The Starkahn of Rhada (17 page)

I turned my attention once again to the great starship. The rhomboidal muzzles were moving--there was no doubt of it. They were training around so that those that were not masked by the bulk of the vessel were pointing at the planet--or at the star beyond. I felt a shivering terror mingled with a reluctant admiration for Marissa’s people of the communes. What sort of men could, in a few short decades, develop a technology like this? And an understanding of stellar-phoenix reactions so complete that they could apply a mote of power in the right manner to puncture the photosphere and destroy the equilibrium of a star! What could such minds have done if they had devoted themselves to something other than revenge and weaponry? For that matter, the time scale was all wrong: perhaps in the millennia that had passed they
had
done just that and turned inward to explore their own galaxy--and others. And why was it that we in the main galaxy had only this messenger of death, launched thousands of years before, to speak for the communes of Magellan?

Was it possible my human mind was too rigid to really understand? Was it possible, for example, that time itself was something different outside the Milky Way? Did each galactic system have its own particular time flow? Perhaps Marissa wasn’t a ten-thousand-year sleeper at all in her own environment of the Cloud. Perhaps the builders of the
Deaths
were still living--Perhaps--My mind spun with the vast and limitless options that would remain unanswered until more men and women make the long voyage--took, as Marissa said, the Long Death. And none of this would ever come to pass if the
Death Three
continued its destructive journey.

In this fight the stakes were nothing less than the future of man: peace and exploration of an increasingly wondrous universe--or very nearly everlasting war and fear of further incursions by “the demons of the Cloud” who seemed sprung from the pages of the ancient
Book of Warls
, black bible of the Interregnal warlocks.

The sun was rising. Not the sun, but Sirius, the brilliant double star of legend. It appeared in a scintillating flare of hot bright light over the dark horizon of Sirius Fifteen, the planet below. Its rays were turning “the wine-dark sea” of the ancients into a restless silver. The swirling clouds made a pattern that caught the red rays of the growing daylight and held them for a time. Then the inexorable motions of the celestial mechanics that governed the immense masses of star and planet caused them to move on in their long cycles, and far above, in the night of space beyond the stratosphere, the first white light struck the alien starship, and it seemed to take on form and substance, mass and dimension. I watched it and felt minute, miniscule, infinitesimal. What, I wondered, can one single man do against the ponderous and unthinking powers of the great beings involved? In my dread I was beginning to revert to the mysticism of the Rhad: we are thought a melancholy people, filled with barely contained wonder. Natural enough, I think, for a nation born on the edge of the known galaxy, with a window, as it were, on the truly infinite.

With its relatively dark companion at apastron, Sirius appeared to fill much of the sky, even though the first and nearest of the planetary companions revolved around the system at a distance of more than one hundred astronomical units. Sirius Fifteen’s orbit lay a thousand times farther away from its primary than did the orbit of Neptune from Sol; yet so large was the great Dog Star that the planet below was subtropical--a paradise of islands and warm sea. On this lambent world lived seventeen millions of my fellow human beings--persons I had never seen, but who had suddenly, in my mind at least, become my brothers and sisters.

I touched the thruster controls and moved toward the
Death
. I was suddenly filled with a sense of fate. Perhaps

I was finally beyond ordinary fear.

Ariane said, “The battleship is the
Intrepid
, Captain Lord Chal Proc-Ouspensky commanding. He says he will hold his position for one hour--no longer. Also he says that we are under arrest and may not leave Sirius district without his express orders.”

The marvelous way our noblemen’s minds worked, I thought with a touch of hysteric gaiety. If they were tossing coins, they would contrive to have them land always on edge.

“Acknowledge his transmission, but tell him we do not accept his authority,” I said. “We take our instructions directly from the Fleet Survey Wing. It won’t stop him, but it will confuse and immobilize him for at least that hour.”

‘There is something else, Kier,” Ariane said. “One of the cruisers is a Navigator’s ship with a completely ecclesiastical crew. He will not speak for them. They are Zealots to a man.”

