The Rebel of Rhada (15 page)

“Energy Four, Ave Stella,” he said.

“Four, may it please the Spirit.”

Kalin felt a touch of annoyance for Brother Yakob’s holier-than-thou  attitude.  Another ten logarithms for that. He told himself that the pace of life in the midst of treason and rebellion was making him lax in his religious observances. That must cease.

“Begin sub-light re-entry sequence,” he commanded.

“Sequence beginning, hallowed be the Name.”

“Energy Level Three and holding for re-entry,” Brother John said from the power console.

The stars were nearly normal now, with only a slight blue shift to indicate their closing speed. But there were few of them here on the Rim. The overpowering presence in this part of the galaxy was not the Rim stars but the engulfing, vast darkness beyond.

Kalin studied the stars ahead. Sarissa lay out there, but it was still too distant to be seen.

“Hold Energy Three,” Kalin commanded.

“Steady on Three, Ave Stella,” murmured Brother Yakob.

Kalin pondered for a moment about the effect it would have on his prestige with the two novices to ask the holy ship for a special agreement. Then he decided that was unworthy of him. He was in an unfamiliar region of space. No one could be absolutely certain of his navigation over stellar distances.

“Brother John,” he ordered. “Query the ship.”

Brother John was momentarily confused. “Coordinates, First Pilot?”

Kalin’s memory for numbers was eidetic. One did not reach the rank of Navigator without such a talent. He gave the spatial coordinates for Sarissa reproachfully.

Brother John bowed his head and said, “Mea culpa, First Pilot.” He tapped in the numbers and then the memorized sequence that meant: “Are we where we think we are?”

The starship’s computer flashed its reply on the screen above the control consoles:
“Position coordinates D233487769-RA888098874563. Province of Belisarius, Area 30. Nearest star-system Sarsa, Sigma Perseus. Range 1.9 parsecs and closing.”

Brother John beamed, “An agreement, First Pilot.”

“Blessed be He Who Rules the Stars,” Kalin murmured, relieved. As always, when the ancient ships spoke in the language of the Golden Age, he felt a thrill of wonder. The archaic spelling, the strange talk of
provinces
and areas--and what, praise be to God, might a “parsec” be? Navigators had been pondering these mysteries for more than a hundred lifetimes. Some day, Kalin thought, we will be free to ask, and to investigate, and finally to
know.
But that time was not yet . . .

“Re-entry sequence phasing, First Pilot,” Yakob reported.

“Energy Two.”

“Sarissa in sight,” Brother John said.

The dull red star was indeed in sight, now near ahead and growing redder still as the starship’s immense velocity dropped.

“Going sub-light, First Pilot,” Yakob reported. “Energy One Point Nine.”

“Set orbital course for Sarissa One.”

The space beyond the hull was normal space now, with the sparse constellations of the Rim taking their proper shape.

As the starship completed its re-entry into sub-light space, the alarm bells went wild, and a fantastic clangor filled the control room.

Brother Yakob’s voice went shrill with fright as he yelled,
“A Warning, First Pilot! Another Warning!”

Brother John made the sign of the Star and began to pray in a trembling, fumbling torrent of ancient words.

It was indeed another Warning, and one such as few Navigators were ever likely to hear, for the Rhad starship had entered normal space in the midst of a fleet of star-ships orbiting Sarissa and in the process of going into stellar drive.

The holograph formed, reshaped itself, swirled, changed shape and scale as ship after ship, out of visual range but clearly visible to the radio instruments of the Rhadan vessel, flared as a point of diamond bright fight and as swiftly vanished.

As each ship attained the energy level needed to go super-light, it seemed to wink out of range of the holograph in the control room of the almost stationary intruder.

It took Kalin a long moment to realize what was actually happening and that the wild manifestations were not some dreadful supernatural happening.

The fleet--the star kings’ fleet,
Kalin thought with sinking heart.
We are too late. The fleet is starting for Earth now.

In just the moments since the alarm bells had begun to ring, the glowing images of the other vessels had become many fewer. Already those gone were racing toward the center of the galaxy at unthinkable speeds, untouchable by any power known now to man.

