"Run on me again like that, y'clottin' guppy, and I'll turn you loose. Come on, salmon. Come on back down. Come on."
Suddenly the salmon broke water, a silver arc flashing in the gray spring sunlight, and came downriver.
The curses doubled as the man touched the wind button on his reel, one thumb held on the reel itself to prevent overwinding.
The meter-long fish torpedoed directly at the fisherman, and he stepped hastily back, swayed as his rib-booted foot slipped on a rock and he almost went under.
Then the salmon was past him and running again.
He flipped the reel switch and now let line run out, braking with an already seared thumb on the line.
Mahoney cut the power on the combat car and it dropped gently to the moss-covered ground. He stepped out of the wind-screened sledge and eyed the grove of soaring redwoods with extreme skepticism. Perfectly safe, the logical side of his mind said. The other side, the side that had kept him alive on half a thousand primitive worlds, insisted there be ghosties and ghoulies and four-pawed critters with appetites inside.
As usual, he listened to that part of his mind and fished a combat harness from the back of the seat, slid the shoulderstraps on, and buckled the belt. On it hung a mini-willygun, a grenade pouch, and his combat knife.
"So if I'm wrong I'll feel like a clottin' fool," he sub-vocalized, and grabbed the small day pack from the floor of the car.
Looking cautiously about him, he paced very deliberately forward into the trees.
And, quite suddenly, standing in front of him was a small, bowlegged, muscular man wearing the mottled brown uniform of a guardsman and a rakishly-tilted bellman's cap with a chin-strap. The soldier's willygun was slung across his back.
Held in his right hand, at a forty-five-degree port-arms, was a fourteen-inch-long knife that looked like a machete, but its blade flared to double its size at the tip. The soldier's left hand held, almost caressingly, the back of the knife.
"Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Mahoney. Mercury Corps. On His Imperial Majesty's service," Mahoney said, being very careful not to move, trying to remember when and why he'd had himself hypnoconditioned to speak Gurkhali.
The soldier was perfectly motionless. Very cautiously Mahoney extended his right hand, palm down.
The guard took his left hand from the knife and unclipped his remote sender. Half-stepped forward and ran the computer's pickup over the back of Mahoney's wrist.
The computer read the implant and fed it back to the guard company's watch-computer. A beat, and then one light glowed green.
The Gurkha stepped back and brought his kukri to the salute. Mahoney returned it and walked deeper into the woods.
He was very, very glad there hadn't been a glitch—he'd once been permitted to attend the praetorian unit's birthday and seen one soldier, no taller than the meter-and-a-half trooper who'd challenged Mahoney, lop a bullock's head off with one stroke, using the long ceremonial knife.
He half grinned, remembering the drunk that had followed the religious ceremonies and the blessing of the unit's weapons. Tradition. How long, he wondered, had the short mountain men from Earth's Nepal served as soldiers'? Perhaps, he thought, longer than even the Eternal Emperor.
And then the roar of the river was loud in his ears, and he stepped through the scrub bush and stood looking down the sloping bank at the fisherman.
It was quite a sight. The man had the rod held high and horsed back. The salmon writhed in the rolling water around the man's knees.
"Ah, if I had one more hand...get in here, you clottin' fish."
The problem. Mahoney decided, was that the fish wouldn't fit the landing net the fisherman held in his other hand. The fisherman turned the chill air a little bluer, dropped the net to dangle from its waist-strap, pulled from his back pocket something Mahoney thought was remarkably like a sap, and smacked the fish.
The salmon convulsed and went limp.
"That's all you needed," the fisherman said with satisfaction. "A priest to administer the last rights."
He swung the creel from his back, opened the top, and started to stuff the overlength fish into it.
"Nice to see a man happy at his work," Mahoney said dryly.
The fisherman froze, then turned and eyed Mahoney with a very cold eye.
"Is that any way to speak to me?"
Mahoney ceremoniously doffed his beret and knelt. "You are of course correct. Accept my most humble apologies, and allow me simultaneously to apologize for disturbing your vacation and to greet His Imperial Majesty, the Eternal Emperor Lord of Half the Universe and All Its Worshipful People, including that half-dead aquatic in your purse."
The Eternal Emperor snorted and began wading toward the bank.
"I have always appreciated," Mahoney went on, "serving a man who, in spite of his position, appreciates the simple pleasures of life."
The Emperor stopped dead in the calf-deep water.
"Simple, you clottin' idiot? Do you know what this clottin' salmon cost me? Three hundred years, you oaf. First I must convince Earth's government that granting me a small vacation spot would in no way interfere with their local half-wit ancestral policies."
He clambered out of the river and began walking toward the campsite.
"Next I purchase from the province of Oregon the whole clottin' Umpqua River. Then I purchase the towns up and down the river and relocate each and every yahoo to the world of his choice with a proper pension.
"Then I spend several million credits cleaning up the pollution and programming these clottin' fish to swim up it to lay their clottin' eggs.
"Nah. Do not give me a simple."
Mahoney followed the Emperor, smiling to himself. It was obvious the Emperor was having an excellent vacation. He hoped he'd be as happy once he finished Sten's report.
It was quite a campsite. A low, staked-down vee-tent almost into the bushes. A half-decayed log had been muscled up to a flat boulder. Stones had been piled nearby to form a three-sided fireplace.
Other than that, there were no signs that the Emperor had been camping in this spot for more than fifty years.
In the fireplace was tinder under a teepee-shaped collection of wood that went from twigs to some fairly sizable logs. The Eternal Emperor walked out of the brush, whistling softly. He was deftly bending a green sapling into a snowshoe-shaped grill. As he passed the fireplace he took out a disposable fire-stick, fired it. and pitched it at the wood. It roared into a four-foot pillar of flame.
"See that. Colonel? Good firebuilding. Woodsy lore and about half a gallon of petroleum. Now we wait for the fire to burn down, and I clean this here monster."
Mahoney watched curiously as the Emperor took out a small knife and deftly cut the fish from below its gills to venthole. He carried the fish guts into the brush, then walked over to the riverbank to wash the now degutted salmon.
"Why don't you have one of the Gurkhas do that, sir?" Mahoney wondered.
"You'll never make a fisherman. Colonel, if you ask that question." Almost without a beat: "Well?"
"The rumors were right," Mahoney said, suddenly sober.
"Drakh!" the Emperor swore as his hands, seemingly moving with their own will, slit the salmon down its back and split it neatly into two halves.
"The samples the Mantis team procured from the Eryx Cluster match, according to preliminary analysis, all the capabilities of imperium-X."
"You can ruin a man's first vacation in ten years, you know, Colonel."
"It's worse. Not only is this X-mineral able to replace Imperium-X for shielding purposes, but it evidently occurs in close to a free state. Of the four worlds surveyed by my team, this X-mineral is present on at least three of them."