DM +63 137—a dim K7v orange star—wasn't much like Iota Pegasi. And the rust-red planet it was peeking over wasn't at all similar to Santaclara. But Roderick Brady-Schiavona was gazing through the transparency at it in a way that made him resemble Corin Marshak to a remarkable degree, given that they didn't look in the least alike.
In fact, he wasn't looking at the local astronomical scenery, but at the ships that reflected the dawning sunlight as they orbited in company with the titanic orbital fortress from which he gazed—the sector military headquarters, and therefore the natural location for the ceremony that was about to commence. He turned from the transparency and looked around him. He stood on a mezzanine that overlooked the fortress's vast docking bay where a Marine honor guard, like the row of dignitaries at right angles to it, faced a dais. That dais filled the space which would have accommodated an arriving shuttle, and it was unoccupied—for now.
Roderick moved to the railing and looked down, watching for a moment as Marine noncoms dressed the honor guard's lines to an even higher degree of exactitude. Then he glanced to right and left along the railing, at others who, like him, were of rank insufficiently exalted to be with the reception committee below.
"Why, Roderick!" The familiar voice was in bantering mode. "I expected you to be down below with the rest of the social elite."
Roderick turned around, and his moody expression dissolved into a grin that wasn't quite as dazzling as its wont—he'd been away from the light of any sun long enough for his face to lose the accustomed ruddy tan that went well with his chestnut-brown hair and provided contrast for his white teeth and blue-gray eyes. He greeted the civilian-clothed figure the way a man who is leaving youth behind greets his mentor.
"You must be joking! A mere captain? You have to be flag rank, or a damned highly placed civilian, to get anywhere close to that receiving line down there."
"A captain, true . . . but hardly a `mere' one," Jason Aerenthal demurred. "After all, as the Sector Admiral's son—"
"Now I know you're joking."
"Of course I am. Anything smacking even remotely of favoritism would be anathema to your father. He is unique in my experience: a man with an accurate public image of probity and rectitude. Besides . . ." Aerenthal didn't need to complete the thought. In the four and a half centuries since the First Empire had begun to unravel, familial ties had waxed in significance as societal ones had waned. The urge to advance one's own blood had assumed an importance it hadn't seen since Old Earth's unimaginably ancient preindustrial days. Even if Admiral Ivar Brady-Schiavona had harbored any dynastic ambitions, he would have been well advised to keep them concealed in the presence of his master the Emperor—holder of the Empire's sole officially hereditary office.
Roderick needed no coaching on the subject of forbidden topics—he'd spent part of his youth at the Imperial court on Prometheus. Nevertheless, he couldn't resist asking the question that had been uppermost in his mind since he'd seen Aerenthal. "But why aren't you down there? Surely you ought to be."
"Hardly. As you know, I prefer to avoid the limelight." Roderick did know it. He reflected that every one of the officers around them knew about the results of Aerenthal's exploits, but only a few of them knew the name of the man responsible—and of those, not one recognized the civilian sharing the railing with them as that man. The celebrity secret agent of popular fiction exists there alone.
"Yes, I know you've raised inconspicuousness to a fine art. You cultivate it like a banker cultivates conservative respectability—and for much the same reasons. But still . . ."
"There's more to it than that, at the moment."
Roderick's face clouded. "It's totally unfair! You were just carrying out a policy—"
"—with which I disagreed. Softly, please." Aerenthal smiled in a way for which the term "world-weary" would have had to be invented had it not already existed. "But, you see, if I'm not to blame, then who is?" He let the question hang suspended in silence for a heartbeat, then nodded. "So the point is, it's necessary to have someone to blame who can be blamed. And I'm the logical choice."
Roderick leaned forward, suddenly alarmed. "See here, how seriously out of favor with the Emperor are you, really?"
"Oh, don't concern yourself. I hardly think the scapegoating process will be carried to its ultimate conclusion. And if things do get hazardous . . . well, I still have a lot of friends and associates in both Domains. My well-established cover persona can become actuality."
"You're lucky I know you too well to take that seriously."
"True." Aerenthal's contrite look might have fooled some people. "With you, I can indulge my abiding vice of flippancy. But look down there. I believe things are about to happen."
An anticipatory hush was falling, only to be shattered as the loudspeaker system filled the vast space with the opening notes of Kolodin's Imperial Anthem. A split second later, a series of bellowed commands brought the honor guard to attention. Without any noise at all, a figure appeared on the dais, dressed in a Fleet officer's uniform which bore a golden dragon in place of rank insignia because its wearer transcended rank.
A more stately, impressive ceremony could probably have been built around the arrival of a grav shuttle and the Emperor's descent down its ramp. But this was typical of Oleg, second of the Duschane dynasty. The Emperor who had installed transposer networks on all the newly restored Empire's principal worlds would hardly pass up an opportunity to make dramatic use of the technology. Roderick knew him only slightly—they were distant relatives—but he knew that much. He mentally reviewed what else he knew as Oleg stepped forward to receive the homage of the sector's military and civilian leadership.
The dynastic name was not that of a Sword Clans family, but Oleg had about as much of their blood as Roderick himself did. Old Armand Duschane, an official of the Sword Clans' "Empire of Man," had married a Moran-Tulwar and arranged for his daughter to marry the Emperor he'd served. Dynastic chance had left Armand regent for his infant grandson. There was still some controversy as to how Armand had parleyed his regency into the Imperial title; there was none at all about the ruthlessness with which he'd purged all possible rival claimants. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that, for the first time, a man of genuine ability and ambition had been at the helm of the Empire of Man at a moment when the rump Solarian Empire which had taken refuge in the Serpens/Bootes region, and which the Sword Clans had never succeeded in conquering, had lain helpless in the aftermath of its latest factional struggle. Armand had his detractors, but not even they denied that he'd had an eye for the main chance. He'd recognized his unique historical opportunity, and taken it. And, for the first time in more than two and a half centuries (more than three and a half, not counting Marvell's ephemeral reunification), the Empire had found itself one.
