Stardogs (8 page)

She scowled at him. “Take him away, Jan-Pieter. You’ve spoilt my day as it is.”

Jan-Pieter shrugged a twisted shoulder at her. “Very well. I’ll handle it from here. Come, little cousin, follow me.” The ancient servos in the motorized wheelchair whined as he rolled away. Johannes found himself hastily bowing and then scurrying after the wheelchair. As he reached the door his aunt’s voice reached after him. “And Johannes, don’t
you
come back with some out league trollop. I had enough of that from your father.”

Johannes bowed and ran.

Jan-Pieter’s quarters were stark, without the everything-covered-in-fur luxury typical of League rooms. As Johannes stepped through the portal into the feared rooms he felt his hair rise. Static crackled off his feet. He looked at them in alarm. “You should wear rubber-soled shoes,” said the spy master grimly. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a device of mine to ruin radio transmission out of my quarters. I have to make these things myself. Decent artificers are hard to come by these days.” He sat back in his chair. “Mariet’s forever moaning about it, but we can’t go on suppressing the sciences and still expect them to flourish, but only produce what we want. Now, your assignment. It is an awkward but simple one. Do you want a drink or something before I start? You’ll have to help yourself. I won’t have slaves in here.”

Hastily, Johannes shook his head. “Very well. Sit.” Johannes sat on the only chair. It was not upholstered for comfort. But then Jan-Pieter cared little for his own comfort, and nothing at all for the comfort of others. His attempts at solicitude made Johannes rightfully suspicious, especially when he continued with “I apologize for raking up the coals about your mother. But I wanted you out of there. Your great-aunt is not strictly dispassionate as far as you’re concerned. She had designs on your father.”

Johannes’s jaw fell open and he hastily caught it. He was stunned, not by the revelations, for inbreeding if not actual incest were the rule rather than the exception in the League, but by Jan-Pieter’s apology. First being offered a drink, then a seat, then an
apology.
Whatever it was that was planned for him must be dire. “It’s quite all right sir. I barely remember my mother. I’ve never really thought about her.” It was true. He had avoided thinking about her, but her face still recurred in occasional nightmare-dreams.

“Hmm. Well, I’m not here to talk about history. We’ve a job for you, young man.” The rictus of a smile twisted the spy master’s face. “We want you to do what the League has spent five hundred years preventing.” He flicked a switch. The lights went out and the head and shoulders of a rabbity looking man appeared on the far wall. The man’s hair was greying and he had a weak, indeterminate chin. It was the face of a hungry man, yet despite this there was a gentleness and a softness about the eyes. Even before he noticed the coarse tunic the fellow was wearing, Johannes knew that this was a rider, one of the League’s cattle. “Liton Bergesson. You must make this man rebel.”

The young Wienan’s jaw fell open again. “But…. “

“Not outright rebellion. Just refusal to do a stellar-jump. It should be easy enough. Afterwards, but before he makes contact with any other rider, I will have him disposed of,” said Jan-Pieter matter-of-factly.

“But, but,” stuttered Johannes, “What about the Stardog? Do I kill it?”

“No. They’re a diminishing resource. We simply can’t afford it. Not even,” he flicked the switch again and the image of the rider disappeared and a woman’s face appeared in its place, “for her.”

The face that now appeared on the wall-screen was one Johannes recognized. The woman however could never be described as beautiful. Her nose was too big for starters, and those grey eyes too steely. With her mouth set in a hard line and her determined chin slightly tilted she looked imperious. It was an unusual pose for the princess Royal. Shari normally took care not to look like a potential threat to her brother. “We’re doing what an Imperial wants?” Johannes was now distinctly puzzled.

Jan-Pieter snorted. This fool would never understand the simplest of the complex plots he maneuvered the League’s interests through. “No. We’re putting a stop to her movements.” He flicked the lights on again. “We don’t actually know just what she’s up to. But it
is
something. Every off world trip she cuts at least two isolation sectors. She’s using her charity work as an excuse, and the ISPCA as a useful front. Personally, I don’t give a damn what she’s up to,
but
as an unpleasant side-effect for us, she’s moving riders. We don’t want contact between the different sectors. That’s why the trade routes were set up like that, to keep the riders isolated, to remove any possibility of conspiracy. We, of course, keep the princess’s riders apart in the compounds, but the space-station facilities are limited. We can’t refuse the Princess directly, because that would be an affront to the Emperor.” The fact obviously irritated him.

“But”, the head of Wienan security smiled, sharklike, “if the
riders
refuse to take their Stardogs through a jump… well, we’ll have an excellent reason to make her highness follow normal trade routes. We have chosen this fellow because he’s ripe to rebel, as much as these weaklings ever are.” He pointed to a slim dossier sitting on the table. “Psycoprofile. Study it. You’ll be expected to prevent the fifth jump, cross-sector from New Sahara to Nekrat. I’m including a Leaguesman carefully chosen to resemble the rider’s late stepfather. We’ll also put a spare rider on board in case Bergersson goes beyond control.”

Johannes knew this to be typical Jan-Pieter planning: every contingency catered for. It was why the Wienan spy-master beat his Imperial counterpart so often, despite Selim Puk’s vast resources.

Uncertainly, Johannes stood up and took the dossier. He didn’t dare ask questions. Anyway, he was still too stunned to think straight.

