Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “There will be no treachery,” the Colonel promised.

  Petra Hodesta’s wandering route now was taking it toward the northernmost of Triple Sea’s three lobes, the one adjacent to Gespinord, the Tristessan capital province. Since Lanista was due back from Shannakha in a few more days, it was the Colonel’s plan to go ashore on the coast of Gespinord and make his way by airtrain to the main Velde terminal, two hundred kilometers inland at the capital city, to await his return. But he was less than halfway there when the train came spiraling down to its track with the sighing, whistling sound of an emergency disconnect and someone in uniform came rushing through the cars, ordering everyone outside.

  Tristessa was under attack. Without warning Shannakhan troops had come pouring through every Velde doorway on the planet. Gespinord City, the capital, had already been taken. All transit lines had been cut. The Colonel heard distant explosions, and saw a thick column of black smoke rising in the north, and another, much closer, to the east. They were hideous blotches against the flawless emerald-green of the Tristessan sky; and there in the west the Colonel saw a different sort of blemish, the harsh dark face of stark stony Shannakha, low and swollen and menacing on the horizon. What had gone wrong up there? What—even while they were in the midst of delicate negotiations—had led the Shannakhans to break the fragile peace?

  The train had halted at some provincial station bordered on both sides by rolling crimson meadows. Somehow the Colonel found a communications terminal. Reaching Lanista on Shannakha proved impossible: no outgoing contact with other worlds was being allowed. But against all probability he did manage to get a call through to the rebel headquarters on Petra Hodesta, and, what was even less probable than that, Ilion Gabell himself came to the screen. His handsome features now had taken on a wild, almost bestial look: the curling golden mane was greasy and disheveled, the luminous, meditative eyes had a frenzied glaze, his lips were drawn back in a toothy grimace. He gave the Colonel a look of searing contempt. “No treachery, you said. What do you call this? They’ve invaded us everywhere at once. Without warning, without any declaration of hostilities. They must have been planning it for years.”

  “I assure you—”

  “I know what your assurance is worth,” Gabell said. “Well, mine is worth more. The reprisals have already begun, Colonel. And as for you—”

  A blare of visual static sliced across the screen and it went black.

  “Hello?” the Colonel shouted. “Hello? Hello?”

  The stationmaster, bald and plump and nearly as wild-eyed as Gabell had looked, appeared from a back room. The Colonel identified himself to him. He gaped at the Colonel in amazement and blurted, “There’s an order out for your arrest. You and that other Imperium agent, both. You’re supposed to be seized by anyone who finds you and turned over to the nearest officers of the republic.”

  “What republic is that?”

  “Republic of Tristessa. Proclaimed three hours ago by Ilion Gabell. All enemies of the republic are supposed to be rounded up and—”

  “Enemies of the republic?” the Colonel said, astonished. He wondered if he was going to have to kill him. But the plump stationmaster clearly had no appetite for playing policeman. He let his eye wander vaguely toward the open door to his left and shrugged, and made an ostentatious show of turning his attention away from the Colonel, busying himself with important-looking papers on his desk instead. The Colonel was out through the door in a moment.

  He saw no option but to make his way to the capital and find whatever was left of the diplomatic community, which no doubt was attempting to get off Tristessa as quickly as possible, and get himself off with them. Something apocalytic was going on here. The sky was black with smoke in every direction, now, and the drumroll of explosions came without a break, and frightful tongues of flame were leaping up from a town just beyond the field on his left. Was the whole planet under Shannakhan attack? But that made no sense. This place was Shannakha’s property; destroying it by way of bringing it back under control was foolishness.

  Gabell had spoken of reprisals. Was he the one behind the explosions?

