The View from the Imperium

by Jody Lynn Nye

  View from the Imperium

  Jody Lynn Nye

  BAEN BOOKS by JODY LYNN NYE

  View from the Imperium

  The Grand Tour

  School of Light

  Waking in Dreamland

  The Ship Errant

  Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear

  License Invoked (with Robert Asprin)

  With Anne McCaffrey:

  The Ship Who Saved the World

  The Death of Sleep

  The Ship Who Won

  Planet Pirates (also with Elizabeth Moon)

  View from the Imperium

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jody Lynn Nye

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3430-6

  Cover art by David Mattingly

  First paperback printing, April 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Bill, with love

  Prologue

  The ions stopped exploding off the surface of the ship as it emerged from ultra-drive and the rift in space sealed behind it. The long vessel’s self-effacing dark blue shell continued to repel in glittering sparks the few microscopic particles that had previously occupied the portion of space that the ship now possessed. Four broad fins of a wedge-shaped cross-section ran the entire length of the solid tube shape. At the propulsion end, the fins widened out to form a traditional landing pattern. At the navigation end, the top was contained in a repulsor net of energy that allowed the sensors within to operate without being ripped off or irretrievably dented by space junk. Its light weapons emplacements lay in the angles. Except for the minor fireworks and the glimmer of the net, the ship Little Darling was a narrow bar of darkness across the greater darkness spangled with pinpoints of diamond light. One star stood out among the others. Portent’s Star, a medium-sized blue-white, shone fiercely, its light only faintly bent into the distance by the black hole only half a light-year away that separated the rest of the Castaway Cluster from the vast Imperium. The red light of a stationary navigational warning beacon glowed like a lantern at the doorway of an ancient inn, welcoming the ship and its contingent to the system.

  “Good, th’un’s out there,” Captain Iltekinov stated, more for the benefit of the row of distinguished visitors standing behind him on the bridge than for the crew. He received no reply. He pressed his broad back into the tattered, glossy, oxblood-colored padding of his chair and peered over his shoulder. All five of the Councillors, clad in the long yellow robes of the Yolk system, were engrossed in the row of shallow viewscreens attached to the handrails.

  “When’s reception return?” Ruh Pinckney, the senior diplomat, demanded. He smacked the side of the display with the flat of his hand.

  A blare of sound and a blaze of light made everyone jump.

  “There it is,” Tam Quelph announced, pointing at her screen, as the rapid data transmission resumed. The woman peered at the time-coding running along the bottom. The backlit image threw colored lights that blurred her white-blond hair and the elaborate wave patterns of pink on her face with blobs of black, blue and white. “Damn all, we’ve missed over five days of discussion during the transit!”

  “Y’can get archives from the First Councillor when y’land,” Iltekinov growled. It wasn’t the first time he had made this observation.

  “We’re hopelessly behind,” Quelph complained. “We caught up with a more current stream, and it only shows how late we are!”

  “Y’could ask ’em to stop talkin’ ’til you gets there,” the captain suggested. He was tired of the endless grousing and whining of the embassy from the Yolk system. An independent businessman who plied his trade among the inhabited planets and stations within the Castaway Cluster, he normally hauled cargo, mostly dry goods and produce. It all stayed quietly in its containers in the hold and didn’t wear his ears out unnecessarily. He still had a whole ear on one side, but only half an ear on the other. The scar, the result of a fight in a Dree station bar over thirty years before, ran across his face to his nose, digging a ruddy furrow among the dark blue angles and crosshatches of his clan tattoos that covered his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. After thirty years and more plying the spaceways, his least favorite load was politicians. Lucky for him, a full, in-person council meeting was a rare event.

  Pinckney, a heavyset man whose dark-green and yellow facial tattoos vanished into the rolls of fat under his swarthy chin, made a sound of outrage at his suggestion. “We have not been introduced to the board yet!” he said. “Our views cannot be noted until we are presented—in person—and been welcomed by the host delegation!”

  “Dunno why,” Iltekinov muttered to himself. “Waste of time. Traders don’t bother with face-to-face. Entertainers don’t bother with face-to-face. Law enforcement don’t bother with face-to-face . . .”

  Pinckney overheard him. “We will do these things properly, as our governments have done them for two hundred years, Captain,” he said, stiffly. “Representational and in the proper order. We will have to speed-review all of the minutes taken thus far so we don’t delay the others any more than we already have.”

  Iltekinov yawned. Once again, Pinckney was trying to blame him for their tardiness. The captain shut out the criticism. He had warned them when they’d first contacted him for passage to Portent’s Star that space travel wasn’t like running a light-rail system in a city. It had been too much to assume that the politicians would pay the least attention to what he’d said, let alone retain it. He was a good Yolkovian, and he had been willing to carry the negotiators to this very important conference on Dree for no other fee than fuel replenishment, in spite of the trip’s interrupting his usual rounds through the Cluster.

