Agent of the Terran Empire

by Poul Anderson

  Flandry placed himself in the turret by Chives. “As near as I can tell,” he said, “this is going to be a terrestroid planet.” “Shall we leave a note for its future inhabitants, sir?” asked the Shalmuan, dead-pan.

  Flandry’s bark of laughter came from sheer tension. He added slowly, “It does make you wonder, though, what might have happened before Terra was born—”

  Chives held up a hand. The red light pouring in turned his green skin a hideous color. “I think that is the Merseian beam, sir.”

  Flandry glanced at the instruments. “Check. Let’s scoot.” He didn’t want the enemy radar to show two craft. He let Svantozik’s dwindle from sight while he sent the Hooligan leaping around the cluster. “We’d better come in about ten kilometers from the base, to be safely below their horizon,” he said. “Do you have them located, Chives?”

  “I think so, sir. The irregularity of the central asteroid confuses identification, but … Let me read the course, sir, while you bring us in.”

  Flandry took the controls. This would come as close to seat-of-the-pants piloting as was ever possible in space. Instruments and robots, faster and more precise than live flesh could ever hope to be, would still do most of the work; but in an unknown, shifting region like this, there must also be a brain, continuously making the basic decisions. Shall we evade this rock swarm at the price of running that ice cloud?

  He activated the negagrav screens and swooped straight for his target. No local object would have enough speed to overcome that potential and strike the hull. But sheer impact on the yielding force field could knock a small vessel galley west, dangerously straining its metal.

  Against looming nebular curtains, Flandry saw two pitted meteors come at him. They rolled and tumbled, like iron dice. He threw in a double vector, killing some forward velocity while he applied a “downward” acceleration. The Hooligan slid past. A jagged, turning cone, five kilometers long, lay ahead. Flandry whipped within meters of its surface. Something went by, so quickly his eyes registered nothing but an enigmatic fire-streak. Something else struck amidships. The impact rattled his teeth together. A brief storm of frozen gases, a comet, painted the viewscreens with red-tinged blizzard.

  Then the main asteroid swelled before him. Chives called out figures. The Hooligan slipped over the whirling rough surface. “Here!” cried Chives. Flandry slammed to a halt. “Sir,” added the Shalmuan. Flandry eased down with great care. Silence fell. Blackness lowered beyond the hull. They had landed.

  “Stand by,” said Flandry. Chives’ green face grew mutinous. “That’s an order,” he added, knowing how he hurt the other being, but without choice in the matter. “We may possibly need a fast get-away. Or a fast pursuit. Or, if everything goes wrong, someone to report back to Walton.”

  “Yes, sir.” Chives could scarcely be heard. Flandry left him bowed over the control panel.

  His crew, minus the two humans with Svantozik, were already in combat armor. A nuclear howitzer was mounted on the Donarrian’s centauroid back, a man astride to fire it. The pieces of a rocket launcher slanted across the two Gorzuni’s double shoulders. The Scothanian cried a war chant and swung his pet wrecking bar so the air whistled. The remaining five men formed a squad in one quick metallic clash.

  Flandry put on his own suit and led the way out.

  He stood in starless night. Only the wan glow from detector dials, and the puddle of light thrown in vacuum by a flashbeam, showed him that his eyes still saw. But as they adjusted, he could make out the very dimmest of cloudy red above him, and blood-drop sparks where satellite meteors caught sunlight. The gravity underfoot was so low that even in armor he was near weightlessness. Yet his inertia was the same. It felt like walking beneath some infinite ocean.

  He checked the portable neutrino tracer. In this roil of nebular matter, all instruments were troubled, the dust spoke in every spectrum, a million-year birth cry. But there was clearly a small nuclear-energy plant ahead. And that could only belong to one place.

  “Join hands,” said Flandry. “We don’t want to wander from each other. Radio silence, of course. Let’s go.”

  They bounded over the invisible surface. It was irregular, often made slick by frozen gas. Once there was a shudder in the ground, and a roar traveling through their bootsoles. Some giant boulder had crashed.

  Then the sun rose, vast and vague on the topplingly near horizon, and poured ember light across ice and iron. It climbed with visible speed. Flandry’s gang released hands and fell into approach tactics: dodge from pit to crag, wait, watch, make another long flat leap. In their black armor, they were merely a set of moving shadows among many.

