The Navigator of Rhada (11 page)

Kynan raised the clumsy weapon and pulled the trigger. He breathed a prayer of thanksgiving as the pistol fired, spitting sparks and wadding, over the heads of his pursuers. The heavy ball struck the polarized hull of the starship and whined away into the darkness. For a moment the soldiers gaped at the sacrilege. The starships were the holiest things in the known universe. They were the very key to men’s survival as a star-voyaging race. To fire a weapon at one, even though it could do the ship no conceivable harm, was a breathtaking sin. And that a Navigator should do it was almost unthinkable.

It was almost so for Kynan himself. With the discharged weapon still in his hand, he muttered an Ave Stella and promised himself severe penance. It would be difficult to fin
d something suitable. He had never committed so unholy an act before. But the situation was desperate, and desperate measures were called for.

He looked up and saw that the sound of the ball striking the hull of the ship had attracted Brother Evart’s attention. But Evart was so stolid and unimaginative a man that he merely remained at the control console, staring at the scene below in leaden amazement.

Kynan whirled the silver mare about in an agony of frustration. He shouted furiously at Brother Evart to open the valve, knowing as he did so that, of course, the underpriest could hear nothing of what was being said outside the starship.

“Nav Kynan!” the officer called, galloping nearer. “You must come with us! We want the Auroran girl--”

At this moment Kynan saw with a flash of hope that Evart, within the ship, was rising from the First Pilot’s place at the consoles. Had he recognized him on the field below--a Navigator beset by a company of horsemen? What in the Star’s name was delaying him?

Kynan turned in the saddle to look at the flank of the ship. A single point of darkness appeared amid the whorls of light. Yes, Evart was dilating the entry valve!

Kynan hurled a command at the silver mare, and she responded with a swiftness that almost unseated him. At an extended gallop, he circled around the line of warmen toward the edge of the field. Kynan signaled to Baltus and Janessa to follow and, without waiting to see if they complied, put his mare directly at the nearest soldier.

The valve was opening, extending a ramp like a dark tongue. The lines of force surrounding the ship shimmered and gleamed. Kynan hoped with all his heart that neither Baltus nor the girl would hesitate. The lights were harmless, but they were ghostly and frightening to laymen.

He shouted,
“Make way, soldier! Make way!”

The warman, disciplined and trained as most Rhadans, would respond only to his own officer. The silver mare collided with the warman’s mount: a thunderous, jarring impact. She was shrieking with savage pleasure, slashing with her tigerish teeth at her rival.

Behind him, Kynan had a momentary impression of thudding pads, and Janessa and the warlock flashed by, heading for the open valve. Kynan saw the Rhad officer’s mount go down before Baltus’s charge, and then they were past him. He wheeled the mare to follow, but his adversary was too well trained to permit him to escape. The Rhad moved in beside him, still not drawing a weapon. He was a large young man, massive in the arms and shoulders. He threw himself across and carried Kynan to the wet grass.

As they fell, they twisted, and Kynan landed with his weight across his would-be captor. The young warman’s breath came out in a whooshing grunt, and he lay stunned. Kynan leaped to his feet and began to run toward the open valve of the starship.

But it was hopeless. On foot he would never make it. The soldiers were closing in on him as he saw the warlock’s charger carry him up the ramp and into the ship.

Then he saw Skua, carrying Janessa, pause on the ramp, wheel, and come pounding back toward him. He had no time to protest, no time to do anything but ready himself to catch Janessa’s stirrup iron as the old war mare came thundering by. The impact felt as though it would tear his arms from their sockets, but he held on, his feet half dragging, half running. With a great effort he swung himself up on the mare’s boney rump and yelled for her to
“Go!”

Sides heaving with the effort, the ancient animal scrambled up the retracting ramp and into the diminishing circle of the valve.

The hidden machines sighed behind them, and suddenly the sounds of the rain and the shouts of the frustrated warmen were shut off. Skua stood, head down, flanks heaving, on the floor plates of the entry port.

