The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  Ariane warned, “The Nav cruiser is under acceleration, Kier! Get away! I’m coming in to pick you up!”

  “Ariane, no!”

  A pale violet aurora formed around one of the Magellanic’s projectors. It danced and shimmered and seemed to reach out toward me, as though the addled memory-bank that controlled it were confused, uncertain. Then it brightened to a flaring electric blue that tripped the selsium cells in my suit and snapped the screens down over my eyes. But the blazing pseudopod of force curved away from me and darted in a solid bolt of hellish light toward the Navigator’s vessel. There was a white flash, a globule of sun-bright brilliance. It was soundless and all the more terrifying for its silence. And I saw the cruiser, a vast machine itself, bulge and distort as though the molecules of its fabric were bloating with impossible energies. Then it was gone in a swiftly expanding ball of hot gases.

  I heard Ariane calling me, and I thought I heard even Marissa in the soundless confusion. A storm of radiation smashed violently against my armor, and I was spun over and over by the pressure of the light that was the by-product of the deadly explosion of the cruiser. I tumbled toward the dark ship, and in my fall I noticed with strange lucidity that the other projectors were dark, as though the strike against Nav Peter’s ship of priests had momentarily drained the defensive systems of power.

  Below me lay the familiar black metal plain, studded with menacing projections. Then as I fell I saw the dark portal--the same open pit that I had ventured into what seemed an eternity ago in Delphinus. Without hesitation I triggered my suit thrusters, righted myself, and plunged into the Stygian darkness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Good sense or reason must be better distributed than anything else in the world, for no man desires more of it than he already has.

  René Descartes, Discourse on Method,

  early Dawn Age

  If a man succeeds in a dangerous enterprise, he is called a hero. If he fails, he may be called a fool--or not be called at all.

  St. Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  It was as though I were entrapped in a recurring dream. First came the suffocating darkness and then the long free fall “down” the open shaft toward the tiny chamber imbedded in the mass of nucleonic circuitry deep inside the great starship.

  As I fell, my only contact with reality was Ariane’s continuous calls on the E-phone. She had closed to within a perilous range, risking her own destruction and the death of Marissa and Erit, but her signals came through sharp and clear. She did not wait for any responses from me, but kept up a running commentary on what was happening outside the vessel.

  “The Intrepid and the rest of the squadron are withdrawing to ten thousand kilometers. The fireball and the wreckage are still expanding. The Nav ship is completely destroyed.”

  Then: “The Death is moving. I am following. Speed is sublight. Direction is toward the planet.”

  And: “The energy level is rising. I can detect heavy ionization of subspace in the vicinity of the Death.”

  I struck the smooth wall of the shaft and went into a tumbling spin. The sensation jolted me into action, and I began to fly my armor with the thrusters. It seemed to me that the shaft was no longer than before, but I knew this was illusion. Yet the ship was moving. Inertia kept trying to smash me against the walls, and it took all my training with the armor to remain more or less in the middle of the shaft.

  Ariane called: “I know you are conscious, Kier. I am receiving telemetry. But try to say what is happening to you.”

  I said through the encephalophone, “I am all right. I’m under control. I don’t know whether or not the ship let me in. I may have made it because it was using power to destroy the Nav cruiser.”

  Then I sensed Marissa through the E-circuit. She said, “It took you for the Watcher. I am certain of it. There would never have been a power lull otherwise.”

  I fetched up against the closed valve at the end of the shaft with a bone-jarring crash that stunned me momentarily. The armor took the impact on the life-support casing at the back of my neck, and I caught the faintest odor of ozone in my breathing air. I didn’t report it, but Ariane caught it on the telemetry immediately.

  “Kier! Something has short-circuited your oxygen demand metering system. The flow has dropped by 30 percent.”