“What ship?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“The
Glory of the Name
from the Theocracy. Navigator Peter commands her.”

Of course
, I thought.
It had to be
. The Zealots would insist on being in at the death of the
Death
. But his lack of understanding of what was involved here could be fatal to all of us. Nav Peter had never before seen the Magellanic vessel. His devil-ridden mind was too rigidly religious to conceive of such a craft being built without the sanction and blessing of the Order of Navigators. Now, what would the sight of the monster do to that irrational man’s powers of reason?

“Can you relay me through to the
Glory
, Ariane?” I asked.

“If they will take a call. They may not choose to talk to a blasphemer and heretic.”

“Try it anyway.” As I exchanged messages with Ariane, I kept drawing cautiously closer to the
Death
. I was within five kilometers now, and the small of my back was tingling with warning messages, and the expectation of sudden blasting extinction.

So Nav Peter had joined the chase, and probably it was his authority as nuncio of the Theocracy that had brought poor Lord Ouspensky and his squadron to this deadly place.
Unfortunate man
, I thought drily. He should have had a good and simple life as lord of his estates in the Procyon worlds. Instead, he now commanded a small detachment of Imperial ships in imminent danger of vaporization.

I heard a harsh voice say in the E-phones: “This is the
Gloria Nomini
, heretic. Speak.” Latin, I thought with irrational irritation. In this time and this place
, Latin
. A language dead even in the middle years of the Dawn Age. But these were the men who had kept knowledge alive through the Dark Time. For that, I owed them respect. Even such as the Zealots. I replied, “I hear you, Nav. I would speak with Peter of Syrtis.”

“Then speak.”

“Nav Peter,” I said, as respectfully as I could under the circumstances, “I ask that you remain with the squadron and make no sudden moves. It could be extremely dangerous.”

“The Order fears no dangers, heretic. The spirit of the Star is with us.”

I racked my brain trying to think of some way to make even a minimal breakthrough of understanding with the fervid priest. It was vital. I remembered that the Zealots were probably the last adherents to what, in Nav Kynan of Rhada’s time, was called the Stellar Heresy. In the middle years of the Empire’s development, certain Navigators put forward the theory that stars were in and of themselves holy, and objects of veneration. The more extreme star worshipers propounded the hypothesis that the stars were not simply celestial bodies (and as such works of the Universal Spirit or God), but rather
aspects
of God: living, sentient beings. And just as the priests of the Dawn Age had wrangled to the point of bloodshed over “how many angels could dance on the head of a pin,” the Navigators of the early Empire split into angry factions over the Stellar hypothesis, or as some called it, the Stellar Heresy. If Nav Peter of Syrtis were, in fact, a stellarite, then the destruction of a star was the most heinous crime imaginable: not because it destroyed the works of man, but because it was a direct assault on the
body
and
person
of God Himself.

“You can see the danger on your own instruments, Nav,” I said. “It is a starship from the Cloud. A vast vessel, but only a ship. There is no religious question here. Let me--”

“Everything that happens is a religious matter, Starkahn,” the priest’s rasping voice went on, tense and near to hysterical rage. “Is there no end to your presumption?”

“Nav,” I said, “there is no need for the Order to become involved in this. It is a matter for the Fleet. I beg you, stand clear and live.”

“To threaten a Navigator of God is to risk damnation, Kier of Rhada. Don’t imagine your patrician birth will help you in this.”

The millennial prejudice of the humbly born for the noble was in his words, and I realized that here was a basically simple man, a peasant, with the power of the clergy (no, of God, he thought) in his hands. The meek to humble the mighty. The man born of the soil to put down the Starkahn. It was too bitter, too sadly hopeless. I could not touch the man’s small nucleus of sanity. His prejudice and vaulting arrogance were too great.

“I am not threatening you, Nav,” I said. “Only let me do what I must, and I will submit myself to an ecclesiastical court on Rhada--on Mars, if you like! A court of damned Zealots--!”

