“Steady on,” Linton grinned, savagely. There was a wild, boyish enthusiasm about Bardry he found infectious.
“Right. Toss another smoke over here, and I’ll—good! Now, then. And here, right in the middle of everything, sit you, eating at your conscience and feeling noble as Arion that you turned down the most glorious, grand and golden opportunity any man ever had offered to him on the bended knees of Destiny! Still don’t read me? Why, great stars of space, man, what’s to keep you from buying the Kahani’s offer, taking command of her army, whipping it together, and ramming it right straight down the Arthon’s fat throat! You get him bottled up—he can’t get his fleet past Ophmar without your permission—even a handful of ships could hold the Rift at this narrow spot against half the Universe till the end o’ time!”
“But-”
“But—hell! You break the Arthon’s advance, and you not only save the Kahani from starting a serious war and making a very bad mistake (right now, Hallen’s government has nothing more on her than they do on you)—but you also preserve the peace and security of Hercules, and save the Inner Worlds from being invaded, smashed wide open and looted bare by this pack of howling savages!
“Know a better way to recover your ‘lost’ reputation, than this one—to single-handedly beat off an invading army and save the whole damned Cluster all by yourself? Arion! Dykon Mather’s blood will boil when he hears it was ‘known seditious troublemaker Raul Linton’ who preserved the Provincial Capital from attack. Think either he or that slimy sneak, Pertinax, will have any career left, when, after hounding you out of the Hercules stars and yapping ‘traitor! traitor!’ at your heels, you turn out to be the heroic savior of the Imperial Border? Why, the government will laugh the two of them from here to Meridian, and they’ll be lucky to get jobs as fourth-sub-assistant postal clerks after everything’s done!
“And what about the Kahani? She has a very legitimate gripe, eh? Hallen did her dirty, right? So—once you’re the big man in these stars, don’t you think the Viceroy could be persuaded to hand out a few amnesties here and there, and maybe restore her to her Dais, if you ask it?”
“I think-”
“Think—kak! I know. What ever you’ll want will be yours for the asking; don’t even bother thinking about it. Why, I wouldn’t put it past Hallen to make you Border Commissioner in Mather’s place, and let it get out you were acting as an undercover agent for his department all the while!”
The prospect revolved slowly in Linton’s mind. He felt his pulse begin to hammer and a half-grin formed on his face. Bardry was watching him closely, almost holding his breath.
“But I’d have to—lie to her. Pretend to accept in good faith—pledge my sword to her cause—” he faltered, half to himself.
“Lie? Man, it would not be lying! You’d be doing her the biggest favor possible. You’d be giving her ‘cause’ the best possible boost. You know she doesn’t have a chance in ten of seizing power in Valadon if the government doesn’t want her there. And if she causes a breach in the peace—attacks under arms—that’s all the excuse they need to slap her away in some moth-eaten back country palace for life. And she’s too fine a person for that. Too promising and intelligent a ruler, to be wasted that way. And too damn beautiful a woman!
“All you’d be doing would be taking charge of her affairs as she has asked you to. Of course, you’d be doing the exact opposite of what she wants, but, hell, she’s only a girl anyway. Right now she’s on the brink of making the biggest mistake in her whole life, and the best favor anyone could do would be to jog her out of it. Why the hell do you think that canny old canary-eyed scoundrel picked YOU for the job?”
Raul blinked. Things were coming on too hot and heavy for him to cope with all of these new ideas.
“Sharl—you mean he—?”
“You bet your last munit! He’s her man, of course, to the last drop of blood in his veins. But he knows she’s heading for the wrong move. He picked you because he knew you’d get caught up in her affairs and take a hand—and, being a loyal, patriotic vokarthu, the last thing you’d do would be to lead an army against your own people, no matter how shabbily they’d treated you, or however righteously mad you were at the whole rotten, stinking crew of government bureaucrats! He picked you because he knew you’d jump the right way—only a sub-cretin could fail to get the idea of turning the Kahani’s army against the Arthon’s invasion!”
“If I could be sure ...” Raul muttered.
“Sure? What else? When Omphale and the Border are crawling with thousands of deserters, honestly rotten traitors, turncoats, cashiered and angry ex-Navy men, criminals, cutthroats, outlaws, exiles, incendiaries, revolutionists. God Arion, man, he could have taken his pick without turning around—any one of ’em would jump at the chance to get back at the Government, or the Empire, or Society, or whatever name they like to use to cover up their own failures and mistakes. But—he picked you, a Linton of Bamassa, with loyalty and service to the Province bred into your blood, and brain, and bone, for six solid generations back!”
There was a long minute of silence, while Wilm’s excited words echoed in Raul’s mind. Then he got up slowly. His face was burning, his eyes flashed, the blood was thundering through him, and everything was settled within him.
“I’m sold, Wilm. I’m your man.”
“Good boy!” Wilm sprang up and seized his hand.
“I knew it! I knew you were the right man—that I hadn’t misjudged you, Linton! Now go to it—bust into that council chamber as acknowledged Shakar and give the Arthon seventy kinds of hell. Accuse him of treachery, of betraying his own pact, of conspiring against the Kahani—”
“Wait a minute, Wilm! What are you talking about? I couldn’t make them swallow a wild charge like that, and it would tip our hand and give the whole game away!”
“Before you can count to twenty, the game’ll be shot if you don’t!” Wilm rapped back. “Because the Arthon means real war. Either he gets a pact with the Kahani, or he takes Ophmar by storm. He’s got half his fleet hovering back there in the Rift, waiting for word to attack us here and now!”
“How do you know this?”
“I got close enough to him in the crush to use this—” One lean, brown hand disappeared into Wilm’s dirty cloak, and emerged holding a marvelously compact little “scanner.” “I suspected he’d try a trick like this—it’s just his style. And sure enough, he was wearing a harness strapped to his chest, under those robes: a commo set large and powerful enough to contact the fleet. He thought he could get away with it, because he knew none of the Rilké would recognize a planet-to-ship tightbeam communicator rig even if they saw him with itl”