The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  THE STARKAHN OF RHADA

  Robert Cham Gilman

  The fourth book in the Rhada series

  Copyright © 1970 by Robert Cham Gilman. Cover art by Kevin Johnson. All rights reserved.

  An Ace Science Fiction Book. Published by arrangement with the author

  ISBN: 0-441-78205-1

  Prologue

  In the beginning was Earth, and Earth’s First Stellar Empire. Before the First Empire were ten thousand years of man’s yearning to reach the stars.

  For a few short decades in the heart of that beginning, man reached farther still, beyond the galaxy, to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. This was Transportation, the Long Death--the voyage had many names. An expanding society cast out its misfits and criminals: cast them beyond the Rim of the main galaxy and into oblivion.

  In time, gentler methods were found to deal with society’s unwanted, and men no longer died the Long Death. And there came wars and times of trouble; the First Empire struggled to survive and did not. The transportees were long forgotten.

  The First Empire died in fire and blood, and there was the Interregnum--the Dark Age. Nyor, queen city of the skies, became a village, a ruin, and then, in the fullness of time, a town, a city, a capital once again. On the brow of Tel-Manhat, between the two rivers, Nyor ruled a planet, then a solar system, and, finally, the Second Stellar Empire. And her vessels, crewed by men of a thousand client nations, again roamed the galaxy. Such is the cyclic nature of history.

  But wherever man’s seed has been planted--there, too, is history. And endeavor. And purpose...

  The great black ship orbited the white dwarf star at a distance of one hundred ninety-seven million kilometers in this, its eight thousandth winter season: a starship unlike any seen by men of the main galaxy since time out of mind. Larger than a small planetoid, its great size humbled even the ancient starships of the First Empire. Yet it strangely resembled them. From blunt nose to oddly flattened tail, it measured seventeen kilometers; in diameter, something over five. The light of the blue-white star was deadened by the dull black metal. The immense craft had a sullen, menacing look to it. Peculiarly formed antennae and projections hinted at an inhuman technology, a perverse and hostile science.

  The ship spun slowly. Once in each forty-three Earth Standard Hours it exposed the totality of its billion metric tons to the glare of the distant, deadly star. Once in eighty-four years, it circled its primary. It had orbited here (around a star so obscure it had no name, only a number) in the densely starred galactic center almost one hundred times since it had first appeared in the nebular mist during a violent plasma storm.

  Seen from a distance of a dozen kilometers, the huge hull would blot out a quarter of the blazing, starry sky. The metal of its flanks was pitted and scarred by the impact of billions upon billions of tiny particles and dust motes. The distance it had traveled was near to meaningless when expressed in kilometers. It had completed its journey while the Galactons of the time men still called the Golden Age ruled a million worlds. Helpless, it had waited through the Dark Time, through the centuries of the Second Empire’s infancy, through the new Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, unable to awaken the single being within its gargantuan hull.

  Inside, all was darkness. The generators and sensors and servo-control mechanisms of the ship’s violent weapons systems were intact. They were superb devices, for all the technology of an embittered civilization had gone into their construction. More than thirty variations of solar-phoenix disruptors had been incorporated into the great black vessel’s offensive power. Any one of a hundred weapons on board could destroy a star, many stars.

  But to activate the ship, the builders had decreed that organic life must be aboard and conscious. The brain waves of a living human being were the keys unlocking Armageddon.

  And the immense ship could not perform the simple task of awakening the being who lay in death sleep, preserved from time in a life-support capsule. Somewhere on its long, long voyage between the galaxies, the ship’s primitive brain had been damaged. It was an engine of total, absolute war: the most vicious engine of destruction ever conceived by the mind of man. Still, no machine is proof against the hazards of the cosmos. Somewhere, millennia earlier and in the intergalactic deeps, a storm of radiation had scrambled the circuitry of the vessel’s protonic brain. The computer signals intended to awaken the starship’s single occupant on arrival had never been given.

  Undiscovered, the great black starship might sleep forever.

