An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Read online

  The floor started to shift under his feet. The final sideslip was starting. He started to grapple with the control yoke. It was frozen; the driver hadn’t been faking. So, either the personal aircar of the Haiken Maru Trader General was suffering an unbelievable set of malfunctions—throttle, steering yoke, guidance and escape systems—or someone had been willing to sacrifice a presumably trusted employee and a vehicle worth five times a deputy director’s annual salary to do Taddeuz Bertingas in.

  Damn it, these vehicles were made to be safe! Almost crash-proof! Just for instance, if the fans cut off or the rubber skirt collapsed, the car’s underside was shaped like a lifting body. It was supposed to glide down to a low-speed, nose-up landing. So . . .

  Bertingas found the turbine switches and banged them down. Whatever gremlin or Human agent had messed up the controls hadn’t thought of a simple shutdown. The fans cut off, feathered, and braked abruptly; the skirt closed with a whump; and the aircar stabilized on its keel. He strapped himself tightly into the driver’s position. The descent was at first invisible and silent—until the blown panels around the front cabin began to whistle, then moan, then shriek as the car picked up forward speed.

  Did he have control now?

  Some. The linkages between the yoke and a set of spoilers on the blunt end of the lifting body were entirely mechanical, and they were working. The best Bertingas could do, however, was pick his landing spot within about five degrees either side of straight ahead.

  Straight ahead, however, and growing larger with every second, was the black bubble of the Palace Dome.

  “Hello? Help?” He thumbed buttons across the traffic control comm set. He also flipped the switch labeled “Emerg Trans”—whatever good that did.

  “Help? Anyone? This is—um—” He read the registration. “Haiken Maru 681 Staff. I’ve got a runaway aircar, here. Over the Palace. Can anyone hear me?”

  Would the antimissile systems pop up and deal with him in their own blind way? He prayed the car’s automatic transponders were saying the same things electronically that he was gabbling into the voice circuits. Only more coherently.

  “Don’t shoot! Please! I am not attacking anyone. I have a total systems failure. Please don’t—!”

  The Dome seemed to be rising to meet him, giving him the illusion that it was inflating, expanding, creeping outward to cover and darken the surrounding gardens. Just as he thought it was going to swallow him, the Dome began to color and swirl. Not just a single iris was opening in the blackness before him, the entire Dome was falling. The opaquing particles dropped like smoke being sucked underground. Below him were the embassy buildings, the Golden House, the three wings of the Residence, broad avenues, trees, and people looking up in wonder.

  Try not to hit the people, Bertingas told himself as he twisted the control yoke. His line of descent now seemed to include a strand of ancient elms, a green knoll, and a lake. As good as he could do . . .

  The underside of the car banged through the trees in a cloud of green leaves. One of the spoilers was unhinged and dug a furrow of turf across the top of the knoll. The body lurched forward into the lake, falling with a bellyflop that threw up a shower of water. The lake was deeper than it looked; the return wave sloshed into the open compartment around Tad’s waist and kept coming. The car was going to sink right there.

  There were three buckles on the straps holding him to the seat. His head was under water before he found and worked the last one. Then he swam to the surface.

  Not two meters away from him was a flat-bottomed punt, carrying two guards in livery. One worked a sweep off the stern. The other held a military-issue repulsor rifle, aimed more or less at Tad’s face.

  Bertingas swam over and grasped the gunwale. The weapon did not move aside particularly fast.

  “Who is it, Lieutenant?” A crowd had gathered on the lakeshore, and the voice that called out was familiar, almost known to Tad.

  “He has a Communicator’s uniform, Ma’am. It looks like . . . it is Deputy Director Bertingas.”

  “Well, bring him in, you fool!”

  It was the governor’s voice. The guard put aside the rifle and reached big hands down into the water. He lifted Tad, sloshing and dripping, straight into the boat. The other began working the sweep toward shore.