  Worse yet, the diplomats’ luggage, for five human beings intending to spend less than a month in a location where food, shelter, entertainment and, if necessary, toiletries and clothing would be provided, took up almost a third of his cargo bay, making him leave behind that much of his payload on Yolk 5, also called Setria, the home planet in the system. The councillors could have made up for it by being pleasant, but no, they went on and on about how an ion storm prevented him from picking them up on the day that he had promised, as if they knew anything at all about the rigors of astrogation or physics, for that matter. How in all of nature did the five biggest complainers in the galaxy end up being named as representatives for the entire system of Yolk? He grumbled to himself and started to turn back.

  The lone Wichu on the council, Ferat Urrmenoc, looked up from her screen and tipped him a sheepish grin and a wink of one of her big round eyes. The nonhumanoid with the thick, black-tipped white fur was the only one who picked up on what he was thinking. He grinned back at her and settled down in his seat.

  A side screen on his personal console ran what they were seeing. The Yolkovian contingent was receiving the minutes of an extended meeting of the advisory council of the Cluster system. He had his screen muted so the transcribed text ran along the top of the image instead of playing audio into the implant in the portion of skull over his left ear. While the combined vid featured visuals, graphics and historic videos in an attempt to liven it
up, the content of each learned and lengthy discourse was such boring stuff he wouldn’t bother to listen to it even if he was on a fifty-year sublight haul all the way to the Core Worlds of the Imperium or the center of the Trade Union and had lost his entire collection of action shows and pornography in a database crash, and everyone in the ship he might play basketball with was in a coma, and hidden somewhere in the press of information was the directions to a planetoid full of cut jewels and wanton, willing women. The download wasn’t even good for inducing sleep, since every so often one of the delegates would break into a screaming diatribe, probably out of frustration that he couldn’t strangle all the others.

  The Yolkovians ought to feel grateful that they had the rapid data transmission system at their disposal. True, it wasn’t as satisfying as being in the room with your conversation partner, but it was a fast conveyance of information. The system had become vital during the founding of an interstellar community, and evolved greatly over the course of history as that community had evolved. The distance between two planets once meant a nine-hour gap in between sentences. Digital high dispersal transmission had shortened that to nine minutes. Once the FTL border had been broken on energy transfer, one could carry on a conversation between stars with a lag of mere hours, far better than communications carried by the first human ancestors to traverse space, but nothing ever seemed fast enough for people in a hurry. Like the council.

  “Now they’re talking about government structure,” Pinckney wailed again.

  “Calm yourself, Ruh,” Quelph said. “They cannot make any decisions without us.”

  “They might form opinions,” Pinckney insisted.

  “Oh, they have plenty of those,” Urrmenoc laughed with the grunting breaths of her kind. “So do we. But listen: they’re saying the same things they were five days ago. We just heard those same arguments. They are not likely to change before we get there. How long now, Captain?”

  Iltekinov turned his head around, no longer having to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping.

  “Matter of two shifts,” he said. “We can’t resume ultra-drive within the solar system. Too much disruption might distort the orbit of a planetary body; ’course, you know that. We’ve got to take sublight, runnin’ about point-one-five C. By late third shift.”

  Ignoring the grumbling, the captain nodded to his navigator to get Little Darling under way. Natalia Poldin nodded back. She was an old-time spacer, gray eyes crinkled at the corners from ages of staring out ports at the stars. Her clan tattoos were shaped like small teardrops on their sides so they resembled schools of fish swimming toward the bridge of her nose. None of them needed explicit instructions on how to do their job. Iltekinov changed the view on his screen to monitor movement of the asteroids and stray bodies in the belt of debris.

  Out here on the edge of the system lifeless rocks the size of small planets rolled and tumbled in a complex pattern that would have made a fine screen-saver. The banging sound that came from the bow of the ship was an artifact, not actual strikes, made by rocks too small to dodge as they met the pure energy of the protective net and exploded into harmless dust repelled by the shield.

  There’d been movements over the centuries to urge ships to enter star systems at a beacon set above or below the plane of ecliptic, in order to avoid potential collisions when coming out of ultra-drive, but there was no doubt that it made getting one’s bearings just that much easier to aim for the geographical marker that was the ring of stone and ice around nearly every star’s purlieu. Even longtime spacers were more comfortable having a solid goal than a nebulous point in space one could only see on scope.

  The danger of being struck by one of the gigantic rocks was microscopic compared with, say, having a collision with another vehicle in planetary atmosphere. At a distance the belt might look like a gravel road, but close up, the bodies revolving around the heliopause were many kilometers apart.

  The real danger lay in ramming into chipped-off chunks of asteroid that were too small to avoid but too big to be easily consumed by the hungry screens at the bow. Energy weapons, controlled by a computer, spotted and picked those off, but the captain liked to keep an eye on the process himself. No human was fool enough to think he had quicker reactions than a computer, but Iltekinov couldn’t help but want to maintain the watch to protect his ship. He was fond of her; they looked after one another.

  His screen showed one edge of brilliant white, the splashover energy from the black hole, still powerful in spite of its safe remove from the system. That collapsed star, combined with the distance in between Portent’s Star and the Imperium, the nearest outpost of civilization, served to isolate the Castaways. Once every year or two Iltekinov made the laborious trip to Imperium space or the even longer journey to the Trade Union for luxury goods and technical devices.