  So it swung in its lonely orbit around the white dwarf star that, in time, men came to discover through telescopes and to which they gave the name Delphinus 2380. Within the massive hull lay a single Homo Magellansis: almost human, not living, not dead.

  Until--

  Chapter One

  Rhada, as we all know, is a nation of planets on the Rim of the galaxy. It produces brave men. Not always wise, mark you, but courageous. That is why I have made it my business to insure that the Rhad shall always be faithful to the Empire.

  Attributed to Glamiss the Magnificent, first Galacton of the Second Stellar Empire,

  after the Battle of Karma

  The Rhad are the bane of historians and the delight of generals, for they are the most foolhardy of men.

  Mattias ben Mullerium,

  The History of the Rhadan Republic,

  late Second Stellar Empire period

  I discovered it. So, being a Rhadan, I naturally found myself about to take a typically Rhadan plunge into the unknown. The specter of a Court of Inquiry nagged at my well-schooled military mind, but the ghosts of a hundred generations of warmen and princes said, “Go on!”

  I stood at the lip of a dark pit, an open shaft in the flank of a starship so vast and so forbidding that it made my presence aboard dreamlike, nightmarish.

  The shaft was black--blacker, even, than the dark metal of the monster vessel. The darkness swallowed the feeble beam of my light. I had the heart-squeezing notion that the blackness extended on through the ship to infinity, that if I committed myself to free fall and started down, I might plunge through the fabric of the familiar universe and through some terrifying star gate into another time, another dimension.

  I realized, standing there in my space armor, the very picture of a soldier of the Empire, that I was not the stuff of which heroes are made. Heroes, I had always been led to believe, were men without fear: giants of character and intrepidity. My ancestors were like that: Kier, the Rebel of Rhada, for whom I was named, could never have known this gut-freezing fear. Surely not?

  Yet here I was, formidable in armor, standing in open space on the flank of the most frightening derelict I had ever encountered in all my service with the Fleet.

  My only contact with the familiar world of the Empire was Ariane. I could see her, a manta-shaped ADSPS cyborg, floating a kilometer or so distant, outlined against the glowing plasmas of the galactic center. It was all I could do to refrain from jetting to her and admitting that she had been right in disapproving my foolhardy decision to invade the mysterious great derelict alone. I could feel her concern flowing past the emotion-suppressing circuitry of the encephalophone.

  Ariane, named for a queen, often behaved like one. An Armed Deep Space Probe Ship cyborg, she was a Fleet officer like myself and a full citizen of the Empire. As great as the ancients of the First Empire might have been, they never built anything to compare with Ariane and her fellow cyborgs of the Imperial Fleet’s Survey Wing. The rest of the Empire’s forces flew, at that time, the cumbersome antiques of the past: ships, not living beings. But the Survey Wing officers flew in company with ADSPS cyborgs, which even antiquarians must admit are the pinnacle of human space-technology.

&nb
sp; Ariane said sharply, “What’s happening?”

  Ariane was receiving all my biosensor transmissions, of course, so she knew as well as I what was happening. (At the moment, all that was taking place was that I was nerving myself for the next step--over the edge of the shaft into the derelict.) But she was a female cyborg and liked to be told.

  “I’m getting ready,” I said subvocally into the E-phone.

  “Your heart rate is up,” the cyborg informed me mercilessly.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Standing by,” she said. “Be careful.”

  The homey admonition was warming but hardly necessary. At my feet lay what seemed to be all the darkness in the universe. The slow rotation of the derelict gave me a slight negative gravity. I felt as though I might break free of my tenuous magnetic grip on the slope of the great metal planetoid and float out into the glowing plasma. Even this seemed preferable to plunging ahead into the black heart of the shaft, no matter what the shades of my noble ancestors urged me to do.

  The white light of the Delphinus star glinted on Ariane’s polished surfaces. She seemed to symbolize all safety and comfort, all the warmth of the loved and familiar. There was no ducking it: I was terrified. Training and heredity prevented me from crying out in fear, but that was all.

