Braxi-Azea - In Conquest Born Part 6

"I'm listening."

"He's defected. Oh. I don't think he knows it himself yet in so many words, but I'm sure we've lost contact for good. He's told them his background and they've accepted the Braxana blood in him as good enough to cancel out the Azean upbringing. He has a typical Braxana household, which means he has computer access to all the information we could want and he won't give us a word of it."

"Excellent."

"Yes, I thought so."

"This does give me faith in your reasoning. I must say, I had my doubts when we first discussed this."

"If we had just sent him in to spy it would never had worked. We would have seen something happen just as it has-a little more slowly perhaps, without my prompting, but just the same in the end. He'd be Braxana and we'd have nothing."

"But this way. . . ."

"As I promised. His rapid a.s.similation into Braxin life is proof of his conditioning, as are a number of other signs I programmed into him. As far as he's concerned, his telepathic talent has gone dormant-he'll have no reason to suspect otherwise. Eventually, the Braxana will realize his value as a negotiator and set him against us because he knows us so well. I guarantee you, put one telepath in the room and you'll have all the information you want. He's an open book-we designed him that way. To the right mind he'll broadcast everything he knows. And neither he nor the Braxana will ever suspect it."

"You guarantee that."

"There's a block put in every telepath, cutting them off from conscious acknowledgment of their conditioning. He couldn't admit to suspicions of that kind if they hit him in the face. As for the rest of them, Ferian has confirmed my suspicions regarding the Braxin culture-it is wholly non-psychic. They'll never suspect a thing."

"Good. Excellent, in fact. So now we have only to wait?"

Li Pazua nods, exultant. "We have only to wait."

Harkur: A man's most sacred possession is his privacy of mind. Examine him, torture him, break him; still his thoughts are his own until he chooses to express them. This concept is one of the foundations of Braxin philosophy. Psychic ability, by its very nature, guarantees violation of this privacy. Therefore, we should not and will not tolerate it.

Five.

There was a Braxin spy on Dari.

The news was not made public, but it was known by those who had to know. A message had been intercepted at the other end of the Azean Empire and the giant mechanical brains had decided that Dari was its destination. That was enough.

Already StarControl had been mobilized, and every available Security agent moved to the sector in question. Every port on the planet was monitored. Every communications frequency was recorded and a.n.a.lyzed. Now there was only waiting to be done, for Dari was a political time-bomb which the wrong move might detonate.

Slowly, those few whose power or anonymity allowed them freedom of movement came to Dari. One of them was a child.

1.

To a human, Laun Set was alien; true aliens, however, would rank him with human stock. His silhouette was faithful to the blueprint of the Scattered Races- a head above a torso, upright posture, two arms, two legs, all in mathematical symmetry as befit the type. His dark brown skin glowed warmly in the sunlight, thickly textured, and his eyes were stained red in the manner of the Bloodletters.

And although more joints adorned his four-fingered hands than a human would consider normal, the theory of the extremity was still the same and the musculature similar.

He was naked but for a metal mesh loincloth, protective rather than ornamental. Gashes ran darkly down the length of one arm, black stripes in three lengths, nearly two hundred of them. They were marks of conquest and therefore tickets to continued life.

His opponent was ready at last, Drago, an older man from Filque. His left arm, recently broken, was barely through healing-a weakness to exploit. The arm would be slower in response, Laun Set knew-and Drago would expect him to take advantage of it.

From the packed earth of the Circle there arose to Laun Set's keen sense of smell the delicate odor of blood. It was something no outsider could ever detect, and even a Bloodletter lacked the sensitivity until the Hyarke was near beginning.

He preferred packed earth for that reason, although a synthetic surface offered surer footing. Here the Blood of all the Fallen- "Laun Set!" Drago's voice was harsh, in the manner of Darian formal speech.

"Come ye to face me?"

The ritual gripped his attention. "To face you, and to feed your blood to the worthy."

"I will pour your essence out upon the earth."

Laun Set gripped his weapon tightly. "Then let us begin," he whispered fiercely.

They began to circle. The excitement gripped him utterly now, and the audience faded from his awareness. Hypersensitive feet tested the ground-damp and firm; good. Drago swung-it was a blow not meant to hit. Laun Set stepped easily out of reach, noting his opponent's manner of movement even as he revealed his own.

His weapon was long, slim, and deadly. On one end of its smooth wooden shaft was fitted a scythe-shaped blade, sharpened on both edges and straightened at the tip. The flat blade on the ada's other end was adorned with curling barbs-for the killing thrust alone, if that.

Laun Set attacked. His opponent's neat parry brought a curved blade dangerously close to his face, then down past his arm. Laun Set let it cut him before he pushed it away. It didn't matter who drew First Blood, provided it was done quickly. Better a controlled cut, unthreatening in the mutual courtesy of the Hyarke, than a Bloodletter desperate for this red inspiration, therefore dangerous in his chaos.

