Read Online The Altar at Asconel by John Brunner - Free Book Online

inconvenience and minor losses they suffered!”
    “Which fleet?” Vix demanded.
    “The Eighteenth.” The injured man stared at him. “What other did you think it was?”
    “What do you mean, ‘what other’?” Vix countered. “The Twenty-Seventh is wiped out, as I well know—but it couldhave been the Tenth, or the Fortieth, or the Forty-Second, or—” He broke off, the other man’s eyes burning at him.
    “Are you sure?” the cripple whispered, after glancing around to make sure there was no one else in earshot.
    “Of course. I’ve just come from Annanworld, before that I was at Batyra Dap, and before that Poowadya, and before that—”
    “All these fleets are still operating? In revolt, but still operating?”
    “At the last hearing, yes. Bar the Twenty-Seventh, as I mentioned.”
    “The liars,” the cripple whispered. “The dirty, double-tongued, deceiving, damnable—”
    “Vix of Asconel!” a speaker cried from the wall. “Go to the door which will open on your right. Bring your companions with you.”
    Puzzled at the cripple’s reaction, Spartak lingered to put a final question to him, and got the answer he had half expected but was barely able to credit. If a high-ranking officer of the crack Third Imperial Fleet had been lied to about the fate of so many other fleets, lying must have become the general policy of the rump Empire. How long could it stand on falsehood? He had envisaged another century or so before its prestige diminished to the point at which rebels and outlaws were tempted clear down to the hub—ultimately perhaps to Argus itself. But if they were already so desperate at the reduction of their loyalist forces that they were hiring pirates as mercenaries, the word would travel fast, and the next time the Empire would find pirates and rebels combined against it; there would be an end to futile shifts like trying to make the two enemies destroy each other.
    Gloomy beyond description, he found he had followed Vix and Vineta into the adjacent office, and there confronted a podgy, gray-haired woman in a uniform encrusted with meaningless decorations and ostentatious badges of rank.
    “Sit down,” she said tonelessly. “Which of you is Vix, the alleged owner of the ship we’ve requisitioned?”
    “Alleged!” Vix purpled again. “I have clear title—”
    “I’m not arguing,” the woman sighed. “If you want to go into legalisms, starships are by definition Imperial propertyand only leased to corporations, trading companies or—save the mark—individuals.” Her mouth twisted as though in disgust. “But where would it get me to rely on a thin argument like that? I imagine you’re competent to handle the ship, and if I wanted to commandeer it I’d have to pick someone equally skillful, and that’s not easy because next thing you know he’d be headed for the great black yonder.…”
    Spartak found himself suddenly pitying the woman, for she had defined herself instantly by what she had said: a weary official trying to keep things going while chaos battered at the structure of law, order and principle by which she had to be guided. He signaled Vix to be quiet, and leaned forward.
    “May we know your authority?”
    The woman blinked heavy lids at him. “Frankly, I’m not sure which capacity I’m acting in right now—I have so many jobs I sometimes lose track. I sit in this room as assistant immigration supervisor, Delcadoré West/North Sector. I have the requisition on your ship as Acting Transport Director, Imperial space, Delcadoré volume. And I’m under orders from the Planetary Government, Department of Public Order, and legally empowered to represent them.”
    “We have business here,” Spartak said. “If we could know what you want our ship for, we could perhaps—”
    “To the Big Dark with your business,” the woman said. “I have a solution to one fiddling little problem out of about ten thousand waiting for me to deal with, and I’m not disposed