  At least six huge confederations existed beyond the black hole, and many small ones, such as the Costadetev Federation, the Uctu Autocracy, the Obqin, the Dro-Tan Technocracy, and the Central Worlds, each consisting of hundreds or thousands of star systems. He knew from history programs on the viewtank that many of the races who co-existed in the Cluster with human beings originated in some of those far-off systems, having conquered or been conquered by his kind in centuries long past and forgotten by mutual consent.

  Once the Castaways had been part of the Imperium, but that was long ago, before Iltekinov was born. The Imperium was too far away to have any real impact on his life, so he ignored the arguments that went on between historians and politicians. For him, business was the most important factor. He paid his taxes to Yolk’s council, and the money was shared out evenly among the other planets and stations in the Cluster. There were the usual arguments about the wealthier communities paying in more and getting less, stations getting heavily subsidized at the expense of groundbounders, and so on, but little changed over the years. Everybody got educated, fed, protected and physicked, mostly.

  Iltekinov didn’t care. All he wanted were safe spaceways and profitable deals. Yolk might be a backwater, even a little inbred, but Yolkovians knew a good life when they had it. He and his fellow Cluster merchants generally policed themselves, preferring not to bring their affairs to the attention of the councils.

  The big companies, suppliers of staples such as food, textiles and power supplies, more or less ran everything, but they left openings of opportunity for such small entrepreneurs as himself. He filled a niche, and he was proud of it.

  What with the Cluster being as isolated as it was, the merchants formed a close, though non-geographical, community. Meeting another ship on one’s way in sublight was grounds for a friendly greeting, if not time to stop for a moment and exchange drinks. The rare strangers from one of the big alliances knew the custom, and most of them joined in. No doubt, Iltekinov thought wryly, making himself more comfortable in the smooth seat, they thought it was quaint.

  Navigator Natalia Poldin glanced up as the proximity alarm went off. Surprised, Iltekinov swung his scope 135 degrees to port and got a distant bloom of a minute heat signature in among the cold rocks, no more than a pinpoint in size. The ship’s ID was unfamiliar. Poldin met Iltekinov’s eyes. He read the worry in hers, and felt it echo in the pit of his gut.

  “Someone coming out of the crossing?” she asked. “A visitor?”

  The captain counted up ships in his head. “Maybe,” he said. “Otari from the Trade Union was coming this way, but I didn’t think he was due out of Scanama for another couple of weeks, so he’d be months early. Maybe Dagnessen from the Central Worlds?” But Dagnessen wouldn’t hover among the asteroids in the belt. In fact, no one would linger there, unless they were up to no good. It had to have been hiding there, its telemetry concealed by the thick walls of one of the planetoids, waiting for someone to emerge from ultra-drive. Who? Them? No time to guess. The other ship was moving towards them. The captain felt a prickle of fear. Pirates were not unknown in the spaceways.

  “Have they hailed us?” Iltekinov called
to his purser, Sam Delius. In spite of his human-sounding name, Delius was an Uctu, a Gecko, born in the Autocracy but brought up in the Cluster.

  “It has yet to send a hail. I have signalled it thirty-five times now,” Delius replied, his long-lidded eyes fluttering nervously. “All wavelengths, digital and rapid-transmit.”

  “Then they don’t want to talk to us.” Iltekinov steeled himself to survive. He slapped the signal in the arm of his seat. “Buckle in! All crew, this is a warning. Stations! We’ve got a stranger out there.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, Captain,” Pinckney exclaimed. “That’s judgmental.”

  Iltekinov didn’t turn around. There was no time to indulge in the irritation he felt. He concentrated on linking into the ship’s computer system through his communications link, freeing his hands for running auxiliary weapons control, if it should come to that. The viewtank responded by zooming in on the other ship as tightly as it could. No details in the visible range yet, but stats began to stack up on the side. Impressive mass it was showing, much greater than the Little Darling. “Councillor, when I hail a ship ten ways from Restday and ’un doesn’t answer, either it’s disabled, an’ y’can see it’s not, or it’s out to get me,” he snapped out smartly. “I didn’t get old like this lettin’ my ship get too close to predators.”

  “Predators! Hardly . . . !”

  Whatever Pinckney was going to say was interrupted by the flash of light that bloomed in the viewtank in the infrared band. An energy blast! Iltekinov’s heart pounded.

  “Turn tail, Nat,” he ordered. “Put on some speed!”

  “Aye, Captain!” she replied. She plastered her palms down over the relays. The ship jerked sideways as it came about hard to starboard and up the Y-axis, seeking to put an approaching asteroid between it and the coming blast. The ship’s internal inertia-dampers kicked in a moment later, but not before the five councillors clinging to the rails went rolling into the bulkhead. His eyes glued to the viewtank, Iltekinov heard the banging and swearing. I told them to buckle in, he thought, with just a tiny bit of satisfaction.