Again, he thought to see the faintest tinge of a smile. “You are welcome to them,” Ip said. He gestured to the door.
“Will not the integrator prevent my taking them?”
Ip indicated that the likelihood was remote.
Intrigued, Imbry rose and went out into the foyer. Several doors led out of the atrium, all of them closed. Imbry paused to evaluate the situation. He turned to find that Ip had joined him from the parlor, placing the box of treasures near the front door. Now Imbry noticed that next to the box was a device that would function as a portable armature into which the house integrator could be decanted for travel.
The bodyguard indicated the closed doors. “Choose,” he said.
Imbry inspected the nearest door. Its panels seemed to bulge slightly. He mentioned this to Ip and the bodyguard moved his head in a subtle manner that discouraged the fat man from reaching for the opener. Imbry gestured to the next door and receiving a less equivocal signal from the silent bodyguard, he crossed to the portal and eased it ajar.
Beyond lay darkness. Imbry could not tell if he stood before a room or a corridor, because the moment he opened the door, a restless rustling filled his ears, and the doorway was filled by a writhing mass of tuberous vines, fleshy and thick as his wrist, from which spouted glossy dark leaves and fibrous, coiled tendrils that immediately unwound and began to sample the air as if sensing his presence.
Imbry closed the door. A few of the tendrils remained caught in the jamb, and one of them wriggled from beneath the lintel. Ip drew his energy pistol and carefully burned each to ashes.
“So Mudgeram planted it,” Imbry said.
“It planted itself,” said Ip.
An image floated up in Imbry’s mind. He remembered Ganche’s description of finding Ramoulian curled around the object, dazed, as if fuddled by Red Abandon. To Ip he said, “Before you decant the integrator, ask it to display Alwinder Mudgeram.”
“You are not the kind to be haunted by frightful memories?” the bodyguard asked. When Imbry said he was not, the man instructed the integrator to show the image.
A screen appeared in the air, filled with a murky scene. Imbry saw darkly veined vines, wider in cross section than his own well-fleshed thighs, choking a room that by its furnishings he took to be a sleeping chamber. At first the view, seen from a percept on the ceiling, was a chaos of interwoven vegetation: The fat creepers had crossed and wound about each other as they had grown in search of exit through the doors and windows.
Then Imbry imposed mental order on the snarl, perceiving how the different vines all proceeded from a common location. Beneath the densest tangle, where the lianas were thickest, he caught glimpses of lush bedcovers. Then he saw something else.
He instructed the integrator to narrow the focus and magnify. The image enlarged upon the screen: a hand spread across a piece of curved dark object, which resolved itself into a fragment of a husk, much like that which had been found in the ship rented by Fallo Wickiram that had returned without him. The hand was withered like a worn-out glove, empty of all but its skin and fragile bones. Above it was what remained of a face.
“Ah,” said Imbry. After a moment he told the integrator, “You may remove the screen.”
He took up the carton from beside the door while Ip finished preparing the integrator for departure. Mudgeram’s black volante hovered outside. They boarded the aircar and went aloft.
They flew in silence for a little while; then Imbry said, “Warrigrove made a perceptive comment. We had noted that the object’s glamour stirred a breathless passion in some—like him and Ramoulian and Mudgeram—but evoked only irritation in more earthbound fellows like you and me. He said that each side of the dichotomy must pity the other.”
Ip’s face remained impassive. He activated Mudgeram’s integrator and issued an instruction. Intense light flashed from somewhere behind them, then faded even before the volante’s canopy could darken.
“Is it pity that you feel for Alwinder Mudgeram?” Ip asked.
“No,” said Imbry, “not pity.”
