The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  “It’s just what it appears to be, Kier. An ingress-egress port. Completely open to space.”

  Now I knew (if I had ever doubted it) that I should chart the derelict’s position and make for CB-20 at Ariane’s best speed. But that open portal drew me. I was, after all, twenty and the Starkahn of Rhada, and I lived in an age that offered little in the way of opportunities for grand gestures and gallantry. Bookish I was, but I was the descendant of warrior star kings and the son of a Great Vegan noblewoman. Personal bravery was expected of me.

  What I planned now was not bravery, of course. It was sheer folly--and Ariane said so.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said, sounding very feminine. “You simply cannot be serious.”

  “I am,” I said, trying to sound masterful and commanding.

  “I won’t permit it,” she declared.

  I drew a deep breath, nerved myself, and said, “I am in command.” It was quite true. Ariane’s fleet rank was ensign, a single sunburst to my two as a sublieutenant. This was not always the case. In several of the Survey teams, the cyborg held the higher rank. Ariane had to defer to me. But as a free citizen of the Empire, she had the right to enter her protests on the log tapes. This was a privilege she exercised often, and she did it now.

  “I am making a copy for the Lady Nora, as well,” she said threateningly.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said hotly. ‘Those tapes are classified as of now.”

  “Protest,” Ariane said sharply.

  “Noted,” I said, tight-lipped. Probably if Ariane hadn’t threatened to “tell my mother on me,” I might have reconsidered. There was actually very little I could accomplish by boarding the derelict, and sober second thoughts about penetrating that grim and enigmatic monster were chilling my desire for glory. But there was no turning back now. “It is decided,” I said.

  I could feel the computer working again. She was probably searching Fleet regulations for some way to prevent me going EV in a tactically questionable situation. But there would be nothing. The Grand Fleet still operated on the regulations and Noble Code written when the military took over the starships from the Order of Navigators. My single sunburst advantage in rank made me warleader, lord, king and master of our little two-person ecology.

  “There’s nothing in the Regs, is there?” I asked.

  “No,” Ariane said.

  “So?”

  “Very well, Starkahn,” she said. She was sulking, no doubt of it.

  “Take us in to one kilometer while I suit up,” I said, feeling masterful and vindicated: a true descendant of Kier the Rebel.

  Chapter Three

  The legends say that there were those among the great of the Golden Age who determined to cleanse the race of all foulness, and to this purpose sent into darkness millions: some guilty, some innocent, all embittered.

  The legends say this, and so do the Warls. But of my own knowledge, I cannot tell whether or not this monstrous tale is true.

  Nav (Bishop) Julianus Mullerium,

  Anticlericalism in the Age of the Star Kings,

  middle Second Stellar Empire period

  Before the founding of our Order, there was undoubtedly great glory. What was lacking was conscience.

  Attributed to St. Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  And so it was that I found myself slowly free-falling through the dark shaft into the heart of the derelict starship. When I left the “surface,” I did so with dread. But with the exercise of the mental discipline I had learned in my seven grimly confining years at the Fleet Academy, I managed to bring myself out of my funk.

  The fact was that there seemed, at the moment at least, little enough to be frightened about. In the absorbing darkness there was very little sensation of falling, or of movement of any sort. Then there was Ariane’s comforting presence, for we soon discovered that the E-phone functioned perfectly through the metal and shielding of the derelict.

  I was suffering from a mild claustrophobia in the passageway. I moved “downward” in an egg of light from my suit lamps. High “above” me I could still see the tiny opening dusted with stars. Then I reached an angle in the shaft, and the patch of sky vanished.

  Ariane spoke to me. “Something has taken note of you. I am getting some protonic leakage. Very low level, but it wasn’t there before. Suggest you return.”

  I swallowed to ease the rusty taste in my throat and said, “Noted. Just a bit farther. Keep me informed.”

  Later, it seemed hours but it was only seconds, Ariane said, “No change.”