Armand had been a prudent, canny ruler, cautiously husbanding his resources—which, thanks to the ease of his reconquest, hadn't been decimated by protracted warfare. The only real blunder of which he could be accused was that he hadn't availed himself of the Emperors' traditional prerogative of choosing their successors from among their blood relatives. He surely could have found somebody besides his son and heir apparent, Oleg. . . .
No, Roderick told himself, that isn't fair. This wasn't the stereotypical case of a dynasty brought to premature grief by its founder's lounge-lizard son—like the second and last Emperor of the Draconis Empire, or Basil Castellan's son. Oleg wasn't that sort. Far from it. True, his appetite for ostentatious grandeur was notorious, as witness his pet project of restoring Old Earth as a secondary capital world, an alternative to frightfully earnest Prometheus. But that was just one among many outsized appetites—most notably, for planning and executing grandiose projects of all kinds. Many of those projects were even farsighted. His crusade to abolish distance on the planetary scale by use of transposer technology—an artificial duplication of the very rare and limited psionic teleportation effect, introduced by the Sword Clans and heretofore used only for military purposes and as a toy of the super-rich—would surely yield economic fruits in the long run. He certainly wasn't stupid. He just lacked a sense of proportion, a recognition of limits.
Maybe I'd lack them too, in his position, Roderick thought ruefully as he watched the Emperor acknowledge a stately salute from his father, to whom almost everyone deferred. But the fact was that Oleg had tried to do too much too fast. Not even antimatter power and nanotechnology could repeal the fundamental economic law of scarcity. His internal projects would have laid the Empire's peoples under a crushing load of taxation even if they hadn't simultaneously had to support his ambitions beyond the frontiers.
Overreaching, Roderick thought bleakly. You'd think that's the one lesson our history would have taught us. He thought back to the Founder, but like most people he shied away from even mentally pronouncing the name of the first Emperor of the Draconis Empire. Eight centuries had been powerless to dispel the memory of that totalitarianism which, however inherently horrible, had been but a means to an even more horrible end: a vast processor into which Homo sapiens was to be fed, emerging as specialized subtypes serving a master race from Sigma Draconis, an interstellar ant colony blending with its own machines in an obscene fusion of flesh, metal and plastic. And yet the decade-and-a-half nightmare of the Draconis Empire had merely capped the two-century nightmare of the Unification Wars. Humanity had finally awakened, with certain phobias so strong that they might as well have been encoded in its genes. Sovereignty must be universal and undivided, and centered in the person of a single individual so as to reinforce its universality by reducing the basis of social organization to its original common denominator. But that sovereign must be limited to the most inarguable governmental functions, presiding over individuals and societies which were allowed to be themselves. Very belatedly, the totalitarian temptation had been burned out of the race's collective soul—and so it had remained, despite the brief New Human relapse.
Oleg could not be compared with the Founder. But he'd lost sight of the fact that the Emperor's legitimate functions were almost entirely negative ones, at least as far as internal matters went. And even in external ones, he'd never known when to stop. Instead of learning from the failure of his first Ch'axanthu campaign, he'd dragooned the Ursa Major frontier sectors into a war effort that had grown all out of proportion to the objective, creating a logistics infrastructure to support a second invasion and then a third, on a steadily increasing scale of grandiosity. The uprisings in those sectors against the ever-increasing exactions, and the repression that had followed, had left a legacy of bitterness that would, Roderick was certain, do the Empire a kind of long-term harm that military defeats could not.
And as his last invasion had ebbed back like a spent wave, Oleg had managed to create a new enemy for his bankrupted Empire, on its opposite side. . . .
"It's really too bad," Aerenthal interrupted his thoughts even as he mirrored them. "All he had to do was do nothing."
"He doesn't have it in him to do nothing," Roderick said absently, not taking his eyes off the Imperial figure below.
"Too true. But the settlement I'd engineered was holding together so well . . ." Aerenthal's tone was that of an artist who'd watched his masterpiece being "improved" by a bumptious amateur—and, in fact, been forced to do the desecration himself, under that amateur's direction.
It had all started back in the previous reign. Armand had barely ascended the throne before he'd begun intriguing to neutralize the Tarakans, inciting the Outer Domain to attack the Inner Domain which had been bullying it. But he'd been too clever by half; for his orchestrated war had turned into a rout of the Inner Domain. Not even Armand's hasty switching of sides had stopped the Outer Domain's grim Araharl. By 4295—before completing his reunification of the Empire—Armand had found himself facing a unified Tarakan state such as hadn't existed since Zhangula's corpse had grown cold.
Fortunately, the Outer Domain's need to digest its new acquisitions had given Armand time to reorganize—which sounded better than "purge"—the section of the Inspectorate that concerned itself with the Tarakan Domains. The situation had been grave enough for him to override bureaucratic precedence and place matters squarely in the hands of his principal on-scene agent, a man with an established persona as a businessman from the Empire dealing through interlocking partnerships in the Inner Domain. (Any interstellar boundary is, of necessity, a porous one.) That man now stood beside Roderick and mused wistfully concerning squandered opportunities.
