An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire

by David : Thomas, T Thomas Drake

  “Why not?” the voice in his head asked. “At cryogenic temperatures, many substances become superconducting and ‘sensitive.’ Why do you believe this is impossible in that order of life you Humans choose to call the ‘Plant Kingdom’?”

  Riffles of laughter went around the cavern. Apparently the ’coder was broadcasting one or both sides of this conversation.

  Tad found his voice. “You can speak for these—?”

  “For these members of the ‘Animal Kingdom’? Yes, I think they will accept my advice. Now, you have a proposal for me, don’t you, Counselor?”

  “I have most of the details in my AID . . .”

  “I know. We’re questioning your little mechanical friend right now. However, you can give me the general outline—yes?”

  “We are . . . that is, the Department of Communications is . . . recruiting a ready defense force. Its objective will be to protect the Hyperwave Satellite Network and other communications assets of this Cluster in the event of civil or military crisis. We need three thousand capables, all trained or trainable in weapons technology, amenable to military discipline, and able to take direction in Lingua and respond in same.”

  The seconds ticked by and Glanville was silent, not even carrier noise from the ’coder.

  “When you reach my age,” it said slowly, “you learn that life, even the short lives of animals, is precious. Some of these ‘capables’ will have the opportunity to die—yes?”

  “They may.”

  “You are trying to project onto my mind the images of an easy life, Bertingas. Barracks living, idle hours, paperwork, games, routine, plentiful food. A few alarms, for drill perhaps, but no real fighting. Yet those are dishonest images, aren’t they?”

  Tad closed his eyes and blanked his mind.

  “Essentially,” he replied.

  “Your department would not budget to pay for such a force if you did not expect to need it. You yourself would not come here, through the barriers of distaste and personal inconvenience we have set for you, if you did not see bloody conflict in the near future. You are more disturbed by the death of the high secretary than you thought—yes?”

  Tad could feel Mora watching him. He shifted his eyes and caught her look of concern.

  “He was your High Secretary, too,” Tad said, “if your species is a Pact signatory. If there is a war for the succession, it won’t be Humans only.”

  “But it will be Humans mostly—yes? So, what will you offer these recruits that would compensate them for casting their lives into probability?”

  “Human pay scales, for starters. The right to choose their own company-level officers. However, all will be ultimately responsible to the Director of Communications, with me as his second in command.”

  “Full Pact citizenship,” Glanville countered. “Extended to families in the event of personal death. The right to live as Human equals at discharge, with no restrictions in space or time. The Bans will be broken for those who volunteer. Veterans will have first call on all new permanent positions in the Communications Department for which they may be qualified.”

  “I can’t promise all that.”

  “You will do your best—yes?”

  “Well, yes. I suppose I can try.”

  A glassine chuckle echoed in his mind.

  “That may be good enough, Counselor. You will have my best, too. The troops you seek, half of them, are even now being mustered and moved to the barracks sites selected by your capable Rinaldi—”

  “It’s too soon—we’re still in the planning—”

  “Our true master,” Glanville’s mental carrier rode over him, “has sent the order down. It will be carried out . . . The other half of your contingent you will obtain from my brother, Choora Maas. Go to him.”

  With a silvery ping, the carrier shut down and the room seemed to lose an extra dimension beyond shape. Bertingas stood there, looking at just a rind of cactus plant frozen in a bath of liquid gas.

  He turned toward Mora, saw the rest of the room, all those aliens with hidden smiles.

  “I guess that’s it,” he said to her.

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Then let’s go, shall we?”

  He took her hand and led her back across the cavern. The knots of onlookers melted away before them, the crowd meeting his eyes with amused stares. As Tad and Mora were about to step into the tunnel arch, the telecoder switched back on.

  “One more thing, Counselor.” From a distance of thirty meters, and with the bowl hidden by the intervening bodies, Glanville’s mental voice seemed depthless and blind. “And ‘No Cernians’—yes?”

  The aliens in the room shared the laughter in his voice, especially the Cernians themselves.

  Before Tad could reply, the carrier clicked off again.

