The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  “Kier,” Erit spoke quietly. “I cannot double-track my mind forever. Hurry, or I shall lose my hold on the attendants.”

  I started and realized that I has slipped into my old ways: daydreaming and fantasizing--being the warman-errant of history, about to rescue a fair lady. In truth, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t rescuing the alien girl. If anything, what I had in mind was to kidnap her, and, with the help of my Vulkish assistants, to pick her brain.

  I used the encephalophone and made contact with Ariane. She reported that the drone had completed reentry and was hovering over the security wing of the hospital awaiting my transmission to localize itself. “Get it started,” I ordered.

  Within seconds I heard the first faint hissing of a laser cutting through the wall and the sputtering spark of a short-circuited alarm system. Then two things happened at once. The alien girl opened her eyes and looked at me, and Nav Peter of Syrtis walked through the door into the room.

  The girl’s silver eyes found me, and the effect was remarkable. The slotted pupils had been dilated so that the eyes themselves seemed dark and liquid. But as her attention focused on me, the pupils contracted to slits, the way cat’s eyes will when struck by a strong light. Then her expression, which had been soft and almost languorous, changed, too, and she opened her mouth and screamed.

  That scream may well have saved my life, for Nav Peter, his shaven skull gleaming in the hard lights and his ceremonial flintlock pistol in his hand, would probably have shot me simply out of surprise at finding me in the alien’s chamber. It was the first time I had actually seen the fanatical Navigator, and the sight wasn’t reassuring. His face was gray and smooth as polished granite. His eyes were deep-set and burning, the eyes of a man who believes he has seen God.

  He stared at me and started to ask, “Who--?” Then he saw Erit and heard the hissing of the laser from the drone outside the window. Meanwhile, the alien girl had stopped screaming and sat like an image, her expression frozen into one of bewildered, terror-stricken disbelief. I hoped that she had been screaming at the Navigator rather than at me, but it didn’t really matter. Either of us could easily have been a source of fright to her. One had to think of whence she had come and how her surroundings must look to her.

  But Nav Peter, like all Navigators, was trained to use his mind swiftly and to make quick decisions. He raised the pistol to cover me and went for his communicator as well. It was that extra movement that gave me my single chance. The laser beam was through the wall. There was almost no time at all, certainly no time for a prolonged fight with a fanatical priest. Before he could either shoot or speak into the communicator, I had chopped him down with an open-handed blow on the throat. I had a fleeting thought: to all my other crimes--add sacrilege. It bothered me, but it had to be done. Erit was saying, “My hold on the attendants is failing.” That meant that they were probably “seeing” two things at once, like a strange double-image. They saw a peaceful room with the alien girl alone and sleeping, and at the same time they saw what was actually taking place in the room, with the falling Navigator, the girl sitting up in terror, the laser cutting a hole in the outside wall, and the black night showing through. They would start howling an alarm in seconds.

  A two-meter section of wall fell in with a sizzle of burning plastic, and I moved swiftly forward to the girl’s bedside and said, “Forgive me.” I didn’t have time for refinements. I rapped her sharply across the chin, and she slumped delicately into my arms. I shouted to Erit for her to go, and she slipped swiftly through the wall and onto the smooth, curving back of the drone that hung in null-grav against the outside wall of the hospital building. Below, in the garden, there was some commotion as passersby began peering up into the darkness at the confusion outside the hospital wall.

  I wrapped a blanket around the girl. Not much help there, because it was a power blanket and about as heavy as spiderwebs--quite useless out of range of the power projector in the hospital building. Still, I had to wrap her in something. The hospital gown could hardly be called a gown at all, reaching, as it did, approximately to the sternum. Then I gathered her up and went through the wall after Erit, squeezing every volt of energy out of the E-phone and shouting for Ariane to start the drone away.