The images were flicking out, leaving only the gloomy, cloud-girt globe of Sarissa and the threatening blackness of the Rim.

In that instant Kalin saw the suddenly huge symbol that represented a starship only a scant hundred or so miles ahead. It was moving across the scanning field in a collision orbit. The clangor of the alarm bells seemed to become desperate.

“Reverse polarity! Energy Two!”
Kalin rapped out the order in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely recognized it as his own. But it was far too late. At orbital velocities the distance between the two starships vanished in seconds. The other--Kalin could make out its markings clearly now: an Imperial cruiser with Vegan symbols--was pulsing with the build-up of energy for star flight. The young Navigator had an impression of something spinning and gleaming nakedly in the dull light of the Sarissan sun, falling away from the great, thrusting hull.

Brother John moaned,
“We are dead men! Beatified Emeric intercede for us!”

And then, with a clap of soundless thunder, the Veg vessel went super-light, vanishing at an oblique angle in a flare of glittering ionization that hung for a long moment like a comet’s tale and slowly began to fade, leaving only emptiness where the thousand-meter hull had been but microseconds before.

The Rhad starship entered the dying energy field and hummed in sympathetic response. The holograph faded, and the alarm bells fell silent. Where dozens of ships had orbited, there remained emptiness--and a single, tiny object twisting and floating against the murky sphere of Sarissa’s nightside.

Brother John was intoning every prayer of thanksgiving in his not inconsiderable repertoire. Brother Yakob sat staring, white-faced, at the place where the Vegan star-ship had been.

Kalin spoke with a sharpness born of sudden relief. “All stop. Hover sequence.”

“Sequence established, First Pilot,” Brother John said in a quavering voice. “For the glory of the Spirit,” he added with shaky heartiness.

The great starship lay dead in space twenty thousand miles from the hidden surface of Sarissa. And the tiny thing left behind by the Vegan cruiser came tumbling nearer, drawn by the gravity generated by the new arrival’s massive hull.

Kalin stared.

Brother Yakob signed himself. “What is it, First Pilot?”

Kalin shook his head, watching, as the object floated lazily against the darkness, etched with the red light of the Sarissan sunshine.

“Holy Emeric,” breathed Brother John.
“It is a ghost, First Pilot--”

A tide of superstitious dread rose in the three men. Generations of ignorance and fear plucked at their hearts.

Kalin said, steeling himself, “It is a
man,
brothers. A dead man.”

And the body of Landro the traitor drifted nearer and nearer until it fell slowly downward to touch the hull of the Rhadan starship, spread-eagling against the transparent god-metal of the control room. The dead eyes, bulging from internal pressure, seemed to stare a warning at the three religious who watched from inside the hull. The frozen arms, extended in a gesture of entreaty, pressed against the night. And cut deeply into the pale skin of the dead man’s chest, in angry red letters, the stunned Navigators read the single cryptic word: CYB.

And sin said to man, Make your cyb in your image, after your likeness: and give him dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creep-eth upon the earth. I, sin, command this, that man’s days may be numbered.

From the
Book of Warls,
Interregnal period

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

Attributed to John Brown,
zealot-reformer of the American period, middle Dawn Age

The city of Sardis lay abandoned under a murky Sarissan sky. Only the watch remained, and the evidences of an encampment of warmen numbered, Kier estimated, in the thousands.

They had left the starship hovering over the landing ground beyond the wall, and the three men--Kier, Cavour, and Han the Vykan--mounted on war mares, picked their way slowly through the blackened rubble of the Street of Night.

The horses murmured nervously to one another, nostrils flaring at the smell of burning. From across the slope and the sluggish river that ran through the town to the marshes, Kier could hear the noises of lawless, hysterical rioting. The sullen people of Sardis, abandoned by their star king and his troops, were making the most of their hopeless freedom. The patrolmen, those few left behind, could not keep order and had joined the population in license and anarchy.

“Once,” Cavour said, listening to the night sounds, “all the worlds were like this. It was the way of men in the Dark Time.”