  The flat bow grounded in the green reeds that lapped the water, and Bertingas stepped off. People pressed around him but, careful of their fine clothes and mindful of the duckweed and water still dripping off him, did not come too close.

  “What a frightful experience, Deputy Director,” the governor said. “How did it happen?”

  “Some kind of mechanical failure,” Tad stammered. The morning breeze was cold. “It was the Haiken Maru Trader General’s own car and, after he got out, somehow . . . Luckily only I was aboard . . .”

  A murmur of gossip and speculation arose in the crowd. One voice cut through it.

  “What about the driver?” asked Halan Follard. So he was still on the Palace grounds.

  “The chauffeur, he—had an accident with the escape harness. Somewhere over there.” Bertingas gestured vaguely off to the southwest, back along his line of descent.

  More gossip. More questions were called out, but the governor cut them off.

  “That’s quite enough, citizens! We’ll know everything we need to, once the trader’s car is raised and the Kona Tatsu technical people have a chance to examine it. In the meantime, the Deputy Director is cold and wet and probably suffering from shock. Halan, will you help him?”

  With a grim nod, Follard took Bertingas’ arm and led him across the grass, onto the ring avenue, and over to the Kona Tatsu building. There they went up to the second floor and the infirmary, where Follard got out a first-aid kit for his scratches and a fluffy white towel for his wet hair.

  Follard called up for dry clothing, but when the duty officer brought it, he shook his head.

  “Can’t have you walk out of here in a prisoner’s singlesuit. Wrong image. Can you stand that wet tunic and pants for another ten minutes, till we can get you home?”

  “They’re all right. Be dry by then and, really, I should get over to the office.”

  Follard shook his head again and took him up to the landing stage. When they stepped out on the roof, it was dark. The Dome had been raised once more.

  “Don’t you want to know what I think happened?” Tad asked as they settled into the little black car and Follard boosted the turbines.

  “Not particularly. You told everyone enough coming in. I was even picking up your signals on my AID. As for the truth, we’ll know that as soon as we pull that aircar apart.”

  “Funny,” he went on. “I know how Elidor dotes on that luxury car of his. Shows it off. Even inflates the cost in his tax reporting. So, he must have been under a lot of pressure if he’d consent to using it for a murder.”

  “Then you do think it was planned.”

  “Of course. Didn’t I say you needed a bodyguard?”

  Bertingas was about to ask “Why me?” when the car grounded on the jutting airlip of Government Block. Follard popped just the one door on Tad’s side.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “You’ll be in good hands in a minute.” Halan smiled. “Try not to get killed on the way down to your office.”

  Tad climbed out, and before he was two steps away, the car had lifted, spun, and darted off.

  The ED drop tube had the effect of beating some of the water out of his uniform. As he stepped out at the ninety-ninth floor, the faint globe of mist surrounding him continued its own descent. His boots still squeaked as he walked down the corridor.

  When he entered the bullpen, the people of his section rose almost as one from their desks and gathered around him. After the early morning call, the senior staff meeting, rumors of an aircar out of control over the city, anxiety about a new director—and now their deputy arriving with weeds on his uniform and scratches on his face and hands—everyone looked nervous an
d unhappy.

  “Is it true, Sir? . . . About the high secretary . . . Will there be a war, Sir? . . . Were you hurt? . . . Is the new man any . . . Have the . . . ?”

  Tad put up his hands.

  “Please, people! It’s been a long day—already—and most of us haven’t had our coffee break yet.” That brought a few smiles.

  “Yes, the high secretary has been assassinated. So we have our work cut out for us there. No, there isn’t going to be any war. So those of you hoping to escape this place into a general conscription are out of luck.” More smiles, some laughs. “I’m not hurt, but crash-landing an aircar from 5,000 meters does put me out of sorts. For those of you interested in details, I’m planning a series of lunchtime lectures on the subject—mandatory attendance”—groans, hisses—“over the next three weeks. With holovids.” Outright booing, chorus.

