Fear, panic, terror, blind howling horror. Shamuvaz groaned to himself.
When a hand touched his shoulder, he leaped up, cursing, and spun around. His pistol was out before he saw that it was only Armazan. Armazan had been his best friend once. But you couldn’t trust anyone now. Shamuvaz held the gun leveled on Armazan’s belly.
«Don’t do that,» he choked. «Don’t ever do that again.»
«Listen.» Armazan spoke swiftly, a whisper that was blurred with his own trembling. «Listen, Sham, we’re meeting after taps, down by the river. Sneak out of the barracks and join us.»
«What, what, what? Go out after dark? You’re crazy! This planet has driven you crazy.»
«No, not that, not that. Listen, a lot of us have decided we aren’t going to take any more of this. The empire can’t ask it of us. It’s too much. Can’t trust those officers. Get them out of the way—a shot in the back, it’s easy if we just stick together, and then we can grab the base spaceship—»
Hurulta had been sleeping poorly in the last month, and drugs no longer seemed to whip up his vitality. He clasped a ringing head in his hands and leaned on the desk.
«It’s no use,» he said aloud. «We’ll have to pull out of Gyreion. Every regiment there has been ruined for service. It’ll take months to restore them to usefulness.»
«But the Patrol, lord—» faltered Sevulan.
«Patrol! We’ll maintain a base on the neighboring planet, and a few orbital scouts around Gyreion itself. Should have done that in the first place.»
«But then a strong attack could come in, wipe out our forces, take over the whole system—»
«I know. What of it? A chance we’ll have to take. If only the busybodies would come out of hiding and fight! It’s like shadowboxing, this.»
«Lord, I understand the General Staff plans to overrule you and order the evacuation of Garvish and Shang. They say it’s too costly to hold them, they’re just consuming men badly needed elsewhere—»
«Don’t tell me that!» shouted Hurulta. «I know it, you idiot! I know all of it! The blind, bloody fools! Shortsighted—aaargh!» His fists clamped together. «But by all the hells, we’re hanging on to Umung. Let the moneybags squawk. I’ll lodge treason charges if they say much more.»
The telescreen buzzed. Hurulta flicked a switch, and the excited voice gabbled out.
«Lord, a report just came in from space. Patrol activity around Ustuban VII. They seem to be rendezvousing—»
«Ustuban VII! They can’t! It’s a giant planet. It’s surrounded by a meteor belt. It… no!»
«Lord, the report says—»
«Shut up! Send me the full report at once.» Hurulta whirled on the general. His eves were feverish.
«Action,» he gasped. «I think we’re going to see some action. The populace has been complaining about our retreats, have they? Their morale is bad, is it? All right, we’ll give them something to talk about. We’ll send the fleet and seize Ustuban VII, and just let the Patrol dare try to stop us!»
«Lord, it’s impossible,» whispered Sevulan. «We’re spread so thin already that we could never mount such an undertaking. It’s just a trick of theirs to lure us out—»
«We’ll turn the trick on them!» Hurulta’s bellow rattled between the walls. «I’m still the supreme commander here!»
Slowly, as he regarded his chief, Sevulan’s eyes narrowed.
«We have, of course, been propagandizing Ulugan,» said Wing Alak. «Radio, message-scattering robombs, and so on—the usual techniques. I think we’ve gotten it across to them that, while League membership means a loss of imperial glories, it means a definite gain in material comfort and security.»
«For the commoners,» said Jorel Meinz. He was annoyed; three days aboard ship, with Alak engaged in directing some obscure maneuver and parrying every significant question when the two men did meet, had worn down his nerves. «But it’s the aristocrats and the industrialists who run things.»
«To be sure. However, they aren’t stupid. They just need a hard lesson to convince them that imperialism doesn’t pay.»
«They were all set to make it pay.»
«Of course, till we interfered. But as long as there is a Patrol, conquest will mean a money loss. We’ll see to that! Once they’re convinced that it’s to their advantage too to come to terms with us, they’ll do it.»
«I see your general strategy, of course,» said Meinz. «You’ve led them into taking over one unprofitable planet after another. Except this Umung, now… I can’t see where that could fail to pay off.»
«Oh, that was my proudest achievement,» said Alak smugly. «I planned that years in advance. I had a cowardly little part-time agent who got to know Umung quite well. As far as he could tell, I meant to use it for the Patrol’s benefit. Ulugan got hold of him, as I thought they would, and learned this. So naturally Ulugan had to grab it first.
«But don’t you see, I’ve studied their economy for years. It’s an archaic form of capitalism, like Terra’s during the First Industrial Revolution. It depends on buying cheap and selling dear—and it must sell manufactured goods. In short, a colony which can manufacture better and cheaper than the mother country is, in the long run, impossible; it must be abandoned or ruined, or else the homeland’s economic system must be changed. After a while, Ulugan’s financiers realized that. And they’re a powerful element.»
He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. «If I might generalize a bit,» he said, «history shows pretty conclusively that an empire must form a natural socioeconomic unit if it is to be stable. Most empires of the past grew slowly, by accretion; or if they were conquered fast, they had to be reorganized swiftly. We forced the Ulugani into taking on more real estate than they could handle, most of it more than useless; and we kept them off balance so that they couldn’t get a chance to organize it properly. Result—an unstable situation which is now rapidly deteriorating.»
«Do we want them within the League?» asked Meinz. «They look like a nest of troublemakers.»
«They are. But in the long run, they can be integrated. Contact with other cultures will break down their paranoid attitude. Interstellar empires are economically unjustifiable anyway, more of a drain than a gain. If you’ve mastered faster-than-light travel, you are also able to produce just about everything you need at home, and trade for the rest. They’ll come to see that too, eventually.»
He glanced at the intercom. «I’m expecting a message hourly,» he said. «My last scout ship brought some interesting political news from Ulugan.»
«Eh?»
«Play me some chess, will you? I love dramatic revelations. You can allow me this one. It’s been a rather dreary year.»
It was only half an hour later that the ship’s radioman announced a subspace broadcast, Ulugan calling the Patrol command. Alak made a leisurely way to the communications room, letting Meinz jitter behind him.
The blue face in the screen was trying hard to maintain its old arrogance, but not succeeding very well. «Hello, Sevulan,» said Alak. «What’s new?»
«There has been a change of government in the empire,» said the Ulugani stiffly.
«Violent, I’m sure. Did you shoot Hurulta or just jail him?»
«The Arkazhik is—very ill. Frankly, we suspected he was a mental case. His rashness brought on many actions of which the new cabinet never did approve.»