"Yes, it worked out rather well, if I do say so myself . . . and before Armand was dead." Roderick had been in his first year at the Academy in 4313, when a rebellion had ousted the Outer Domain's Araharl and established friendly regimes in both of the again-sundered Domains. He still wasn't altogether clear on how Aerenthal had engineered that, for all the older man's reminiscences. They'd met on Prometheus a few years after that, when one of Aerenthal's periodic returns to the capital had coincided with Roderick's stint at court, and the agent was always willing to avail himself of an appreciative audience; but there were too many things he couldn't talk about. By then, Oleg had inherited the throne—and a Tarakan situation which couldn't have been better. Unfortunately, he'd also inherited a congenital need to meddle.
"To a certain extent, I'm to blame," Aerenthal was saying, paralleling Roderick's thoughts in his always-startling way. (He was, Roderick knew, a telepath. It was useful enough, despite the ubiquity of psi-damping technology, to allow intelligence agents a conditional exemption from the general strictures against psionics. But he didn't have the kind of powerful abilities whose possessors were generally unfit for anything else; he was limited to accessing active surface thoughts like those formed in the process of preparing to speak. And he would, Roderick was certain, never use it on a friend without knowledge and consent.) "I should have resisted—even to the point of threatening to resign—when Oleg ordered me to destabilize the Outer Domain five years ago."
"Popular legend has it that resignation is discouraged in your line of work," Roderick said playfully.
"There's something to that—and it may possibly have influenced my decision not to make the threat. Still, I should have expressed my feelings more emphatically. The possible benefits—replacing a compliant regime with an even more compliant one—never justified the risks. There's always an element of uncertainty in these things, you know."
"And, in the end, the faction you were ordered to support turned out to be hostile to us. Yes, I know. But at least having them in power is only a limited inconvenience to us. After all, given the Outer Domain's remoteness . . ." Roderick's voice trained miserably to a halt. Open mouth, insert foot, he recited to himself.
Aerenthal smiled. "Finish the thought. The Inner Domain isn't remote. It's the immediate danger. So I had even less excuse for not digging my heels in two years later when Oleg was taken in again—by Tarakan malcontents offering to break up the Inner Domain. I warned him that they were all talk."
"But why did Oleg even want the Inner Domain balkanized? The Outer Domain would have gobbled up the fragments, leaving the Tarakans united under a hostile regime."
"Unfortunately, my efforts to tactfully point that out merely reminded him of the reason for the Outer Domain's new hostility—which didn't exactly enhance my credibility. At any rate, I again followed orders under protest. And, as I'd expected, my efforts had no result except to irritate a basically friendly regime and turn it into an enemy."
"The enemy he's here now to overawe," Roderick finished for him. He heard a fresh set of orders being bawled at the honor guard below, and looked down over the railing. "Things are breaking up down there. And I am invited to the reception. Are you coming?"
"Oh, yes. I can't avoid that. Hopefully it won't be too unpleasant." Aerenthal stood up from the rail and straightened the cravat that fashion decreed for semi-formal attire. He had always been good-looking in a saturnine way, and he was wealthy enough from his business dealings in the Inner Domain—which were legitimate, as far as they went—to afford anagathics, to which he took unusually well. Nevertheless, he was some years past the blood-chilling moment when a man accustomed to being described as handsome first hears the dread words "distinguished-looking."
"Maybe the hors d'oeuvres will be better than usual, considering who's the guest of honor," Roderick speculated hopefully as they set out through the dispersing crowd.
The reception room was at the "top" of the orbital station, as defined by artificial gravity: a vast circular chamber whose wall curved upward to join the ceiling in a seamless ellipse. Vertical transparencies all around the room's circumference admitted the light of DM +63 137 and a billion more distant stars, as well as the reflected light glinting off the flanks of the ships matching the station's orbit.
The throng that filled the room was less dazzling than might have been expected, given its social composition. Current civilian styles were on the sober side; and the Sword Clans, with their centuries-long heritage of bitter struggle, had established an enduring tradition of utilitarian plainness in military uniforms. Even the full-dress versions on display for this occasion were austere by the peacocklike standards of the old Solarian Empire.
Both sorts of dress were in evidence in an especially select knot of people near the room's center, a group set apart as though by an invisible wall. The man who was the focus of that group turned to his host with an easy smile.
"Admiral, we were given to understand that your younger son would be present. We were looking forward to renewing our acquaintance with him."
"Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. He should be here any time." Admiral Ivar Brady-Schiavona was a big man—not fat, but large-framed, with a massive square-set solidity. He didn't look like one given to fidgeting, and as a general rule he wasn't. But he cast an anxious look around and ran a hand over his broad, gleaming scalp. In an age when baldness was correctable, its presence was widely regarded as a sign of a man above vanity. Some men had their hair-growth artificially suppressed for that very reason. The admiral was not one of them.
"Good. We haven't seen him since his time at the capital, you know—and that was several years back."
"Before his meteoric rise," one of the Emperor's civilian flunkies simpered. Then his eyes met the admiral's—and froze.
Ivar Brady-Schiavona's uncharacteristic jitters had departed, burned away by anger, and under his rock-steady gaze the flunky wilted rapidly. It was a sore point, and a matter for mixed emotions, to have a son who was a captain at the unheard-of age of twenty-nine standard years. The admiral was death on any hint of nepotism and determined to lead by example. But he could hardly tell the boy to underachieve.
Oleg's eyes twinkled as he observed the byplay—he had no use for stupid courtiers, and enjoyed watching them squirm in the coils they created for themselves. He was about to say something when he noticed two approaching figures. "Ah, here he is now."