  The Merseian dome came into view. It was a blue hemisphere, purple in this light, nestled into a broad shallow crater. On the heights around there squatted negafield generators, to maintain a veil of force against the stony rain. It had been briefly turned off to permit Svantozik’s landing: the squat black flitter sat under a scarp, two kilometers from the dome. A small fast warcraft — pure Merseian, the final proof — berthed next to the shelter, for the use of the twenty or so beings whom it would accommodate. The ship’s bow gun was aimed at the Ardazirho boat. Routine precaution, and there were no other defenses. What had the Merseians to fear?

  Flandry crouched on the rim and tuned his radio. Svantozik’s beam dispersed enough for him to listen to the conversation: ” — no, my lords, this visit is on my own initiative. I encountered a situation on Vixen so urgent that I felt it should be made known to you at once, rather than delaying to stop at Ardazir—” Just gabble, bluffing into blindness, to gain time for Flandry’s attack.

  The man checked his crew. One by one, they made the swab-O sign. He led them forward. The force field did not touch ground; they slithered beneath it, down the crater wall, and wormed toward the dome. The rough, shadow-blotted rock gave ample cover.

  Flandry’s plan was simple. He would sneak up close to the place and put a low-powered shell through. Air would gush out, the Merseians would die, and he could investigate their papers at leisure. With an outnumbered band, and so much urgency, he could not afford to be chivalrous.

  “ — thus you see, my lords, it appeared to me the Terrans—” “All hands to space armor! We are being attacked!” The shout ripped at Flandry’s earphones. It had been in the Merseian Prime language, but not a Merseian voice. Somehow, incredibly, his approach had been detected.

  “The Ardazirho is on their side! Destroy him!” Flandry hit the ground. An instant later, it rocked. Through all the armor, he felt a sickening belly blow. It seemed as if he saw the brief thermonuclear blaze through closed lids and a sheltering arm.

  Without air for concussion, the shot only wiped out Svantozik’s boat. Volatilized iron whirled up, condensed, and sleeted down again. The asteroid shuddered to quiescence. Flandry leaped up. There was a strange dry weeping in his throat. He knew, with a small guiltiness, that he mourned more for Svantozik of the Janneer Ya than he did for the two humans who had died.

  “ — attacking party is about sixteen degrees north o/ the sunrise point, 300 meters from the dome—”

  The gun turret of the Merseian warship swiveled about.

  The Donarrian was already a-gallop. The armored man on his back clung tight, readying his weapon. As the enemy gun found its aim, the nuclear howitzer spoke.

  That was a lesser blast. But the sun was drowned in its noiseless blue-white hell-dazzle. Half the spaceship went up in a fiery cloud, a ball which changed from white to violet to rosy red, swelled away and was lost in the nebular sky. The stern tottered, a shaken stump down which molten steel crawled. Then, slowly, it fell. It struck the crater floor and rolled earthquaking to the cliffs, where it vibrated and was still.

  Flandry opened his eyes again to cold wan light. “Get at them!” he bawled.

  The Donarrian loped back. The Gorzuni were crouched, their rocket launcher assembled in seconds, its chemical missile aimed
at the dome. “Shoot!” cried Flandry. It echoed in his helmet. The cosmic radio noise buzzed and mumbled beneath his command.

  Flame and smoke exploded at the point of impact. A hole gaped in the dome, and air rushed out. Its moisture froze; a thin fog overlay the crater. Then it began to settle, but with slowness in this gravitational field, so that mists whirled around Flandry’s crew as they plunged to battle.

  The Merseians came swarming forth. There were almost a score, Flandry saw, who had had time to throw on armor after being warned. They crouched big and black in metal, articulated tail-plates lashing their boots with rage. Behind faceless helmets, the heavy mouths must be drawn into snarls. Their hoarse calls boomed over the man’s earphones.

  He raced forward. The blast from their sidearms sheeted over him. He felt heat glow through insulation, his nerves shrank from it. Then he was past the concerted barrage.

  A dinosaurian shape met him. The Merseian held a blaster, focused to needle beam. Its flame gnawed at Flandry’s cuirass.

