Judgment Night Read online

  “Like a fuse,” Juille murmured. “An invisible fuse, long enough to follow him wherever he goes, and you can light it when you wish. Oh, very nice! It’s easily portable, I suppose?”

  “The weapon itself is a bulky machine which must be set up in some impregnable position, perhaps sealed in against possible bombardment. But the focusing instrument is a small double lens in a frame. It has a slightly telescopic property. Once a man is centered in the cross hairs and a trigger sprung, he’s your victim whenever you spring the second trigger on the lens and thus touch off his particular pattern in the central machine.”

  The emperor put his fingertips together and stared at them, shaking his head.

  “It’s a treacherous thing,” he said. “The ultimate refinement of a stab in the back, eh? I suppose the victim can’t tell if he’s been spotted?”

  “Probably the victim never does know, highness. Death is almost instantaneous.”

  The emperor shook his head again. “Personally,” he said, “I don’t like it. But I can see why the H’vani wiped out a world trying to get it away from us. As you say, the psychological value of the thing is tremendous, once they know what they’re up against.”

  Juille laughed, a short, triumphant sound. “I like it,” she said. “I’m not squeamish. Think of it, father! We can send armed spies into their bases to snap their leaders, and wait until the height of battle to pick them off. Imagine the effect during some complicated maneuver if all the leaders fell dead simultaneously! And that’s saying nothing of how the leaders themselves will feel, knowing they’re walking dead men, doomed the moment they step into a responsible position and start giving orders. Oh, I do like it!”

  Her father nodded, frowning. “Once it’s known,” he said, “once it’s actually proved in combat, I should think every H’vani officer with any responsibility would become either a reckless fatalist or a nervous wreck. It isn’t so bad to be killed outright—every soldier knows that can happen, and there’s an end of it. But to know the assassin will strike inevitably at the high point of your responsibility, when thousands of lives depend on yours and the whole outcome of a battle may hinge on what you do—This ought to cause the most profound psychological reactions all along the line in any army the weapon’s used against.”

  Juille took a short turn about the room, spurs tinkling, and came back with shining violet eyes.

  “Do you know what we’ve got here?” she demanded. “It’s something so new it almost frightens me. Not just the weapon—but the principle behind it. It’s the only new thing, really, since cavemen led off the procession of warfare with the bow and arrow. From that time forward, weapons have been increasing in range and scope and volume. The whole story of military warfare’s been a seesaw between defense and offense—new method of attack, new defense against it, stalemate, then a newer weapon that kills more people quicker. But now—” She laughed exultantly. “Don’t you see? This is a complete rightabout-face. Ever since the beginning of time, all martial invention’s been forging ahead in one direction only, toward bigger and bigger weapons with greater range and scope. Men’s minds are trained to think in those terms only. But with this new thing, we’re flashing back in the other direction entirely, turning their flank, smashing them in a vulnerable spot left absolutely unprotected all this while. Their minds won’t even be able to cope with it or devise a defense. People just don’t think in terms like that.”

  The emperor looked at her thoughtfully, stroking his beard. The envoy’s great, translucent eyes dwelt upon her animated face with an impersonal remoteness.

  “See it?” Juille demanded. “Now we can strike them where they least expect it. We’re back at the very beginning, even before the sword or the club. It’s the individual we attack now. This is a weapon as terrible as anything that wipes out cities, but aimed at the other end of the scale of offense—the individual himself. Each man alone, in personal danger of a doom that’s picked him out from all the rest and will follow him wherever he goes. This attacks the mind as well as the body. It’s like a germ of terror that can eat a man’s morale out and leave his body intact. He won’t trust himself or his leader. And do you know the only possible defense?”

  She struck her hands together and her voice almost crowed with triumph.

  “Individual responsibility. The breakup of an integrated war machine. No one can depend on anyone else for anything, once our weapon’s in action. They’ll have to throw out all their elaborate maneuvers and all their training and start again from scratch. Each man for himself. An army of guerrillas. Utterly reckless, of course, fatalistic to the last degree. But I don’t see how they can hope to conduct space warfare with every man in the army independent of every other man. It’ll win the war for us, father!”

