The Starkahn of Rhada (16 page)

“You did what your people trained you to do, Marissa,” I said.

“Have I done more than that? Have I come between you and your cyborg?” The silver eyes held that dark sadness they sometimes did, and I felt torn between an old loyalty and--was Ariane right?--love?

A shock of discovery ran through Ariane’s extended search systems. Even before she alerted me, I felt it through the encephalophone contacts. Marissa said,”What is it?”

Ariane replied, through the grid speakers, so that Erit and Marissa could know what had aroused her, “Contact in the S-band. Extreme range.”

“Fleet signals?” I asked.

“No. I’ll give you a holograph.” She materialized a cone of space in the pod and blanked out the walls. Sirius and its companion hung in the air of the pod, and I could make out the three largest of the great star system’s thirty planets. There could have been something at the center of the holograph, something that should not have been there, but we were too far away to get a clear return.

“Range?”

“Two parsecs. That’s approximate. An hour at two kilo-lights. Maybe a bit more. I am computing,” Ariane said. Gone was the wistful cyborg. This was an ADSPS cyborg performing her function.

Erit glided noiselessly into the bridge. “Have we found the
Death
?”

“I think so,” I said. “In Sirius.” I turned to Marissa.

“Was the Sirius system part of the attack program?”

Marissa shook her head.

“Then perhaps it is not the
Death
,” Erit suggested.

“I can make a measurement now,” Ariane said. “Wait one.” While she sent out the translight pulses, she said, “It is orbiting, but the orbit is eccentric. It is under power.”

I waited anxiously. The S-band radar, sparkling with strong stellar emissions from Sirius’s blue-white photosphere, was giving no steady indications. There was obviously something there, but the blip was unsteady, scruffy in the aurora of the stellar wind that flared out of the giant star.

Ariane said, “Dead mass is 1,000,906,098,006 metric tons. It is the
Death
.”

The breath whistled from my lips. It was an expression of mingled relief and dread. We had found the monster again. Now what did we do about it?

“It shouldn’t be in Sirius at all,” Marissa said. “That means the programming has broken down completely.”

“Then Earth, at least, is safe for the time being,” Erit said.

“But it might also mean the
Death
will refuse to accept its Watcher,” Marissa said.

I looked at her bleakly. “It might mean that, of course.” To Ariane I said, “Close the range. Hold at a mega-K.”

“Yes, Starkahn,” the cyborg replied. “You can’t stay in the pods, so everyone take a gravigen tablet.” A dispenser extruded from the console.

I swallowed the capsule and watched while Erit and Marissa did the same. Then I said, “Into space armor, Marissa. Let’s do it now.” There was no armor on board small enough to suit Erit, so I secured her within the control pod and closed the latches. To Ariane I gave orders that Erit was to be ejected if we were disabled by any of the Death’s light weapons. A hit by heavier offenses would vaporize us and sterilize a few hundred thousand cubic miles of space in our vicinity. There was no point in dwelling on that possibility.

Marissa and I, bulky in our EV gear now, had little to do while Ariane tracked and closed. She gave us a running commentary on all that was happening outside, but for the moment there was nothing we could do but wait. I was haunted by the thought that the
Death
intended to destroy Sirius. The other stars it had imploded were obscure bodies, unknown to most of mankind. But Sirius--the mighty Dog Star--was a familiar feature of Earth’s night sky. A nova of that magnitude was beyond imagining.

“What are the defensive systems?” I asked Marissa.

“I don’t know how they function,” the girl said, her voice metallic in my headset. “They are force-field variants. They are keyed to my molecular structure. They will reject anyone else--that is all I am sure of.”

“When and how were they imprinted? When you came aboard?”

“When I left the capsule,” she said.

I felt a sinking sensation in my belly. By the holy Star, I had done it again. Careless, thoughtless, stupid. Why hadn’t I thought this through before we began this insane chase, I wondered?

Because it was becoming sickeningly clear suddenly--the glaring mistake in my reasoning. She had told me before and I hadn’t listened, hadn’t realized the significance of what she had said and what she was saying now.

