An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Read online

  “Clearly,” Bertingas said, “this Praise is the choice to head a sophisticated technological department. Like mine. Thank you.”

  “What isn’t public is that Selwin Praise is a Kona Tatsu light operative. Under direct report to Avalon Boobur.”

  I see.

  “Normally that would be none of your business. None of mine, either. Trouble is, Boobur is supposed to share such details with his cluster chiefs. Just as a courtesy. I found out about Praise from my own contacts in Central Center, people I tend to trust. They have nothing good to say of your new boss. No definitives, just a lot of circumstantials that suggest a cabal within a cabal. The implication is that Boobur isn’t running his man with too close a rein, either. So Selwin Praise, who on inspection is a just jolly boy and a no-count, wears a very big question mark on his back.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Bertingas asked. Too eagerly, for Follard’s taste.

  “Nothing overt. Follow his orders. Treat him at face value—or better. But keep your eyes and ears open. And share with me, on a secure line, anything that looks suspicious.”

  “And, in return . . . ?”

  “I’m treating you as a friend, Tad. You may need one soon.”

  Follard brought the car in high over the Palace perimeter. Below them was a stretch of parkland, dotted with low, porticoed buildings; silvery reflecting ponds; a few deeper, bluer lakes; white-graveled walkways and carriage drives; and small, square formal gardens, some of them buried in hedge mazes.

  Halan knew from personal inspection that some of those hedges concealed radar transponders. The pools covered automatic missile/anti-missile defenses.

  At the center of all this idyllic beauty, like a black thunderhead over green pastures, was the Dome. It was the Palace’s electromagnetic screen against ground- and space-borne plasma weapons. Normally as clear as summer air, it now floated an opaque layer of ionized particles. That was the official warning to all air traffic that an alert was on and the Dome was up to its full, killing power. It also blocked all outside peeping, whether optical, electronic, or mimetic.

  Unfortunately, when the particle layer was deployed, no natural light could enter the area covered by the Dome. A starless midnight fell, and the Palace’s illuminations came on automatically.

  As Follard’s aircar approached, sending the correct recognition signals for the day, the black chord facing them began to swirl and a seam, a pair of vertically aligned lips, opened. The car passed between their roiled edges. Bertingas turned his head and looked behind, where a flicker of blue daylight was dying in the night sky.

  “What would happen,” he asked, “if they didn’t open that patch for us? I mean, it’s just an e-mag field with some dust in it. It might damage our electrical systems. Might scratch the paintwork. But if we were moving fast enough, it wouldn’t stop us. Could it?”

  “I once examined a car that one of the Pang Fasters tried to crash a dome with. Not this dome, but one like it. The field is computer controlled. It stays passive when it has to handle a plasma burst—just absorbing and shedding it, absorbing and shedding. However, when anything metal gets past the missile defenses and pierces the shield, the control becomes overt. The electromagnets divide and reverse the field, which sets up a shearing counter-current and shreds anything caught in it.”

  “Anything ferrous, you mean. But who would build an aircar out of iron? Aluminum and resins”—Bertingas tapped the dashboard—“are not magnetic.”

  “Hemoglobin is.”

  Below them in the nighttime darkness, the street lamps and building floods lit the intersection of two major thoroughfares in a gauzy, jeweled cross. It was four kilometers long, end to end. Follard took the car down to the deeper shadows near the inside perimeter of the Dome. As he approached on instruments, a square of blue edge lights came up around his parking space.

  “I never saw this before,” Bertingas said. “Most of the Government people drop off in Chancery Lane. I thought permanent parking wasn’t allowed inside the Dome. Is this new?”

  “No, just special.” Follard switched off the engine and closed the fan vents, and the car settled on its extensible jacks. “We’re on the roof of the Kona Tatsu Hall of Justice.”

  “Oh.”

  The dying whine of the turbine seemed to suck all other noise out of the cabin.