  The emperor drummed his fingers on the table. “You may be right,” he conceded. “If we can keep it for ourselves, that is. But if anyone stole it—”

  “Who else knows how to build the machine?” Juille demanded of the Dunnarian.

  “No one, highness. There were few of us at the beginning, and I saw all my co-workers die. The knowledge is quite safe so far, with us.”

  Juille bent upon him a curiously cold, violet stare. The grave, gray eyes met it without a flicker, though he must have known what passed through her mind. Artisans who create the unique for jealous emperors are notoriously short-lived, and in this case the need for uniqueness went far beyond petty jealousy.

  “You’ll want a constant guard,” Juille told the man thoughtfully. “And you’ll have to work fast.”

  The Dunnarian bowed silently as the emperor waved a dismissing hand. He looked more than ever falconlike for a moment, and as he turned his head and Juille saw the narrow skull and the beaked nose outlined, she wondered how he could seem so birdlike and yet so smoothly poised, for birds are creatures of small, nervous motions.

  Then she remembered that before the bird came the snake. It was the snake behind the falcon that epitomized this man’s smooth gestures, his elegance, his quiet, lidless stare.

  In another part of the palace a figure slipped quietly and unseen out of a curtained window. He dropped to the dark grass of a garden and, moving with the sureness of one who has come this way many times before, went out through an unguarded postern and through a band of trees dripping with rain that flashed in the lights behind him.

  Quickly and silently through the rustling silence of the night he moved away, leaving the turmoil of the palace behind him, where the news of the ruin of world after world flamed across the luminous screens that pictured their destruction.

  He went disdainfully through the dark, picking his way with delicate steps. He knew the path so well that no one challenged him, no one saw the dark figure slipping from shadow to shadow. He had a long way to go, but he knew every step of it, even in the dark.

  He was tired when he came to the far end of the journey, for it had been a long way to come on foot. In the end it was intricate, too, because he had to enter by a hidden way.

  But the end was reward enough for all his weariness and secrecy, as he had known it would be. Indeed, he knew and loved each step of the path because it brought him nearer this goal. He stood in a dark archway at the end of the journey, and looked out over the low rooftops of the city of his people, glittering with warm, soft lights through curtained windows. No two curtains were of quite the same shade, nor were the windows shaped alike at all, so that the city glowed with myriad flowery shapes, like a lighted garden. His heart swelled with the knowledge that he was at home again, that the city was his and he the city’s. He no longer moved stealthily as he went down the slope of sand toward the sandy streets before him.

  There were few abroad at this hour, but those he passed knew him and exchanged with him the reserved formula of greeting behind which lay a deep, sure affection between individuals for the sake of the group itself—a feeling almost indescribable to anyone unfamiliar with such a community as this.

  He went along the
sand-padded street silently, straight for the house where his friends awaited him. Reserve was strongly rooted in them all, and their meeting betrayed no emotional unbalance, but common purpose and common danger had welded them into a group so close and strong that words were scarcely necessary among them.

  Still, when he was refreshed and relaxed, he could not help voicing the dominant emotion which had harried him all the way here.

  “I wish it were over!” he sighed. “I left them listening to the news of their own destruction, and making noises about it. Ericon will be a better world when the last of them dies.”

  “A better place for us, I hope,” one of the others said. “Will it be soon?”

  “I think so, don’t you? I think they’re finished now, if they only knew it.”

  “They stand at a very definite crisis,” said someone else, and glanced around the group with grave, affectionate eyes. “They can still save themselves—perhaps. There’s time for it, if they only knew the way. Such a simple way, too. Some of them see it, but I don’t think they’ll have the chance to try.”

  “They’re doomed,” the newcomer declared in his soft voice. “I know them too well. Poor ignorant, blundering creatures.” He hesitated. “I almost feel pity sometimes, watching them. But they’ve had their turn, and the sooner they finish the better. We’ve waited so long—”

  “Would you help them if you could?” asked someone.

