The Game of Empire

Chapter 12

Miriam Abrams Flandry started home barely in time. Although news of civil war was recent, and nothing untoward had yet happened in the lanes between Sol and Niku, already apprehension pervaded the entire Empire. Word came in that, here and there, malcontents of many different sorts were proclaiming themselves adherents of would-be Emperor Olaf and making trouble or outright disaster for local authorities. Insurance rates had begun to skyrocket, which caused shipping firms to abandon route after route. It was natural to cancel service to the planet Ramnu, Niku IV, early on. There was no economic incentive to continue, after the quick announcement that the climate modification project was suspended for the duration of the emergency.

The woman had been on the surface, in the field, isolated among primitive autochthons. She just managed to catch the last liftoff for Maia. Of course, had she been stranded, Fleet Admiral Sir Dominic Flandry would have taken steps to get his wife back. He might well have unlimbered his speedster Hooligan and gone after her himself. But her survival meanwhile, on the grim world she loved, would have been doubtful.

As was, Maia III—Hermes—continued important enough that she could book passage from there directly to Terra. The vessel being a luxury liner which numbered noblefolk among her passengers, she had armed escort all the way, never mind how useful those ships might have been on the battlefront.

The xenologist kept to herself during the voyage, taking no part in its entertainments and intrigues. At meals she was minimally civil to her tablemates. It wasn’t only that they and their games bored her. (Attractive and alone, she could have had a succession of bed partners; and after weeks among nonhu-mans, the physical sensation would have been welcome; but she would have had to talk with them› even listen to them. She’d rather wait for Dominic. The fact that he had probably not been waiting for her, in that sense, made no difference.) It was that she was full of grief and fear.

Grief for her dear Ramnuans, who had given her the name “Banner” that she still bore. She had come to see how the project was progressing, that would put an end to the planet’s repeated civilizations-destroying glaciations, and how it was affecting the cultures she had studied for so long before her retirement. Shortly after she arrived, the order to shut down came in. Considering how bureaucracy operated, if Magnusson’s insurrection were crushed immediately, which it obviously could not be, months must pass until work resumed. Ramnuans would perish by the additional thousands, or worse.

Fear for the Empire, Technic society and, yes, those other societies the Empire enclosed. Old and rotten it might be, its outworks crumbling less because strength had failed than because the will to be strong had. Nevertheless it was all that guarded the heritage of humanity and humanity’s allies. Sometimes Flandry let his personal defenses drop in her presence and spoke of the Long Night that lay beyond the fall of the Empire.

And she had her kinfolk on Dayan to think about, and her natives on Ramnu, and friends strewn about among the stars, and—she and Dominic were not yet too old for a child or two. Not quite, he approaching seventy and she approaching fifty, given anti-senescence plus the kind of DNA repair they could pay for. Besides, she had years ago deposited some ova in a biobank.

They had always been too busy, though, she and he; and now this wretched affair had begun.

He met her at debarkation, attired in a uniform that got them waved straight through inspection, and hurried her to the apartment they kept in Archopolis. There the champagne and caviar and such had to wait a while longer.

When they had feasted, the darkness would no longer be denied. She asked what the truth was—not the news, but the truth. Reluctantly, he told her.

“The latest dispatches we’ve received make unpleasant reading. In just these weeks, Magnusson’s driven a salient in nearly as far as Aldebaran. Of course, he isn’t sitting on everything from there back to his Patrician base. And his blitzkrieg is bound to slow down while he consolidates those gains. But he needn’t do much toward that end, you realize. He dominates the whole volume of space already. He can snap up any significant traffic that doesn’t flow the way he wants, and lay waste any planet that won’t give him whatever support he demands. None will refuse. Who can blame them?

“His forces have won every battle to date, except for a couple of draws. Most engagements have been fairly small; but seeing what harm a single capital ship can do, each victory has been a lopsidedly big addition to his score. He is a brilliant tactician, and his overall strategy is basically the same as what carried Hans Molitor to the throne.” Flandry narrowed his gray eyes and stroked his mustache. “Or is it, entirely?” he murmured.