"Your Imperial Majesty." Roderick came to attention as was proper for a serving officer in uniform, below decks and uncovered. His civilian companion bowed from the waist.
"Ah, Captain Brady-Schiavona! Please be at ease. We were just discussing the splendid course your career has taken since your time at court as a junior officer." Oleg glanced sideways at Aerenthal and his mouth drooped at the corners. "Inspector," he greeted coolly. It was the correct form of address for all officers of the Inspectorate, originally a watchdog agency over the bureaucracy, which over the centuries had grown to encompass all Imperial security functions, including external espionage. But Oleg said it in the tone one uses when unavoidably referring to an unfortunate social disability.
"Your Imperial Majesty," Aerenthal acknowledged. His bland expression excluded the courtiers' snickering and whispered remarks from notice. Roderick, determined to match the older man's urbanity, ignored the flunkies and studied the Emperor.
Oleg was very tall, and his build—wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders—gave him the look of an attenuated rectangle, which his face mirrored. Now in his fifties, he had the indeterminate early-middle-aged look of those who'd been on anagathics from the earliest age—the late twenties—at which they could be usefully applied. The staggeringly expensive annual regimen slowed the aging process by a factor which was almost three in some individuals and averaged a little less than two—except for the six percent or so of humanity for whom they had no effect whatsoever. . . . Roderick thrust the thought down below the level of consciousness in a way which, in less than a year and a half, had not yet attained the automatism of habit. He concentrated on his father's voice.
"Roderick will be in command of the screening force we're providing, sir." The admiral's "sir" was as acceptable as Roderick's coming to attention had been, for he too was a Fleet officer and these were field conditions despite the background music—something semiclassical from Old Earth's unthinkably ancient past—and the waiters who circulated with trays of wine glasses and canapes.
"Excellent. Not that we expect to need one. After all we're merely reinforcing this frontier against potential dangers." Oleg gave Aerenthal another sidelong glance. "A potentiality which wouldn't exist had our agents in the field executed our directives properly."
Sheer outrage at the injustice took Roderick's breath away, preventing him from saying the unsayable. The courtiers, recognizing their cue, resumed their tittering. One of them—a Fleet captain named Vladimir Liang, who was chief of the Emperor's personal military staff, spoke up with a sneer in Aerenthal's direction. "Yes, it's a pity that His Imperial Majesty himself has to come here, applying his own incomparable gifts to a problem that his agents should have been able to deal with, given the ordinary competence he has a right to expect of them."
Oleg beamed, and Roderick began to understand how Liang—whose dress tunic was innocent of combat-related decorations—had attained his post. He started to open his mouth, but caught his father's warning glance out of the corner of his eye. Well, he told himself, if Jason can continue to disregard this shit, so can I.
"Still, sir," the admiral said in his formidable bass, as though the byplay had never taken place, "it can't hurt to have a screen out as per tactical doctrine. Standard procedures should be observed at all times."
"Spoken like a line officer of the old school, Admiral! And of course we couldn't ask for a finer officer to command it." He favored Roderick with a smile. "And now, we need to speak to the Sector Governor, if you and Captain Brady-Schiavona will excuse us." Pointedly ignoring Aerenthal, Oleg moved away, the flunkies following in a sycophantic swarm.
"Be careful what you say," the admiral rumbled in Roderick's ear. "He's . . . unpredictable. He can sometimes be very tolerant. But he can also be vindictive—especially with slime like Liang around to goad him in that direction."
"True," Aerenthal agreed. "The secret of success as a courtier is to play to the ruler's mood of the moment, thus amplifying it and translating into actions what are, for most of us, mere passing impulses. Small wonder that monarchs have always been noted for extreme behavior." Abruptly, the bantering tone dropped from his voice. "By the same token, the lickspittles who surround him are likely to confirm him in his disinclination to take the dangers out here seriously. This would be . . . unfortunate."
The admiral looked up sharply. His feelings about Aerenthal were ambivalent. The military class to which he belonged had always despised intelligence work, which doubtless helped account for the Empire's traditional weakness in that area. But he also valued expertise in any workman, and he knew full well that Aerenthal's work—however unappetizing he himself found it—had given the Empire a decades-long respite on this frontier. So he'd never been inclined to disapprove of Roderick's association with the agent. "What do you mean?" he asked quietly.
"In spite of everything I've managed to maintain contact with most of my sources of information in the Inner Domain. And my impression is that . . . well, the individual personalities involved would mean nothing to you. Suffice it to say that the Inner Domain's attitude goes beyond the mere annoyance that has to be expected in light of the pathetic intrigues to which I was required to lend the Empire's support. I believe something major is in the offing."
The admiral's gaze grew even sharper, and his voice harshened. "If you have reason to believe there's a serious danger to the Imperial person, why didn't you speak up?"
"To repeat, it's only an impression—albeit an impression backed by not inconsiderable experience out here. I have no real proof. And how much weight do you suppose my opinion would carry with the Emperor just now?"
"Some truth in that," the admiral admitted gruffly.
"Just so. And now that I've put in my obligatory appearance, I must be going. Thank you for your hospitality, Admiral. Good luck, Roderick." And Aerenthal was gone, leaving father and son in thoughtful silence.
"I've never quite known what to make of him," the admiral finally said. "But if he's worried, I'm worried. And I know better than to waste my time trying to persuade the Emperor to change his plans." His massive head turned slowly toward Roderick, and his voice grew even deeper than its wont as he spoke with obvious effort. "I know I don't have to remind you of your duty. But this goes beyond ordinary duty. The reunification is still young, and fragile. His life"—he jerked his chin in the direction of Oleg, across the room—"is the knot holding everything together. He may not be everything we could have wished for in an Emperor, but he's what we've got. He has to be kept alive. You're not old enough to remember what it was like before Armand's reconquest, but I am."
