The Altar at Asconel (5 page)

F
IGHTING
and running were out of the question. When the order was given to make a landing on Delcadoré under the escort of the Imperial battleship, Vix—punctuating his pilot work with oaths that seemed to grow fouler by the second—furiously complied, while Spartak tried to console him with the suggestion that at least so far they weren’t being told to do anything but what they had intended all along.

Meanwhile, Vineta stood close against him, her large dark eyes fixed as though hypnotized on the hull of the escorting ship, her whole body trembling with the unexpressed terror she felt at the nameless threat the “Imperial requisition” implied.

Spartak’s heart lifted, though only briefly, when he saw what forces the Empire could still command—there might be a thousand vessels, he guessed, docked here at what huge illuminated signs still declared to be the Headquarters Port of the Third Imperial Fleet. Then he took a second look at those monstrous hulls, ranged like a forest of branchless metal trees across the concrete plain, and realized he had failed to make an obvious deduction. The Empire, by all accounts, was struggling against decay and rebellion all through the galaxy—why then were so many ships out of the sky at one place and one time? And he began to spot the clues which accounted for their presence: gashed hulls from distant battles, plating removed by the hundreds of square feet to expose the vital equipment within which was being cannibalized to maintain those ships still capable of flight.

Maybe somewhere out near the rim there was a world where ships stood like this in vast numbers, but not antiques used to the limit by reckless commanders—new ships, human-made, ready to bring inwards to the hub those who for ten millennia had been harried away from the Argian domains and had bided their time on the threshold of intergalactic emptiness, waiting for the inevitable collapse.

If there were such a world, he thought, it would be worth hunting for. The shadow of an idea crossed his mind, and was dispelled immediately by the arrival alongside their own vessel of officials from the port controller’s staff.

Vix vented his anger on them in a single blast of abuse and complaint. They ignored him as they might have ignored a breath of wind. Spartak, urging Vix aside, attempted to tackle them on a more rational basis, inquiring the authority for “Imperial requisition” and contesting the legality of giving orders to non-Imperial citizens.

The officials sighed and produced guns. It seemed that this had become the standard substitute for argument on Delcadoré.

All three of them were taken—for Vineta refused to stay alone aboard the ship after her experience on Annanworld—to wait in a large, fight anteroom outside the office of the port controller. There was no one else there apart from a man of early middle age, who to their horror lacked both
a leg and an arm. They could not refrain from staring at him; on a world returning to barbarism after the withdrawal of Imperial support, such a sight might have been expected, but Delcadoré was supposed to be an outpost of the still viable Argian civilization.

The man cracked a bitter smile as he saw their eyes covertly turning on his injuries.

“I’m not pretty any longer, am I?” he rasped. “Well, not to wonder at that! If you’d been picked out of an airless wreck the way I was, you’d have …” A fit of coughing interrupted his angry words, and racked his body for a good minute before he could answer Spartak’s tense questions.

“Oh, sure they’ll fix me up sooner or later. But that can wait, they tell me. I’m the only survivor from my whole team, and all they want to know is where they went wrong. I’m going to tell ’em, too! Without mincing my words!”

“What happened?” Vix snapped.

“Fools—gas-brained fools! I could have told them.…” The man’s eyes were unfocused, staring through the wall at a faraway disaster. “Hiring pirates, that’s what they’ve hit on as their latest brain-wave! A whole Imperial fleet revolts under a commander who thinks he can do better than the mud-heads we have in charge at the moment—and who’s to say he couldn’t? Sometimes I think I could! And what do they do to combat this? They hire a ramshackle bunch of pirate ships, thinking to keep them from pillaging some Imperial planet this way, send out a command echelon to give the orders—that’s where I got involved—and sit back and pour some more ancinard. And what happens? Exactly what any schoolchild would have said: you can’t give pirates orders, so they break and run, and the Imperial-trained rebels pick them off like scooting watersliders, and then the Imperials-that-were loot the very planet the pirates were aiming for, to make up for the inconvenience and minor losses they suffered!”

“Which fleet?” Vix demanded.

“The Eighteenth.” The injured man stared at him. “What other did you think it was?”

