William Keith Renegades Honor

by Renegade's Honor

  Renegade's Honor

  by

  William H. Keith Jr.

  Historians unanimously identify the founding of the Empire of Man with the rise of the Roman Empire, a technologically primitive, planetary state in the Mediterranean Basin on Earth nearly seven thousand years ago. As an empire, it was remarkably resilient and stable. Even the so-called Fall of Rome was only a temporary stumble, a Dark Age lasting less than two thousand years, ended as Man found his way to the stars.

  For seven millennia, the Empire has proven to be mankind's answer to a Universe dark, vast, and hostile—a special solution to the special challenges of governing the peoples of tens, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of disparate and far-flung worlds, as Man mastered technology and emerged to dominate the Galaxy.

  Who can doubt that only the Empire stands between our Galactic-Pax and a final and ultimate Fall of Rome, bringing with it mankind's absolute and eternal enslavement to the alien darkness around us?

  —From The Seventh Millennium, by Gaeaphilos the Philosopher, University of New Rome Press, New Rome, Terra, Anno Imperii 6801

  Kendric Ramsay Fraser leaned against the railing that lined the parapets above Vulpeculana Major's starport. A ship was landing, and for a moment, the old excitement washed away both worries and discouragement.

  The ship was one of the ubiquitous TOG Navy Cingulum Class corvettes, light, fast, and handy. With a crew of seven and room for only two passengers, it was not exactly a model of luxury and comfort in interstellar travel, but the sharp keening of its antigrav drives spoke of speed and channeled power. Overpressure from the ship' s fields sent dust devils scurrying from its shadow, as metal clamps rose from half-buried receptacles within the docking mechanism to grasp and lock down the descending craft. The corvette's tau radiators still rippled with a hazy shimmer where Cherenkov radiation bled tachyons with the craft's plus tau.

  The shimmer was bright. She had been travelling, that one. The stark, triangular, red-on-black symbol of the Terran Overlord Government was emblazoned on the hull below her name: Teachdair.

  The sight raised conflicting emotions in Kendric. Ever since childhood, he had wanted nothing more of the universe than to serve aboard a starship. It had been pure accident that his people had first stumbled out beyond the narrow boundaries of their own tiny star cluster when he was nine years old. Even before that, though, Kendric had been spellbound by accounts of explorations and conquests within the home cluster. When word had come of First Contact between the Gael Cluster Confederation and the mighty, Galaxy-spanning Empire of TOG, it had only whetted his appetite to range far among the stars.

  Kendric had come far since then. First Contact was only twenty-three standard years in the past, but his dream had become reality. He was a Navarchos—a Captain of starships—of the Imperial Navy of the Terran Overlord Government.

  Or he had been. With the turn his career had taken of late, Kendric had begun to wonder.

  "So, how does it feel, going home and all?"

  Kendric turned, startled by words that so closely echoed his own musings. Caius Elliot was a full head shorter than Kendric's long-limbed height, and outweighed the younger man's eighty kilos by at least ten more. He wore formal civilian dress, the white toga and leggings currently affected by TOG's elite, under a green and scarlet body cloak. The gold-wrought and heavily ornamented sash across his chest indicated his position as a TOG Special Administrator.

  Spartan by comparison, Kendric's dress was the high-collared black tunic and trousers of the Imperial Navy. Gold piping at his wrists and shoulders indicated his rank as Navarchos. His plain white cloak had been chosen for its cool comfort in Vulpeculana's arid heat rather than for sartorial splendor. The uniform's one bit of ornamentation winked blood-red at his throat in the bright sunlight.

  "Hello, my Lord Elliot. I wish I knew." He gestured to the corvette, where debarkation brows were sliding into position next to her locks. "That is our ship, isn't it?"

  "None other. Teachdair.. .fresh off the ways at Alba Port Orbital. She'll be part of your fleet."

  Your fleet. Kendric still could not grasp the thought completely. And Teachdair was a name in the Old Tongue of the Cluster, not the Galatin of the Empire of TOG. 1 belong with the Imperial Fleet, he thought. Not with this—this playacting! I belong back aboard Metus Magnus.

  "None of this makes any sense, my Lord. Why me?"