  Follard led him at a brisk walk—because they were already latish—over to the roofs private elevator (concealed as an air conditioning tower), past sentries whose somber uniforms blended with the darkness, down to a public loggia off the main entrance hallway, and out into the pseudo-night of the street. It was a fast two-kilometer trot to Nero’s Golden House, where the current governor preferred to hold her meetings.

  The House was much more impressive in the full light of noon, when its mirrored glass and fourteen-carat spider buttresses fairly glittered with reflections from the four petal pools surrounding it. However, a million watts of tuned halogen lamping could simulate the effect well enough, at least, that a fond memory could carry it off. In his thoughts, Follard called this building the Jewel Box. Open the lid, and a mechanical tone fork would begin to chime Esmonee.

  It was far too civilized a setting for the squabble they were going to hear this morning.

  Follard and Bertingas showed their credentials to the frocked herald at the West Door. He lowered his nose a fraction to peer at the holo likenesses, sniffed, and waved them through. In the outer circular hallway, they walked around to the ten o’clock entry door. Follard cracked it, looked through with one eye. They were not as late as he had thought.

  Beyond the low curtain wall that backed the corridor, the Golden House was a single egg of space. A neo-Faberge egg. Tiny golden ribbon lights picked out the arches that soared upward among the glass panels, toward the crested finial. Tiny silver footlights picked out the ramps that descended past the gallery and mezzanine seating to the amphitheater stage. Well-diffused pinlights and backgrounders filled in the shadows. The overall effect was one of mellow brightness without direction and without glare.

  On the stage was the council table with its parallel lines of high-backed, red-upholstered chairs. They looked like theater props for a banquet scene. Except there were too many people standing around it for the number of places. From a distance, the stage appeared to shimmer in a heat haze—sign of a portable dome on low power. When Sallee rapped the meeting to order, the aides and sideboys would retreat to the gallery and the dome would go opaque. More darkness. That’s why the stage was also set with a ring of free-standing, self-powered floor lamps, refugees from some grand hostel. The long table had a central row of crook-necked reading lights, again self-powered.

  The whole rig was probably as secure as Governor Sallee’s staff thought they could make it, on short notice. To Follard, however, who knew about security, the effect was hurried and graceless. Opaque magnetic shielding was hardly the connoisseur’s approach to privacy.

  He and Bertingas hurried down the ramp and climbed the six steps to the stage level.

  “Well, Follard! Going to join us at last?”

  Halan turned to see Valence Elidor moving toward him majestically, like a land yacht under sail with outriders—his body guards, bestboys, and staff admirers. The inspector general knew for a fact that Elidor carried fifty-eight years. Yet the appearance he gave was of a tanned and athletic forty year old. Biceps like a wrestler. No belly. Slim hips. His hearty grin and that hand-clap on the shoulder were meant to be manly, friendly, and at the same time dominating. Elidor had the firm jaw, flinty eyes, and trained expressions that executives pick up at conferences with each other and practice in front of the mirror.

  “Had a bit of a detour. Business.”

  “More important than the you-know-what?” Elidor winked at him.

  “What do I know?”

  “Ahhh, Halan! Spoken like a real cop.”

  “Why not? That’s what I am.”

  “And who’s this up and coming young man?�
�� Elidor turned a twenty-kilowatt smile on Follard’s companion.

  “Tad Bertingas, of Cluster Communications, currently the acting Director . . . Tad, this is Valence Elidor, Haiken Maru’s Trader General for Aurora Cluster.”

  Bertingas made his manners with a gleam—of awe? of opportunity?—in his eyes.

  Elidor shook hands with a vacant politeness, his attention already turning elsewhere.

  Follard and Bertingas made their way toward the table. At either end government functionaries and various military brass were sorting themselves out. Near the head—which was reserved for Governor Sallee—the new and yet-to-be-announced Director of Communications, Selwin Praise, had claimed the first chair on the left.

  With a nudge and a covert finger gesture, Follard pointed him out to Bertingas.