“What do you mean, ‘what other’?” Vix countered. “The Twenty-Seventh is wiped out, as I well know—but it could
have been the Tenth, or the Fortieth, or the Forty-Second, or—” He broke off, the other man’s eyes burning at him.

“Are you sure?” the cripple whispered, after glancing around to make sure there was no one else in earshot.

“Of course. I’ve just come from Annanworld, before that I was at Batyra Dap, and before that Poowadya, and before that—”

“All these fleets are still operating? In revolt, but still operating?”

“At the last hearing, yes. Bar the Twenty-Seventh, as I mentioned.”

“The liars,” the cripple whispered. “The dirty, double-tongued, deceiving, damnable—”

“Vix of Asconel!” a speaker cried from the wall. “Go to the door which will open on your right. Bring your companions with you.”

Puzzled at the cripple’s reaction, Spartak lingered to put a final question to him, and got the answer he had half expected but was barely able to credit. If a high-ranking officer of the crack Third Imperial Fleet had been lied to about the fate of so many other fleets, lying must have become the general policy of the rump Empire. How long could it stand on falsehood? He had envisaged another century or so before its prestige diminished to the point at which rebels and outlaws were tempted clear down to the hub—ultimately perhaps to Argus itself. But if they were already so desperate at the reduction of their loyalist forces that they were hiring pirates as mercenaries, the word would travel fast, and the next time the Empire would find pirates and rebels combined against it; there would be an end to futile shifts like trying to make the two enemies destroy each other.

Gloomy beyond description, he found he had followed Vix and Vineta into the adjacent office, and there confronted a podgy, gray-haired woman in a uniform encrusted with meaningless decorations and ostentatious badges of rank.

“Sit down,” she said tonelessly. “Which of you is Vix, the alleged owner of the ship we’ve requisitioned?”

“Alleged!” Vix purpled again. “I have clear title—”

“I’m not arguing,” the woman sighed. “If you want to go into legalisms, starships are by definition Imperial property
and only leased to corporations, trading companies or—save the mark—individuals.” Her mouth twisted as though in disgust. “But where would it get me to rely on a thin argument like that? I imagine you’re competent to handle the ship, and if I wanted to commandeer it I’d have to pick someone equally skillful, and that’s not easy because next thing you know he’d be headed for the great black yonder.…”

Spartak found himself suddenly pitying the woman, for she had defined herself instantly by what she had said: a weary official trying to keep things going while chaos battered at the structure of law, order and principle by which she had to be guided. He signaled Vix to be quiet, and leaned forward.

“May we know your authority?”

The woman blinked heavy lids at him. “Frankly, I’m not sure which capacity I’m acting in right now—I have so many jobs I sometimes lose track. I sit in this room as assistant immigration supervisor, Delcadoré West/North Sector. I have the requisition on your ship as Acting Transport Director, Imperial space, Delcadoré volume. And I’m under orders from the Planetary Government, Department of Public Order, and legally empowered to represent them.”

“We have business here,” Spartak said. “If we could know what you want our ship for, we could perhaps—”

“To the Big Dark with your business,” the woman said. “I have a solution to one fiddling little problem out of about ten thousand waiting for me to deal with, and I’m not disposed to compromise.”

“Now you listen to me!” Vix burst out. “First off, my ship is mine and I’m not handing it over to anyone who still has delusions of glory about the Empire! Second, my business here is important not only to me but to my home planet, and I’m not going to be cheated out of it. And thirdly—”

“Oh, shut up,” the woman said. “Third is probably going to be something about not being an Imperial citizen. You’re an Imperial citizen if you were born on any planet which was ever part of the Empire, and Asconel was—your Warden still holds his fief from Argus, and his space fleet too.”

“The blazes he does! The present Warden’s a usurper,
and he brought his fleet with him from some world called Brinze which the Imperial records don’t show!”

“I wouldn’t know,” the woman shrugged. “Don’t think I have time to keep up with what’s happening on backwater planets like that, do you? What’s left of the Empire generates enough problems to keep my attention fully occupied. So swallow this, and digest it at leisure.