  “I’ve met the new man . . .” Tad turned his voice serious. “His name is Selwin Praise. He’s from Central Center; of course . . . He seems to be—um—a stickler for details. That’s okay. That’s parfait. We can all work with a director who wants everything done right, because that’s the way we do things here.”

  Relaxed looks and a few knowing nods moved the faces around him. The tension had gone out of them—or gone underground.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” He picked a strand of green weed off his sleeve, held it out for inspection. “I think I’ll go plant these things.”

  The crowd broke before him, all but Gina Rinaldi. She matched pace with him on the way to the corner office.

  “Tad!” she whispered. “What really happened?”

  “Someone tried to kill me. Took a lot of trouble over it, too.”

  “Then don’t go into your office.”

  That made him pause. “Why not?”

  “Because there’s a person in there who could complete the job. One handed.”

  “Oh. Then let’s meet her, shall we?”

  Gina stared at him. “How do you know it’s a ‘she’?”

  He had already gone in.

  The person was standing at ease on the other side of the desk, by the window. The blunt body was either the most out-of-norm Human he had ever seen, or some new order of Humanoid alien. Almost a meter wide and half a meter thick, but scarcely 130 centimeters tall. A walking lump, with wrists like ankles and ankles like tree stumps. Flat slabs of heavy muscle concealed any trace of breasts, hips, or other secondary sex characteristics. The person wore no trace of make-up, and its—her—reddish blonde hair had been cut back to a thin bristle that showed golden against her scalp. She wore a singlesuit of monofiber. A hint of alien background there—possibly intentional? And a weapons belt.

  “Good morning, Sir,” she said, stepping forward and putting out a hand that looked like a shipside docking grapple. Her voice came from deep in that wide chest, a flat rumble, although the voicebox modulating it might, in another person, have produced a pleasant contralto. “My name is Patty Firkin. Halan Follard thought you would need my services.”

  He took the hand, felt it close gently.

  “Thank you, Miss Firkin. I think we all do.”

  Chapter 4

  Gina Rinaldi: PAPER TIGRESS

  Not one day in Gina Rinaldi’s life passed without pain.

  The worst of it was the atmosphere on Palaccio. It had too little oxygen for her needs. So each breath, no matter how she filled her gillsacs, left her on the edge of a gasping convulsion. There were pills that helped slow her metabolism and reduce her need; and she kept a small injector nearby at all times to boost the oh-three content of her fluid stream. Neither remedy was as good as being really able to breathe.

  The gee-pull here was another source of constant annoyance. Her musculature had evolved on a planet with a far deeper gravity well. Every move she made had to be choreographed in her head. Otherwise she would leap two meters through the air while the Humans around her shuffled along the ground. Without careful planning, the coffee cups she picked up would fly off their saucers toward the ceiling; the contents of file folders would sling themselves across the room. When she accidentally bumped a chair or a table, it skittered along like a fast beetle.

  She thought of Palaccio as the thin world.

  More serious, Gina found as she grew older that the planet’s low gravity was changing her body. Her bones were becoming brittle here as they shed their alumina content. Her tendons were contracting, causing painful cramps. The specific gravity of her fluids was altering, precipitating the lighter metals, on which she depended. Gina began to understand why neither her poly-divergents, who had immigrated to Palaccio to work the fields of Pescador Holding, nor her diploids, who had moved into Meyerbeer as contract money traders, had lived much beyond fifty standard years when the normal lifespan of a Deoorti individual was 250 years.

  Worse than the physical problems was the casual contempt the Humans displayed. The “aliens” among them were valued only as convenience machines. Her gynamere had just been some land of self-replicating agricultural tractor. Her mere had been a mechanical tallyboard. Gina herself was a walking AID, when she wasn’t an automated sex toy. Tad might forget and talk to her like a real person, sometimes, but that machine mentality was always there, under the surface. What the Humans forgot was that, pound for pound in protoplasm, and outside the artificial boundaries of Pact politics, the “aliens” outnumbered them a billion to one.

