The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  He knew that the thing for him to do was to cut and run as fast as he could. The enemy fighters, side by side, were coming in fast, the big sphere of the mother ship moving along behind them. From the faint dimming of the stars behind it, Darfur could tell that they were getting up their shields.

  Darfur had been a first-class knife fighter on his home in Zylene. Boys there began their lives on the great plain that so resembled the Serengeti Plain of their distant homeland. The two Mtabeles came suddenly out of a thorn thicket. Darfur was alone, with only his knife. He knew that either man was a match for him with their heavier pangas. But some instinct told him that his only safety lay in driving straight ahead.

  He pretended to turn and run as they came at him, their dark skins gleaming with red and ocher stripes of war paint. Then, as they came up behind him, he suddenly whirled, and, in movements as choreographed as any ballet sequence, ran between them, ducking low. Their pangas, swung in furious reaction, sliced each other. Before they got over the shock, Darfur was behind them, stabbing with the knife, then taking to his heels as the main Mtabele war band came up.

  The feat won him a scholarship at Zylene’s Space Academy. And now, years later, he was ready to try it again.

  At full acceleration he swung his little ship, kicking it into a 180-degree turn. The two Gerin were startled to see him coming directly at them. As he started to pass between them, Darfur put the ship into a fishtail maneuver, the bow swinging first right, then left. He let go his plasma torpedoes and kept on going.

  The Gerin aboard must have been too full of fighting lust to care that they were in danger of disabling their partners. That was one thing you could count on about the Gerin—they were individualists all the way, even when that way could put their winning chances into peril.

  One of the fighters took a hit and blossomed into a brilliant fireball. The second one managed to intercept the oncoming torpedo and to bring its torpedo tubes to bear on Darfur’s ship. Darfur frantically swung his ship again, expecting at any moment to take a torpedo up the spout. But the Gerin ship was hit by wreckage from its partner before it could fire. Darfur’s automatic cameras had caught the whole thing.

  The cameras also caught his hasty retreat into FTL space when the globeship released five more fighters. But that was not held against him. He had succeeded against daunting odds. The affair was written up in the squadron newspaper. The CO of his squadron sent in Darfur’s name for a medal. This was turned down—there were a lot of medals given out that month. But he did receive his promotion to commander, and was put in charge of the cruiser Cochise.

  * * *

  Duty had not been dangerous on Alicia, but it had been dull. The planet’s main city of Morgels was a one-horse town with little in the way of entertainment for off-duty personnel. Commander Darfur had counted himself lucky that a circus had come to Alicia recently. Watching the various acts and strolling through the sideshows had given his crew something to do.

  Darfur had his doubts about spacekeeping circuses. It was said that circus people weren’t like others. They had special talents. Dealing with them could be tricky.

  In such disrepute were they held that some of the countries of Earth barred circus people from landing or performing.

  They had caused Darfur no trouble here, however. He had enjoyed their performance himself. Now, however, it was his duty to tell Jon Blake, the circus director, that he and his cruiser were pulling out, and he was prepared to take Blake and his people with him.

  Darfur was also prepared to cram aboard as many of the Alicians as he could. But so far, from the evasive answers the Alician dignitaries had given him, it looked like they would be content to stay on their home planet and deal with the Gerin as best they could. Probably by joining them, Darfur thought angrily. It was always the same on these little isolated worlds. The inhabitants forgot their ties to the League of Free Planets when any inconvenience was involved. You couldn’t blame those who were outright aliens—the G’tai, for example, and the Neuristii. Even though the League of Free Planets had many alien allies, not all aliens were interested in joining their fortunes with those of the League. Especially now, when it was looking a little dicey for the Terrans. But people of human stock ought to stick to their race. That’s what Darfur thought, and it’s what he expected all right-minded humanoids to think.

  * * *

  Straightening his uniform and setting his cap at a rakish angle, Commander Darfur left his office, waving off the guards who were supposed to accompany him. He walked down the dusty main street to the edge of town. Long before he got there, he could see the big aluminum-colored bulge of the Circus Ship. A few Alicians nodded to him as they passed. Darfur was going to regret giving up this, his first independent command. Soon he would return to the Earth base, and then he would be just one more young commander among many.

  The Circus Ship, several hundred yards long, lay in a field just on the outskirts of town. It had been costly in terms of fuel to bring the ship down to planetside rather than leave it in geosynchronous orbit. But once down, the ship served as quarters for the circus acts, and as commissary, and it even had its own built-in theater set up in the big storage areas where cargo had gone, back when the ship was a trader for the OddJohn Corporation.

  * * *

  Darfur went to the Circus Ship, well dressed in his pressed whites and very aware of his dignity. Darfur was almost seven feet tall, skinny, dark-skinned, and dark-eyed, with clean-cut features inherited from his Somali-Arabian ancestors.

  There was confusion around the Circus Ship, as always seems to happen at circuses. Darfur pressed his way through the crowd of scruffy, pale-eyed Alician urchins who were trying to sneak in free, like youngsters everywhere. The ticket-taker recognized Darfur and let him through, directing him to the backstage door to find the impresario, Blake.

