A Slave is a Slave

by H. Beam Piper

  Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  A SLAVE IS A SLAVE

  BY H. BEAM PIPER

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+| Transcriber's Note || || This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact--Science || Fiction April 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any || evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was || renewed. |+--------------------------------------------------------------+

  There has always been strong sympathy for the poor, meek, downtrodden slave--the kindly little man, oppressed by cruel and overbearing masters. Could it possibly have been misplaced...?

  Jurgen, Prince Trevannion, accepted the coffee cup and lifted it to hislips, then lowered it. These Navy robots always poured coffee too hot;spacemen must have collapsium-lined throats. With the other hand, hepunched a button on the robot's keyboard and received a lightedcigarette; turning, he placed the cup on the command-desk in front ofhim and looked about. The tension was relaxing in Battle-Control, thepurposeful pandemonium of the last three hours dying rapidly. Officersof both sexes, in red and blue and yellow and green coveralls, wererising from seats, leaving their stations, gathering in groups.Laughter, a trifle loud; he realized, suddenly, that they had beenworried, and wondered if he should not have been a little so himself.No. There would have been nothing he could have done about anything, soworry would not have been useful. He lifted the cup again and sippedcautiously.

  "That's everything we can do now," the man beside him said. "Now we justsit and wait for the next move."

  Like all the others, Line-Commodore Vann Shatrak wore shipboardbattle-dress; his coveralls were black, splashed on breast and betweenshoulders with the gold insignia of his rank. His head was completelybald, and almost spherical; a beaklike nose carried down the curve ofhis brow, and the straight lines of mouth and chin chopped under itenhanced rather than spoiled the effect. He was getting coffee; hegulped it at once.

  "It was very smart work, Commodore. I never saw a landing operation goso smoothly."

  "Too smooth," Shatrak said. "I don't trust it." He looked suspiciouslyup at the row of viewscreens.

  "It was absolutely unnecessary!"

  That was young Obray, Count Erskyll, seated on the commodore's left. Hewas a generation younger than Prince Trevannion, as Shatrak was ageneration older; they were both smooth-faced. It was odd, how beardswent in and out of fashion with alternate generations. He had beenworried, too, during the landing, but for a different reason from theothers. Now he was reacting with anger.

  "I told you, from the first, that it was unnecessary. You see? Theyweren't even able to defend themselves, let alone...."

  His personal communication-screen buzzed; he set down the coffee andflicked the switch. It was Lanze Degbrend. On the books, Lanze wascarried as Assistant to the Ministerial Secretary. In practice, Lanzewas his chess-opponent, conversational foil, right hand, third eye andear, and, sometimes, trigger-finger. Lanze was now wearing the combatcoveralls of an officer of Navy Landing-Troops; he had a steel helmetwith a transpex visor shoved up, and there was a carbine slung over hisshoulder. He grinned and executed an exaggeratedly military salute. Hechuckled.

  "Well, look at you; aren't you the perfect picture of correct diplomaticdress?"

  "You know, sir, I'm afraid I am, for this planet," Degbrend said."Colonel Ravney insisted on it. He says the situation downstairs isstill fluid, which I take to mean that everybody is shooting ateverybody. He says he has the main telecast station, in the big buildingthe locals call the Citadel."

  "Oh, good. Get our announcement out as quickly as you can. Number Five.You and Colonel Ravney can decide what interpolations are needed to fitthe situation."

  "Number Five; the really tough one," Degbrend considered. "I take itthat by interpolations you do not mean dilutions?"

  "Oh, no; don't water the drink. Spike it."

  Lanze Degbrend grinned at him. Then he snapped down the visor of hishelmet, unslung his carbine, and presented it. He was still standing atpresent arms when Trevannion blanked the screen.

  * * * * *

  "That still doesn't excuse a wanton and unprovoked aggression!" Erskyllwas telling Shatrak, his thin face flushed and his voice quivering withindignation. "We came here to help these people, not to murder them."

  "We didn't come here to do either, Obray," he said, turning to face theyounger man. "We came here to annex their planet to the Galactic Empire,whether they wish it annexed or not. Commodore Shatrak used the quickestand most effective method of doing that. It would have done no good toattempt to parley with them from off-planet. You heard those telecastsof theirs."

  "Authoritarian," Shatrak said, then mimicked pompously: "'Everybody iscommanded to remain calm; the Mastership is taking action. TheConvocation of the Lords-Master is in special session; they will decidehow to deal with the invaders. The administrators are directed toreassure the supervisors; the overseers will keep the workers at theirtasks. Any person disobeying the orders of the Mastership will be dealtwith most severely.'"

  "Static, too. No spaceships into this system for the last five hundredyears; the Convocation--equals Parliament, I assume--hasn't been inspecial session for two hundred and fifty."

  "Yes. I've taken over planets with that kind of government before,"Shatrak said. "You can't argue with them. You just grab them by thecenter of authority, quick and hard."

  Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use offorce. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he hadsaid so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, hewas absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only theincompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, itis usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

  But, at the same time, he was opposed to authoritarianism, except, ofcourse, when necessary for the real good of the people. And he did notlike rulers who called themselves Lords-Master. Good democratic rulerscalled themselves Servants of the People. So he relapsed into silenceand stared at the viewscreens.

