Read The Navigator of Rhada for Free Online Page B

of Karma, an ancestor of mine held Glamiss of Vyka’s sword.” Tran indulged his thin smile again. “Perhaps if he had used it at that moment, history would have been different. Perhaps I would rule in Nyor now instead of Torquas---and Torquas could spend his life writing those silly poems he loves so. But it didn’t happen that way--and I am the Prince’s general, not the Prince. Still, with the Empire saddled with a Torquas--someone must actually rule. For twenty years, I have done that.” He turned to face the young warman sternly. “But for each of those twenty years, I’ve been dogged and balked and harassed by the Navigators.” His voice turned scornful and angry.
    “Our holy men. Because they control the starships, they imagine they are our moral preceptors. They’ve done much that’s useful--I’d be the last to deny that. But their time is gone. Their age of faith is over. There is not room in the galaxy for two powers. It must be the Empire or the Order. It can’t be both. And your little war on the Rim is the fuse that lights the charge that destroys them at last.” He began to pace the terrace restlessly. Below, the troop of Vegan warmen had reached the lodge gates. The officer commanding called out to the general, holding aloft the object that had hung at his saddlebow. Karston, though accustomed to violence and bloodshed, was shocked to see that it was a human head.
    Tran raised his hand in acknowledgment. “Well done, Captain!” he called. He turned to regard Karston coolly. “A Navigator’s head, young sir. Specifically, the head of the Navigator who flew the starship that brought you here from Aurora.”
    Karston gasped at the sacrilege and unconsciously made the sign of the Star.
    “It had to be done,” Tran said. “He knew it, too. That’s why he took refuge with the Saclarans in the valley.”
    Karston’s senses were reeling. Priest murder was a deadly sin among the men of the Rim worlds.
    “When the war begins between the Rhad and Aurora, Karston,” the general said quietly, “I shall intervene with an Imperial division. You know of the enclave the Navigators maintain on Aurora?”
    Karston nodded dumbly.
    “Do you know what they mine there?”
    “Holy metals--”
    “Holy metals indeed. Uranium. For nuclear bombs. Have you read your history? Do you know what brought the Dark Time?”
    “Sin--”
    “Fusion bombs. Open-ended nuclear weapons. Bombs that could smash whole continents. That is what the Navigators are doing on Aurora--mining the metals that will make those hell bombs possible again.” The general’s face was drawn, his voice savage.
    Karston stared, not knowing what to say. The notion was almost impossible for him to grasp. For a hundred generations, men had gone in racial terror of the weapons that had destroyed the Golden Age.
    “You will stop them, of course,” he said in a shocked voice.
    General Tran’s eyes widened with surprise. “You are even more provincial than I imagined, young Karston. Stop them? By the Star, of course not! I intend to have those weapons and the men who make them. When fate hands a man the power of a hundred suns, does he throw it away?” He began to laugh. The harsh sound grated on Karston’s shattered nerves. “In recent times,” Tran said, “the Empire has begun to be reinfected with an old, old virus. There’s talk again about the rights of man, democracy, home rule for the provinces, the authority of the mob. All that has been tried too often and has failed too often. What’s wanted is the rule of power, character, order. The Navigators aren’t fit to dispose of the weapons of absolute mastery.”
    Karston stared hard at the Vegan. The sun was hot, but he felt the inward touch of an ancient, icy wind. “But you are,” he said.
    Tran drew a deep breath and looked out over the deceptive spring peace of the broad valley. His voice was harsh as the cutting edge of a sword as he asked, “Who else is there, Karston? When