  At least whatever it was took no overt action against my penetration of the ship. Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t intended to.

  I didn’t like it. I decided to go for one minute more and then abandon my exploration. I told Ariane so.

  “Keep sending,” she said. “Talk.”

  “I am moving now. This place is black as hell. I must be a good two kilometers inside and still nothing but this shaft. I’ll go on for thirty seconds more and then I’ll--” I stopped abruptly. Ariane immediately demanded to know what was happening.

  But nothing was happening at all. I had come up against a blank wall. I oriented myself, standing on a side wall, and stared, stunned by the anticlimax of it. An open passageway leading into the gut of the huge vessel, and now this--a wall.

  I described it to Ariane.

  “Not logical,” she said shortly.

  “Nevertheless,” I said, annoyed.

  “There must be a way through. The life-support system I scanned is just past it.”

  I turned up my suit lamps and saw the symbols. They formed a single word. The letters were spiny and archaic: almost, but not quite, the characters of First Empire Anglic. The word was a simple instruction. Touch.

  Who etched that word into the black metal? And how long ago? And by all the cybs and little demons, where?

  I touched the wall with my gloved hand. A valve dilated swiftly. A simple pressure latch. There were valves that operated that way on the antique starships of the Grand Fleet.

  Ahead of me lay the room Ariane had described after the scan. It was as featureless as the shaft had been--except for one thing. In the light of the suit lamps, I could see a crystal pod, a cylinder. Metal containers were affixed to both ends and the whole latched to the deck with two metal straps. My suit radiation counter was registering the low count associated with nuclear clocks. I energized the scan camera so that Ariane could see what I was seeing. Ariane said immediately, “The radiation is snowing the picture. I can’t see clearly.” I described my surroundings. “The whole room is so simple. There’s nothing on the walls. No controls of any sort.”

  “The ship is automatic. That room has nothing to do with the rest of it. It’s a passenger cove,” Ariane said. “Investigate that pod.”

  I could see that the cylinder was independent of the ship but for a single power lead. Except for that and the metal straps, the capsule could float free in the near null-gravity. I settled to the proper floor and moved into the center of the room. My lamps cast their light down on the crystal pod. My heartbeat went wild, and Ariane, guarding the biosensors, immediately demanded to know what was wrong. “What do you see?”

  But I had no words to describe what I was seeing.

  The cylinder was filled with some sort of clear liquid, gently in motion. And within, floating in amniotic repose, lay the “alien.”

  I unconsciously made the sign of the Star. I am not really very religious, but it seemed the proper thing to do, under the circumstances.

  The alien was a woman. A girl, really, though I had no way to guess at her age. Her age! What was I thinking? She must have lain, naked and gently moving, in that life-supporting pod for--how long? Holy Star and St. Emeric, how long? A thousand years? Two? Longer. Probably much longer. How long is eternity?

  Dark hair floated about her pale oval face. She was beautiful--and frightening. I felt an icy chi
ll as I realized she was looking at me. Her eyes were open, and they were the strangest eyes I have ever seen. They were the color of newly minted silver. There was no iris, only the silver sheen of the eyeball, pierced by a tightly contracted slit pupil. She was not human. Not completely so, in any case. A mutant. And, of course, she was not looking at me at all. She lay in a death sleep in that chrysalis: beautiful, uncannily strange--but alive. As I stared in rapt fascination, I could see a pulse beat in her throat. Once every minute and a half it gently throbbed.

  After a long while I reported to Ariane, never taking my eyes from the silver-eyed girl.

  “Kier!”

  It took me a moment to awaken from my dream.

  “Kier!”

  Cyborgs are said to have rather phlegmatic temperaments, but there was nothing calm or placid about the emotions Ariane was feeling at this moment. Her concern was so strong that it was feeding back to me through my own biosensors and the encephalophone contacts. In a human being it would have been fear, even terror, but cyborg emotive functions are not human. They respond differently (and, I think, more efficiently) to danger.

