“I had ordered Agent Solin to go to Era 4 and destroy the body of Andro. I thought she would immediately try to... you see, there’s an emotional attachment... seemed logical that...”
“Do you remember your history, Sarrz? What in its simplest sense, was cancer?”
“Why... uncontrolled cell growth, starting with one rebel cell and—”
“Any Agent, Sarrz, equipped with an Agent’s ship, is very, very close to being impregnable. We are dealing with an unbalanced Agent, for the first time in socionetic history. You would have fixed it so that she would have returned to that place and found this Andro destroyed. Revenge is a typical emotion in an unbalanced mind. What, then, would keep her from using the ship and her mobility to intrude in the most destructive possible way on all probability frames within our reach?”
Sarrz blanched. “But...”
“One rebel cell in our structure, Sarrz Remember that. If we are not to lost twenty-two sister galaxies, we must eliminate her. Possibly you think this is an alarmist reaction. Agent Calna ceased to be predictable when she prejudiced the entire operation in Era four. Angered and hurt she can force twenty-two cultures off their extrapolated pattern. Saying that she retains enough loyalty to refrain from doing that is mere wishful thinking. I want every available Field Team briefed and assigned to the planet Era four calls Zeran. I want a trap that she won’t see on the way in, and can’t slip out of. Is that clear?”
“It is clear,” Sarrz said with an effort.
“In the meantime proceed with your plan of presenting Shain, through Solin and the team on Rael, with proof of the death of his youngest son. But warn Solin not to kill Andro. Not under any circumstances. Once we have the girl, Andro can be safely killed.”
When Deralan had been young, he had not feared space flight. He stood as a guest on the bridge of the flagship of the police fleet returning to Rael. He was returning to report to Shain the utter destruction of the remnants of Andro’s rebel force. And the sixth escape of Andro himself.
Deralan was a realist. The execution would be swift, and relatively painless. For a time he had considered lying to Shain. But lying led straight to the rooms of evil repute under the main palace, and there Deralan would scream until Shain found the truth and permitted him to die.
In his youth he had accepted the great, roaring, shuddering, thundering ships as a part of life that would never change. Now he knew of the great fields where tens of thousands of the ships moldered away, as no one had the skill to repair them. If the drive failed in flight, the crew and passengers were dead. It was that simple.
And many had failed. Abilities had been lost, somehow. He could see the sign of those lost abilities in the puffy face of the captain of the flag ship now standing before the vast control board, watching his officers complete the intricate procedure for landing. Deralan felt a vast bitterness. They were like monkeys firing a gun. The monkey pulled the trigger and the gun went bang. Ask the monkey to explain the principle of expansion of gasses. The officers pulled switches in the order prescribed in the space flight manuals. The ship landed. It was that simple. If one switch was pulled and somewhere in the guts of the ship a coil failed, that was too bad, and very very fatal.
Routine repairs could be made. New tubes, oxygenation equipment — things on that level. But what made the ship take off, accelerate to ten lights, deaccelerate and land — what induced the normal gravity under any acceleration — what force adapted the view screens to the acceleration — all those things were mysteries, lost in the ancient past when men were wiser, stronger.
Deralan thought sourly that Andro had not been very farsighted. All he had to do was wait. He could die knowing that within a thousand years there would be no more ships that would function. With no more ships, the House of Galvan would rule one planet rather than a galaxy. Each inhabited planet would be isolated, left to go its own way, find its own answers, maybe win its way back to space. The ships would die and Empire would die with them.
Now the face of Rael was so close that it filled all of the view screen, the tiny drift of cloud appearing flat against the surface. Deralan’s mind kept returning to the report the three men had given him. He could not suppress a thin eerie feeling of awe and concern. “I saw him. He seemed to be hurt. He had a weapon. As I aimed, he dropped out of sight. We went back there. There was no place for him to get out. There was no hole for him to drop through. He was just... gone.”
Shain would not be amused by that story. Three of them had seen it. Deralan had isolated the three who had seen it happen. After considering all sides of the question he had killed them. His power over his men was that of life and death, with no questions asked. Their eye-witness account was an embarrassing factor, an unnecessary factor in the equation. Deralan felt no regret, and no satisfaction over it.
He knew that he did not dare lie to Shain, and yet he wished to continue to live. It was impasse.
The fleet landed, a far smaller fleet than had set out in pursuit of Andro. A guard of honor awaited Deralan as he disembarked. They formed a hollow square around him. Deralan smiled. Shain hadn’t been thinking of honor when he sent the guard. Shain had been thinking of escape.
Metal-clad heels struck the paving in harsh cadence as the twelve guards escorted Deralan down the center of the Avenue of Kings. The once-proud street had become a place of bazaars. Rael was a wise and sour old planet. To it had come the dregs of a thousand planets, the sycophants, the cheats, with their smell of depravity, their swaggering insolence. One did not walk alone at night on Rael.
The aimless crowds opened to let the guard through. Some of them jeered at the guards and then fell suddenly silent as they recognized Deralan, feared almost as much as Shain himself and his elder sons.
A drunk reeled too close to the guard. The man at the front left corner of the hollow square reversed his ceremonial short-sword with a practised gesture and smashed the man’s skull with the heavy grip.
They marched through the stink of the bazaars, past the crones that vended remedies for every ill, past the street girls in their rags, past men who turned with jerky quickness to hide a wanted face from the keen eye of Deralan. The main palace towered at the end of the Avenue of Kings. They marched through three gates so huge that the men did not have to change formation. Only the fourth gate was so narrow that they shifted to a column of twos. Deralan was midway along the column.
Just as he passed through the gate a screaming girl came racing from the side, her eyes wide with panic. A bearded man chased her. In her fright she ran directly into Deralan, staggering him. The guards cursed and shoved her roughly back into the grasp of the bearded man. Deralan fingered the object the girl had thrust into his hand. It had a soft texture. In the great main hall of the palace he risked a glance at it. For a moment he did not know what it was. When he at last understood what it was, his mind reeled with the shock, and his mouth went dry.
But Deralan was a realist and an opportunist. They took him back through the corridors to the private apartments of Shain. Shain was a ruin of what had been an enormous, powerful man. Years of debauch had left him looking like a pig carved of cold lard.
“Your report told me nothing,” Shain said.
Deralan straightened up from the ceremonial bow. “Forgive me,” he said. “I possibly took a childish pleasure in anticipating this moment.”
“I have some childish pleasures waiting, if I don’t like your report.”
Deralan bowed again, advanced and handed the object to Shain. “My proof, your imperial majesty.”
Shain unfolded the soft square. He stared at it. Then he threw back his great head and began to laugh. He laughed until tears squeezed out of the small eyes and rolled down the white heavy cheeks: Deralan took a deep breath. He knew that he was out of danger.