Orion Shall Rise

by Poul Anderson

  ‘In Wellantoa, Prime Minister Lonu Samito addressed Parliament. His broadcast speech declared that the situation is well in hand and the nation’s most urgent need is public calm. He decried hysteria at any mention of nuclear explosives, pointing out that whatever supply the enemy has accumulated must be small, and apparently committed to the Orion project. As for it, Sir Lonu said, the lunacy of the whole idea proves that the Wolf gang is too irrational to pose a serious danger.’

  ‘Which is why we’re sending the Grand Fleet against them,’ Terai muttered.

  The officers in the wardroom paid no attention. They were listening to the radio news or playing cards. All at once he wanted out of this stuffy air and bland voice. He took his pea jacket off the rack and sought the companionway.

  It was not unduly cold on deck, but raining again. The water fell straight, so thick that its silver-gray drowned vision within a few hundred meters. It sluiced chill across his skin, drummed dully on the ship, gurgled off through the scuppers. Windless, Rongelap throbbed ahead under power, sails folded, but waves still ran high from half a gale in the night and the hull rolled to their booming pace.

  Companion vessels that he could see were dim. Nearest was an aircraft carrier. The flat silhouette was unmistakable; that class necessarily ran always on engines. Her twin hulls were about as long as the battleship’s one, a hundred and twenty-five meters. Twenty VTOL planes rested on the forward half of her catamaran deck beneath the bridge, like bullets stood on end.

  No – nineteen. The twentieth broke through the ceiling and swung, aglisten, into an approach path. It must have gone to take a noon sight on the sun, as a check on inertial navigation systems. The sound of its jets came faintly to Terai.

  He wondered afresh how anyone could endure the high North. Rain – rain at home was quick, joyful, alive with light, and left a rainbow for a mark of its blessing. Here it was a ceaseless presence. When it did not fall, which it seemed to do more hours than not, it brooded in cloud and mist; even the monstrous winter darknesses rarely saw heaven. Could the North have driven its dwellers insane? Could they be embarked on their Orion hellishness not as a wild strategic gamble – that being merely what they told themselves it was – but because they were starved for stars?

  Dolphin-graceful (O Hiti, our romps together!), the airplane descended.

  A flaw came out of nowhere. Ship and flyer lurched. The pilot missed the deck. A wing struck and crumpled. The plane cartwheeled. The time felt like days before it struck water, but then it sank instantly.

  Sirens wailed. Men scuttled about. Rongelap drew to a halt of her own, and lifeboats dropped from davits. Useless. The armada had taken its first loss, and what killed the man was the North he had come to tame. Terai bruised his fist, hammering on the rail.

  That night, a heavy fog arose. Despite radar, a frigate and a fuel tanker collided. Both ships were disabled, and several more crew-folk perished.

  ‘– In a radio communique, Fleet Admiral Alano Kepaloa denied reports of extremely high casualties. “We have had a setback, not a disaster,” he maintained. “Nor can it properly be said that we were taken by surprise. Our hope was to force Cook Inlet, disembark our marines at Tyonek town, and send them inland to find and seize the Orion site. Aerial reconnaissance showed only a single warship in the firth, an obsolete steam-driven ironclad which the Union was allowed to keep after the last conflict. It has been secretly and illegally refurbished, with missile launchers as well as gun turrets, but should be no match for us.

  ‘“Nevertheless, we did not commit ourselves to an all-out assault, but dispatched a squadron to probe. This proved wise, when concealed batteries opened fire from both shores. Admittedly that was unexpected, especially in its intensity. The Wolves had prepared themselves with remarkable thoroughness as well as cover. But they had a decade or more to do it. They sank three light vessels and inflicted severe damage on others, including a dreadnaught. However, the squadron disengaged in good order.

  ‘“An alternative plan will shortly be executed.”’

  It was.

  Afterward Terai and chosen fellow officers sat at a conference table aboard Rongelap, heard the tale of the slaughter, and debated how the Navy could have brought such a catastrophe on itself.