  One, from an outside pickup on the _Empress Eulalie_ herself, showed thesurface of the planet, a hundred miles down, the continent under themcurving away to a distant sun-reflecting sea; beyond the curved horizon,the black sky was spangled with unwinking stars. Fifty miles down, thesun glinted from the three thousand foot globes of the twotransport-cruisers, _Canopus_ and _Mizar_.

  Another screen, from _Mizar_, gave a clearer if more circumscribed viewof the surface--green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled withmountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds.Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race onthis planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonizedthe Terro-human population had never completely lost the use ofcontragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the fourdestroyers, _Irma_, _Irene_, _Isobel_ and _Iris_, were tiny twinkles.

  * * * * *

  From _Irene_, they had a magnified view of the city. On the maps, nonelater than eight hundred years old, it was called Zeggensburg; it hadbeen built at the time of the first colonization under the old TerranFederation. Tall buildings, rising from wide interspaces of lawns andparks and gardens, and, at the very center, widely separated fromanything else, the mass of the Citadel, a huge cylindrical tower risingfrom a cluster of smaller cylinders, with a broad circular landing stageabove, topped by the newly raised flag of the Galactic Empire.

  There was a second city, a t
hick crescent, to the south and east. Theold maps placed the Zeggensburg spaceport there, but not a trace of thatremained. In its place was what was evidently an industrial district,located where the prevailing winds would carry away the dust and smoke.There was quite a bit of both, but the surprising thing was the streets,long curved ones, and shorter ones crossing at regular intervals to formblocks. He had never seen a city with streets before, and he doubted ifanybody else on the Empire ships had. Long boulevards to giveunobstructed passage to low-level air-traffic, of course, and shortwinding walkways, but not things like these. Pictures, of course, ofnative cities on planets colonized at the time of the Federation, andeven very ancient ones of cities on pre-Atomic Terra. But these peoplehad contragravity; the towering, wide-spaced city beside thiscross-gridded anachronism proved that.

  They knew so little about this planet which they had come to bring underImperial rule. It had been colonized thirteen centuries ago, during thelast burst of expansion before the System States War and thedisintegration of the Terran Federation, and it had been named Aditya,in the fashion of the times, for some forgotten deity of some obscureand ancient polytheism. A century or so later, it had seceded from orbeen abandoned by the Federation, then breaking up. That much they hadgleaned from old Federation records still existing on Baldur. Afterthat, darkness, lighted only by a brief flicker when more records hadturned up on Morglay.

  Morglay was one of the Sword-Worlds, settled by refugee rebels from theSystem States planets. Mostly they had been soldiers and spacemen; therehad been many women with them, and many were skilled technicians,engineers, scientists. They had managed to carry off considerableequipment with them, and for three centuries they had lived inisolation, spreading over a dozen hitherto undiscovered planets.Excalibur, Tizona, Gram, Morglay, Durendal, Flamberge, Curtana,Quernbiter; the names were a roll-call of fabulous blades of Old Terranlegend.

  Then they had erupted, suddenly and calamitously, into what was left ofthe Terran Federation as the Space Vikings, carrying pillage anddestruction, until the newborn Empire rose to vanquish them. In thesixth Century Pre-Empire, one of their fleets had come from Morglay toAditya.

  The Adityans of that time had been near-barbarians; the descendants ofthe original settlers had been serfs of other barbarians who had come asmercenaries in the service of one or another of the local chieftains andhad remained to loot and rule. Subjugating them had been easy; the SpaceVikings had taken Aditya and made it their home. For several centuries,there had been communication between them and their home planet. ThenMorglay had become involved in one of the interplanetary dynastic warsthat had begun the decadence of the Space Vikings, and again Adityadropped out of history.

  Until this morning, when history returned in the black ships of theGalactic Empire.

  * * * * *

  He stubbed out the cigarette and summoned the robot to give him another.Shatrak was speaking:

  "You see, Count Erskyll, we really had to do it this way, for their owngood." He wouldn't have credited the commodore with such guile; anythingwas justified, according to Obray of Erskyll, if done for somebodyelse's good. "What we did, we just landed suddenly, knocked out theirarmy, seized the center of government, before anybody could do anything.If we'd landed the way you'd wanted us to, somebody would have resisted,and the next thing, we'd have had to kill about five or six thousand ofthem and blow down a couple of towns, and we'd have lost a lot of ourown people doing it. You might say, we had to do it to save them fromthemselves."

  Obray of Erskyll seemed to have doubts, but before he could articulatethem, Shatrak's communication-screen was calling attention to itself.The commodore flicked the switch, and his executive officer, CaptainPatrique Morvill, appeared in it.

  "We've just gotten reports, sir, that some of Ravney's people havecaptured a half-dozen missile-launching sites around the city. Hisair-reconn tells him that that's the lot of them. I have an officer ofone of the parties that participated. You ought to hear what he has tosay, sir."

  "Well, good!" Vann Shatrak whooshed out his breath. "I don't mindadmitting, I was a little on edge about that."