“We have a girl here who can apparently read minds—a mutant, obviously. We could have let her be stoned to death, I guess; things are nearly that bad already, even on Delcadoré. But when we can we cling to the Imperial rules, because they’re better than anything else we have, and the Imperial rules say we keep the
status quo
by putting her out of the way on some habitable planet off towards the rim.

“In the old days we could have assigned her passage on regular liner-routes, under Imperial guard and protection to make sure some superstitious knothead didn’t assassinate her before she reached where she was sent. According to my best information—which I’ll share with you since you’re from way out anyway—there isn’t a single commercial routing left which would get her to a rim system in less than a year. Coordination had gone to hell, schedules aren’t reliable, and pirates are picking off so much traffic the lines are closing down or flying only in armed convoy.

“So you’ll have to do. I’m having this girl brought here from wherever the blazes she’s been kept, and the moment she arrives you’re going to take off and head for—what’s the name of that place?” She pushed a stud on the arm of her chair and consulted a small screen set at an angle beside her. “Ah yes—Nylock. I picked it because it’s comparatively close: a straight-line route from here to the rim.”

Vix was half out of his chair with rage. “You can’t do this!” he thundered.

“Be grateful,” the woman said stonily. “I could have sent you anywhere—out the far side of the Big Dark, come to that! How do you fancy your chances with the pirates in that volume, hey? Used to take three Imperial battleships to get across there safely!”

Spartak, controlling himself better than Vix but nonetheless
white-hot inside, forced out, “What right have you to make the requisition anyway?”

“Argian decree,” the woman said. “If you want the number and text I’ll get it for you, but it runs to seventy figures and two full recording crystals, and seeing it won’t make a grain of difference. I don’t care for your business on Delcadoré, I don’t care for your complaints and objections—all I care about is getting shut of one irritating problem.”

She stabbed another stud on her chair-arm, and the doors of the room slid back.

“And don’t think, either, that there’s an easy way to avoid doing as you’re told—dumping the girl in space when you get out of our jurisdiction, for instance, and trying to sneak back here. You’ll be welcome to conduct your business when you’ve finished ours. And to make sure you do—”

Soft footfalls sounded behind Spartak’s chair, and he half-turned to see menacing uniformed figures there.

“We condition you,” the woman said. “You won’t be able to be comfortable or happy or sexually potent or even sleep properly from now on unless you’re directing all your efforts to the completion of the mission on which you’re sent.”

T
HE EFFICIENCY
of the conditioning process was flawless: impersonal as a mechanical repair, thorough as the work of a first-rate surgeon. Spartak, who knew something of this and related psychological techniques from his wide researches on Annanworld, had hoped to offer at least token resistance to the drugs and hypnotic instructions employed on him. But it was useless. As though a shutter had snapped down over his brain, he blanked out, and on re-awakening he found he could recall nothing of what had happened except at the two extreme levels of his awareness. Consciously he knew he had been conditioned; subconsciously he was disturbed, as it were by an itch, that was already intense and would grow to be unbearable if he did not at once comply with the Imperial order.

He was appalled beyond measure. If this experience was
anything to go by—and he felt it was, for the odds against a random sample in a society organized on a multi-billion population basis like the Empire being anomalous were tremendously high—it appeared that the chief tools of the Imperial power had been reduced to lies, propaganda and the threat of obliteration.

Small comfort, in view of that, to know that the galaxy now held forces too strong to be impressed by the last of those three instruments!

And perhaps worst of all was the fact that they were so confident of the reliability of the conditioning that they permitted him, Vix and Vineta to return to the ship without escort, knowing that until the telepathic girl was delivered to them they would sit and wait, and once she arrived they would helplessly depart for Nylock, the only place in the galaxy where they could be sure of release from the imprinted command.

“Is there nothing we can do?” Vix pleaded for the tenth time. His courage in regular combat, his habitual assertive self-confidence availed him not at all when faced by a weapon as subtle as this conditioning. It had perhaps been an inspiration on the part of the gray-haired woman to cite sexual impotence as one of the consequences of failing to comply with her decree; in any case, Spartak was reminded of a theory he had once formed about this red-haired half-brother of his—that his insatiable demand for women was a way of compensating for the fact that he was youngest of three brothers, much alike—he needed women’s attention to reassure him about his own individuality.