  Once in the corridor, the lobsterman who had been at the desk—or another of the same color—took them to a lighted side tunnel. Cut into its far wall was the opening of a drop tube. The bony ridges of the guard’s hand settled on their shoulders . . . and shoved.

  Tad, Mora, and a kick of dust from the corridor floor spun into a lift field set far higher than any building was allowed by license. The loose white gown rose up around Tad’s hips; he sacrificed his equilibrium to use his hands for modesty. Mora just let her gown float and met his eyes with her woman’s secret smile.

  In ten seconds the field slowed and balanced them opposite an entranceway. Tad swam out and put a foot down onto the loading dock and cold storage area of a large restaurant. He reached back in and pulled Mora onto the solid flooring.

  Still hand-in-hand, they walked out into the steamy kitchen area. It was bustling with Satyrs. Amid steam and the clatter of pans and pots, they chopped, mixed, kneaded, baked, and boiled. What they were cooking, Bertingas couldn’t figure out. It looked like green bamboo, or maybe papyrus reeds. It smelled like a glue factory, with overtones of honey bucket.

  Satyrs had a Pactwide reputation as gourmands. Perhaps that was more concealment. Perhaps, too, they were cooking here for a herd of Gitchoos.

  One of the Satyrs spotted them, paused with his cleaver high, tucked it—still dripping green sap—into his hairy armpit, and dug a bundle from under his chopping block. He brought it over and put it in Tad’s hands.

  They pulled on their clothes. Tad’s AID, when he set it on a counter, squawked about rough treatment and “the bulls” giving him “the third degree.” Whatever that meant. He supposed it had been dropped and damaged somehow. Mora’s military service model AID was discreetly quiet.

  “Now what?” she asked, bent over and tying her bootlaces.

  “Now we go find Choora Maas. And get away from this smell!”

  Chapter 8

  Hildred Samwels: XENOPHOBES

  Castor and Pollux were the strangest configuration that Captain Hildred Samwels had seen in fifteen years of service with Central Fleet. They still drew his eye every time he looked up through the wall of ten-gauge pressure glass behind the admiral’s head.

  It was clearly an ephemera, a condition of instability that could not last . . . How long would it last? As a programming exercise, Samwels had once fed what was known about the pair into his AID and asked for a prediction. Fifteen hundred years, plus or minus two hundred, was the answer. Barely a strobe flash in the history of this system orbiting around the star named, ominously enough, Kali. Yet the Pact had happened to put a base here at the precise moment of grandeur.

  Castor was a massive gas giant, the primary about which Gemini Base orbited at a distance, far outside the chaff of rocks and moonlets that circled the giant. Castor’s small, dense companion was Pollux, which orbited fast and close to the larger planet’s limb. Little Pollux was more than moon and less than twin—and Samwels knew enough preclassical mythology to make the connection.

  Between the binary planets flowed a bell-shaped tube of gas, the atmosphere of Castor bleeding off to Pollux, lagging under the speed of th
e latter’s orbit. Under most conditions, a laminar flow of nearly pure hydrogen would be invisible against the black of space. However, the tube was more than a gas stream, and the gas was more than pure hydrogen. Fierce energies flowed between the two bodies. The atmosphere of Castor contained a high percentage of the noble gases: neon, argon, krypton, xenon. They absorbed those energies and discharged photons at random and gorgeous frequencies within the visible spectrum.

  Worms of red and orange wrestled with cloudbursts of green and blue. For Samwels, it was better than closing his eyes and watching the phosphenes dance. More color. What would happen when, 700-odd years from now, Pollux tipped the gravity balance with its weight of stolen atmosphere? Would the flow reverse? Would the revolution of master and moon reverse—and Pollux become the primary? That would create instabilities which Gemini Base, even at this distance, would be better off not experiencing.

  What was Pollux, anyway? A cindered-out dwarf star? A lump of pure uranium? A fist-sized fragment of neutronium? Gemini Base’s electromagnetic scanners were vague on the matter, but the probes that Samwels had sent down to the surface of Pollux disappeared without a squeak. A pauper for data, his AID was rich with speculations. It was almost a hobby with the machine, one that Samwels encouraged.