Laun Set's nostrils flared as he breathed in the odor of his own blood. It was a drug to him and his kind, that almost imperceptible smell, and it would inspire his reflexes to their greatest capacity. From the earth a thousand voices seemed to ring, and from his soul, which had absorbed the strength of over a hundred men, reflexes came which were not his own, knowledge which he had never learned.

He was one with the hundred, in the Circle, serving the Hyarke, and all were centered on the kill.

He waited until Drago's eyes glowed with the Change before he struck again.

Less would dishonor the other man's experience. A half dozen clas.h.i.+ng, gleaming exchanges taught him the man's basic reflexes while exhibiting his own.

There was nothing now but the Hyarke, the bloodsport which was the soul of Dari. The Circle pulsed about him, a physical boundary pounding in rhythm with his own heartbeat. He had moved beyond conscious thought, into that nether world where the body moves faster than reason and trained instinct must take over.

They traded blows; sometimes one or the other cut, more often each was parried. Blood mixed with sweat and dripped to the ground. Occasionally the clash of steel bespoke a blow which might have left a man alive to conquer but deprived him of the right to progeny. The blood gave them strength and the ritual gave them endurance and they fought under the hot sun forever.

Then there was an opening. Laun Set saw it, let the awareness flow through his limbs and become action; without thought, he struck. The shaft of his ada tangled in Drago's legs and the other's faulty balance failed to compensate. He fell, and death awaited him. The long curved blade of Laun Set's weapon was turned toward him, its back to the dirt, and as Drago fell he impaled himself upon its gleaming length. He cried once, gloriously, a song of dying to accompany the outpouring of his lifeblood, and with that cry, in pain and glory, expired.

Laun Set waited while the essence of Drago's strength flowed forth from his body. Energy pulsed inside the Circle, free of the dead man but not of that boundary. Then the victor stooped beside his kill. "Worthy one," he whispered, cupping his hands so that the wet redness flowed into them. Drago's life-essence danced in the red fluid and strengthened Laun Set as the latter drank it.

Then he stood back from the Fallen. Two young Bloodletters had entered the Circle and were rubbing his body with drugged oils which would combat exhaustion and compensate for the overdrive state he had fought in. They were all coming now, the spectators who were Bloodletters, for the Sharing, while those who were not of that brotherhood hurried to vacate the stadium, reverent of the ritual.

The two young men who had brought the drug knelt next and tasted the blood of the Fallen. Others knelt after them, touching dark hands to the killing wound, tasting Drago's strength and skill from their fingertips. Somewhere outside the Circle the audience was gone, leaving no visible witness to the Sharing but those who were ent.i.tled to indulge in its mysteries.

A horizontal cut was made on Laun Set's arm and dye powder was rubbed into it. It was a long mark, for Drago had killed over a hundred opponents. Already the life force in the Circle was ebbing, absorbed into the dozen men of the Shar- ing. And as it was drunk by the last of them the Circle fell, becoming once more only a line on the packed, blood-soaked earth.

The ritual was over.

In the shadows, well hidden, a human girl smiled.

2.

No one could have mistaken Torzha er Litz for a civilian. Her crisp stride bristled with military overtones and her eyes took in the details of her surroundings with sharp efficiency. Because she was Azean she was tall, lean, and golden; because she was Torzha er Litz she was impressive. "I've come to see the Governor."

The native receptionist looked up at her with infuriating slowness.

"You are who?"

"Starcommander Torzha er Litz, from the Vengeance." She spoke slowly, a.s.suming from his accent that his Azean was poor. Nevertheless, he seemed to take an interminable amount of time to absorb that information, and longer to get the Governer's appointment schedule on the screen.

She tapped one booted foot impatiently and looked around her. In structure the offices looked like those in any Azean building-simple in design, relying more on color than three-dimensional detail for decoration. But the colors were out-of- date and Torzha found them unpleasantly garish.

"Starcommander Torzha Litz," the secretary read slowly. Torzha suspected he knew just how much insult he was doing her by denying her the subname. She decided she disliked him.

"No appointment," he concluded.

"I know I don't have an appointment. StarControl should have called. Here-"

She pulled her orders out of her half-jacket "-this will explain."

It took him a century, it seemed, to go over the cellose sheets. She wanted to tell him: d.a.m.n it, man, you've got a translator in your desk, run it through that!

But Ebre had asked her to bend over backward to avoid offending the natives, and she would certainly try. At least for the first day. Just as her patience was reaching its end, the door behind the secretary slid open. Governor li Dara smiled broadly as he saw her. "Starcommander! I thought I heard someone out here.

