The Merseian group screamed about and headed northwest, at a mere kilometer of altitude. The Gorrazanians took a while to straighten out their formations and give chase. Bullets, missiles, energy beams raked ahead of them. The Merseian gunners, superbly computer-guided, shot down most of the material projectiles. Those that got through, and the rays, generally missed; those that struck, forcefields and armor generally absorbed. A member of the escadrille, flying rear guard, did fall—flash of light, tail of smoke, shatter-ping burst on the ground. Uroch raised hand in homage. They would be remembered, yon brave males, if their comrades lived.
The sun dropped behind him. He flew through night, under stars and a small, hurtling moon. Occasional flickers aloft told of the battle in space. Metal throbbed around him. He heard the shrilling of cloven air. Information from orbit registered on his data displays: another opposition force was bound his way from the east.
But ahead, sheer, its heights coldly agleam with snow and glaciers, loomed a mountain range. Its contours were engraved on Uroch's brain well-nigh as fully as they were in his computer programs. This was why he had studied the planet unmercifully hard, the long way from Merseia: so that he could develop his contingency plans. The move that he found himself making was altogether in his style; and he had hand-picked his follower pilots and made them learn nearly as much as he knew.
In a wild swoop, he lifted. Crags clawed after the belly of his craft. Ahead was a pass between two peaks, and on the far side an immense, many-branched canyon. Flesh could never have steered through, at the speeds wherewith he and his traveled. Robots could, barely. His living brain told them to do it.
Cliffs reared out of abyssal darknesses. Sonic shocks broke snowfields apart and sent them away in avalanches; clouds and plumes rose off them to glisten beneath the moon. Their rumbling drummed through the howl of outraged air.
No few of the Gorrazanian flyers were taken by such surprise that they crashed before they could pull clear. Shards and skulls went skittering down the heights. The rest of the defenders buzzed about in dismay. They had lost contact with the enemy.
As he emerged above a wintry lowland, Uroch fought temptation. He could bring his escadrille quickly around and take the pursuit from behind, catch them in their bewilderment, shatter and scatter a force that outnumbered his three or four to one. What a deed! They'd sing about it in ships and halls throughout the Roidhunate, for centuries to come.
He remembered his captain's words, set his jaw, and flew straight onward. The directive had been clear from the beginning. "Except for the objective, you will inflict minimal damage. Wherever consonant with that objective and with maximum survival in your force, you will choose evasion over confrontation. If it appears that a major action is necessary to accomplishment of the purpose, you will withdraw as expeditiously as possible to your mother vessel, or to whatever other transport is most suitable."
Never had he been under orders more difficult to follow. He began to realize what it meant to be in the high command. Perhaps, flickered through him, that was another reason he had been chosen for this undertaking. Could they have him in mind for greater things? … Dismiss that. Carry on your hunt.
Inevitably, he had broad discretion. After a quick review of the data, he made his next decision and issued his instructions. The Merseians lifted spaceward.
He saw the planet in sapphire and silver splendor, the sun rising in dawn-hues over its brow; but his attention was aimed along a radius vector ahead, where two warships maneuvered about and lobbed lightnings at each other. However tenuous, the ionized gas that lingered for seconds after a nuclear detonation sufficed to hide his group from detection, when they orbited free-fall as he told them to. Thus he shook off the second ground-based flotilla that had been trying to intercept him.
The orbit soon bent his flyers back into atmosphere. With judicious nudges of thrust, they sought a hurricane which was traversing a southern ocean, and hid themselves in its violence. That required daring as well as skill; but people had reason to call Uroch Lucky."
As that luck would have it, the storm lumbered to the very shore he wanted. Otherwise he would have tried something else, maybe for several days. In the event, he could shout, "Haa-aa and away!" His warriors burst from the clouds and winds. They went like shooting stars above sere hills and a broad, green, canal-veined valley.
It was not well defended. The Gorrazanians had relied mainly on their space fleet. What planetary units they had were dispersed around the globe; a substantial portion was still at the antipodes, trying to find Uroch's raiders. Missiles and aircraft lifted in low numbers. The Merseians swatted them and came to rest, a-hover on their grav drives, above the target.