"I understand, sir. We can't afford a succession struggle. I'll bear that in mind at all times." Roderick spoke formally. He'd always found it difficult to speak to his father in any other way. It wasn't that Ivar was frightening or unapproachable. He wasn't even humorless—not totally. He simply had no lightness in him. His way of speaking suggested that his words were being chiseled into marble above a Classical colonnade. Roderick forced himself to try and bring the conversation down to a more human level. "By the way, I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to pay a personal call before the ceremony, but I'd only just arrived here. How is everyone?"
"Well." The admiral's expression softened as much as it ever did. "At least Maura was well the last time I heard from her." Roderick's younger sister was off in Ursa Major, executive officer of a cruiser which, like her, had survived the latest Ch'axanthu war. Since then, she'd been involved in the police actions among the restive Imperial worlds near that frontier—a topic Roderick and his father avoided in conversation. "Ted is as always. In fact, he'd hoped to be here by now, but was delayed by business."
Why am I not surprised? Roderick didn't voice the thought. There was something special about a firstborn son, something that tended to banish objectivity. Something that outweighed Ivar's mild disappointment that Teodor had left the Fleet after satisfying the minimal demands of family tradition by serving a single hitch. And it didn't help that his serene blond handsomeness recalled the admiral's long-dead wife. So Roderick contented himself with a neutral response. "Too bad. But maybe it's for the best. If Jason is right, this sector may not be any place for a civilian to be visiting for a while."
"No." The admiral was preoccupied, and his eyes focused on something far beyond the confines of the station. Then he shook his head as though irritated with himself and turned his thin but genuine smile on Roderick. "Just remember what I said earlier. I didn't put you in command of the Emperor's screen to hand you a plum assignment—whatever some people may think. I did it because you're the best choice for the job . . . the most important job in the Fleet at this moment."
"Yes, sir. I won't forget."
In fact, Roderick was recalling the conversation weeks later as he lay in his bunk, staring at the overhead.
They had proceeded along a string of closely spaced K-type stars which formed the terminus of the Beta Cassiopeiae Sector, leaving one element after another of the Emperor's convoy behind. Now they had departed the sector and entered a starless gulf beyond which lay Theta Persei, capital system of the sector of the same name. Roderick's dozen cruisers had taken their accustomed position—about a light-month to starboard of the convoy, which placed them between it and the volume of space occupied by the Inner Domain. Now that the deployment was complete, Roderick had turned matters over to Commander Tatsumo, skipper of HIMS Cataphract—the "flag captain," since Roderick had been gazetted to commodore for this command—and retired to his cabin for a moment of relaxation.
The Imperial procession had been uneventful, and Aerenthal's apprehensions were beginning to look like the kind of compulsive worrying that often overtook people above a certain age. About time, at almost a standard century—in spite of anagathics . . . Roderick winced away from the thought, which as usual he hadn't forestalled before it could blossom into hurtful life. With time, the knack would doubtless come.
Justice, I suppose, he brooded, picking compulsively at the emotional scab. I've spent most of my life being told I'm exceptional. So why should I expect to be like ninety-four percent of humanity in this one thing?
His father had, characteristically, never uttered a word suggesting disappointment. Just as characteristically, he'd been unable to relax his stiffness and cry out to his son that it didn't matter.
And it shouldn't matter, Roderick's thought flared. Should I whine because I'll have to settle for the lifespan that my ancestors were content with, and that most humans—those who're neither rich nor socially valuable by Imperial definition—still have to accept? Not even that; I've always had access to the best conventional medical technology money can buy, so I ought to outdo the Biblical threescore-and-ten.
But . . . Does Father overlook every fault of Ted's because, at the back of his mind, he's thinking that at least he has one son who can be expected to outlive him?
And do I try so hard because I know my time is limited?
He began to drift off as the thoughts pursued their endless loop, and was spiraling down into sleep when the general-quarters klaxon began to whoop.
He came sailing up out of the bunk, jabbing for the intercom button with the disoriented clumsiness of the rudely awakened. Before he could find it, Tatsumo's voice rasped from the grille as the flag captain spoke on the emergency link that needed no acceptance.
"Commodore, we've received an Ultimate Priority distress call from His Imperial Majesty's flagship. They've detected a hostile force on intercept course. The energy signatures indicate Tarakan ship classes."
"But—" Roderick savagely shook the last tatters of drowsiness from his head. "But how could we have not detected them?" It was the whole raison d'etre of the screen. Its function wasn't to fight off a serious attack—not with ships of cruiser size and below—but to provide early warning by deploying sensors between the Emperor and that region of space from which danger might come. Roderick wouldn't be able to send instantaneous warning, of course—cruisers could receive instantaneous tachyon messages from the mammoth communications ship that accompanied the Emperor, but they couldn't begin to carry the vast transmitter arrays required to send such messages across interstellar distances. But he could dispatch a frigate with the tidings his near-realtime sensors would have provided.
"They're coming from inside Imperial space, sir. We've got their vector plotted—"
"I'm on my way. Get us moving immediately." Roderick cut the connection without waiting for an acknowledgment and strode from the cabin. He proceeded toward the bridge, oblivious to the running figures and the raucous klaxon. His thoughts were raging.