  And I had come here--alone--at my own choice, against Ariane’s recommendations, against Fleet regulations, and I had no one to blame but myself. I had left no options. I must go forward, or rather “down,” into that Stygian darkness where there was no “down,” no “up,” no reference of any sort. And far worse, somewhere, in the miles of metal beneath my feet, a life-support system was functioning, keeping alive--what?

  The price of heroics can be high for a dedicated nonhero. But I was a Rhad. In fact, I was the most Rhad of the Rhad, the Rhad Starkahn. In an earlier age, I would have been a king. The need to be courageous was upon me, for good or ill.

  “I feel a bit disoriented,” I said. It was my first extravehicular activity in space for months.

  “Take a gravigen,” Ariane ordered.

  I activated my feeder and swallowed the bitter-tasting pill dry. It stuck in my throat. I shifted my weight and had to bum a thruster to hold myself in place on the metal landscape.

  “Easy,” cautioned Ariane. “There is an antenna array behind you. I think they are inert, but the Star knows what sort of radiation they emit. Stay clear of them.”

  “I’d better start down,” I said hoarsely.

  “Look around a bit first.” The cyborg was as apprehensive as I, that was obvious. My heart overflowed with gratitude and affection for her.

  I said, “No. I’d better do it now.” I didn’t finish the thought: Or I won’t do it all.

  The star was a brilliant arc light on the near black horizon. I took one last look at Ariane. She had just launched a message drone. The tiny, light-swift missile was gone, carrying copies of our tapes--just in case something prevented our return to a Fleet base. Sensible, but not very reassuring. I moved to the edge of the pit, sat down carefully. My booted feet hung over--what?

  I gave a nervous laugh. “No point in loitering about, is there?” I imagined unspeakable things lurking down there in the iron belly of the derelict. Then training and discipline came to my aid, and I drew a deep breath. “I’m going,” I called.

  “Carefully,” Ariane whispered.

  “Rely on it,” I said. I took one last look at the bright stars strewn thickly across the sky and stepped over the edge. I burned a thruster for direction, and the coaming swallowed the stars. I began to fall...

  Only short hours before, Ariane and I had been routinely quartering the final segment of our patrol area. I had been sloughing off on my work, letting the cyborg do both the searching and cataloging. The large personal hoard of history tapes and films aboard were often my undoing, for I was, at that time, a bookish young man and as the noble Lady Nora Veg-Rhad (my mother) often said, inattentive to duty.

  For several hours I had been deeply engrossed in Nav Julianus Mullerium’s tape, Anticlericalism in the Age of the Star Kings, and when I get involved in that particular segment of the Empire’s past, I lose track of time and almost everything else. It was Mullerium’s account of some doings of my ancestor St. Emeric of Rhada that had me spellbound. But it was Ariane’s almost miraculous competence that permitted me to be “inattentive.”

  No two ADSPS cyborgs are the same. Ariane is purely feminine--though sex isn’t the same for a fifteen-metric-ton cyborg as it would be for a merely human woman. The psycho-medics who teamed Ariane and me must have known my mother. Certainly Ariane is every bit as strong-minded as Lady Nora. The medics must have thought I needed a mother figure to keep me in line while prowling the far reaches of the galaxy.

  I admit I am bookish and perhaps overprotected. But I am still the Starkahn of Rhada, heir presumptive to the crown of a semiautonomous nation of twenty planets, including some rather well-populated ones, such as Gonlan and Aurora and Rhada itself. Of course there is no crown of Rhada any longer. The royalist Rhadan Palatinate became the very un-royalist Rhadan Republic two generations ago. Lady Nora, however, acts as though the new republicanism of our people were some sort of temporary mental lapse, a hiatus in the reign of the star kings. Her primary occupation seems to be encouraging rather pitiful little royalist plots against the “government of storekeepers,” as she calls it.