  Through the melted wall I could see the fallen Navigator stirring. He was tough as leather. The chop I gave him would have put another man in the hospital for repairs, but not the nuncio. I felt Erit clinging partially to me and partially to the back of the drone. We started abruptly to move, and it was, I admit, a terrifying way to travel. Drones are space vehicles, not meant to carry passengers. This was one of our largest, four meters long by one in diameter, and the only handholds were the coolant wings and the laser-beam drill. It was a device meant to supply tools and power for external repairs on Ariane’s hull in space. As an air car, it was bad news.

  At one hundred meters high, a terrifying altitude to anyone so insecurely fastened to a flying machine as we were, the drone bolted suddenly south and seaward, toward our rendezvous with Ariane off Zodiac Bay. I saw the city lights whirl and blur beneath us. Then we were almost dislodged by the sudden acceleration and the rush of night wind, and the university acropolis simply vanished in the mist of the low overcast rolling in from the sea. I could feel Erit doing the Vulkish muscle disciplines that deaden fatigue and fear, and I felt the alien girl’s fingers digging into my shoulder. My silly student’s wig went flying off into the night. The frigid ocean air blasted my naked thighs under my kilt. I was terrified and miserable and at the same time exhilarated and intoxicated with my own heroics. I had a fleeting thought about the horror with which Lady Nora would regard the night’s activities, and then I put the thought out of my mind and promised myself not to worry again about what my mother would think--not until all this was over.

  I locked my legs around the drone, for all the world like some absurd parody of one of my warman ancestors gripping his battle mare. We couldn’t have been traveling very fast or we would have been blown off and directly down some half a kilometer into the Gonlan Sea. But it felt as though we were making kilolights through the night and cloud. And then we climbed out of the stratus undercast into clear air, and I could see the glow of the galactic lens and the distant, distant fuzzy brightness of the Magellanic Clouds, and it was so beautiful that I forgot to be frightened. I simply held on to the half-naked girl in my arms and shouted with delight.

  Erit’s Vulkish cloak whipped in the wind across my shoulders, and I felt the alien’s face close to mine. I looked through the darkness and saw the gleam of silver. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at me, no longer afraid, but simply beautiful. We climbed higher and higher, as in a wonderful and nerve-scraping dream of night flight, and the air grew bitterly cold and I could feel the girl’s slender body shivering, but there was nothing I could do to warm her. It was all I could do to hold us all on the curving back of the drone.

  And then I heard the sonic boom of Ariane’s reentry and saw the glowing ionization trail she left across the sky as she came down to us. And in that blue light I saw, also, that the alien girl was smiling. Her fear was gone, and her teeth showed whitely in the darkness. Lord Star, I thought, what human woman could make so swift a transition from bewildered terror to strength? Where, in all the universe, were people like this one made?

  “That, Starkahn,” Ariane said against my skull, “is exactly what we intend to find out.” She had been spying on me all the way from Gonlanburg.

  Chapter Nine

  The time of the black starship, or the Year of the Death, as it came to be called, was not only a time of peril, but one of deep social change. Those transitions taking place within the fiber of society were not readily apparent to contemporaries; to an historian they would have been obvious.

  Vikus-Bel Cyb 1009, The Symbiotic Culture,

  early Confederate period

  A time will come, brethren, when even the Empire and the Order will have outlived their usefulness. This is not
treason, but prophecy.

  St. Emeric of Rhada, The Dialogues,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  We orbited Rhada at a mean distance of 11,000 kilometers, out of range of all but the most deliberate search. I sat on the ill-fitting contour in Ariane’s bridge and listened to the exchange of messages among the various minor units of the Fleet in Rhadan space.

  It was inevitable, of course, that our original flight plan, the one we had filed on Gonlan to the Omicron satellite and then to the Rhada sun had come under some very close scrutiny by the Fleet authorities when Ariane failed to arrive on time. Now, judging by the radio traffic, the planetary controllers were beginning to suspect that something was amiss. Either someone had filed a false flight plan or a small starship was missing. A slow but gradually increasing shock was traveling through the axons and dendrites of the in-trastellar navigational network. Soon, if the trauma were not corrected (by someone finding the missing vessel), the tremor would jump the provincial boundaries and reach Fleet Sector headquarters, and from there it would flash swiftly to Command, where some note was taken of all Imperial units in this spiral of the galaxy. And finally, it would jar the powers that be in Nyor, at Grand Fleet headquarters on Earth.

