The Rebel Worlds

That conversation lasted beyond nightfall. The torches were lit, the fires stoked, cooking begun in stone pots. While the nogas could live on raw vegetation, they preferred more concentrated and tasty food when they could get it. A few more Didonians came home from the woods, lighting their way with luminous fungoids. They carried basketsful of edible roots. No doubt hunters and foragers remained out for a good many days at a stretch. The lodge filled with droning, fluting, coughing talk. Flandry and his men had trouble fending curiosity seekers off their injured without acting unfriendly.

At last Kathryn made the best imitation she could of the gesture of deference, and sought out her fellow humans. In the leaping red light, her eyes and locks stood brilliant among shadows. ” Twasn’t easy,” she said in exuberance, “but I argued heesh into it. We’ll have an escort — mighty small, but an escort, guides and porters. I reckon we can start in another forty-fifty hours … for home!”

“Your home,” growled a man.

“Dog your hatch,” Flandry ordered him.

X

Centuries before, a rogue planet had passed near Beta Crucis. Sunless worlds are not uncommon, but in astronomical immensity it is rare for one to encounter a star. This globe swung by and receded on a hyperbolic orbit. Approximately Terra-size, it had outgassed vapors in the ardor of its youth. Then, as internal heat radiated away, atmosphere froze. The great blue sun melted the oceans and boiled the air back into fluidity. For some years, appalling violence reigned.

Eventually interstellar cold would have reclaimed its dominion, and the incident would have had no significance. But chance ordained that the passage occur in the old bold days of the Polesotechnic League, and that it be noticed by those who saw an incalculable fortune to be won. Isotope synthesis on the scale demanded by a starfaring civilization had been industry’s worst bottleneck. Seas and skies were needed for coolants, continents for dumping of radioactive wastes. Every lifeless body known had been too frigid or too hot or otherwise unsuitable. But here came Satan, warmed to an ideal temperature which the heat of nuclear manufacture could maintain. As soon as the storms and quakes had abated, the planet was swarmed by entrepreneurs.

During the Troubles, ownership, legal status, input and output, every aspect of relationship to the living fraction of the universe, varied as wildly for Satan as for most worlds. For a while it was abandoned. But no one had ever actually dwelt there. No being could survive that poisonous air and murderous radiation background, unless for the briefest of visits with the heaviest of protection. Robots, computers, and automatons were the inhabitants. They continued operating while civilization fragmented, fought, and somewhat reconstructed itself. When at last an Imperial aristocrat sent down a self-piloting freighter, they loaded it from a dragon’s hoard.

The defense of Satan became a major reason to garrison and colonize Sector Alpha Crucis.

Its disc hung darkling among the stars in a viewscreen of Hugh McCormac’s command room. Beta had long since dwindled to merely the brightest of them, and the machines had scant need for visible light. You saw the sphere blurred by gas, a vague shimmer of clouds and oceans, blacknesses that were land. It was a desolate scene, the more so when you called up an image of the surface — raw mountains, gashed valleys, naked stone plains, chill and stagnant seas, all cloaked in a night relieved only by a rare lamp or an evil blue glow of fluorescence, no sound but a dreary wind-skirl or a rushing of forever sterile waters, no happening throughout its eons but the inanimate, unaware toil of the machines.

For Hugh McCormac, though, Satan meant victory.

He took his gaze from the planet and let it stray in the opposite direction, toward open space. Men were dying where those constellations glittered. “I should be yonder,” he said. “I should have insisted.”

“You couldn’t do anything, sir,” Edgar Oliphant told him. “Once the tactical dispositions are made, the game plays itself. And you might be killed.”

“That’s what’s wrong.” McCormac twisted his fingers together. “Here we are, snug and safe in orbit, while a battle goes on to make me Emperor!”

“You’re the High Admiral too, sir.” A cigar in Oliphant’s mouth wagged and fumed as he talked. “You’ve got to be available where the data flow in, to make decisions in case anything unpredicted happens.”

“I know, I know.” McCormac strode back and forth, from end to end of the balcony on which they stood. Below them stretched a murmurous complex of computers, men at desks and plotting consoles, messengers going soft-footed in and out. Nobody, from himself on down, bothered with spit-and-polish today. They had too much work on hand, coordinating the battle against Pickens’ fleet. It had learned where they were from the ducal guards they chased off and had sought them out. Simply understanding that interaction of ships and energies was beyond mortal capacity.

He hated to tie up Persei when every gun spelled life to his outnumbered forces. She was half of the Nova-class dreadnaughts he had. But nothing less would hold the necessary equipment.

“We could do some fighting in addition,” he said. “I’ve operated thus in the past.”

“But that was before you were the Emperor,” Oliphant replied.

McCormac halted and glowered at him. The stout man chewed his cigar and plodded on: “Sir, we’ve few enough active supporters as is. Most bein’s are just prayin’ they won’t get involved on either side. Why should anybody put everything at stake for the revolution, if he doesn’t hope you’ll bring him a better day? We could risk our control center, no doubt. But we can’t risk you. Without you, the revolution ’ud fall apart ’fore Terran reinforcements could get here to suppress it.”

McCormac clenched his fists and looked back at Satan. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m being childish.”

“ ’Tis forgivable,” Oliphant said. “Two of your boys in combat—”

“And how many other people’s boys? Human or xeno, they die, they’re maimed … Well.” McCormac leaned over the balcony rail and studied the big display tank on the deck beneath him. Its colored lights gave only a hint of the information — itself partial and often unreliable — that flowed through the computers. But such three-dimensional pictures occasionally stimulated the spark of genius which no known civilization has succeeded in evoking from an electronic brain.

According to the pattern, his tactics were proving out. He had postulated that destruction of the factories on Satan would be too great an economic disaster for cautious Dave Pickens to hazard. Therefore the Josipists would be strictly enjoined not to come near the planet. Therefore McCormac’s forces would have a privileged sanctuary. That would make actions possible to them which otherwise were madness. Of course, Pickens might charge straight in anyway; that contingency must be provided against. But if so, McCormac need have no compunctions about using Satan for shield and backstop. Whether it was destroyed or only held by his fleet, its products were denied the enemy. In time, that was sure to bring disaffection and weakness.

But it looked as if Pickens was playing safe — -and getting mauled in consequence.

’ S’pose we win,” Oliphant said. “What next?”

It had been discussed for hours on end, but McCormac seized the chance to think past this battle. “Depends on what power the opposition has left. We want to take over as large a volume of space as possible without overextending ourselves. Supply and logistics are worse problems for us than combat, actually. We aren’t yet organized to replace losses or even normal consumption.”