Lehr, Rex
Jay Lake
Captain Lehr’s face had been ravaged by decades under the coruscating emanations of this forgotten world’s overbright sun. The angry star, a rare purple giant, dominated the daysky with visible prominences that sleeted hard radiation through every human bone and cell that walked beneath its glare. Still, one could see the spirit of command that had once infused him, present even now in the lines and planes of his face, as rough and striated as the great, crystalline cliffs that marched toward the horizon, sparkling azure and lavender under the hard light. His eyes were marbled with a blindness which had come upon him in the long years, victim perhaps of some alien virus, until his blank visage appeared to be chiseled from the planet’s sinews as much the very rocks themselves.
How he and whoever yet lived among his crew had survived this hellish gravity for close to half a human lifetime was a mystery to me, which yet remained to be unraveled, but survive they had. The old man was king of all he surveyed with his blind eyes, soul shuttered behind milky shields, ruling from his seat in a shattered palace comprised of the main hull frame series of
INS Broken Spear
. The baroque pillars that had once bounded the great rays of energy required to leap between the stars now did little more than support a roof to keep off the rare rains and cast a penumbra against the pitiless glare. The place had a gentle reek of aging plastic lying over the dank dance of stone on shadowed stone, but otherwise it was little different from any cavern fitted out for the habitation of men.
We did not yet know where the rest of his benighted vessel had come to her grave, but she had certainly fulfilled her ill-starred name. Finding the balance of her remains was critical, of course, in the niggardly time allotted our expedition by Sector Control and the unsympathetic laws of physics. That mankind had bent its way around the speed of light was miracle enough, but we had not yet broken past the photons cast so wide in nature’s bright net. Thus must we live with the twinned constraints of relativity and simultaneity.
“Golly, skipper, he’s a real mess,” whispered Deckard behind me. “Just like his ship.”
I waved my idiot engineer to silence.
Allison Cordel, a woman still beautiful despite age and hard use, stood yet beside her commanding officer, loyal as any starman’s wife though it was the two of them together lost so far from home. Our own records, copies of dusty personnel files laboriously thermaxed from ancient microfilm, had shown that, despite the natural disadvantages of her sex, Cordel had risen to Executive Officer of
Broken Spear
before that ship’s collapse from heaven. Most of the female officers who came into the service under the Navy’s occasional outbreaks of gender rebalancing soon enough yielded to destiny and their biological imperatives and found more suitable work as service wives, competing as hostesses to aid their chosen man’s rise in the service in the no-less-vicious battlefields of the salon and ballroom. Not for Commander Cordel those sharp-nailed sham combats. In the time I had studied her file, I had developed a fond respect for her, nurtured in the hope that she had been one of the survivors mentioned in the desperate longwave help signal that had finally arrived at Gloster Station after laboring at lightspeed across the echoing darkness between the stars.
Now I cast my eyes upon this woman who had served as sort of a shadow idol to me in the months of our journey to this unnamed place—Girl Friday to the great Captain’s Robinson Crusoe. Had those been her footprints that had disturbed the bright, brittle dust outside to find whatever resources had sustained them all these years? At any rate, she was yet slim as any message torpedo, her rough-spun tunic cut in homage to a uniform doubtless long since worn to raveling threads but still hinting at womanly charms beneath. Her eyes gleamed as bright with genius as any worthy man’s, her charming chestnut hair in an unbecoming style fit only for such a primitive place, shot through with a silver that lent her gravitas beyond her gender.
“So, Captain de Vere,” she said, her voice like vacuum frost on a lander’s struts, “you are come among us. Even in the face of our pleas for you to keep your distance.”
Despite myself I nearly bowed, so elegant was her manner. Were there women this controlled, this powerful, even among the silk-walled drawing rooms at the core of the Empire? I strongly doubted it. She might have been a duke’s consort had she remained in society, or even dowager duchess of some cluster of lucky planets. Though I supposed this woman who had fought so hard for the twinned comets of her rank would hardly shed her uniform for the love of a man or for politics either.
I settled on a salute. “My orders are all too plain, ma’am.”