  All of this would be vastly hastened when the sluggish Gonlan controllers realized that the ship that filed the original plan had been none other than Cyb-ADSPS 339, partner and companion to the Starkahn of Rhada.

  I was genuinely sorry for the trouble we were causing: trouble that would get far worse before it got better. But I had spent a lifetime heeding the warnings and accepting the advice of Rhada’s Royal Vulk. Fleet discipline was strong in me (well, reasonably so for a Rim noble), but my belief in Gret was absolute. The Vulk, with his perspective of millennia, was more to be believed than a fanatical Navigator, an expedient Galacton, or an ambitious mother. (Forgive me, Lady Nora, I thought. But it is true.)

  “What’s happening on the ground?” I asked Ariane. “Can’t you extend the sensors?”

  “Not without risking detection,” she replied. “It is best to let Erit handle it.”

  “Yes,” I told myself, “Erit could reach Gret through the mind-touch.” But Gret was old and sick, immobile in his tank of gel. What could we expect if the Vulks’ mind-link failed?

  I stared distractedly through the transparent walls of the bridge. The nebulosity of the galactic lens was very distinct--it was difficult to think of it as what it really was: a swirl of a billion stars, some few million with planets, some few thousand of those populated by men. Yet even with that winnowing, the number of my kind in the galaxy was staggering. And each one, each life, stood in mortal danger from the apparently random attacks of the black starship.

  I looked away from the lens and back to Rhada: a blue world of seas and some green and brown lands. White cloud patterns, brilliant against the sun-gleaming oceans, mottled the surface. From this distance the works of man were invisible. The planet hung in interstellar space, silent, seemingly without motion, a great blue-green gem flecked with the colors of soil and sand and mountain. It was said Earth herself once looked like that before the city of Nyor grew to cover almost the entire surface of the world.

  Yet the black starship could infect the Rhada sun with some stellar death, and within hours Rhada’s clouds and seas would boil off into the void and the land would first parch and then melt and finally vaporize as the clouds of white-hot plasma, the hot guts of the sun, laved over it with the speed of light.

  When one thought on it, the science involved was massive--but not superhuman. The warlocks of my own time knew how to kill stars--in theory. It was simply that we had never, even in our Dark Time, considered undertaking murder on so vast a scale. Questions filled my mind, questions only a Triad of Gret-Erit and the silver-eyed girl could answer. Where was the black starship now? Where had it come from? How much longer could it function? And over and over again--why? Why had such an engine of destruction been built?

  I turned impatiently to the bridge valve, half expecting to see Erit. But the Vulk had taken the girl into such seclusion as Ariane’s interior offered the moment we’d come aboard.

  I scratched irritably at the interfaces between my own flesh and the gill tubes that still protruded from my chest. There had been no possibility of finding a technician to remove the waterlung implanted in my chest. I could feel the slight chill of the cryogenic carbon dioxide scrubber against the inside of my rib wall. I was struck by the matter-of-fact way we accepted the great changes life had brought in the last few centuries. The artificial gill in my chest was a case in point--a minor one, but it was part of a technology and a Zeitgeist that might, in time, bring down the Empire itself and all other familiar human social forms. A thousand years earlier, my ancestors would have been shocked and horrified at the thought of undergoing casual surgery for such things as implanting the means to breath water--simply for sport. Those same ancestors would regard Ariane as some sort of horrible hybrid creature, part robot, part monster. In fact, my namesake, Kier the Rebel, became a racial hero by killing a cyborg in ritual combat during Mariana’s rebellion. And the alien girl--how easily we accepted the obvious fact that she was only conditionally human, that she was some sort of mutant, but still a living, thinking (and very beautiful) fellow creature with whom we must communicate and learn to cooperate, lest her black starship kill us all. Even in Kynan the Navigator’s time, the instinctive response would have been one of hatred, fear, and retributive murder.

