The Starkahn of Rhada (15 page)

“Ariane,” I said. “Which is it?”

“That’s the strange part of it, Kier. It hasn’t even a name, only a number in the New Galactic Catalogue. No planets. NGC 6698.”

“Could it have been a natural phenomenon?”

“No,” Ariane said flatly. “The star was recently surveyed. Eighteen ES months ago, in fact, by Lieutenant Commander Riso Bel-Koryzibsky and Deela Cyb-ADSPS 217. It showed not one characteristic of instability. The nova was triggered by a massive attack on the stellar photosphere. The
Death Three
without a doubt.”

“You’ve made a plot projection?”

“By helical extension, the
Death
can be in solar space within a week or, on the next sweep, in two and a half months. I
don’t
think we have to worry about the latter date, do you?”

“Could it possibly be earlier?”

“Not if the attack program included inhibitions against overusing the main propulsion systems.”

Marissa said, “That’s true. The
Deaths
were all built to take the most economical orbits. Fighting range was important to the designers--and since they are practically impregnable, speed intra-galaxy isn’t.”

“But the positronic controls are damaged.” I said.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Marissa said.

“Of course we do. Why else would it attack NGC 6698? There’s nothing there. There never has been. The farther the
Death
gets from its point of activation in Delphinus, the less rational--if we can use such a word in connection with a doomsday machine--it becomes.”

“Nothing will impair its fighting capacities,” Marissa warned.

I looked at the silvery eyes in that finely made, handsome face. I wondered if she were actually, in some perverse way, proud of the hell ship she had brought to the main galaxy? It was probably true--she was mostly human, and such self-destroying pride could be very much a part of our human makeup.

“It was programmed for Earth,” I said quietly. “You knew that all along.”

The girl nodded slowly. “Earth was the home, the hub, of the Eugenicist movement . . . “

“It is also the home of the entire race,” I said.

She looked at me with mute appeal. Then she said, “Out there--in the Cloud--I don’t know how to explain it to you. It seemed
right
. We had cause to do as we did, and we were all
together
--”

“That is the key, of course,” I said.

“The key?”

“To unlock the box full of evils that set you on your way, so arrogant, so filled with moral outrage and a sense of having been wronged that you’d destroy all human life in the galaxy if you could. You had that wonderful feeling of
community
, and so you
knew
you were right.” I felt sick and I suppose I showed it.

“It was right, then,” she said hopelessly.

I shook my head. “It is wrong now, and it was just as wrong then. Revanchism. Mass murder. Genocide. Not nearly so noble an effort when we call it by its right name.”

“A moment, Starkahn.” Erit stood in the open valve, the soft light shining on her eyeless face and sensitive mouth. “We may all die together, so it is well to treat with one another fairly and with honesty. Marissa Tran Wyeth has done this. So must you. We are dealing with a case of
attempted
genocide,
attempted
racial murder. The verdict of history is something we must let the future pronounce. Our job, we four, is to stand together and fight. We are the only ones who can do it. Otherwise, we would have called in the Grand Fleet--isn’t that so, Starkahn?”

“I think so,” I said. I really wasn’t sure. The wild adventure, the impossible fight, still appealed to me. Was I being a child? Playing a game and gambling with the lives of my friends, with the lives of billions?

“Kier!”

It was Ariane. I felt the lurch of speed increasing. I couldn’t imagine where she was finding the power to surpass a four thousand times light-speed velocity, but she was. “What have you found?”

“Ionization trail, Kier. Massive. The Death has traveled this way.”

“How long ago?”

“No less than a day ago. No more than a month. That is the best I can do. But I can plot the direction of the trail.” I waited. Presently, the cyborg reported in a carefully controlled and neutral voice, “An extension of the helix penetrates Sagittarius in the Province of Tellus, the District of Lemuri. Is that near enough?”

“Too near,” I said heavily. “The star nearest the trail, then?”

“Sol.”

