Free The Starkahn of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman Page A

obvious. Make dead certain you stay on Rhada to play politics. How better to do that than pull some strings and have one of her friends in the Fleet--that lady admiral, for example--arrange a discreet shuffle of computer cards in Bu Personnel?”
    “She wouldn’t do that,” I protested. But, of course, I knew that she would. And she would with only the best will in the world. My Lady Mother, sad to relate, would happily dismantle my entire life and career to serve some mystical sense of noblesse and family ambition. Ariane knew it, and so did I.
    “That is why,” the cyborg said matter-of-factly, “I have no intention of returning to the Fleet base at New Kynan when my leave is up. At least not until we’ve delivered that silver-eyed creature to Gret-Erit and found her ghastly machine as well.”
    I assimilated that with difficulty. There has not been an authenticated case of mutiny in the Fleet since the Interregnum, and I was about to start reading the Articles for the Governance of the Fleet to Ariane when I realized that she was absolutely right and functioning with direct cyborg honesty and logic. The threat of random destruction of stellar systems had to be met with intelligence, not with greater force--for there was no greater force, not in any nation that we knew, nearby or across the spiral arms of the galaxy.
    “All right,” I said finally. “When do we begin our short happy careers as mutineers?” Before she replied, I knew the answer.
    “Erit is waiting for us in Gonlanburg now” Ariane said.
    “So my question is academic?” I said, half resentfully.
    “The decision is really yours to make, Kier,” Ariane said.
    “They have revived the alien?”
    “This morning. So Erit says.”
    I didn’t ask how Ariane knew. If she said she did, then she knew. It came as no surprise that there could be a telepathic bond between Vulk and cyborg. Both of their minds were, in that sense, more highly developed than man’s.
    “Then,” I said, “I suppose the time is now.”
    “Yes,” Ariane said, and I felt her leap from the darkness of the sea.
     
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Kier, the king, and Ariane, the silver princess,
Rode the night wind, and in their hands were truth swords,
And righteousness mantled their shoulders,
And honor was in their heads--
Yet the way was difficult. So it is.
Even for heroes.
    Guest Song, authorship unknown,
early Second Stellar Empire period
     
    Wjen Ey be dead And long forgotten, then lyt it be Syd of me that Ey dyd my duty to My People; wielding in Thyr Name thye myghtiest Engines and Weapons of destruction thyt Men hyve yyt Conceived and using thyr own Scyence that thyye have corrupted for the
    Banishment of all that is best and Fynest among Thye People....
    Oath administered to Watchers of each of the three Deaths before their departure from the Communes of Magellan.
Engraving found on the bulkhead wreckage of Death Two during the early Confederate period
     
    So I came back to Gonlanburg: a naked man with the tubes of an artificial gill still jutting from my chest, aboard a cyborg ship already allotted to some other Survey pilot.
    The change in assignments, Ariane and I surmised, was not yet official, so there was no immediate problem about our whereabouts and whether or not we were together. Thus it was possible for her to remain quite openly at the civil spaceport while I, playing the bookish Starkahn, had a haberdasher come aboard to outfit me in a tunic and kilt of the sort worn by students at the university. I bought a wig from the man, too, so that I could wear the encephalophone contacts on my mastoid bones without causing too much curiosity among the school people. Long hair is far more common in the colleges of the Rim than are bits of SW equipment such as E-phones.
    It was nearly evening when I was finally ready to leave the port and go searching for Erit in the university gardens. Ariane’s presence in the civil docking area was causing more of a stir than