From inside Imperial space—the far side of the convoy from us! Somebody must have sold the Inner Domain his complete itinerary. So they slipped a force into this gap between sectors, where it's been lying undetectable in space, waiting to pounce from the direction nobody expected. Meanwhile, we of the screen are out here in the middle of nowhere, playing with ourselves. . . .
He shook off the useless self-reproach as he entered the bridge, automatically muttering "As you were" and waving people back to their seats. A Cuirassier-class cruiser leader like Cataphract had no separate flag bridge, just a command chair beside the captain's. Roderick flung himself into it and ran his eyes over the readouts and displays that lent color to the dimly lit space.
"We're continuing to receive messages from the convoy, sir, and displaying the data as quickly as it can be downloaded," Tatsumo reported. "By now, we've got a fairly comprehensive force composition as well as the vector."
"So I see," Roderick murmured, studying the display and feeling ill. It was an even more powerful force than he'd feared. The Emperor's convoy was just that, not a fighting fleet. At its original strength, it could have held off the fleet bearing down on it. But now, after having left various components behind to reinforce the systems it had visited . . .
The good news was that the hostiles hadn't just sprung into detectability right on top of their prey—they were coming from a respectable distance, and thus had been discovered at the maximum range of the sensors that Admiral Rahmani, commander of the Emperor's escort, had at least had the sense to have out in all directions. Instead of trying to evade, Rahmani was proceeding at his best speed—that of his slowest ship, hence none too good—toward Theta Persei, hoping to reach the shelter of its defenses. The computer's extrapolation of the enemy's intercept course foretold that he wasn't quite going to make it. Nor was Roderick's command going to be able to rendezvous with the convoy until after the latter had come under attack—and had probably surrendered, given the identity of the passenger for whose life Rahmani was responsible, assuming that the Tarakans offered quarter.
Not that it would matter if we could, Roderick thought as he studied the breakdown of enemy classes and numbers. His light vessels would be little more than a feather in this balance of forces. But he never even considered ordering a change in Tatsumo's course. His ships continued to arrow toward the rendezvous they wouldn't make at a speed flatly forbidden by the laws of physics—at least as far as the outside universe, and their personnel's own time-sense, were concerned.
It never occurred to any of those personnel, from Roderick on down, to marvel at what they were doing. Seventeen centuries had passed since mankind had learned how to fool the gods into thinking their laws were being obeyed, in the words of Chen Hsieh, a leading member of the team that had produced the prototype time-distortion drive . . . which wasn't really a "drive" at all, for it didn't actually move the ship. Rather, it surrounded it with a field within which the passage of time was enormously accelerated. Within that bubble in the continuum, the ship disobeyed no cosmic speed limits. But to outside observers, the acceleration its impellers imparted sent it hurtling past the velocity allowed by the semi-mythical Einstein. Meanwhile, a second, inner field around its crewed spaces slowed time down by the same factor, lest the trip seem to the crew to take the centuries it would have taken without the drive. So Roderick was able to watch the stars stream impossibly past in the viewscreen as he tried to will the drive to even greater compression of time.
But of course it couldn't be done. All military ships mounted drives that speeded the time-flow by the same factor: the highest permitted by existing technology. Had they not, they would have been helpless in combat against ships that did, given the drive's amplifying effect on the power of energy weapons and corresponding defensive value against directed energy from outside. So speed differentials between ship classes were strictly a function of old-fashioned thrust-to-mass ratios. On that showing, Roderick's ships were fast—faster than either of the other two forces in play, which included massive battleships and transports. But there were no tricks by which they could be made even faster.
And, he asked himself, just what are we going to do when we get there, besides die?
Time crawled by at a protracted rate which had nothing to do with the inner field. Food was brought to the bridge, and neither Roderick nor Tatsumo left save to answer calls of nature. No one on the bridge felt inclined to interrupt the commodore's intense brooding.
At last there came a time when Tatsumo reported quietly. "The Emperor's convoy has come under attack, sir." She indicated the holo tank, where the string-lights of the opposing fleets' courses had crawled together.
Roderick nodded. He didn't need to be told that it meant the comm ship, like every other ship in the convoy, would have killed its inner field, thus maximizing its crew's time to react to outside events that seemingly moved at a crawl.
"Disengage our inner field," he ordered Tatsumo. It was necessary, for they could only continue to receive transmissions from the convoy if they and it were existing at the same time-rate. Besides, they'd need all the subjective time they could get to prepare themselves. The flag captain obeyed, and the stars abruptly became motionless in the screen, even though Cataphract was still moving through the outer universe at the same speed.
Soon, Tatsumo had another report. "Sir, the convoy is continuing to fight back."
So Rahmani isn't going to surrender after all. Or maybe he wasn't given the option.
With startling abruptness, Roderick sprang up from the chair in which he'd been sitting motionless, and began pacing. Then he stopped and turned to Tatsumo. "Aline, the Emperor is going to be killed. I refuse to believe there's nothing we can do."
"I concur, sir. But . . . Well, we haven't been able to set up any meaningful tactical models to work out, not knowing exactly what situation we're going to be facing when we—"
"We can't accomplish anything by fighting. We both know that. The numbers and tonnage and firepower just aren't there. Besides, that battle's probably going to be over by the time we arrive." Roderick resumed pacing, then halted in front of the holo tank. "We're going to be within sensor range of the battle soon. And presumably the Tarakans will have some sensors out, as a routine precaution. I want our stealth systems set for sensor confusion—make them think we're stronger than we are."
