“I gotta appointment, too,” Parsons said, seeing his brief errand stretching into an endless muddle.
The old woman put her hands on her hips. “Can’t fill either one of your orders until I’m up again! Now, hop!”
Parsons, with a deep sigh, hopped. He put a hand on the counter and vaulted into the space beyond. While the Croctoid paced back and forth, slashing his heavy tail back and forth with annoyance, Parsons attempted to reboot all of the antique machinery, all the while wincing at the shrill instructions being barked into his ear.
“No! Those three gotta be rebooted in order.” A bony hand poked past his nose. “First that one, then that one, then that one! No, wait a minnit. Maybe that one’s first.”
Parsons was familiar with most types of miniature terminals, from billing all the way to ordnance control. These were all old but well maintained. In a battered aluminum magazine underneath the counter, among several other mismatched cases and boxes, she had a circuit-tracer. He ran it over each unit in turn. “There seems to be nothing wrong with your equipment, madam.”
“All the fellas say that,” she said coyly. She aimed a sharp little forefinger. “If they ain’t broken, then why ain’t they runnin’? I got a business!”
“Forget it!” the Croctoid snapped, gnashing his teeth. “I’ll pay cash! Just tell the crew to start!”
“Can’t do that until I run yer plate,” the old woman said. “Come bring it back in a while, chickling. I’m sure me and this fumble-fingered lug can get the reader goin’ by then.”
Parsons offered him a look of sympathy, as any station plumber might to a fellow afflicted being. The Croctoid was not mollified. He slammed out of the door and headed down the corridor, shouting abuse. Parsons turned back to his hostess, who watched the reptilian depart with an expression of smug satisfaction. Then he noticed the buttons hidden in the worn carpet near the counter’s edge.
“You did that on purpose,” he said, very nearly surprised into his normal voice.
“Some people gotta learn manners,” she said. “Now, what is it yer want, friend? Let’s take it from the beginnin’, as if we just now met.”
Parsons did not allow even a modicum of his annoyance to show upon his face. To do so would be to break a lifetime of training. Instead he schooled it into pleased surprise. “Hello, gorgeous,” he said. “You’re a fine sight for a guy who’s been out in the middle o’ nowhere.”
She smiled and put a hand on his arm. “That’s a whole lot better.”
“Now may I have what I came for?” he asked.
“Message cube, right? Came in last sixday.” She looked around. “Well, I gotta find it, now. It’s in one o’ these boxes. Yer can help me look. Start with the ones under there.” She pointed to the chaos underneath the table at the rear of the shop. “After that yer can go through my storeroom.”
Chapter 13
“So,” Margolies asked, peering at me intently. His eyes were growing somewhat red around the irises from the liquor. “You don’t really have a job at home, huh?”
I began to reply, but Rous interrupted me.
“Nah,” the Gecko said, with a grin. “Butterflies, Imperial nobles are. Not literally.” He snapped his bony jaws around a chunk of pinkish melon and grinned at my discomfiture. Having proved himself a superior athlete and discovered that he outranked me in military hierarchy, he was taking every opportunity to add further to my humiliation. Fortunately, I was a past master at self-deprecation, a skill that was necessary to survival in the Imperial court.
“He has me dead to rights,” I said, spreading my hands out plaintively. “I have no official duties beyond my service in the Imperial Navy. We all take our turn.”
“And what’ll you do in the future? Are you going to make a career out of it?”
I started to reply, but Rous let out a trill of his tongue that was the equivalent of a human raspberry. “Probably not should. Not too much of a success, he.”
“He grrkked off the admiral on his first day!” added Oskelev, with a hooting laugh. I was wounded to the core of my soul. I thought she liked me. I had not realized until liquor teased the truth out of my shipmates how little respect they had for me. I had a strong urge to resign my commission and stay here among the miners. They liked me without reservation.
But my great-uncle Perleas always told me to fight the battles I knew I could win. The hearts and minds of the militia of Smithereen, who were also my hosts, deserved my attention. I wiped disappointment off my face and focused all my attention upon my hostess.