The defenses of the black starship had been inactive during the long flight from the Cloud and during its millennial wait in Delphinus. They probably devoured power, and there was no need to activate them until the ship began its attack plan. So logically enough, the defenses were activated when the Watcher awoke.
But the girl had been awakened in Gonlan and not, as the Magellanics intended, aboard the starship
.

And, therefore, the starship would not regard Marissa as a Watcher. It would not accept her. To the primitive systems of the ship, she was bound to be identified as another enemy.

So all of this: taking Marissa from the warlocks, tracking the starship across the galaxy, closing with it now--all this was a hopeless, gratingly useless gesture. She could not possibly get aboard.

I told the others my thoughts, and for a long while we simply sat in stunned silence. The logic of it was inescapable--and deadly.

If Ariane had been a computer or a robot (as so many people of our time thought of her), she would have seen the problem at the outset. But she was a cyborg, a cybernetic organism, and, as such, as fallible as any human. Nor could the nonmechanical Vulk have been expected to foresee the check. No, the fault was mine and no one else’s.

I knew then what I must do. There is an ancient saying among my mother’s people, the Great Vegans. In one form or another, it is familiar to all the people of the main galaxy.
The Star King is father to his people
. I was a poor excuse for a star king, and poorer still for a father. But there was a single chance, and I must take it.

I said, “Ariane. Remember when we first encountered this thing in Delphinus--and I went aboard?”

“I remember, Starkahn.”

“You said something to me while I was in the life-support chamber. You said that something was happening to the ship.”

“Yes. The cores began to function
after
you’d gone aboard.”

“Isn’t it possible the sensors took me for the Watcher?”

“That seems a farfetched chance, Kier,” Erit said.

I looked at Marissa. Her gleaming eyes regarded me from the bulk of the suit helmet. “Is it possible, Marissa?”

“I don’t know, Kier,” the girl said.

“How selective can life sensors be? How selective would it be necessary to make them? After all, the builders didn’t expect anyone
ever
to be aboard the
Death
but a Watcher. Surely they wouldn’t be able to differentiate between one human being and another.”

“But Marissa is not a human being. Not in the same way you are,” Ariane protested.

“Near enough,” I said, with an assurance I didn’t feel. ”And the ship began to move after I had boarded it. I barely had time to get off before it went translight. You remember, Ariane. We even tried to hold it with a torpedo, but it was too far along with the core lighting. It just went.” I drew a deep breath and said positively, “It took me for its Watcher.”

“That is a dangerous assumption, Kier,” Ariane said.

“It is the only one we can make,” I said. “I’ll go aboard again.”

“Kier!” Ariane said sharply. “I have a Fleet contact.” She holographed the expanding space where the black starship curved into Sirius’s inner zone. An Imperial battleship and three cruisers had materialized out of translight mode. Their intentions were unmistakable. They might have had battleflags flying, so obvious was their intention to attack the giant.

“The commo station on Sirius Fifteen has been sending out a distress call. They must have detected the
Death
coming in,” Ariane said.

Marissa looked at me with frightened eyes. “S-Fifteen is the outermost habitable planet in the system,” I said. “We are approaching from the night side, so we can’t see it. But they must have radar contact with the
Death
.”

Marissa’s voice was horrified. “Are there people on the planet, Kier? Many people?”

“It is a water world,” Ariane said. “Larger than Earth. Seven large islands in a planetary ocean.”

“But people? Cities?”

“A population of seventeen millions,” I said flatly. “Would the
Death
attack a planetary body?”

“Yes,” Marissa said. “It could do that.”

I turned back to the holograph. The battleship and its englobing cruisers were moving at sublight speeds, but they were driving hard to intercept. A gallant gesture--and a futile one.

“Ariane,” I said. “Tell those ships who we are, and say that they are to veer off.” I drew a deep breath and then gave the order, “Close in on the
Death
. I am boarding her again.”

In that moment, for the first time in my life (and quite possibly the last, I realized), I felt like the Starkahn of Rhada.

