Poul Anderson: The Rebel Worlds

The other snapped a salute. “Lieutenant Nasruddin Hamid, sir, commanding your rescue party by order of Captain Oliphant.”

“Assaulting an Imperial installation?” It was as if somebody else used McCormac’s larynx.

“Sir, they meant to kill you. Captain Oliphant’s sure of it.” Hamid looked frantic. “We’ve got to move fast, sir. We entered without loss. The man in charge knew about the operation. He pulled back most of the guards. He’ll leave with us. A few disobeyed him and resisted. Snelund’s men, must be. We cut through them but some escaped. They’ll be waiting to send a message soon’s our ships stop jamming.”

The event was still unreal for McCormac. Part of him wondered if his mind had ripped across. “Governor Snelund was appointed by His Majesty,” jerked from his gullet. “The proper place to settle things is a court of inquiry.”

Another man trod forth. He had not lost the lilt of Aeneas. “Please, sir.” He was near weeping. “We can’t do without you. Local uprisin’s on more planets every day — on ours, now, too, in Borea and Ironland. Snelund’s tryin’ to get the Navy to help his filthy troops put down the trouble … by his methods … by nuclear bombardment if burnin’, shootin’, and enslavin’ don’t work.”

“War on our own people,” McCormac whispered, “when outside the border, the barbarians—” His gaze drifted back to Llynathawr, aglow in the port. “What about my wife?”

“I don’t … don’t know … anything about her—” Hamid stammered.

McCormac swung to confront him. Rage leaped aloft. He grabbed the lieutenant’s tunic. “That’s a lie!” he yelled. “You can’t help knowing! Oliphant wouldn’t send men on a raid without briefing them on every last detail. What about Kathryn? ”

“Sir, the jamming!! be noticed. We only have a surveillance vessel. An enemy ship on picket could—”

McCormac shook Hamid till teeth rattled in the jaws. Abruptly he let go. They saw his face become a machine’s. “What touched off part of the trouble was Snelund’s wanting Kathryn,” he said, altogether toneless. “The Governor’s court likes its gossip juicy; and what the court knows, soon all Catawrayannis does. She’s still in the palace, isn’t she?”

The men looked away, anywhere except at him. “I heard that,” Hamid mumbled. “Before we attacked, you see, we stopped at one of the asteroids — pretended we were on a routine relief — and sounded out whoever we could. One was a merchant, come from the city the day before. He said — well, a public announcement about you, sir, and your lady being ‘detained for investigation,’ only she and the governor—” He stopped.

After a while, McCormac reached forth and squeezed his shoulder. “You needn’t continue, son,” he said, with scarcely more inflection but quite softly. “Let’s board your ship.”

“We aren’t mutineers, sir,” Hamid said pleadingly. “We need you to — to hold off that monster … till we can get the truth before the Emperor.”

“No, it can’t be called mutiny any longer,” McCormac answered. “It has to be revolt.” His voice whipped out. “Get moving! On the double!”

A metropolis in its own right, Admiralty Center lifted over that part of North America’s Rocky Mountains which it occupied, as if again the Titans of dawn myth were piling Pelion on Ossa to scale Olympus. “And one of these days,” Dominic Flandry had remarked to a young woman whom he was showing around, and to whom he had made that comparison in order to demonstrate his culture, “the gods are going to get as irritated as they did last time — let us hope with less deplorable results.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Because his objective was not to enlighten but simply to seduce her, he had twirled his mustache and leered: “I mean that you are far too lovely for me to exercise my doomsmanship on. Now as for that plotting tank you wanted to see, this way, please.”

He didn’t tell her that its spectacular three-dimensional star projections were mainly for visitors. The smallest astronomical distance is too vast for any pictorial map to have much value. The real information was stored in the memory banks of unpretentious computers which the general public was not allowed to look on.

As his cab entered the area today, Flandry recalled the little episode. It had terminated satisfactorily. But his mind would not break free of the parallel he had not uttered.

Around him soared many-tinted walls, so high that fluoropanels must glow perpetually on the lower levels, a liana tangle of elevated ways looping between them, the pinnacles crowned with clouds and sunlight. Air traffic swarmed and glittered in their sky, a dance too dense and complex for anything but electronic brains to control; and traffic pulsed among the towers, up and down within them, deep into the tunnels and chambers beneath their foundations. Those cars and buses, airborne or ground, made barely a whisper; likewise the slideways; and a voice or a footfall was soon lost. Nevertheless, Admiralty Center stood in a haze of sound, a night-and-day hum like a beehive’s above an undergroundish growling, the noise of its work.

For here was the nexus of Imperial strength; and Terra ruled a rough sphere some 400 light-years across, containing an estimated four million suns, of which a hundred thousand were in one way or another tributary to her.

Thus far the pride. When you looked behind it, though—

Flandry emerged from his reverie. His cab was slanting toward Intelligence headquarters. He took a hasty final drag on his cigaret, pitched it in the disposer, and checked his uniform. He preferred the dashing dress version, with as much elegant variation as the rather elastic rules permitted, or a trifle more. However, when your leave has been cancelled after a mere few days Home, and you are ordered to report straight to Vice Admiral Kheraskov, you had better arrive in plain white tunic and trousers, the latter not tucked into your half-boots, and belt instead of sash, and simple gray cloak, and bonnet cocked to bring its sunburst badge precisely over the middle of your forehead.

Sackcloth and ashes would be more appropriate, Flandry mourned. Three, count ’em, three gorgeous girls, ready and eager to help me celebrate my birth week, starting tomorrow at Everest House with a menu I spent two hours planning; and we’d’ve continued as long as necessary to prove that a quarter century is less old than it sounds. And now this!

A machine in the building talked across seething communications to a machine in the cab. Flandry was deposited on the fiftieth-level parking flange. The gravs cut out. He lent his card to the meter, which transferred credit and unlocked the door for him. A marine guard at the entrance verified his identity and appointment with the help of another machine and let him through. He passed down several halls on his way to the lift shaft he wanted. Restless, he walked in preference to letting a strip carry him.

Crowds moved by and overflowed the offices. Their members ranged from junior technicians to admirals on whose heads might rest the security of a thousand worlds and scientists who barely kept the empire afloat in a universe full of lethal surprises. By no means all were human. Shapes, colors, words, odors, tactile sensations when he brushed against a sleeve or an alien skin, swirled past Flandry in endless incomprehensible patterns.

Hustle, bustle, hurry, scurry, run, run, run, said his glumness. Work, for the night is coming — the Long Night, when the Empire goes under and the howling peoples camp in its ruins. Because how can we remain forever the masters, even of our insignificant spatter of stars, on the fringe of a galaxy so big we’ll never know a decent fraction of it? Probably never more than this sliver of one spiral arm that we’ve already seen. Why, better than half the suns, just in the micro-bubble of space we claim, have not been visited once!