  “Something is happening to that ship, Kier! I want you out of there--now!”

  “What is it?”

  “The drive cores are heating up. And there is some sort of radiation screen building. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to maintain contact. Get out of there fast.”

  Something--perhaps my presence--was activating the black starship. I stood for a moment, torn by indecision. If the cores were warming, the vessel could go into translight mode at any moment. In minutes, the ship and all it contained could be moving at an unknown number of kilolights across space in intersystem transit--if it didn’t disintegrate into fissioning atoms, torn apart by the gravitational field of the Delphinus star.

  But could I simply decamp, leaving the life-support capsule--the most important find of centuries? At that moment I only knew that I wasn’t going to leave the derelict by myself.

  “Ariane!” I called. “Can I feed this capsule from my suit batteries?”

  The cyborg didn’t waste time arguing with me. She came back with an instantaneous computation. “Plug the power lead into your biosensor bank. The contacts won’t match, but there should be enough leakage to keep it going for a few minutes while you get back here. Only make it fast, Kier. There’s an ionization corona forming around the core projections. You haven’t much time.”

  I unlatched the metal straps holding the capsule to the deck and pulled the power lead free. Next I disconnected my biosensors and jammed the lead into my suit batteries. I glanced at the valve and saw with a flash of incipient panic that it was contracting.

  For a nonathlete, soft from months of low-gravity living, I moved with remarkable speed. I wrapped myself around the crystal cylinder and burned my suit thrusters all in one movement. We crashed through the closing valve and caromed silently off the wall of the open shaft. The jar set my head to ringing, but I managed to orient myself properly and plunged up the corridor at full thrust, riding the life-support capsule like a war mare. Twice during that plunging flight the capsule struck the sides of the shaft and almost started tumbling. At our speed it would have been fatal, but I straightened out, lighting the walls with the thruster flames, until I could see the sky overhead. The ionization corona, the mark of a starship making ready to move, had spread from the core projections kilometers away at the stem. It shimmered over the skin of the vessel like swampfire.

  “Kier--” Ariane’s transmission was faint, blocked by an increasing hiss of core harmonics. “There’s a rising level of activity in the positronic banks. I can’t translate, but I’m taping everything I can. Hurry!”

  In moments the great starship would vanish into inter-system transit. When it was gone from this place, assuming it didn’t go off like a planet-sized bomb, what hope would there be of our ever finding it again? “Ariane!” I called. “Stop it. Put a fish into the stem cores!” The damage a nuclear torpedo would do striking the stem of the monster ship would be considerable--but better that than to lose such a find forever.

  “When you are clear.” Ariane’s transmission was barely readable.

  At that instant I burst from the open portal into space, straddling the alien cylinder. The ship had rotated and I was in the direct glare of D2380, and for a second or two I was disoriented. Then I caught sight of Ariane, silvery against the dust of stars, and I thrust in her direction with all the power in my suit.

  I was tumbling, and I could see the great sheets of light, like an aurora, playing off the metal surfaces of the monster. “Shoot!” I ordered, and Ariane responded immediately. I caught only the briefest glimpse of the nuclear torpedo, a meter in diameter and three meters long, streaking for the target like a miniature starship.

  The great starship vanished. As it went hyper-light, the vast volume of space it had occupied imploded with soundless violence. Streamers of glowing plasma formed, swirling into nebular shapes. Ariane and I and the alien capsule tumbled inward toward the heart of the torn space and then were flung outward, like leaves in a whirlpool. The stars streaked in my field of vision. I could feel my body fluids surging this way and that under the sudden and unpredictable G-loads. I lost my hold on the capsule, and it went spinning off. Ariane’s nuclear torpedo reached the spot where its intended target had been and exploded in white flare, adding to the confusion and disruption.