“Close the door as you leave,” Jan-Pieter said in dismissal, turning his chair away.

Later, in his soft-lit luxurious chambers, Johannes Wienan peered disconsolately at the dossier, as the servant set before him a desert of dried black figs marinated to plumpness in Silenius seven-star brandy, stuffed with dark chocolate and almond-slivers, then oven-baked with just a delicate touch of sage, and finally capped with whipped cream decorated with chocolate curls. The Smyrna figs came all the way from Earth. The tiny wasps which fertilized figs had not been successfully introduced to any other colony world. These, the best, came from Greece, at fabulous expense.

He’d toyed with the previous courses, not giving them the kind of attention that the efforts of the perfectionist martinet in his kitchen deserved. He sighed and took a spoonful of the desert. Then pushed it away. The brunette slave looked apprehensively at him, and the storm signals coming.

“Some coffee, Lila. The dark-roast Jamaican,” he snapped. “And tell the chef I don’t want to see this muck again.” Three weeks ago he’d described it as exquisite, the perfect ending to a magnificent meal. She left hastily, happy to do the table-servant’s job, as it got her out of the room. When he was in this sort of mood, which was fortunately rarely, he hit people. It would be sex tonight, and it would be rough, but at least what she had to report would hurt both him and the damned League far more.

That night, as Johannes snored, she inspected the bruises on her buttocks and breasts in the bathroom. Then she washed herself, scrubbing the sore places, trying to scrub even the memory away. As usual, it was the shame that got to her the most. Knowing that her body had responded, against her wishes. Stepping out of the shower unit, she left the water trickling and splashing. Then she took down the shower-rail and shook out a tiny comm unit. She turned on the hand-basin tap. Knowing that she could not be overheard above the water-noise, and that the narrow-beam transmitter would encode her message before sending it out in a microsecond-long blip, she carefully related all the details of her master’s mission.

In his chambers Jan-Pieter smiled his twisted shark’s grin of satisfaction as he put aside the headphones. He’d modified her transmitter himself. Now, a few small alterations to the content of the message, and he would send it out. Mariet had a soft spot for the boy. But he had to go. Johannes would have done well to remember that the plots of the spy master were as multi layered as onions.

The Emperor had a thin web of agents controlling and reporting from four hundred and thirty two worlds. The agents’ reports had to travel through space. Guild controlled space. It had been most amusing to make this transit the point at which their information was neatly filched. Or even filched and replaced, slightly altered. The League was happy to let the vast clumsy mechanism of the Emperor’s secret police do most of the legwork. It was happy to supply a few clumsy idiots to provide the Empire’s counter-espionage men with employment.

There was a lot of garbage that they were quite cheerful about letting the Emperor’s spies have. However, Jan-Pieter was sure the clone-project had not been penetrated. Unlike the Emperor’s own mechanical-starship project. Jan-Pieter snorted. The League kept a careful watch on technicians. Those whom it couldn’t absorb, and who were also reasonably competent, it had killed or corrupted. Technology stood at a lower base now than it had in the mid-twentieth century, when building a starship was a fool’s dream.

Not that the starship idea wasn’t tempting. It offered a way to break away from the limits of Denaari-worlds. To choose their own planets. The Denaari had preferred dry, cool low gravity worlds, with thin air. Some of those on which they’d left extensive traces of settlement were too bleak for serious human colonization. Earth herself had almost certainly been a hardship post with a bare minimum of staff, possibly just there to study the natives. The Stardogs were far more common around the dry, bleak worlds than the occasional Earth-visiting Stardog had been. Still, it was to the worlds the Denaari once populated, and those worlds only, that the Stardogs would go to.

Jan-Pieter stopped musing and took off the headphones. Well. Perhaps it would be a pity to kill off young Johannes, but it couldn’t be helped. Unlike his second-cousin Mariet, who sat on the league throne at the moment, Jan-Pieter had no desire to keep the League for the Wienan-bloodline. His own line ended with himself. All Jan-Pieter wanted was power. The idea of his own mortality had never crossed his mind.

He stood up, not without difficulty, and walked from his office slowly across to his chamber. There would be no one in his bed. Jan-Pieter had no real interest in sex, taking his pleasure from his power.

The window was open. Across the predawn silence someone in the rider-compound below started to sing. The sound drifted upwards, full of sadness. The haunting words were full of deep emotions, sung in the loud, tuneless fashion of the deaf. Or, in this case, of the deafened. With irritation Jan-Pieter snapped the tower window shut. If there was one group of people that he totally despised it was those spineless riders. Useless dummies. Well, if the clone-project succeeded they could dispense with them.

He had to admit that at the moment they were a problem. Less good candidates every year, it seemed. Yet the population of the Empire was increasing. You’d think there’d be more soppy dummies. There seemed to be a pattern now of fewer coming from the central worlds, and more from remote frontier worlds and backwaters. These had never been good recruiting grounds in the past. Pioneer families tended to take care of their offspring. He wondered, not for the first time, if sterilizing riders had been a good idea. Had the resource been mined dry? Were they systematically stripping the human population of Stardog rider genes, when they ought to breed the revolting little creatures? But it had been tried in the past. The riders simply refused to co-operate. They would rather die than give up their young to the League. It had caused the death of two Stardogs, too precious to be wasted, as well as the League guards and the Riders and their offspring. If the riders realized the League intent they refused to even allow a chance of conception.