  Praise was defending his seat against the Protocol Master’s polite suggestions that he find a lower place: the Chief of Staff was due any minute. The ex-Playmate and Kona Tatsu operative was a small man, pale, with thin hair combed straight back from a too-high forehead. He had little eyes and a narrow mouth that, when opened in protest, showed pointed, mouselike teeth. The P.M. looked just about ready to push him sideways out of the chair when the Chief breezed in, nodded a greeting to Praise, and took the seat on the right. With a flap of his arms the P.M. walked off. Praise smiled to himself.

  “There goes your chair, Tad,” Follard observed.

  “I’d better go find a place in the orchestra then.” Bertingas touched his shoulder. “Thank you for the ride, Halan . . . and the advice.”

  “Ni’evo,” he smiled, and the other hurried off the stage.

  Bread upon the waters, Follard thought. We’ll see how fast Bertingas sinks.

  The chair at the bottom of the table, opposite Sallee’s—which made it the number two seat on the stage—had been taken by General Pollonius Dindyma, the Cluster Commander. He officially held a rank equal-to-but-slightly-below Deirdre Sallee’s, his authority derived from military rather than political appointment. Another squabble broke out at this end of the table when Captain Malcolm Thwaite arrived feeling he was entitled to sit opposite the governor.

  As senior representative of the Pact’s Central Fleet on Palaccio, Thwaite contended—and always had—that his minor rank was superior to any in the merely local administration. After all, as he liked to say, the Fleet’s Base Gemini, in the otherwise uninhabited Kali system, was home to eight cruisers and more than twenty destroyers, while the Cluster Command could field no more than four overage destroyers and a planetary monitor whose hyperspace drive had been written off for years. All very well, Dindyma would be saying, but those four destroyers were just a whistle away, while who knew where Admiral Koskiusko was patrolling with his gunboats this week? Thwaite countered that those “gunboats” were the cluster’s first line of defense in uncertain times, and furthermore . . .

  Follard’s attention drifted to the middle ranges of the council table. No little fights marred the order there. Valence Elidor claimed the central chair on the right side and flanked himself with two Haiken Maru staffers. The other leading conglomerates—Baranquilla, Daewoo, and Mitsui—took the remaining places at the table, and the lesser traders docilely drifted back off the stage to find seats beyond the ring.

  On the left side, the latifundistas and small estate holders ranked themselves by precedence after Amelia Ceil, the matriarch of Greengallow Holding. Again, when the chairs ran out the little fish retreated to the auditorium seats.

  Follard approached that side, coming up behind Rebus Jasper of Prentiss Fief, who was sitting on the edge of the military reservation. He tapped Jasper on the shoulder and, when the man turned, gave his humorless gestapo smile. The landholder popped out of the chair as if it had been wired. Follard sat down without a nod or thank you.

  Everyone at the council, he noted, was full Human. Not even the Gowta, the Deoorti, or the other “passers” with semi-illegal Pact citizenship had the coin to buy their way in here: the trust and tolerance that the red-blooded proto-primates from Planet Earth gave to their own, first and foremost.

  The two o’clock door opened with a bustle of pages and heralds, and Deirdre Sallee breezed down the aisle with her entourage.

  She was a tall woman with a straight, mannish figure. Iron-gray hair was pulled back from her face in a coif that, even here in Aurora Cluster, was several years out of date. Her face was weathered granite: hard lines across the brow; deep dents beside her mouth; nose prominent, like a ship’s prow; eyes dark and weary. She was seventy-two standard years old. All of that.

  The dossier said she had borne three daughters, though not to her current husband, Regis Sallee, who trailed her like a small white poodle. She had six grandchildren—four boys, two girls—who remained at Central Center “for schooling purposes.” Hostages against Sallee’s good behavior in office, no doubt.

  Who would hold the strings on those young lives now, he wondered. Avalon Boobur? Someone closer to the Heir? Someone secretly in the pay of Haiken Maru? Follard made a mental note to find out.

  She took her chair at the head of the council table, helped not by Regis but by a liveried footman from the Palace precincts who stood two and a half meters tall and was muscled in proportion. He handled the high-backed, dark oak chair like a cane-bottomed stool.

