An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Read online

  Ten minutes and counting.

  Bertingas double-checked his timetick against the AID’s mindless quartz clock circuit. He considered plugging its voice loops back in and snooping on how the news of Stephen’s assassination was progressing throughout the capital. First he would have to put up with the AID’s electronic tongue-lashing about the rituals of secrecy. He was definitely not in the mood for that. He began to drum his fingers on the table.

  Gina brought his coffee without a word and left. From the bullpen, the normal drone of working bodies—some carbon based, most not—had risen to an audible level. Everyone out there was still waiting to be told what the midnight alarm was all about. Meanwhile they chatted, groused, and fiddled with old busywork.

  Twelve minutes. Two minutes later than the last time he looked.

  Bertingas’ own professional expertise had been with the Baseform Scatter Platter. That was the cluster’s optical, encyclopedic data base, accessed by fiber cables, taking feeds from the HSN. Physically, the Platter was located in Meyerbeer—down in the basement of this Block, to be exact. Bertingas had started there, ten years ago, as a record assistant with a shiny new badge in informational sets from the Central Center Universalis Organum. A squeaky little read/write datahead. From that job, he had progressed through coordinator for a whole sector of knowledge, vector chief, and finally director of the Platter Base, before becoming the D.D.ofC. Ten long years to rise one hundred floors in the same building. The careers of Veracitors moved slowly.

  Ping!

  The comm circuits in the AID made that special sound when the call came from the Palace. Twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds. So much for the superiority of the multipath brain.

  “Bertingas speaking.”

  “This is the major-domo. Her Excellency has called an emergency extended staff meeting for seven o’clock. Can you make it?” It was the voice of Multiple Mind itself, and for once no drawl demodulated its synthetic demeanor. What a strain that must be!

  “Of course,” Bertingas answered. “Morning or evening?”

  “Umm.” Tick-tock. “Morning, of course.”

  “Thank you. Usual place?”

  “The Golden Pavilion, of course.”

  “Thank you. Please tell Milady Sallee that, as Deputy Director of Communications, I shall be honored to attend for the Department. Unless, of course, she wishes to take this opportunity to name her Director . . . ?”

  “Umm. Noted.” Click.

  Damn! The meeting was in half an hour. No time to get back to his apartment and freshen up. Did he have a clean shirt in the lower drawer? Was there a charge on his shaver? Bertingas did the best he could, even using spit and a novelette to worry a scuff on the toe of one uniform boot. The limp collar of his tunic and that bit of frayed silver braid, he would just have to cover with panache and, in a pinch, an artful turn of his head. Such was the life of a career bureaucrat,

  He took the electrostatic drop tube, signaled it to repulse mode, and lifted to the level of the airlip. The charge in the tube had the expected effect of beating a few grams of residual dust out of his clothes. Bertingas arrived in a small cloud of smokelike particles, which he fanned away with his hands.

  Government Block was an equilateral pentahedron, modeled on a famous series of tombs in Old Egypt, an obscure Earth reference. Bertingas often thought it served the same purpose in Aurora Cluster politics. Because the building had no true roof—the 150th floor was a single room, the office of the Planetary Administrator, with a fantastic view from four sides—aircars had to land on a narrow shelf jutting out from the east face at Floor 123.

  The morning glare was already strong on the white syncrete of the airlip. Bertingas found himself in an impatient queue of officials from several different departments. Evidently it was going to be a big meeting, with lots of aides and sideboys. He noted tunics in the excitant orange of General Services, the aquamarine blue of Water Supply, the brown and red of Energy Supply. His own tunic, the black with gray flashes of Communications, was of course absorbing most of the sunlight. He could feel the sweat working its way down his sides and from his hairline. He imagined his collar tabs wilting even further.

  The staff cars hummed up out of the nearby parking complex, lowered onto the lip with a blast of warm air from their ducts—more heat!—loaded and lifted off. It was a mechanical ballet that would not be hurried.

