A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

XIII

The earliest signs of trouble reached them faintly across distance. Fifty astronomical units from Zoria and well off the ecliptic plane, the Hooligan phased out of hyperdrive into normal state. Engines idle, she drifted at low kinetic velocity among stars, her destination sun only the brightest; and instruments strained after traces.

Flandry took readings and made computations. His lips tightened. “A substantial space fleet, including what’s got to be a Nova-class dreadnaught,” he told Kossara and Chives. “In orbits or under accelerations that fit the pattern of a battle-ready naval force.”

The girl clenched her fists. “What can have happened?”

“We’ll sneak in and eavesdrop.”

Faster-than-light pseudospeed would give them away to detectors. (Their Schrodinger “wake” must already have registered, but no commander was likely to order interception of a single small vessel which he could assume would proceed until routinely checked by a picket craft.) However, in these far regions they could drive hard on force-thrust without anybody observing or wondering why. Nearing the inner system, where ships and meters were thick, Flandry plotted a roundabout course. It brought him in behind the jovian planet Svarog, whose gravitational, magnetic, and radiation fields screened the emissions of Hooligan. Amidst all fears for home and kin, Kossara exclaimed at the majestic sight as they passed within three million kilometers—amber-glowing disc, swarming moons—and at the neatness wherewith the planet swung them, their power again turned off, into the orbit Flandry wanted, between its own and that of Perun to sunward.

“With every system aboard at zero or minimum, we should pass for a rock if a radar or whatever sweeps us,” he explained. “And we’ll catch transmissions from Dennitza—maybe intercept a few messages between ships, though I expect those’ll be pretty boring.”

“How I hope you are right,” Kossara said with a forlorn chuckle.

He regarded her, beside him in the control cabin. Interior illumination was doused, heating, weight generator, anything which might betray. They hung loosely harnessed in their seats, bodies if not minds enjoying the fantasy state of free fall. As yet, cold was no more than a nip in the air Chives kept circulating by a creaky hand-cranked fan. Against the clear canopy, stars crowned her head. On the opposite side, still small at this remove, Zoria blazed between outspread wings of zodiacal light.

“They’re definitely Technic warcraft,” he said, while wishing to speak her praises. “The neutrino patterns alone prove it. From what we’ve now learned, closer in, about their numbers and types, they seem to match your description of the Dennitzan fleet, though there’re some I think must belong to the Imperium. My guess is, the Gospodar has gathered Dennitza’s own in entirety, plus such units of the regular Navy as he felt he could rely on. In short, he’s reached a dangerous brink, though I don’t believe anything catastrophic has happened yet.”

“We are in time, then?” she asked gladly.

He could not but lean over and kiss her. “Luck willing, yes. We may need patience before we’re certain.”

Fortune spared them that. Within an hour, they received the basic information. Transmitters on Dennitza sent broadbeam rather than precisely lased ’casts to the telsats for relay, wasting some cheap energy to avoid the cost of building and maintaining a more exact system. By the time the pulses got as far as Hooligan, their dispersal guaranteed they would touch her; and they were not too weak for a good receiver-amplifier-analyzer to reconstruct a signal. The windfall program Flandry tuned in was a well-organized commentary on the background of the crisis.

It broke two weeks ago. (Maybe just when Kossara and I found out about each other? he wondered. No; meaningless; simultaneity doesn’t exist for interstellar distances.) Before a tumultuous parliament, Bodin Miyatovich announced full mobilization of the Narodna Voyska, recall of units from outsystem duty, his directing the Imperial Navy command for Tauria to maintain the Pax within the sector, his ordering specific ships and flotillas belonging to it to report here for assignment, and his placing Dennitzan society on a standby war footing.

A replay from his speech showed him at the wooden lectern, carved with vines and leaves beneath outward-sweeping yelen horns, from which Gospodar had addressed Skupshtina since the days of the Founders. In the gray tunic and red cloak of a militia officer, knife and pistol on hips, he appeared still larger than he was. His words boomed across crowded tiers in the great stone hall, seemed almost to make the stained-glass windows shiver.

“—Intelligence reports have grown more and more disquieting over the past few months. I can here tell you little beyond this naked fact—you will understand the need not to compromise sources—but our General Staff takes as grave a view of the news as I do. Scouts dispatched into the Roidhunate have brought back data on Merseian naval movements which indicate preparations for action … Diplomatic inquiries both official and unofficial have gotten only assurances for response, unproved and vaguely phrased. After centuries, we know what Merseian assurances are worth …

“Thus far I have no reply to my latest message to the Emperor, and can’t tell if my courier has even caught up with him on the Spican frontier … High Terran authorities whom I’ve been able to contact have denied there is a Merseian danger at the present time. They’ve challenged the validity of the information given me, have insisted their own is different and is correct …

“They question our motives. Fleet Admiral Sandberg told me to my face, when I visited his command post, he believes our government has manufactured an excuse to marshal strength, not against foreign enemies but against the Imperium. He cited charges of treasonous Dennitzan activity elsewhere in the Empire. He forbade me to act. When I reminded him that I am the sector viceroy, he declared he would see about getting me removed. I think he would have had me arrested then and there”—a bleak half-smile—“if I’d not taken the precaution of bringing along more firepower than he had on hand …

“He revealed my niece, Kossara Vymezal, whom I sent forth to track down the origin of those lies—he claimed she’d been caught at subversion, had confessed under their damnable mind-twisting interrogation—I asked why I was not informed at once, I demanded she be brought home, and learned—” He smote the lectern. Tears burst from his eyes. “She has been sold for a slave on Terra.” The assembly roared.