Banner regarded him across the table and spread her hands in an immemorial gesture. She was a lean, strong-featured woman, her own eyes luminous green, silver-streaked brown hair falling to her shoulders. “Do you suppose he can win?” she asked.

“He might.” Flandry ignited a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “In view of the latest developments, his chances are starting to look pretty good. When I saw our darling Emperor Gerhart a week ago, he was in an absolute hissy fit.”

One reason the apartment was costly to rent was that it included state-of-the-art antibugging devices. Technicians personally loyal to Flandry made periodic inspections to be sure the system was still working.

Banner sighed. “Rhetorical question—or is it? Would it really be so awful if Magnusson took over? How did the present dynasty come to power, anyway, and how much is Gerhart really worth?”

“I keep telling you, darling scientist, you should take more interest in human history and politics,” Flandry said. “Not but what it’s understandable you don’t. A filthy subject. I often wish I’d been born into some era like the Second Sugimoto, when everybody could cultivate his vine and fig tree, or his private arts or vices, without having to worry who’d come climbing over the wall next.” He reached above the glasses and plates to stroke her cheek. “To be sure, then I’d never have met you.”

Abruptly he got to his feet. The bathrobe flapped around his ankles as he strode to the transparency and stood raggedly smoking. Through a light rain and an early dusk, the city flashed hectic, as far as vision could fare. Within this room, the odor of roses and the lilt of a Mozart concerto receded toward infinity.

“I’m against revolutions,” he said low. “No matter the alleged justification, it’s never worth the short-range cost—lives and treasure beyond counting—or the long-range—ripping the fragile fabric of society. You know how in my younger days I did what I could to help put down a couple such attempts. If afterward I signed up with old Hans, why, the Wang dynasty had collapsed utterly, and he was the least bad of the contending war lords. At that, he turned out to be a tolerable Emperor, didn’t he? Neither a figurehead nor a monster. What more dare we expect? And we may owe something to the memory of Edwin Cairncross, inasmuch as his try at usurpation was what got us reacquainted with each other, but surely you’ll agree he was an undesirable sort.”

She secured the sash of her kimono and went to join him. He laid an arm around her waist. His straight-lined countenance writhed into a smile. “Sorry about the oratory,” he murmured. “I’ll try to keep it properly caged henceforward.”

She leaned close. “I never mind. It’s nice to see you relax from your perpetual clowning.” Her innate seriousness rose afresh. “But you haven’t answered me. All right, the Empire was bumbling along fairly peacefully, and Magnusson’s revolt is a disaster. Don’t I know it myself? However—my parents always told me to look at every side of a question—would his success be a catastrophe? I mean, I’ve heard you say often enough that we no longer have any such thing as legitimate government. Maybe Magnusson would be better than Gerhart, who is rather a swine, isn’t he?”

“Well, yes, he is,” Flandry admitted, “although a shrewd swine. For a moderately important instance, you know he doesn’t like me, but he’s given to taking my advice, because he sees it’s practical. And … Crown Prince Karl does have a high opinion of me, and is a thoroughly decent boy.” He snickered. “If I’m still alive when he inherits the throne, I’ll have to set about curing him of the latter.”

She stared outward and upward. Stars were lost in the haze of light from the towers everywhere around, but—“Does it make that much difference who is Emperor? What can he, what can any person, any planet, do to change things?”

“Usually very little,” Flandry agreed. This was by no means the first time they had been over the same ground. They were both aware and concerned, she less cynically than he. But some open wounds do not allow themselves to be left alone; and tonight they were feeling a freshly inflicted one. “The Policy Board, the provincial nobles, the bureaucrats and officers, the inertia of sheer size—Still, even a slight shift in course will touch billions of lives, and perhaps grind them out. And occasionally a pivotal event does happen. More and more, I wonder whether we may not be about to have that experience again.”

“What do you mean?”