  It took the Colonel a week and a half to cover the hundred kilometers from the train station to the capital, a week and a half of little sleep and less food while he traversed a zigzag route through the devastated beauty of Gespinord Province, dodging anyone who might be affiliated with the rebels. That could be almost anybody, and was likely to be nearly everybody. A woman who gave him shelter one night told him of what the rebels were doing, the broken dams and torched granaries and poisoned fields, a war of Tristessa against itself that would leave the planet scarred for decades and worse than useless to its Shannakhan masters. At dawn she came to him and told him to go; he saw men wearing black rebel armbands entering the house on one side as he slipped away from it on the other.

  He had three more such narrow escapes in the next four days. After the last of them he stayed away from inhabited areas entirely. He hurt his leg badly, slogging across a muddy lake. He cut his hand on a sharp palm frond and it became infected. He ate some unknown succulent-looking fruit and vomited for a day and a half. Skulking northward through swamps and over fresh ashheaps still warm from the torching, he started to experience the breaking down of his innate unquenchable vitality. The eternal self-restoring capacity of his many-times-rejuvenated body was no longer in evidence. A great weariness came over him, a sense of fatigue that approached a willingness to cease all striving and lie down forever. That was a new experience for him, and one that shocked him. He began to feel his true age and then to feel older than his true age, a thousand years older, a million. He was ragged and dirty and lame and his throat was perpetually parched and there was a pounding against the right side of his skull in back that would not stop; and as he grew weaker and weaker with the passing days he began to think that he was going to die before much longer, not from some rebel’s shot but only from the rigors of this journey, the fever and the chill and the hunger. He cursed Geryon Lanista a thousand times. Whatever Lanista had been up to on Shannakha, could he not have taken a moment to send his partner on Tristessa some warning that everything was on the verge of blowing up? Evidently not.

  And then, at last, he stumbled into Gespinord City, where uniformed soldiers of Shannakha patrolled every street. He identified himself to one of them as a representative of the Imperium, and was taken to a makeshift dormitory in a school gymnasium where members of the diplomatic corps were being given refuge. There were about a dozen of them from five or six worlds, consular officials, mainly, who in ordinary times looked after the interests of tourists from their sectors of the galaxy that were holidaying on Tristessa. All the tourists were long gone, and the few officials who remained had stayed behind only to supervise the final stages of the evacuation of the planet. One of them, a woman from Thanda Ban-danareen, saw to it that the Colonel was washed and fed and medicated, and afterward, when he had rested awhile, explained that the Tristessan Authority, which was the name under which the invaders from Shannakha were going, had ordered all outworlders to leave Tristessa at once. “I’ve been shippping people out for five days straight,” she said, and the Colonel perceived for the first time that she was not much farther from exhaustion than he was himself. “There’s no time to set coordinates. You go to the doorway and you step through and you work things out for yourself on the other side. Are you ready to go?”

  “Now?”

  “The sooner I get the last few stragglers out of here, the sooner I can go myself.”

  She led him to the doorway and, offering a word or two of thanks for her help, he entered its Velde field, a blind leap to anywhere, and came out, to his relief, on that glorious planet, Nabomba Zom, identifiable instantly by the astounding scarlet sea before him, which was shimmering with a violet glow as the first blue rays of morning struck its surface. There, in a guest lodge of the Imperium at the base of pale green mountains soft as velvet, the Colonel learned from a fellow member of th
e Service what had taken place on Shannakha.

  It seemed that Geryon Lanista had badly overplayed his hand. For the sake of persuading the Shannakhans to adopt a more lenient Trist-essa policy, Lanista had shown them forged documents indicating that Ilion Gabell’s revolutionary army would not simply launch a rebellion on Tristessa if concessions weren’t granted but would invade Shannakha itself. The Shannakhans had taken this fantasy seriously, much too seriously. Lanista had meant to worry them with it, but instead he terrified them; and in a frantic preemptive overreaction they hurriedly shipped an invading army to Tristessa to bring the troublesome colonists to heel. The worst-case scenario that Lanista had foreseen as a theoretical possibility, but did not seem to believe could happen, was going to occur.

