Poul Anderson: Ensign Flandry

Maria, I miss you.

Abrams was almost at his quarters when he remembered he hadn’t stashed the papers on his desk. He stopped dead. Great Emperor’s elegant epiglottis! He was indeed due for an overhaul.

Briefly he was tempted to say, “Urinate on regulations.” The office was built of ferroconcrete, with an armorplate door and an automatic recognition lock. But no. Lieutenant Novak might report for duty before his chief, may his pink cheeks fry in hell. Wouldn’t do to set a bad security example. Not that espionage was any problem here, but what a man didn’t see, he couldn’t tell if the Merseians caught and hypnoprobed him.

Abrams wheeled and strode back, trailing bad words. At the end, he slammed to a halt. His cigar hit the deck and he ground down a heel on it.

The door was properly closed, the windows dark. But he could see footprints in the churned, not yet congealed mud before the entrance, and they weren’t his own.

And no alarm had gone off. Somebody was inside with a truckload of roboticist’s gear.

Abrams’ blaster snaked into his hand. Call the guard on his wristcom? No, whoever could burgle his office could surely detect a transmission and was surely prepared for escape before help could arrive. By suicide if nothing else.

Abrams adjusted his gun to needle beam. Given luck, he might disable rather than kill. Unless he bought it first. The heart slugged in his breast. Night closed thickly inward.

He catfooted to the door and touched the lock switch. Metal burned his fingers with chill. Identified, he swung the door open and leaned around the edge.

Light trickled over his shoulder and through the windows. A thing whirled from his safe. His eyes were adapted and he made out some details. It must have looked like any workman in radiation armor as it passed through the base. But now one arm had sprouted tools; and the helmet was thrown back to reveal a face with electronic eyes, set in a head of alloy.

A Merseian face.

Blue lightning spat from the tool-hand. Abrams had yanked himself back. The energy bolt sparked and sizzled on the door. He spun his own blaster to medium beam, not stopping to give himself reasons, and snapped a shot.

The other weapon went dead, ruined. The armored shape used its normal hand to snatch for a gun taken forth in advance and laid on top of the safe. Abrams charged through the doorway while he reset for needle fire. So intense a ray, at such close range, slashed legs across. In a rattle and clash, the intruder fell.

Abrams activated his transmitter. “Guard! Intelligence office—on the double!”

His blaster threatened while he waved the lights to go on. The being stirred. No blood flowed from those limb stumps; powerpacks, piezoelectric cascades, room-temperature superconductors lay revealed. Abrams realized what he had caught, and whistled. Less than half a Merseian: no tail, no breast or lower body, not much natural skull, one arm and the fragment of another. The rest was machinery. It was the best prosthetic job he’d ever heard of.

Not that he knew of many. Only among races which didn’t know how to make tissues regenerate, or which didn’t have that kind of tissues. Surely the Merseians—But what a lovely all-purpose plug-in they had here!

The green face writhed. Wrath and anguish spewed from the lips. The hand fumbled at the chest. To turn off the heart? Abrams kicked that wrist aside and planted a foot on it. “Easy, friend,” he said.

Morning on Merseia—

Brechdan Ironrede, the Hand of the Vach Ynvory, walked forth on a terrace of Castle Dhangodhan. A sentry slapped boots with tail and laid blaster to breastplate. A gardener, pruning the dwarfed koir trees planted among the flagstones, folded his arms and bent in his brown smock. To both, Brechdan touched his forehead. For they were not slaves; their families had been clients of the Ynvorys from ages before the nations merged into one; how could they take pride in it if the clan chief did not accord them their own dignity?

He walked unspeaking, though, between the rows of yellow blooms, until he reached the parapet. There he stopped and looked across his homeland.

Behind him, the castle lifted gray stone turrets. Banners snapped in a cool wind, against an infinitely blue sky. Before him, the walls tumbled down toward gardens, and beyond them the forested slopes of Bedh-Ivrich went on down, and down, and down, to be lost in mists and shadows which still cloaked the valley. Thus he could not see the farms and villages which Dhangodhan dominated: nothing but the peaks on the other side. Those climbed until their green flanks gave way to crags and cliffs of granite, to snowfields and the far blink of glaciers. The sun Korych had now cleared the eastern heights and cast dazzling spears over the world. Brechdan saluted it, as was his hereditary right. High overhead wheeled a fangryf, hunting, and the light burned gold off its feathers.

There was a buzz in the air as the castle stirred to wakefulness, a clatter, a bugle call, a hail and a bit of song. The wind smelled of woodsmoke. From this terrace the River Oiss was not visible, but its cataracts rang loud. Hard to imagine how, a bare two hundred kilometers west, that stream began to flow through lands which had become one huge city, from foothills to the Wilwidh Ocean. Or, for that matter, hard to picture those towns, mines, factories, ranches which covered the plains east of the Hun range.

Yet they were his too—no, not his; the Vach Ynvory’s, himself no more than the Hand for a few decades before he gave back this flesh to the soil and this mind to the God. Dhangodhan they had preserved little changed, because here was the country from which they sprang, long ago. But their real work today was in Ardaig and Tridaig, the capitals, where Brechdan presided over the Grand Council. And beyond this planet, beyond Korych itself, out to the stars.

Brechdan drew a deep breath. The sense of power coursed in his veins. But that was a familiar wine; today he awaited a joy more gentle.

It did not show upon him. He was too long schooled in chieftainship. Big, austere in a black robe, brow seamed with an old battle scar which he disdained to have biosculped away, he turned to the world only the face of Brechdan Ironrede, who stood second to none but the Roidhun.

A footfall sounded. Brechdan turned. Chwioch, his bailiff, approached, in red tunic and green trousers and modishly highcollared cape. He wasn’t called “the Dandy” for nothing. But he was loyal and able and an Ynvory born. Brechdan exchanged kin-salutes, right hand to left shoulder.

“Word from Shwylt Shipsbane, Protector,” Chwioch reported. “His business in the Gwelloch will not detain him after all and he will come here this afternoon as you desired.”

“Good.” Brechdan was, in fact, elated. Shwylt’s counsel would be most helpful, balancing Lifrith’s impatience and Priadwyr’s over-reliance on computer technology. Though they were fine males, each in his own way, those three Hands of their respective Vachs. Brechdan depended on them for ideas as much as for the support they gave to help him control the Council. He would need them more and more in the next few years, as events on Starkad were maneuvered toward their climax.

A thunderclap cut the sky. Looking up, Brechdan saw a flitter descend with reckless haste. Scalloped fins identified it as Ynvory common-property. “Your son, Protector!” Chwioch cried with jubilation.

“No doubt.” Brechdan must not unbend, not even when Elwych returned after three years.

“Ah … shall I cancel your morning audience, Protector?”

“Certainly not,” Brechdan said. “Our client folk have their right to be heard. I am too much absent from them.”