  Those were deadly words to me. I didn’t know how long I could last in the armor with only 70 percent flow. I could quickly become euphoric from anoxemia, and death wouldn’t be far behind. To my own credit, let it be said I was more concerned with how I could inactivate the starship than I was with how long I might last. I turned on my suit lights and saw that I was standing spraddle-legged once again before the almost invisible valve bearing the First Empire symbols that said: Touch. It was a familiar thing, and oddly, the familiarity brought a certain crazy comfort. No matter how desperate the situation, I had been here before, and I had returned to the world of the living. It was possible.

  I placed my gloved hand on the sensitive pressure latch, and the valve obediently dilated, disclosing the featureless room where Marissa Tran Wyeth had lain in the crystal capsule.

  Now I could see again, as I had on the first occasion, that the walls were bare. I E-phoned back to Ariane. “Is Marissa on the circuit?” I asked, trying to seem calm and competent.

  “I am here.” Marissa’s impulses came clearly through the contacts. “Look on the deck under the latches that held the capsule.”

  I was standing on them. I knelt and discovered a small grid.

  “It extrudes if you apply pressure,” Marissa said. “But it is a simple vibratory speaker. It won’t function properly unless the chamber is pressurized.”

  There were no other controls--nothing to control an airflow into the room.

  “Close the valve,” she said.

  I went to the wall and touched the reverse side of the latch. The valve closed obediently. Then I watched the external pressure sensors of my armor. Nothing. I reported back to Ariane and Marissa. Immediately, I felt a surge of apprehension from the girl. Even through the E-phone the Magellanic Mutation projected her emotional responses. “What is it?” I asked.

  “The pressurization should have been automatic,” she said.

  “Is there a manual override?”

  “No,” she said heavily. “There is not.”

  I stood in baffled thought. “Maybe the grid will transmit well enough by contact with my armor.”

  “Try it,” Ariane suggested.

  “Are we moving?” I asked.

  “Yes. Into a low orbit around Sirius Fifteen.”

  “How low?”

  “I haven’t been able to compute it. But it looks like about six hundred kilometers.”

  Marissa said, “The Death will make a planetary attack with its secondary weapons and then go on to the star. It isn’t functioning rationally.”

  I had a fleeting impulse to say that none of this was rational, that revenge on this scale was monstrous insanity, that the people of the communes of Magellan must have been raving maniacs ever to conceive such a plan--and then I thought more calmly and accepted what was. Snarling and snapping at Marissa would solve no problems.

  I extracted the grid from its housing and held it against my helmet. I heard something, but very faintly. It sounded like a distant, distant voice speaking in a foreign language. It was Anglic, I supposed, the language of the First Empire. But I couldn’t understand it or even make it out.

  “Put the grid next to the E-phone pack,” Ariane said. “Maybe I can amplify it.”

  “Let Marissa translate for me,” I said, doing as the cyborg instructed.

  I stood for what seemed a long time in that silent place, with the bulkhead walls lit only by my suit lights that cast strange shadows around me. I felt like a man deep in a dungeon cell. I must have experienced a kind of racial memory, reverting emotionally back to the time when my ancestors had fought on horseback
and, losing some forgotten battle, found themselves deep in the hold of some prison starship or the stone oubliettes of some grim stone castle by a dark and restless sea. It was a sobering experience.

  Presently, Ariane said, “The instructions to the Watcher are as follows, Kier: ‘Now set all in order with your commands through this grid. Be certain that the Death will obey. And when that is done, compose yourself for an honored rest.’ “ Her despair was now so clear that it was frightening.

  The girl knew something vital. I was sure of it. “Marissa,” I said. “What else?”

  “The instructions also say--” Her impulses faltered, and I felt my heart sinking. “They also say that the chamber is locked. The valve will not open now.”

  Long ago, in the Dawn Age, when men had fought their wars with simple machines that sailed the sea and flew in the air, a nation had created something called the Corps of the Divine Wind--pilots who locked themselves in their craft and died with them willingly, to serve their nation. The planners of the communes of Magellan had done the same with the Watchers. I was trapped in the black starship.