Aside from communication and detector masts, and a tower for local weather control, it revealed nothing special to the eye. Some domes snuggled into a landscape ruddy with ripening grain. Three sleepy villages clustered within a few kilometers: archaic earthen buildings, for the Gorrazanians are a conservative breed, no matter how many mercenary soldiers they export. A large modern structure, squarish and garish as their tastes called for, might have been a school or a museum or something of that kind.
Uroch didn't know. He had not even heard, officially, what it was that he was supposed to destroy. In the course of his studies en route he had deduced that it was probably a key command center—police, military, however you wanted to designate a corps trying to suppress revolutionary guerrillas. Without it, the Folkmoot would not be disastrously handicapped against the Liberation Council, but counterinsurgency operations would be set back.
It seemed a trivial reason for dispatching warships across hundreds of light-years and getting into a fight with the Terrans themselves. Uroch had schooled himself to refrain from wondering. The great lords of state had their plan. His duty was to execute his part thereof.
And … by the God, by all the pagan gods of the forefathers—he was about to!
"Goal attained," he said flatly into the outercom, while joy sang in his blood. "Fire by the numbers."
His flyer threw the first missile. It flashed in the sun, it smote, it blossomed as blue-white as Alpha Crucis. Dust, smoke, vapor rose in a column that swelled as it grew, reached the bottom of the stratosphere, smeared itself across heaven. Megaton after megaton followed. In the end there lay a monstrous crater, incandescent until its sides cooled to glass. The canals ran dark and poisoned. Everywhere around, the crops were afire.
"Arrach, let's go!" Uroch shouted.
How he and his males fought their way through vengeful metal swarms; how they won back to Tryntaf; how Tryntaf and her sisters returned to Gadrol's victorious fleet; how the Merseians, who had taken few losses, eluded Terran search and returned home without further combat—this is the stuff of epic. Yet behind it lay always a cool intelligence, whose painfully garnered knowledge and carefully crafted schemes made the heroism possible.
For Uroch, sufficient was that he came back to his wife, his sole wife thus far, and to the first son she had hitherto borne him, with a tale that would ring the lad on to achievements of his own, in those unbounded years that reached before the Race.
After the raid, night fell. A full moon rose above that which had been the villages. Light rippled bleak, shadows moved, under the hastening white shield. Wind rustled. It was cold, harsh with ash; the lethalness was not perceptible.
Big and shaggy, a Gorrazanian female sat beneath the remnant of a wall. In her four arms she rocked her dead child. In her rough voice she sang it a lullaby that it had always liked.
Chapter 12
Miriam Abrams Flandry started home barely in time. Although news of civil war was recent, and nothing untoward had yet happened in the lanes between Sol and Niku, already apprehension pervaded the entire Empire. Word came in that, here and there, malcontents of many different sorts were proclaiming themselves adherents of would-be Emperor Olaf and making trouble or outright disaster for local authorities. Insurance rates had begun to skyrocket, which caused shipping firms to abandon
route after route. It was natural to cancel service to the planet Ramnu, Niku IV, early on. There was no economic incentive to continue, after the quick announcement that the climate modification project was suspended for the duration of the emergency.
The woman had been on the surface, in the field, isolated among primitive autochthons. She just managed to catch the last liftoff for Maia. Of course, had she been stranded, Fleet Admiral Sir Dominic Flandry would have taken steps to get his wife back. He might well have unlimbered his speedster Hooligan and gone after her himself. But her survival meanwhile, on the grim world she loved, would have been doubtful.
As was, Maia III—Hermes—continued important enough that she could book passage from there directly to Terra. The vessel being a luxury liner which numbered noblefolk among her passengers, she had armed escort all the way, never mind how useful those ships might have been on the battlefront.