  Of course, I thought, not all humans were so willing to meet this challenge peaceably. I remembered the stony fanaticism of Nav Peter and thought of the political pusillanimity of Sokolovsky Bel-Ami, our great (and short-sighted) Galacton.

  Ariane, with half of her systems lying idle as we orbited the planet, was in a ruminative mood. Perhaps it was our situation, or perhaps it was the fact that the silver-eyed alien was aboard, but she spoke to me in her most feminine and seductive voice: a veritable whisper from the console speakers.

  “Do you realize, Kier, that it was hardly more than two months ago that we were surveying Delphinus? It seems much, much longer than that.”

  Since a cyborg has one of the most keenly developed senses of time passage imaginable, I could only assume that Ariane was speaking figuratively--and reply in the same mood. “We were having an argument about Nav Anselm Styr, weren’t we?”

  “Not really an argument. We don’t argue, Kier.”

  I considered that statement for a while before risking a reply. “Well,” I said finally, “sometimes we have discussions.”

  “No more than that,” the cyborg said dreamily.

  “Are you all right, Ariane?” I asked worriedly.

  “Of course.”

  I blanked out the walls and played with a holograph of near space. We didn’t dare use our instruments, and for Erit to contact Gret comfortably, we had to wait for the planet below to rotate under us. The lands of the Rhad family were still beyond the sunlit limb of the watery world we orbited. Ariane said, “You seem nervous, Kier.”

  “I can’t imagine why I should be,” I said with a touch of sarcasm. “We are deserters from the Fleet, kidnapers, priest-attackers, hospital robbers, and the Star knows what else we are being accused of at this moment. Why should I be the slightest bit nervous?”

  “That isn’t the reason,” the cyborg said evenly.

  “Meaning what?”

  “The girl. She’s what makes you jittery.” There was an edge of resentment in Ariane’s voice.

  “You can’t mean it,” I said.

  “She’s very beautiful, of course. In a human way.” By all the little stars and comets, there was a touch of archness in Ariane’s manner. A dash of--jealousy. Yes, my cyborg partner was jealous of the alien.

  “My interest is purely practical,” I said. Then I wondered why I said something so obviously as untrue as that. Ariane, of all persons, would know me well enough to know what I was feeling--even before I, myself, might p
ut it into perspective.

  “You should have seen yourself when you came aboard,” Ariane said. “Like a cadet on his first rendezvous.”

  “That was one hellishly exciting ride you gave us on the drone, Cyb Ari,” I said, using her formal title for the first time in weeks.

  “It was the girl,” Ariane said stubbornly. Then she added darkly, “If this were back in the olden days you like so well, she would probably be burned as witch. Just because of those silver eyes.”

  “She’s obviously a mutant,” I said stiffly. It wasn’t like Ariane to carry on like this. “You’ve seen human mutations before.”

  “None like that one,” Ariane said. “You know,” she went on obliquely, “I could look like that if I chose.”

  That was approximately true, of course. An ADSPS cyborg, after his or her tour of duty, could ask to be reintegrated into a humanoid form and programmed to lead a planetary life. Not many did, but it was possible.

  “You mean you’d trade the freedom you have--our freedom to roam the whole galaxy--just for a pretty girl’s figure?” I was so aghast at the thought that I lost track of the fact that the only reintegration and reprogramming we could look forward to now was the criminal code variety.

  Ariane didn’t, however, and she began to laugh. It was familiar, warm laughter, far more human than cyborg, and it relieved me because it indicated that her mood was passing and she was acting more like herself and less like an imitation of a jealous wife.

  She made a humming sound that indicated derision, and she said, ”Well, we mustn’t quarrel before our guests, Starkahn. Erit has finished with our victim, and they are about to join us. I hope you can withstand the shock at such close range. But I forget--you brought her aboard clutched to your bosom, didn’t you?”