  Bertingas should have beeped for his car from the office. Then it might have arrived, on remote, out of turn. Now it was going to come in order behind the—let’s see . . . six, seven, nine—true heads of department here on the lip. Deputies who were merely acting head didn’t have the same clout.

  While he was counting the minutes, multiplying by the sweat trickles he could feel, and dividing by the number of bureaucrats ahead of him in line, a sleek two-seater slid onto the platform under the nose of a seven-place wagon. The bigger car honked imperiously at the smaller one. Evidently the driver couldn’t see the unobtrusive pair of gold zigzags, mark of the Kona Tatsu, on the fenders.

  The little car popped its offside hatch and a hand pointed back in line, straight at Bertingas.

  “Tad! Get in!”

  Heads and eyes in the queue turned to look at him. Bertingas looked at the anonymous white hand. It could only belong to one person.

  Straightening his tunic, he ran forward and swung a leg over the airskirting. The interior was chilled and dark, a blessed relief from the glare of the airlip. Before he could pull the hatch down, his friend—maybe his friend this week—Halan Follard was feeding power to the high-side fans and sliding the car off the lip.

  Chapter 2

  Halan Follard: TRUSTWORTHLESS

  Twisting the control yoke through a partial figure-eight, Halan Follard shifted the car’s airflow from the high portside fans to the low starboard ones, rocking the body across its center of gravity. The same move also boosted the bow thirty degrees, then dropped it off to the left.

  The little aircar made a rolling turn that reversed direction and slid it 500 feet under the pattern of other cars coming onto the Government Block’s airlip.

  Follard gave himself a tight smile, proud of his mechanical kinesthesia. Then he focused attention on his passenger.

  Bertingas was splayed across the seat, panting. His tunic collar was loosened to catch the stream of cool air from the dash. His fingers plucked at the stiff material of the uniform pants, trying to lift it from his perspiring thighs. Follard helped by turning down the air conditioning two more notches and stepping up the blower. The cabin dropped ten degrees in ten seconds and a grin spread slowly across Bertingas’ face.

  “There are fresh collar tabs in the map box,” Follard said. “They should cover for your rank and department.”

  “Why, thank you,” Bertingas said, popping the lid. “But how did you—?”

  “Intuition,” Follard replied, smiling. A Kona Tatsu Inspector General sometimes had to pass for a member of the middle ranks in the halls of Government Block. Let Bertingas think what he might.

  Most of the people in Follard’s circle, the outer circle, thought of Taddeuz Bertingas as a harmless fool. Pedantic, foppish, self-centered, soft-centered. A career climber who never would reach the top rung. An innocenti, not a cognoscenti.

  The inner circle didn’t think of Bertingas at all.

  Follard himself thought he detected some steel in the man. Not a lot. A sliver, not a shard. And it was well padded by the attitudes and affectations that anyone would acquire after ten years in Aurora Cluster’s Government Block. That sliver was doubly padded, because Bertingas was in the mind-manipulation business. Deluding and self-deluded. He slithered around with the kind of people who make a word mean exactly what they choose it to mean . . . the last Director of Communications, for instance.

  Bertingas was soft, like this planet.

  Of the 4,000 or so Pact worlds, Palaccio was the strangest—but Humans had to luck out just once.

  It was a severely oblat
e globe, squashed like a pumpkin grown on one of the high-gee worlds. In addition to that, Palaccio’s axial inclination was nil: the north and south poles were a true ninety degrees from the plane of orbit around the primary. Consequently, there was almost no climatic variation: eternal winter and darkness at the two poles; eternal summer in the broad band around the equator; spring and fall passing through 50 to 70 degrees of latitude north and south.

  The planet had a strong magnetosphere, with its magnetic poles coinciding precisely with the rotational axis. So radiation from the local solar wind hardly affected the climate.

  Palaccio was larger than Earth—by several diameters. The internal structure, however, was much less dense: silicon and potassium at the core instead of nickel and iron. So the surface gravity was 0.92 gee, making everyone feel good and strong, if a little light-headed.

