“Did you have any trouble getting cooperation from the native officers?” Shatrak asked.
“Not in the least. They cooperated quite willingly, if not always too intelligently. I simply told them that they were now the personal property of his Imperial Majesty, Rodrik III. They were quite flattered by the change of ownership. If ordered to, I believe that they would fire on their former Lords-Master without hesitation.”
“You told those slaves that they. … belonged … to the Emperor?”
Count Erskyll was aghast. He stared at Ravney for an instant, then snatched up his brandy-glass—the meal had gotten to that point—and drained it at a gulp. The others watched solicitously while he coughed and spluttered over it.
“Commodore Shatrak,” he said sternly. “I hope that you will take severe disciplinary action; this is the most outrageous. …”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Shatrak retorted. “The colonel is to be commended; did the best thing he could, under the circumstances. What are you going to do when slavery is abolished here, Colonel?”
“Oh, tell them that they have been given their freedom as a special reward for meritorious service, and then sign them up for a five year enlistment.”
“That might work. Again, it might not.”
“I think, Colonel, that before you do that, you had better disarm them again. You might possibly have some trouble, otherwise.”
Ravney looked at him sharply. “They might not want to be free? I’d thought of that.”
“Nonsense!” Erskyll declared. “Who ever heard of slaves rebelling against freedom?”
Freedom was a Good Thing. It was a Good Thing for everybody, everywhere and all the time. Count Erskyll knew it, because freedom was a Good Thing for him.
He thought, suddenly, of an old tomcat belonging to a lady of his acquaintance at Paris-on-Baldur, a most affectionate cat, who insisted on catching mice and bringing them as presents to all his human friends. To this cat’s mind, it was inconceivable that anybody would not be most happy to receive a nice fresh-killed mouse.
“Too bad we have to set any of them free,” Vann Shatrak said. “Too bad we can’t just issue everybody new servile gorgets marked, Personal Property of his Imperial Majesty
and let it go at that. But I guess we can’t.”
“Commodore Shatrak, you are joking,” Erskyll began.
“I hope I am,” Shatrak replied grimly.
The top landing-stage of the Citadel grew and filled the forward viewscreen of the ship’s launch. It was only when he realized that the tiny specks were people, and the larger, birdseed-sized, specks vehicles, that the real size of the thing was apparent. Obray of Erskyll, beside him, had been silent. He had been looking at the crescent-shaped industrial city, like a servile gorget around Zeggensburg’s neck.
“The way they’ve been crowded together!” he said. “And the buildings; no space between. And all that smoke! They must be using fossil-fuel!”
“It’s probably too hard to process fissionables in large quantities, with what they have.”
“You were right, last evening. These people have deliberately halted progress, even retrogressed, rather than give up slavery.”
Halting progress, to say nothing of retrogression, was an unthinkable crime to him. Like freedom, progress was a Good Thing, anywhere, at all times, and without regard to direction.
Colonel Ravney met them when they left the launch. The top landing-stage was swarming with Imperial troops.
“Convocation Chamber’s three stages down,” he said. “About two thousand of them there now; been coming in all morning. We have everything set up.” He laughed. “They tell me slaves are never permitted to enter it. Maybe, but they have the place bugged to the ceiling all around.”
“Bugged? What with?” Shatrak asked, and Erskyll was wanting to know what he meant. No doubt he thought Ravney was talking about things crawling out of the woodwork.
“Screen pickups, radio pickups, wired microphones; you name it and it’s there. I’ll bet every slave in the Citadel knows everything that happens in there while it’s happening.”
Shatrak wanted to know if he had done anything about them. Ravney shook his head.
“If that’s how they want to run a government, that’s how they have a right to run it. Commander Douvrin put in a few of our own, a little better camouflaged than theirs.”
There were more troops on the third stage down. They formed a procession down a long empty hallway, a few scared-looking slaves peeping from doorways at them. There were more troops where the corridor ended in great double doors, emblazoned with a straight broadsword diagonally across an eight-pointed star. Emblematology of planets conquered by the Space Vikings always included swords and stars. An officer gave a signal; the doors started to slide apart, and within, from a screen-speaker, came a fanfare of trumpets.
At first, all he could see was the projection-screen, far ahead, and the tessellated aisle stretching toward it. The trumpets stopped, and they advanced, and then he saw the Lords-Master.
They were massed, standing among benches on either side, and if anything Pyairr Ravney had understated their numbers. They all wore black, trimmed with gold; he wondered if the coincidence that these were also the Imperial colors might be useful. Queer garments, tightly fitted tunics at the top which became flowing robes below the waist, deeply scalloped at the edges. The sleeves were exaggeratedly wide; a knife or a pistol, and not necessarily a small one, could be concealed in every one. He was sure that thought had entered Vann Shatrak’s mind. They were armed, not with dress-daggers, but with swords; long, straight cross-hilted broadswords. They were the first actual swords he had ever seen, except in museums or on the stage.
There was a bench of gold and onyx at the front, where, normally the seven-man Presidium sat, and in front of it were thronelike seats for the Chiefs of Managements, equivalent to the Imperial Council of Ministers. Because of the projection screen that had been