“What is there to do for fun here?” I asked Captain Chan.
“We don’t have a lot of down time,” Chan replied frankly. “We are always looking for extra shifts. When there’s a break we grab a few drinks with friends, find a bed partner, or we sleep. Sleep’s precious.”
“But there’s music, culture, art and sport,” I said. “Don’t you have time for anything like that?”
Chan raised an eyebrow. “Might, if there was room for entertainment arenas on the mining ships. We go out for weeks at a time, y’know. Head out a few million miles, let the spectrometers find a good vein where the asteroids have a similar mineral content, strip it and fill up. The belt’s thousands of klicks wide in any direction. The mining ships are about half the size of Smithereen Prime. They stay in orbit. Only the empty loaders and the people-carriers transit down here to drop off cargo and personnel. The money’s good when the orders are coming in, so we work as much as we can. Canned entertainment’s not worth wasting time on when there’s a new vein to be cracked. I regularly pull double shifts when I can, all sixday round if I can.”
I could well believe it. Next to any of the people in the room I was a twig. Merely being in good shape athletically meant nothing here. These beings were strong and determined, self-reliant, so different from my kinfolk. Among the upper classes I think only Parsons struck me as similar to these in being real. How the servants must laugh at us, I reflected. I was ashamed. We did nothing. These were the beings who built the Imperium that the Emperor commanded.
“Then what do you do in this operation?” I asked.
“I run fifth starboard drillhead on the number three mining ship, the Smithwick. Me and the drill understand each other. It never breaks down when I’m on it.” Derisive calls and snorts met this from some of her fellow miners. “It’s true!” she declared, scowling at them. She aimed a finger around at her critics. “You check my records! I’ve got more million-kilo days than any other driller in the corps!”
“It sounds like very hard work,” I said, soothingly. “You all have my admiration. I’d break down after a couple of days.”
“Ah, it’s just a job,” Chan said, but she and her companions looked pleased. She snapped the end off a nic-tube and inhaled the vapors. “I can see how you move. You’re not in bad shape, for a softie. There’s some muscle in there.”
Softies were atmosphere-dwellers, as far as I could determine.
“I don’t do badly,” I said. “I play shadow-handball, tri-tennis, jai-alai, ride, fly speedships, that kind of thing.”
“O-oh,” Filzon said, with a knowing expression.
I flushed. Any of them, from the skinniest Uctu upward, could have tied my body into a knot. I admired them, and, from their expressions, they respected me.
“That’s great,” Chan said. “I can’t contort myself into the kind of knots you need to be a good tennis player. Not built for it. Love to watch it, though. I bet you’re great.”
“No, no,” I said, modestly.
“You play in tournaments?”
“Yes,” I said, brightening. “I won one last year. The Smoothon Supplements Tour.”
“Hey, I saw that!” Hamadi said, his face becoming animated. “You were cracking astonishing! You saw that, right, Margolies?”
“That was you?” Margolies asked. “God, I wanted to jump through the viewtank and kiss you.” He gazed at me in wonder. “You’re a wonder, my lord.”
/> “It’s nothing,” I said, offering self-deprecation, but enjoying the adulation very much.
That awe clearly did not extend to my crew.
“Yeah,” I overheard Bailly say from another table, “he’s a noble. Not much use, or so I heard. He’s spent his whole time on the ship dawdling in the records department.”
I was stung. Nobles are useless. I didn’t care to hear that again. I had to drag my mind and my ego away from it. I intended to matter, even if that was only on a diplomatic basis. I was making this militia happy that I was here, and that counted for something—or, at least, I fervently hoped it did.
“How often does your militia train?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. About once a month?” Chan looked to the others for confirmation. “Whenever we can get most of us together. Doesn’t happen too often. Juhrman is my second.” She aimed a thumb at the big man. “If I’m out on an arc of the belt, he runs drills. We do okay.”
“Ever been called out?”
