man would turn it down. No dishonor would accrue—nobody expected an octogenarian in a bath chair to die for the fatherland—and meantime they’d find a hard-headed young whippersnapper to lead the fleet into battle.
Coming to a decision, the Emperor took a deep breath. “We have a problem. Something abominable has happened, and Rochard’s World is under siege. I’m going to send the fleet. Are you too ill to lead it?” He winked at his brother the Duke, hoping—
“War!” The old man’s bellow nearly deafened Ivan. “Victory to the everlastingly vigilant forces of righteousness waging unceasing struggle on enemies of the New Conservatives! Death to the proponents of change! A thousand tortures to the detractors of the Emperor! Where are the bastards?
Let me at them!” The clattering in the background might have been the sound of a walking frame being cast aside.
Duke Michael grimaced unhappily at his brother. “Well I suppose that answers one question,” he mouthed. “I’m not going to say I told you so, but who are we going to send to push his wheelchair?”
New Prague was only a thousand kilometers north of the equator (this planet being notoriously cold for a water-belt terraform) and the train pulled into the Klamovka station shortly after lunchtime. Martin disembarked and hailed a cab to the naval depot at the foot of the beanstalk, pointedly ignoring Rachel—or whatever her real name was. Let her make her own way: she was an unwelcome, potentially disastrous complication in his life right now.
The beanstalk loomed over the military depot like the ultimate flagpole; four tapered cones of diamondoid polymers stretching all the way to geosynchronous orbit and a bit beyond, a radical exception to the New Republic’s limitations on technology. Bronzed, bullet-nosed elevator carriages skimmed up and down the elevator cables, taking a whole night to make the journey. Here there was no fin-de-sidcle ambience: just rugged functionality, sleeping capsules manufactured to a template designed for Kobe’s ancient salarymen, and a stringent weight limit. (Gravity modification, although available, was another of the technologies that the New Republic shunned—at least, for non-military purposes.) Martin hurried aboard the first available pod and, to his relief, saw no sign of Rachel.
Upon arrival, he disembarked into the military sector of the space station, presented himself to the warrant officer’s checkpoint, and was ushered straight through a crude security scan that probably exceeded his annual allowed dose of X-rays in one go. There was one bad moment when a master sergeant asked him to demonstrate his PA, but the explanation—that it was a personal assist, that it stored all his working notes, and that he’d be unable to cope without it—was accepted. After which he cooled his heels for half an hour in a spartan guardroom painted institutional green.
Eventually a rating came to collect him. “You’d be the engine man?” said the flyer. “We been waiting for you.”
Martin sighed unhappily. “And I’ve been waiting, too.” He stood up. ‘Take me to your CO.“
The New Republic had paid Mikoyan-Guerevitch-Kvaerner back on Luna to design them a battlecruiser fit to bear the name of their Navy’s founder: one that looked the way a warship ought to look, not like a cubist’s vision of a rabies virus crossed with a soft drink can (as most real warships did). Style imposed strictures on functionality: despite which, it was still worthy of a degree of respect—you could be killed by its baroque missile batteries and phased-array lasers just as surely as by a more modern weapon. Besides, it looked good, which had enabled MiG to make a killing selling knockoffs to gullible juntas everywhere, demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.
In Martin’s opinion, the Lord Vanek was cut from the same comic-opera fabric as the rest of the New
Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence