With that end to the conversation, hurried as it was, he rose, thanked the spider monkey, and left the audience room with Arctus. They passed through curtains of draped light: mauve, lavender, lilac, finally effervescent lemon.
Suddenly they were in the space-torsion room.
A nine-year-old boy was on duty, a son of one of the crew who had been given the job much as he might have been given a toy. With an eager sense of ceremony he presented Archier with the message, which had come in word form.
It was a directive, engraved in glowing letters on a sheet of yellow parchment. Archier murmured his thanks and scanned it.
After the addressing and classification codes came a terse instruction.
ESCORIA SECTOR IN CONDITION REBELLION. PROCEED IN FULL MAJESTY, OBJECT SUPPRESSION, CONDITION AUTONOMY. ENABLING DATA WILL FOLLOW.
Admiral Archier gazed at the parchment for some time, allowing the key phrases to sink in. Full Majesty. That meant he was to recognise no constraint on the deployment of the fleet’s resources. Condition Autonomy. That meant that the fleet has the legal standing of a sovereign state. In theory it implied that the High Command had lost its power to act or had even collapsed. He, Archier, could behave as though he were the government of the Empire, responsible to no one.
If the rebellion in Escoria could not be dealt with, he could choose to obliterate all human life there—and was probably expected to do so. Instead of punishing the planet below by destroying a city or two, he could, likewise, annihilate it.
The disintegration of the Empire as an organised and effective entity was plainly proceeding apace.
He passed the parchment to Arctus. The elephant took the bottom edge in the tip of its trunk and raised the sheet before its face.
“Ah. This is promotion of sorts, sir.”
“Is it?” Archier sounded doleful. “It bodes a less happy set of circumstances to me.”
Ruefully he thought of the tax reprieve which now had inadvertently befallen Rostia. The dignity of the Empire would best be served, he thought, if Ten-Fleet were to leave without warning, as abruptly as it had come.
“Come Arctus,” he sighed, “let’s to the Command Room.”
Minutes passed. And then the web of orbits surrounding Rostia faded from the diagrammatisation screens, though the thousand or so satellites were expendable and remained, a replacement gift for the planet that, Admiral Archier feared, had slipped for the time being from the Empire’s grasp.
As the fleet withdrew it was simultaneously reassembling itself into interstellar flight formation, gathering itself together like a school of fish, while each ship geared up its feetol drive. The path of exit from Rostia’s solar system was nearly parallel to the orbital plane, and as the fleet passed close to the primary gas giant a cursory message reached Archier from the environs scan officer.
“Methorian ship descending towards gas giant, sir.”
Archier accepted an imaging fix. He saw the alien vessel, a great bulky pod caught within a baroque-looking cradle, and watched as it slipped into the swirling clouds of the huge planet.
“I’m hazy on recognition, Arctus. What is it?”
“It’s a Methorian cargo carrier,” Arctus informed him.
“Oh,” Archier murmured, incurious as to whether the alien settlement was merely an outpost or even a fully developed planetary society. As with several other alien interstellar empires, the Methorian empire interpenetrated the human one but had practically no contact with it. Given the scale of interstellar distances, and the variety of worlds, there could be little concept of exclusive territory as between oxygen-breathing humans, hydrogen-breathing methanogens, salines, high-temperature acidophiles, and so forth, all inhabiting types of planet of no value to the others.
So the Methorian presence in a system from which the Empire was, for the time being, forced to retreat, signified nothing. The gas giant flipped from the screen, and at the same time from Archier’s notice. In its place he saw the local star field, almost a cluster in its own right, lighting up lacy gas trailed to one side of it.
Are we to give this up? he thought. No! It’s ours. It must remain ours. The Empire claimed each one of these stars as its own property. That aliens might hold a similar view was of no consequence, any more than the owner of a stretch of forest would bother himself with the territorial struggles of the animals living in it. Vast dramas might be unfolding in any of these alien empires, without human society being in the least aware of it.
There was a flurry on the screen as the metric fields generated by the feetol drives of a hundred and forty ships intermeshed to form a single field enclosing the fleet like a bubble. By then they were already travelling faster than light; now their velocity increased a hundredfold.
Ten-Fleet was en route to Escoria Sector.
Evening, fleet time, and Admiral Archier left his quarters to go strolling through his flagship ICS Standard Bearer.
ICS prefixed the names of all Star Force vessels. It stood for Imperial Council Ship, the Imperial Council having replaced the Imperial Directorate—a cybernetic decision-making system—nearly a century ago. The short-lived Directorate, a product of the Anti-archist Revolution, had in its turn replaced the Imperial Civil Service, which had been commanded by an hereditary line of genetically optimised Emperor Protectors.
Though Archier would readily admit that the overthrow of the principle of personal overlordship was praiseworthy on ideological grounds, its practical results had been far from beneficial. The Directorate had so completely failed to handle the affairs of the Empire that an official doctrine of machine unsentience had ensued. Ironically, that doctrine was now crippling the Empire’s industrial capacity because of the disaffection of the robot workforce. The collective leadership of the Council was doing its best to arrest the Empire’s progressive decay and disintegration, but it too was failing. Archier, in common with many officers under his command, privately believed—though it was politically unwise to say so too openly—that the disinheriting of the Protector had been a tragic mistake.
Haunting music, exotic scents, drifted through the salons and dance halls of the flagship, which like all major war vessels of Imperial Star Force was one huge pleasure ship. It could hardly have been otherwise; the vessel had been built in the Imperial yards and its crew all belonged to that part of the Empire’s starclouded heartland known as Galactic Diadem. To such people, sybaritic luxury was as natural and necessary as the air they breathed.
The talented artists and scientists collected as taxes by Ten-Fleet—it had become its chief function—were often openmouthed with astonishment when brought aboard. Archier had heard them apply the word “decadent” more than once. For his part, the outlying worlds from which the taxes were levied seemed rude and barbarous. He viewed their unreliability with disdain, all the more so because their contribution was so vital if the Empire was to survive.
“Good evening, Admiral.”
“Good evening, Madam.” Archier’s response was cordial to the handsome matron who lounged against the frame of an arcaded entrance. Beyond it, in a kind of gymnasium, a group of ten-year-old girls in leotards were learning a dance routine. They were nymphs—junior members of Priapus’ People, one of Diadem’s finest dance and sex troupes, for which training began at the age of eight. Already these girls would be experts in a variety of erotic arts, coached in the giving of sexual pleasure.
An entertainment by their more mature colleagues was scheduled for later. Barely glancing at the lissom, lunging bodies, Archier walked on, to enter the main salon. There, airy melodies blared softly over a hum of conversation. He tried to forget his anxieties, to let himself relax.