Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn
This book is for Russell Galen,
whose patience, persistence, and perspicacity
make everything possible.
Acknowledgments
IT WOULD BE CHURLISH (to say the least) not to acknowledge the works of Rafael Sabatini, Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn, and C. S. Forester. Bedad, you can do it again, but you can't do it better.
CHAPTER XX: KRUMM THE BAKER 1 63
CHAPTER XXI: FLATSIES AND ROLLERBALLERS 1 74
CHAPTER XXII: THE JENDYNE CORSAIR 1 86
CHAPTER XXIII: THE NIGHT BLACK DEEP 1 95
PART four: THE BLACK USURPER, YEARDAY
192, 3010 A.D. 207
CHAPTER XXIV: THE AMBUSCADE 208
CHAPTER XXV: THE MAGIC LANTERN 2 1 7
CHAPTER XXVI: A TOKEN OF PROMISE 227
CHAPTER XXVII: LUNCHEON WITH ALYSABETH 236
CHAPTER XXVIII: A RENDEZVOUS IN NEWTOWN 246
CHAPTER XXIX: UPON THE SPIRAL STAIRWAY 256
CHAPTER XXX: THE DUNGEON AND THE TOWER 267
PART FIVE: LOREANNA, YEARDAY 9, 3OII A.D. 279
CHAPTER XXXI: A FATE WORSE THAN EXILE 2 SO CHAPTER XXXII: THE 'DROOM OF THE
MONOPOLITY 2 90
CHAPTER XXXIII: LEUPOULD IMPERATOR 300
CHAPTER XXXIV: OF LIES AND LOVE 309
CHAPTER XXXV: THE DROWNED MAN 3 1 8
CHAPTER XXXVI: THE BRIGANTINE PELICAN 327
PART Six: HENRY MARTYN, YEARDAY 70, 3011 A.D.
339
CHAPTER XXXVII: THE PORT OF HANOVER
COMPLEMENT 340
CHAPTER XXXVIII: TEN MONTHS EARLIER 350
CHAPTER XXXIX: SISAO AND SOMON 360
CHAPTER XL: THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN 369
CHAPTER XLI: THE CORMORANT 378
CHAPTER XLIl: THE GHOSTS OF SOMON 388
CHAPTER XLIl I: BATTLESTORM 397
CHAPTER XLIV: RETURN TO SKYE 404
CHAPTER XLV: THE EXECUTOR-GENERAL 4 1 4
CHAPTER XLVI: THE CEO'S HAND 423
CHAPTER XLVII: SKYE OF GOLD 43 1
i
Prologue: Hanover
Yearday 278, 3008 A.D. Desse 36, 509 Hanoverian
SECUNDUS 12, 1566 0LDSKYAN
Bad news, bad news to the woodsrunners bold,
Bad news from black Hanover came.
That their dearest son had been murdered most foul,
Most foul,
Most foul. And dark dishonor brought to a good name.
Wheels of spreighfonned pneumoplastic rolled along the carpeted corridor beneath a pale blue perforate ceiling of acoustic insulation. Nor did the technicians, laboring by twos and threes in dozens of small bays upon either side of the corridor, look up as the wheels passed. They represented an accustomed presence in this place.
The figure folded into the wheeled chair gave a nod in signal to the hulking servant-creature pushing it, almost the sole physical gesture of which his wasted body was capable. Suspended upon a silken ribbon about his graying thatch, he wore a masque—an unprepossessing flesh-toned schweitzer —which, by contemporary convention, ought to have been held upon a wand that it might be whisked away in moments of disarming truthfulness. Yet he was incapable of the gesture, even had he been capable of the candor. The servant-creature, unmasqued save by a countenance frozen into perpetual neutrality, man-shaped, man-colored, yet well in excess of the height and bulk an ordinary man might have attained, paused—the sole response of which it was capable being obedience—and brought the wheels to a halt.
