My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (41 page)

“You would be able to appoint whomever you need to handle it,” Donnar said in response to my comment. “Governing Lussern will be difficult enough. I doubt you could manage that, as well as the defenses, by yourself.”

“Then, if I agree to take over as governor of Lussern system, the empire will confirm Jaenna a Tyaromon as commander of the system defense forces?” Jaenna gasped. I would have loved to see her face, but I was concentrating on Donnar.

He had some difficulty with the idea. “A female in command of a system, not to mention a Fleet base?” His voice actually rose an octave. “If there is historical precedent at all, it would be ancient.”

“New emperor, new rules,” I reminded him.

“Hmph. I’ll need the emperor’s approval to do that. However, the repairs here will take two to three months before we would need to turn the base over anyway. I think I can get approval in that time. If I do that, will you accept?”

I had raised a point, and won it, but suddenly it was hard to say “yes.” The reason, I think, was that if I took this step there could be no turning back. As long as I was captain of the Francis Drake, and no more, I could go back to Earth if I wanted to. If I took over Lussern, the fantasy of going back would be gone. The thought brought up all sorts of things that I would miss. Not big things. Little things, like Christmas music in shopping malls, skiing in the Tetons after a fresh snow, the Sunday sports section and brunch in the city. Against that, Jaenna and I would have options we lacked on Franny. If she wanted them. I had never asked, and now it was too late.

While I debated with myself over this stuff, Jaenna broke in with the obvious question. “If the Fleet is gathering its forces to fight the kvenningari, there will be full-scale actions. There will be more Lusserns, right?”

“Yes,” said Donnar, “it is finally time for the Sri’Andor to face the challenge of their history.”

“The Sri’Andor?” I remembered someone, possibly the Aalori overseer using that name, but I didn’t know what it meant.

Now, Donnar’s shoulders slumped along with his face. “Yes, even the name has faded away. But we are the Remnant Fleet of the Sri’Andor, although for centuries outsiders have just called us the Fleet. The Sri’Andor were the original explorers who spread civilization through this part of the galaxy. It wasn’t a military organization to start—the original meaning of the word is more like ‘adventurer’—but as the empire grew it evolved into a peacekeeping force. You were born into it, or were tied into it—that’s how the custom of the family tie started. The Sri’Andor were the power and the glory of the empire,” Donnar said wistfully, “but the zenith was four thousand years ago. It grew too much—restrictions on joining were eased. And the kvenningari grew. Did you know that the kvenningari began as advocacy groups to support various interests against the influence of the Sri’Andor on Imperial politics?” I shook my head. “Few do,” Donnar continued. “They have evolved over time and there has been a lot of time. The kvenningari chartered the first freebooters two thousand years ago to support their positions by force. Of course, it was easier to equip freebooters for a campaign than to disband them afterward. The consequences should have been obvious. They multiply independently now, although most maintain that they have Imperial charters and follow Imperial regulations. Easier to recruit when people can pretend they have kept their oaths. Meanwhile, some of the kvenningari were able to seduce Sri’Andor commanders to give first loyalty.”

“And then came Srihan,” I said.

From the look on Donnar’s face, I had said a no-no. “I see you read history most are more comfortable not knowing about,” he said.

“But why didn’t you, the Sri’Andor, crush them back then? You must have had the power to do it.”

“Who knew where first loyalties ran in the chaos that followed? The computer simulations could not exclude the possibility that our civilization would disintergrate if the Sri’Andor moved against the kvenningari and we know that interstellar civilizations are unstable from the ones that have preceded us. Only total war can obliterate an interstellar civilization so thoroughly that only the barest traces tell us they existed. That’s why the empire has been patched and papered over the way it has, why we made the Game of Empire work.”

“It doesn’t work, Donnar,” I told him.

“There are many who would disagree with you. They would say that the Game of Empire has let billions of Srihani live out their lives in peace who would have died had we plunged into war.”

“No way I’m buying that, Donnar.” I actually laughed. “What about the billions whose lives were ruined because the Outer Empire is a cesspool? What about the billions more who will die now because the Fleet didn’t end this ages ago? Or have your computers weighed all those lives and decided it’s better like this?”

“No computers made those decisions,” Donnar said. “You need true independent intelligence for such complex judgments and sentient computers go insane. We have had plenty of catastrophes to prove that. No, those decisions were made by Srihani who have agonized over them time and again.”

“Well, maybe there needs to be a little more action and a lot less agonizing. I’ll bet that every time your ancient Fleet ran their simulations, that possibility of collapse was a little larger than before, so they waited. Now, though, collapse isn’t just a possibility you can’t exclude; it’s so likely you don’t have a choice.”

“I’m afraid you are right. Many of us have felt that way emotionally for a long time. Our only alternatives are for some to die quickly in the fire—and hope it is only some—or we will all slide slowly into oblivion, bits and pieces at a time, the way we have been doing. Our civilization will not survive a Carrillacki takeover. I just hope we are not too late.”

I asked, “Do you think you can you win?”

