Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War

by Jerry Pournelle

Eyes on Make Ready, the duke brought up his right hand.

  Lord Mardy thrust past the guard, reaching out a hand. "Not yet, sire. Ask the youth why."

  Make Ready swallowed. Despite the menacing doigt, this was no ogre to fear. This was his father. His nervousness passed. He said, "Sire, your gene-man signals to someone. I fear he wishes me ill."

  The duke frowned. "Why should Messer Greville wish you ill, boy?"

  Make Ready responded in his mère's old penal patois. "Sieur, sh'm'appelle—I am called Mercredi, son of Semée La Douce, who was a transportee from Pont des Larmes in Lontaine France. My mère loved an inconnu who abandoned her with an unborn child."

  The duke raised his eyebrows. "That is not an unusual story, lad. Why choose to tell me?"

  Make Ready hoped he had the right answer. "Because, sire, the child inherited a finger which right now is scaring your scruffy vassal silly."

  Lord Mardy, still gripping the duke's arm, whispered, "Sir—he's claiming to have the doigt!"

  "Helix!" the duke snapped. "I know that. What do I do about him? I don't want to lose Greville. This wild youth wants to blight him."

  Lord Mardy's eyes gleamed with wariness. "If he can do that, we don't want to lose him either." He raised his voice. "Lad! Put down your doigt! I guarantee your life."

  Make Ready felt perspiration on his forehead. Greville was eyeing him with open malevolence. The duke still dithered over his execution. Lord Mardy's eyes pleaded. Make Ready slowly lowered his threatening finger.

  Larry Greville's glance flicked along the allée. His fingers moved swiftly. Faster still, Lord Mardy's hand came up. Lightning hissed from the tip of his doigt, stabbing at a figure which had appeared in the allée. The figure dropped a musket, and crumpled, cloak smoking.

  "Greville!" snarled the duke. "That's enough. Send your men away. Then leave us."

  They watched the geneticist go. Lord Mardy examined a hole in his fingerstall. He grinned at Make Ready. "That's a new doigt-clout you owe me, brother."

  The duke surveyed Make Ready grimly. "My son seems to have made up his mind somewhat prematurely. Did you intend to blight my gene man?"

  Make Ready's mind raced. How should a street arab respond to a noble parent of brief acquaintance, who was surely bound to discover that he had been hoodwinked about a crucial part of that urchin's anatomy?

  Only the truth would do. Make Ready went down on one knee. "Sire," he confessed. "I couldn't do no harm to Messer Greville. My doigt hasn't yet come on song. But Messer Greville didn't know that."

  Duke Corwen Persay shook his head in reproof. "A risky trick, boy. But for Lord Mardy, you'd be carrion now."

  Out of the corner of his eye, Make Ready saw them carrying the smoking corpse from the allée. He inched his gaze upwards from the duke's shoes. "I was hoping you'd see fair play, sir."

  The duke's eyebrows climbed towards his flat cap. "Oh—an arbiter, am I? Between my loyal retainers and any young hoodlum who chooses to threaten them?"

  Make Ready lowered his eyes again. "No, sir. But I thought you wouldn't see one of your subjects killed without reason."

  The duke grunted. "Boy, I've killed dozens of my subjects, myself, without a shred of reason. If you had so much as pointed that dummy doigt in my direction my guards would have cut you down without any objection from me."

  Make Ready kept his head down. "You are the duke, sir, and you can get away with it. Messer Greville don't have your authority."

  The duke glanced at Lord Mardy. "By Helix—a pocket diplomat, too!" His voice grew harsh. "Boy, how did you come by a copy of my costume?"

  Make Ready kept a quaver out of his voice. "Sir, I was told how you would be dressed. I thought I couldn't have a better model."

  "And a courtier!" The duke scowled. "You must have allies in the Chateau. Who is your accomplice?"

  Make Ready thought of Bregonif, waiting anxiously with the gremgaurs. The man would be in trouble enough, without help from him. He stammered, "I—I'd rather not say, sir."

  "And loyal, to boot!" The duke sighed. "I have efficient torturers, boy. Would you face them?"

  Make Ready began to tremble. Too late now, to cut and run. What price his smartalick ideas of embarrassing the Grand Maitre! He said, "I'm not keen, sir."

  He heard the duke's laugh. Felt himself pulled to his feet. The duke spoke in the old penal tongue. "Leve-toi, garçon! Get up, boy. Where did you learn the langue? I haven't used it for years."

  Make Ready responded in the same patois. "Sir, it was my mère's tongue when she first came to High Barbary."

  The duke's face saddened. "That's true. I recall teaching her how to pronounce some fairly useless phrases in our modern argot. Where is she now?"

  Make Ready shrugged. "Sir, I haven't seen, nor heard, from her since I was seven years old."

  "And you are now?"

  "Seventeen—I think, sir."

  "Show me your doigt!"

  Make Ready pulled off the fingerstall. The duke took the blackened digit gently in his hand. He turned to his elder son. "This has a few years to go, Mardy. Yet the lad scared the mighty Greville with it!"