  Sallee sat there for a moment in silence, like a hooded hawk, appraising—with senses other than sight—those around her. Her shoulders were squared against the old brocade of the chair, her hands resting down in her lap.

  “All right, let’s have the dome,” she said.

  The stage went dead dark. The echoes of the Golden House died away. Like smothering . . . Then, one by one, hands found the switches on the table and floor lamps. New, smaller noises—tap of finger, rustle of fabric, scrape of shoe—defined their space.

  “Some of you will already know why I’ve called this extraordinary meeting. Most of you will not. In ten words, then: the high secretary is assassinated; the succession is in doubt.

  “The remaining members of the Proto Council have demanded that, as an electrix supremator, I register my nomination in favor of Roderick. Immediately. Further, that all of you—as Pact military, administrative, trading and holding members—second that nomination. Also immediately.

  “My staff has prepared coding for the appropriate signals. All that’s required is your personal—”

  “Aren’t we being a bit hasty, Deirdre?” The rich, reasonable voice of Valence Elidor cut across her gravelly monotone. Its echo left a deep silence.

  “Wait until I call for discussion and recognize you, Haiken Maru,” the governor said formally.

  “Discussion didn’t seem to be on your agenda, my dear. However, I think this group has much to discuss. Our choices, for example, and how we can improve them . . .”

  “We have no choice but to offer our—”

  “Come, come, Your Excellency! If we voted according to the pro-formas of a mere caretaker council, who represent none but themselves and a group of decadent hereditaries and hangers-on—your pardon, Madam!—whose competence the entire handling of this assassination has called into question, and who happen to be a thousand light years and twenty-one jumpseconds away, why, then we would well deserve the political chaos that will follow throughout this interspatial agglomeration. We would be courting a—dare I say it?—a civil war that will make the Years of Ascension seem like peaceful negotiations.”

  As Elidor spoke this set piece, Follard watched not him but the others around the table. He saw agreement and doubt mixed in those faces.

  “Are you quite through?” Sallee asked.

  “I think others share my feelings.”

  A restless shuffling around the table bred first a word here and there, then a spoken aside to a neighbor, then a murmur of not-quite-dissent. “What’s this about a civil war?” Captain Thwaite asked, into the lapping tide of voices. “Not while the Fleet’s on guard.”

  “Merikur,” Amelia Ceil
said aloud, to the table at large. “He’s all but taken control of Apex Cluster. He now holds fifteen others in fief if not in name. He makes open war upon Haiken Maru. Do you think he will sign these pro-formas?”

  “Governor Merikur is no threat to Haiken Maru,” Elidor replied.

  “Haiken Maru is a threat to us all!” Abel Peller, a junior latifundist, shot back. “You promote this war, Elidor.”

  “If war comes here—however it comes—there will be no place for neutrals,” the Trader General replied smugly. “Friends or foes. Take your pick. But choose the right friends quickly. Or earn yourselves a lot of trouble.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “If Aurora takes sides, she is lost,” General Dindyma declared. “I haven’t ships enough to defend Palaccio from a determined attack, much less this whole cluster.”

  “I have enough ships,” Thwaite grinned.

  “Don’t think we’ll forget the Ponsable Massacre, Captain,” Ceil told him. “An entire planet fused—”

  “They had aligned themselves with aliens. Wogs from beyond the Pact perimeter, another order of technology which—”

  “So you say! None here ever saw them.”

  Tap, tap. Sallee’s ring beat against the tabletop.

  “We displayed the skeletons, the new metals, evidence of inHuman logics.”

  Tap, tap, RAP! The governor brought her hand down flat.

  “Forgeries!” Ceil said. “Inept ones at that.”

  “Order!” Sallee barked out.

  “No one ever—?”

  “I said order!” the governor shouted. The table fell, silent. “If this council cannot decide where its loyalty lies,” she said, “I shall be forced to reply for it. Our loyalty—”

  “Not without our consent codes!” Elidor spoke through his teeth. His lips were twisted into the grim parody of a smile.