  "Wait till you hear what Lieutenant Carmath has to say." Morvill seemedto be strangling a laugh. "Ready for him, Commodore?"

  Shatrak nodded; Morvill made a hand-signal and vanished in a flicker ofrainbow colors; when the screen cleared, a young Landing-Trooplieutenant in battle-dress was looking out of it. He saluted and gavehis name, rank and unit.

  "This missile-launching site I'm occupying, sir; it's twenty milesnorth-west of the city. We took it thirty minutes ago; no resistancewhatever. There are four hundred or so people here. Of them, twelve, onedozen, are soldiers. The rest are civilians. Ten enlisted men, a non-comof some sort, and something that appears to be an officer. The officerhad a pistol, fully loaded. The non-com had a submachine gun, empty,with two loaded clips on his belt. The privates had rifles, empty, andno ammunition. The officer did not know where the rifle ammunition wasstored."

  Shatrak swore. The second lieutenant nodded. "Exactly my comment when hetold me, sir. But this place is beautifully kept up. Lawns all mowed,trees neatly pruned, everything policed up like inspection morning. Andthere is a headquarters office building here adequate for an armydivision...."

  "How about the armament, Lieutenant?" Shatrak asked with forcedpatience.

  "Ah, yes; the armament, sir. There are eight big launching cradles forpanplanetary or off-planet missiles. They are all polished up like theCrown Jewels. But none, repeat none, of them is operative. And there isnot a single missile on the installation."

  Shatrak's facial control didn't slip. It merely intensified, whichamounted to the same thing.

  "Lieutenant Carmath, I am morally certain I heard you correctly, butlet's just check. You said...."

  He repeated the lieutenant back, almost word for word. Carmath nodded.

  "That was it, sir. The missile-crypts are stacked full ofold photoprints and recording and microfilm spools. Thesighting-and-guidance systems for all the launchers are completelymissing. The letoff mechanisms all lack major parts. There is anelaborate set of detection equipment, which will detect absolutelynothing. I saw a few pairs of binoculars about; I suspect that that iswhat we were first observed with."

  "This office, now; I suppose all the paperwork is up to the minute inquintulplicate, and initialed by everybody within sight or hearing?"

  "I haven't checked on that yet, sir. If you're thinking of betting onit, please don't expect me to cover you, though."

  "Well, thank you, Lieutenant Carmath. Stick around; I'm sending down atech-intelligence crew to look at what's left of the place. Whileyou're waiting, you might sort out whoever seems to be in charge andfind out just what in Nifflheim he thinks that launching-station wasmaintained for."

  "I think I can tell you that, now, Commodore," Prince Trevannion said asShatrak blanked the screen. "We have a petrified authoritarianism. Quitelikely some sort of an oligarchy; I'd guess that this Convocation thingthey talk about consists of all the ruling class, everybody has equalvoice, and nobody will take the responsibility for doing anything. Andthe actual work of government is probably handled by a corps ofbureaucrats entrenched in their jobs, unwilling to exert any effort andafraid to invite any criticism, and living only to retire on theirpensions. I've seen governments like that before." He named a few. "Onething; once a government like that has been bludgeoned into the Empire,it rarely makes any trouble later."

  "Just to judge by this missileless non-launching station," Shatrak said,"they couldn't even decide on what kind of trouble to make, or how tostart it. I think you're going to have a nice easy Proconsulate here,Count Erskyll."

  Count Erskyll started to say something. No doubt he was about to tellShatrak, cuttingly, that he didn't want an easy Proconsulate, but anopportunity to help these people. He was saved from this by the buzzingof Shatrak's communication-screen.

  It was Colonel Pyairr Ravney, the Navy Landing-Troop command
er. Likeeverybody else who had gone down to Zeggensburg, he was in battle-dressand armed; the transpex visor of his helmet was pushed up. BetweenShatrak's generation and Count Erskyll's, he sported a pointed mustacheand a spiky chin-beard, which, on his thin and dark-eyed face, lookeddistinctly Mephistophelean. He was grinning.

  "Well, sir, I think we can call it a done job," he said. "There's adelegation here who want to talk to the Lords-Master of the ships onbehalf of the Lords-Master of the Convocation. Two of them, with about adozen portfolio-bearers and note-takers. I'm not too good in LinguaTerra, outside Basic, at best, and their brand is far from that. Igather that they're some kind of civil-servants, personalrepresentatives of the top Lords-Master."

  "Do we want to talk to them?" Shatrak asked.

  "Well, we should only talk to the actual, titular, heads of thegovernment--Mastership," Erskyll, suddenly protocol-conscious, objected."We can't negotiate with subordinates."

  "Oh, who's talking about negotiating; there isn't anything to negotiate.Aditya is now a part of the Galactic Empire. If this present regimeassents to that, they can stay in power. If not, we will toss them outand install a new government. We will receive this delegation, informthem to that effect, and send them back to relay the information totheir Lords-Master." He turned to the Commodore. "May I speak to ColonelRavney?"

  Shatrak assented. He asked Ravney where these Lords-Master were.

  "Here in the Citadel, in what they