The Game of Empire

Chapter 4

The home of Admiral Sir Olaf Magnusson lay in the desirable tract a hundred kilometers north of Aurea. It was small, and the interior austere, for a man of wealth and power. But such was his desire, and any decisions he made, he enforced. The only luxuries, if they could be called that, were a gymnasium where he worked out for at least forty minutes in every fifteen hours, and an observation deck where he meditated when he felt the need. Naturally, his use of these was restricted to times when he was there, which had not been many of late.

He stood on the deck and let his gaze range afar—a tall man, thickly muscular, with wide, craggy features, heavy blond brows over sapphire-blue eyes, thinning sandy hair. The face was tanned and deeply lined; its left cheek bore the seam of a battle scar which he had never troubled to have removed and which had become a virtual trademark. What he saw was a vast sweep of land and sky. Close by, the land had been terraformed, planted in grass, roses, hollyhocks, Buddha’s cup, livewell, oaks, maples, braidwoods, and more, the gardens of an empire brought together around human houses. Beyond was primeval Daedalus, trees and brush, leaves a somber, gleaming green, never a flower. Those were not birds that passed above, though their wings shone in the evening light as the wings of eagles would have. The sun, sinking west, had begun to lose its disc shape. Haze dimmed and reddened it enough for vision to perceive that, because the rays came through ever more air as it dropped below what should have been the horizon. Golden clouds floated above.

Olaf Magnusson did not really see this, unless with a half-aware fraction of his mind. Nor was he rapt in the contemplation of the All that his Neosufic religion enjoined. He had striven to be, but his thoughts kept drifting elsewhere, until at last he accepted their object as the aspect of the Divine which was set before him tonight.

Strength. Strength unafraid, unhesitant, serving a will which was neither cruel nor kind but which cleanly trod the road to its destiny … He could not hold the vision before him for very long at a time. It was too superb for mankind. Into his awareness there kept jabbing mere facts, practicalities, things he must do, questions of how to do them—yes, crusades have logistic requirements too—

A footfall, a breath reached his hearing. He swung about, his big frame as sure-footed as a fencer’s or a mountaineer’s, both of which he was. His wife had come out. She halted, a meter away. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Emergency?”

“No.” He could barely hear her voice through the cold, whittering breeze, as soft as it was. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have interrupted .you, except that it’s getting late and the children are hungry. I wondered if you would be having dinner with us.”

His basso rasped. “For something like that, you break in on my devotions?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. Yet she did not cringe, she stood before him in her own pride. And her sadness. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t. But since you are going away for a long while at best, and God knows if you will ever come back—”

“What gives you that idea?”

Vida Lonwe-Magnusson smiled a bit. “You’d never have married an idiot, Olaf, no matter how much money she brought with her. Allow that I’ve gotten to know you over the years, in part, and I follow the news closely, and have studied history. What date have you set for the troops to spontaneously proclaim you Emperor? Tomorrow?”

Surprised despite himself, he gave her a long look. Unflinchingly, the brown eyes in the black face returned it. The slender body in the simple gown stood straight. They were excellent stock on Nyanza, their ancestors as ruthlessly selected by a hostile nature as his had been, although the oceanic planet had prospered afterward more than cold and heavy Kraken ever could. Among his thoughts when he was courting her had been that a crossbreeding should produce remarkable offspring. Warmth touched him from within. “I wanted to spare you anxiety, Vida. Maybe what I actually did was cause you needlessly much. I never doubted your loyalty. But the fewer who knew, the better the odds. Premature disclosure would have been disastrous, as you can surely understand. Now everything is ready.” “And you are really going through with it?”

“You will be Empress, dear, Empress of the stars we never see on Daedalus.”

She sighed. “I’d rather have you … No, self-pity is the most despicable of all emotions. Let me only ask you, Olaf, here at the last moment, why you are doing this.”

“To save the Empire.”

“Truly? You’ve always had the name of a man stern but honorable. You gave your oath.”

“It was the Imperium that broke faith, not we who fought and died while noblemen on Terra sipped their wine and profiteers practiced their corruptions.”

“Is war the single way to reform? What will it do to the Empire? What of us, your people—your family—if you draw away our defenses? You kept this sector for Terra. Now you’ll invite the Merseians to come back and take it.”

Magnusson smiled, stepped forward, laid hands on her waist. “That you needn’t worry about, Vida. You and the children will be perfectly safe. I’ll explain in my proclamation, and details will go into the public data banks. But you need just think. This sector is my power base. Until we’ve occupied and organized significant real estate elsewhere, this is where our resources and reserves are. And the Patrician System is the keystone of it. Nearly every other set of planets in the vicinity is backward, impoverished, or totally useless to oxygen breathers. That’s why the base is here, and the industries that support it. Gerhart’s first thought will be to strike at Daedalus, cut me off from my wellspring. So of course I must leave enough strength behind to make that impossible, as well as to back my campaign. The Merseians will know better than to butt against it. I promise!”

“Well—” She shivered, stiffened, and challenged: “What else do you promise? Why should anybody go over to your cause, besides your devoted squadrons? Oh, I’m not saying you would be a bad ruler. But who can possibly be good enough to justify the price?”

“You have heard me talk, both at home and in public,” he said. “I don’t claim to be a superman or anything like that. Conceivably, a better candidate exists. But where? Who else will make the Imperium strong and virtuous again?”

His voice dropped, became vibrant: “And Vida, I will make up for lives lost, by orders of magnitude. For I will hammer out an end to this senseless, centuries-old conflict with the Roidhunate. The Merseians aren’t monsters. They’re aggressive, yes, but so were we humans in our heyday. They’ll listen to men who are strong, as I’ve shown them I am, and who are reasonable, as I will show them I am. It has already happened, on a smaller scale. The galaxy has ample room for both our races.

“Will not a dream like that appeal to worlds gone weary?”

There was a stillness that lengthened. The sun began to spread itself out in a red-golden arc.

Vida laid her head against her man’s breast. He closed his arms about her. “So be it,” she whispered. “I’ll hold the fort as best I can. You see, I often think it’s foolish, but the fact won’t go away that I love you, nor do I want it to.”

“Good girl,” he said into the fragrance of her hair. “Sure, let’s enjoy a family dinner.”

That would be a chance to re-inspire his sons.