Clearly they had been sampling what the café had to offer for they walked unsteadily as they came up to Archier.
“Eh, it’s the Admiral,” slurred one. “Howdy, A’m’ral.”
The other grabbed Archier by the arm, swung him round and raised his fist to hit him in the face. “Whatcha doin’ still alive, Admiral?”
“Leave him alone!”
The peremptory female voice rang out, causing the pirate to jerk round in surprise. Hesper Positana came striding from the other end of the café area. Boldly she climbed the slope and waved the two men back.
“Clear out, or Ragshok will hear of it.”
The sight of her black and silver uniform seemed to have an effect on them. One grinned sheepishly.
“All right, sister, keep your vest on.”
The phrase was opaque to Archier. He allowed the girl to lead him down the ramp. Behind him, his assailants passed on.
“You’d be safer in your quarters,” Hesper told him. “Those two might have killed you if I hadn’t happened along.”
“This is my fleet,” Archier said stubbornly. “My ship.” He sighed. “They killed my adjutant,” he said blankly. “He was such a nice little chap.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” Archier said dolefully. “You’ve won. This is what you wanted.”
“You’ll have to believe me when I say that I never wanted what I’ve seen happen here. We fought to get you Imperials off our necks, that’s all. So as not to have to let our best men and women be carried off to Diadem. Not to have your fleets hovering over our heads threatening to blast us all.”
“It looks like you’ll have that. But in the process Diadem is going to be ripped apart by these people. It’s going to be ghastly.”
She looked at him sharply. “You mean you can’t defend yourselves?”
He shook his head. “Diadem is wide open. It’s completely defenceless.”
“But what about the other fleets?”
“They are out in the Empire. They’ve been ordered to stay out of Diadem, as a matter of fact. There’s… a political crisis there.”
She was silent for a while. “Look,” she said at length, “for what it’s worth to you, I haven’t got any time for these characters. Ragshok’s people are just scum. Shipwreckers… the ironic thing is, it’s the fleets that have prevented us from clearing the spacelanes of these pirates, by not letting us have proper policing forces of our own… And though the others wear the same uniform as myself, I don’t feel a part of them. They’re the dregs of the rebel forces, the garbage.” She stopped in her tracks. “Why, I’ve seen them rape children.”
Despite himself, Archier smiled. “I doubt if what you saw was rape,” he said.
The mainly male invaders had, it was clear, come aboard with the intention of making free with the flagship’s women. Initially they had been disappointed. All but a handful of the nubile human females followed the fad of facial senility, which the Escorians were unsophisticated enough to find repulsive. When things settled down a little, however, the Priapus’ People troupe, including the young girl trainees, had been more than willing to accommodate them.
“I know what I saw,” Hesper insisted. “You probably don’t understand these things. You people from Diadem are so innocent in some ways. Sex isn’t really a part of your lives at all, is it?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say…”
She was thoughtful, not hearing him. “Isn’t there any way to regain control? I mean, I don’t want to see the fleet handed back to you, to the Imperials. But I would like to see it in responsible Escorian hands. If we had Ten-Fleet we could defend Escoria as a sovereign state, without doing crazy criminal things like rampaging around Diadem.” She reflected. “What happened to all the prisoners you took?”
“They’re still on the prison ship. Ragshok didn’t release them… he’s ahead of you.”
“So? How would we go about releasing them?”
Archier found he liked the Escorian girl. He admired her guts. But he shook his head. “There’s no way to get to them. The intermats are under guard. The only other way would be to steal a gig, but what with the way Ragshok lets people like me wander around he must be pretty confident that’s not possible either.”
In fact Archier had been in the Command Centre since the take-over. Ragshok had wanted him to explain how to mesh feetol bubbles and fly the fleet in formation. Although in fear of his life, Archier had refused: but it had made no difference. Handling the fleet was fairly easy, and Ragshok’s men had soon got the hang of it. Ten-Fleet was now heading for Diadem at top speed.
He ushered Hesper down a narrow passage that ran just behind the café. “Apparently you’ve been taught certain ideas regarding our attitude to sexuality,” he said. “I’d like to show you that those ideas are a misconception. Actually many people in Diadem think provincials can’t separate sex from reproduction. You are described as erotically uneducated. But perhaps that’s not true either.”
The corridor contained several arched doors. One opened as Archier placed his palm on it. Inside there was only a vague diffused light, until Archier slid the door shut behind them and touched a contact.
At once the room had defined limits. They were surrounded by—themselves; their own images thrown back at them in multiple, from every possible angle, at every stage of enlargement.
He smiled at her as he hit a second contact, flooding the room with aphrodisiac. “In here is our own universe, consisting only of ourselves.”
Quickly he stripped off, throwing his garments in a corner and moving towards the shell-shaped couch that, reflecting imagery as completely as the walls, floor and ceiling, was almost invisible. His images moved as he moved, piling flesh tone on flesh tone, totally submerging Hesper’s vision.
“Why, this is perverted,” she said delightedly. She was grinning, and the gas was getting to her. Trying to keep her eye on the real Archier amid the image flood, she unpeeled her uniform and stepped from it.
“I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” Archier said.
The endless mural of writhing limbs and organs engulfed them as they came together.
11
The natural colour of this planet’s sky was a blue so pale as to be almost white. The sun was large and alum-pale, glaring behind that sky like a ghost of a sun, shimmering, casting a moderate heat.
Hako Ikematsu was interested in neither sky nor sun, but he frequently peered overhead nevertheless. The processes that took place in the sky, in the air, sometimes reaching down to the ground, were interesting indeed.
They were, of course, the same as had appeared on board ICS Standard Bearer, but here the range of their operations was easier to view. It was rather as if the space near the planet had been engulfed in a sort of linear cobweb which entered the atmosphere occasionally, blown by a cosmic wind. Long glistening threads, always dead straight, always parallel. He had, of course, guessed the nature of those threads, even since being transposed, in the twinkling of an eye, from the corridor of the flagship to the surface of this world.
It was surprising he was still in one piece. He suspected he would not be so for long if those threads should touch him again. In the days that the weaponless kosho had been searching for his nephew he had come upon the remains of numbers of people, beasts, buildings and artifacts. In every case they had been dismantled; not clumsily, as a butcher or a demolitioner would do it, but with extraordinary finesse. In the case of the organic remnants there was often remarkably little blood. Separations were apt to be along natural lines of division: membranes, sinews, systemic functions. Nerves were left dangling, sometimes pulled out of their ensheathing flesh to a length of several feet, or with receptor organs still attached. How such careful dissection had been accomplished, by beings who did not even seem to be beings, and who lacked any apparent means of manipulation, was a mystery.