  I was trained in the profession of arms because the men of my family have always been so trained. Though Rhada has enjoyed varying degrees of independence and autonomy in the Second Stellar Empire, the ruling family of the Rhad has always served the Galacton, whoever he may be, who rules in Nyor on far-off Earth. For all of our independent airs, we have always been good Imperials and soldiers. But had I had any choice, I would have been a warlock, as learned men have been called since the Interregnum between the Empires. An historian, preferably; for that is where my interests have always been. My love of man’s history through his millennia in space is great.

  On this voyage Ariane and I had been charting stars in the densely starred region of the galactic center. Our operational area for the last sweep included the PPA, or Potential Planetary Area, of the stars Delphinus 2377 through 2382. These stars were all either white dwarfs or red giants and had produced only a few frozen methane planets with strong radiation belts. In addition to this, the nebulosity of the galactic center is pronounced, and the gas clouds and plasma storms tend to block translight commo systems. Consequently, we had been out of touch, peacefully so, with any Fleet base or commo beacon for two Earth Standard Months. Thus, when the alarm came, it was a shock.

  Ariane had been nagging at me for failing to give her the human inputs she needed to complete the Fleet reports on 2378 and 2379, but I had stubbornly refused to be distracted from Mullerium and the bloody tales of the Interregnal period.

  My intention was to shorten our sweep of 2380 and use the time thus saved to catch up on our clerical work. Since the white dwarf we were approaching couldn’t have any terraforms, I did not think of this as exactly cheating. It is the sort of thing I used to do often as a child, to the dismay of Lady Nora, and it had approximately the same effect on Ariane, who is very conscientious about Fleet busywork.

  Ariane had completed the outer zone search on her own, scanning the edges of the PPA and chastising me at the same time. As expected, the region of space subject to Delphinus 2380 inside 500,000,000 kilometers was empty, a true void. Even planetoids and cometary debris had been scoured from the area. It seemed likely that the dense white dwarf star had imploded early in life, sterilizing most of its dependent space.

  Somewhere between Nav Julianus’s excellent account of the heresy trial of Anselm Styr and his translation of St. Emeric’s Defense of Apostasy, Ariane said, “We are picking up a line profile of radio emission by neutral hydrogen at twenty-one centimeters in galactic longitude thirty degrees. Shall I file the maxima for retransmission to SW when we are within commo-be
acon range?”

  I turned slightly on the contour couch and grunted something appropriate. My mind was then a thousand years in time and a million parsecs from Delphinus. I was in the Age of Heroes. I was Nav Anselm on the scaffold; St. Emeric thundering in the cathedral on Algol Epsilon.

  Then the alarm sounded, and I came back to reality, surprised to feel my heart suddenly begin to pound under my tunic because I had not heard a danger signal in all this long, long voyage. Ariane was alerted instantly.

  “What do you see, Ari?” I demanded.

  The computer lights flashed. “Ranging now,” Ariane said. “Wait one.”

  Presently she reported a contact. In this case it was a body of planetoidal size at maximum scan range. Within seconds, Ariane had computed the orbit, “Position now 197.665.0 kilometers from D2380. Apastron is 280.998.0 kilometers, periastron 179,543,000 kilometers. Sidereal period is 83.92 Earth Standard Years. I’ll refine that shortly, when we get closer.”

  The information startled me. Not only was there something in an area of sterilized space, but it was something “planetoidal” in a long period ellipse that brought it perilously close to a white dwarf’s radiation belts every eighty-two years. I lowered the lighting on the bridge to red-battle and armored my pod. I brought up the Very Long Range radar display in the console. I could see the familiar stellar scatter associated with radiating dwarfs, but deep in the S-band, I could detect the unmistakable blip of a metallic mass return.

  “Ariane,” I said. “Recommendations?”

  “Deep penetration of the stellar temperate zone with translight cores engaged. I really can’t scan effectively at this range.” This last remark had a tinge of exasperation in it, as though I were expecting the impossible. At the end of a long survey, Ariane had a tendency to petulance.

  “Accepted,” I said. “Let’s go in. Change to memory mode and record everything. Discharge a message drone at one mega-K intervals.” If anything happened to us, the message drones would be picked up eventually by another SW ship or a beacon. “Give me more magnification on the S-band.”