A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Read online

  erect, the height well below her own, the other differences

  unreckonable. "Sir Dominic saw fit to dub me Chives," he introduced

  himself. "I trust you will find his service pleasant. Indeed, I declined

  the manumission he offered me, until the law about spy bracelets went

  into effect on Terra. May I direct you out?"

  Kossara went along through rosiness, into an aircar, on across the city

  and an ocean, eventually to an ornate house on an island which Chives

  called Catalina. He showed her to a suite and explained that her owner

  was busy elsewhere but would presently make his wishes known. Meanwhile

  these facilities were hers to use, within reason.

  Kossara fell asleep imagining that Mihail was beside her.

  III

  ---

  It was official: the Emperor Hans would shortly leave Terra, put himself

  at the head of an armada, and personally see to quelling the

  barbarians--war lords, buccaneers, crusaders for God knew what strange

  causes--who still harassed a Sector Spica left weak by the late struggle

  for the Imperial succession. He threw a bon voyage party at the Coral

  Palace. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry was among those invited. Under such

  circumstances, one comes.

  Besides, Flandry reflected, I can't help liking the old bastard. He may

  not be the best imaginable thing that could happen to us, but he's

  probably the best available.

  The hour was well after sunset in this part of Oceania. A crescent moon

  stood high to westward; metrocenter star-points glinted across its dark

  side. The constellations threw light of their own onto gently rolling

  waves, argent shimmer on sable. Quietness broke where surf growled white

  against ramparts. There walls, domes, towers soared aloft in a

  brilliance which masked off most of heaven.

  When Flandry landed his car and stepped forth, no clouds of perfume (or

  psychogenic vapors, as had been common in Josip's reign) drifted from

  the palace to soften salt odors. Music wove among mild breezes, but

  formal, stately, neither hypersubtle nor raucous. Flandry wasn't sure

  whether it was composed on a colony planet--if so, doubtless

  Germania--or on Terra once, to be preserved through centuries while the

  mother world forgot. He did know that a decade ago, the court would have

  snickered at sounds this fusty-archaic.

  Few servants bowed as he passed among fellow guests, into the main

  building. More guardsmen than formerly saluted. Their dress uniforms

  were less ornate than of yore and they and their weapons had seen

  action. The antechamber of fountains hadn't changed, and the people who

  swirled between them before streaming toward the ballroom wore clothes

  as gorgeous as always, a rainbow spectacle. However, fantastic collars,

  capes, sleeves, cuffs, footgear were passe. Garb was continuous from

  neck or midbreast to soles, and, while many men wore robes rather than

  trousers, every woman was in a skirt.

  A reform I approve of, he thought. I suspect most ladies agree. The

  suggestive rustle of skillfully draped fabric is much more stimulating,

  really, and easier to arrange, than cosmetics and diadems on otherwise

  bare areas of interest. For that matter, though it does take more

  effort, a seduction is better recreation than an orgy.

  There our good Hans goes too far. Every bedroom in the palace locked!

  Ah, well. Conceivably he wants his entourage to cultivate ingenuity.

  Crown Prince Dietrich received, a plain-faced middle-aged man whose

  stoutness was turning into corpulence. Though he and Flandry had worked

  together now and then in the fighting, his welcome was mechanical. Poor

  devil, he must say a personal hello to each of three or four hundred

  arrivals important enough to rate it, with no drug except stim to help

  him. Another case of austere principles overdone, Flandry thought. The

  younger brother, Gerhart, was luckier tonight, already imperially drunk

  at a wallside table with several cronies. However, he looked as sullen

  as usual.

  Flandry drifted around the circumference of the ballroom. There was

  nothing fancy about the lighting, save that it was cast to leave

  unobscured the stars in the vitryl dome overhead. The floor sheened with

  diffracted reflections from several score couples who swung through the

  decorous measures of a quicksilver. He hailed acquaintances when he

  glimpsed them, but didn't stop till he had reached an indoor arbor where

  champagne was available. A goblet of tickle in his hand, roses around

  him, a cheerful melody, a view of pretty women in motion--life could be

  worse.

  It soon was. "Greetin', Sir Dominic."

  Flandry turned, and bowed in dismay to the newcomer beneath the leaves.

  "Aloha, your Grace."

  Tetsuo Niccolini, Duke of Mars, accepted a glass from the attendant

  behind the table. It was obviously not his first. "Haven't seen you for

  some while," he remarked. "Missed you. You've a way o' puttin' a little

  spark into a scene, dull as the court is these days." Shrewdly: "Reason

  you don't come often, what?"

  "Well," Flandry admitted, "his Majesty's associates do tend to be a bit

  earnest and firm-jawed." He sipped. "Still, my impression is, your Grace

  spends a fair amount of time here regardless."

  Niccolini sighed. He had never been more than a well-meaning fop; but in

  these last years, when antisenescence and biosculp could no longer hold

  wrinkles, baldness, feebleness at bay, he had developed a certain wry

  perspective. Unfortunately, he remained a bore.