  Terai needed no report. They had not let him join the invasion, for his knowledge and abilities were too valuable to risk. But when the survivors began to straggle back, bearing their wounded and what few of their many dead they were able to, he had taken a boat to the receiving station ashore. In between getting accounts out of dazed minds and pain-twisted lips, he had assisted in a hospital tent, where surging did what they could for remnants of men. The blood, the mutilation, the stench, the cries, probably most of all the attempts at cheerfulness, would be with him while he lived.

  Beyond the tobacco reek of the cabin, ports showed water fitfully agleam as clouds drove across the moon, and the heights of the Laska Peninsula. Wind whistled drearily. Waves smacked on the hull, making it rock and creak. Terai cradled his pipe in his hands for whatever warmth the bowl might give, though this room was hot enough to bring out sweat.

  Silence fell upon the dozen men and women. Terai let it ripen before he said, ‘Figures can wait. We took a beating; the rest is details. And I know what brought this on.’

  The haggard faces turned his way. ‘You did not state that earlier,’ Kepaloa reproved.

  ‘No, sir, because I’d had no chance to think about it. And the admiral will remember that since returning here I’ve been occupied in grilling such prisoners as the marines brought along and comparing their stories. By the way, hanging on to those Norries was heroic. The men who did so should be recommended for the Te Kooti Cross.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  Terai squinted through the blue haze. His eyes smarted, his head felt full of sand, weariness dragged at every bone in him. ‘Our scheme was sensible in itself,’ he said. ‘Rather than lose more to the artillery, let’s land farther south, where there’s practically no habitation, and slog up through the mountains to the objective. The trouble was, the enemy saw as well as we did that that was sensible, and took measures, just as he’d done to defend the Inlet.’

  ‘But what measures?’ cried the flagship’s captain. ‘Lesu Haristi, yonder country’s empty because it can’t support a population! Aircraft surveys showed nothing. But still the marines walked into an ambush and were wiped out. How?’

  Terai clamped teeth about his pipestem. ‘That mass flight from the southern tier of the Union, by every available conveyance – and the Norries have a great many conveyances, sir, with small commercial fuel depots everywhere. It wasn’t panic, as we supposed. It was a rush to these parts, through the Inside Passage or by air or over the upland highways. Men by the thousands, munitions by the tonne, bound north to resist the attempt that it was predictable we’d make.’

  ‘No, wait, please,’ said a woman in his corps. That’s impossible, No entire nation could be organized for such a mass action without us learning about it beforehand. Certainly not the Norries!’

  He sighed. True. But you see, organization wasn’t necessary. The conspirators simply stockpiled matériel: portable rocket launchers, machine guns, and the like, including plenty of ammunition for the small arms that almost every Northwestern household keeps.’

  He rested elbows on table and gestured with his pipe. ‘You can’t understand what’s happened unless you understand the Norrie character,’ he said. ‘Which isn’t easy, as foreign to ours as it is. I’ll try to explain.

  ‘They’re individualists, but they’re also cooperators. Their basic social unit, above the family, is the Lodge – even nonmembers tend to follow that lead – and precisely because it is a voluntary organization, a Lodge need not be democratic. So a few persons can command large resources and give no accounting to anybody else for an indefinite period.

  ‘Next consider the spirit of the people.’ Plik called it Faustian, whatever that means. They had no chance to as
semble militia against us, as they did before the Power War. Events moved too fast; scarcely any of them knew about Orion. But they are giving us a hard time all the same. The news of a space force a-building has not left them thunderstruck. Instead, it’s charged them with lightning. They want the atom set afire again, for the power it’ll bestow on them to do things, and Nan take the consequences!

  ‘A very cunning man made this the basis of his contingency plans.’ Surely it was Mikli Karst, guiding genius of the genii.