Please come in."

Without a glance at the desk she swept up her orders and followed him. "Your staff-" she began.

"Shh. Not here." He led her down a long corridor, to an office at the end. When they were inside, he made sure the door was well sealed behind them. Only then would he speak.

"I'm really sorry about that. They're usually good, you know, but your rank must have been just too tempting. Kir Lao speaks perfect Azean and is outstandingly efficient- anything else, I'm afraid, was strictly for your benefit.

Ver?"

"Please." The drink was standing ready and she accepted a steaming cupful from him. She looked over the office, a simple room decorated in what she thought was a poor mixture of Azean and Darian. A glance out the window revealed a public demonstration on the street below. "Azeans go home," read one sign, and others had longer slogans which included such descriptive pa.s.sages as "imperialistic starslime" and "alien filthmongers."

"Nice place you have here," she commented. He followed her gaze out of the window and grimaced. "They don't actually rebel, you know, and the Treaty of Conquest gives them the right to a.s.semble . . . like that." He looked up at her. "It goes without saying we're not popular here."

"I gathered that."

He sighed. "Which, of course,. is nine-tenths of the problem. The standard list of things to do when one suspects there is a spy amongst the natives is invalid in this case. One wrong move, one overtly imperialistic gesture, and we just might lose this planet as a pa.s.sive base."

"We could simply obliterate it."

He laughed, on the a.s.sumption that she was kidding him, then stopped when he saw her face. Surely, he hoped, she's not serious. "I'd be out of a job," he offered.

She gave him a faint smile. "Then it's out of the question." She looked out over the horizon. "No, I'm well aware of what this planet is worth as a base of operations, and equally aware of how easily we could lose it. That's why I was sent. Do you know exactly what a transculturalist is, Governor?''

He nodded. "We have a few working for us here. Translators, mostly."

She shook her head. "It's far more complicated than that. Simple translation can be done by computer. But in each language there are words and concepts that don't have a direct counterpart in any other. A transculturalist is one who can take the abstract ideas contained in one language and express them effectively in another. Which requires, of course, a complete understanding of both cultures.

The primary job of a transculturalist is obviously translation. But there are other skills."

She turned away from the window and faced him. "My specialty is Braxin-Azean exchange, which only a handful of people have mastered. StarControl sent me here in the hope that I could reason out where your spy is likely to be hiding." She smiled indulgently. "This in addition to your other efforts, of course."

"Yes, of course." He obviously had his doubts about the approach but wasn't going to admit it. "If you'll tell me what you need in the way of facilities. ..."

"A private office, standard computer access, a staff of . . . say three people, preferably Azean, answerable only to me." She recalled her reception. "Make that definitely Azean. And for a start, a copy of the customs records for the past eight Standard Days. I want to see who's been coming and going here. Starcontrol never should have left the ports open-" She waved his objection to silence. "Yes.

I know, we can't infuriate the locals. Did you say in your request that you had a copy of the transmission?"

"I do." It was on top of the desk and he gave it to her, a thin celchip recording and its printed translation. She ignored the written text and slid the clear chip into place in the desk's decoder. The clicks and whirs of an interstellar code came forth from the speaker.

"I see," she said thoughtfully. "It is the Ernan code, which is very strange because Braxi hasn't used it for years. And the augmentation-" She leaned over the desk to read it.

"StarControl said something about that. I can't pretend to understand."

"Simply that for reasons involving the science of interstellar communication, it was very likely we'd pick this up. I can't believe they didn't know that." She sipped her ver. "Not like them at all. The Braxins are many things, but rarely are they careless." She shrugged. "But then, that's why I'm here. Have you translators?"

"Dari-Azean transculturalists."

"Even better! I'll need the services of one. And a guide."

"I'll get you one. For any place in particular?"

"Yes." She looked out the window, as if by studying the faces of the demonstrators she would unearth some clue. "I want to see this blood-ritual, this Hyarke. I have a feeling. . . ." She looked back at him and laughed, lightly. "But I won't bore you with that until I have some more to go by. I should warn you now, even in war I tend to operate on hunches."

"Your record speaks for itself."

"Sometimes I think it's the only way to second-guess them," she mused. "As if they act in response to primal instincts, rather than reason."

He took a last drink of his ver and collapsed the cup. "There's a Hyarke in Toul tonight, now that I think of it, and I might have someone here who could take you, if I catch him before he goes off duty. Will you excuse me for a moment?''

"Please," she responded, waving her a.s.sent. When he was gone she went over the problem in her mind, and she laughed softly.

"One Braxin somewhere on this very large planet," she reflected, "and no real clues. Well, it could be worse."

She thought about that for a few minutes and then admitted. "But I don't see how."