The xenologist kept to herself during the voyage, taking no part in its entertainments and intrigues. At meals she was minimally civil to her tablemates. It wasn't only that they and their games bored her. (Attractive and alone, she could have had a succession of bed partners; and after weeks among nonhu-mans, the physical sensation would have been welcome; but she would have had to talk with them> even listen to them. She'd rather wait for Dominic. The fact that he had probably not been waiting for her, in that sense, made no difference.) It was that she was full of grief and fear.
Grief for her dear Ramnuans, who had given her the name "Banner" that she still bore. She had come to see how the project was progressing, that would put an end to the planet's repeated civilizations-destroying glaciations, and how it was affecting the cultures she had studied for so long before her retirement. Shortly after she arrived, the order to shut down came in. Considering how bureaucracy operated, if Magnusson's insurrection were crushed immediately, which it obviously could not be, months must pass until work resumed. Ramnuans would perish by the additional thousands, or worse.
Fear for the Empire, Technic society and, yes, those other societies the Empire enclosed. Old and rotten it might be, its outworks crumbling less because strength had failed than because the will to be strong had. Nevertheless it was all that guarded the heritage of humanity and humanity's allies. Sometimes Flandry let his personal defenses drop in her presence and spoke of the Long Night that lay beyond the fall of the Empire.
And she had her kinfolk on Dayan to think about, and her natives on Ramnu, and friends strewn about among the stars, and—she and Dominic were not yet too old for a child or two. Not quite, he approaching seventy and she approaching fifty, given anti-senescence plus the kind of DNA repair they could pay for. Besides, she had years ago deposited some ova in a biobank.
They had always been too busy, though, she and he; and now this wretched affair had begun.
He met her at debarkation, attired in a uniform that got them waved straight through inspection, and hurried her to the apartment they kept in Archopolis. There the champagne and caviar and such had to wait a while longer.
When they had feasted, the darkness would no longer be denied. She asked what the truth was—not the news, but the truth. Reluctantly, he told her.
"The latest dispatches we've received make unpleasant reading. In just these weeks, Magnusson's driven a salient in nearly as far as Aldebaran. Of course, he isn't sitting on everything from there back to his Patrician base. And his blitzkrieg is bound to slow down while he consolidates those gains. But he needn't do much toward that end, you realize. He dominates the whole volume of space already. He can snap up any significant traffic that doesn't flow the way he wants, and lay waste any planet that won't give him whatever support he demands. None will refuse. Who can blame them?
"His forces have won every battle to date, except for a couple of draws. Most engagements have been fairly small; but seeing what harm a single capital ship can do, each victory has been a lopsidedly big addition to his score. He is a brilliant tactician, and his overall strategy is basically the same as what carried Hans Molitor to the throne." Flandry narrowed his gray eyes and stroked his mustache. "Or is it, entirely?" he murmured.
Banner regarded him across the table and spread her hands in an immemorial gesture. She was a lean, strong-featured woman, her own eyes luminous green, silver-streaked brown hair falling to her shoulders. "Do you suppose he can win?" she asked.
"He might." Flandry ignited a cigarette and inhaled deeply. "In view of the latest developments, his chances are starting to look pretty good. When I saw our darling Emperor Gerhart a week ago, he was in an absolute hissy fit."
One reason the apartment was costly to rent was that it included state-of-the-art antibugging devices. Technicians personally loyal to Flandry made periodic inspections to be sure the system was still working.
Banner sighed. "Rhetorical question—or is it? Would it really be so awful if Magnusson took over? How did the present dynasty come to power, anyway, and how much is Gerhart really worth?"
"I keep telling you, darling scientist, you should take more interest in human history and politics," Flandry said. "Not but what it's understandable you don't. A filthy subject. I often wish I'd been born into some era like the Second Sugimoto, when everybody could cultivate his vine and fig tree, or his private arts or vices, without having to worry who'd come climbing over the wall next." He reached above the glasses and plates to stroke her cheek. "To be sure, then I'd never have met you."
Abruptly he got to his feet. The bathrobe flapped around his ankles as he strode to the transparency and stood raggedly smoking. Through a light rain and an early dusk, the city flashed hectic, as far as vision could fare. Within this room, the odor of roses and the lilt of a Mozart concerto receded toward infinity.
