Poul Anderson - A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

“Yes,” Kossara opined, “the trick will be to stay on top of events.”

Was that the very night when the Imperial marines stormed them?

{Or another night? Trohdwyr shouted, “Let go of my lady!” In the gloom he snatched forth his knife. A stun pistol seat him staggering out onto the ledge, to collapse beneath the moons. After a minute, quite deliberately, the marine lieutenant gave him a low-powered blaster shot in the belly.

No surprise that Kossara didn’t remember the fight which killed her companions. She knew only Trohdwyr, stirring awake again. His guts lay cooked below his ribs. After she tore loose from the grip upon her and fell to her knees beside him, she caught the smell. “Trohdwyr, draganr He coughed, could not speak, maybe could not know her through the pain that blinded him. She raised his head, hugged it close, felt the blunt spines press into her breasts. “ Dwynafor, dwynafor, odhal tiv,” she heard herself crazily croak.

A man dragged her away. “Come along.” She turned on him, spitting, fingers rigid for a karate attack. Another man got a lock on her from behind. The first cuffed her till the world rocked. “All that fuss over a xeno,” he complained, and booted Trohdwyr for a while. She couldn’t tell whether the ychan felt the blows; but his body jerked like a dropped puppet.}

{The office was cramped, its air stale. The commander of Intelligence said, “Nothing slow and easy for you, Vymezal. Treason’s too urgent a matter; and traitors deserve no careful handling.”

“I am not—”

“We’ll soon find out. Take her away, O’Brien. I want her prepared for hypnoprobing.”}

{Downward whirl through shrieks, thunders, flashes, pain and pain, down toward emptiness, but oh, she cannot reach blessed cool nothing; eternity has her.

The Golden Face, the cinnabar eyes, an indigo plume above, a voice of mercy: “Rest, Kossara. Sleep. Forget.” No more.}

{She was still dazed, numb, when the drumhead court-martial condemned her to life enslavement.}

Flandry considered the papers in his hands. Her few dry words appeared to have turned him as impersonal, for he said in the same tone, expressionless, “Thank you. Not much left in your mind, is there? No explanation of your hatred for the Empire.”

“What do you mean?” exploded from her. “After what I told!”

“Please,” he said. “You’re a bright, educated, reasonably objective person. Taking your memories as correct—which they may not be; you could be recalling pieces of delirium—you should be able to entertain the possibility that you and your friends had the bad luck to meet fools and brutes such as infest every outfit. You should consider using established procedures to have them identified, traced, penalized. Unless, of course, you’re so set in your attitude that this business seems typical, mere confirmation of what you already knew.”

He glanced up. “Have you been told exactly what’s in this report on you? The Intelligence report, that is.”

“No,” she got forth.

“I didn’t expect you would. It’s secret. Let me give you a summary.” His vision skimmed the sheets he flipped through as he recited:

“Overtly, you and your attendant Trohdwyr arrived at Thursday Landing for a duly approved xenological research project on behalf of your, um, Shkola, among the Diomedeans of the Sea of Achan area. The declared motivation was that Dennitzans have lately opened trade with a comparable species near home, and want an idea of what to expect from continued impact of high-technology civilization on them. Quite normal. The Imperial resident provided you the customary assistance. He and his household depose that you were a charming guest who gave them no hint of bad intentions. However, you were soon off for the field. They never saw you again.

“Meanwhile, Naval Intelligence was busy throughout that part of space. There was reason to suspect some kind of hostile operation, taking advantage of widespread disorganization caused by the war and not yet amended. Diomedes was certainly a trouble spot, secessionism steadily gaining strength in a principal society of the planet. Those revolutionaries seemed to hope for Ythrian support.

“But other, more reliable sources indicated Ythri had nothing to do with this. Then who were the humans known, from loyal native witnesses, to be active on Diomedes? If not Avalonians, working for the Domain they live in, who?

“With the help of informers, Intelligence agents tracked down a group of these subversives to a mountain hideout. Seeing what they took for a Merseian, they leaped to conclusions … not unjustified, it turned out. The gang resisted arrest and, except for you, perished in the fire fight. Blasters in an enclosed space like a cave—the marines were wearing combat armor and your companions were not. The fact that the suspects fought, under those circumstances, seems to prove they were as fanatical as your psychograph says you are.

“Hypnoprobed, you revealed you were the deputy of your uncle the Gospodar, come to check on the progress. His idea was that Dennitzans posing as Avalonians could incite an uprising on Diomedes. This by itself would draw Imperial attention there. The apparent likelihood of Ythri being behind it would decoy considerable of our armed strength, too. Then at the right moment—you quoted your uncle simply as speaking of a ‘lever’ to use on the Imperium, for getting concessions. But you spilled your belief—and you ought to know—that, if events broke favorably, he’d seize the chance to rebel. Depending on circumstances, he’d either try for the throne, or carry out the same plan as the late Duke Alfred was nursing along, to rip a sizable region loose from the Empire and place it under Merseian protection.

“Which, of course”—Flandry lifted his gaze again—“would give the Roidhunate a bridgehead right in that frontier. Do you wonder that the treatment you got was rough?”

Kossara sprang from her chair. “How crazy do you think we are?” she yelled.

“We’re bound for Diomedes to find out,” he said.

“Why not straight to Dennitza like an honest man?”

“Others will, never fear. Detective work on an entire nation, or just on its leaders, takes personnel and patience. A singleton like me does best vis-a-vis a small operation, as I suppose the one on Diomedes necessarily is.”

Flandry’s eyes narrowed. “If you want your liberty back, my dear, rather than being resold when I decide you’re not worth your keep, you will cooperate,” he said. “Think of it not as betraying your folk, but as helping save them from disastrously wrong-headed adventurers.

“We have a libraryful of material on Diomedes aboard. Study it. Ponder it. Something may jog your memory; a lot that you’ve forgotten is probably not irretrievably lost. Or you should be able to make deductions—you’re a smart girl—deductions about likely rendezvous points remaining, where we can snare more agents. Or, better yet, I’d guess: Diomedeans involved in the movement, never identified by our people, they should recognize you, if you show yourself in the proper ways. They should make contact and—do you see?”

“Yes!” she screamed. “And I won’t!”

She fled.

The man sat quiet for a while before he said to the empty air, “Very well, if you wish, Chives will bring you your meals in your cabin.”

As Flandry conned the Hooligan, Diomedes grew huge in the screens before him. Too heavily clouded for oceans and continents to show as anything but blurs, the dayside glowed amber-orange, with tinges of rose and violet, under the light of a dull sun. The nighted part gave pale whiteness back to moons and stars, reflections off ice and snow. When Kossara last came here, equinox was not long past; now absolute winter lay upon fully half the planet.