Free The Starkahn of Rhada by Robert Cham Gilman Page B

either of us thought safe or suitable: the merchant fleets have nothing comparable to the ADSPS cyborgs. It was only a matter of time until someone, the Lady Nora perhaps, or the Fleet authorities, or even some misguided Navigator working for the Zealots, would locate us and become interested in what it was brought us to the same city as the alien we had discovered in Delphinus. So we filed a flight plan for Ariane back to Rhada, and as I left the port in a rented hovercraft, I caught a glimpse of Ariane’s manta silhouette rising above the jumble of gantries, hangars, and veetols docked in the port.
    We had deliberately filed for a free-fall course out to Gonlan-Omicron’s orbit, and then translight to the Rhada sun. This would leave Ariane unreported for the better part of eleven hours--which was enough time for her to establish herself in synchronous orbit directly over Gonlanburg and wait for my E-phone call. She could act as commo satellite between me and Erit, as well, if conditions for Vulk-to-cyborg telepathy were good.
    Filing a false flight plan was a reprogramming offense for both Ariane and for me, but it seemed that the more deeply we involved ourselves in the recovery of the alien girl, the more we found ourselves in conflict with the establishment and the law. I am not, as my famous ancestor was, a rebel by nature. But when every instinct warns me that the powers-that-be are handling something important in a rash and ill-considered way, then I will take personal action. I am, after all, the Starkahn and a Rhad. I explained many transgressions that way in my lifetime. But I had a feeling that if things went badly now, the explanation wouldn’t save me.
    Yet there was something else to consider, as a mental discipline only, because it is quite impossible for a man--one single man--to come to terms, actual terms, with the destruction of whole solar systems. As a soldier, one might readily understand the sort of death and havoc created by a laser rifle, or even nuclear torpedo. But carnage on a planetary scale, let alone on a stellar one, is simply impossible to conceive, except as an abstract notion. I personally had witnessed the destruction of the Delphinus star, yet I had no genuine grasp of the meaning of such power, such genocide plus. Nor, I suspected, did the unknowns who constructed the black starship. By such minds were pogroms launched and epidemics started in the murk of human history.
    I was certain that no single human being could come to working terms with the meaning of a real doomsday machine. What did that leave, then, as the markers of it? True aliens? I thought of the girl’s silver eyes and wondered if that were her only “difference.” Or the mass hysteria of some rabid human organization so maddened with self-amplifying hate that it would contrive the random death of stars--and in so doing consign to glowing plasma billions of living things?
    The result of this soul-searching was to make it crystal clear that my potential personal troubles were academic. If the black starship came to Rhadan space (and why should it not?), then the local authorities, the Rhadan units of the Fleet, a few hundred civilian starships, Gret, Erit, my mother, the alien girl, Ariane, the faculty warlocks of Gonlanburg, Nav Peter the Fanatic, the Rhadan Royalists ( and the Rhadan Republicans, Collectivists, Anarchists, Disciplinarians, and so on), this city and all the other cities in Rhada, together with Sublieutenant the Honorable Kier Kynan Emeric Veg-Rhad, Starkahn of Rhada, would be superheated molecules of gas in free space, driven into the intergalactic void by light-pressure from a swollen and dying star. That much, I knew . The knowledge didn’t allow much room for maneuver.
     
    Gonlanburg is an old town; some of its buildings date back to Interregnal times, and in the years since then it has been relatively untouched by wars. The other towns and cities of Gonlan, the inland agricultural centers and