“Blasphemy and heresy. You bargain with God’s will!” In the darkness of a distant starfield I saw the familiar scintillation of a starship’s hull glowing with ionization. The Navigator’s ship was getting under way. I almost screamed into the E-phone: “
Stay where you are, Peter! On peril of all our lives, don’t come closer!
”

“That abomination of demons has murdered stars. It must submit to the Order or be destroyed,” Nav Peter shouted.

Insanity. Religious fanaticism would be the end of us all here in the Sirian sky
, I thought hopelessly. Now I could make out the shape of the Navigator’s cruiser. It was patterned on the ancient vessels, so like the monster before me. Yes, insanity and irony. How bitter it was!

I pleaded as I rotated slowly in space like a miniature spaceship. “Nav Peter. Give me an hour. One hour, that I can try to board this thing and immobilize it--!”

“Do you think I will allow a heretic to grasp the demon’s power? I excommunicate you, Kier of Rhada!”
He cut off communications, and there was nothing in my E-phone but the hiss and crackle of stellar static from the blazing blue-white sun.

Ariane warned, “The Nav cruiser is under acceleration, Kier! Get away! I’m coming in to pick you up!”

“Ariane, no!”

A pale violet aurora formed around one of the Magellanic’s projectors. It danced and shimmered and seemed to reach out toward me, as though the addled memory-bank that controlled it were confused, uncertain. Then it brightened to a flaring electric blue that tripped the selsium cells in my suit and snapped the screens down over my eyes. But the blazing pseudopod of force curved away from me and darted in a solid bolt of hellish light toward the Navigator’s vessel. There was a white flash, a globule of sun-bright brilliance. It was soundless and all the more terrifying for its silence. And I saw the cruiser, a vast machine itself, bulge and distort as though the molecules of its fabric were bloating with impossible energies. Then it was gone in a swiftly expanding ball of hot gases.

I heard Ariane calling me, and I thought I heard even Marissa in the soundless confusion. A storm of radiation smashed violently against my armor, and I was spun over and over by the pressure of the light that was the by-product of the deadly explosion of the cruiser. I tumbled toward the dark ship, and in my fall I noticed with strange lucidity that the other projectors were dark, as though the strike against Nav Peter’s ship of priests had momentarily drained the defensive systems of power.

Below me lay the familiar black metal plain, studded with menacing projections. Then as I fell I saw the dark portal--the same open pit that I had ventured into what seemed an eternity ago in Delphinus. Without hesitation I triggered my suit thrusters, righted myself, and plunged into the Stygian darkness.

Good sense or reason must be better distributed than anything else in the world, for no man desires more of it than he already has.

René Descartes,
Discourse on Method
,
early Dawn Age

If a man succeeds in a dangerous enterprise, he is called a hero. If he fails, he may be called a fool--or not be called at all.

St. Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,
early Second Stellar Empire period

It was as though I were entrapped in a recurring dream. First came the suffocating darkness and then the long free fall “down” the open shaft toward the tiny chamber imbedded in the mass of nucleonic circuitry deep inside the great starship.

As I fell, my only contact with reality was Ariane’s continuous calls on the E-phone. She had closed to within a perilous range, risking her own destruction and the death of Marissa and Erit, but her signals came through sharp and clear. She did not wait for any responses from me, but kept up a running commentary on what was happening outside the vessel.

“The
Intrepid
and the rest of the squadron are withdrawing to ten thousand kilometers. The fireball and the wreckage are still expanding. The Nav ship is completely destroyed.”

Then: “The
Death
is moving. I am following. Speed is sublight. Direction is toward the planet.”

And: “The energy level is rising. I can detect heavy ionization of subspace in the vicinity of the
Death
.”

I struck the smooth wall of the shaft and went into a tumbling spin. The sensation jolted me into action, and I began to fly my armor with the thrusters. It seemed to me that the shaft was no longer than before, but I knew this was illusion. Yet the ship was moving. Inertia kept trying to smash me against the walls, and it took all my training with the armor to remain more or less in the middle of the shaft.

Ariane called: “I know you are conscious, Kier. I am receiving telemetry. But try to say what is happening to you.”