“Chief Strategist,” Marten said. “I request your permission to keep my sidearm. If you refuse, I will relinquish my command and return at once to the
Erasmus
.”
“You are in no position to give me terms,” Tan said.
Suddenly, Marten was weary of the bickering. It reminded him of Major Orlov, of Training Master Lycon and Arbiter Octagon, of everyone who’d tried to tell him what to think.
“I’m not giving you terms,” Marten said. “I’m telling you what I’m going to do.”
“You will adjust your tone while addressing me,” said Tan.
Marten squinted at the small woman. She controlled the bulk of the military vessels in this planetary system. She was the de facto ruler. But Marten no longer cared. She was playing games he didn’t understand, and through the arbiter, she’d just tried to disarm them.
“Did you wish to see me?” Marten asked.
Tan’s mouth grew firm, and three seconds passed. “Your bodyguard will return to his room.”
“And?” asked Marten.
“And you and I shall speak within,” said Tan.
“Sure,” Marten said, recognizing that she’d dropped any reference to his disarming, at least for now. He’d won this round. Now he’d have to make sure he walked out of her chamber a free man.
In Tan’s chamber, a statue mused in a corner. The statue depicted a fawn of a woman with wisps of cloth heightening her semi-nudity. The statue stared into an unseen distance, as if thoughtfully concerned over the fate of the world. A golden lyre hung on a wall, as did several faint, brushstroke paintings. Brown and teal silk hung from the ceiling in a complex pattern of loops.
Tan knelt on a cushion before a low table. On the table was a small dispensary, with a silver chalice beside it. Smoothing her robe, Tan indicated that Marten should sit across from her. Then she picked up the chalice and pressed a button on the dispensary. A blue pill appeared. With tiny fingers, Tan slipped the pill onto her tongue, sipping it down with wine.
Feeling like a giant, Marten sat cross-legged on a cushion. He had to adjust his holster to do so. The table was metallic and smooth, with controls near Tan’s hands. No doubt, she could project images on it.
“You leave me in a quandary,” said Tan.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It would trouble me if you did,” said Tan, sipping more wine.
“I don’t want to give you trouble,” Marten said. “Look, you’ve just destroyed the last cyborgs in the system. You should be rejoicing. Then you should figure out how to take the fight to the enemy.”
“Ah,” she said, setting the chalice onto the table without making a sound. “You reached that conclusion even faster than I’d expected you to do. But then, you are a monomaniac.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The obvious: that you’re a single-minded soldier. I might add that you thrive on mayhem, on chaos and instability.”
“You call fighting to stay alive mayhem?”
“I’ve studied you, Marten Kluge. You’re more than a soldier. You are a killer, an atavistic throwback to man’s earliest times. You would have done well in a suit of armor on a horse and with a sword.”
“If this is about the kidnapping—”
“You once laid hands on my person,” said Tan, with a trace of emotion. “Believe me, I haven’t forgotten the event.”
“Good. Then you’ll also remember that you planned to go to Athena Station. If I hadn’t stopped you, you would have unknowingly given yourself to the cyborgs.”
Tan smiled indulgently. “You claim to have kidnapped me for my greater good?”
“Chief Strategist,” said Marten.
Tan held up a small hand. “That day, your actions were beneficial to me. I concede you the point. No. This meeting has nothing to do with that. The cyborgs invaded our system, destroyed three-fourths of our society and then perished under our retaliatory strikes.”
“I helped kill the cyborgs.”
“Killing to you is as eating is to a glutton,” said Tan.
Marten banged the table with a fist. “I resent that.”
“Now your barbarism is on display.”
“This is just great,” said Marten. “Everywhere I go, people try to kill me or try to force me to accept their beliefs. They don’t ever consider that I might want to run my own life.”
“I’m sure every killer espouses a similar doctrine.”
“I’m tired of you calling me a killer. You’re the killer.”
Tan smiled faintly. “Your dialogue lacks grace and wit. It is a sophomoric verbal assault. Undoubtedly, it’s the reason you’re so quick to resort to physical violence.”
Marten’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the one using genetically-warped policemen. I thought you Jovians had stopped using myrmidons. When did that change?”
Tan’s manner intensified as she stared at him.
It allowed Marten a good look at her eyes, at their dilatation. There was a glassy sheen to them, perhaps a side effect of the blue pill. It made him pause and wonder what it would be like orchestrating the war against the cyborgs. They were cunning, ruthless enemies. Yet Tan had made some brilliant guesses these past months, and she had outmaneuvered the guiding cyborg intelligence. Marten had never considered what that kind of high-level pressure might do to a person. He’d heard how the controllers of Europa and Ganymede constantly argued with Tan, and how the Helium-3 Barons tried to interfere with military matters.
“I congratulate you on your victory,” Marten said abruptly.
Tan appeared not to hear.
“The cyborgs were clever,” he added.
Leaning toward him, Tan clutched the table’s edge. “Clever, you say. They were brilliant.”
“Yet you beat them.”
A line creased Tan’s otherwise smooth forehead. It heightened her beauty. Then she eased back so she rested her butt on her heels. Turning her head, she looked at the golden lyre.
“They destroyed us,” she whispered. “They killed the most superior form of life in the Solar System, and by that I mean the Dictates. Yes, I crushed them as one would a spider. As the last philosopher-queen of Callisto, it was my solemn duty to do so. Yet what have I achieved? Renewed life of the perfected form?” She shook her head slowly.
“The war was brutal,” Marten said.
Tan stopped shaking her head to regard him. “Banality is your strong suit.”
“I thought it was being a killer.”
“A banal killer,” she said with a soft shrug.
“What’s wrong with you? You’ve just won a great victory. Now you sulk in your room and turn against your fellow soldiers.”
