large disk, and most of it is flat.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“Good. We’ll see how much your knowledge has improved since you’ve joined the legions. Frontier 921, like all frontier provinces outside the Core, is about five hundred lightyears thick. Each province is a slice of this relatively thin, spinning disk of stars.”
“Right,” I said, “and here’s old Sol, on the right edge of this map.” As I said this, I pointed it out in order to show off. Our home sun blinked when I brushed it with a finger. “Now, off to my right would be the Galactic Core—but that’s maybe thirty thousand lights away.”
“You’re doing well. I’m shocked.”
I moved my hand over the wall. To my surprise, my finger brought up information on any star it brushed against. “Let me see if I can get my bearings. Frontier 921 extends in a roughly cubic region with about five hundred lightyears on each border.”
“That’s right,” Turov said, “but we’ve changed the borders recently to include the Cephalopod Kingdom. There are several hundred thousand stars in the entire region now—but most of them are useless. Many are brown dwarfs or tiny red suns, so cool and dim they almost don’t qualify as stars at all.”
“Huh…” I said thoughtfully, running my eyes and fingers over the map. I quickly found Gamma Pavonis and poked at it. “Here’s Machine World, right here.”
“James, this level of interest and knowledge on your part is unexpected.”
“Yeah…I’ve spent some time lately looking at stars with my daughter’s auto-scope.”
“I’m astounded,” Turov said, and again I let her implied insult slide.
“I’ve been curious about the real extent of our chunk of real estate for a long time,” I told her, even though the truth was I’d hardly cared until a few nights ago. “Just how many star systems in our territory are worth fighting over?”
“Not many,” she said. “We ignore a hundred stars for every one of them that’s interesting.”
“So few… Even with the squid-owned stars? What’s wrong with them all?”
“Many have no planets, or they’re circled by only a few burnt husks. Some systems are too full of radiation, dust, or other hazards to be much use.”
“What’s that leave us with, then? A thousand?”
“Less. Even with the Cephalopod Kingdom added in, we’re dealing with maybe five hundred stars that support any kind of complex life.”
“How many are under our military control?”
Turov cleared her throat. “That depends on who you ask. As a Hegemony officer, I’d tell you all of them. But that’s unrealistic. There are at least a hundred systems that are governing themselves, or which have no form of government at all.”
She stepped near the left edge—away from the side that was closer to the Core. At her touch, a region lit up and showed a large, dull-red zone. There were a few reddish patches like this closer to Earth, but I could tell right off most of the rebel stars were out on the border of known space.
“The fringe of the fringe,” I said. “Those are former Cephalopod worlds, right? Can’t say I blame them if they’re rebelling.”
“You can’t blame them? They’re suffering—and making their people suffer. Chaos and anarchy are never pleasant things, James.”
Chaos and Anarchy? Was that what she called freedom and self-governance? I glanced at her, but I didn’t comment because she looked serious. Turov liked order—especially if she was in charge of it.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m guessing I’m headed out here, into the lawless region. Right?”
“That’s correct,” she said. “We need to make some allies out there. We’ve found a critical world. One that has exactly what we’re looking for.”
“Uh… and what would that be?”
“We’re losing ground out there, James,” she said, evading the question. “Every month or so another world breaks off ties and declares independence—or just goes dark.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“We’re going to build our own battle fleet.”
I eyed her, and I decided she was serious. “Thousands of ships? Enough to terrorize all these star systems? How?”
“Shipyards are springing up everywhere in the loyal systems. We’ve received an emergency clearance to ignore the patents of the Skrull. They aren’t happy about losing their monopoly, but now they have new jobs as trainers and foremen to teach the rest of us.”
“Wouldn’t it just be easier for the Empire to send Battle Fleet 921 to the biggest rebel worlds and smash them up a little?”
“Probably, it would. But Grand Admiral Sateekas has almost finished his tour. He has been recalled again to the Core.”
“No, they aren’t. The ceasefire has become tense. The whole thing might spark up into a fresh conflict at any time. That’s why the battle fleet is withdrawing again—leaving us in charge. You recall the deal we made a year or so ago, don’t you?”
“How could I forget? I negotiated the details myself.”
“Don’t remind me.”
I laughed good naturedly at the memory, but she didn’t join in. “Sateekas said we’d have to agree to go to war with some neighboring power if we wanted to keep the squid worlds. Is that what’s happening out there?”
“Not yet. There is another growing power just beyond that red zone—but we’re not ready to face them yet. Interstellar war fleets aren’t built in a day, James. We need to get our own house in order first. To that end, we’re building a coalition of forces under Earth’s banner.”
“Who’s paying for all this?” I asked. “I bet the Empire hasn’t given us a dime.”
“You are correct in that assumption. But now we’re allowed to tax the industry of faithful Empire worlds in this province. We’re funding our own build-up locally.”
“Huh…” I said, looking back at the map.
I was impressed. Earth was just one tiny planet on this vast scale. We sure had some out-sized gonads even to try to rule a half-million star systems, empty or not.
“You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here today. Why I’m pit-fighting with Germanica.”
She heaved a sigh. Did she… yes, if I wasn’t mistaken, she looked a tiny bit guilty.
That worried me. In order to make someone like Turov feel sorry for him, a man had to be in a pretty bad spot. After Graves’ similar reaction, I was doubly concerned.
“You’re going on a diplomatic mission,” she said at last. “You are going to try to forge an alliance.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I said. “First off, I’m no diplomat. I don’t like flag-waving marches or tea-ceremonies.”
She chuckled. “There will be precious few of either on this journey. What you must do is prove to the inhabitants of a critical planet that Earth’s legions are impressive.”