The Book of Warls says that there are demons in the Cloud which one may see in the southern skies of Earth and that these demons lived on the Earth, and on Vyka, and on all the worlds of men. Now, I have been to Earth, and to Vyka, and to many worlds, and I find it most curious that the only demons I have met there are my fellow men.

Attributed to Navigator Anselm Styr, burned for heresy at Biblios Brittanis,
early Second Stellar Empire

The death of the Royal Vulk Gret, coming as it did when his participation in Triad with the Magellanic invader would have disclosed the impossibility of effective action against the marauding Death Three, is ironic. The truth, as the invader knew it, would have made any attempt to neutralize the great starship useless. But the Rhadan Starkahn, a precipitous youth, did not discover until too late that the Magellanic’s presence could not quiet the threat, and so he acted in a spirit of self-immolation. Thus, even in death, the Vulk Gret served the state.

Vulk Varinius (Academician of the Council of Ministers, 625-870 New Galactic Era),
My People
, middle Confederate period

Once again I found myself in space approaching that great metal planetoid. I had instructed Ariane to retreat to a thousand kilometers, and there, invisible to me, she matched the
Death’s
orbit and waited.

At a distance of eight thousand kilometers, the night side of the planet Sirius Fifteen blotted out a large part of the sky. The double star lay behind the planet as seen from my location, and I could clearly make out the star’s diamond-bright corona. It shimmered like an aurora, a vast stellar wind of glowing particles that dimmed the more distant stars.

In the bulky armor I felt hot and clammy. There was a hard knot of real fear in my belly, for I fully expected to be met with a blast of destroying defensive energies as I approached the Magellanic vessel. Marissa had briefed me as well as she could concerning the rudimentary controls available within the ship. They consisted mainly of several methods of reducing the power inputs to the various systems within the giant: defensive armaments and propulsion. The offensive weapons were far beyond Marissa’s comprehension, having been designed by the malign genius of an entire civilization’s most brilliant minds.

As I approached the massive ship, I was struck once again by its derelict appearance. The projecting cones of the intersystem drive, the extensions of the main cores, still scintillated faintly with the residual energies it had expended to slow from faster-than-light speeds to a mere crawl--the twenty-seven thousand kilometers per ESH needed to establish an eccentric orbit around the watery planet below. In that flickering glow I could see that the knobs and protrusions I had noticed on the ship’s surface previously were now fully extended, and the blunt muzzles of energy projectors, rhomboidal in shape and alien to the eye, projected far above the black, curving surface of the ship’s skin. It was difficult to be certain in the dimness, but it did seem to me that grids that appeared to be search radar were scanning rapidly, bobbing and weaving like fans as they probed space all around. I wondered, dry-mouthed, if one of those hundreds of antennae were scanning me, sending its pulses down through the kilometers of circuitry to the addled positronic brain of the robot and asking whether or not the tiny mote it had discovered were a threat and should it spare a small portion of destruction to wipe it out. It was not a comforting notion.

I heard Ariane through the E-phone: “You are within six kilometers, Kier. I cannot detect any rise in radiation. Perhaps you are too small to be noticed.”

I didn’t believe that for a moment, and I didn’t think the cyborg did. She said it for the same reason small children whistle when passing burial grounds at night.

“Have you been able to raise the battleship?” I asked. Ariane had sent pulses to the Imperial vessels before I went EV, but the range was great and the situation aboard the warships tense, I had no doubt. Our signals had apparently not been received--or they had not yet been passed through the absurdly complicated chain of command that has become deadly common practice in the Grand Fleet after all these years of peace.

“I am trying now. I’ve told them they must hold their position and under no circumstances attempt to attack because we have someone EV in the area of the
Death
.”

Since Ariane’s messages would contain our commo code identification symbols, there was no doubt the commander of the Imperial squadron would know who was extra vehicular near the marauder. That might slow them down some. If what I knew of high commanders in the Fleet held true in this case, the lord nobleman on the battleship’s bridge would soon be burning up the long-range commo beacons with pleas for special instructions. Our Imperial officers did not reach flag rank by being rash.