  The Colonel shook his head in disbelief. That Lanista—his own protege—would have done anything so stupid was next to impossible to accept; that he would have done so without telling him that he had any such crazy tactic in mind was an unpardonable breach of Service methodology. That he had not sent word to the fellow officer whom he had left behind in harm’s way on Tristessa that events in this planetary system had begun to slide toward a ghastly cataclysm as a result of his bizarrely clumsy maneuver was unforgivable for a different reason.

  It seemed Gabell had been anticipating an invasion from Shannakha and had had a plan all ready for it: a scorched-earth program by which everything on Tristessa that was of value to Shannakha would be destroyed within hours after the arrival of Shannakhan invaders. One overreaction had led to another; by the end of the first week of war Tristessa was utterly ruined. Between the furious destructiveness of the rebels and the brutal repression of the rebellion by the invaders that had followed, nothing was left of Tristessa’s plantations, its great estates, its hotels, its towns and cities, but ashes.

  “And Lanista?” the Colonel asked leadenly. “Where is he?”

  “Dead. By his own hand, it would seem, though that isn’t a hundred percent certain. Either he was trying to get away from Shannakha in a tremendous hurry and accidentally made a mess out of his Velde coordinates, or else he deliberately scrambled up the coding so that he wouldn’t be reassembled alive at his destination. Whichever it was, there wasn’t very much left of him when he got there.”

  “You really believed I was dead?” Lanista asked.

  “I hoped you were dead. I wanted you to be dead. But yes, yes, I believed you were dead, too. Why wouldn’t I? They said you had gone into a doorway and come out in pieces someplace far away. Considering what you had managed to achieve on Shannakha, that was a completely appropriate thing to have done. So I accepted what they told me and I went on believing it for the next fifty years, until some bastard from the Imperium showed up at my house with proof that you were still alive.”

  “Believe me, I thought of killing myself. I imagined fifty different ways of doing it. Fifty thousand. But it wasn’t in me to do a thing like that.”

  “A great pity, that,” the Colonel said. “You allowed yourself to stay alive and you lived happily ever after.”

  “Not happily, no,” said Lanista.

  He had fled from Shannakha in a desperate delirious vertigo, he told the Colonel: aware of how badly awry it all had gone, frantic with shame and grief. There had been no attempt at a feigned suicide, he insisted. Whatever evidence the Service had found of such a thing was its own misinterpretation of something that had nothing to do with him. Fearing that the truth about the supposed Tristessan invasion would emerge, that the Shannakhans would discover that he had flagrantly misled them, he had taken advantage of the confusion of the moment to escape to the nearest world that had a Magellanic doorway and in a series of virtually unprogrammed hops had taken himself into some shadowy sector of the Rim where he had hidden himself away until at last he had felt ready to emerge, first under the Heinrich Bauer name, and then, as a result of some kind of clerical error, as Martin Bauer.

  In the feverish final hours before the Shannakhan invasion began he had, he maintained, made several attempts to contact the Colonel on Tristessa and urge him to get away. But all communications lines between Shannakha and its colony-world had already been severed, and even the Imperium’s own private communications channels failed him. He asked the Colonel to believe that that was true. He begged the Colonel to believe it. The Colonel had never seen Geryon Lanista begging for anything, before. Something about the haggard, insistent look that came into his eyes made his plea almost believable. He himself had been unable to get any calls through to Lanista on Shannakha; perhaps the systems were blocked in the other direction too. That was not something that needed to be resolved just at this moment. The Colonel put the question aside for later consideration. For fifty years the Colonel had believed that Lanista had deliberately left him to die in the midst of the Tristessa uprising, because he could not face the anger of the Colonel’s rebuke for the clumsiness of what he had done on Shannakha. Perhaps he didn’t need to believe that any longer. He would prefer not to believe it any longer; but it was too soon to tell whether he was capable of that.

  “Tell me this,” he said, when Lanista at last had fallen silent. “What possessed you to invent that business about a Tristessan invasion of Shannakha in the first place? How could you ever have imagined it would lead to anything constructive? And above all else, why didn’t you try the idea out on me before you went off to Shannakha?”