  The bridge between Castor and Pollux was a reminder to him. This system, with no inhabitable planets—no planets at all except for this antic pair—in an empty corner of the hyperbubble called Aurora Cluster, could harbor such a sight, a waterfall of light to please the Human eye. It told him that the universe was a huge place with its own designs and purposes. The universe was self-minded, ever-changing, sometimes cold and indifferent, sometimes generous with surprise . . .

  “Do you follow me, Captain?” the admiral demanded.

  “Of course, Sir. The—ah—the succession, and its effects on Central Fleet policy. Yes, Sir.”

  “Hmph! ‘Effects.’ The high secretary is our policy. Of course, you’re probably feeling a bit out of your depth here, in a staff job. Not as simple as your usual post in Engineering. There you take direct action: assess, make plans, do. Got a burned out condenser under the pinch bottle? Then you figure the man-hours in watches, line up dockage space, and fix it. Well, that’s my preference, too, Captain.”

  “That’s—”

  “But here we have to be pol-i-tick. Can’t specify and predict these civilians’ actions the way you can order a Tech Spec-2 around. Politicians are going to do what they want and figure it’s our duty to run after them with a magnetic wipe. Damn them.”

  “What will the envoy from Arachne Cluster want, Sir?”

  “His head patted every fifteen seconds, I’ll wager. Governor Spile is a man of limited capabilities, from what I’ve seen. The sort who’ll keep toadies and send them all over his neighbors on social calls. I’ll take care of him in half an hour. Then, Samwels, we must talk more about the situation out of Central Center. Decide what we’re going to do if that blind puppy Roderick is allowed to sit on his uncle’s chair.”

  “Yes, Sir . . . Uhhh, is there any word about Mora—Ms. Koskiusko—Sir?”

  “Damn girl! Goes shopping in the cluster capital and disappears. I’ve asked Thwaite to look for her, quietly. Not a man I’d trust alone with her, you understand. Not a man I trust entirely on anything—too involved with the landsiders, the traders, the political people.” The admiral paused. “You keep that kind of knowledge in this office, Captain. Still, Thwaite is on the spot, and he does have a company of Marines on Palaccio. He’ll find her. Unless she’s disappeared herself and is shacking up with some bar stud. Kill that girl. Daughters are a heartbreak. When you marry, Samwels, have only sons—and that’s an order.” The admiral smiled at his own joke.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “All right, go and get Spile’s errand boy. See what kind of fish oil he’s selling.”

  The envoy from Arachne Cluster was a war hero—from a war Samwels had never heard of. The man walked and gestured with multiple prosthetics, his spine encased in glass and tapped with electrodes. A small compressor strapped to his lower back drove the hydraulic pistons on his skeletal limbs. Above this walking.machine was a face as pale and thin as winter.

  Samwels invited the envoy into the admiral’s inner office, and the man strode past, sparing him not even a glance. A whiff of machine oil and the purr of pumps went with him. The captain withdrew and shut the hatch. In the outer office sat the envoy’s retinue: a woman in civilian dress and two men in the uniform of Cluster Command. They were older, with a gray hair here, a wrinkle there, and had the aura of a team of strangers thrown together, from different special interests, to make this official visit. Samwels read anxiety in their eyes. Their focus shifted nervously around the reception area and yet, when these people occasionally traded a word with each other, their eyes did not meet. Samwels was crossing to his own adjutant’s office, across from the admiral’s, when one of the men spoke to him.

  “Captain, what kind of armed strength would you be having here at Gemini?”

  “Enough. This is a Class 2 Cruiser Dock and Cluster Resupply. We have the cyber capacity, energy equivalents, and manpower here to patrol and protect a fifty-planet unit. Or administer a ten-planet cluster directly, in a crisis.”

  “You must have the power to win those planets, too, by conquest, I’ll bet. Very useful.”

  “Ahhh. The question isn’t likely to come up, is it, Sir?”

  “Sooner than you think, boy.”

  “Surely, we’re past those days—Sir. That’s the whole point of the Pact.”