  The man’s own energy gun spat — straight at the other weapon. The Merseian roared and tried to shelter his gun with an armored hand. Flandry held his beam steady. The battle gauntlet began to glow. The Merseian dropped his blaster with a shriek of anguish. He made a low-gravity leap toward his opponent, whipped around, and slapped with his tail.

  The blow smashed at Flandry. He went tumbling across the ground, fetched against the dome with a force that stunned him, and sagged there. The Merseian closed in. His mighty hands snatched after the Terran’s weapon. Flandry made a judo break: yanking his wrist out between the Merseian’s fingers and thumb. He kept his gun arm in motion, till he poked the barrel into the enemy’s eye slit. He pulled trigger. The Merseian staggered back. Flandry followed, close in, evading all frantic attempts to break free of him. A second, two seconds, three, four, then his beam had pierced the thick super-glass. The Merseian fell, gruesomely slow.

  Flandry’s breath was harsh in his throat. He glared through the drifting red streamers of fog, seeking to understand what went on. His men were outnumbered still, but that was being whittled down. The Donarrian hurled Merseians to earth, tossed them against rocks, kicked and stamped with enough force to kill them through their armor by sheer concussion. The Gorzuni stood side by side, a blaster aflame in each of their hands; no metal could long withstand that concentration of fire. The Scothanian bounced, inhumanly swift, his wrecking bar leaping in and out like a battle ax — strike, pry, hammer at vulnerable joints and connections, till something gave way and air bled out. And the humans were live machines, bleakly wielding blaster and slug gun, throwing grenades and knocking Merseian weapons aside with karate blows. Two of them were down, dead; one slumped against the dome, and Flandry heard his pain over the radio. But there were more enemy casualties strewn over the crater. The Terrans were winning. In spite of all, they were winning.

  But—

  Flandry’s eyes swept the scene. Someone, somehow, had suddenly realized that a band of skilled space fighters was stealing under excellent cover toward the dome. There was no way Flandry knew of to be certain of that, without instruments he had not seen planted around. Except—

  Yes. He saw the tall gaunt figure mounting a cliff. Briefly it was etched against the bloody sun, then it slipped from view.

  Aycharaych had been here after all.

  No men could be spared from combat, even if they could break away. Flandry bounded off himself.

  He topped the ringwall in three leaps. A black jumble of rocks fell away before him. He could not see any flitting shape, but in this weird shadowy land eyes were almost useless at a distance. He knew, though, which way Aycharaych was headed. There was only one escape from the nebula now, and the Chereionite had gotten what information he required from human minds.

  Flandry began to travel. Leap — not high, or you will take forever to come down again — long, low bounds, with the dark metallic world streaming away beneath you and the firecoal sun slipping toward night again: silence, death, and aloneness. If you die here, your body will be crushed beneath falling continents, your atoms will be locked for eternity in the core of a planet.

  A ray flared against his helmet. He dropped to the ground, before he had even thought. He lay in a small crater, blanketed with shadow, and stared into the featureless black wall of a giant meteor facing away from the sun. Somewhere on its slope—

  Aycharaych’s Anglic words came gentle, “You can move faster than I. You could reach your vessel before me and warn your subordinate. I can only get in by a ruse, of course. He will hear me speak on the radio in a disguised voice of things known only to him and yourself, and will not see me until I have been admitted. And that will be too late for him. But first I must complete your life, Captain Flandry.”

  The man crouched deeper into murk. He felt the near-absolute cold of the rock creep through armor and touch his skin. “You’ve tried often enough before,” he said.

  Aycharaych’s chuckle was purest music. “Yes, I really thought I had said farewell to you, that night at the Crystal Moon. It seemed probable you would be sent to Jupiter — I have studied Admiral Fenross with care — and Horx had been instructed to kill the next Terran agent. My appearance at the feast was largely sentimental. You have been an ornament of my reality, and I could not deny myself a final conversation.”

  “My friend,” grated Flandry, “you’re about as sentimental as a block of solid helium. You wanted us to know about your presence. You foresaw it would alarm us enough to focus our attention on Syrax, where you hinted you would go next — what part of our attention that superb red-herring operation had not fastened on Ymir. You had our Intelligence men swarming around Jupiter and out in the Cluster, going frantic in search of your handiwork: leaving you free to manipulate Ardazir.”