Flandry ran fingers through his sleek gray hair. “I’m not sure. Possibly nothing. Yet every intuition, every twitchy nerve I’ve developed in decades I misspent as an Intelligence agent when I might have gone fishing—my hunch screams to me that something peculiar is afoot.” He pitched his cigarette expertly away, into an ashtaker, and swung about to face her, hands on her shoulders. “Listen, Banner. You’ve been in the yonderlands, you haven’t followed the input as you would’ve with me if you’d stayed home. The Merseians have now hit us.”

She gave him a stark smile. “Is that a surprise? Haven’t they always taken what advantage they could, when the Empire’s been in disarray? Nibbles here and there, no casus belli that might unite us against them—obviously, not in this case either, if the story hasn’t been released.”

“This case is oddly different,” Flandry said. “There’ve been the predictable skirmishes in the marches, yes. No major thrust. But … they sent a task force, which passed straight through Imperial space—they sent a strike force to Gorrazan, on the far side of us.”

“What?” She stiffened. “Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, it does, it does, when you contemplate it from the proper, skewed angle.” He spoke softly, as was his wont when discussing terrible things. “Yes, the Realm of Gorrazan is the pathetic souvenir of a botched attempt at empire, a few colonies and clients on a few second-rate worlds near the home sun. Yes, its government has been plagued by insurrectionists who proclaim a bright new ideology—God, how long has the universe endured the same old bright new ideologies?—and the rebels are known, to everybody except our journalists and academics, to nave Merseian inspiration and help. Trouble at our backs. Certainly I’d instigate the identical thing behind Merseia if I could.

“But now—” He drew breath. “Word came in the other day. The Merseians sent a ‘mercy mission’. They declare the need was so urgent they had to traverse our space, hoping we wouldn’t notice, and we were wicked to pounce on them as they were in Sector Alpha Crucis approaching their destination. It was a shame that we compelled them to trounce what forces we could bring to bear. The diplomats will be discussing who’s to blame, and who’s to pay what reparations to whom, and the rest of that garbage, for years to come. Oh, yes, business as usual.

“But the fact is, the Merseians could have passed through unknown to us, if they’d wanted. They made their presence blatant when they neared our Alpha Crucis frontier. Our units had no choice but to attack and take losses. Meanwhile a Merseian detachment punched through to Gorrazan itself. It made rags of the home defense fleet. It could have blown up every governmental installation. The rebels could have taken over entirely. We’d either have intervened to prevent, and found ourselves bogged down in a nasty, lasting little war; or, likelier, we’d have done nothing, and in due course had a pro-Merseian power at our backs, small and weak but an almighty nuisance.

“Instead, the raiders contented themselves with taking out the Folkmoot’s main command center. The government’s badly hurt, but it can still fight. The Gorrazanian civil strife proceeds.”

“What does that imply?” She guessed his answer.

“Why, when the news breaks, as it inevitably will, the powers that be in the Empire will fall into a rupturing controversy. Some will want to tie down strength in watchfulness, diametrically opposite to Magnusson’s campaign, lest the situation explode in our rear end. Others will claim there’s no danger in those parts, whether because the Liberation Council hasn’t yet won or because the Liberation Council represents progress and this past incident proves how wrong we are to keep provoking the Roidhunate. The waste of energy, the confusion of purpose among us would be unbelievable if it didn’t have so many precedents.” Flandry shrugged. “Oh, the Merseians have studied us. They understand us better than we understand them. And … Magnusson has the kudos of having beaten them in battle, but he also promises that when he becomes Emperor, he’ll negotiate a permanent peace with them.”

“How do you read the sign?” she whispered.

“The entrails, do you mean?” His laugh turned into a groan. “I don’t try. I know better. I only see that a most useful piece of psychological warfare has just been waged on Magnusson’s account. Coincidence? Or an attempt to further the cause of sincerely desired peace? I can only nurse my suspicions. What can I, here on Terra, find out for sure? How can I?”

Again he laughed, but cheerfully, and hauled her to him. “So never mind, sweetheart! Let’s enjoy ourselves while we may.”