No member of the gentry had ever made major so quickly in the imperial service. Most nobles didn't.
Despite his naked ambition, rapid rise, and lack of noble forebears, Major Tagurt Meksorli was not widely resented among the ambitious young officers of the division, mostly nobles. Partly it was his matter-of-fact personality, blunt but friendly. And partly it was his parties.
Tagurt Meksorli's town place was in the rugged Anan Hills, which overlooked Ananporu from the west. Veeri Thoglakaveera had never been there before. Hovercar roads twisted over and through them like goat trails, past homes expensive but mostly not large, cantilevered from plunging slopes on shelves. The headlights of Veeri's taxi flashed across the trunks of great trees, frequently vine-clad, that shouldered and overhung the roads. Their beams swept thick growths of lustrous ground vines protecting the slopes. Flowering shrubs scented the night, overriding the constant undersmell of moist and loamy mould. Insects and other small creatures peeped, buzzed, ratcheted; sprinklers hissed quietly in the darkness. An occasional bird chirped aimlessly as if half awake, or tried a vague and tentative half bar of song.
Veeri noticed it all only absently. Mostly he was thinking about what this party might mean to him; something, he was sure. And wondering whether anyone there would know of his purported impotence.
For a minute the road ran along the top of a ridge, the houses on both sides with their backs to it facing outward. Houses and trees allowed Veeri only glimpses of the overviews-on one side eastward over the city, on the other westward across a span of night-hidden plantations that spread to the horizon, broken at intervals by the concentrated lights of villages and towns. Behind one home, half a dozen cars were parked tightly to conserve space. A post bore the address, the symbols a vertical column beneath its small light.
"That's it, sir," the cabbie announced as he pulled up and stopped.
"You'll wait," Veeri said.
"Of course, sir," the man replied, then added almost apologetically, "per the rate schedule you've noticed on the back of my seat, sir."
He'd turned as he'd said it, and Veeri noticed now the small mark on his forehead. Even on Varatos, Veeri knew, more than a few of the lesser nobility were down on their luck. But seeing one of them like this irritated him. It seemed indecent of the man to display his ill fortune in public.
The house was one story high in back, but getting from the cab, he could see that that one story was the topmost of at least two on the downhill side. The party wasn't loud; he couldn't hear it at all as he walked to the door. A man wearing corporal's insignia stood guard there, eyeing his Klestronu Marines uniform with its gold colonel's hammers on the collar, the insignia used by imperial as well as the separate planetary forces.
"Good evening, sir," the corporal said. "Let me announce you, if you please, sir."
"Colonel Veeri Thoglakaveera."
"Thank you, sir."
The corporal spoke it into a small grill on the doorpost. Within four or five seconds the door opened, and now Veeri could hear quiet music and the murmur of voices from somewhere inside. A sublieutenant stood there, looking impossibly young. "Colonel! Do come in! It's a pleasure to greet you. Major Meksorli and the others have been looking forward to your arrival."
He ushered him down a hallway. At the other end they entered a room as wide as the house, which was fairly wide. It was nothing special, nor were its furnishings; it was the view that made it expensive. The east-facing wall was glass, opening onto a narrow strip of balcony. Beyond its polished bronze railing, Ananporu and its suburbs spread below them like a field of scintillant, multi-colored jewels. The cab had climbed higher than he'd thought, Veeri realized-they had to be more than a 1,000 feet above the city. He pulled his eyes away, to the major and captain who'd gotten to their feet. The captain he knew-Alivii Simnasaveesi, who'd delivered the invitation. The other, a rather small major who projected an unusual sense of power, had an unmarked forehead, and Veeri realized that this man was his host.
The captain introduced them, and Meksorli shook Veeri's hand. "Colonel Thoglakaveera! It's a pleasure to have you here. Would you care for a drink? We can cover most tastes."
Veeri chose whiskey on ice. He preferred to stay in control of his mind and tongue, and with whiskey on ice he could better monitor and limit his intake. While the serving man got his drink, Veeri glanced around at the other guests. They were all looking at him, but with no sign of sympathy or amusement. Only interest.
One, the oldest, wore colonel's gold hammers, like his own. Two others were majors, both older than Meksorli. The rest were captains and full lieutenants, except for the sublieutenant who'd served as door greeter. There were no women. Apparently no more guests were expected; at any rate Veeri'd been guided to the last of the chairs arranged in an oval.
It occurred to him that he was not only a guest; he was the program. His chair was at one end of the oval, and everyone was facing him.
"So, Colonel," said Meksorli, "what was it like on the alien world?"
Veeri was a willing liar, but not a compulsive one. This time he told the truth pretty much as he knew it. "Basically," he said, "it isn't so different from Varatos or Klestron. The gravity's stronger, but not oppressively strong for a man in decent condition. And planetwide it's cooler, rather like Kathvoktos or Chithvoktos, but we were practically on the equator, so the climate was quite comfortable.
"Probably the biggest difference was the population; there wasn't much. The biggest town had only about fifteen thousand, something like that."
The reactions were mixed; some looked surprised, some puzzled, some eager. "How do they get by with so few?" someone asked. "How do they maintain their technology? Their civilization?"
Veeri began to warm up at that: he enjoyed being looked to as the expert. "It seems that the world we found-it's called Terfreya-is a very minor planet. Not even a minor associate in the Confederation; it's what they call a 'trade world.' They raise a single export crop there, a spice, and beyond that some livestock and food crops for local use. Most of the planet's a wilderness, complete with large beasts of prey."
"Damn!" said another. "We could make a lot better use of it than that."
There was voiced agreement. Then the Vartosu colonel spoke. "I heard you had some hard fighting. What was that like?"
"It's-not easy to describe, but hard is an understatement. Of course, we were only a light brigade. And there's a lot we never did learn about the forces we fought. Even the local officials knew very little about them. Some, the initial force, were cadets who'd been training on Terfreya. They were fearless and full of tricks, but their weaponry was inferior. We'd killed a lot of them, and markedly reduced their attacks, when another force, not cadets, arrived from somewhere. This was after a couple of months. These were also extremely good troops, but they were a very light force-no weapons a man couldn't carry, except gunships. They did have gunships, though not as fast or as powerful as ours.
"We'd made captives of some local officials-had them on the flagship under instrumented interrogation for months-and they knew nothing at all about this new force. We pretty much decided they must have landed from outside the system-the new troops, that is. Maybe for training, like the cadets. Though how they did it without being noticed is a bit of a puzzler. The assumption is that they entered real space far enough out in the system that their emergence waves were too weak to pick up. That sort of thing can happen, with careless astrogation. Meanwhile the navy'd impounded Terfreya's homing beacon to study its technology, and its absence could have warned the Confederation ship that something might be wrong. Then they could have used a blindside approach, and with enough luck, landed undetected.