  “My egotism will miss you,” said Aycharaych coolly. “You alone, in this degraded age, can fully appreciate my efforts, or censure them intelligently when I fail. This time, the unanticipated thing was that you would survive on Jupiter. Your subsequent assignment to Vixen has, naturally, proven catastrophic for us. I hope now to remedy that disaster, but—” The philosopher awoke. Flandry could all but see Aycharaych’s ruddy eyes filmed over with a vision of some infinitude humans had never grasped. “It is not certain. The totality of existence will always elude us: and in that mystery lies the very meaning. How I pity immortal God!”

  Flandry jumped out of the crater.

  Aycharaych’s weapon spat. Flame splashed off the man’s armor. Reflex — a mistake, for now Flandry knew where Aycharaych was, the Chereionite could not get away — comforting to realize, in this querning of worlds, that an enemy who saw twenty years ahead, and had controlled whole races like a hidden fate, could also make mistakes.

  Flandry sprang up onto the meteor. He crashed against Aycharaych.

  The blaster fired point-blank. Flandry’s hand chopped down. Aycharaych’s wrist did not snap across, the armor protected it. But the gun went spinning down into darkness. Flandry snatched for his own weapon. Aycharaych read the intention and closed in, wrestling. They staggered about on the meteor in each other’s arms. The sinking sun poured its baleful light across them: and Aycharaych could see better by it than Flandry. In minutes, when night fell, the man would be altogether blind and the Chereionite could take victory.

  Aycharaych thrust a leg behind the man’s and pushed. Flandry toppled. His opponent retreated. But Flandry fell slowly enough that he managed to seize the other’s waist. They rolled down the slope together. Aycharaych’s breath whistled in the radio, a hawk sound. Even in the clumsy spacesuit, he seemed like water, nearly impossible to keep a grip on.

  They struck bottom. Flandry got his legs around the Chereionite’s. He wriggled himself onto the back and groped after flailing limbs. A forearm around the alien helmet — he couldn’t strangle, but he could immobilize and — his hands clamped on a wrist. He jerked hard.

 
A trill went through his radio. The struggle ceased. He lay atop his prisoner, gasping for air. The sun sank, and blackness closed about them.

  “I fear you broke my elbow joint there,” said Aycharaych. “I must concede.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Flandry, and he was nothing but honest. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “In the end,” sighed Aycharaych, and Flandry had never heard so deep a soul-weariness, “I am beaten not by a superior brain or a higher justice, but by the brute fact that you are from a larger planet than I and thus have stronger muscles. It will not be easy to fit this into a harmonious reality.”

  Flandry unholstered his blaster and began to weld their sleeves together. Broken arm or not, he was taking no chances.

  Bad enough to have that great watching mind next to his for the time needed to reach the flitter.

  Aycharaych’s tone grew light again, almost amused: “I would like to refresh myself with your pleasure. So, since you will read the fact anyway in our papers, I shall tell you now that the overlords of Urdahu will arrive here for conference in five Terran days.”

  Flandry grew rigid. Glory blazed within him. A single shell-burst, and Ardazir was headless!

  Gradually the stiffness and the splendor departed. He finished securing his captive. They helped each other up. “Come along,” said the human. “I’ve work to do.”

  XVIII

  Cerulia did not lie anywhere near the route between Syrax and Sol. But Flandry went home that way. He didn’t quite know why. Certainly it was not with any large willingness.

  He landed at Vixen’s main spaceport. “I imagine I’ll be back in a few hours, Chives,” he said. “Keep the pizza flying.” He went lithely down the gangway, passed quarantine in a whirl of gold and scarlet, and caught an airtaxi to Garth.

  The town lay peaceful in its midsummer. Now, at apastron, with Vixen’s atmosphere to filter its radiation, the sun might almost have been Sol: smaller, brighter, but gentle in a blue sky where tall white clouds walked. Fields reached green to the Shaw; a river gleamed; the snowpeaks of the Ridge hovered dreamlike at world’s edge.