The Navigator of Rhada Read Online Free PDF

feasting. Then we were attacked--without warning and without the hope of any real resistance. Karston was taken. Several of our officers were killed--”
    “The men who attacked you--?”
    “You wouldn’t expect them to wear Auroran harness, would you, Master Gret? No, nothing of the sort. Their arms and armor were civilian design--they could have been from any one of the Ten Worlds. But they were on Aurora. They were in Star Field. Could they have done that if they were strangers?”
    Gret made no reply.
    LaRoss shrugged and turned away, renewing his scrutiny of the restless, darkening sea.
    Tirzah said, “They reckoned without a full understanding of us, though. We are Rhad, after all”--he flushed momentarily and then continued--”men of Gonlan, in any case. We fought our way back to our ship--and we took Janessa with us. She is here now. Below, under guard. That is all there is to say except that Aurora will regret it.”
    Gret said, “You, General Crespus. Were you there?”
    “No, by the holy Star. I wasn’t, and I should have been. But I was here, inspecting the garrison.”
    “It’s just as well,” LaRoss said moodily. “If Crespus had been taken or killed, Gonlan would be without a military leader. I believe that was the intent of the operation. My agents on Aurora send word that they are mobilizing for war--invasion, if they can manage it.”
    Gret shrugged and caressed his lyre so that the strings hummed softly. “You have their heiress, after all.”
    Tirzah made an impatient gesture. “No, Master Gret, things have gone too far. It’s war, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry our Alberic is displeased, but nothing can be done. We ask only that he stay out of it and allow us to settle with the Aurori in our own way.”
    Alberic, Gret thought sadly, too old now to take the field against insurgent vassal states, too old to keep the peace on the Rim. Why was it that something warned him that this choice of time, place, and combatants was not coincidental? Was it the plaguing Vulk sense of history? That knowledge that came with long, long life and much knowledge of the galaxy’s only star-voyaging race, man the predator?
    One last throw, then, the Vulk thought, like the counter falling on a board where a lost game of stars and comets must be played to the end.
    “War between Gonlan and Aurora will give the Imperials an excuse to intervene, councilors. You know that, of course. But do you know what it means? For two hundred years home rule has been a fact in the Rhadan Palatinate. What happens when Torquas’s warships appear here ‘to keep the peace’?”
    “Torquas would not dare,” General Crespus said positively.
    The Vulk sighed. There was no convincing these touchy outworlders. Perhaps it was as Crespus had said--perhaps he had been too long among the politicians of the Inner Worlds and had forgotten that here, on the Rim, disputes were settled with blows and bloodshed. But intervention by the Imperials seemed a virtual certainty to Gret, who knew the temper of the Galacton’s court. Home rule, democracy, these were despised concepts in the Imperial city of Nyor, half across the sky.
    But surely there was something more in this? There was a missing factor somewhere, a piece of the puzzle gone, an element not yet clear. The Vulk’s narrow shoulders sagged wearily. Somehow, he was failing in his duty. His intuition told him that he had not penetrated to the heart of the matter, yet he was at a loss how to continue. Perhaps it might be best to go to Kreon and ask to probe his mind. A desperate thing to do with, and to, a dying man. The strain could kill a human untrained in the mind-touch. And should a man die while sharing his mind with a Vulk, the symbiote shared his death. Yet there seemed no other way. Vulks had been dying for men--and at their hands --for three thousand years with a docility and loyalty few men understood. What would one more death mean to history, Gret wondered?