  Shadows of petals stirred across a peacock robe as he lifted his drink.

  "D'you think I should go to my ancestral estates and all that rubbish,

  set up my own small court along lines I like, eh? No, m'boy, not

  feasible. I'd get nothin' but sycophants, who'd pluck me while they

  smiled. My real friends, who put their hearts into enjoyin' life, well,

  they're dead or fled or sleepin' in an oldster's bed." He paused. "

  'Sides, might's well tell you, H.M. gave me t'understand--he makes

  himself very clear, ha?--gave me t'understand, he'd prefer no Duke o'

  Mars henceforth visit the planet 'cept for a decent minimum o' speeches

  an' dedications."

  Flandry nodded. That makes sense, flickered through him. The Martians

  [nonhumans; colonists by treaty arrangement in the time of the

  Commonwealth; glad to belong to it, but feeling betrayed when it broke

  down and the Troubles came; dragooned into the Empire] are still

  restless. Terra can best control them by removing the signs of Terran

  control. I suspect, after poor tottery Tetty is gone, Hans will buy out

  his heirs with a gimcrack title elsewhere and a lot of money and make a

  Martian the next Duke--who may not even know he's a puppet.

  At least, that's what I'd consider doing.

  "But we're in grave danger o' seriousness," Niccolini interrupted

  himself. "Where've you been? Busy at what? Come, come, somethin' amusin'

  must've happened."

  "Oh, just knocking around with a friend." Flandry didn't care to get

  specific. One reason why he had thus far declined promotion to admiral

  was
that then he'd be too conspicuous, too eagerly watched and sought

  after, while he remained near the Emperor. He liked his privacy. As a

  hanger-on who showed no further ambitions--and could therefore in time

  be expected to lose his energetic patron's goodwill--he drew scant

  attention.

  "Or knockin' up a friend? Heh, heh, heh." The Duke nudged him. "I know

  your sort o' friends. How was she?"

  "In the first place, she was a he," Flandry said. Until he could escape,

  he might as well reconcile himself to humoring a man who had discovered

  the secret of perpetual adolescence. "Of course, we explored. Found a

  new place on Ganymede which might interest your Grace, the Empress Wu in

  Celestial City."

  "No, no." Niccolini waggled his head and free hand. "Didn't y'know? I

  never go anywhere near Jupiter. Never. Not since the La Reine Louise

  disaster."

  Flandry cast his mind back. He couldn't identify--Oh, yes. It had

  happened five years ago, while he was out of the Solar System.

  Undeterred by civil war, a luxury liner was approaching Callisto when

  her screen field generators failed. The trapped radiation which seethes

  around the giant planet, engulfing its inner moons, killed everybody

  aboard; no treatment could restore a body burned by so much unfelt fire.

  Nothing of the kind had happened for centuries of exploration and

  colonization thereabouts. Magnetohydrodynamic shields and their backups

  were supposed to be invulnerable to anything that wouldn't destroy a

  vehicle or a settlement anyway. Therefore, sabotage? The passenger list

  had included several powerful people. A court of inquiry had handed down

  the vaguest finding of "cumulative negligence."

  "My poor young nephew, that I inherited the Dukedom from, was among the

  casualties," Niccolini droned on. "That roused the jolly old instinct o'

  self-preservation, I can tell you. To blinkin' many hazards as is. Not

  that I flatter myself I'm a political bull's-eye. Still, one never

  knows, does one? So tell me 'bout this place you found. If it sounds

  intriguin', I'll see 'bout gettin' a sensie."

  Flandry was saved by a courier in Imperial livery who entered the arbor

  and bowed. "A thousand pardons, your Grace," she said. "Sir Dominic,

  there is an urgent message for you. Will you please follow me?"

  "With twofold pleasure," Flandry responded, for she was young and

  well-formed. He couldn't quite place her accent, though he guessed she

  might be from some part of Hermes. Even when hiring humans, the

  majordomos of the new Emperor's various households were under orders to

  get as many non-Terrans as was politic.

  Whoever the summons was from, and whether it was terrible or trivial, he

  was free of the Duke before he could otherwise have disengaged. The

  noble nodded a vague response to his apology and stood staring after

  him, all alone.

  His Imperial Majesty, High Emperor Hans Friedrich Molitor, of his

  dynasty the first, Supreme Guardian of the Pax, Grand Director of the

  Stellar Council, Commander-in-Chief, Final Arbiter, acknowledged supreme

  on more worlds and honorary head of more organizations than any man

  could remember, sat by himself in a room at the top of a tower. It was

  sparsely furnished: a desk and communicator, a couch upholstered in worn

  but genuine horse-hide, a few straightbacked chairs and the big

  pneumatic that was his. The only personal items were a dolchzahn skin on

  the floor, from Germania; two portraits of his late wife, in her youth

  and her age, and one of a blond young man; a model of the corvette that

  had been his first command. A turret roof, beginning at waist height,

  was currently transparent, letting this eyrie overlook an illuminated

  complex of roofs, steeples, gardens, pools, outer walls, attendant

  rafts, and finally the night ocean.