“Nah. Who’s attacking a mining colony?” she asked, her eyes brimming with laughter. “Wha’ for? ‘Gimme all your grade three nickel ore’?”
The others laughed. “Yeah, right,” Filzon said. “Only someone with a whole robot task force and a train of space barges is gonna walk in here and steal something. This wouldn’t be a high-speed pursuit for the videos, I can tell you that.”
I laughed, too. I caught my orbiting camera and held it up. “If you like high-speed pursuit, I have some space races that my cousins and I took right around the Core Worlds. Makes for some exciting viewing.”
The notion appeared to leave them cold. It simply added to the idea that we nobles did nothing of value.
“Maybe later, my lord,” Filzon said. “Do you still play competitively?”
I was content to talk about sports, if that made them happy. But some people could not let a subject go. Chee Rubin-Sign was one of them.
“All right, my lord,” she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the others. She poked a finger figuratively into her palm. “So, the Emperor can make you marry anyone he likes?”
“Not anyone he likes,” I said. I hated the topic. We members of the noble house had to take courses over the years in our rights and responsibilities to the Imperium. “He determines whether a certain gene combination is missing from the line, and he can correct it by use of his discretion.”
“Well, what if he ordered you to, say, marry a dog? Or a fiksnake?”
“He would never do that,” I assured them fervently. “The Imperium rests upon its stock of pure human DNA, or as pure as possible—no offense,” I added to the non-humans present.
Chertok waved away the apology. “Not needed. I would not be human. Why would you want to be Croctoid?”
“Well, exactly,” I said.
“So,” Rubin-Sign asked, her finger up, “can the Emperor terminate your marriage if he thinks you ought to get together with someone specific?”
“Yes, he can,” I said, a trifle unhappily. “Technically, he can order any subject to mate with whomever he considers needs to produce a genetic combination vital to the survival of the Imperium.”
“Anyone?” Rubin-Sign echoed. “Me? He’d have to catch me first.”
I smiled. As a defiant child, I had felt the same way. “It’s not likely. It hasn’t happened in centuries. It’s just one of the powers that the Emperor commands.”
“Well, I don’t like it!”
The conversation was getting very awkward. Desperate to change the subject, I brandished my camera. “As perhaps you can determine, I have lately become most enthusiastic about photography. Would you like to see some of my prized pictures? The ones I never show anyone?”
“Dirty snaps?” Chan asked, looking bored. “We get that stuff from all over the galaxy, my lord.”
“Oh, no!” I assured her, with a grin. I felt naughty, but it was all in a good cause. I lowered my voice. “If you will promise never to tell anyone that you saw these, they will be our little secret.” They nodded eagerly. I ran my finger along the ridged side of the tiny, silvered globe, and an image sprang into being in our midst. A man’s face appeared. His eyes were screwed up, his mouth was open, and globules of a pale brown liquid were caught as they were expelled from his mouth. “This is the Minister for Industrial Development, Lord Gahan Wilcox Mu.”
“I seen him in the news vids! He’s a pompous hunk of slag. How’d you get him like that?” Chan asked, gawking.
“Pepper extract in the coffee,” I said. “I must confess I was not alone in this particular prank; he had offended my cousin Xan, and it was not going to pass unavenged. That was the first spit-take I captured.” I lowered my eyelids suggestively. “Would you like to see more?”
“Yeah!” the miner militia chorused with glee.
“Hey, I can’t see!” Torkadir protested, from behind Chertok’s hefty back. “Size it up! Let the rest of us see.”
I looked about at the circle of avid grins. “How about it?” I asked Chan, slyly. “Should we let them in on it?”
“Why not?” Chan asked, her eyes twinkling.
I knew the controls on the Optique Callusion as if they were my own nerve endings. Among the settings for display was a search function, designed to locate the nearest open portal that was capable of receiving images. The Optique’s onboard processor would translate the file to whatever system the receiver used, at the greatest possible resolution. I thumbed the small touch square on my viewpad, and held the small globe up in the air.
