Trevayne heard the hiss and turned toward her in con- cern. Her face was even more frozen than usual, and her eyes were haunted as she looked up at him over the terminal.
"What is it, Sonja?" "Admiral," she said, very quietly, "the scout cruiser is Ashanti." Every officer on the flag bridge either personally knew or had heard of Trevayne and his family-- and that Lieutenant Commander Colin Trevayne was executive officer of TFNS Ashanti. Heads turned and eyes looked at the admiral.
""rhank you, Commodore," Trevayne said levelly. "Carry on, please." Yoshinaka glanced quickly aUs tle command bridge corn screen, seeing the pain in Remko's dark eyes. Years before, struggling upward through the tight, almost hereditary ranks of the peacetime TFN, the flag captain had encountered Innerworld senior officers who'd barely troubled to conceal their snobbery, and others who'd displayed their enlightened social attitudes with forced, patronizing toleranc And then Lieutenant Commander Sean Remko had found himself serving a flag officer who quite simply didn't give a damn about where Sean Remko had been born or how he talked.
And now, watching Remko stare from the corn screen at that same officer, Yoshinaka understood the inarticulate flag captain's need to offer Trevayne something. "Sir, the carriers are what matters. A scout doesn't have enough armament to hurt us much... and the missiles are still under shipboard control... it ought to be possible to..." Trevayne also understood, but he turned to the screen and calmly cut Remko's stammering short.
"Fight your ship, Captain," he said.
Then he settled back in the comfortable admiral's chair. The drumbeat was back, but he ignored it.
There were decisions to be made in the next few minutes, and there was no time for anything else. No time to examine the new sensation of being utterly alone in the cosmos but for the cold companions Duty and Self-Discipline. No time for grief, or self-hatred, or nausea. Plenty of time for all of that, later.
ALLIANCE Xanadu averaged slightly warmer than Old Terra, and its axial tilt was less than fifteen degrees, giving it short and mild seasons.
Prescott City, on the seaboard of the continent of Kublai, lay just inside the northern temperate zone and was enjoying a distypical winter as lan Trevayne stepped from his shuttle. The day was blustery but only mildly cool; the chill was in his soul.
He spent a moment acclimating himself. (weather of any sort was always a little startling to a man diswho spent most of his working life in artificial environments, and the 0.93 G gravitation was perceptibly different from the TFN'S statutory one G.) Then he crossed the ceramacrete to greet Genji Yoshinaka. The dapper ops officer saluted and fell in beside him.
"Good afternoon, Admiral. Your schedule's been arranged for the evening. In the meantime, your skimmer is waiting. The pilot is a Prescott City native; he says Ms. Ortega's address is a good kilometer from the nearest public landing platform, so l've laid on a ground ear to take you the rest of the way." Trevayne looked around him. Low clouds scudded "rapidly across a sky of deep blue crystal. For the first time in months, he made a completely impulsive decision. "Cancel the ground ear, Genii. I11 walk." Yoshinaka, struggling to keep pace with his long-legged boss, was startled. In the week since the engagement people were beginning to call the Battle of the Gateway,
Trevaye's days had been regimented almost to the see-ond. It was inevitable, of course, especially given the new responsibilities which had fallen to him when Sergei Ortega had died with his flagship. But Yoshinaka understood why the admiral had attacked his work with such furious energy. There were too many ghosts, and Trevayne sought to hold them at bay in the only way he knew. Knowledge made his impulsiveness, his willingness to waste time, all the more startling. But, then, Yoshinaka reflected, the admiral had never been a predictable man.
Trevayne had visited Xanadu before, but only for brief conferences at the base itself. Now, for the first time, he looked down from the skimmer and saw the planet's chief city not as an abstraction to be defended, but as a bustling urban sprawl. He couldn't recall what Prescott City had been failed when it was founded during the Fourth Interstellar War--probably something else outre from Coleridge. The old name didn't much matter anyway, for it had soon been renamed in honor of Commodore Andrew Prescott, whose statue and column dominated the lawn before Government House. It was a fitting tribute to the survey officer who had provided the Terran/orion alliance with the information it needed to win that war--and who'd died doing it. Trevayne's mouth twisted with the wry. grimace that now served him for a smile. He hoped Winston Churchill had been wrong about the bad luck that attends nations which change the names of their cities.
It was hard to quarrel with Xanadu's choice of the name, though. Time after time, the war had brought large-scale space combat to this system. At the touch of the destructive energies those battles released, a living planet would wither like a leaf in a flame. Thanks to Andrew Prescott, the people of Xanadu had finally awakened one morning and known they could live and bear children without that fear.
Until now, Trevayne thought, and the bile rose in his throat. Now the fear was back, but this time it was fear of the rebellious ships of the TFN itself, the TFN which for centuries had stood between all the worlds of Man and that horror! As Sergei had stood.
His controlled face tightened as his vivid imagination pictured the loathsome mushroom clouds once more.
