The View from the Imperium (4 page)

“May I say, without fear of contradiction, that you are the only one like you in the universe. Sir.”

I cocked my head, trying to figure out if the statement was an insult or a compliment, and had to light upon compliment. Parsons was not given to blatant mud-throwing. I pressed my point. “You know what I mean, Parsons. I went all the way through Academy with dozens—no, hundreds—of my distant cousins and friends of friends. People I’ve known since I could crawl. Class of ’049. When we all got our orders on graduation day and compared notes I very nearly dropped my teeth out of my head.
They’re
all on the same three or four ships doing escort duty around the Core Worlds. I’m the only one assigned out here on the perimeter. What am I doing out
here
by myself?”

No clue could be gleaned from my aide’s face. It was as unreadable as the bulkhead just behind him. “Your specific assignment will be given to you in good time, sir. Are any of your classmates in incipient command of a cutter?”

“Well, no,” I acknowledged, pleased all over again as the warm feeling the thought engendered washed over me. Not that I had seen the vessel in question yet, but it did exist, Parsons had confirmed for me, and was safely aboard the
Wedjet,
awaiting that mysterious assignment. The shuttle that had conveyed me aboard from the surface of the Imperium’s capital world of Keinolt had come aboard in one of the other landing bays of the vast destroyer. The
Wedjet
itself was thousands of meters long, shaped like an angel, wings slightly spread, nose of the navigation section forward pointed purposefully toward deep space, its long, slender underside gleaming white from reflected light from the planet’s atmosphere. It was so lovely one had to recall deliberately that it was also deadly. The 836 weapons emplacements, I recalled from lessons in the Academy, were well concealed behind panels and in the curves of her hull. My barely adequate quarters were situated where one of the angel’s knees might have been. “But it might get a little lonely, won’t it?”

“There are over two thousand people on this ship, comprising sixteen races and sub-races, sir,” Parsons said impatiently. “Loneliness would seem to be the least of your worries.”

“I know,” I tried to explain, searching for words to describe my feelings of puzzlement and loneliness, “but it’s not the same. I mean, those people at the Academy were my peers. Nobility. The upper crust. The noted, even the notorious. Except for traveling, going shopping or to parties, or speaking to the staff in the Imperial Compound, I hardly ever really cross paths with anyone to whom I’m not distantly related at the very least.”

“Think of it as a new experience, sir.” The door slid open, and my ADC urged me away from the mirror by getting in the way of my view. I attempted, without success, to see over his shoulder. It was no use. He used his superior height and maneuverability to thwart me no matter which way I shifted. With a snort of annoyance I finally gave up and tried to stare him down. Parsons’s long face wore no expression. I, as usual, blinked first. “Shall we go?” he asked.

“Wait a millisecond,” I said urgently, though I knew I was delaying the evil moment just a little longer. “I want to take a picture of us on my first day of active service.” I reached into a hidden pocket I had had the Imperial tailoring service sew into my tunic seam and let go of a little gold globe, which floated out in front of Parsons’s impassive face. The Baltion Clic 4.0 was one of many cameras I had with me, part of my newfound passion for photography and image capture. I threw an arm around the adjutant’s shoulder and grinned at the ball. It twirled, blinking faster and faster. “Here it goes! Say ‘cheese’!”

“Yes, sir,” Parsons said, with the same expression he had worn all along, as red-tinged light bloomed out of the globe in a blinding flare. The muscles in my eyes contracted painfully to protect my retinas, but I had recorded the glorious event. While I blinked away the glare Parsons put a firm hand in my back and urged me towards the door. “The admiral is waiting.”

I snatched the ball out of the air just before the doors closed behind us.

* * *

“Are you certain that I shouldn’t make a grand entrance?” I asked, as we strode the grand corridor that led to the officers’ wardroom, knowing that my voice hovered near a whine. I could not help feeling petulant.

“Absolutely not, sir,” Parsons stated firmly, not slowing up at all. I had to increase my pace to keep from being outdistanced by the man. “It would give the wrong impression. You must by all means hold to the structure of ship’s command. To do otherwise is to undermine the authority of her rightful commander.”

“But it’s
me,
” I stressed. “They don’t often get someone from the loftiest social circles, do they?”