  "Political maneuverings can lead to some twisty outcomes," Elliot said. "Having second thoughts, son?"

  "I suppose so. It seems...well...too large a jump. Like being promoted to Admiral straight from the enlisted ranks."

  "Well, it's not quite that extreme, I should hope. You were certainly the best choice for what we had in mind." Elliot's eyes narrowed. "Is it that you're not feeling big enough for the job...or something else?"

  Kendric stared down at the Teachdair's, lean wedge-shape, its hull already crawling with service technicians. He did not let his eyes meet Elliot's.

  "I was happy as an Imperial Naval officer," he said. "I was happy as Exec aboard the Metus Magnus."

  "Hmpf." Elliot grumbled. "What's happiness to do with it? Look at me! Don't you think I would rather have been happy...instead of finding myself appointed Special Administrator to some Caesar-forsaken backwater province like Alba's Confederation?"

  Kendric glanced sharply at Elliot. It was often difficult to tell from the man's tone whether he was joking or not. From the twinkle in his eye, Kendric decided that the insult was another example of the Administrator's odd sense of humor.

  This time, however, Kendric could not respond in kind. "I don't know anything anymore" he said, scowling. "Maybe it's the Deep Dark sitting on my soul."

  Elliot's twinkle vanished. "Get hold of yourself, son. You're not like the rest of them...the Gaels...and you know it."

  "Do I?"

  There was a name for his people's terror of the Deep Dark: Gael's Bane. Kendric had only rarely experienced the affliction, but that was probably because he had been so young at the time of leaving the Gael Cluster. Since then, he had spent most of his adult life traveling the reaches of the Galaxy, where the stars were thin and the Night showed through. Kendric had known many people, all fellow Albans, who had been unable to face the night sky of a world outside the Cluster. It was difficult for the Gaels to face the knowledge that the sky was so vast and so empty,—especially older Gaels who had grown up in the days before First Contact.

  The Gael Cluster had been isolated from the mainstream of Galactic history for so long. The Gaels themselves had forgotten just how long. Alban records were fragmentary, at best. Dim recollections, shrouded in folklore and myth, recalled the collapse of the United Star Systems and the fall of Old Earth in war and invasion. At best guess, that would have been almost four thousand years ago. The Dark Ages that followed had blotted out nearly all that the Gaels had known or had recorded. No one remembered why they had left Earth in the first place on a trek across a gulf that even light took eight millennia to bridge. No one knew why they had chosen as their new home a group of planetary systems within the heart of a star cluster where no earthlike worlds should exist at all.

  The Cluster was extremely young, with most of its member stars only a few hundred thousand years old. The majority of those suns were spendthrift blue giants woven into a misty web of gossamer star stuff— remnants of the nebula that had given birth to the cluster. One particularly brilliant star had already swollen into its red giant phase, its color a stark contrast to the blues of its near neighbors. The Gaels called that one "Cridhe," their Old Tongue word for "heart". From Terra, 8,0001 ight years away, Cridhe would look like a ruby set against a scattering of blue white
diamonds. This thought gave rise to the Cluster's ancient name, Jewel Box.

  Such stars are far too young to have planetary systems, much less worlds old enough to have developed the conditions necessary for life. It was this reason alone that had kept the Gael Cluster from being rediscovered after the wars that brought down the United Star Systems. The Cluster was interesting enough to astrophysicists, but easily studied from a distance. Who among them would have dreamed that its compact mass of stars contained worlds able to support Human colonies?

  Yet there were. Prevailing scientific opinion was that the much older G- and K-Class suns of the Five Worlds had been swept up and carried along by the Cluster's gravitational field. No one knew why the Gaels' ancestors had decided to explore the cluster when they could not reasonably expect to find habitable worlds there. It was only known that once they discovered the Five Worlds, they had wandered no more.

  The Gaels had only just emerged from their Dark Age. The people of Alba had undergone their equivalent of an industrial revolution five centuries ago and had rediscovered space travel four centuries later. The discovery of an ancient starship, still intact, on Alba's inner moon had given the Albans the key to interstellar flight. They had refitted the derelict vessel and christened her the Longluath, or "Swift Ship." In that vessel, they had discovered and explored the other worlds of the Gael Cluster, reestablishing contact with their long-lost and more technologically primitive kin. The years that followed had been a time of high adventure and excitement. The glories and the riches of heaven, of the entire universe, had been the Gaels' for the taking.

