And now one of the aged faces she despised so much called out to him from within the pulsating flanges of a flashblast projector costume.
“Admiral! Come and dance with me!”
As he swept into the melee, Archier saw a look of jealous puzzlement fleetingly across Hesper’s face.
Not far away Gruwert, his costume switched off, the fabric hanging like rags about his corpulent bristly form, talked earnestly to Pout the chimera.
“So how do you gain your followers?” he asked.
For answer Pout smiled idiotically, his large eyes swivelling mysteriously towards the ceiling.
Gruwert gave an exasperated snuffle. He knew that this amalgam of primates could not be as stupid as he acted. Not to have all those people in tow, most of them apparently much brighter than himself.
These apes always were a shifty lot, he told himself. And that went for the hairless variety, too.
And in a corridor some yards from the room where Gruwert was entertaining Pout, Hako Ikematsu sat cross-legged in the rest position, inasmuch as a kosho could ever be said to rest. His spine was erect, his arms spread in the prescribed position, but his consciousness was not in suspension. He had merely blanked out his thoughts to make himself receptive to the emanations of others.
That way he was able to keep track of the presence of the man-ape chimera. Pout’s mental signature was distinctive: crafty, greedy thoughts in a brew of resentful malevolence that was, Ikematsu recognised, merely the perversion of the love of life that was natural to all mammals, but which in this case had been much ill-used.
Alongside it he sensed another presence, another signature: a sort of thrusting, porcine forcefulness, an impression of rooting, trampling power.
It was the tang of empire.
Chaotic music from the ballroom drifted up the corridor as a door opened at the far end, then was cut off again. Sinbiane and his new friend, a dark-eyed boy of about the same age whose black hair was gathered behind his head in a knot, approached.
“Hello uncle. This is Trixa. He’s on the battle staff here. He works the big guns. I told him you were a great warrior on Earth.”
Ikematsu rose to his feet and smiled down at the boy. “So you fought in the battle they are celebrating?”
“Yes sir,” Trixa told him boldly. “I coordinate eight guns here on the flagship. I helped knock out four of the enemy.” He paused. “Have you killed many people, sir?”
Ikematsu continued smiling. “I have killed no one, young cannoneer.”
, “A true warrior does not kill by his own hand,” Sinbiane intoned to the puzzled boy, “but only by the unavoidable fate of he who is killed.”
Sweating, Tengu found Ragshok in Claire de Lune’s restaurant. He was talking to Morgan and the Salpian engineer, Drue.
“The intermat,” Tengu choked out. “It’s started working!”
Ragshok’s eyes lit up. He licked his lips.
The Salpian had been eating from a plate in rapid gulps. He pushed it away. “It figures! I should have guessed it!”
Tengu stared at him.
“I was just telling the chief what I found out,” the engineer explained. “Whenever this fleet flies in feetol formation, all the bubbles merge into one big bubble. That’s why Imperial fleets are faster than our own ships. For the intermat to work, you must be inside the big bubble too.”
“These Imperials got a lot of tricks up their sleeve,” Morgan said admiringly.
“Let’s see them trick their way out of this one.” Ragshok leaned towards Tengu. “Are you sure it’s working? Have you been through?”
“Sure. To the flagship and back. I spent half an hour there.”
He would have stayed longer, once the smokes in the air got to him. But he had become nervous because of the looks he was getting. Besides, he had wanted to make sure he could get back.
“The flagship, no less,” Ragshok murmured. “What did you find there?”
“It’s weird. There’s some sort of victory dance going on. They call this a warfleet? It’s more like a ride down the Janja.” He was referring to the famous river replete with pleasure boats.
“A celebration. What a time to strike! And, anyway, we have to do it before the fleet comes out of feetol. Did you see many arms about?”
“Nobody was armed that I could see. It looks easier than taking a passenger liner, by far.”
“Okay. It will take an hour or more to get ready to move. Choose some men and reconnoitre the bigger ships, if you can do it discreetly. Make sure it’s the same all over.”
Broodingly Ragshok stared down into the main area of the restaurant from the executive’s balcony he had reserved for himself. They had got the dispenser operating and now everybody came to the restaurant for meals. Like the ship, it was overcrowded, and noisy too. In at least three places brawls were going on.
“We’re going to do it,” he said in a dreamlike voice. “We’re going to seize an Imperial Star Force fleet, one of the greatest instruments of power the galaxy has seen.”
“And then we’re going to rape Diadem,” Morgan finished for him.
“That’s right. The greatest act of pillage in history. It will be just like taking some ripe, defenceless woman—Diadem doesn’t have any defences of its own. There are only the Star Force fleets, and they are out in the Empire.”
“They could soon be recalled,” Drue pointed out.
“Too late. It will be a stand-off: we give them the message, move in and we start blasting worlds.”
“And if they promise the same for Escoria?” Tengu asked softly.
Ragshok’s answer was a ferocious growl. “We let them! What’s it to us? The Empire will fall to pieces and we pick up Diadem as first prize.”
He stood up, pointing to Tengu. “You and Morgan see to the reconnoitre. I’ll round up our team leaders and organise the squads.”
Just then an odd, transient event took place. In the air before him Ragshok seemed to see fine silvery threads, straight as tracks of light and sparkling from end of the restaurant to the other. It was like a linear cobweb being spun just too fast for the eye to catch. But in a second or two the apparition was gone.
“What in the Simplex was that?” he demanded.
When, in the ballroom aboard Standard Bearer, Archier noticed similar threads, this time glinting obliquely from floor to ceiling, he took them for an arranged visual effect, a presage to some extravagance to come. Then word was brought to him. Something unexplained was happening.
He summoned Arctus and made his way to the Command Centre. On the way there they saw the threads again. This time they started at the farther end of the corridor and proceeded at moderate pace down it, looking, he thought, like an array of lines marking the interfaces of metallic crystals. But, before they reached him, they vanished.
In the Command centre he found the white-haired Menshek and a number of ship engineers, including the chief engineer he had questioned earlier over the behaviour of Earth’s moon. Menshek was talking earnestly with the duty officer, a young tiger.
With a spasm of guilt at having such a thought, Archier suddenly found himself wishing some of the engineers could have been human. Animals weren’t at their best when handling the totally unknown.
“These lines that are appearing in the air,” Menshek said to him. “We’re getting the same reports from all over the fleet. In fact we think they’re appearing over a wide region of space. It must be another manifestation from the rent.”
“The instruments showed a very brief interruption in the operation of the engines,” the gorilla chief engineer told him. “That could be serious. But it hasn’t recurred yet.”
“We’re not supposed to be in the affected region yet,” Archier remarked.