"This has a familiar look, what have we here?" The crippled figure spoke to blue-smocked workers in a bay to his right, regarding the naked body of a young human male, by look a commoner, stapled through the bones of his arms and thighs to the nichromium surface of an examination table. With precise care—the man in the chair tolerated no inelegant butchery here—the youth's fingernails had been removed, the outer layer of skin at the fingers, hands, and wrists slit and flayed back, the better to expose more sensitive tissues beneath. Upon a freestanding tray beside the table, an array of probes and palps of various sizes, shapes, and substances lay ready to explore this sensitivity. Yet the
4 HENRY MARTYN
chairbound figure's eyes gazed upon a scene beyond this, visible through a broad transparency behind the technicians.
No dank basement, this, the man in the chair thought with proprietary satisfaction. Others of the Drector class might choose to skulk about in cellar and attic as if there were something about their amateurish pursuits to feel guilty of. His facility was the finest in private use upon the planet, the equal of anything available to official intelligence, and lay upon ground level, where the sun of a rare beautiful Hanoverian afternoon shone in through great windows reaching floor to ceiling. Outside, his artfully landscaped personal gardens were to be seen, with their exotic trees and flowering bushes collected from a hundred thousand worlds, kept in balance by skillful and expensive labor. Birds and colored insects whirred and fluttered among them, although nothing of their activities could be heard. This wing was soundproofed to three hundred decibels. It was often necessary that it be so.
Upon a tiled wall, as in each of the other bays, was displayed a fanciful poster representing a man, its head gigantic, fingers, toes, nose, and lips swollen in grotesque proportion to arms and legs which, in comic atrophy, illustrated the relative occurrence of nerve endings throughout the body. The poster was for the edification of visitors— ladies tittering and titillated behind fashionable masques and strutting popinjays sick but afraid to manifest it before one of his position—always surprised at the insignificance afforded the genitalia, as well as by the absence of sensation in the brain. The technicians required no such reminder, knowing their art as they did and having benefitted from much opportunity to practice it.
Movement caught the cripple's eye as the aesthetist left her valves and tanks of pain-enhancing gases to peer over her own masque—no mere social convention this, even had her station in life permitted it—at floating lines of barquode from a datathille inserted in a reader at the table's foot. Muttering inquiry to a smock-garbed assistant bent over a cautery intended to stanch unplanned bleeding, she received a single word in answer and gave the data brief attention again before looking up.
"A Skyan peasant, Drector, discovered traveling without sponsorship and diverted here as you ordered ail such should be. You put the question to him yourself, sir, yesterday a week."
A nod, "So I did." He was a busy man with many duties here upon the capital of the grandest civilization in recorded history. He could not expect to remember everything, even regarding personal schemes as long in preparation as these. "I had purposed rescinding the order, as, thanks to this youngster, among others, there is no further need. It slipped my mind." The boy's brown eyes were desperate above the temporary gag forced into his mouth upon the chairbound man's arrival. He had long since betrayed such data as the names and duties of key servants, geography and plans of strategic sites, movements of products and supplies, transportation and communication, and, most vital, descriptions and characterizations of principal members of the family in question. The man shook his head as if in dismissal of an errant thought. "Ah well, what glimmerings have we torn from him today, then?"
"More personal informati(Mi, sir," replied the aesthetist. "You may recall he names himself Henry Martyn, seventeen Monopolitan years of age, colonial bondsman and stowaway, bored with home and harvest, looking for adventure." The aesthetist shook her head, brown curls bobbed beneath her surgical cap. "That last, sir, corroborated by the captain of the Plover, a lugger of eleven projectibles out of the Autonomous Drectorate of Prudentalis. What our poor Henry got, in place of adventure, was a pressganger's
needle in the back of his skull and a free voyage to Hanover. A runaway, under death sentence by rights, though it says here suchlike aren't prosecuted upon Skye." A pause. "What sort of barbaric back-eddy will not punish runaways, sir?"
Behind the chair, the servant-creature gasped, startled from its torpor by the directness of the question. Indeed, thought the crippled man, it bordered upon insubordination, coming from one of the aesthetist's class. Yet she, like each of the others garbed in his surgical livery, were superlative technicians. And the patron to whom they gave much gratification pampered them, making allowance for artistic temperament.