  And then the Longluath had ventured beyond the boundaries of the Gael Cluster for the first time.

  Students of psychohistory and psychology from across the Galaxy had already written numerous studies of the phenomenon known as Gael's Bane. The jokes concerning the Gaels and their preference for sleeping or making love with the light on were also legion. Contrary to popular opinion, however, the Gaels were not afraid of the dark. The fact was that the night sky on any of the Gael Cluster worlds was so brilliant that one could read print by the light of the stars. Even on a cloudy night, enough light diffused through the cloud layers to create a dim and murky twilight.

  The problem stemmed from the fact that, although their science had developed rapidly in almost every field since the Gael's recovery from the Dark Age, they had remained woefully primitive in one field. There were, of course, a wealth of stars and moons and neighboring worlds to observe, but so brilliant were the night skies that the Gaels had never discovered observational deep-sky astronomy.

  Even with the recovery of the long-lost starship, Gael cosmologists had estimated that the diameter of the universe was, at most, fifty light years. It was not until Longluath ventured out beyond the filmy, gleaming barrier of brilliant stars and obscuring nebulae that they learned the truth. Five of the crew went mad after their return to Alba.

  "Gael's Bane" was the term applied to the nearly agoraphobic fear that Gaels—especially older Gaels—had of the outside universe. Imperial researchers and the Gaels themselves admitted that it was not the dark, or even the sight of a night sky without stars, that triggered their irrational fear. It was their loneliness, their isolation in a universe

  suddenly grown incomprehensibly vast.

  Is it the Gael's Bane? Kendric wondered. Or something else? If it were the Bane, I'd be happy about getting back to the Gael Cluster, with stars thronging the sky and my own people about me. But they're not my people anymore, are they? They haven't been since...They haven't been for a long time.

  Kendric tried to shrug off the sense of futility and emptiness. "Do you feel as much an exile as I do, my Lord?"

  "Come now, Ken! It's not exile, but opportunity! Opportunity! And Alba is, after all, your homeworld!"

  That, of course, was a large part of his problem. Kendric no longer felt as though Alba, or the Gael Cluster, was his home. He had not set foot on his homeworld sincejust after Cara's death. The Imperial Navy had been both career and life for ten years. Memories of Alba, and of Balmarin, its capital, were clear but tinged with sadness.

  He did not want to go.back.

  Light centuries from Vulpeculana Major, the Imperial destroyer Raptor, slowed by precisely balanced forward maneuvering gravs to less than a meter per second, slid gently into the Alba Port's Docking Bay 12. Below, Alba's nightside bulked huge and dark against thronging stars, edged by the gleaming white sickle of morning. The planet's nightside was not completely dark. Reflected starlight illuminated the swirl and eddy of clouds and the ragged edges of gray continents. Argrian, Alba's sun, burst above the horizon in all its gold-orange glory.

  Docking clamps swung shut and locked magnetically, silent in space but echoing with metallic clangs through the hull of the warship. Enclosed and pressurized brows swung out to meet and kiss airlock docking seals.

  Inside, along Alba Port's circular Main Concourse, TOG Legionnaires lined up in full ceremonial armor, their faces masked by the sinister, dark-visored battle helmets. Their combat armor, with straps and clamshell plate gleaming white over duraleath tunics, kirtles, and leggings, was vaguely reminiscent of a far earlier era of Imperial history. The pilums rigid in each greaved fist resembled short, stocky spears, a deliberate melding of technology with image. Though intended as a ceremonial link with a distant past, the pilums were powerful laser weapons as well, charged from the massive backpacks each man wore.

  The air was heavy with the tang of machine oil and artificial leather.

  The rasp of helmet respirators was the only sound as Vice Admiral Marius Arada and Provisional Governor Vindicus Malatya walked the Legionnaire ranks in one last review.

  "Acceptable, Governor," Arada said, as they came to the end of the final rank. The airlock hatch to Bay 12 remained sealed just beyond, a red light still glowing warning overhead. "Most acceptable."