"Yes, sir," Tatsumo nodded, unsurprised. She'd thought of it herself; it was virtually their only option. The systems collectively and anachronistically known as "stealth" couldn't render a vehicle massive enough to carry them invisible to sensors, except temporarily. But they could induce distorted returns. "We can make our cruisers appear to be battlecruisers. But I must point out that the Tarakans know we can, and will therefore view the returns with caution. And given our small numbers, they won't find us very alarming even if they do think they're dealing with battlecruisers."
"I know, I know," Roderick muttered. He watched his force crawl along in the tank, nearing the Tarakans' sensor range. It wasn't easy to keep the implications of that range in mind. The sensors were active ones, using treated antineutrinos which could be given superluminal acceleration but which lacked the virtual instantaneity of tachyon communications. It took a finite interval for the antineutrino stream to go out to its extreme range and back again. So some little time would pass before the Tarakans would realize they were there. . . .
Then it burst on Roderick with a force that left him physically immobile, staring into the holo tank and thinking in a fury of concentration.
After a while, Tatsumo spoke hesitantly. "Uh, Commodore . . . ?"
Roderick whirled around and faced her. "Commander, listen very carefully, because it is essential that my orders be carried out to the letter and without a second's hesitation. Clear?"
"Y-y-yes, sir," Tatsumo stammered, caught flat-footed by Roderick's sudden formality and rocked back by what she saw in his eyes.
"Good. Now, on my command, just before we enter the Tarakans' sensor range, we will implement sensor confusion, with a view to spoofing their sensors into seeing our ships as battlecruisers, as per our earlier discussion. Then, after waiting thirty seconds to assure that we'll register on their sensors, we will shift our stealth suites to invisibility mode—"
"But, sir—"
"Don't interrupt, Commander! Immediately thereafter we will disengage our drives, turn around, and get out of their sensor range."
"What?" Tatsumo's shock wiped the commodore's ban on interruption from her mind. "Run away? Damn it, sir—"
"Commander, you will implement my orders, or I will relieve you and bring you up on charges." Roderick thrust his face to within inches of Tatsumo's and spoke too low for the bridge crew to hear. "Shut up and listen, Aline! I'm going to try something a little different—it's our only chance." He rapped out his plan in a few swift sentences, overriding her occasional protests. When he was done, her lower jaw was hanging agape.
"But, but," she finally sputtered, "you can't! I mean, nobody's ever . . ." All at once, her face cleared, leaving room for a roguish smile. "Yes!"
For a second his blue-gray eyes and her dark almond-shaped ones held each other, alike in the gleam they held. Then he straightened up and spoke in a normal volume. "Stand by to execute orders, Commander."
"Aye aye, sir. But may I suggest that you communicate directly with the other ship captains first, so they'll know what to expect?"
"Not a bad idea. Have comm connect me with them—quickly, because we haven't much time."
It was as Roderick commanded when they crossed the invisible line beyond which they could be detected. When Tatsumo ordered the withdrawal, faces turned toward her from all around the bridge with expressions ranging from incredulity to mutiny—until their owners met her quelling glare. Then the little formation turned around and swung out of the Tarakans' sensor range in the kind of near reversal of course the drive permitted.
Then Tatsumo turned briefly to Roderick, and they exchanged a brief, knowing look before she gave her next orders: to disengage the drive again, go back to sensor confusion, and swerve back into enemy sensor range . . . while the first signals were still on their way back to the Tarakan ships.
One by one, the bridge crew's expressions changed as understanding dawned.
They completed the maneuver . . . and tidings of another dozen battlecruisers sped toward the Tarakans.
Again, they performed the maneuver. And again. And again.
By the time the returns began to register on the Tarakans' scopes, a phantom armada was sweeping down on them.
Of course, those incoming squadrons of battlecruisers were going to concealment mode immediately—which was curious, for given the notoriously short-lived nature of the invisibility it conferred, most commanders preferred to withhold it until battle was almost joined. Or at least it would have seemed curious had the Tarakans possessed the leisure to calmly consider the matter. . . .
"That must be one flustered admiral they've got," Tatsumo murmured to Roderick, barely able to sustain the frowns she periodically directed at the bridge crew as she sought to forestall an incipient manic glee that escaped in occasional splutters and chortles.
"I imagine so," was Roderick's measured reply. For the swarms of apparent Imperial battlecruisers were coming in from frontierward—the one direction from which the Tarakans had known no reinforcements could reach their prey. "In fact, I imagine—"
"Skipper! Commodore!" The yelp came from the young lieutenant j.g. at the comm station. "They're starting to—"
"We see it, Lieutenant," Roderick said quietly as he settled back in his chair and watched the holo tank where the scarlet icons of the Tarakan units were swinging away from the battered convoy, breaking off the engagement and fleeing in the direction from which they'd come. It worked, it actually worked! The words seemed to sing in his head . . . but only for a moment, before being drowned out by the storm of cheers and applause that Tatsumo, with all the centuries of Fleet discipline behind her, could no longer contain.
It is given to only a few people to be present at moments that give birth to legends—and to even fewer to realize it at the time. But every member of the bridge crew knew that HIMS Cataphract had just sailed through the gauzy curtain that separates fact from myth. And they crowded around their impossibly young commodore who'd just sent an entire Tarakan battle fleet scurrying with just a dozen scout cruisers, and saved an Emperor.
Tatsumo yelled into Roderick's ear to make herself heard. "They know this story will be good for free drinks for the rest of their lives!"
The afternoon light of Theta Persei A was streaming through the conference room's tall windows as the Emperor entered, with Captain Liang following like an eager poodle. They all rose to their feet: Roderick, wearing the insignia of the commodore's rank the Emperor had made permanent; Admiral Rahmani, who still hadn't stopped looking at Roderick with incredulous awe; Roderick's father, who'd arrived with a powerful task force lest the Tarakans come back, boiling with rage at the way they'd been snookered; and all the rest of the officers around the long, gleaming-topped table.