Janessa and Kynan dismounted and stood, scarcely believing that they were safely aboard, as the humming sound of the ancient engines grew louder and a slight pressure against their feet told them that the starship was lifting, rising into the rainy atmosphere of Gonlan.

Divide and rule.

Political maxim attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli,
Dawn Age philosopher and soldier

--we imagined that the terror of our weapons was such that men would never again seek to settle their differences in warfare. That we were wrong is proved by the civil wars that are now upon us.

Late Golden Age microfilm fragment found in the ruins of Station One, Astraris, by members of the Astrarian Archeological Foundation,
late Second Stellar Empire period

We are being stifled by priests. Let us sever the tentacles of the so-called holy Order of Navigators. Yes, let there be war.

General the Honorable Alain Veg Tran addressing the Congress of the AbasNav party,
middle Second Stellar Empire period

Kynan stood on the deck of the starship’s bridge and listened to Brother Evart sing the changing of the watch. The traditional chant, charged with the immense sadness of life in interstellar space, ancient beyond imagining, brought memories of the Theocracy.

In Algol, it took many years for a consecrated religious to learn the way of a Navigator. The office of Spiritual and Temporal Guide of Starships was one so surrounded with ritual, dogma, and ceremony that many a young novice (and Kynan remembered his own doubts) despaired of reaching ordination.

Evart would make a fine Navigator one day, though he must now be suffering nervously under the eye of his superior, as were the other religious in the crew. But all were made uneasy by this radical shift in the ordered progression of events. They had been, until Kynan appeared on the landing ground, in the process of returning the great starship to the Lyran Republic, where it belonged. Now all was changed, and the course was set for Aurora without authority from either the Lyri, who owned the vessel, or from the Theocracy.

Kynan watched the three watch keepers at their consoles and hoped that his own uncertainty didn’t show. This was the first time in his young career as First Pilot that he had taken independent action, diverting a starship from its planned schedule. Furthermore, he was a fugitive and possibly an outlaw on his own home world. And he intended to take unconsecrated persons, Janessa and the warlock, into a sanctuary. It was unnerving for an inexperienced Navigator to diverge from the orderly fulfillment of his duties in this way--but he was at a loss to think what else he could do. The situation called for older heads than his, and the sanctuary on Aurora seemed the logical place to find the guidance he needed so desperately.

Meanwhile,
Kynan thought,
I am a Navigator, a First Pilot--and I must act like one.
The ghost of a wry smile touched his lips.
Just as though I know what I am doing.

Being on the bridge of a starship was soothing, however. The soft humming of the walls and hull, the familiar sights and sounds, the sense of
life
that pervaded the great ancient vessel--all helped to build and sustain confidence. With this ship, Kynan thought, I could fly to the end of the sky, to Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds. It might take a lifetime to reach those distant ports, but the ship could do it.

Austere in clean black clericals, free of his weapon harness, his head covered by the black skullcap of his rank, Kynan stood in command of one of the mightiest engines ever built by the hand of man. It could not help but build confidence, even in one so young.

The viewscreens ahead and behind showed the oddly grouped stars. Those ahead were violet, those behind, red. In the time of Grand Master Emeric, the Mystery of the Red Shift had been the subject of many a learned synod of the Order. Navigators, time out of mind, had pondered its meaning. Now it was known that it was but a natural phenomenon caused by the extreme speed of the ship. Navigator Anselm Styr, an indefatigable investigator (who eventually paid with his life for his scientific curiosity) had discovered that light traveled at a finite and measurable velocity. He had theorized that the Red Shift was caused by the separation of light into its various components when an object--in this case the starship--approached light-speed. (The terms “sublight” and “superlight” had been part of the dogma of star flight since the Dark Time.)