  Malatya nodded. "Thank you, my Lord Admiral. One does one's best with what one has, after all."

  Arada masked sour feelings with practiced formality. The troops were TOG Imperial Legionnaire Marines, Arada's own, on loan to the governor from Arada's fleet. "Indeed. I trust there has been no further need for their services of late?"

  Malatya pursed his fat lips. He was a heavy man, ludicrous in his gold and silver toga and scarlet sash of office. "None worth mentioning," he said. "There is occasional unrest, to be sure. The anti-Unionists, you know. Call themselves Jacobites. But the situation in Balmarin, and here at Alba Port, is completely under control. My control."

  It was a none-too-subtle attempt to remind Arada of Malatya's own personal power in this place. The Admiral commanded the Imperial Fleet units stationed within the Gael Cluster, but Malatya was Provisional Governor, Caesar's own representative, over the Gael Confederation. There was a long history of bitterness between the civilian and military branches of the Imperial government. Malatya had been at something of a political disadvantage when a new flurry of anti-Imperial sentiment swept Alba's capital, forcing him to request— request!—a cohort of Arada's Legionnaire Marines.

  Arada smiled inwardly at the thought, though he took care to keep the humor from showing on his lean, age-creased face. A few more such incidents, and my Lord Malatya willfind he that his position isn' t quite so powerful as he likes to believe!

  There was a clang, muffled from the far side of the bay lock door, and the two antagonists turned to face it.

  Alba Port, a space station, ten kilometers across, was part of Caesar's gift to the people of the Gael Confederation. Its purpose was to handle the expected increase in interstellar traffic and trade once the Confederation was fully assimilated into the TOG Empire. The other half of the Emperor's gift hung in Albasynchronous orbit some 38,000 kilometers out from Alba, a VLCA station that would tie the Cluster into the general network of galactic communications.

  In exchange, the Gaels had completed construction of the ten-ship flotilla known as the Gael Squadron. Phase Two of the Imperial plan
would begin now, with the arrival of the man waiting on the far side of the airlock door.

  The light above the door winked from red to green. With the sigh of pressure escaping, the lock valve slid aside. Two rows of armed and armored troops entered, their power guns at high port. As members of a personal guard, they were more conspicuously garbed than the Marines awaiting them, with silver clamshell body pieces, spotless tunics, and cloaks of gold-trimmed green. Their helmets were squat and alien-looking, the black visors completely masking the faces within. The dozen guards took up assigned positions on either side of the airlock entrance.

  The man who strode through next was shorter than either Arada or Malatya, with a husky frame that showed none of the Governor's tendency toward fat. Though the man wore a uniform of sorts, scarlet and black with a stiff, high collar, he was, strictly speaking, a civilian. Like the Marine guard, he wore body armor, ornately engraved and chased in gold, and in his hand he carried the short staff that was his badge of office.

  "Ave, Domine!" Arada and Malatya said in unison, as both rendered the Imperial salute, fist to chest, then snapped up and forward, palm out.

  The newcomer acknowledged the salute with a tip of his baton. "Ave," he said, his voice quiet, but utterly compelling. "I am the Overlord Magnan Domitius Gracchi." He strode forward, the movements setting his scarlet shoulder cloak aswirl. "I am here to inaugurate the second phase of the Gael Plan."

  Overlord! There had been no need of an introduction. Arada and Malatya both had been considerably ill-at-ease since they had heard that an Imperial Overlord had been dispatched to Alba.

  "Welcome, Overlord Gracchi!" Malatya managed to add a half-bow to his formal greeting.

  Arada kept the mask over his expression. Why Gracchi? It was well known that this particular one of Caesar's Overlords had followed the custom of many of the TOG elite and added a Galatin suffix to his name. Gracchi was known as Gracchi Carnifex. Gracchi the Butcher. What was he doing at Alba?

  Ave, Caesar, Domine!

  The delicate political situation among the Five Worlds of the Gael Cluster has much improved. Since these formerly isolated worlds were first contacted in 6807, there was a distinct possibility that conservative elements within the local ruling class would reject all dealings with the Terran Overlord Government. Such a rejection would, of course, have necessitated a crushing military response on our part.