“Yes. Thank you.” There was nothing else to say, nothing else to do but continue the slowest sort of pursuit there was--the stern chase. Ariane was faster by a factor of one hundred than the ancient and clumsy starship, but the distances were so immense that we could very well arrive in solar space too late and find only the tenuous fiery gases of an expanding planetary nebula--

And among the disintegrating molecules would be the history of man, from his beginnings among the hominids of the old continents, through Galileo and Shakespeare and Spinoza and the great ancients, to Faraday and Einstein and

Gagarin and Aldrin and Armstrong, to St. Emeric and Nav Kynan and--

Oh, the list was endless, timeless, as man was timeless! But the black starship could bring most of it to an end, destroying as it did so the heart of a mighty Second Stellar Empire of man.

For an attempt at genocide and mass murder, it seemed to have a dismayingly good chance of succeeding.

Where will it end, I ask, good people?
Grim people, cold people, warlike people, hateful humans!
Some day it will end, you know--
The finger of God will point at you from the sky--

Torquas XIII (called The Poet),
18th Vykan Galacton, 6212 GE-6252 GE

When asked what troops he considered the best, Glamiss is said to have replied: “Those which are victorious.” The Rhad say he spoke of them.

Nav Julianus Mullerium,
The Age of the Star Kings
,
middle Second Stellar Empire period.

Yes, I have a doctrine in battle, and I recommend it to my descendants for as long as they follow the warman’s trade: When weary and dispirited--attack. When outnumbered and outflanked--attack. When faced with impossible odds and certain defeat--attack.
Attack, attack, attack!

Attributed to Aaron the Devil, first Star King of Rhada, circa 6000 GE (?),
early Second Stellar Empire or Interregnal Period

We followed the ion trail left by the great starship for eight Earth Standard Days. The archaic design of the engines and their immense size made Ariane’s task of tracking it through the end of Sagittarius reasonably easy. So far the trail had not been detected by any units of the Grand Fleet, but it was only a matter of time, for we were now penetrating the Inner Marches: the center, not of the galaxy proper, but of the most densely populated areas, the region of the stars nearest Earth. In this province of the Empire lay Alpha Centaurus, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, and, dominating the darkness with its size and brilliance, Sirius--at this distance a clear visual double. Around these stars revolved the ancient worlds, the planets of scholars and libraries, laboratories and universities. These Inner Worlds were the first colonized when man liberated himself from the tyranny of Sol. They formed, in most ancient times, the heartlands of the First Empire (hence their Dawn Age names). Now they lay under their own varied skies, somnolent, academic, untroubled by war or conflict of any sort since Glamiss the Magnifico’s time. And it was into this peaceful region of space that the
Death Three
was now moving.

Ariane pointed out quite properly that if the
Death
was intercepted by any major Fleet unit, the scenario would be completely predictable: All capital starships of the Grand Fleet were commanded by noble, titled commanders from the great warman families of the Empire. Since the Empire had been at peace for three hundred years, they would be anxious to provoke some military incident that might produce a victory, glory, and Imperial attention. Yet they were all inexperienced in any sort of serious ship-to-ship combat. Added to this would be the massive power of the
Death’s
weaponry and the fact that the vessel’s positronic program banks were damaged. For a starship of the Grand Fleet to engage the
Death
would be rather like a small boy with a sharp stick attacking an armored, mounted warman about to go berserk.

We could not receive any radio transmissions as long as we remained in the translight speed ranges, so it was impossible to know whether or not the ionic swath of the doomsday vessel across the Inner Marches had yet been discovered. But it was inevitable that it should be, and soon. We had to overtake the great ship before it committed mass murder.

The relationship that rapidly developed between Ariane and Marissa Tran Wyeth was a strange one, or so it seemed to me (though Erit assured me that it was quite a normal state of arrested hostility--the sort often found between two strong-minded women). But once the shock of realizing that the ship was a cyborg, and a female cyborg at that, had worn off, Marissa accepted Ariane with more toleration than Ariane offered the Magellanic girl. So it seemed to me, in any case. Perhaps the reason for it was that Marissa, who had been trained (so
long
ago!) as a scientist for her duties as Watcher, admired Ariane’s abilities--almost in spite of herself. Erit suggested that the fact of her being human (at least in the important particulars) while Ariane weighed fifteen metric tons might also have something to do with it. “You, Starkahn, are the only man she has had a chance to become acquainted with since her awakening,” Erit said.