“I don’t know,” was Donnar’s unhappy answer. “When Jerem came to the throne, it was different. He had been governor at Triuvir, powerful in his own right. The Fleet rallied to him and the kvenningari were badly divided over his selection. If he had struck then … If only …

“Jerem was a fool! He was afraid of the dark that might take the empire, so he tried to negotiate. The kvenningari hadn’t negotiated with the emperor in so long, they had forgotten how. It gave Carrillacki time to forge an alliance against him, and he squandered the best chance this sorry empire had in centuries. Now? If you matched the ships of the Great Kvennigari against all the ships of the Fleet we would be outnumbered, of course, but no battle like that will ever be fought. Each side has too many places that must be defended, and kvenningari alliances have never been more than temporary. We may prevail. Tyaromon of Kaaran has negotiated a tie with Duromond that should help. Duromond has been a strong ally of Tomarillio. If Tyaromon can pull them to the Imperial side, as he seems to have done, it might tip the balance toward the emperor. We think that Carrillacki chose to strike now because the tie will be formalized soon.”

Jaenna gasped when the name Tyaromon was mentioned. “What tie?” she whispered.

It took Donnar a moment to make the connection. Then he laughed. “Of course! You would hardly have heard about it. Tyaromon has managed to arrange a tie with Rinaridon of Durmond for Valaria. From what I have heard, it is a masterpiece.”

“When does this happen?” she asked.

“If you mean the formal ceremony, it will take place in about a month.”

I remembered Jaenna’s talk about her brother, especially about what they would do together in the future, when Valaria ruled on Kaaran. It seemed that brother Valaria was being given some real power right now. I’m sure Jaenna was wondering what this would due to their earlier plans. In that moment, she must have been regretting not having returned to Kaaran before this.

“I need to be there for the ceremony,” she told Donnar. “Would the Fleet grant us a safe conduct to Kaaran, in view of our service here?”

“That should be possible,” Donnar said. “Given the work to be done here, I should think you could go to Kaaran and return in the time it will take us to complete our tasks. What do you say, Captain Danny? If I make all the necessary arrangements can I count on you to return to Lussern after the ceremony?”

I said “Yes” without hesitation, and probably without thought. I had just tied myself to Lussern at precisely the moment that Jaenna was beginning to think about returning to Kaaran. I wondered if I would be coming back by myself.

T
his trip to Kaaran was peaceful. It should have been pleasant as well, but there was an odd undercurrent running through the ship. The crew was far too quiet. Everyone knew there would be no action on this voyage, and action is what a freebooter needs to live. No action, no booty. The crew understood this all too well, even those who had been in the Fleet before they joined us. If the crew was quiet, their captain was depressed. This may seem odd. We were, after all, still alive and much honored after the battle at Lussern. The uniform of a Fleet captain, adorned with the Fleet Command ribbon, lay in my stateroom. My uniform, courtesy of Donnar. The commission that went with it, and my credentials as governor of Lussern, were in Franny’s computer and in hard copy alongside the uniform. What freebooter, however rich, had ever attained such heights? I was on my way to visit one of the richest planets of the Inner Empire, with a Fleet safe conduct in the computer. I should have been ecstatic.

Instead, I was depressed. Severely. The cause was easy enough to understand. I had finally decided to commit myself to Jaenna, only to have her, in that same instant, commit herself to Valaria and Kaaran. She had always put off returning to Kaaran, even put off talking about returning, but now she was doing it. I wished I knew what the odds were of her deciding to stay there. If she did, I didn’t know what I would do. Returning to Lussern without Jaenna held no attraction for me, but I didn’t see any good way out of the commitment I had made. I moped about it the whole way to Kaaran.

Jaenna was no help, because she was acting peculiar as well. As you’ve gathered by now, there was a certain amount of schiz in Jaenna’s personality to begin with. She could flip-flop from Susie Teenager to Sergeant York with frightening speed, especially when ship-in-action sounded, but I’d grown accustomed to that. On this trip, though, she was very different. She seemed unsure of herself, nervous. She marched about the ship irritably and couldn’t keep her mind on what she was doing. It was all very un-Jaenna like, which improved neither my mood nor the mood of the crew.

It was bad enough that Angel felt compelled to speak to me about it. He had spent most of our stay in Lussern system after the battle recuperating from wounds he suffered on Gadjeen, but he was his old self by the time we made our first transit. A moody captain, he pointed out, was considered bad luck. The crew would follow me anywhere, but things would be better if I would look more cheery. I told him where he could stick it. He apparently made a similar comment to Jaenna, who told him the same thing. This left Angel edgy, which made me even more uneasy. I wondered if he still liked the smell of my karma.

It was an immense relief to finally break out at Kaaran, even though Franny’s battle control boards promptly lit up from one end of the bridge to the other. Thank God for that safe conduct! Kaaran system literally bristled with weapons emplacements. There were bases on the other planets of the system and their moons, bases in various orbits, warships of Kaaran’s own defense command and, finally, two Fleet squadrons. Looking at the firepower concentrated in that system made me think that my original plan of flying straight to Kaaran in the Flower had been hopelessly harebrained. If the defenders had chosen to shoot before asking questions, I doubt we could even have surrendered before we were atomized.

Ruoni startled me by saying that it was about what he had expected. If that was true, why in God’s name hadn’t he said anything when I was setting Flower’s course?

“It was at your order,” he said. “And you didn’t ask for discussion. Maybe it would have worked. That is the essence of command decisions.”