  ‘When the crisis came,’ Terai proceeded, ‘word went out to the Lodgemasters. They were to inform their members, discreetly, and ask for volunteers to defend Orion. They could tell those volunteers where to pick up munitions, food supplies, reserve fuel, everything that had year by year been stashed away for them.

  ‘The ragtag army flocked off. Cadre officers met it and posted it around the peninsula. Probably it outnumbered our marines. We weren’t expecting significant resistance. Besides, the Maurai never have been good at land warfare; we are the Sea People. Most Norrmen are used to inland wilderness, and to firearms, machinery of every kind – they’re a nation of mechanics. That made up for their lack of soldierly training.

  ‘The upshot was, they destroyed the flower of our Marine Corps.’

  Terai leaned back. His eyelids drooped. That much talk had exhausted his remaining strength.

  ‘Well,’ said a man presently, roughly, ‘I suppose we must believe you, fantastic though it sounds. You do have information from prisoners, and past experience with these folk. The question is, what action shall we now take?’

  Kepaloa swept his glance around the gathering, checkreined his own pain, and said: ‘At the moment, we can do little. I see no point in capturing the Inlet, at high cost, when we no longer have the troops to send on to Orion. Furthermore, a concentration of ships would be vulnerable to a nuclear weapon, and we must reckon with the possibility that the enemy possesses some.’ It was a measure of his self-discipline that he could say that in a level voice. ‘I will deploy the fleet accordingly and attempt a blockade. Meanwhile, our army in the South can try to keep the irregulars from being supplied overland. Maybe after a while they’ll grow hungry.’

  ‘But what if they get their damned spaceships up in the meantime?’ asked another man.

  Terai rocked back and forth, trying to stay awake. ‘My impression from what I heard while among them is that they can’t do it soon,’ he told the group. ‘Not for a year or more, at earliest.’

  Kepaloa nodded. ‘That seems probable. Well, whenever we have reasonable weather – not often! – we can try bombing the general area, though I suppose the Orion installations are well reinforced.’

  ‘Sir,’ Terai said, ‘I could lead a small party ashore and try to sniff out precisely where the target is.’

  ‘I will take that under advisement,’ the admiral replied, ‘but I doubt the possible gains would justify the risk. Haven’t we had sufficient losses?’

  ‘Sir,’ proposed a major of the marines, ‘given replacements, we can punch through that rabble. The South doesn’t matter. Once we’ve scotched Orion, we can reduce the South in detail, same as we did in the Power War. Why not send our army up here?’

  ‘I imagine they are considering that in Wellantoa,’ said the admiral. ‘But I mean to recommend against it. If we evacuated the South, there would be nothing to prevent a huge flow of men and supplies overland to Laska. We don’t want a bloodbath – not on either side.

  ‘You heard Captain Lohannaso. Except for one or two possible test shots, Orion cannot rise for at least a year. That should give us ample time. Frankly, I felt from the beginning that the Cabinet was paying too much attention to public funk, when it ordered immediate full-scale action. That phrase “atomic energy” made so many knees jerk. Now let us hope we shall be permitted to proceed rationally, and not cut the enemy down but strangle him.’

  For the first time in recent memory, Kepaloa smiled. ‘And such a long period may not even be required,’ he finished. ‘My information is that we can expect help quite soon.’

  ‘Today the Five Nations issued a joint declaration of war against the Northwest Union. Crack troops, already stationed near the Rocky Mountains, are moving toward the passes, which appear to be only lightly defended. In Chai Ka-Go, the Tien Dziang himself predicted that the allies will occupy the Orion site well before summer solstice.’

  2

  More and more as the months passed, Faylis kept to her apartment. Despite the loneliness, she felt almost glad that Jovain must work the long hours he did. Were he free to entertain, as a Captain normally was, she would have had to be the hostess and do him credit. She had come to dread meeting people and avoided it whenever possible. Her servants took care of things, and the shuttle brought books from the Consvatoire library.