  There seemed to be even more confusion backstage.

  Men rushed back and forth carrying cardboard scenery and painted wooden sets. Jugglers practiced their acts one last time; the dancers were warming up. Darfur noted that these circus folk looked thoroughly disreputable and probably deserved the evil reputation that clung to all interstellar circuses. And where in all this was he to find Blake?

  “He’s in the animal sector,” a roustabout told him. “One of the elephants has gone spooky.”

  Commander Darfur thanked him and walked quickly to the animal sector. But he forgot to duck his head as he passed through the entrance. His cap was knocked off his head by a guywire. He picked it up hurriedly, brushed it off, set it back on his head, and marched stiffly off. He was aware that several of the performers seemed to find that funny.

  * * *

  Some of the people he passed were obviously of human stock, especially the jugglers and acrobats. Some of them derived from a bewildering mixture of alien and human races. Some of them had been mildly gene-teched. Others appeared to be the result of unfortunate mutations. There were startling man-animal combinations. Some of the circus people were feathered and some were furred, some walked on two feet and others on four. And then there were the winged men, the first Darfur had ever seen, though he had heard of them. How had they gotten that way? Implants on earth-type people? Or was there a race of winged humans somewhere out there among the thousand or so worlds that had been contacted since space exploration had begun?

  There was sawdust on the floor. It made the footing uncertain for a man in polished military boots.

  A sweating groom working with the team of horses used for the big chariot event pointed him in the right direction. He went past a group of Neanderthal-looking jugglers tossing several small balls back and forth, then introducing other objects into their act, objects thrown to them by people outside their circle, until the air around them seemed filled with flying objects—balls, small chairs, combs, pocketbooks, glasses, anything light enough to lift and throw.

  Darfur ducked past them
and saw, far down one side of the hold, a good-sized gray elephant being backed with difficulty into a cage. The elephant looked ready to turn on the man at any moment. That was Blake. Darfur recognized him from their earlier meeting. Blake was not as tall as Darfur but he was burly-chested and muscular. His floating blond hair was held in place by a woven gold circlet, and he was overawing the elephant by sheer force of character. Although the elephant looked as if it wanted to stomp the man, Blake kept steadily advancing on him, a cigar clamped into the side of his mouth, talking steadily and without much inflection:

  “Back away there, Daisy, and no sense you keep on glaring at me with those little red eyes of yours, you know I’m the boss and you are going into that pen where we can strap you down and do something about that toothache of yours, and don’t try anything with me ‘cause I’ll hit you right between the eyes.”

  Brandishing a light whip, Blake finished backing the elephant into her cage, then turned away as a groom ran forward to secure the door of the cage. Blake noticed Commander Darfur and strolled over to him.

  “Is this a social call, Commander?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Darfur said. “I’ve come to tell you that I have been ordered to close down the League station on this planet and get my men back to Point Bravo.”

  “Well, that’s life in the service,” Blake said. “Here today, gone tomorrow.”

  Darfur was annoyed but struggled not to show it. “My departure,” Darfur said evenly, “has been hastened by information that a Gerin fleet is believed to be heading this way. I will be happy to escort your ship back to Point Bravo, where the forces of the League of Free Planets can protect you. “

  “Mighty kind of you, sonny,” Blake said. “But we’ve got other plans.”

  “Might I ask what they are?”

  “It’s none of your business,” Blake said, “but you might as well know I’m taking this ship on to Rhea.”

  “Rhea? Next planet out in this system? They’ve just got a few hundred thousand people there.”

  “That’s a good audience for a circus, Commander,” Blake said.

  “I would advise against it. There’s a possibility the Gerin will move this way.”

  “Sure. And there’s a possibility they’ll show up in a hundred other places, or even vanish right up their own tail pipes. It’s no concern of mine. This planet’s played out. We’re moving on to Rhea.”

  “And if the Gerin come?”

  Blake shrugged. “We’re from Pelops, and we’re noncombatants. None of us are original Earth stock.”

  “Do you think the Gerin give a damn where you were born? You look like humans and they’ll treat you as such.”

  “What I’ve heard,” Blake said, “is that some humanoid worlds have gone over to them and they haven’t suffered for it.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!” Darfur said. “You still owe something to the human race.”

  “Because they gave birth to me? Extend that back. I also owe the entire line of primates, who were the forebears of all of us. And the rodents and reptiles before that. And so on, to lichen and algae and finally to constituent chemicals.”

  “You can make anything sound absurd,” Darfur said.

  “The fact is, no matter which planet you were born on, you’re still humanoid and you owe something to the rest of the race.”

  “You think so?” Blake said. “Let me tell you, the human race as represented on our homeworld hasn’t been so nice to us. Do you know about the Pelopian doctrine of True Breeding?”

  Darfur nodded.

  “We’re the culls.”