Only the consuming demands of responsibility had kept him functioning under the shocks of the mutinies and the deaths of his wife and daughters. And then Colin.... His mind shied away from the thought like a wounded, skittish horse. In the aftermath of battle Trevayne had deliberately filled the little free time he might have had with a hectic round of self-imposed duties. Such as this one: a call on Sergefs daughter to express his condolences. It ought to fill the time between now and tonight's round of appointments and paperwork. And the time wouldn't be totally wasted. She was, after all, politically influential.
The wind gusted as he turned into Miriam Ortega's street, and he cursed as he nearly lost his cap. Then the gust died and he straightened his cap, glancing around at his surroundings.
The street skirted the broad estuary of the Alph, running down to a seawall and the azure, white-capped harbor. This was one of Prescott City's oldest residential districts, and the houses were on the small side but wellbuilt, mostly of stone and wood, as first-wave houses tended to be. High-rises and fused cermacrete came later, as did the premium on space which would have doomed the large old native trees surrounding the houses. The ast'chi-tecture was vaguely neo-Tudor, and he suspected it had developed locally; it certainly fit the materials and the setting.
He drew a deep, lung-filling breath of the salt-tinged air and decided he'd been right to take the time to walk. Sensory deprivation was an ever-present danger in space; it had probably begun to catch up with him. In the midst of artificiality,, the mind tended to turn inward on itself. His native Old Terra might be out of reach, but here he could at least touch the soil of a world humans had made their own.
A few children were at play, and at the sight of them a shadow chilled his mind just as the low-flying clouds periodically blocked out the warmth of Zephrain A.
A small boy looked up and smiled at him.
Trevaeavne hurried on.
Miriam Ortega's house wasn't far from the seawall. He stepped through the old-fashioned gate in the low, stone wall along the street, noticing the faint rim of salt clinging to the seaward stones. He climbed the steps and rang for admittance, and the door swung open.
The woman in the doorway was in her middle to late thirties, he decided. She was of medium height and rather sturdy build, with thick black hair pulled back in a severe style which accentuated her high cheekbones. Those cheekbones reminded Trevayne of Sergei, but the rest of her features, including the strongly curved nose, seemed to owe more to Sergefs late wife. Ruth Ortega had been from New Sinai, and her genetic heritage was strong in her daughter's face.
Miriam Ortega, he thought, was no beauty.
"Ms. Ortega?" "Yes. You must be Admiral Trevayne. Your yeoman called earlier today. Won't you come in?" Her voice was husky but firm. Though she seemed somber, there was no quaver.
She led him down a short hallway to a siting room whose large, many-paned window overlooked the street. Though not messy, the room looked very lived-in. It was lined with old-style bookshelves, and an easel with paints and brushes stood near the window. A desk sat to one side, built around a functional data terminal and utilitarian tape and data chip racks.
"Do you paint, Ms. Ortega?" He gestured briefly at the easel.
"Only as an off-and-on hobby. No real talent, I'm afraid." They sat down and she lit a cigarette. "I'm going to give it up this summer--smoking, that is, not painting. Right now, though, I seem to need ali the bad habits I've got to see me through." Trevayne was uncomfortably reminded of his reason for coming. He cleared his throat.
"Ms. Ortega, the last time I talked to your father, he spoke of you. He said he wanted me to meet you. I deeply regret that we're finally meeting under these circumstances. But please accept my condolences for your loss. Believe me, I share it. Your father was, in many ways, one of the finest officers I've ever served under." God, he thought. I didn't intend to sound so formal; it's almost stilted. But what can one say? I've never been at my best dealing with human tragedy.
Including my own.
Miriam Ortega inhaled smoke and let it trickle out. "You know, Admiral, I think Dad was a bit disappointed to have produced possibly the most unmilitary offspring in the Federation, but I managed to soak up enough of his attitudes to understand him. However easygoing he sometimes seemed, he felt very strongly about certain things. One of them was the Federation, and another was his concept of what TFN service meant. He used to quote some ancient saying about placing your body in harm's way, between the horror of war and those you're sworn to protect.
He could imagine no higher calling." Her face had worn an inward look, but now she looked up at Trevayne and he could almost feel the unconquerable vitality she radiated. When she spoke again, her voice was still controlled, but the words were vibrant.
"Dad died the way he would have wanted to. I can't deny I'm grieving for him, but at the risk of seeming callous, I can't honestly say I feel sorrow. Sorrow isn't big enough... there's no room for pride in it!" Trevayne was startled by how closely she'd paralleled his own earlier thoughts. But beyond that, he suddenly wondered how he could have thought this woman unexcep-tional-looking even for a moment. She wasn't conventionally pretty, no; but her face was a strikingly vivid and expressive one, uniquely her own. She was like no one else.
For an instant he wanted to reach out to her and tell her of his own loss. She was the sort of person who inspired confidences. But no, he had no right to burden her with his problems. And he wasn't sure he was ready to expose his own wounds.
"I know you were close to your father," he said. "I recall him mentioning that you moved out here when he was first posted to Zephrain." "I suppose my closeness to him was a form of overcom-pensation. I didn't see much of him when I was young--he was in space a lot, and Mother played a much bigger role in raising me. Whenever he was around, he did his best to turn me into a tomboy." Her mobile features formed a rueful smile.