  For all that, the Humans fascinated her: they could doubt.

  Deoorti Orthodoxy was almost a biological thing, based as much on commensalism as on Hive law. To disbelieve in a structured society, to disobey the common precepts, to distinguish oneself from the common good—these were unthinkable. A Deoorti might as well disbelieve in the stars, disobey the flow of time, or distinguish herself from sodium.

  By contrast, the Humans were so diverse! They could disbelieve, disobey, and distinguish. Freely and at will. And from that raw material of discontent, they had created comedy, tragedy, music, war, commerce, and a thousand other interesting things the Deoorti had never dreamed of. Human life was a rich-smelling garbage heap of emotions and responses, some that didn’t work at all, and some that worked better than expected. As much as Gina was repelled by the waste of it, she loved the variety.

  Most confusing of all was the concept of politics. Two Human beings, both of good will, honest intent, and certifiable sanity, could disagree so violently on basic questions of public action and benefit. In her own department, the battles raged between privatism and macloohanism, between the Imageurs and the Veracitors, between the careerists like Tad and the appointees like this new man, Selwin Praise. That battle would be no different from the last, or the one before it.

  After several years, she had learned that the words they used, the issues they fought over, the decisions that one would make and the other unmake, were not what they were fighting about at all. Behind the words was this mystical thing called a “position.” Each of them, Tad and the currently appointed director, could have one. Neither could have the same one. In some way Gina could not understand, this “position” was linked to each man’s view of himself in relation to the political structure of the Pact, to Human society as a whole, and to the universe of one hundred billion galaxies. Each Human had to invent this view for himself and defend it vigorously against all others.

  Her Deoorti body may have been patterned on the Human, but some things the mind could not copy.

  Of course, in all these battles, she sided with Tad.

  Not for “politics,” she reminded herself, but for “love.” That was another emotion the Hive had never produced. Love was something like Hive loyalty but focused on a single individual. It was not, could not be, the coupling of sex—although, for Tad, sex was impossibly intertwined with love. Of course, sex with a Human and sex among the Deoorti were two different functions: one social, the other biological.

  It was all very hard to understand. At times, when she was alone by herself, Gina thought it
might be easier to stop trying. To lapse into the machine role the Humans seemed to want for her.

  On another level, however, it was all very simple. The movements of sex and the words of love had brought her a permanent work permit and temporary authorization to live within the city limits of Meyerbeer. In Human society, sex and politics were survival. That she could understand.

  “Gina!”

  Tad’s voice from the corner office, raised in a shout when the intercom was six centimeters beyond his fingertips. “Yes, Tad?” she called back.

  “Come in here a minute!”

  Inside, she found him sitting at his desk. He was bent over his artificial intelligence device, fiddling with the optical attachments.

  “These lenses don’t seem to work. I’m trying to get a holo image, but they don’t even show a blur.”

  Gina saw the problem in two seconds. He’d fitted the microscanner instead of the macroprojector. Now, how could she tell him this without making him feel stupid? Well, let the machine do it.

  “AID?” she queried.

  “Ready!” it answered enthusiastically.

  “Show pic.”

  “I can’t. I’m blind. Has that idiot put on my micros again? If he has, then he’d better give me something to read inside a three mikey-mike focus, or I’m going to sit here and recite the entire Rig-Veda. In Sanskrit. And leave out the dirty parts.”

  “Oh. Wrong lens,” Tad said. “They ought to mark these things better.” He switched them out and angled the unit across the corner of his desk blotter.

  “Show pic,” he commanded.

  “Do you mean, ‘Please let me see the image series we were discussing?’ If so, that would be the polite way to say it.”

  “Just dump the data.”

  The center of his work area lit up with a blinking, strobing blur. It was over in six seconds. The images changed so fast, Gina could get only the most general idea that they were topo maps or structural plans of some land.