  I must have lost consciousness for a few moments because when I opened my aching eyes again, Ariane was very nearby, her hatch open and her crane extended to hook me in. The capsule was already aboard, the snapped power lead tangled in coils on the airlock deck. A reflection inside my helmet made me turn as the polarized shield snapped over my eyes. The glittering arc light of the Delphinus star was brightening. It was impossible, but it was happening. A million-mile stellar flare formed, and once again the plasmas swirled around us. I could see the shape of the star distorting. Something had shattered the photosphere, and the flaming guts of the star were boiling into space.

  “Ariane!” I yelled. “What’s happening to it?”

  I felt the cyborg lay hold of me with her crane, gentle as a mother. She drew me into the lock. “The star,‘‘ I said confusedly, “what’s happening to the star?”

  The hatch closed, and I could feel the jolt of high acceleration--much higher acceleration that I ever remembered Ariane using while a human was aboard her. I felt as though I were being squashed inside my suit, like an insect in its shell. Then came the familiar disorientation of a fast shift into hyper-light speed. The surge was powerful, and it lasted a full six seconds. Ariane was traveling away from D2380 at two kilolights or more. Panic speed.

  Then I realized what had happened, even though the cyborg was too busy saving our lives to take the time to tell me.

  The black starship had done something--something impossible according to any science we knew. The alien starship had done something, and the star was going nova.

  Chapter Four

  (Who knows) what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women?

  Dawn Age fragment found at Tel-London,

  attributed to Sir Thomas Browne (1603-1665 Old Style)

  The actions of the young sometimes seem ill-considered and foolish, but should we not await the judgment of history?

  St. Emeric of Rhada, The Dialogues,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  I had to face the ordeal of a military Court of Inquiry for the “loss” of the black starship, for endangering “by poor astronautical judgment” the life of one Ariane Cyb-ADSPS 339, “a citizen of the Empire,” and--just incidentally--my own.

  There were two captains, three commodores, and an admiral on the board, and they were a grim lot, for all their silver braid and medal ribbons. Alt-Romul, the Altairi Commodore, held out for a full court martial to be conducted at Nyor--which would have made a circus of the whole business. I had my noble an
cestry to thank for that suggestion. Alt-Romul is descended from the Interregnal kings of Novorome, a planet subdued (with no great gentleness) by Kier the Rebel in Glamiss Magnificio’s time. So long do our Empire nobles cling to ancient blood feuds.

  Fortunately for me (and, I hope, for the cause of military justice), Admiral the Honorable Morag O’Kane Macdonald had gone to school with the Lady Nora at Tel-Lausanne about thirty years ago, and she spoke for me and put the Altairi inquisitor in his place. It is custom, though not law, in the Empire that any man must face judgment by his peers. And this has come to mean, over the centuries, that a Rhad must be tried in Rhada, just as a Veg would be tried in Great Vega or an Altairi in the Alt Confederacy.

  The court held several sessions at the New Kynan Fleet base, where Ariane was resting, so that she could testify, and I think it was her account of our encounter in Delphinus that saved me. That, and Lady Nora, and the stern-faced old maiden admiral who reminded the noble court of ancient privileges and prerogatives. All women, of course. The men on the board wanted to hang me.

  In the end I received a reprimand for my conduct. It declared that I had used poor judgment in venturing into the black starship, that I had deviated from standing orders for such contacts, and that I had violated Fleet regulations in removing “an artifact” from the derelict. They couldn’t bring themselves to refer to the girl in the life-support capsule as an alien. I was further reprimanded for bringing “the artifact” to Rhada rather than to my Fleet base. But I refused to be dismayed by that part of the reprimand. The alien girl was resting now in the hands of the warlocks of the University of Gonlanburg rather than in some triplesecurity military prison-cum-experimental laboratory, and custom being what it was in the Empire, it seemed unlikely that the government at Nyor would demand Rhada surrender her to them, though an unnecessary number of security troops had now descended on the quiet campus of the Gonlani-Rhad school.