For a long moment Spartak didn’t reply. All he would have said would have amounted to the same as he had already repeated over and over. He knew of nothing that could be done without psychological assistance as skilled as what the Empire could draw on, and it couldn’t be obtained without putting the ship into space for some other friendlier world—and once in space, the compulsion would be far too strong to withstand.

The pause gave Vix a chance to think of something else: Vineta was weeping silently in the corner of the control room, her face pale and drained of hope. Vix rounded on her.

“Stop that sniveling, woman!” he blazed. “I can’t do anything about what’s happened—can I? Control yourself and stop crying as if I’d been beating you!”

“Vix!” Spartak snapped. “You ought to stop taking your frustration out on the poor girl! It can’t make much difference to her where you drag her away to—Nylock and Asconel are both meaningless names to her. If she’s in tears it’s for your sake, not her own.”

The cloud of gloom lifted momentarily from Vineta’s perfectly shaped features, and she found the energy for a sad smile of gratitude at the intervention. Beside himself, Vix retorted, “I suppose you’re glad of this, are you? Glad we’re being sent to some back-of-beyond planet instead of to Asconel where we belong! There’s fighting there—or will be—and you have no stomach for it!”

Spartak clung grimly to the shreds of his own temper. The abstract principles inculcated in him on Annanworld, though, were very hard to apply under present circumstances.

“How long did you spend burrowing in your piles of stale knowledge?” Vix sneered. “Ten years, isn’t it? And does nothing you learned in all that time tell you how we—?”

He was interrupted by a bang on the outer door of the lock. Hardly stopping to draw breath, he charged away on a new line of complaint: “Now our time’s up—they’ve brought this telepathic mutant along and the moment she’s aboard we’ve lost our last chance to figure out a way of staying on Delcadoré and tracking down Tiorin!”

The idea struck Spartak that having a mind-reader close to him frightened Vix as much as being sent far away from Asconel. Superstitition, merely—or the fear of having some secret misdeed revealed? For himself, he knew he would welcome thin consolation in this opportunity to find out the truth behind all the rumors which he had heard; the policy of deportation which the Empire had instituted to insure itself against wild factors in the peoples it ruled by imposing statistical averages on them had worked well, but it had also fed the imaginations of the ignorant.

He got to his feet. Somehow he wasn’t so sure as Vix that the mutant girl was waiting at the entrance. He would have expected a call from the port controller and perhaps
some triggering command to reinforce the conditioning on their minds, not a simple knock without advance warning

He unlocked the panel and slid it aside.

The person who met his gaze was a little man, apparently very nervous, with protruding teeth and wide startled eyes. He held tight to the guardrail around the narrow platform, as though he was afraid of losing his balance and crashing to the ground.

He said in a squeaky, eager voice, “Is this the ship from Asconel?”

Spartak nodded, and the nervous man was infinitely relieved, even going so far as to take one hand from the rail he clutched.

“Please! May I come inside and discuss a proposition with you?”

Spartak hesitated, then stepped back and gestured that the other should pass him. Vix, from within the control room, called out fiercely to know what was going on.

But the nervous man would not say anything further until he was safely in the control room himself. Then he drew himself up importantly.

“My name is not of any consequence,” he commenced. “It is in fact Rochard, but I am representing a—uh—a third party who is very desirous of securing passage to your planet. For some time he has had his agents making inquiries at all the spaceports on Delcadoré, asking about ships from Asconel and nearby systems, offering a generous fee for a flight there. Yours is the first such ship to come to my notice since I was requested to assist him.”

Vix and Spartak exchanged astonished glances. Then the redhead pursued his lips as if to spit.

“Can’t help him,” he snarled.

Rochard put his hand suggestively into his belt-pouch, and there was the mellow jingling noise of solid Imperial coin. He said, “I’m instructed to make a very liberal payment in advance, and then my—uh—principal will guarantee double the old commercial rate for the distance. You’d be well advised to—”

“It’s nothing to do with money,” Vix broke in. His shoulders bowed, and he turned half away from Rochard. “Go
look for some other vessel. If I could, I’d cheerfully take him to Asconel and not ask one circle for the flight—that miserable world needs outsiders to visit it and view its present plight! But it’s out of the question”

Bewildered, Rochard renewed his original offer, his wide alarmed eyes seeking a clue to the refusal. Abruptly Vix whirled and clamped a hand on his wrist.