  Darfur knew about Pelops. It was a case study in repression frequently lectured on in Military College. Many of the humanoid-occupied worlds had small populations, kept under distressingly rigid dictatorial control by the self-elected authorities. This was especially true on the planet Pelops, where the clique known as the Lords of Force ruled and had ruled since the founding of the civilization. It wasn’t only political control the Lords were after. They were obsessed with racial purity. Their doctrine was called True Breeding. With the help of their scientists they had drawn up a Code of Protocol. It dealt with both physical appearance and mental attitude. The first test, the most important test for a young Pelopian, came on the day he would be checked by the Psychometrics Board. They would test his deviation from the idealized Pelopian norm. The Lords had stringent ideas about what humanity should be like. Any unusual skills or talents were forbidden. Anything resembling psychic talent was absolutely proscribed.

  The Lords, taking a lesson from Earth history, didn’t want to breed geniuses. We’re a down-to-earth people, they said. Everybody is doing well here. We are not going to rock the boat. Those who did not pass were subject to outshipment. They were given a short period of time in which to settle up their affairs and make their goodbyes, and then they were shipped off-planet. Any who exceeded the period of grace were subject to immediate seizure and incarceration. After a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, the Outcaste would either be summarily executed as a criminal against the social order or marooned on one of the little planetoids at the edge of the Pelopian system. Here he would have to live on a planetoid never designed to support human life. These were prison worlds. It was an open prison: you could leave and go elsewhere, if you could find some place that would have you, and would be willing to pay your way there. There were few planets which gave them that opportunity. Life was tough for everyone; each world was still trying to make things work for its own population, and none had time left over to take in strays. And, too, each of these worlds had its suspicions about people who didn’t fit into its own social matrix. Life on the Outcaste worlds tended to be short, brutish, and painful.

  Many governments of human-occupied planets did not approve of the Pelopian methods. In a multiracial universe, these doctrines of racial purity were sinister, unethical, and certain to lead in time to fatal inbreeding. The Lords didn’t care what people of the other worlds thought. And because of the great struggle against the Gerin, the Pelopian fleet was badly needed. So dire was the plight of the League of Free Planets that the usually liberal League government refused to get involved and refused to take in Outcastes for fear of offending the Pelopians.

  “All of us here in this circus,” Blake said, “human and alien alike, are mutants as well as Outcastes. That compounds our untouchability. Humanoids dislike people with mutant abilities. Even minor mind-reading skills freak them out. They think all our people are reading their minds, learning their shoddy little secrets. It’s untrue, but it’s one of the lies they spread about us. We’ve been kicked off quite a few earth-settled worlds. We’re not allowed on Airies, or on Earth itself. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Darfur said.

  “It’s true. So I say, let the humanoids go their way. Good luck and all that, but I think we’ll just sit this one out.”

  “If the Gerin let you,” Darfur said.

  “Hey, we’ve dealt with a lot of aliens in our time. No trouble. Once they see we’re truly neutral, they’ll leave us alone.”

  Commander Darfur had to be content with that. He left the ship and returned to his headquarters building. Everything was in readiness. Everybody had been expecting orders to come through at any moment to take them off this dreary little world of Alicia. They were ready to go.

  The formalities were brief. Within, twelve hours, the cruiser Cochise upwarped.

  * * *

  Not long after that, the converted cruiser P. T. Barnum, having run out of suckers and spectators, rang down the final curtain. The circus people were well schooled in quick exits. Sometimes they were necessary when things didn’t go right on the world they were entertaining. No problem this time, but they got off quickly anyhow.

  * * *

  When Commander Darfur came out of FTL space to Point Bravo, he found a scene of conf
usion at fleet headquarters. Ships had been recalled from many points along the vast volume of space guarded by Point Bravo. So many had come at the same time that it posed a traffic-control problem for the local fleet headquarters of Admiral Clark Van Dyne, commanding MacDonald’s 4th Flotilla.

  Darfur had to remain in space for three standard days. From his ship’s observation post he could see the waiting ships keeping station in long rows, their winking lights like stars across the panoply of space. At last, orders came through. Darfur had the navigator set the parking orbit and ordered the crew to stand easy. There would be nothing for them to do until Darfur had made his call upon the admiral and was given further orders.

  * * *

  It took three Earth-standard twenty-four-hour days before Van Dyne’s calendar was clear. Then Darfur was summoned. Dressed in his best whites, hat under his arm, he took his launch to the admiral’s dreadnought and was piped aboard.

  Van Dyne was a busy man. Short, narrow in the shoulders, potbellied, he didn’t look as if he could be the famous Van Dyne of Temple Pass fame, the man who had taken his ships through the narrow straits between the crowded planets of Temple Pass, to break through the Gerin gauntlet and live to fight another day. He was known as one of MacDonald’s best fighting admirals, and most men considered it an honor and privilege to serve under him.

  So had Darfur. Until his interview with the admiral. “What do you mean, you let the Circus Ship go on to Rhea?” Van Dyne demanded. His eyebrows knotted. His eyes were glittering gray slits. Darfur felt his stomach knot.