These considerations, however, seemed likely to remain academic. Of primary importance was the problem of what we were to do if and when we succeeded in tracking down the
Death Three
. The simple act of getting anywhere near the monster could quite easily result in our being blasted into hot vapor. And, if we should be permitted within range and allowed to try to put Marissa back on her ship, we had no assurance that the mechanisms aboard would work as their designers had intended--ten thousand years ago.

In all, our situation was tense and not calculated to fill us with confidence. By this time we were listed as deserters from the Grand Fleet (surely the
first
time a
ship
had defected). The fact of my being a Rhad noble (whose mother plagued the Republic with royalist plots and bothers) was cause for some alarm among the more timid in the Imperial civil service, I was sure. Then Ariane’s “ancestry” was probably stirring up old memories of the great cyborg rebellions of First Empire times. That couldn’t be good. In addition to this, we had a Vulk with us. Time out of mind anti-Vulkism had plagued the Empires--First
and
Second. And finally, Nav Peter and his fanatics must surely be spreading the word among the faithful that an “abomination” from the Cloud was leading us all astray and into damnation. Meanwhile,
Death Three’s
damaged brain muddled its way through the long-ago imprinted and programmed attack plan intended to kill Eugenicists and adherents of the Raschilid Dynasty.

I lounged disconsolately in my pod, with the curving surfaces around me polarized to let the night come through. Erit and Marissa were beyond the open valve to the bridge: I could hear their murmured talk. Erit was being very kind to the girl from the Cloud, and in return Marissa was trying to describe the sort of life she had led in the communes of Magellan. Erit, being a Vulk and nonmechanical, probably thought the life of the Magellanics sad and lacking in hope or dignity. But she would never say so. Her only comment was to repeat what she had said before: that perhaps the present-day inhabitants of the Cloud had turned to more rewarding pursuits than vengeance.

I looked across the interstellar night at mighty Sirius, blue-white, flooding the darkness with diamond light. We were moving in a steady search-spiral around the ion traces left by the
Death
. Our speed was just sublight now, for we wanted to intercept any radio traffic in this district of Sagittarius.

The result was a normal-looking sky, beautifully dusted with distant stars, alight with the nearer suns, and touched with the softness of deep space: black as raven’s wings.

Ariane said, “I have been thinking, Kier.” I could feel the touch of her affection for me. The E-phones were not as effective in transmitting emotions as the Magellanic Mutation, but somehow Ariane got the message across. We had been together a long time. “This thing we are doing could be--very likely will be--the end of us.”

“I have been thinking the same thing, Ari,” I said.

“Even if we succeed--which is very doubtful--the powers will want to separate us. We have broken every rule.”

“Very nearly,” I said with a thoughtful smile.

“Are you in love with that girl?”

I squirmed uncomfortably, but I thought about it--faced it for the first time. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

“I think you are,” Ariane said.

I pursed my lips and looked at the vista beyond the pod walls.

“I am not a human woman, Kier,” Ariane said. “That does not mean I am without feelings. I am not--as she put it--a robot.”

“I know that,” I said.

“I simply want you to know that I understand what is happening,” the cyborg said, and I thought of the way people who didn’t have this sort of symbiotic tie to another kind of living being looked at SW people and said, “Those pilots and their cyborgs,” not understanding that there are many faces of love.

I was at a loss for something to say. To be parted from Ariane would be to separate myself into two parts: each part to remain alone from then on, for as long as I lived. It was frightening and terribly sad.

“What happens will happen,” Ariane said, with cyb fatalism.

I wanted to promise her that nothing would ever change in our relationship, but I couldn’t do that, not to Ariane, who had shared a hundred adventures and pleasures with me.

Marissa came through the valve and stood at my pod. She could feel what I was feeling, and she touched my hand gently and said, “I have come a long way to bring trouble to you and yours, Kier of Rhada. I am sorrier than I can say.”