“Out! Or I’ll throw you out. You can’t take no for an answer, can you? I guess you’re losing a fat bonus for finding us, hey? Well, have your argument with the woman who sits in the port control building yonder!” He added a vivid and obscene description of her.

“Just a second,” Spartak whispered. His mind had been buzzing ever since Rochard’s entrance with a wild, fantastic notion. Even now he was reluctant to utter it, but he felt he must.

“This ‘principal’ of yours—he isn’t by some miracle a man called Tiorin of Asconel?”

Rochard started. “Why, you know him!” he blurted. “How do you know him? I was forbidden to name him to anyone.”

“Don’t you see a resemblance between him and this man who holds your arm?” Spartak rapped. The success of his million-to-one probe had shaken him, physically, so that he was now trembling with excitement. As for Vix, he was so startled he had completely forgotten to release his hold on Rochard.

“Why—I guess so. But there are many worlds where one genetic strain has dominated others and produced a general likeness between many people.”

“This is no accidental resemblance. You’re looking at his full brother Vix. And I’m Spartak, his half-brother.”

“Amazing!” Rochard breathed. “Why, for this he’ll pay me double—treble—ten times what he promised! Please let me go,” he added cringingly to Vix. “I must carry the news to him at once.”

“It still won’t help much,” Spartak grunted, silencing a threatened interruption from Vix with a lift of his eyebrows. “We’ve been put under Imperial requisition, and conditioned to take a mutant girl to some place called Nylock.
You must be well in touch with what goes on around here—what can we do to get out from under this?”

Rochard’s face fell. He said, “Oh, no…” The two words were like the sighing of wind through bushes in a cemetery.

“Is there someone we can bribe to have the conditioning reversed?” Spartak urged. “Is there anyone we could go to for counter-conditioning?”

“How about Tiorin himself?” Vix snapped. “What’s his situation here? How’s he fixed for contacts, government influence, things like that?”

Rochard spoke so rapidly he was almost babbling, his gaze apparently riveted on the imaginary spectacle of a fat reward disappearing into space. “Your brother is in no position to help you either! He’s not meant to be on Delcadoré at all. You see, some short time ago there came a man from—I think—his own world, yours too of course, an assassin, from whom he barely escaped. Since then he’s been in hiding, and only some few trusted agents have been told he’s still here; for the sake of any more would-be killers, the news was passed that he had left for Argus to raise aid against the new rulers of Asconel.”

“Do you know where he is? Can you contact him quickly?” Spartak demanded.

“Why, within minutes if he’s at the usual place. But it may take a while to bring him to you. If you’re under Imperial requisition you can’t leave the ship, and any attempt you make to communicate with people on the planet will be automatically jammed.”

“Get hold of him at once anyway,” Spartak ordered. “It’s our only chance.”

Frantically Rochard dashed for the door.

Spartak turned to Vix, wiping sweat from his face. He said, “It might have taken weeks to track him down here—he might have fooled us, along with Bucyon’s assassins, and we’d have gone on a ridiculous chase to Argus looking for him. Even if we have to go home via Nylock, we may prove to have wasted amazingly little time.”

“If we get back from Nylock,” Vix said. “If we get him aboard in time to make the trip with us, and the girl isn’t brought here before he arrives. If. If.
If!”

“I should have given Rochard a message to cover that risk,” Spartak whispered. “Told Tiorin to wait for us, and we’d be back to locate him right here.”

“You were not expecting to find your brother on this world at all,” Vineta suggested unexpectedly. “You were prepared to find he had left for somewhere else.”

Spartak nodded absently.

“Then you are in luck,” she said with a shrug. “Try to look on that side of it. I will go fix refreshments against your brother’s arrival.”

She slipped silently from the cabin, and the two men settled down to try and abide by her extremely sensible advice.