The Berserker Throne Read online

  As soon as the docking was completed, the visitor’s main personnel hatch opened, and some military people in sharply designed uniforms began trotting out of it onto the dock. They continued to come out, pair after pair of them like mirror images, until the watching commander could count sixteen sharp military uniforms in all, in two rows leading from the hatch. They were actually bearing arms, the commander noticed with surprise and disapproval, as they took up their positions for what was evidently to be some kind of a guard-of-honor show.

  The deployment of these troops had the incidental effect of providing a pretty effective occupation and coverage of dockside space, as if they were on the lookout for snipers, or ready to repel a boarding rush. Whether intentionally or not, these armed people—dragoons, she thought Roquelaure called the little army she had heard he was so proud of—were confronting the two or three Templar guards, who were always posted in positions overlooking the docks on what really amounted to no more than ceremonial duty. The dragoons stared up at their outnumbered cousins-in-arms belligerently, while the young Templars goggled back in sheer surprise, for which their commander could hardly blame them. The invaders’—well, that was the impression that they gave—uniforms looked sharper than the Templars’, too.

  Motioning her driver to follow with the car, the commander had begun walking briskly toward the visitor’s main hatch even before it opened, and by now she had come down a flight of stairs and was on the same level as that hatch, ready to greet or confront whoever had sent out all these guards as they emerged.

  And now in the ship’s open hatchway appeared the man who had to be the object of this belligerent-looking guard of honor. Commander Anne recognized him as soon as he appeared, though she had never seen him before in person, and had certainly not been expecting to see him now; almost anyone in the Eight Worlds would know that gaunt, aging face on sight, trademarked as it was with long, curled mustaches. It belonged to Grand Marshall Beraton, a Niteroi native and a legendary hero to all the Eight Worlds. His career in anti-berserker warfare went back long before General Harivarman’s in that ancient and apparently endless field of endeavor. The grand marshall, Anne Blenheim thought to herself, must now be at least a couple of hundred years old, and if anyone had recently asked her about him she would have said that he must have retired long ago. In passing, she wondered suddenly if the grand marshall might have been on the Fortress during or before the last berserker attack against it, and whether he might therefore be able to advise her on some points of historical restoration.

  The grand marshall stalked out of his ship and stood looking rather fiercely about him, ignoring the two ranks of his guards. Then his stern expression altered as his gaze lighted on Commander Blenheim’s approaching figure. It was a subtle change, in keeping with his dignity. So was his bearing as he advanced toward her now on his long legs. Of course her uniform and her insignia made her quickly recognizable by rank and status if not by her personal identity.

  Coming in that ceremonial pace to meet her, the impressive old man halted four paces away, and granted Anne Blenheim the salute that was her due here as commanding officer; elsewhere, of course, his own rank would be far greater.

  She returned his salute sharply.

  “Press coverage?” Those were the grand marshall’s first words of greeting. At least that was how Anne Blenheim understood them. They had been delivered in an aristocratic accent with which she was not overly familiar, and the question was asked in a low, almost conspiratorial tone, as the grand marshall looked alertly to right and left.

  “I beg your pardon, Grand Marshall?”

  Beraton’s great age was even more obvious at this close range, but by all appearances age was still treating him very kindly. Bending near, smiling faintly as he towered over Anne Blenheim’s own modest height, he said, this time not quite so softly: “Thought there might be press on hand. Not sure that it’s a good idea at this stage. Just as well there’s not.” She got the impression that the grand marshall was enjoying himself, that he would have enjoyed some press on hand even more. The old man’s expression was just suitably tinged with sadness, in keeping with the gravity of what she supposed must be his mission.

  It was one of those occasions, Anne Blenheim decided, when it might be better not to push immediately to clarify the meaning of what someone had just said.

  She had hardly begun her formal welcome, offering the hospitality of the base, before another officer, this one a much shorter and younger man, came marching out of the open hatch and approached them with short-legged, energetic strides. Behind him, well inside the ship, a man in civilian clothes appeared momentarily, and retreated out of sight before Anne Blenheim was able to get a good look at him.

  “Captain Lergov,” the short, energetic officer introduced himself, at the last moment breaking off what was almost a charge to toss her a quick salute.

  “My second-in-command,” Beraton amplified.

  “Commander Anne Blenheim,” she told them, looking from one to the other. “Welcome to you both, gentlemen, and to your crew.” She was a little surprised, not at the coolness in her own voice—she thought the visitors’ behavior so far had earned that—but that she did not regret that there was cause for coolness. “Is this a duty call?”

  “Afraid so,” said the grand marshall. Looking a trifle sadder and keener than ever, he fell silent at that point, as if the subject were too painful for him to continue. Lergov meanwhile muttered something about seeing to his people, and turned away to give his honor guard a quick looking-over; Anne Blenheim observed how the sixteen young women and men who composed it stiffened visibly, fearfully, under his inspection.