  Lord Mardy was grinning. "A genuine chip off the Persay block, sir. No one else would dare that kind of trick."

  The duke extended his arms to Make Ready. "Come, son, we have tormented you enough. It's time you took your rightful place in the world."

  Make Ready went with him, reckless of the consequences.

  And the watcher at the end of the allée turned away. Skirting the market stalls, he made circuitously for the sunken garden below the Chateau. Pausing by a marble ballustrade, he waved to the cloaked man who waited at the foot of the steps with three gremgaurs. Bregonif would be pleased to know that the sixlegs wouldn't be required. That his extra five years were a certainty.

  The healer smiled. There might be benefits for others who had helped, too.

  Hector Garman, when he heard the news, hurried home to report to his secret masters that a new doigt had been found to replace Lord Cledger's.

  And, as daylight faded, Make Ready stepped out into the Chateau gardens. Omkrit II, the evening star, gleamed above the treetops.

  Make Ready shook his fist at it. What was fantasy for a Kelmet street arab might be possible for a noble of Mary Cage. One day, he would discover who lived up there in Lontaine France—and why they had sent his mère to exile in High Barbary.

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Yellow Rain And Space Wars

  Adrian Berry

  Science may save us; it also has its dangers.

  I first met Adrian Berry at one of the scientific cocktail parties Larry Niven and I give at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Adrian is the Science Correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. His book The Iron Sun is magnificent, as is the older The Next Ten Thousand Years. If you haven't discovered Adrian Berry, go out and do so immediately. You'll do yourself quite a favor.

  Adrian Berry writes of real futures: of real star wars; and it is no accident that these two essays are presented together.

  Yellow Rain

  Adrian Berry

  He will practise against thee by poison.

  "As You Like It"

  For centuries, communities from Europe to Asia died in agony in huge numbers when their bread became polluted by virulent fungus poisons. Soviet scientists isolated these poisons in the 1930s, and have since been mass-producing them as a means of mass murder.

  Most of the advanced nations, it is true, either manufacture or carry out research into chemical weaponry. But the Soviet Union and its allies have outstripped all others in the intensity of their devotion to the development and use of poison.

  What are these substances? The most lethal toxins used in modern warfare are still the hideous natural poisons that one associates with the Dark Ages, rather than any synthetic material created in the laboratory.

  Democratic countr
ies have been pitifully slow to recognize and counteract the advances which Eastern dictatorships have made in this field. It comes as a dark surprise to today's Western mind that the technological societies of the Communist bloc are but a veneer on a base of mediaeval barbarism, in which poisons extracted from herbs, fungi, snakes, amphibians, and fishes are often the most favored way of getting rid of an enemy.

  It was in this tradition that the Soviet Union began its 1980 invasion of Afghanistan with the most terrible arsenal of offensive chemical weapons used by any army in history. Countless Moslem rebels died in convulsions from attacks by clouds of "yellow rain".

  Nor should there be too much surprise at the manner of their death. To quote from an excellent book on chemical warfare, "the Red Army demonstrates a military psychology that makes it possible to use war poisons without hesitation, as simply another weapon." [Yellow Rain: A Journey through the terror of Chemical Warfare, Sterling Seagrave (M. Evans and Co., New York).]

  Let us look at the history of one such poison: ergot, a fungus toxin which has been known for nearly 3,000 years. An Assyrian tablet of 600 BC first mentions it as a noxious pustule found on ears of grain. It probably caused the plague which nearly destroyed Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, when starving people were forced to eat bad bread. It caused mayhem in Duisberg, Germany, in 857 AD, and in wide areas of France in 943.

  A French chronicler of that year speaks of people "shrieking and writhing, rolling like wheels, foaming in epileptic convulsions, their limbs turning black and bursting open." Then he explains: "The bread of the people of Limoges became transformed upon their tables. When it was cut it proved to be wet, and the inside poured out as a black, sticky substance."

  The cause of these horrors which became endemic among the ignorant peasantry was bad harvesting and grain storage, that permitted fungal growths on bread. Ergot, and similar fungal poisons, specially treated in Soviet laboratories, are nowadays used against rebel villages in Laos and Afghanistan, as Mr. Seagrave's book reveals in detail.

  For mass killings or for individual murder, the ancient poisons are proving most efficacious. The Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, hated in Sofia for his BBC broadcasts, was murdered in London in 1978 by an agent using an umbrella tipped with ricin, from the castor bean, which the murderer had boasted in a telephone threat to Markov "is a poison the West cannot detect or treat."

  The greatest danger of all is that some group of ill-intentioned people might seek to combine the ancient poisons with the techniques of modern science to create a new weapon of unprecedented frightfulness.

  It could happen like this. Genetic engineering, the laboratory manufacture of microbes through the alteration of genes, promises much for better medicines. But this hopeful new technology could be perverted to make a "monster microbe" that would colonize the human intestine with "pili," or tentacles, with which to adhere to its walls. For such a poison, there might be neither treatment nor antidote, and anti-bodies would accept it as being normal. A vial of it dropped in the water supply of a few major cities could, within days, produce a catastrophe to rival the Black Death.