  It was the only planet where the natural ground cover was a mass of tightly packed tendrils which never grew above 4 cm, was invariably an emerald green, and was called “grass.” Where every tree was either a stately Sequoia sempervirens—perfect for roofbeams and ship’s keels—or a spreading, leafy apple tree, complete with ruddy, edible fruit. Where every cliff was columniated marble, topped with your choice of Ionic scrollwork or the Corinthian acanthuslead pattern. Where the air was as pure as oxygen and nitrogen mixed from cylinders. Where the water was as sweet and flat as fresh-burned hydrogen.

  For the Humans, who had discovered this planet—there were no indigenous intelligences—it was a Mediterranean paradise. Hence the name “Palaccio.”

  For the Pact aliens who had immigrated, it was a hell world.

  The sunlight was too bright and the wrong color for delicate alien eyes raised under red giant primaries. The light was too dim for eyes grown in the blue-white actinic glare of brighter stars. Tree pollens irritated delicate membranes or grated in delicate joints. Chlorophyll from the “grass” burned under delicate alien feet. The gee-pull was too strong for spidery alien frames from the moonlets or for gliding membranes from the heavy-gas worlds. The gravity was too weak for robust alien circulatory systems and molecular bonds developed on high-gee worlds. The water lacked essential trace elements necessary to delicate alien metabolisms—or water itself was an alien poison. The microbes that Human settlement had brought attacked everything.

  The non-Humans suffered from sores and burns, allergies, aches, falls, sniffles, and fits of homesickness. Quietly, interspecially, the multiple races that congregated with Pact Humans called the planet Porifera, the smelly sponge. Or just “Stinkworld.”

  However, it was inevitable that Palaccio, being equidistant from the other Aurora worlds, would become a center for government and communications. It was, after all, perfect for Humans.

  And so Taddeuz Bertingas—after ten years in a desk job, in a Human-dominated government, on a paradise world, in a cluster with almost no dissidents, not even commercial pirates—was bound to be well-insulated, self-centered, self-deluding, soft-centered, and all the rest.

  Well, it was time to wake him up.

  “This isn’t the way to the Palace,” Bertingas said, lifting his head and pushing himself up in the seat.

  “No, it isn’t. I thought we’d take a little detour. Enjoy some scenery.”

  “Those are the Palisades. I’ve seen them—and beyond. Nice car you’ve got here. Fast. Now, shouldn’t we be getting on to that all-hands meeting?”

  “Look at the cliff structure,” Follard prompted. He tipped the aircar and pointed down through Tad’s window. “Huge blocks at the base there, supporting those strong white columns, which in turn support the Uplands Plains . . .

  “Or that’s the way it seems. But if you look hard, and if you know anything about geology, it’s just illusion. The blocks at the bottom support nothing. They’ve simply broken off from above and landed at the foot of the cliff. The real strength, the native rock of the planet, is hidden by those crumbs of white stone.

  “Those columns that we can see,” Follard continued, “they support nothing either. They only stand out because the background rock is weathering away. They’re simply what’s left.

  “No, the strength to support the Uplands is not on the face of the cliff, but deep inside, with the native rock and the web of the planet, which we can’t see.”

  “You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?” Bertingas teased. He wore a soft, superior smile which occasionally made Follard want to strike him.

  “Call it a parable of the stones,” Follard said. “You know the high secretary’s been assassinated?”

  “Ahhh . . . No, I didn’t. That’s terrible. Who did it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. His friends, retainers, or next of kin. All of the above. None of the above. He had no enemies, so it must have been his friends who did it. As I said, it does not matter. Stephen ten Holcomb is like those white blocks out there. He seems to be the foundation of the Pact. He has told us, in his usual flood of words, that he is the ‘binding link’ of our political structure—but he binds nothing, supports nothing. He’s just a piece of stone that fell down long ago, when his family line happened upon the Secretaryship.”

  “I see. That explains a lot. Can we go to the Palace now?”

  “Listen well, little man,” Follard said, intentionally putting a hiss and a rasp into what he called his Inquisitor’s voice. “There are others who would like to take the throne at Central Center. They would say they were ‘ascending’ to the Secretaryship. But you and I know that, from our parable here, they are only pieces of stone, falling where gravity takes them.”