Parsons was unmoved. “Naval protocol does not permit exceptions, my lord. Even the Emperor himself would wait to be piped aboard.”

Privately, I doubted it. I had lived in the Imperial Compound near the palace and played in it since I was a child, and I couldn’t recall a single instance when I didn’t look up and suddenly see my elevated cousin looking down over my shoulder with the greatest expression of disapproval, and not a knock or a genteel clearing of the throat to have been heard at any time preceding the discovery. Shojan had a positive knack for appearing where he was less than expected. In fact, the Imperial staff kept alarm beepers—discreet, of course; some as small as a millimeter across—to avoid having one’s regal master turn up when one was indisposed or slacking off one’s duties. Such things, sadly, were not available to mere relatives without a worthwhile profession to use as an excuse. He had once caught me and several of my close cousins when we were in the room next to the private wine cellars . . . but I digress.

The memory of that setting threw my current location into a comparison less favorable than perhaps it deserved. After all, it was a warship. The grandeur of the walnut-colored paneling had to take second place to durability and fireproofing, rendering it hopelessly artificial-looking. The carpets, while woven in an intricate and handsome pattern, needed to withstand the passage of thousands of feet a week. Some of the private rooms in the royal residence and compound had never been trodden by more than the current regnant, his or her personal secretary and the cleaning staff. Silk there was a possibility; here, synthetics were the rule. I tried hard not to feel snobbish as I reached for the control.

The door of the wardroom slid open and emitted its little chime. With Parsons an undoubtedly chilly presence a pace behind my shoulder, I strode in without making the grand entrance that I’d dearly hoped to make, just to announce in a little way that I was aboard and eager to be of service. Sometimes it pained me that Parsons did not appreciate my sense of drama. The rest of the ship’s complement ought to be a little awed, perhaps even slightly agog.

Maybe they were agog anyhow. Certainly eyes opened widely as I made my way into the handsome chamber. My spanking-new boots made a disconcerting clicking noise upon the shining composite floors. I tried not to count the number of steps, but it was difficult to ignore, since I was now making the only sounds in the room. Diners of many races in crisply pressed uniforms around the wide round tables set down their forks momentarily to watch me make my progress through the chamber. I flicked off my hat and tucked it underneath my left arm. After a month or so it seemed, I arrived at the board, an elegant blackwood three-pedestal table set with priceless antique crystal and china that appeared to hover just over the surface of a gleaming white damask tablecloth. I halted. Hoisting my back into its stiffest upright position, I saluted crisply to the spare man at the center of the table, and offered containing just slightly less starch to each of the four other captains seated behind it on either side of him. Admiral Podesta’s hawklike eyes traveled down from mine, over my uniformed chest, a slight dogleg to the left, to the side of my trousers, and back up again. When the eyes reached mine once more, I offered him a grave smile and a second salute to honor his flag rank. The thin black brows on his egg-shaped head rose a sound centimeter toward his fluffy, thin gray hair, and his eyes narrowed as if in deep thought.

“Ensign Kinago reporting, Admiral,” I announced.

“Dinner begins at twenty-hundred, Ensign,” the flag officer snapped out, then returned to his soup without another glance. Parsons sighed just loudly enough for me to hear him.

“Apologize. Now.”

“I apologize, Admiral,” I said at once. Podesta didn’t even look up. I hovered for a moment, wondering if I ought to enlarge upon my regrets. My Naval Academy training stressed courtesy, but never had the commandant of the college refused to maintain eye contact with me. I wavered.

“Sit down now and stay out of trouble, sir,” Parsons muttered. He removed himself from his position at my shoulder and placed himself silently at a central table in between others who bore the same shoulder and wrist badges as he did.

Stay
out of trouble? I mused. I wasn’t
in
trouble. A trifle late, perhaps. But the entire room sat gawking at me. Couldn’t go on interrupting everyone else’s dinner. I smiled blandly around. Strangers didn’t deter me. I had always felt that unknown persons were just friends that one hadn’t met yet. My philosophy had served me well my first twenty-three years, and I saw no reason to doubt it now.