The matte midnight wall above the room’s control panel suddenly bloomed with color. There, twenty meters high by fifteen wide, was the Minister for Industrial Development, choking out a mouthful of coffee. Each expelled droplet was larger than my head. I had not recalled what a brilliant red his complexion had turned, nor the strained tendons that stood out in his neck. The audience gasped with shock, then burst into hoots of hilarity.
“More!” Chan hooted, pounding on the table with her fist. “More! Who else you got?”
Happily, I clicked through my most precious images of coughs, sneezes and red-faced choking. My collection included many famous people who had come to the Imperium compound or whom I had met at charity events or in vacation spots.
“Did you spike all of their drinks?” Margolies asked, gawking at the image of a stunning actress whom I had caught sneezing vigorously at the head table at a banquet.
“No! Most of them are lucky shots. This lady had a bad cold. I knew if I waited long enough I’d get a wonderful picture.” I regarded the image with satisfaction. It was perfectly focused and centered, with the lighting absolutely ideal. I was getting rather good at picture-taking.
“Can’t you get in trouble for having those?”
“No,” I said. “Not one of these is taken during a confidential meeting, or contains compromising material. They are merely embarrassing.”
“Do you have one of the Emperor in there?” Hek-et-rahm asked.
“Wha-what?” I stammered. But it was only a guess on his part. I did have one of the Emperor, hidden in the buffer of the camera itself under an invisible coded name to keep anyone from locating it, especially Parsons, but no one else would ever see it. No one could possibly keep that secret. I was saved, when light suddenly blocked from landing lights above the ballroom.
“Now, that would be trouble,” Chan asked, slapping the back of the Wichu’s head with his palm. “He wouldn’t dare. Would you, my lord?”
Her expression was so adoring that I didn’t dare disabuse her. Nor did I dare admit the truth.
They were all falling in love with me, I realized. Round, moony eyes met my gaze everywhere I looked—except for my crew. They were not that impressed with my collection. Bailly was amused. Oskelev, the Wichu, looked as if she thought it was very bad manners to see someone spit food—which in her culture it was. But most of my audience was human, and I went for broke. I sifted through the less-than-perfect shots and found one the
most up-to-date digitavid star, Cwindar Prosser, captured in the moment of expelling a distasteful mouthful, and got a good laugh.
I bent over the controls, hoping for my next triumph. Suddenly, the lighting upon which I depended was extinguished.
“Curse it.” I looked up through the transparent ceiling at the offending object. Suddenly, something struck my memory forcibly. I rose to my feet. “Plet? Plet?”
The urgency of my voice attracted her attention from where she was enjoying her dessert with a group of miners. Not surprisingly, her nose went up. “Ensign?” The term was delivered in a haughty tone.
“Lieutenant Plet,” I corrected my address to her, but kept my tone calm and my eyes on the ceiling. “Please review the alerts that you gave to me on our departure from Wedjet.”
Her left eyebrow rose, but she took her viewpad from the pouch on her hip and began to spool off the information in a disinterested manner. “An ion storm will be one and one half light years off our route but moving towards us. It may be an issue upon our return to the Wedjet . . .”
“Past that,” I said impatiently. “Read me the data about the ships for which we are on the lookout.”
She gave me an odd glance, but complied.
“A cruiser stolen from Vijay Nine is believed to be a prank by university students on midyear break . . .”
“No,” I said.
She began again. “Suspected pirate craft with markings on body, tail and lateral fins of the Calsag Trading Corporation have been spotted. Calsag reported the vessels stolen by armed raiders during a delivery to Poctil colony. The craft have been reportedly used in a series of raids against small trading ships in the zone around this area.”
“That’s the one!” I exclaimed. “That’s one of the ships! It’s right above us on the landing pad!”
“Not right, my lord,” Margolies said, puzzled. “It belongs to the Harmony Exchange Foundation. See, it’s right there on the body. Pale blue field with joined hands across it.”
“No, look at the right rear fin,” I said. I pointed.
The View from the Imperium Page 18