Cordel favored Lehr with a look in which I fancied I espied the smoldering ashes of prior argument, though the flash in her eyes was lost upon his sightless gaze. She then returned her attention to me, with a focus as tight as any comm laser. “So you have told us. ‘Search and rescue with all despatch survivors and assets of
Broken Spear
.’ Did it never occur to you that the survivors and assets might have made their peace with fate after all these years?”
Behind me, snickers broke out amid the ranks of my contact team. Those men would pay, later, with a thrashing or a discipline parade . . . depending on how my temper had settled by then. I knew Heminge would rat out the culprit and satisfied myself with a promise of a pointed discussion later on.
“Ma’am—” I chose my words with care and some precision, allowing for the sort of dauntless pride which had to be in the makeup of any woman of Cordel’s achievements. “Commander, rather. With respect, it was your broadcast seeking assistance that summoned us to this place.
Broken Spear
was stricken from the ship list twenty-eight years ago, after she’d been missing thirty-six months from her last known course and heading.” I drew myself up, tapping the deep well of pride in the service that had always been an inspiration to me. “The Imperial Navy does not leave starmen behind.”
“Nor starwomen, apparently,” she said with that chill still in her tone. I did fancy that a smile ghosted at the edge of her stern but striking face, even as another snicker escaped behind me.
It would be a thrashing, I thought, and a good one, down in the ship’s gymnasium. Something to make those monkeys remember respect.
“Enough,” said Lehr. His voice was as ravaged as his expression, a mountain slipface given over to gravity’s claims until there was only rough gravel and rude streams left to trap the unwary. “You are here. Perhaps you will profit thereby.” He leaned forward on his throne—and throne it was, for all that his seat had been the captain’s chair salvaged from
Broken Spear
’s bridge, the toggles and interfaces embedded in its generous arms long gone as dark as the spark within their commander’s eyes. Rocks, perhaps uncut gems, had been applied to the surfaces, creating strange patterns and half-recognizable friezes that his hand stroked as he spoke. Comfort, or some fingered language, a geological Braille reserved for his especial use?
Lehr’s blank gaze met my face is if he were still blessed with the gift of sight. That confident stone stare clamped a hard chill upon my spine, which I sought not to show as weakness before the captain’s formidable executive officer. “We are upon a time of change here, Captain de Vere. It may be well enough that you are come among us.”
It was a voice and manner that would recall any starman to his days as the rawest recruit, all left feet and ten-thumbed hands—much like a man grown and bearded might be yet a quaking boy before the echo of wrath bursting from an aging father. Nonetheless, my duty to my command and my orders sustained me against this unexpected onslaught of primitive emotion. “Indeed sir, and what would this time of change be?”
The captain’s laugh was as rough as his speech, a sort of stony chuckle that gathered momentum until another layer was stripped from the gravel of his voice in a wheezing hack. The look with which Cordel favored me would have chilled a caloric insulator, but I resolutely ignored her, awaiting her commander’s pleasure.
“I am dying, de Vere,” he finally managed to say. “And dying I divide my kingdom among my daughters.” His arm, still great-muscled and long enough to strike any man with the fist of authority, swept outward to encompass what lay behind my shoulders—the open end of his hall, where the cataclysm of
Broken Spear
’s demise had left a gap through which an enterprising man could have driven a herd of banths. “These green and pleasant lands we have wrested from the anger of this world must be husbanded against the days of our children.”
I turned slowly, staring out past the strips of thermal cloth and fabric scraps that made a curtain insufficient to hide the glowing glass desert beyond. If anything the color of a verdant Terran field prospered under than hideous giant sun, it was outside my reckoning. My team—Deckard the engineer, Heminge the security man, Beaumont the political, and Marley the doctor—stared as well, each then turning to cast a shadowed look toward me.
When I once more faced the captain, Cordel’s face was twisted into a mask of silent misery, like a widow’s crumpled handkerchief. She betrayed nothing in her breathing, but a slight shake of her head confirmed what I already knew: to humor the ancient, failed madman in deference to his years of service and impending demise was a far better course than slaughtering his final, feeble hopes with the hard light of truth.