  The courier ushered Flandry through the door and vanished as it closed

  behind him. He saluted and snapped to attention. "At ease," the Emperor

  grunted. "Sit. Smoke if you want."

  He was puffing a pipe whose foulness overcame the air 'fresher. In spite

  of the blue tunic, white trousers, and gold braid with nebula and three

  stars of a grand admiral, plus the pyrocrystal ring of Manuel the Great,

  he was not very impressive to see. Yet meditechnics could not account

  for so few traces of time. The short, stocky frame had grown a kettle

  belly, bags lay beneath the small dark eyes, the hair was thin and gray

  on the blocky head: nothing that could not easily be changed by the

  biocosmetics he scorned to use. Nor had he ever troubled about his face,

  low forehead, bushy brows, huge Roman nose, heavy jowls, gash of a mouth

  between deep creases, prow of a chin.

  "Thank you, your Majesty." Flandry settled his elegance opposite,

  flipped out a cigarette case which was a work of art and, at need, a

  weapon, and established a barrier against the reek around him.

  "No foolish formalities," growled the rusty, accented basso. "I must

  make my grand appearance, and empty chatter will rattle for hours, and

  at last when I can go I'm afraid I'll be too tired for a nice new wench

  who's joined the collection, no matter how much I need a little fun."

  "A stim pill?" Flandry suggested.

  "No. I take too many as is. The price to the body mounts, you know. And

  ... barely six years on the throne have I had. The first three, fighting

  to stay there. I need another twenty or thirty for carpentering this

  jerry-built, dry-rotted Empire into a thing that might last a few more

  generations, before I can lay down my tools." Hans chuckled coarsely.

  "Well, let the tool for pretty Thressa wait, recharging, till tomorrow

  night. You should see her, Dominic, my friend. But not to tell anybody.

  By herself she could cause a revolution."

  Flandry grinned. "Yes, we humans are basically sexual beings, aren't we,

  sir? If we can't screw each other physically, well do it politically."

  Hans laughed aloud. He had never changed from a boy who deserted a

  strait-laced colonial bourgeois home for several years of wild adventure

  in space, the youth who enlisted in the Navy, the man who rose through

  the ranks without connections or flexibility to ease his way.

  But he had not changed either from the hero of Syrax, where the fleet he

  led flung back the Merseians and forced a negotiated end to a short

  undeclared war which had bidden fair to grow. Nor had he changed from

  the leader who let his personnel proclaim him Emperor--himself

  reluctantly, less from vainglory than a sense of workmanship, when the

  legitimate order of succession had dissolved in chaos and every rival

  claimant was a potential disaster.

  A blunt pragmatist, uncultured and unashamed of it, shrewd rather than

  intelligent, he either appalled Manuel Argos or won a grudging approval,

  in whatever hypothetical hell or Valhalla the Founder dwelt. The

  question was academic. His hour was now. How long that hour would be,

  and what the consequences, were separate puzzles.

  Mirth left. He leaned forward. The pipe smoldered between hairy hands

  clenched upon his knees. "I talk too much
," he said, a curious admission

  from the curtest of the Emperors. Flandry understood, though. Few

  besides him were left, maybe none, with whom Hans dared talk freely.

  "Let us come to business. What do you know about Dennitza?"

  Inwardly taken aback, Flandry replied soft-voiced, "Not much, sir. Not

  much about the whole Taurian Sector, in spite of having had the good

  luck to be there when Lady Megan needed help. Why ask me?"

  Hans scowled. "I suppose you do know how the Gospodar, my sector

  governor, is resisting my defense reorganization. Could be a simple

  difference of judgment, yes. But ... now information suggests he plans

  rebellion. And that--where he is--will involve the Merseians, unless he

  is already theirs."

  Flandry's backbone tingled. "What are the facts, sir?"

  "A wretched planet in Sector Arcturus. Diomedes, it's called. Natives

  who want to break away and babble of getting Ythrian help. Human agents

  among them. We would expect such humans would be from the Domain,

  likeliest Avalon--not true? But our best findings say the Ythrians hold

  no wish to make trouble for us. And our people discover those humans are

  Dennitzan. Only one was captured alive, and they had some problems with

  the hypnoprobing, but it does appear she went to Diomedes under secret

  official orders."

  Hans sighed. "Not till yesterday did this reach me through the damned

  channels. It never would have before I left, did I not issue strictest

  orders about getting a direct look at whatever might possibly point to

  treason. And--Gott in Himmel, I am swamped, on top of all else! My

  computer screens out lese-majeste cases and the rest of such piddle.

  Nevertheless--"