  “What others? Who are you talking about?” Bertingas sounded petulant, as he would after that “little man” jibe.

  “The pillars, the forces that seem to support the Pact. The heads of the commercial conglomerates. The loosely allied cluster commanders. The cluster governors who have been in place too long and are years removed from the give-and-take of any real political arena. Every one of them has a plan, a plot, a daydream that, with luck and help and the right conjunction of forces, he—or she—can step up to the throne. And what would that be? In the context of our parable?”

  “Another block of marble, falling off the cliff to land in the rubble heap at the bottom,” Bertingas said sullenly. “That heap does have a lot to say about who we’ll salute, what we’ll be doing, how we live, what we believe—”

  “Salute, maybe. But when was the last time you changed your socks, let alone your mind, because of something Stephen VI said? He’s a peacock on display. A figurehead.”

  “Possibly. However, he does select the cluster governors and all the rest. They have the real power in our lives.”

  “Nonsense, Tad. They select themselves. The high secretary makes about three key appointments a day, just by nodding his head. They merely put themselves in the way of that nod and they’re in. That’s all.”

  “You have microphones in this car,” Bertingas said loudly. “You’re trying to trap me into sedition. Well, it won’t work. I’m loyal to the Pact. I’m loyal to the high secretary, whoever he will be. To Governor Sallee. To the Director of Communications, if and when he’s appointed. To the—”

  “Why don’t you just say you’re loyal to the Pact and be done with it?”

  “I am loyal.”

  “You can be loyal to our society, can’t you, to the ancient forms that make this interspatial empire work, without wasting your time or tears on the fools who appear to hold power.”

  “Eh?”

  “The fabric of our society. The daily agreements and transactions that put food on the table, water in the pipes, power in the overhead, and jingle in the pocket. Those are the things that support our lives—the things to remember when the rocks start falling on the cliff face. Put your trust, your loyalty, in the people around you.”

  “Why is the inspector general of the Kona Tatsu telling me this? I would have thought it was your business to, ahh, inspire loyalty to the high secretary. At least here in Aur
ora. And to his chosen governor.”

  “That’s my field of duty, of course—when the high secretary is alive and fulfilling his obligations, however competently, to govern. But His Excellency is by now formally couched under marble in the Hall of Ages. The safety of the Heir is in doubt, and strong forces are at work to determine Roderick’s affairs once and for all.”

  “Which forces?” Bertingas sounded genuinely curious.

  “Ask yourself who owns or controls half of Aurora Cluster and even more in her nearer neighbors.”

  “Haiken Maru?”

  “Yes, our dominant conglomerate. With a charter for trade only—not to farm freeholds, not to provide banking or other contract services, not to hold administrative office . . . We all know how closely those charters are monitored.”

  “You think they will try to influence the succession?”

  “Do stones roll downhill? We of the Kona Tatsu believe they will try to buy the succession. The only question is, with what coin?”

  “Not with money, you mean?”

  “Will Haiken Maru influence the political side? Will they maneuver to install an overt innocent—but one of their own choosing and purchase? Or will they support another candidate, one whom they can influence indirectly? Or will they simply launch a war, funded with their considerable resources, to take the throne for their Centrist chairman, Villem Borking?”

  “Well, what are they going to do?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Oh. So, again, why are you telling me all this?”

  “We do know a thing or two,” Follard said, maneuvering the aircar away from the cliff and turning toward the Palace precincts. “For instance, who the next Director of Communications will be. His name is Selwin Praise.”

  “I’ve heard of him.” Bertingas said. “He’s part of the entourage that Deirdre Sallee brought from Central Center. On the face of it, he’s a Playmate: wealthy family, subsenatorial, no distinction for about five generations. Educated at New Harvard. Took his degree in time-lapse financing. Graduated in the class following Roderick’s. Did some freelance banking with the family inheritances until those blew away. Then he went to the Forum and became a drinking buddy, presumably an Old acquaintance. All of that’s in the public knowledge.”