  “The Pact is just a bookmark in the pages of history. Just a breathing space for those who have the will to believe in—argh! Get off! Bugeyes!”

  While the man had been talking, Pasqual had come up and touched him. The Dorpin was a heavy-gravity creature, built low to the ground like an earthly turtle but without the hard shell. He was nominally in the ranks as a swabbie assigned from Maintenance and Repair; his pushbroom was parked out in the corridor. Samwels knew Pasqual as a gentle soul and an innate Human psychologist to whom the noncoms and deckies took their personal problems. The touch, with one forefoot, was an aid to his hearing. (Samwels had personally seen that same foot, armed with four-inch stiletto claws under those moistly wrinkled pads, score metal in an airlock emergency.) Pasqual must have sensed a troubled spirit in the Arachnean’s face or gestures and wanted to help.

  “He only means to be kind, Sir,” Samwels said.

  “Well, he’s disgusting. I won’t be pawed by an animal.” Almost as an afterthought, the man pulled back his fist and punched the Dorpin in the snout. “Teach you, Bugeyes.”

  “Stop that!” Samwels ordered. “He is not an animal.”

  Without hearing a word of this but sensing the emotional flow, Pasqual looked up at Samwels. The captain waved him off. Using the two-finger language that Gemini Base had learned for Dorpins, he made the sign for a pile of waste. Pasqual replied with a push of his nose, sweeping up said pile, and made a smile.

  “They’re all animals,” the Arachnean concluded grandly. “Those under alien influence—even such as Merikur, who’s become a little too big for his reputation—will get what they deserve from the rest of Humanity.”

  “Really?” Samwels said coolly and began to turn away.

  “But tell me, Captain,” said the other man. “What kind of support for the Pact do you have among your other ranks? Everyone as uniformly loyal as you?”

  “You may assume the answer to that, Sir.”

  “Come now! Central Fleet’s position is not so strong that you can turn your back on all of us. There will be places in the new order for all men with latitude of vision. Even outside the confines of Arachne Cluster. Even for former captains. We will need young men who can see their rightful loyalties.”

  “I doubt you’ll find many here.”

  “Don’t hesitate too—”

  “Be still, you fools,” the woman hissed at them. “This young fanatic will b
e putting us all in irons, before Quintain has a chance to convince the old fanatic inside.”

  The three cackled among themselves, although their eyes never met. Samwels went into his office and had almost closed the hatch on them. Suddenly the facing hatch into the admiral’s office popped open. The envoy, Quintain, emerged in a series of fast jerks, his evident anger overriding the governors on his steel limbs. The three aides gathered themselves quickly and followed him out into the corridor.

  “We’ll be back, Captain.” The man who had punched Pasqual stuck his head back into the room and leered. “Don’t you—”

  “Come!” Quintain barked at him. They all bustled up the passageway in the wake of the pistoning machine-man. Samwels waited a moment, then drifted back toward the open hatchway of Admiral Koskiusko’s office. It was shameless to invite himself that way, but . . .

  “Captain Samwels!” the admiral called.

  “Yes, Sir?”

  The older man was sitting behind his desk, smoking a Nicotiana hydroponica cigar so hard and fast that the coal on the tip fairly crawled toward his mouth. And the admiral had been trying to give them up.

  “Do you know what that slimy piece of—of machinery tried to do to me? Suborn me, that’s what!”

  “How did he—?”

  “Told me I could ‘reaffirm my loyalty to the Pact’ by immediately putting Gemini under the command of Governor Spile. Those people must have worms in their heads if they can confuse a minor proconsulship with the high secretary.”

  “Of course, Sir. I found his retinue to be—”

  “I told him that neither my loyalty nor the chain of command was in question, and that neither one would permit me to even consider such an act.”

  “Good for you, Sir.”

  “So he says that Arachne Cluster is the Pact in this quadrant, and Aaron Spile is running it. Or words to that effect. Gemini will be ‘reduced’ if it doesn’t submit . . . Now what kind of Cluster Command forces are going to take—and beat, mind you—eight heavy cruisers and twenty destroyers?”