But we, the soldiers of the shrouded bases, are unanimous in our desire to continue the struggle for independence. We cannot violate the terms of Sanahadra without dooming our people (those who have been spared) and so duty demands that we honor the treaty no matter what our feelings. Yet we are the soldiers who were not at Sanahadra to surrender. We have not signed the treaty and we will not sign the treaty. Though it takes us countless millennia, we shall be the Auditor General of the Peace. We are the Overseer. We reavow the promise made by our forebears to defend the Helmarian virtues forever against whatever fate an emperor shall impose upon us. We weep tears of fire that will, from the humiliation of Sanahadra, forge a new choice of weaponry. Peace can be as sharp as any sword. Peace shall be our new definition of war.
—From The Hidden Document of Reaffirmation, 7981 GE
This was the third leg of their journey. Already Hiranimus Scogil (alias Murek Kapor) and his student Eron Osa had spent fifty-four watches aboard the cramped cargo ship. Now they had docked for change of crew and exchange of cargo at a cometary station some 570 microleagues from the star Ragmuk of the Thousand Suns, which was only a member of the Thousand Suns by ancient Imperial Decree, lying, as it did, on the wrong side of the Helmar Rift. Still to come were four more stops and thirty-six more watches of jumping along the Main Arm just to get as far as Sewinna. Then they were going to have to debark and shop for a transfer to the Periphery. Hiranimus was already feeling the need for money sticks he didn’t have.
Their hyperfreighter’s nature was to spurt and then linger, taking on passengers only as a sideline. The Skipper’s frugal choice of supply station at the interplanetary rim of the Ragmuk System was designed in the interest of energy conservation—the station was moving almost at rest relative to the velocity of their starting jump, and it was high in its star’s gravity well, a piece of citified home built into a tundra of ice and sludge.
Ragmuk had been settled these seven millennia past, not by Helmarians but by Imperial troops of the Stars&Ship laying out a forward base at the beginning of the Wars Across the Marche. Previous to the wars it had been a slumbering Military Resupply Outpost, lacking government colonial subsidies and too poor to support any kind of thriving colony on its own. But it was high ground to the Imperial General Staff: it looked outward over a roil of new stars across the Helmar Rift toward the original Thousand Suns. This was the observation point from which suddenly attentive warrior-emperors had measured the panoramic threat of the Helmarian people. To a true Helmarian the constellation which included Ragmuk was called the Dangling Blade.
Hiranimus Scogil was Helmarian, a peculiar loyalty.
He hit the oval door of the cabin with a shoulder, intending to unjam its stuck hydraulic hinges—not even the basic luxury of a robodoor here. He poked his head inside, ducking the pipes, looking for his charge. Their cabin was “shelf space” on one of the catwalks that circled the motors. It was about arm-wide and held only two skinny bunks, one on top of the other. “Wake up, Eron. The Skipper has granted us a watch worth of leave with the callous admonition that if we aren’t reboarded in time, the ship will depart without us— taking our baggage with it.”
“I can pack,” said Eron sleepily. “Nothing I can’t carry on my back.”
“No, we leave our stuff here. Just stay close to ship’s dock and watch the time. I’ll be leaving you alone for a stint. Business.”
He had schemes on his mind that needed attention, and he felt that the boy was old enough to wander alone. Nevertheless, when the youth was loose in the terminal, Hiranimus didn’t go about his affairs right away but kept the boy under a watchful, if distant, eye. He relaxed. Eron seemed to be fine, a spirited sightseer with his nose plastered to a viewport, drinking in the line of berthed hyperships tethered to the great pier that rose pallidly against its astral background. Ragmuk itself was no brighter than a minor star.
Scogil refocused on his own concerns and went looking for an ultrawave terminal. On a station whose whole rationale was interstellar traffic, sending a message to the Oversee would be as easy as praying. But a reply? Directives to lower agents like Scogil came down from mobile relay ships staffed by a priesthood of aides who weren’t in direct communication with the Oversee themselves. The Fortresses, wherever they were, had maintained such strict ultrawave silence for sixty-eight centuries that they had simply vanished Into Helmarian mythology.
One could report to the Overseer in elaborate code, one could warn them of an emergency—but the communication was all one way. The Overseers accepted Personal Capsules but never sent one out. Two-way handshaking was taboo. It was a conversation with a God who often left you to answer your own questions, who answered obliquely if he answered at all, and then only at a time when he felt it auspicious, all transcribed into the runes of some cabalistic ritual that you might or might not be able to decipher. If you wanted a twoway conversation you talked to a lower priest. Cumbersome but safe. In wartime such a convoluted procedure, if maintained, would prove dangerously slow.
Back on Agander or Mowist, where prolonged transmissions might have attracted attention, Scogil had not dared pursue matters to the point of clarification. He was used to having the authority of the final judgment himself, the doubt of the lonely decision, the act based on incomplete analysis. It left questions; he was anxious to address incomplete concerns. It was much safer to do that out here where a high level of dispatches was normal. But he really didn’t expect to get answers until he was recalled to a Fortress himself. What he needed now was an immediate bundle of cash sticks.
Hiranimus found an ultrawave utility three floors above the main deck of the station inside the office of a small freight brokerage. They warned him about local hyperspace storms kicking up a ruckus but plugged his cash stick into the connector anyway. Being out in nowhere’s boondocks seemed to have its disadvantages.
Behind a privacy barrier he made his interstellar connection—but the handshaking went out of time/phase. Ultrawave always went on the kibosh when the handshake tried to acknowledge the message before it was sent. A storm. It was a nuisance. The more the autocorrect tried to mitigate the storm by probabilizing a region of space, the more the message fluttered in time, and vice versa. He waited and tried again. During the second attempt the timing stayed on but locked onto the noise—even a clutch of error-correction algorithms he had stored in his fam could make no sense of the garbled reply.
Then—when he did get through—it was because a second agent far above the storm had taken the call and was rerouting... That roboclerk took the Galaxy’s own languorous time about tracking down his (new) boss. The ultrawave charges were gulping his limited funds. Scogil’s mood turned rancid. His contact, after being reached, was also in bad humor having been interrupted from some vital activity he did not want to discuss. Because of the transmission difficulties the conversation proceeded at a high-redundancy, low-information rate full of frustrating pauses. Ultrawave, because of its probabilistic “speed” of transmission, could deliver packets to Personal Capsules far better than it could modulate a handshaking conversation. That he needed handshaking meant that he had to go through a very low-level contact.
He came out of the ultrawave communication booth in a chastised and angry mood. How could he have created such a mess? It seemed that his contacts had misunderstood almost everything he had sent them from Agander and Mowist. Or else they had forwarded his requests to the Oversee, and, in its own good time, for its own inscrutable reasons, the top Smythosians had made other plans for him. The Ragmuk System was a ridiculously inconvenient place from which to change one’s whole itinerary.