"Some would say it took. Anyway, you're fight about" my coming out here. It was just after my divorce. I was in the mood for a change of scenery, and Mother had died just before he was out-posted; he was still taking it pretty hard." She broke off for a moment, drawing on her cigarette. Her face was briefly thoughtful before she shrugged and looked up again.
"I had a law degree from New Athens and reasonably good references, so I was able to etablish myself here on Xanadu. I found I liked it here.
What started as a "stay close to Dad" sort of thing turned into something else entirely, in a sense.
I landed a position with one of the better firms-- Bernbach, de Parma, and Leong--and suddenly I was one of the old hands. That doesn't take long here in the Rim, you know. And our firm's always been heavily into local polities, which is how I ended up involved in lhe formation of the provisional government." Trevayne nodded, though he suspected that wasn't the half of it. Suddenly she looked self-deprecating and waved her cigarette dismissively.
"Here I am running off at the mouth about myself when I've got the most famous man in the Rim sitting in my living room! Just bringing your battlegroup all the way out here made you a hero to these people, you know. Since the battle, you've become even more of one, ff that's possible! I'm probably boring you stiff..." "No, no," Trevayne denied. "Far from it.
In fact, you were just coming to something I need to know more about.
I'm stfil not toe clear about the origins of your provisional government." "No?" She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment.
"How much do you know about Xanadu's history, Admiral?" "Only the bare-bones outline from the handbook, I'm afraid. His "Then you know Xanadu was setfied during the Fourth Interstellar War when the Navy built the Fleet base. What you may not realize is just what that meant for the makeup of our population. There was a tremendous amount of military construction going on sixty years ago, and that required a large labor force. People came from all over the Federation, and today's population is about as racially mixed as you'll find anywhere. Which--was a sudden smfie his-comis probably one reason I fit in so well! Anyway, the point is that this isn't one of the planets settled by closeknit ethnic or national groups. To govern themselves, this polyglot crew needed a simple pyramidal structure to interact on. Xanadu is divided into prefectures, which are grouped inff.tricts, above which are provinces. Each prefecture elects a representative to the district assembly. The district assemblies each select one representative to the provincial assemblies, which each send one member to the Planetary Council.
There's also a popularly elected president, who appoints the judiciary. There's a lot more to it, of course, but that's the basic idea." As democratic systems went, Trevayne reflected, it owed more to the French than to the American model.
"Actually, it's worked pretty well," she said.
'rhe planet has taken on a sort of uniformity in diversity. The Xandies are probably on the way to developing what the anthropologists call a 'planetary ethnicity."" Seeing his puzzled look, she elaborated. "People from Xanadu are called "Xandies." It's not a slur," she added quickly. "We call ourselves that." He noted the shift from third to first person.
"Anyway," she continued, "the pro-rebel party here was extremely small and--partly as a result of being so alienated from the Xandy mainstream, I supposc extremely militant. Right after word of the mutinies arrived, a gang of fanatics tossed a bomb which killed the president and several high-ranking members of the government... not to mention a good number of innocent bystanders." She grimaced. "rhe chief conspirators fled off-planet and got as far as Aotearoa. I was a member of the delegation sent to arrange their extradition, and, in the course of the discussions, it became clear that we needed some sort of inter-system authority to deal with any further terrorist acts locally, since we were completely isolated from Old Terra. The result was the provisional government, which includes Zephrain and several of the nearer systems--the most populous and highly-developed ones in the Rim. Brilliant improvisation!" She beamed at him in mock self-satisfaction.
"Dad's support gave it some teeth, but it's still pretty chaotic." "Yes. Your father and I talked about this.
As I see it, the problem is that the Rim is on its own indefinitely. We need a Rim-wide provisional government, if only to perform the kind of day-to-day functions that the Federation always provided.
But it isn't only day-to-day matters... we've handed the rebels a setback, but we haven't heard the last of them. And it's only a matter of time before the Tangri Corsairs take advantage of this civil war to start raiding again." He rose and began pacing as he went on. "I said to your father that we may as well be all the Federation that's left.., and I wasn't just being dramatic.
We
're isolated to an extent that no one in the government has ever dreamed of, much less planned for! Thank God we've got a loyalist provisional government to work with." He stopped suddenly in the middle of the room and looked at her and realized that she'd been watching him intently.
"Ms. Ortega, a while back you said something about not wishing to seem callous. Well, neither do I. But I must tell you that what I said earlier about sharing your loss was meant not just on a personal level. The fact is, I'd planned to have your father, as TFN senior officer, declared emergency governor-general of the Rim systems. It's legally defensible, but without support from local leaders, it would probably do more harm than good. With the contacts he'd built up in his years out here.... " His voice trailed off.
"Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to get carried away. And it's all a matter of might-have-been now that he's dead." Miriam Ortega's expression had become even more intent. Now her eyes flashed.
"No! It still makes sensebeautiful sense, politically as well as militarily. Your idea of a "governor-general" is per-feet. He'd represent the Federation, so he'd provide a focus for loyalist sentiment. And he'd give the provisional government exactly what it lacks: a strong executive. And @u.. we ve got the perfect man for the position." Trevayne looked at her levelly. "Me," he said, slightly more as a statement than a question.