  “If it weren’t for us—perhaps. At heart they mean well. But they’re muddled beyond all hope now, and I can’t believe anything could straighten them out. Think how long we’ve waited—”

  “Think of Their promise,” murmured a voice.

  “It wasn’t a flat promise, remember,” someone else warned cautiously. “It was contingent, you know. They haven’t failed yet. If this war turns in the right direction, they still have their chance, and we may have to begin our waiting all over again.”

  “They’ll miss the chance,” the newcomer said, half exultantly and half in reluctant pity. “I know them too well.”

  The officers’ lounge in one of the tower tops was roofed and walled in glass, against which gusts of storming rain beat fitfully now, out of a purple sky. Ericon is so much a world of rain that all its architecture is designed to take advantage of rain’s beauty, much like solariums on other worlds.

  Today the lounge was crowded, and there was a murmur of grave undertones beneath the voice of the news screen that filled one wall. It rolled out the toll of ruined cities and silenced worlds. All over the Galaxy, insurrection was spreading inward toward Ericon like a plague from the rotting fringes of the empire. The imperial cities were going down like ninepins on world after crashing world.

  “They’re slowing up a bit, though,” Juille said thoughtfully. “You know, I believe they had to strike sooner than they meant to, because of that weapon from Dunnar.” She nodded at the envoy from that now voiceless planet, who sat in a deep chair beside her, long legs crossed, long fingertips interlaced, his lidless stare upon the screen that covered one wall of the room. Unobtrusively his bodyguard leaned upon the wall behind him.

  Around them sat Juille’s staff of officers, most of them young, many of them women, who among them divided most of the power of the empire today. Helia leaned across the back of her chair, the llar on her shoulder preening its sleek sides with hands like fingery starfish.

  “You’re right about that, highness,” remarked a grim-faced woman in a plumed helmet. “They’re definitely slowing down. But the best we can hope for now, I think, is the striking of some balance. We can fall into a deadlock—beyond that we can’t hope to pass just now.”

  “There are worse things than deadlocks,” Juille told her. “Wait till the weapon’s finished! But if my father’s conference this afternoon comes to anything—” She slapped the chair arms angrily. “If it should, I think the whole Galaxy’s lost.”

  “The emperor, highness, would call it lost if the conference fails.” The man from Dunnar turned his grave, luminous eyes upon her.

  “I won’t sit down to a peace conference with those bloody savages,” Juille declared fiercely. “Why they ever agreed to a conference I can’t understand, but there’s something behind it we won’t like. As for me, I wouldn’t offer them peace if they held a knife at my throat, and now—when we really hold a knife to theirs, if they only knew it—” She gave an angry shrug and did not finish.

  “Do you feel there’s any hope of their accepting the emperor’s terms?”

  Juille scowled. “It depends on how intelligent they are. I’d have called them utter savages, unable to see beyond the next battle, if they hadn’t planned this invasion of the inner systems so well. And just now, of course, they do have the upper hand. They took us by surprise. But we’re finding our balance and beginning to strike back. They may realize they’ve struck a little too soon. Maybe they can see ahead to the time when we’ll reach that deadlock—and then the new weapon may very well turn the balance to our side.” She shook her head fretfully, so that the windows gleamed in reflection upon her shining helmet. “I don’t know. It worries me that they came at all. Since they did, it’s just possible they might agree to a treaty. Yes, I might almost say I think there’s some danger of their agreeing to peace.”

  “You consider it a danger, highness?”

  “The greatest the empire has to face. I say crush them utterly, whatever it costs us. I’d rather inherit a bankrupt empire, when my turn comes, than live on side by side with those murderous savages, giving them our arts and sciences, letting them think themselves our equals. No. No, I feel so strongly about this that I’ve had to discard a luxury no empire can afford to keep when it threatens the common good.” Juille glanced around the room, gathering the eyes of her staff. She nodded.

  “We’ve all agreed to this,” she went on. “We make no secret of it. I’m so afraid of even the remote chance of peace at this stage that I’ve given orders to prevent it.” She paused a moment. “I’ve given orders that the H’vani ambassadors be assassinated before they reach the conference table.”