Han the Vykan turned in his saddle. “But why has Tallan done this? Why has he left his holding?” To the young Vykan’s feudal mind, a ruler--one of the Great Folk-- could commit no worse crime than to abandon his people.

“He has taken his warmen. He has no more need of this place,” Kier said grimly. “He has left it to crumble.”

Han looked about him at the charred ruins of the Street of Night and shivered with superstitious horror. A land without a king was anathema--an invitation to demons.

“They have gone away, the kings and the armies,” the drunken patrolmen had said to them at the Sardis gate. “They have gone in the starships and taken Tallan with them.”

Cavour had asked, “And the house where Kelber, the warlock, lived, where may we find it?”

The patrolman had quickly made the sign of the Star and pointed the way. “There is nothing there now but ashes and dead bones and the marsh winds.” And then he had hurried away, wrapped to the eyes in his leather patrolman’s cloak, uneasy with these strangers on their muttering mounts, and fearful of the spirit of sin that he sensed around them.

Han tried to swallow the dryness in his mouth and touched his fretful mare to gentle her. “Go sweetly, little queen,” he said.

“There is death here,” the mare said, rolling her eyes, and the other animals snorted agreement.

There was death everywhere, Han thought bleakly. His own sergeant lay dead on Earth and perhaps all his comrades, too, in their camp on the Jersey shore. He thought worshipfully of his Queen Ariane and told himself that when a simple soldier became involved in the affairs of the mighty, he must be prepared to see much dying.

But
such
dying.

He thought of the frozen corpse stark in the portal of the starship: white, covered with a rime of ice from the ship’s air, and those terrifying, swollen letters etched into the flesh. A dead man’s message that none but the warlock Cavour seemed to understand.

“We must land at once and find Kelber’s laboratory,” Cavour had said.

And though Nevus had wanted to go immediately to Rhada for troops, and Kier wanted to turn and follow the vanishing fleet, and Kalin, the holy Navigator, wanted only to penetrate the Sarissan atmosphere to freshen the air in the ship without landing--Cavour had got his way.

Now they paced their mares through darkness and ruins in an unhallowed place, and Han imagined he could feel the webbed, membranous wings of devils brushing his cheeks. By the Spirit, how much better was simple battle!

Cavour, in the lead, halted his mare with a word. In this place twisted metal shapes and half-melted rubble were mixed with the fallen stonework. In the twilight, puddles of solidified lead and zinc glittered fitfully. “Here,” the warlock said.

Kier dismounted swiftly carrying a flail for a weapon, but there were no living enemies here--only the dead and mute ruins.

Kier stooped to uncover a length of copper cable, distorted by heat into a serpent form. Han murmured a prayer and looked away from the unholy shape.

Cavour dismounted and looked about him, studying the destroyed shapes of electrical cabinets and control consoles. His eyes were dark with anger. “To think that such stuff still existed--and someone has burned it, smashed it all beyond repair.” He walked deeper into the rubble and called to Kier. “Here, look at this. Storage batteries--or what’s left of them. There must have been a whole roomful--”

Kier stood by his side. “What were they used for?”

“A power source. Electrical power.” Cavour’s voice had a note of frustrated anguish in it. “Warlocks have been trying to build storage cells for two thousand years, but no one in the galaxy knows how to purify the nickel and silver. And here they were, hundreds of them,
working.
Ruined now, beyond hope of repair.” He scraped a bit of the soft, melted metals into a cloth and folded the specimen carefully into his pouch.

Kier regarded the wreckage. “A sin-smashing mob?”

“I don’t think so. There are no religious symbols. No stars. Nothing chalked on the stones.”

The two men stood in silence. Behind them the war mares muttered to one another and jingled their harness impatiently. The smell of the marshes was strong in the twilight. The wet wind carried the stink of rotting reeds and salt.

When at last Kier spoke, he asked quietly, “What was Kelber making here, Cavour?”

Cavour smiled bleakly. “That giggling fool Landro knew.”

Kier said impatiently, “Landro must have been tortured.”

The warlock shook his head. “His death and his wounds were self-inflicted. Yet when he left Earth, he must have been confident--on the crest of a wave. The Veg had Nyor; Mariana had us at weapon-point. So why?”