6 HENRY MARTYN
"That," he answered, "is but one of several quarrels with Skye's Drector-Hereditary which we shall settle before the year is out." He gave a different nod this time, one sensible to mechanisms within the chair itself, the being which had pushed it here mostly serving purposes of ostentation appropriate to its master's class and, in rare need, acting as bodyguard. The chair's servodevices emitted a thin whine and trundled closer to the table, so that, through the wise and benevolent eyeholes of the masque he wore, its owner might witness proceedings the better. "Prod him somewhat," he ordered, "I wish to hear the villain speak for himself."
"Sir." In dutiful—and compensatory—acknowledgement, the aesthetist resumed her position at the subject's head and replaced the gag with one of her transparent algesic masques. She signaled her assistant. Gases began flowing, amplifying sensations, as the exacting treatment afforded the subject's upper extremities was repeated upon his toes and feet.
"Kill me and have done!" The boy's scream tore through the masque, which had been designed not to muffle words. His breathing would have been ragged but for the flow of oxygen. "I'll tell whatever you want to know!"
Another nod, and the chair's owner leaned closer to the boy's face, masque, as it were, to masque. "Dear boy, you mistake me. If I wished to know anything more from you, I would simply have you kept awake three days and nights as I did before. As you know, you would tell me anything, anything at all, in gratitudinous exchange for a single hour's sleep." Servos whined and the crippled figure backed up. "It is the very fact that this procedure is unnecessary which transforms it into art. I am having this done to you for nothing more than the pleasure it gives me." He looked across the taWe, past the helpless form which lay upon it, at the aesthetist. "I have an appointment within the hour and cannot wait for things done in proper order."
"Sir?" Failing to take his meaning, she looked a question at her master over her pale blue masque. In answer, she received an impatient scowl.
"Do the eyes now, while I can watch."
Part One: Two Weddings Yearday 113, 3009 A.D.
Primus 6, 1567 Oldskyan IRSSE 1, 509 Hanoverian
There were three brothers who dwelt upon Skye.
'On Skye did their Holdings they keep.
And they did cast lots as to which one should go,
Should go,
Should go. Roving and star-robbing out in the Deep.
ARRAN ISLAY
"Pray tell, my dear Forbeth-Wethinghouth, which ith it to be with the gell, gavage or gavelleth?"
An appreciative titter arose from an unseen audience. Lightyears—and another way of life—further away, twelve-year-old Arran Islay shook his head. "Gell" was the snotty way denizens of the capital world pronounced "girl," but what was this about "gavage or gavelles"? Gavelles were units of Monopolitan currency, of course, but if he were to look up "gavage" in the dicthille lying among his school references upon a shelf across the bedroom and Mistress Lia or Old Henry were to catch him out of bed . . .
Arran shook his head again. With his father gone pleasure voyaging (against better judgment, he had complained until the moment of departure), that conscientious pair were all the more serious in the execution of their duties. This meant, from a point of view unique to the object of those duties, considerable annoyance.
In Old Henry's case, Arran's annoyance was doubled. Since his namesake and only grandson had run away offplanet last year—the youth had been in Old Henry's charge since his parents had been killed alogging—the old man had "adopted" Arran with the family Islay's approval, cared for him through this sickness, and begun teaching him many of the ancient Skyan ways passed down, father to son, mother to daughter, over the century which had seen this planet rediscovered by the Monopolity of Hanover, one of a handful of great imperia-conglomerate which dominated the known reaches of—
The viewer caught Arran's eye again. Across a too-colorful, make-believe drawing chamber, past overembellished furnishings and garish fixtures, a second actor, the juve-
nile lead, having waited through the audience reaction, ran a slender hand through his elaborate hairstyle. He grimaced at the question Arran had found incomprehensible, an embarrassed blush revealed behind the masque—a conservative (some might have maintained, unimaginative) silver kennedy —he had let drop in momentary display of vulnerability. He oflfered nothing more in answer, but raised the masque again upon its stick, the more decently to conceal his emotions.
The speaker, a blond, aristocratic figure in chartreuse culottes and lavender doublet, half lifted an arm, his pale wrist bent at the lacy cufF. His masque, a classic bronze machiavelli, lay upon the parqueted surface of the secretary before him, demonstrating what a forthright, modem fellow he must be. In the background a synthechord was playing. Notes fell like metallic raindrops as if timed to the fitter of the lumitory sconces upon the walls, or the chandelabra making their own tinkling music overhead. Standing at his secretary, the fictional and famous Piotr Megrim-Boutade produced an expensive hand-wrought inhaling tube, gave its knurled ferrule a delicate twist of adjustment, and thrust it up each elegant, flared nostril in turn.