  The seeing-to did not take long. Lergov turned back, able now to spare a few more moments, it appeared, for a mere Templar colonel. But no, he was ignoring her. “Grand Marshall?” he asked, in a tone of deferential prodding.

  “Humf, yes.” And from an attache case that had heretofore been tucked under one of his arms, looking like part of his elegant uniform, Beraton now produced a folded document of what looked like genuine heavy paper. This, with a gesture conveying understatement, he now presented to the base commander.

  She examined the document. It was indeed real, heavy paper, as far as she could tell. Unfolding it she saw that it came in both electronic and statparchment forms—the electronic in the form of a small black tab attached to the paper—and it was from the Council themselves. Or at least, though this was not explicitly noted, from a quorum of the Council’s members. As many of them as possible must have been convened in an extraordinary session as soon as possible after the shock wave of the Empress’s death struck through the Eight Worlds.

  To Commander Blenheim at first inspection, the order seemed undoubtedly authentic, legal, and official. As such it would seem to require that the base commander of the Templar Fortress at the Radiant turn her famous prisoner over to these people at once.

  So, he was right, was Anne Blenheim’s first thought after reading the sense of the message, seeing in her mind’s eye the general’s impassioned face. She felt angry with Harivarman for being right. Then why has he been hiding out there in the empty regions, occupying himself with archaeology? Why wasn’t he—doing something? Of course, he might have seen that there was nothing to be done.

  “Can you please order him brought here at once?” the grand marshall was inquiring of her. It sounded rather as if he were asking some junior officer to have his car sent round. Evidently the old man, impetuous as any youth, was ready to turn in his tracks, undock his ship again, and depart in a matter of minutes.

  The commander continued to study the printed order in her hands. She felt glad that she had already had some time, a few days, in which to anticipate this moment, and ponder the several choices that it might pose.

  She said: “I’m afraid, sir, the business mentioned here can’t possibly be concluded that quickly. This paragraph calls on me to hand over other people to you as well . . . offhand I don’t know th
at I have a right to do anything like that.”

  “No right? No right?” The old man looked her up and down, in a way that gave the impression that he was revising his opinion of her downward. “I understood that I was speaking to the commanding Templar officer.”

  “And so you are, Grand Marshall. But civilians here are only very tenuously under my jurisdiction. At a minimum I’m going to have to talk to the judge advocate first on the subject of those people. As for General Harivarman himself, I’ve already sent courier relays out to inform the Superior General of my order—inform him of the assassination of the Empress, and the possible implications—and I hope to have some reply from the SG in a few days.

  “Meanwhile, won’t you come aboard? We may be a little short of completely finished quarters for a crew the size that yours must be”—she glanced at the two armed ranks, letting a touch of disapproval show—“but we can offer you all some hospitality.”

  Actually, prodded by Harivarman’s warnings, she had several hours ago ordered such legal staff as she had available to get busy researching the situation. So far there had been no report. The commander suspected that no one was going to be eager to stick his or her neck out and advise her firmly as to what to do—no one of course but General Harivarman himself, and now these people who had come here to arrest him.

  But the order looked damnably authentic. And, at least regarding the general himself, it looked convincing too.

  It looks like I’m going to have to give him up to these people. And I don’t want to do that. And Anne Blenheim’s own silent words surprised her, for they suggested an uncomfortable and unwelcome personal attachment.

  For the moment, the commander was politely adamant with her visitors, assuring them that all the people named in the arrest order were on hand, but that she needed to hear from her superiors, or her advisers at least, before any of them could be simply handed over.

  Beraton, his feelings perhaps wounded by his failure to overawe her instantly, seemed to withdraw uncommunicatively inside a protective shell, perhaps to heal them. Lergov became rather ominously silent. The grand marshall formally accepted hospitality for them all, but he informed the base commander that most of his ship’s crew would probably remain aboard his ship. One implication was that their stay was going to be quite brief.

  Five minutes after ordering the arrangements for hospitality, Commander Blenheim, the Council’s formal document still in hand, was conferring in her office with her judge advocate. Major Nurnberg was a rather short, stout woman who took her usually dull job quite seriously.

  The commander complained: “They want Shizuoka, too, and not only him. The way this thing is worded, it seems to be telling me that they can arrest anyone on the Radiant Fortress with whom Harivarman has become closely associated during his stay. If they discover someone who they think fits that category, they can just direct me to hand that person over. I frankly can’t see myself giving them that, or anything like it. Not without some clear directive from the Superior General himself. Or some equivalent authority.”

  “You may have a point, ma’am.” Major Nurnberg was evidently going to play it cautiously, for which her boss could hardly blame her. “Looks to me like they’re just fishing to see how much they can get. This is our territory. As to the general, of course he’s not a Templar. I don’t see that you have any possible grounds to refuse them in his case. As for Recruit Chen Shizuoka . . . maybe we can wait for word from the SG.”

  “And the civilians they’re demanding I hand over to them?”

  “Well . . . I’d like to do some more research, ma’am, before I say yes or no definitely on that.”