  There was silence for a moment. The Dunnarian regarded Juille with expressionless eyes. “They’re under truce,” he said at last, matter-of-factly. Juille’s lips thinned.

  “I know. But I intend to be merciless in victory, and I may as well start now. In this case I believe that the end more than justifies any means necessary to achieve it.”

  “You feel there is that much danger that the H’vani will agree to peace at this stage, when they’re winning on all fronts?”

  “Why else would they consent to come?” Juille shrugged. “I don’t mean to waste any more thought on the matter. If they don’t agree now, my father will offer it again and again, to prevent a long war. Sooner or later, as we gain more of the balance of power, they’ll accept if they have the chance. If we kill their envoys under a flag of truce now—well, there’ll be no more conferences.”

  The Dunnarian nodded quietly. “A very interesting decision, highness. I assure you I wouldn’t interfere even if”—he glanced up at the clock—“even if you’d given me time to.”

  Juille followed his gaze, “Ah,” she said. “You’re right—they should be landing. Helia, get us the scene.”

  Helia, moving with the forthright clumping tread of an old soldier, crossed to the screen where an animated map of an embattled world was tracing the course of insurrection. As she passed the Dunnarian the llar on her shoulder gave itself a last preening stroke, gathered its sleek limbs and leaped without a jar onto the envoy’s shoulder. He put up a hand to stroke it, and the little creature bent its head to the caress, rolling up its great round eyes with solemn pleasure.

  Juille stared. “I’ve never”—she stammered with surprise—“never in my life…why, he’ll hardly let me touch him! I’ll swear I haven’t stroked him like that twice in my life. And he never even saw you before!”

  The envoy’s delicate, lean features creased in the first smile she had seen
upon them. “I feel the honor keenly,” he said to the llar. It butted its round forehead against his palm like a cat.

  A blast of music from the screen interrupted them. Swimming into focus as Helia turned the controls, the scene of the H’vani envoy’s landing sharpened into colorful view. Juille curled her lip at it.

  “All that ceremony,” she murmured, “when we ought to be cutting their throats! Well, they’ll soon see what the empire really thinks of them. My men ought to show up very soon now.”

  She took off her helmet and leaned forward to watch, chin on fist, her dark-gold braids catching the red reflections of banners from the screen and shining as if in firelight. The braids were pinned like a coronet across her head to cushion the heavy helmet which she held now upon her knee. In its surface the red reflections moved too, blurrily, as if—in obvious simile—she cradled the momentous event in her very lap.

  The H’vani newcomers were small, brightly clothed figures moving in a press of soldiers. Because the emperor had insisted that their representatives be the highest officials of the enemy race—its hereditary leader and its commander in chief—there had been tremendous haggling over the terms of safe conduct. In the end, they had been assigned a camp outside the city, near enough the boundaries of the Ancients’ forbidden territory to remind them of the fate their ships had suffered. And now in the midst of a bodyguard of imperial soldiers they rode toward the city on horseback, amid much flurry of trumpets and streaming of red imperial banners.

  Juille was not much interested in the dignitaries as individuals. Her eyes were sweeping the crowd in quick, impatient glances, picturing the flash of her assassins’ guns. And the same thought, the same picture, was in every mind in the room with her. No one moved, waiting for that instant. If the power of thought had tangibility, their common concentration of purpose should have been enough in itself to strike the H’vani down.

  With intolerable slowness, on the backs of tall, mincing horses, the procession drew near the city. It was a long, colorful ride. The people of Ericon, at the heart of the Galaxy’s culture, paradoxically ride horseback when they travel. Except for the straight, paved roads which link city to city, there is little power-driven traffic, and that chiefly the transportation of supplies. Radio-television is so superlatively developed that almost no occasion ever arises for travel upon Ericon itself. Sightseeing is not encouraged upon the sacred control planet, and so much of its surface is forbidden by the Ancients for their own mysterious ends, and by the emperor for his imperial prerogatives, that as a rule only legitimate business traffic, with its prescribed roadways, moves upon the face of Ericon.