  Lanista was a long while in replying. At length he said, in a flat, low, dead voice, the voice of a headstrong child who is bringing himself to confess that he has done something shameful, “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “What?”

  “To surprise you and to impress you. I wanted to out-Colonel the Colonel with a tremendous dramatic move that would solve the whole crisis in one quick shot. I would come back to Tristessa with a treaty that would pacify the rebels and keep the Shannakhans happy too, and everything would be sweetness and light again, and you would ask me how I had done it, and I would tell you and you would tell me what a genius I was.” Lanista was looking directly at the Colonel with an unwavering gaze. “That was all there was to it. An idiotic young subaltern was fishing for praise from his superior officer and came up with a brilliant idea that backfired in the most appalling way. The rest of my life has been spent in an attempt to atone for what I did on Shannakha.”

  “Ah,” the Colonel said. “That spoils it, that last little maudlin bit at the end of the confession. ‘An attempt to atone’? Come off it, Geryon. Atoning by starting up a rebellion of your own? Against the Imperium, which you once had sworn to defend with your life?”

  Icy fury instantly replaced the look of intense supplication in Lanista’s eyes. “We all have our own notions of atonement, Colonel. I destroyed a world, or maybe two worlds, and since then I’ve been trying to build them. As for the Imperium, and whatever I may have sworn to it—”

  “Yes?”

  “The Imperium. The Imperium. The universal foe, the great force for galactic stagnation. I don’t owe the Imperium a thing.” He shook his head angrily. “Let it pass. You can’t begin to see what I mean.—The Impe-rium has sent you here, I gather. For what purpose? To work your old hocus-pocus on our little independence movement and bring me to heel the way you were trying to do with Ilion Gabell on Tristessa?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “And how will you do it, exactly?” Lanista’s face was suddenly bright with expectation. “Come on, Colonel, you can tell me! Consider it the old pro laying out his strategy one more time for the bumptious novice. Tell me. Tell me. The plan for neutralizing the revolution and restoring order.”

  The Colonel nodded. It would make no real difference, after all. “I can do two things. The evidence that you are Geryon Lanista and that you were responsible for the catastrophic outcome of the Tristessa rebellion is all fully archived and can quickly be distributed to all your fellow citizens here on Hermano. They might have a different view about your capability as a master schemer once they find
out what a botch you made out of the Tristessa operation.”

  “They might. I doubt it very much, but they might.—What’s the other thing you can do to us?”

  “I can cut Hermano off from the Velde system. I have that power. The ultimate sanction: you may recall the term from your own Service days. I pass through the doorway and lock the door behind me, and Hermano is forever isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Or isolated until it begs to be allowed back in, and provides the Imperium with proof that it deserves to be.”

  “Will that please you, to cut us off like that?”

  “What would please me is irrelevant. What would have pleased me would have been never to have had to come here in the first place. But here I am.—Of course, now that I’ve said all this, you can always prevent me from carrying any of it out. By killing me, for example.”

  Lanista smiled. “Why would I want to kill you? I’ve already got enough sins against you on my conscience, don’t I? And I know as well as you do that the Imperium could cut us off from the Velde system from the outside any time it likes, and would surely do so if its clandestine operative fails to return safely from this mission. I’d wind up in the same position but with additional guilt to burden me. No, Colonel, I wouldn’t kill you. But I do have a better idea.” The Colonel waited without replying.

  “Cut us off from the Imperium, all right,” Lanista said. “Lock the door, throw away the key. But stay here on the inside with us. There’s no reason for you to go back to the Imperium, really. You’ve given the Impe-rium more than enough of your life as it is. And for what? Has serving the Imperium done anything for you except twisting your life out of shape? Certainly it twisted mine. It’s twisted everybody’s, but especially those of the people of the Service. All that meddling in interstellar politics—all that cynical tinkering with other people’s governments—ah, no, no, Colonel, here at the end it’s time for you to give all that up. Start your life over here on Hermano.”