Free The Starkahn of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman

her.
    “Look around you,” Ariane said. “Any other changes?”
    I did as she told me and moved about the tiny bridge with increasing consternation. “My reading tapes are gone. So are all the rest of my personal belongings. What’s the meaning of this, Ariane? Why didn’t you say something to me?”
    “I wasn’t sure,” she said. “After all, if a surgeon went to work on you, could you say for sure what he took out?”
    The accuracy of that homey analogy was beyond my disputing.
    “The Bureau of Personnel is going to break us up,” I said, aghast. Not that the military gods and goddesses lacked the right and authority to change our assignments. That was unquestioned. But it was a thing almost never done; unheard of in the Fleet, actually. SW teams were, by custom, sacrosanct. Then why were Ariane and I being reclassified?
    “It is something to think about, isn’t it, Kier,” she said. “We come back from a probe with the first specimen of what could be a lost branch of homo sapiens , with news of a doomsday machine loose in the galaxy--and what happens? You are nearly court-martialed, and I’m sent off to play in the sea, and neither of us are told that we are being reassigned. Now who had the power to do something like that, Starkahn? Tell me who?”
    I threw myself disconsolately onto the now-ill-fitting contour couch and said, “ You tell me , Ariane--”
    “I can’t. This is human behavior. No cyborg ever behaved so sneakily. I can’t help you. But I can guess that it was someone who wants no further investigation of the black starship or, quite possibly, the girl in the support capsule.”
    “But that’s absurd, Ariane. To do something like this, a person would have to have tremendous influence in Imperial circles--among high officers of the Fleet at Nyor. And he--or she--would have to be almost paranoiac about investigating spatio-historical probabilities . . .“ My voice trailed off into uncertainty because it sounded vaguely as though I were describing someone I’d heard about recently--an influential fanatic.
    “I know what you are thinking,” Ariane said. “But there is another possibility.”
    “There are dozens of possibilities,” I said irritably. “Maybe hundreds. It’s just that we don’t know about any of them. We are only guessing.”
    “Nav Peter of Syrtis,” Ariane said. “Or Lady Nora.”
    I grew really angry at that: Ariane grouping the fanatic Navigator with my mother.
    “Think about it,” Ariane said. “An Inquisitor a few thousand years out of his time and yearning for the good old days could do something like this. We found the alien, after all. The black starship could be the scourge of God, the sword of the holy Star, in his mind. You name it. Your history is filled with that kind of thinking. And when you are a fanatic, you don’t investigate growing legends--you encourage them.... They are the way to power. And remember--the Fleet can send out a hundred cruisers--but the only ones with any real chance of locating the black ship again are you and me. There is one possibility. Has the monk enough influence with the Galacton to pull the right wires and separate us?”
    “He might well have,” I said, still angry. “But that’s only your first guess. What about Lady Nora?”
    “That is a different matter,” Ariane said. “We both know her. We both know her ambitions for you. She could put up with our relationship to one another as long as you were just a frustrated historian--yes, it’s so, and there is no denying it, so don’t try. I have the greatest admiration for the Lady Nora Veg-Rhad, and we have a great many things in common. Our wishes for you, for example. But she wants to bring back the past on Rhada. She wants to build a great, antique social pyramid and put you, the Starkahn, on the top of it. Now that you are a hero to the Rhada, a source of concern to the Imperials and the clergy, too, I wouldn’t be surprised, why the thing to do is