  One scientist who has warned of just such a danger is Professor Donald B. Louria, of the New Jersey Medical School. Explaining his worst fears, Professor Louria has said: "One microbiologist with whom I discussed this scenario said it could not happen because the experimenters themselves could not avoid becoming victims.

  "But this is nonsense. They could immunize themselves against pili before the toxins were added, so that the bacteria could not take hold in their intestinal tracts. I believe there are those among us on this planet so venal, so committed to achieving power, or simply so mentally warped, that they would do exactly as I have outlined."

  One doesn't have to be a geographical genius to predict just who these people might be. That is, if they thought they could get away with it.

  SPACE WARS

  This decade is likely to present greater dangers to mankind than any since the end of World War II. If the Soviet Union succeeds in placing an operational laser battle station in orbit while the Americans fail to do the same, the free world will be at the mercy of its enemies, most of its strategic weapons rendered useless.

  The reason is simple. A laser beam fired in the vacuum of space can, or will soon be able to, punch fist-sized holes in metal objects at a range of hundreds of miles. This means that American intercontinental ballistic missiles, which make some of their journey through space, could all be destroyed before they reach their targets.

  Nor will Western missiles that travel to their targets without leaving the Earth's atmosphere, like the Cruise and the Lance, be necessarily safe from enemy battle stations in orbit. While the energy of laser beams can dissipate in air, especially on cloudy days, this is not true of weapons which shoot beams of charged particles.

  Polaris submarines will soon be at risk from spy satellites. For many years they have been safe in the secret depths of the oceans, able to inflict more damage on the Soviet Union in the space of four minutes than Hitler did in four years. But this is unlikely to be true for much longer. The Russians have a large and growing fleet of space-borne anti-submarine satellites, with a developing ability to detect the infra-red "scar" which a submarine leaves on the surface, enabling them to track its movements.

  In short, with space warfare, strategic weapons are entering a new realm of technology. Thanks to four inactive years during the Carter Administration, the Russians have gained a substantial advantage in their efforts to acquire the ability to destroy Western strategic forces totally and without warning. Unless America acts with determination, we may be faced in this decade with the choice between surrender or destruction.

  Not being privy to the councils of the Pentagon, we cannot be sure whether the Americans are reacting to this crisis with sufficient speed and vigour. It is only possible to be certain of one thing: that the space shuttle, a quarter of whose flights will be military in purpose, will add enormously to America's ability to place weapons in orbit. And weapons there are needed above all else.

  Only if the new Soviet threat is successfully countered can there be hope for continuing the mutual balance of terror, which has prevented war between the superpowers for more than 30 years, and which now is trembling so dangerously.

  The old balance, consisting of thousands of missiles in their silos, will give way to dependence on electromagnetic weapons which move their targets, not at a cumbrous 17,000 mph, but at the speed of light, 670 million mph. This, like previous great advances in military technology, is likely to lead in turn to new social developments. Let us try to predict what they will be. The first consideration is that the existence of opposing laser battle stations in orbit, each holding the strategic forces of their client state in pawn, will not be the end of the cold war in space. Battle stations can themselves be attacked, and those weapons which threaten them will in turn be vulnerable to assault. The race will be on to construct the "ultimate" space weapon, a battle station so powerful and with such impregnable defences that all objects in low Earth orbit will be at its mercy.

  One of the two safe places to install such a weapon will be beneath the surface of the moon. On the moon? At first sight, the idea must seem crazy, but it is being seriously considered as a long-term contingency plan by specialist groups at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and at Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska.

  Consider the advantages of a manned lunar laser battle station. The only remaining technical obstacle is the creation of a laser with sufficient power and narrowness of beam to destroy space vehicles at a range of 238,000 miles. But once installed it would be almost impossible to find, since it could be hidden anywhere among the moon's craters and canyons. It could not be destroyed by an opposing laser, since the enemy would not know where to fire. Nor could it be immobilized by a nuclear missile, since the approaching warhead would itself be vulnerable to the laser.

  Building the station will, of course, require
considerable preparations which can be observed by telescope. Would this reveal its intended location? Perhaps not. We speak now of a period 20 to 50 years hence, when civilian activity is likely to be taking place on the moon on a large scale. In this situation, military construction can be concealed. Peaceful technology is likely to follow the military lead into space, as it has in so many fields. As in the empires of old, the merchant will walk in the tracks of the army.

  But the lunar battle station will have one disadvantage. It will only be effective in deterring aggression for about half the day. Anyone can verify, by playing with a small globe, that there are several missile flight-paths between Russia and key Western targets which, for some parts of the day, will not be in line of sight of the moon.

  A Superpower desiring absolute command over the Earth would therefore need at least two more battle stations in deep space, so that all parts of low Earth orbit could be covered round the clock.