Something flashed in her eyes. “You dare to equate me with yourself? I belong to the philosophers. You are at best a guardian who cannot understand his place in the hierarchy. There is no equality between us.”
“Are you drunk?” asked Marten.
Tan made a sharp gesture. “I have enhanced my thinking. I see linkages between actions that are invisible to others.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Marten said. He adjusted his holster. “You know what I think.”
“Grace me with your wit,” she said.
“I think you’re trying to revive Callisto or these Dictates the only way possible now: through a military dictatorship. Which units landed on Athena Station? Did you hold back the ones with Callisto space marines?”
“How little you know.”
“You’re brilliant,” Marten said. “You’ve fought a grueling war against aliens of human devising. The cyborgs are a nightmare, and they’re merciless, more than willing to bring about our extinction. Your strategies checked them at every turn. I did some hard fighting, along with many others. Too many good men died implementing your orders.”
“
The wisest should rule
,” said Tan. “It is an axiom of inexorable truth.”
“
Men should live free
,” said Marten. “It’s what makes life worth living.”
“Ah, your quixotic belief,” said Tan.
“I’m not sure what that word means, but your tone, the myrmidons outside—you want to revive the old Callisto order.”
“Look around you, Marten Kluge.”
Marten glanced at the paintings on the walls.
“No,” she said. “That was a metaphorical phrase. How simple you really are, how direct and…barbaric.”
“What happened to you?” Marten asked. “You’ve changed.”
The glassy look to Tan’s eyes had grown. “I peered into the abyss, barbarian, into the future. I saw the cyborgs staring back at me—and no humans existed in that future.”
“We beat the cyborgs.”
“We defeated a small penetration raid into our system.”
“How do you know it was just a raid?” asked Marten.
“It is self-evident,” whispered Tan. She picked up the chalice, staring into the depths of the cup. “How does one face certain doom?” She shook her head. “I realized many months ago that I must retain full control of the Jovian moons, as only I possessed the insights, the sheer brain-power to counter cyborg brilliance. Strategically, there was only one manner in which I could do so.”
“You’re wrong,” Marten said.
Tan looked up, blinking. She seemed surprised to see him. “Wrong?” she said, as if tasting the word.
“You’re trying to re-forge the chains that bound the Jovians in servitude. Don’t you remember Force-Leader Yakov? He sacrificed his life so we could defeat the cyborgs on Carme. He didn’t sacrifice it so proud philosophers from Callisto could lord it over the people of Ganymede.”
“You poor barbarian, you’re too ignorant to appreciate the glory of the superior life.”
“Do you think I’ve fought these past months in order to let you handcuff me?”
“You are a virus, Marten Kluge. You spout your inanities about freedom and find eager listeners, I know. By freedom, however, you mean license for the glutton to gorge himself with food and the sex fiend to rut like an animal with any willing partner. Humans need guidance. They need purpose. The philosopher does what I’ve done: giving this guidance for the furtherance of the whole. Your freedom would dissolve human associations into chaos. Then the cyborgs would defeat us with even greater ease.”
“Yakov fought to free Ganymede from your philosophic oppression.”
“Yakov, Yakov, I grow weary of hearing his name. He is dead. Let him remain so.”
Marten leaned across the table. “Yakov gave his life because he saw how precious freedom was. He’d tasted it, as I’ve tasted it. The cyborgs sought to enslave us in nightmarish servitude. Yakov gave his life to defeat them and stop such a bitter future.”
“Yakov was a soldier, a guardian, a man of spirit. It was his nature to do as you’ve described. You shouldn’t try to give his act more grace than it deserves.”
“I see,” Marten said. He found that he was breathing hard. He struggled to control himself. “You’re under the illusion that it was your generalship that gave us victory.”
“Your emotionalism has confused you,” said Tan. “First you entered my chamber, praising my guidance. Now you reverse course. Which is it, because you cannot logically say both?”
“Your generalship would have been useless without hard-fighting soldiers.”
“Ah,” said Tan, “therein lays your ignorance. Like most fighters, you overvalue yourself. The sword is nothing without the brain that guides it.”
“Fancy footwork stops when a laser burns you down,” Marten said.
“Is that a threat?” Tan asked softly.
Marten banged the table with his fist, and this time, Tan flinched.
“Forget about that,” he said. “The truth is I don’t care who rules here. It’s such a little thing that it makes me angry I’m even arguing about it.”
“You are amazingly illogical and sporadic. I’m beginning to wonder if your chaotic thought-patterns act as a protective shielding. It’s almost impossible for a high-grade logician such as me to predict your course or understand your thinking.”
“Listen to me,” Marten said. “I’ve thought a lot about how to defeat the cyborgs.”
“You are a monomaniac, as I’ve said.” Tan fingered one of her rings. Its signet was the Greek letter
omega
. “Has your single-mindedness unhinged you? The cyborgs
are
defeated.”
“I’m talking about killing every one of them in the Solar System,” Marten said. “I’ve actually met them on the battlefield, not just theorized about them in the quietness of my study. I know how incredibly deadly they are.”
“…The people of Callisto knew that too,” Tan said softly. “My cousin Su-Shan knew that.”
“That’s why you should be listening to me, instead of insulting me,” Marten said. “You’ve seen the devastation caused by these aliens. You must know like me that the Jovians cannot defeat them on their own.”
Tan lowered the chalice with a clunk. She frowned at Marten.
“We have to unite against them,” he said.
“We?” asked Tan.
“Every human in the Solar System,” Marten said. “The Jovian moons, Mars, Earth, Venus, maybe even the Highborn. The Praetor gave his life to kill cyborgs. Maybe the other Highborn—”
“The Highborn are too arrogant,” Tan said. “It would be like taking orders from myrmidons. That would be worse than foolishness.”