Styr’s theory postulated that as a starship accelerated into the faster-than-light speed range, the shift stabilized and the apparent colors of the stars remained unchanged. But the apparent
shape
of the subjective universe was deflected by the increase of the starship’s mass to near infinity, causing the star images to group ahead and behind the vessel. He had even suggested that at some point along the velocity curve, the stars would vanish completely and the starship would be ejected from “real” spacetime into a continuum as yet unexplored by men. In this way, the heretic priest had suggested, voyages to other galaxies might be attempted, since the unknown continuum’s space-time would probably be of different, and possibly smaller, dimensions than the familiar universe.

Styr’s theories were currently discussed in Algol, and as a student Kynan had found them baffling and fascinating. Styr himself, unfortunately, had turned from theoretical physics to practical physics a century before. He had produced a controlled nuclear reaction, was accused of heresy, and ended his distinguished career on a scaffold at Biblios Brittanis. The Order approached new knowledge--or even the rediscovery of the old--with extreme timidity.

It was the way of things, Kynan told himself. Fear of science was natural among members of a race that had populated the stars only to be brought crashing down into savagery by the hammer blows of the hideous weapons created by their own technology. Rebuilding confidence and civilization after so dark a time as the Interregnum was a delicate business, to be approached with great caution. That, in the end, was the true purpose of the Order of Navigators.

Yet slowly the old mysteries were uncovered. Kynan, like many a young priest before him, dreamed of the time when men would begin to break new ground, rather than redo what the godmen of the First Empire had done before. He hoped this time of discovery would come in his lifetime --but he knew that this was unlikely. He was not even certain that if the time
should
come before his own end, he would fit into the new age, for it would surely be a time when science and religion parted, divided, each discipline going its separate way.
And I am, after all,
he thought,
a priest of the Order Militant.

One lived one’s life in the time allotted by God and the spirit of the Star. Not yesterday and not tomorrow, but today.

He made the sign of the Star and withdrew from the sanctum of the control room, seeking the living spaces and the quarters Evart had assigned to Janessa and Baltus, the warlock.

The journey from Gonlan, at the edge of Rhadan space, to Aurora customarily took from ten to thirty hours, Earth Standard, depending on the relative positions of the astronomical bodies involved. With Brother Evart, Kynan had plotted orbits and trajectories for an intersystem flight of twenty-one hours. Time enough to rest and think and
plan,
for at the moment, he realized with a pang for his own inadequacy, he had no real scheme of action. And in the face of impending war, catastrophe (the Vulk had made
that
very clear), and the Star knew what else, he needed desperately to act wisely and speedily. For a moment, as he strode through the tunnel-like companionways of the vast, empty ship, he was conscious of his youth and inexperience.
Twenty,
he thought,
is too callow an age to carry the fate of nations.
Still, the Galacton himself was but twenty--and
he
carried on
his
shoulders the responsibility for all the worlds of the Empire. If Torquas the Poet could deal with the problems of twenty thousand planets, surely Kynan the Navigator could deal intelligently with the problems of two.

The warlock was waiting for him in the entryway that led to what must have been, in First Empire times, one of the main troop bays of the ship. The cavernous chamber was sparsely lit: only three small globes of the hundreds in the low overhead burned. The farthest reaches of the bay were lost in shadows.

It was obvious that Baltus had been exploring this section of the craft. His bearded face was set in an expression of delighted wonder familiar to Kynan. Warlocks--as a class--loved the starships and enjoyed nothing more than investigating them without an escort of Navigators, for they were freethinkers, free
researchers,
actually, and the starships were still the most direct link to the wonder-working builders of the legendary First Empire.

“Kynan,” the warlock said without preamble. “I have never explored a Lyran starship before. The troop bays are different from the ships of the Rhad.”

Kynan stood beside the warlock, looking down the vast empty sweep of the compartment, trying to imagine what it must have looked like filled with the soldiers of the First Empire and their fantastic weapons. “All the starships have differences, Baltus. Each star system--province, actually--supplied troops of a special sort to the armies of the Empire. The Lyri were always infantry. Flying infantry, it appears. Each man was equipped with a device to nullify gravity.” He pointed to the oddly honeycombed overhead. “We think the devices were stored in the ceilings when not in use.”