  Perhaps it was the euphoria induced by a failing oxygen supply, but the notion seemed supremely simple and logical. What else was there for a Watcher? Marissa had told me that they were expected to awaken, check over the instructions, and repair whatever needed to be repaired, and die. The fusing shut of the valve was simply a logical precaution against the possibility that the Watcher, no matter how well indoctrinated, might change his or her mind and opt for life--thus imperiling the mission of the starship built at such great effort.

  I looked about me at the Death--at my death--and grinned foolishly. Of course. Simple, perfect logic. No temptations. What a clever animal was man!

  Ariane said sharply, “Kier!” When she had my attention, she said more gently. “The nitrogen count in your blood is rising. That is why you feel as you do.” She didn’t wait for a reply, which would have been only the expression of an intoxicated man in any case. I was deep in the zone of nitrogen narcosis. It was like drink. “Kier, are you paying attention? Hear me. You have a cutter in your armor. You can cut through the bulkhead.”

  Not so, I thought vaguely. The cutter was small, the bulkhead thick and hard. It would take time, an eternity of time--

  I forced myself to think. Why had I come here? There had to be a reason. I could feel the silly smile on my lips. What was it I came to do? Oh, yes, I had to make the ship stop what it was doing--And what was that? Something bad, something very bad...

  “Ariane, Ari--” I called. “Where are we now?”

  “Seven hundred kilometers above S-Fifteen. Kier, listen--”

  I laughed out loud. It was really so very simple. Once one was relieved of the necessity for self-preservation, everything became more--how should I put it?--reasonable. Yes, that was it.

  “Ari,” I said. “Tell Marissa to give me the right words--the words this foolish monster understands. How do I tell it to turn around? To reverse attitude?”

  “What are you planning, Kier?” Ariane asked.

  I felt a slight shortness of breath, and my lightheadedness seemed to increase. “Now, Ari. You are not Lady Nora. Remember that, now, you simply are not, so don’t question me about the obvious.” I had never spoken so to the cyborg, but it was something I’d often longed to say in my hagridden moments. “I am old enough to make my own decisions, and the first thing I have decided is that this beast must turn about and slow down.”

  Marissa said, “Kier, use the cutting touch on the valve--please. Do it now.”

  I heard Ariane talking to Lord Ouspensky aboard the Intrepid. Was she begging him to make an attack? No, surely not that. The Death would do to the battleship what it had done to the Nav cruiser.

  “Marissa,” I said, growing suddenly very angry, “I need the words, the Anglic words. Stop wasting time.”

  She gave them to me, and I repeated them to myself, giggling at my atrocious accent. When I had committed them to memory, I held the grid tightly against the face plate of my helmet and shouted them over and over again.

  There was a slight inertial change. I could feel it, and it filled me with a gleeful sense of power. The Death was following my commands--slowly and incompletely, but it was moving in response to my instructions. For the first time in ten millennia, the great black starship was directly under the command of a human being.

  “Tell the Intrepid to stay clear, Ariane!” I said exultantly. “The SW forces are in charge here!” I was tempted to break into the song of the SW wings, but I couldn’t remember the words.

  “Yes, Starkahn,” Ariane said. “You are in command.”

  “Kier!” Marissa interrupted. “I beg you! Start cutting the valve!”

  “In time, all in good time.” I felt assured and completely in control of the situation. I felt like dancing and laughing, except that it was really very difficult to breathe. I wondered why that was. Ariane would know. I would ask her, just as soon as I got the next evolution under way.

  “What is the starship doing now, Ari?” I asked.

  “It has reversed attitude, Starkahn.”

  “Now, Marissa. I want it to retrothrust enough to decay the orbit on this revolution,” I said. “Can you translate the instructions for that?”

  “I--I--don’t know, Kier,” the girl said.

  “Have Ariane compute the amount of thrust. Come along, girl. We haven’t all the time there is, you know.” In fact, I thought with a touch of maudlin sentiment, We haven’t much time at all. Poor Lady Nora--she was going to be terribly upset about this. She would probably be angry with Ariane, too. No more Starkahn. No more happy Royalist plots. No more son Kier--

  Marissa’s message came through the E-phone. I gave the order to retrofire, to slow orbital speed to the velocity of destruction in the heat of atmospheric entry.