“Uyak Bodin, Uyak Bodin,” Kossara herself wept. She lifted her hands to the screen as if to try touching him.

“Sssh,” Flandry said. “This is past, remember. We’ve got to find out what’s happening today and what brought it on.”

She gulped, mastered her sobs, and gave him cool help. He had a fair grasp of Serbic, and the news analyst was competent, but as always, much was taken for granted of which a stranger was ignorant.

Ostensibly the Merseian trouble sprang from incidents accumulated and ongoing in the Wilderness. Disputes between traders, prospectors, and voortrekkers from the two realms had repeatedly brought on armed clashes. Dennitzans didn’t react to overbearingness as meekly as citizens of the inner Empire were wont to. They overbore right back, or took the initiative from the beginning. Several actions were doubtless in a legal sense piracy by crews of one side or the other. Matters had sharpened during the civil war, when there was no effective Imperial control over humans.

Flandry had known about this, and known too that the Roidhunate had asked for negotiations aimed at solving the problem, negotiations to which Emperor Hans agreed on the principle that law and order were always worth establishing even with the cooperation of an enemy. The delegates had wrangled for months.

In recent weeks Merseia had changed its tack and made totally unacceptable demands—for example, that civilian craft must be cleared by its inspectors before entering the Wilderness. “They know that’s ridiculous,” Flandry remarked. “Without fail, in politics that kind of claim has an ulterior purpose. It may be as little as a propaganda ploy for domestic consumption, or as much as the spark put to a bomb fuse.”

“A reason to bring their strength to bear—while most of the Empire’s is tied up at Spica—and maybe denounce the Covenant of Alfzar and occupy a key system in the Wilderness?” Kossara wondered.

“Could be … if Merseia is dispatching warships in this direction,” Flandry said. “The Imperium thinks not—thinks Dennitza concocted the whole business to justify mobilization. The Merseians would’ve been delighted to co-conspire, a behind-the-scenes arrangement with your uncle whereby they play intransigent at the conference. Any split among us is pure gain for them. From the Imperium’s viewpoint, Dennitza has done this either to put pressure on it—to get the disbanding decree rescinded and other grievances settled—or else to start an out-and-out rebellion.”

He puffed on his cigarette, latest of a chain. “From your uncle’s viewpoint—I assume he was honest with you about his opinions and desires—if he believes Merseia may be readying for combat, he dare not fail to respond. Terra can think in terms of settling border disputes by negotiation, even after several battles. Dennitza, though, will be under attack. A tough, proud people won’t sit still for being made pawns of. And given the accusations against them, the horrible word about you—how alienated must they not feel?”

The commentator had said: “Is it possible the connivance is between Emperor and Roidhun? Might part of a secret bargain be that Merseia rids the Imperium of troublesomely independent subjects? It would like to destroy us. To it, we are worse than a nuisance, we are the potential igniters of a new spirit within the Empire, whose future leadership may actually come from among us. On the Terran side, the shock of such an event would tend to unite the Empire behind the present bearer of the crown, securing it for him and his posterity … ”

Flandry said: “I’m pretty sure that by now, throughout the Dennitzan sphere of influence, a majority favors revolution. The Gospodar’s stalling, trying to bide his time in hopes the crisis will slack off before fighting starts. Wouldn’t you guess so, love? I suspect, however, if it turns out he doesn’t have to resist Merseia, he will then use his assembled power to try squeezing concessions from Terra. His citizens won’t let him abstain—and I doubt if he wants to. And … any wrong action on the part of the Imperium or its Navy, or any wrong inaction, anywhere along the line, will touch off rebellion.”

“Well go straight to him—” she began.

Flandry shook his head. “Uh-uh. Most reckless thing we could do. Who supplied those Intelligence reports that scared Miyatovich and his staff—reports contradicted by findings of my Corps in separate operations? If the Merseian fleet is making ominous motions, is this a mere show for the Dennitzan scouts they knew would sneak into then: space? How did the news about you get here so speedily, when the sale of one obscure slave never rated a word on any Terran newscast? Could barbarian activity in Sector Spica have been encouraged from outside, precisely to draw the Emperor there and leave his officers on this frontier to respond as awkwardly as they’ve done?”

He sighed. “Masks and mirages again, Kossara. The program we heard showed us only the skin across the situation. We can’t tell what’s underneath, except that it’s surely explosive, probably poisonous. Zorkagrad must be acrawl with Merseian undercover men. I’d be astonished if some of them aren’t high and trusted in the Gospodar’s councils, fending off any information they prefer he doesn’t get. Aycharaych’s been at work for a long time.”

“What shall we do?” she asked steadily.

Flandry’s glance sought for Dennitza. It should be visible here, soft blue against black. But the brightnesses which burned were too many. “Suppose you and I pay a covert visit on your parents,” he said. “From there we can send a household servant, seemingly on an ordinary errand, who can find a chance to slip your uncle a word. Meanwhile Chives lands at Zorkagrad port and takes quarters to be our contact in the city. Shalmuan spacers aren’t common but they do exist—not that the average person hereabouts ever heard of Shalmu—and I’ll modify one of our spare documentations to support his story of being an innocent entrepreneur just back from a long exploration, out of touch, in the Wilderness.”

“It seems terribly roundabout,” Kossara said.

“Everything is on this mission.”

She smiled. “Well, you have the experience, Dominic. And it will give us a little time alone together.”