“Oh, I suppose a bit of it is,” he grumbled.
Her glance dropped. How long the lashes lay, above those finely carven cheekbones. He saw the blood rise in face and bosom. “I felt sure, but I wanted to hear it from you,” she whispered. “We’ve got plenty of noble titles around these days, but damn few noble spirits.”
“Oh, hai, hai,” he protested. “You know better. I lie, I steal, I cheat, I kill, I fornicate and commit adultery, I use shocking language, I covet, and once I had occasion to make a graven image. Now can we relax and enjoy our evening?”
She raised her countenance to his. Her smile brightened. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Why, in your company I’d expect to enjoy exile.”
They had talked about that, what to do if the mission failed but they survived. A court martial would find him guilty of worse than insubordination; defiance of a direct Imperial command was treason. She was an accomplice. The maximum penalty was death, but Flandry feared they would get the “lighter” sentence of life enslavement. He didn’t propose to risk that. He’d steer for a remote planet where he could assume a new identity, unless he decided to seek asylum in the Domain of Ythri or collect a shipful of kindred souls and fare off into the altogether unknown.
Banner had agreed, in pain. She had far more to lose than he did, a mother, a brother and sister and their families, Yewwl and her lifework.
Has she found hope, now, beyond the wreckage of hope? His heart sprang for joy.
She leaned close. Her blush had faded to a glow, her look and voice were steady. “Dominic, dear,” she said, “ever since that hour in the gym, you’ve been the perfect knight. It isn’t necessary any longer.”
VII
Ramnu swelled steadily in the forward screen, until it owned the sky and its dayside radiance drowned stars out of vision. The colors were mostly white upon azure, like Terra’s, though a golden tinge lay across them in this weaker, mellower sunlight. Cloud patterns were not the same, but wider spread and more in the form of bands, spots, and sheets than of swirls; surface features were hidden from space, save as vague shadowiness here and there. The night side glimmered ghostly under moonlight and starlight. Brief, tiny fire-streaks near the terminator betokened monstrous lightning strokes. Brought into being by a magnetic field less than Jovian but stronger than Terran, auroras shook their flags for an incoming man to see above polar darkness.
Flandry sat at the pilot console. Hooligan continued doing the basic navigation and steering herself, but he wanted his hand and judgment upon her, that he might arrive in secret. Besides, he meant to use the instruments in the control section to study the moons and any possible traffic in the system.
He passed close enough by Diris, the innermost, that he could make out Port Lulang, the scientific base. It was a huddle of domes, hemicylinders, masts, dishes, beside a spacefield, in the middle of a large, symmetrical formation oddly like Sullivan’s Hoofprint on Io; little that was Cynthian remained except the name. Otherwise the satellite was nearly featureless. Once it had exceeded his mother world in size; but the supernova whiffed away everything above its metallic core. Probably naught whatsoever would have survived, had not the shrunken bulk of Ramnu given some shielding. As the melted ball cooled to solidity, no asteroids ormeteoroids smote to crater it. Those had been turned into gas, and dissipated with the rest of the nebula among the stars.
Tiglaia showed a measure of ruggedness; it had kept the mass to generate orogenic forces. Elaveli, outermost and largest, bore mountains, sharp-edged as when first they were uplifted.
Flandry probed toward the latter, but got no sight of Port Asmundsen, the industrial base there. He wasn’t observing from the proper angle, and dared not accelerate into a different course lest he be noticed. If his idea about Cairncross was right, these days the expanded facilities included war-craft. Anyway, Banner had confirmed that nothing unusual was apparent from outside. Whatever evil was hatching did so under camouflage or in man-made caverns. Neutrino detectors spoke of substantial nuclear powerplants. Yes, they impress me as being rather more than required by mining operations. Having an exposed planetary core makes the enterprise worthwhile for Hermes—but scarcely this profitable, when the same metals are available closer to home.
As for Dukeston—His look strayed back to Ramnu. The commercial base on the planet had likewise been a minor thing, until lately. A sulfur-rich marshland produced certain biologicals, notably a finegrained hardwood and the antibiotic oricin, effective against the Hermetian disease cuprodermy. They were barely cheaper to obtain here and to ship back than to synthesize. They might not have been were not the nearby Chromatic Hills a well-endowed source of palladium and other minerals.
Why had Dukeston, too, seen considerable recent growth? And why had it, too, become hard to enter and to deal with? True, it and Wainwright Station were separated by five thousand kilometers of continent. A parameter in choosing the site for it had been the desire that its cultural influence reach only the natives in its vicinity, not those whom the xenologists made their principal subjects of study. Nevertheless, people used to flit freely back and forth, often just to visit. General Enterprises used to be generous in supplying the Ramnu Research Foundation with help, equipment, materials.
But under the present director, Nigel Broderick—Well, he explained the niggardliness and the infrequency of contact by declaring that the expansion itself, under adverse conditions, took virtually all the resources at his beck. The undertaking was a part of great Duke Edwin’s far-sighted plan for restoring the glory and prosperity of Hermes. His Grace had ordered stringent security measures against the possibility of sabotage, in these uneasy times. No exceptions could be made, since a naive scientist might innocently pass information to the wrong persons. If this attitude seemed exaggerated, that was because you did not know the ramifications of the whole situation. His Grace alone did that, and ours was not to question him.
Which I aim to do, if time and chance allow, Flandry thought. Oh, I am a bad, rebellious boy, I am. I actually nourish a few doubts about the wisdom and benevolence of statesmen.
Hooligan set down with admirable smoothness, considering. For a few minutes Flandry was addressing the hastily summoned ground control officer. (He was a young fellow named Ivan Polevoy, whose primary job was electronician.) The station spacecraft occupied the sole proper connection to the interior which the minuscule field possessed. It would be necessary to send a car for the newcomers.
Having spoken his thanks and requested that no word of this go out—“Dr. Abrams will tell you why, in due course”—Flandry made his routine check of guardian devices: irrespective of the fact that Chives would stay aboard till it was certain that no backup would be needed. Meanwhile his glance roved around outside. Port Wainwright consisted of several conjoined buildings, whose low profiles and deep foundations were designed for this world. A pole displayed a flag of gaudy, fluorescent stripes. Beyond, the landscape reached tremendous.
Niku stood at early afternoon, ruddy-aureate in an opalescent heaven; its light suffused the hazy air in a way to remind of autumn on Terra. Nothing else was like home. Broad, gray-green, a river flowed past more swiftly than it should, casting spray that lingered shining above rocks and current-whirls. The woods on the opposite shore were not dense, though they stretched out of sight. Squat brown boles sprouted withy-like branches with outsize leaves of cupped form and hues of dark olive, amber, or russet. A slow, heavy breeze sent the stalks rippling about and stirred the underbrush.