“Right, see you later,” I told Parsons. Conscious of the number of eyes on me, I marched smoothly toward the only empty chair in the big room, at the table farthest from the door through which I had just entered. I put a hand on its back and smiled at my tablemates. Each of them wore an ensign’s bar on his, her or its collar. “Evening, all.”

“H’lo,” a few of them muttered.

The ensign nearest me was an Uctu, the correct name for the race whose section of the galaxy ran a third of the way along the Imperium’s border. Humanity, upon beholding their nearest nonhuman neighbors, promptly named them “Geckos,” after the reptile of Old Earth that they most resembled. There had been a movement to rename them “Dragons,” as being more complimentary to a fellow spacegoing race, but it failed. Herpetologists pointed out that Uctu had large, slightly sticky pads at the tips of their flexible fingers, and their blunt, round-eyed faces failed to look fierce even when provoked. Geckos they remained. Unlike some of their neighbors the Uctu evolved under nearly identical gravitational and atmospheric conditions so they battled with the Imperium and the Trade Union, the largest of the Human-occupied systems. Over thousands of years that border had shifted up and back, until there were both Uctu and Human systems under the dominion of each. The Geckos had been fairly quiet for the last few decades, so this Uctu must have been born on Imperium soil. He was quite young, I reflected, still having the luminous turquoise spots on the rough skin above his eyes, and the reddish scales that ran from the crown of his head and disappeared down the back into his uniform collar had soft edges instead of points. The tab at his breast pocket said redius, k. I smiled at him.

“Pok no Ya inho?” I inquired. It was the polite way to greet one of his kind. They were keen multi-media viewers. The current style of digitavids were invented by an Uctu scientist. I had kept up for several seasons with the
Ya!
show, an ongoing search for the most talented dancers. Uctus loved dance.

The Uctu showed a brief flash of his sharp, flat teeth. “A fan you?”

“Avid,” I assured him, sitting down. “Lord Thomas I . . . Kinago. Ensign.”

“Kolchut Redius. Did you not tremble in boots yours?” the Uctu whispered.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you were late,” a human female ensign with tilted golden eyes and black hair informed me from across the table. She shifted her slim shoulders in her uniform as if she had only just learned how to wear clothes and wasn’t at all comfortable with the exercise. Her name was Anstruther, P. “The old man’s a stickler for punctuality. You’ll pull extra duty.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said, leaning forward, then automatically immediately back to allow the removal of a bowl of soup by a thin hand in a white sleeve. The moment I realized the china basin was moving away, I reached for it, but in vain. The servers cleared the table swiftly to make way for the next course. I was ravenous. A lightly cooked yak wouldn’t have been too small a meal to bring me. Instead, I concentrated on my tablemates. They would be my companions for the duration of my enlistment aboard this vessel, and I was eager to befriend them.

“What makes you special?” Xinu asked. He had coffee-dark skin and shiny black hair. The cost to tailor his uniform to wide shoulders down to impressively narrow hips had been well spent. His teeth, brilliant white, had a small blue jewel in the center of each.

“I’m just me,” I said modestly.

Xinu pretended to stick his finger down his throat. “False modesty makes me tired,” he said. “Admiral Podesta has been known to kick people out when they’re fifteen seconds late, and you sashayed in after ten minutes. Why aren’t you back in your cabin eating survival rations?”

I shrugged disarmingly. “I suppose I owe it all to my mother. She’s an admiral, too. Professional courtesy, I suppose,” I added, glancing back in alarm at Podesta, who was eating a green salad from a pale blue china bowl with quick, stabbing bites of a gleaming silver fork.

“He’s never heard of it,” said the dark-furred Wichu beside Redius. His name was Perkev. He showed his rows of pointed teeth. “You will see. I nearly starved after making a noise during inspection. I cannot eat the
preekech
that you humans consider palatable.”

Like anyone who adored languages, I had a working knowledge of all the curses and swear words used in the many cultures and systems of the Imperium. It was an inspired choice of epithets for the survival rations, whose unassuming acronym had been reapplied by my peers and me to other, less savory terms when we had had to taste the bars in question. The aromas coming from the serving hatches were appealing. I compared it with my memory of survival rations, and peered once again at Podesta. Was he that much of a stickler for rules? Why had I not heard about that during our transfer to the
Wedjet
?