For Love and Glory

“Meaning the lizards,” said Lissa with scorn.

He showed more pain than anger. “That sort of insult is unworthy of you.”

“All right, the Dominators of the Great Confederacy. But I’m no friend of theirs,” as I am of those Susaians they have persecuted. “Nobody ought to be.”

“Why? What threat have they ever been to us? What might be gained by cooperating with them instead of denouncing them and intriguing against them? Why not try to win their amity and trust?”

“As the chickens wondered about the foxes,” said Hebo aside. His archaism went by.

“It seemed reasonable,” Romon insisted. “Didn’t it? After all, as Ironbright explained, they have a legitimate grievance. This could make it good.”

“Well, nobody’s judgment is perfect,” Lissa admitted, mainly to encourage him to go on. Ours, for instance, dashing off the way we did, she thought. But at least we can still live with ourselves. He sounds like being on the verge of breakdown.

“Esker Harolsson strongly recommended the idea when I consulted him,” Romon said. “In fact, he was afire with it; he insisted he should go too.” The tone wavered. “He— In spite of everything, he’s been horribly lonely.”

And here was possible new fame to win, Lissa thought. And glory attracts some women to even the most repulsive men.… No, I’m being unfair, maybe downright cruel. I could never stand him personally, but he is brilliant in his field, he’d have much to give us if we let him.

Romon continued in a rush, words he must have rehearsed: “Our message was carefully nonspecific. We just told that we had certain interesting clues to the Forerunners, which the Susaians might like to discuss with us confidentially. We anticipated months of negotiation back and forth. Instead, they responded within two weeks. They offered to send a ship for our representatives.

“Of course I volunteered. This was my doing, in a way, and—I am a man.” He was looking straight at Lissa. She saw the hunger and realized, faintly amazed: Why, he’s in love with me. How long has he been, and not dared speak because that would most likely bring his flickery hopes to naught?

Romon’s voice steadied. “Esker came along. No one else. We supposed this would be only the first meeting, only a mutual feeling out. But—almost immediately, the Dominator committee proposed an equal partnership with House Seafell, provided that our news proved worth following up. We had to decide virtually on the spot; they said hyperwave consultation with Asborg posed too big a risk of the secret escaping. Esker and I thought this might well be so, and took it on ourselves to reveal what we knew. Again, it was stunning how fast they moved. In a few days they had outfitted Authority and dispatched her.”

“I wouldn’t have been surprised,” Hebo said. “That government’s been wallowing deeper and deeper into trouble. The Old Truther emigration is a minor symptom. All their traffic and communication restrictions, all the light-years around them, can’t quite hide economic breakdowns, provincial unrest, armed coups—” After a moment he remarked quietly, “Well, human or nonhuman, totalitarian regimes aren’t any more stable than democracies, often less. The Dominators must be near the point where they’ll try damn near anything.”

This rough-hewn man has lived through a great deal of history, Lissa thought, and he’s studied a great deal more in his spare time. I’d like to learn how deep his thinking runs.

“We came to this sun,” Romon stated flatly. “We cruised about as you did. Finally we made for this planet.”

“And you were ordered off, and your hyperwave decommissioned, same as with us,” Lissa said. “Why didn’t you head straight home?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“We were about to. But whatever becomes of us, they know in my father’s council that we arrived and explored a little.”

“As they know about us in the Dominance. However, Ironbright is determined to do everything possible before giving up. If we are destroyed, others will follow.”

“A warrior soul,” Dzesi said. “My compliments to her.”

“Pretty inconvenient for us, though,” Hebo added sardonically.

Romon’s resoluteness cracked. “Lissa, if I’d known! If I could have warned you!”

“What actually happened?” she asked sharply.

Still shaken, he regathered himself. “We withdrew, but didn’t leave the system. We cruised at a distance, observing whatever we were able to. Nothing pursued us, nothing called to us, we detected nothing alien in space except the one guardian, keeping near-planet orbit. Esker, especially, got some more data. He has ideas. Ironbright’s reasoning was that if the machines were—mortally serious—about us, they’d probably let us know by less than lethal means. That’s when we’d depart. Otherwise our duty was to linger and look till we weren’t learning anything further.”

“Like us, sort of,” Hebo put in, “except she’s willing to gamble an expensive ship and a whole crew.” He shrugged. “Well, the Dominators never did set much of a price on individual lives.”

Romon gulped. “And then,” he continued harshly, “we detected you, and followed your progress.”

Hebo nodded. “Naval-quality instruments. Naval doctrine. It didn’t occur to us. Damn!” he sighed. “Too late now.”

“If, if I’d known you were aboard, Lissa,” Romon stammered, “I’d have—” He broke off in futility. What could he have done?

“So friend Ironbright guessed that we’d get the same reception she did,” Hebo said. “Your ship kept watch from a few light-minutes away and pre-matched velocities to ours before she jumped.”

“To blast the guardian was daring indeed,” Dzesi said.

“Ironbright—she’d concluded the Forerunners are, or were, probably very peaceful,” Romon tried to answer. “They wouldn’t have foreseen a,, a devotion like that.”

“Besides, she’s got us to bear the risk,” Hebo said. “At gunpoint.”

“A plan doubtless made as fast as everything else the lizards have done,” Lissa said. That word didn’t really taste bad. “Yes, Torben, I agree, desperate people are dangerous.”

“Small consolation to us if the Dominance collapses in ten or twenty years,” Hebo replied. “Unless we’re alive to enjoy the circus.”

“Lissa,” Romon pleaded, “believe me, believe me, I—

“We are close to final approach,” Hulda interrupted.

“Till later, then, Romon,” Lissa said. “Maybe.” She shut off the com and the sight of his anguish.

IL

Few spacecraft of Hulda’s size or greater could land on a planet without docking facilities. Descending on an unprepared surface, the plasma jet would melt it. Ironbright must have recognized her type and known what she, meant to meet unpredictable hazards, was capable of. Lissa wished grimly that the Susaian weren’t such an able spacefarer. But the Dominance had known it when making the assignment. Ordinarily, at least in human services, a captain who lost a ship, whether culpable or not, never got another command.

Having positioned herself and verified every vector, Hulda cut drive and fell. Dropping some two hundred klicks under this gravity, she would have struck ground at one kps. Her hull could readily have taken that impact, but her crew were less hardy. She extended the forcefields that had helped keep them alive when she collided with the asteroid. Other vessels, liners, freighters, warcraft, carried no such generators. For them the contingencies were too unlikely to justify taking up the mass and volume. As for landings, some models had boats. Hulda’s machine spread its invisible shields to distribute weight over square kilometers and decreased their strength at a measured rate. Touchdown was feather-soft.

The silence that followed seemed to ring.

The riders stared at the view. Extended landing jacks rested on a basaltic plain, scarred, drifted with reddish dust, but reasonably flat, about five kilometers north of the complex. Seen from their present height, it lay on the near horizon. Shadows reached long and irregular from a sun, shrunken but still too savage to look near, not far up into a sky almost space-black but with stars hidden by glare. A few dust devils whirled on a wind more ghostly than