  “Thank you, Major. I’ll keep putting our visitors off for a few days, then.”

  “That seems like a good plan, ma’am.”

  Anne Blenheim could only hope that word from the SG came soon.

  Chapter 11

  Within a few minutes after Harivarman had concluded his talk with the base commander in her staff car, he had arrived back at his house with Lescar. And as soon as he entered the house he found that now, in a kind of apparent time-reversal, the long-awaited summons to a conference with the commander had finally arrived.

  The communication waiting for the Prince in the memory of his holostage was couched in the form of a courteous invitation: If the general would visit Commander Blenheim’s personal office at his earliest convenience . . . He didn’t bother to check the time the message had been received to see if she had sent it before she spoke to him. At least she hadn’t called back to cancel it afterwards.

  Approximately an hour after receiving the message, Prince Harivarman was standing in the commander’s drab office—it was a temporary facility, for the wave of remodeling had evidently reached here too. The room was much more spartan than even a temporary base commander’s office would have been in the ascendancy of Colonel Phocion. There were only two or three pieces of furniture, and the craggy face of the current Superior General of the Order glowering down from a holographic portrait on the wall. Harivarman had met the current SG several times, and there had been mutual respect.

  As Harivarman entered, Anne Blenheim got up from behind what must also be her temporary desk, and came around it as if to meet him at close range. But there was hesitancy in her movement, and it stopped altogether before she had left the desk completely behind her.

  Neither of them said anything until the door had been closed behind him, by the clerk who had shown him in.

  With one hand still on her desk Anne Blenheim said: “They’ve come for you. As you predicted.”

  “And you’ve made your decision.” He smiled; that she had hesitated just now made him confident as to what that decision was.

  “And they want your man Lescar, too.”

  The Prince nodded. “Of course.”

  “And the recruit Chen Shizuoka—”

  “My co-conspirator. Yes, of course.”

  “—and some other people too. All of them civilians.”

  “I see. And out of this list you are going to give them—?” Then, struck by a thought, he interrupted himself. “I suppose the list includes my wife as well?”

  “It does now. They were somewhat surprised to find her here, but they put her on the list as soon as they learned she had come back to the Fortress.”

  Harivarman nodded. The yacht that Beatrix had come in was conspicuously visible, and naturally his enemies would have managed to find out who had been on it when it arrived.

  Anne Blenheim drew a deep breath. “I hope to hear from the SG before I have to give them any final answer. It should really be his decision.”

  “But, as we know, it’s quite likely that you are going to have to make it.”

  “Perhaps. Quite probably I will.”

  “Having made some difficult decisions of my own in my time, I sympathize.” Harivarman paused again. “So, who else do they have down on their list? I suppose it’s fairly elastic, so they can open it up again any time they want and stuff more people in.”

  They were both still standing in the middle of the room, facing each other. The commander said: “I’m afraid your friend Gabrielle Chou is on it too.”

  “Ah.”

  “And you’re right, the Council order does contain a vague, blanket clause: Any other person intimately associated, and so forth, with the aforesaid General Harivarman can be arrested. I should have no trouble in finding legal precedent for refusing to go along with that one. Unless of course the SG should show up and give me a direct order to the contrary, which seems unlikely.”

  The Prince was silent for a little time. “The bastards are worse than I thought, really. More arrogant, I mean. But I suppose I should have expected nothing better of them.”

  Commander Blenheim said: “Of course I haven’t agreed to anything as yet, except that they can see you. There’s a Captain Lergov who insists that he must see immediately with his own eyes that you’re really still here.”

  “Lergov.” Hari
varman could hear the change in his own voice. He raised both hands in an aborted gesture.

  Anne Blenheim asked: “You know him?”

  “I know of him. To know him that way’s bad enough. If the two of us had ever met, I suppose one of us might not have survived the encounter.”

  “But he’s not the one in command.”

  “I thought his rank was a bit low for that. Who’s in charge, then?”

  “Come along. You can see for yourself.” The commander moved to open a door at one side of the room.

  The Prince did not know who he expected to see. But a moment later he found himself surprised, almost as if some ancient news recording had come to life before his eyes. He was confronting Grand Marshall Beraton. Harivarman had met the old man once or twice before, briefly, on ceremonial occasions, and held him in contempt, for several reasons. The Prince had no reason to doubt that the feeling was reciprocated.

  There was a long moment of silence as the two men faced each other. Their mutual contempt on the grounds of philosophy and politics was tempered by a certain grudging mutual respect. Each man would have agreed that the other had in the past done well fighting against berserkers.

  It was the tall old man who spoke first. “I must say, Prince, I am greatly surprised and saddened to behold you here before me, under such circumstances.”

  Harivarman was in no mood to suffer fools gladly. “Grand Marshall, I must say that I am not really surprised to see you. Roquelaure has a well-known knack for choosing the proper tool.”

  A flush mounted in Beraton’s aged cheeks. “I should have expected better from one of your rank,” he murmured.