  I felt Ariane say, presumably to Marissa, though I couldn’t be certain: “Will the ship make an attack as it touches the atmosphere?”

  “I don’t know,” Marissa replied. I received another surge of emotional empathy from the girl through the encephalophone contacts. She was weeping. For me, I wondered? That was remarkable. Was this thing she was feeling--love? How marvelous, I thought. And how sad, because now there was almost no time left, no time at all.

  I shouted again through the face plate into the grid. For a moment there was no response because even the damaged positronic brain of the great ship, primitive as it was, realized it was an order that would result in self-destruction.

  Then, like a true robot, it responded. The cores released a burst of energy against the direction of motion. I was slammed hard against the wall of the compartment by the swiftly mounting G-force. The dazing impact half sobered me, and I had a clear and lucid moment during which I knew what was happening to me.

  All my defenses crumbled, and the age-old curse of man--his fear of death--came pouring through. My oxygen-starved brain reeled under the blow. And in that moment--

  --I was Erit, I was Marissa. Somehow, I was Ariane, too, because I could see everything. I saw the night of space, and bright Sirius, and below me I saw the mottled blue and green and white planet covered by a restless sea. In the distance I could make out the slender shapes of the Fleet warships standing helplessly by, and I could see the Death, as well, as Ariane saw it: a pattern of electrical impulses and atomic movements beautiful beyond compare; and as Erit saw it: a shape of radiances, pseudo life-forces in the cubic miles of nucleonic circuitry with my own human aura deeply centered in the sparkling, living mass; and as Marissa saw it: a darkness falling, like a dark meteoroid toward the first wisps of the planet’s upper air. I saw all of that at once and intermingled with the walls and the shape and the textures of the tiny compartment that imprisoned me.

  I understood--everything that was happening. I even understood how it happened and what a marvel it was. The moment of great stress and anger had created a new thing in the galaxy. The moment had been midwife to a new kin
d of being. Erit the Vulk (and in her-me I sensed the presence of Gret, the ethos of him intact and immortal) and Marissa with her Magellanic Mutation that caused an outflowing of emotional energies, and Ariane with her marvelous cyborg powers had all combined in a near-miraculous Triad. And because I was the cause of it, because it was their concern and love for me that fused them together, they--together--reached out across the intervening space to the black starship--to me--and formed this new quadripartite being: four dissimilar creatures sharing their essence and their knowledge . . . and their powers.

  We agreed that this stellar being must not die with the Death.

  And as the starship began to glow with the first heat of friction in S-Fifteen’s atmosphere (I could see it happening in three modes), I flung myself at the valve, cutter in hand, and began to work.

  The laser cut with agonizing slowness, and there was already heat in the walls from the starship’s steepening fall. I didn’t need to be told what was happening. I was aware of it as I have been aware of nothing before in my life. I could literally see the atomic structure of the metal changing under the laser. I could see the starship falling, beginning to tumble now out of control, a vast planetoid of metal rolling end for end through S-Fifteen’s stratosphere. I could understand the vessel’s weaponry and neutralize it easily now, but none of that mattered because the last Death was falling inexorably into the Sirian Sea.

  The oxygen flow from my life-support pack was very low, but I was cyborg enough to simulate Ariane’s ability to oxidize from my own bodily resources. It would not last long, but for the moment I was a cyborg. I was Marissa, too, wanting most desperately to live and be part of this new thing that we had all created. And I was Erit, calm and wise with the wisdom of understanding and near immortality. I worked swiftly and without fear.

  Still I fell, entombed in cubic kilometers of metal, toward the cobalt sea. I could feel the threat of the danger, yet I could sense the placid beauty of the deep ocean toward which I fell, now streaming fire as the surface of the starship glowed white.