"As you were, as you were," the Emperor said, a little too heartily. He took his seat at the head of the table, with Liang hovering behind him. "We have called you together to make two important announcements. First, we are placing Admiral Brady-Schiavona in overall command of this frontier, with responsibility for this sector as well as Beta Cassiopeiae. In light of the Inner Domain's manifest hostility, a unified command structure is essential to deal with the further incursions that are bound to come." Oleg paused and looked around the table in an oddly furtive way, the precise nature of which Roderick found himself unable to define. "It is in light of these inevitable future hostilities that we have reached our second decision.
"After taking counsel with our advisors, we have come to accept the view that the Imperial person cannot be hazarded in what must realistically be regarded as a war zone. Indeed, even Sigma Draconis must be considered too close to this frontier. We have therefore decided, despite our private inclinations, to relocate the Imperial court to the secondary capital at Lambda Serpenti."
Maybe, Roderick thought, it was something about the room's acoustics that caused Oleg's last words to seem to echo for a few seconds as they dropped into a well of stunned silence. That silence stretched until Roderick feared it would snap like an overdrawn wire. He waited, too junior in this company to speak first, hoping someone else would blurt out what had to be said. Finally, his father spoke. Ivar's bass had its usual calming effect. One had to know him well to recognize the near desperation in that voice.
"Sir, surely the defenses of Sigma Draconis are strong enough to insure your security. And it is the traditional capital—as well as being in an advantageous location from which to direct the defense of this frontier."
"It is precisely this `location' that is the problem, Admiral—as we have already intimated." Oleg's voice held an undertone of nervous irritation. His eyes flickered in Liang's direction as though in search of support. Roderick's puzzlement deepened.
"But sir," the admiral persisted, "even if Sigma Draconis is too exposed in the present circumstances, there are other alternatives besides the rather . . . drastic one you are contemplating. There are more practical choices for the Imperial seat. Old Earth, perhaps. Much has been done to restore it, and with its central location and its unique prestige as the homeworld—"
Liang broke in, which at any other time would have left everyone at the table thunderstruck. "Sol is still too close to the threatened frontier, Admiral—as must surely be clear to anyone with His Imperial Majesty's safety at heart."
The admiral's expression stayed rock-steady, but his eyes flashed a dangerous fire. Ordinarily, he would have squashed Liang like the insect he was. But he ignored the courtier-captain and addressed the Emperor. The desperation in his voice was now unmistakable, and so was a note of pleading Roderick had never thought to hear in that voice. "Sir . . . Your Imperial Majesty . . . I implore you to reconsider. Lambda Serpenti's remoteness is such that the command-and-control problems for this entire flank of the Empire could well become insuperable."
"This is why we have granted you extraordinary powers, Admiral. We have the fullest confidence in your ability to contain the Tarakans—aided by your son, Commodore Brady-Schiavona." Oleg smiled in nervous self-congratulation for this transparent attempt at mollification. "At any rate, Lambda Serpenti's location is the very reason we have chosen it, for security must be the paramount consideration."
Yeah, Roderick thought, seventy-odd light-years ought to be far enough from here. All at once, he realized that in trying to analyze the Emperor's odd behavior he'd fallen into the classic clever person's fallacy: searching for complexity where there was none. Oleg was, quite simply, a coward. It had never been apparent before, because he'd never been in physical danger in his life. But now he was, and his nerves were shattered. He could think of nothing but putting as much distance as possible between his body and the Tarakans. If that meant abandoning all the Empire outside the Serpens/Bootes region, so be it.
"At any rate, Admiral," he was concluding with forced briskness, "our mind is made up. And now, ladies and gentlemen, you are dismissed." He stood up with an abruptness that screamed his relief to have this over with. The officers around the table barely had time to scramble to their feet before he was gone, leaving them exchanging nervous glances and separating into muttering groups.
Admiral Brady-Schiavona caught his son's eyes and gestured with his chin toward a door. Once outside the conference room, Roderick could barely keep up as his father strode down the corridor.
"I doubt if many of them back there realize how bad this really is," the admiral rumbled in a low voice. "From Sigma Draconis, or even Sol, he could maintain order by his presence. But he's effectively abandoning us out here at the very moment that war is breaking out. And it hasn't been that long since we came out of warlordism—four centuries when rebels and local military commanders took matters into their own hands whenever danger threatened or advantage beckoned. That's why we need the Emperor as a symbol . . . and he's taking that symbol away."
"And don't forget where he's taking it to," Roderick said. "It's a disastrous choice, not just astrographically but also historically."
The admiral came to a halt and gave a low moan, as though from physical pain. "Yes, you're right. Lambda Serpenti, the last refuge of failing dynasties. It's where the Marvell Emperors fled when the Zyungen took Earth." he shook his massive head slowly. "He usually has some sense of symbolism."
"I don't think that's what's on his mind at the moment." Roderick took a deep breath. "Sir, what are we going to do now?"
"Do? We'll carry out our orders, of course. We're officers of His Imperial Majesty—nothing more and nothing less."
"Of course, sir. But . . . may I suggest that we get in touch with Jason Aerenthal and ask him to join us at our headquarters? I think his counsel may be useful."
The silence didn't last quite long enough to become awkward. Then the admiral spoke heavily. "Yes, I imagine you're right. See to it." Then he drew himself up and walked away, moving like a man looking for something he'd lost and feared he'd never see again.