Megrim-Boutade, Mistress Lia had explained when she lent him this thille, was second son to an imaginary Drector-Hereditary of Capriccio and a celebrated character in parlor-pieces such as this. He was the soul of wit (in theory, Arran added for himself), the spirit of his times (whatever that was worth), and, she had claimed, the unanswerable social arbiter to far-flung Hanoverian civilization and all who admired and wished to emulate it. He would not have lasted a single hour, Arran thought with scorn, in the everblue forests or the mist-shrouded shroom bogs of his own birth planet, Skye.
Not realizing what harsh and final judgment had been passed upon him, the elegant Megrim-Boutade slipped the inhaling tube into his ruffled sleeve, exposing the polished collimator of a gold-chased kinergic thrustible strapped to his forearm. " Ton my thoul," he observed with a delicate snijff, "there can he no middle courth with her ilk, nay, nor even clavitheth, for I have it upon good authority your
lO HENRY MARTYN
enamorata ploth her own courth, toward thome Jendyne gentle of a germane gender." The audience erupted with laughter.
Clavises! y^iih a snarl, he jerked the dramathille, criminally misnamed, the thought flashed through his mind, from the viewer upon his blanket-covered lap. The images before his eyes dissolved in a shower of incoherent sparks. He hurled the cylinder across the bedroom. It struck the spotless wall beside rough-cast door timbers—a flower garland, beginning to brown and dry, hung from a peg there, souvenir of a festivity which, in his illness, he had been unable to attend—and fell to the polywood floor, frightening the boy's pet triskel which had been lying upon a hand-hooked oval rug. With a squeak, the triskel leapt to all three feet and burrowed under the rug.
Arran's room was at the apex of a tower, built of graniplastic blocks by the Islays' predecessors and long disused, at one comer of his father's Holdings. Arran had claimed it for himself as soon as he was old enough to state his preference in this or any matter. With help from Old Henry and Mistress Lia, he had pried the door from the frame to which it had long been nailed, driven out the night-fliers, cleaned the place up, and seen the walls beadblasted until they shone translucent white.
That had been before he had fallen ill.
He glanced up at the lo
ng, slender precolonial weapon they had found while renovating the place. Its metal parts were rough and pitted, stained with oxides. No maker's mark remained, if ever there had been one. Here and there a patch showed of the original dull-gleaming blue-black tint. The thing was much too heavy for strapping to the user's forearm, as was the custom with thrustibles. It had been mounted in a length of grainy, unplasticized wood, carven, where broadest, with the figure of an alien animal, long extinct, which Old Henry said had once been brought to Skye by hundreds for riding, but which had not prospered upon the forage found here.
In the old man's opinion this symbol had been personal to the owner and indicated that he or she had been among the planet's first human inhabitants, long and long, as Henry put it, before the Monopolity had come. They had found other
things in the tower room, a toothless comb, a bristleless brush, the top of a small plastic chest which had been in similar manner carven.
Cleaned and oiled, though still unworkable, the weapon, topped with a dented sighting tube which placed its time before that of laser designators, hung from its sling, with a dozen of the tarnished chemenergic cylinders it had used, upon the wall between the broad sails of a pair of modem fiiU-rigged model starships, products of Arran's mentor-guided hands. The boy was filled, as he had often been before, with a feeling of curiosity about the first Skyans, wondering what it must have been like here before the thrustibles of Hanoverian Oplytes had overridden ancient arms like this.
Outside the arch-topped tower windows, thick polymer with calmed and beveled borders, the morning sun shone in a sky of faultless azure. A ghostly thumbnail sliver of the Broken Moon was visible, horizon to horizon, above the close-spaced tops of trees which marked the near edge of the forest. Between the everblues and the Holdings, Islay retainers would be harvesting groundberries in a meadow where they grew year round. Birds would be singing. It was, upon those accounts and others, he thought, a terrible day, the worst kind of day for a boy to be bedridden, sentenced to remain indoors.