  It wasn’t that anyone was openly rude to her. If she received cold looks from many of the aerostat staff, especially women, she also received the phrases that would be hers by right when her divorce was complete and she was truly the Captain’s wife. Members of the Terran Guard showed her a sincere respect. Various of its officers attempted cordiality.

  She did not know how to respond. Those were soldiers, creatures of another species. Most no longer had home ties, which reminded her, wrenchingly, of her own estrangement. Their conversation bored her, when it did not turn to military matters or politics and repel her; they knew nothing of scholarship or esthetics and cared less.

  As for Mattas Olvera, he was a stinking vulgarian who could not keep his moist paws to himself. She had finally summoned the courage to tell him she wanted no further instruction in Gaean principles.

  With her brother, Lorens, she could be somewhat at ease, but he was usually traveling about the Domain as Jovain’s spokesman and troubleshooter, and would land here wrung out by the stresses.

  Skyholm itself had turned eldritch. At first she had hated the crowding. Now, since Jovain had dismissed the Cadets and suspended Clan-right visits for the duration of the emergency (whose nature she never could quite understand, because it always seemed to change), nobody was left except the staff, their spouses, Jovain’s few confidants, and a hundred Guardsmen who rotated monthly. The occasional persons who flew up on business were unknown to her, commonly foreigners, and stayed less than a week. She sensed how huge and high aloft the aerostat was, when she passed through its present echoing hollowness, and must fight to remember that the dreads this raised in her were senseless. Or were they? Their very irrationality made them horrible. She had frequent nightmares.

  There was a small compensation, in that the Garden was never overrun. Many times she savored its beauty and calm without encountering anyone else. Otherwise she felt best in the apartment, reading, listening to music, dabbling out a watercolor or a fragment of writing for Jovain’s dutiful praise.

  He was kind and attentive, held her close and murmured to her when she cried, unfolded his wonderful mind in their conversations over wine, yet listened in his turn. Those talks – about art, literature, history, languages, astronomy, everything – should have been recorded, she thought. They were surely as brilliant as any had been in a Pinckard Era salon. That he and she seldom made love did not trouble her. Poor dear, he came home exhausted, and she was safe from the shock of recollecting two or three days later that she had not taken her pill, something which the messiness of it all did tend to make her forget. But if only he were not gone so much!

  Faylis realized she was withdrawing from the world. It was no great loss. Someday Jovain would bring his opponents to heel, and he and she could go live in a grand place among cultivated friends. Meanwhile, perhaps she drank a wee bit more than she ought, but it kept the melancholy down, and she was growing well informed on a wide range of subjects.

  Thus his action came as a whipcrack surprise.

  He had not sent word he would be delayed, and did arrive before the cook finished dinner. Faylis laid aside a Coimbran novel. (It was fascinating in its subtleties, a
nd new, too, barely ten years in print. She thought she might try translating it into Francey.) ‘Good evening, dear,’ she began. His grimness struck at her. ‘Oh. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I want a drink,’ he said, went to the liquor shelf, and poured himself a hefty apéritif.

  Though the Captain’s quarters were comparatively spacious, suddenly they appeared too small for him. The walls pressed inward, as if the pictures sought to take him prisoner. They were not his or hers. She had had no chance thus far to exchange Toma Sark’s possessions for new ones. At least, she had not made the chance, finding it easier to learn to ignore those family portraits and banal landscapes. Jovain stood surrounded. He drank fast and refilled his glass.

  ‘I hope … nothing terrible has happened,’ Faylis essayed.

  ‘No, no.’ He shook his head. A laugh clanked from him. ‘Not today. But tomorrow will be busy.’

  The cook gave him a quizzical glance. He had imported her from the Valdor estate, remarking that she was skilled, loyal, and limited in her command of any tongue besides Eskuara. Faylis felt sorry for her, as lonesome as she must be here, but it was a relief not to be able to carry on any real conversation with her. Jovain smiled and addressed her. She brightened. How charming he can be, Faylis thought. Why do they harass him? He only wants the good of the Domain. Of the whole planet.