“Sure it is. But I’m not certain we actually used it. At least, I doubt if Amundsen will put it in his report. He’ll be too embarrassed.”
“Let’s go,” Krabbe ordered.
The drive was engaged. The Enterprise shot off into interstellar space, to look for pastures new.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Holding the traditional oak rod in his right hand, for the second time in his life Roncie Reaul Northrop intoned the words that put him in fealty to Karl Henry Krabbe and Boris Oliver Bouche, Partners. They held similar oak rods. They promised to protect him and to treat him well. Remuneration was not mentioned. By custom that resulted from some vague notion of ‘reciprocal good will’ that was supposed to arise between master and bondperson.
Northrop knew what was coming next. The short ceremony over, its record safely locked in the ship’s files (alongside the first identical ceremony) it was customary for the master to give his new slave a moral homily. This one would not be like the first. Karl Krabbe put on the pained and anxious expression Northrop had seen so many times when he was about to give someone a dressing-down.
“You do understand, Roncie, that this time it’s real? This time you can’t go through the form then change your mind like you did before. Conduct like that is bad for you, bad for us, bad for everybody. Now I’m going to be straight with you. I know you resented it when we stopped you leaving us. I suppose you imagine we were thinking only of ourselves, but that’s not true! After all, we can always get another nuke man. No, we had your welfare in mind just as much, if not more so, as ours. We take our oaths seriously, even when you don’t. We’re responsible for you, you’re like family. Let’s face it, where were you when we recruited you? In a bar, half drunk, with no money and no prospects. A drifter and a bum. You may be a fine engineer, but when it comes to taking charge of your own life you’re hopeless. Without us to take care of you, you’ll never amount to anything.”
Northrop felt uncomfortable. Krabbe and Bouche were adept at the avuncular act. But he didn’t like to admit that there was something to what Krabbe had said. He liked to think of himself as an individual.
Then why had the partners’ offer seemed such a haven, that first time?
Krabbe was finishing his speech. “So whatever criticisms you have of us, I want you to voice them now.”
He said this with an air of fairness rather than confrontation. Northrop ground his teeth.
“I don’t like people who are prepared to extinguish entire races for the sake of profit!” he blurted out.
Krabbe blinked, as if taken aback.
“Maybe you just don’t understand business.”
Boris Bouche, who up to now had sat by saying nothing, stirred and intervened. “If you have such high and mighty ideals, Roncie, why did you cooperate with the rehydration project? You could have sat in the brig and refused to have anything to do with it.”
“I was under bond,” Northrop muttered.
“So what? If it meant that much to you, you could have refused orders and taken the consequences.”
“I did do something,” Northrop said defensively. “I sent a warning to the Stellar Commission. I had hoped they would stop the project before any harm was done.”
“Did you? I looked at the communications log. It has no record of your transmission. The log can’t be falsified. The only way it doesn’t register a call is if you fail to contact the destination before sending. You transmitted blind rather than risk discovery, didn’t you? Your message had maybe a five per cent chance of being received.”
Bouche licked his lips, a wolf getting ready to pounce. “Your character is weak, Northrop, as Partner Krabbe says. It’s neither one thing nor the other, neither good nor bad. You’re incapable of making decisions and sticking to them. You need the discipline of the firm to give you strength of purpose. While you’re with us you have the opportunity to develop and strengthen your personal qualities. In fact, we insist on it. Remember that this is a two-way relationship. We can renounce the bond too. If you disappoint us again, we may have to do that. In which case I have no doubt you will end up as a derelict.”
Northrop was silent. Better not to disclose how he had tried to sabotage the project a second time by warning the dehydrates. That had not really influenced events, anyway.
“I did accomplish something. The Commission will have to sort matters out, accommodating both sides, though I suppose in the end that will mean giving either the lobsters or the dehydrates a new world and moving them there.”
Bouche propped his head on his hand, his lopsided smile becoming almost sad. “You really think so? Governments are very ethical, of course. They always do the right thing. The harm wrought by those wicked gogetters has to be put right! Let me explain how it will be done. Shelley has looked at the legalities of it. He thinks they point to the lobsters keeping a watered Tenacity and the dehydrates being relocated to another desert planet. That’s a very expensive option. The decision is too big to be made in situ, aboard the Invicta. It will have to be made by some committee back home. Also the project will have to be costed and funded, and that’s a Treasury matter. So the issue gets batted back and forth for a while. Eventually, as a first step, the Treasury releases funds for a fact-finding mission. It rushes to Tenacity, only to report that it’s too bad, nothing can be done, the dehydrates are extinct. No further funds are required.
“See how it works? Delay is the bureaucrat’s best friend. Anyway half the dehydrates are dead already even as we speak. Who cares? They are an artificial lifeform which would never have evolved by itself. The lobsters made them for a specific purpose, and that purpose is over. So you see, Roncie, your little act of treason, feeble as it was, didn’t alter a thing. We’ve done our job. We’ve given the lobsters what they wanted, and we’ve got their signatures on the contract. There’ll be a good return on it eventually, and there’s a share for you too.”
There was a slight shifting sensation as the Enterprise changed course yet again, seeking to shake off the Invicta’s pursuit that would now be taking place.
Northrop’s heart sank. The pursuit had little or no chance of tracking them down, and it would not persist for long.
But every day it lasted lessened the dehydrates’ already slender chances of survival. His mind filled with images of the brave desert warriors, struggling to beat the odds stacked against them.
Boris Bouche was pure cynic. He assumed that everyone was as unprincipled as himself, including the Stellar Commission and all other arms of government. But for the sake of the green men of Tenacity, the blue men, the black men, the men of every colour on the small planet, fighting and striving with all the courage and intelligence they could muster, he hoped that Bouche, for once, was wrong.
Also by Barrington J. Bayley
Age of Adventure
Annihilation Factor
Collision with Chronos
Empire of Two Worlds
Sinners of Erspia
Star Winds
The Fall of Chronopolis
The Forest of Peldain
The Garment of Caean
The Grand Wheel
The Great Hydration