"I'm against revolutions," he said low. "No matter the alleged justification, it's never worth the short-range cost—lives and treasure beyond counting—or the long-range—ripping the fragile fabric of society. You know how in my younger days I did what I could to help put down a couple such attempts. If afterward I signed up with old Hans, why, the Wang dynasty had collapsed utterly, and he was the least bad of the contending war lords. At that, he turned out to be a tolerable Emperor, didn't he? Neither a figurehead nor a monster. What more dare we expect? And we may owe something to the memory of Edwin Cairncross, inasmuch as his try at usurpation was what got us reacquainted with each other, but surely you'll agree he was an undesirable sort."
She secured the sash of her kimono and went to join him. He laid an arm around her waist. His straight-lined countenance writhed into a smile. "Sorry about the oratory," he murmured. "I'll try to keep it properly caged henceforward."
She leaned close. "I never mind. It's nice to see you relax from your perpetual clowning." Her innate seriousness rose afresh. "But you haven't answered me. All right, the Empire was bumbling along fairly peacefully, and Magnusson's revolt is a disaster. Don't I know it myself? However—my parents always told me to look at every side of a question—would his success be a catastrophe? I mean, I've heard you say often enough that we no longer have any such thing as legitimate government. Maybe Magnusson would be better than Gerhart, who is rather a swine, isn't he?"
"Well, yes, he is," Flandry admitted, "although a shrewd swine. For a moderately important instance, you know he doesn't like me, but he's given to taking my advice, because he sees it's practical. And … Crown Prince Karl does have a high opinion of me, and is a thoroughly decent boy." He snickered. "If I'm still alive when he inherits the throne, I'll have to set about curing him of the latter."
She stared outward and upward. Stars were lost in the haze of light from the towers everywhere around, but—"Does it make that much difference who is Emperor? What can he, what can any person, any planet, do to change things?"
"Usually very little," Flandry agreed. This was by no means the first time they had been over the same ground. They were both aware and concerned, she less cynically than he. But some open wounds do not allow themselves to be le
ft alone; and tonight they were feeling a freshly inflicted one. "The Policy Board, the provincial nobles, the bureaucrats and officers, the inertia of sheer size—Still, even a slight shift in course will touch billions of lives, and perhaps grind them out. And occasionally a pivotal event does happen. More and more, I wonder whether we may not be about to have that experience again."
"What do you mean?"
Flandry ran fingers through his sleek gray hair. "I'm not sure. Possibly nothing. Yet every intuition, every twitchy nerve I've developed in decades I misspent as an Intelligence agent when I might have gone fishing—my hunch screams to me that something peculiar is afoot." He pitched his cigarette expertly away, into an ashtaker, and swung about to face her, hands on her shoulders. "Listen, Banner. You've been in the yonderlands, you haven't followed the input as you would've with me if you'd stayed home. The Merseians have now hit us."
She gave him a stark smile. "Is that a surprise? Haven't they always taken what advantage they could, when the Empire's been in disarray? Nibbles here and there, no casus belli that might unite us against them—obviously, not in this case either, if the story hasn't been released."
"This case is oddly different," Flandry said. "There've been the predictable skirmishes in the marches, yes. No major thrust. But … they sent a task force, which passed straight through Imperial space—they sent a strike force to Gorrazan, on the far side of us."
"What?" She stiffened. "Why? It doesn't make sense."
"Oh, it does, it does, when you contemplate it from the proper, skewed angle." He spoke softly, as was his wont when discussing terrible things. "Yes, the Realm of Gorrazan is the pathetic souvenir of a botched attempt at empire, a few colonies and clients on a few second-rate worlds near the home sun. Yes, its government has been plagued by insurrectionists who proclaim a bright new ideology—God, how long has the universe endured the same old bright new ideologies?—and the rebels are known, to everybody except our journalists and academics, to nave Merseian inspiration and help. Trouble at our backs. Certainly I'd instigate the identical thing behind Merseia if I could.
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