Heirs of Empire

overhead lights as he walked to stand beside the heroically scaled sculpture that machinery had wrought in exact duplicate of the sketches he’d provided.

A stoop-shouldered man turned to greet him. His artist’s eye told him he had never seen his employer’s undisguised face, and he was glad, for he believed that made him safe. He didn’t know he, too, would be eliminated anyway when his task was done. Lawrence Jefferson took no chances.

“Good evening,” the stoop-shouldered man said. “No one told me you were coming in person, sir.”

“I know. But I’ve brought you a gift.” Jefferson set the holo plate on a work table and pressed the button.

“Magnificent,” the man breathed. He looked back and forth between the sculpture and his own handiwork. “I see a few details will need changing. I must say, sir, that this is even more spectacular than the sketches indicated.”

“I quite agree,” Jefferson said sincerely. “Will there be any schedule problems?”

“No, no. It’s only a matter of arranging the input and then letting the sculpting unit do its job.”

“Excellent. In that case, I’d like you to go ahead and input it now; I need to take this with me when I leave.”

“Of course. If you’ll excuse me?”

The stoop-shouldered man bent over his equipment, and Jefferson stood back, hands folded behind him while he admired the work his doomed henchman had already produced. It looked just like real marble, and so it should, given how much it was costing.

Perfect, he thought. It was perfect. And no one who looked at it would ever guess the secret it concealed, for the gravitonic warhead and its arming circuits were quite, quite invisible.

Chapter Eighteen

Israel’s captain was in a grumpy mood.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but Israel’s crew were bright, competent, confident … and young. And, as bright, confident people are wont to do, they’d underestimated their task—which made their lack of progress enormously irritating. Still, Sean told himself with determined cheer, for people who’d found out they were approaching a populated world only in the last half hour of their flight they weren’t doing all that badly. And Sandy had said she and Harry had some good news for a change.

He lay back in the captain’s couch, studying the image from one of the stealthed remotes. They’d decided to rely on old-fashioned, line-of-sight radio, something an Imperial scan system probably wouldn’t even think to look for, rather than more readily detected fold coms to operate their remotes. That limited their operating radius, but it gave them enough reach for a fair sampling, and Sean watched a kneeling row of villagers weed their way across a field of some sort of tuber and wondered how whatever they were tending tasted.

He glanced up as Tamman arrived, completing their gathering, then turned his gaze to Sandy. She and Harriet relied heavily on Brashan’s hard-headed pragmatism to shoot down their wilder hypotheses and upon Tamman to build and maintain their surveillance systems, but the major burden of analysis was theirs, and Sean was delighted to leave them to it.

“Okay, Sandy,” he said now. “You’ve got the floor.”

She rubbed the tip of her nose for a moment, then cleared her throat.

“Let’s start with the good news: we finally have a language program of sorts.” Sean sat up straighter, and she smiled. “As I say, that’s the good news. The bad news is that without a proper philologist, we’ve had to fall back on a ‘trial and error’ approach, with predictably crude results.

“It helps that they’re literate and use movable type, but it would’ve helped more if the old alphabet had survived. Out of forty-one characters, we’ve found three that might be derived from Universal; the rest look like somebody tried to transcribe Old Norse into cuneiform. Working at night, we’ve managed to scan several printed books through our remotes, but they didn’t do us much good until about six weeks ago when Harry found this.”

The display changed to a recorded view looking down from some high vantage point on a circle of children. A bearded man in a robe of blue and gold stood at its center, holding up a picture of one of the native’s odd, bipedal saddle beasts to point at a line of jagged-edged characters beneath it.

“This,” Sandy resumed after a moment, “is a class in one of those temples of theirs. Apparently the Church believes in universal literacy, and Tam built a teeny-tiny remote for Harry to land on top of a beam so we could eavesdrop. It was maddening for the first month or so, but we set up a value substitution program in the linguistics section of Israel’s comp cent, and things started coming together early last week.”

Sean nodded, glad something had finally worked as he’d hoped it might. English was the common tongue of the Imperium and seemed likely to remain so. Its flexibility, concision, and adaptability were certainly vastly preferable to Universal! Age had ossified the language of the Fourth Imperium and Empire, and, given the availability of younger, more versatile Terran languages, the Fifth Imperium had no particular desire to speak it.

Yet all Fourth Empire computers spoke only Universal, at least until they could be reprogrammed. Worse, in some cases—like Mother’s hardwired constitutional functions—they couldn’t be reprogrammed, so all Battle Fleet personnel had to speak Universal whether they wanted to or not.

Cohanna’s Bio-Sciences Ministry had met that need with a dedicated implant, and with the enormous “piggy-back” storage molycircs made possible, Battle Fleet had decided to give its personnel all major Terran languages. That made sense in view of their diversity—and also meant each of Israel’s crewmen had a built-in “translating” software package. True, none of the languages in their implants’ memories were quite this foreign, but if Israel’s computers could cobble up a local dictionary…

“As I say, it’s still patchy, but we ought to be able to make a stab at understanding what someone says. It’s going to be another matter if we try to talk back, though. So far Harry and I have identified seven distinct dialects and what may be one minor language, and there’s no way we could mingle with the locals without a lot more work.”

“How much more?” Tamman asked.

“I can’t say, Tam—not for certain—but I’d estimate another month of input. At the moment, we can read about forty percent of the printed material we collect, and the percentage is expanding, but that’s a far cry from understanding the spoken language, much less conversing coherently. And we need more than simple coherency, unless we want to scare the natives to death.”

“Umph.” Sean frowned at the frozen image of the teacher. He’d hoped for better, but even while he’d hoped, he’d known it was unreasonable.

“In the meantime, one of our ‘borrowed’ books—an atlas—has given us a running start on figuring out the geopolitics of the planet, which, by the way, the natives call ‘Pardal.’ We can’t find the name in any of Israel’s admittedly limited records, so I suspect it’s locally evolved.

“As near as we can tell, this is what Pardal currently looks like.” The display changed to a map of Pardal’s five continents and numerous island chains. The biggest inhabited continent reminded Sean of an old-fashioned, air-foil aircraft, flying northeast towards the polar ice cap with a second, smaller land mass providing its tail assembly. “We made enough photomaps on the way in to know the atlas maps aren’t perfectly scaled, and we still can’t read all of its commentary, but it appears Pardal is split into hundreds of feudal territories.” Scarlet boundary lines flashed as she spoke. “At the moment, we’re located just inside the eastern border of this one, which is called, as nearly as I can translate it, the Kingdom of Cherist.

“Now, North Hylar—” she indicated the fuselage and wings of the “aircraft” “—seems to be the wealthiest and most heavily populated land mass. The ‘countries’ are larger and seem to contain more internal subdivisions, which suggests they may be older. It looks to us like there’s been a longer period of absorption and consolidation here, and that conclusion may be supported by the fact that our ground site is, indeed, underneath North Hylar’s largest city.” A red cursor flashed approximately dead center in North Hylar.