The Spectre General Read online

  The Spectre General

  Theodore Cogswell

  The Spectre General

  by Theodore Cogswell

  I

  “SERGEANT DIXON!”

  Kurt stiffened. He knew that voice. Dropping the handles of the wooden plow, he gave a quick “rest” to the private and a polite “by your leave, sir” to the lieutenant who were yoked together in double harness. They both sank gratefully to the ground as Kurt advanced to meet the approaching officer.

  Marcus Harris, the commander of the 427th Light Maintenance Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines, was an imposing figure. The three silver eagle feathers of a full colonel rose proudly from his war bonnet and the bright red of the flaming comet insignia of the Space Marines that was painted on his chest stood out sharply against his sun-blackened, leathery skin. As Kurt snapped to attention before him and saluted, the colonel surveyed the fresh-turned earth with an experienced eye.

  “You plow a straight furrow, soldier!” His voice was hard and metallic, but it seemed to Kurt that there was a concealed glimmer of approval in his flinty eyes. Dixon flushed with pleasure and drew back his broad shoulders a little further.

  The commander’s eyes flicked down to the battle-ax that rested snugly in its leather holster at Kurt’s side. “You keep a clean side-arm, too.”

  Kurt uttered a silent prayer of thanksgiving that he had worked over his weapon before reveille that morning until there was a satin gloss to its redwood handle and the sheen of black glass to its obsidian head.

  “In fact,” said Colonel Harris, “you’d be officer material if—” His voice trailed off.

  “If what?” asked Kurt eagerly.

  “If,” said the colonel with a note of paternal fondness in his voice that sent cold chills dancing down Kurt’s spine, “you weren’t the most completely unmanageable, undisciplined, overmuscled and under-brained knucklehead I’ve ever had the misfortune to have in my command. This last little unauthorized jaunt of yours indicates to me that you have as much right to sergeant’s stripes as I have to have kittens. Report to me at ten tomorrow! I personally guarantee that when I’m through with you—if you live that long—you’ll have a bare forehead!”

  Colonel Harris spun on one heel and stalked back across the dusty plateau toward the walled garrison that stood at one end. Kurt stared after him for a moment and then turned and let his eyes slip across the wide belt of lush green jungle that surrounded the high plateau. To the north rose a great range of snow-capped mountains and his heart filled with longing as he thought of the strange and beautiful thing he had found behind them. Finally he plodded slowly back to the plow, his shoulders stooped and his head sagging. With an effort he recalled himself to the business at hand.

  “Up on your aching feet, soldier!” he barked to the reclining private. “If you please, sir!” he said to the lieutenant. His calloused hands grasped the worn plow handles.

  “Giddiup!” The two men strained against their collars and with a creak of harness the wooden plow started to move slowly across the arid plateau.

  II

  Conrad Krogson, Supreme Commander of War Base Three of Sector Seven of the Galactic Protectorate, stood at quaking attention before the visiscreen of his space communicator. It was an unusual position for the commander. He was accustomed to having people quake while he talked.

  “The Lord Protector’s got another hot tip that General Carr is still alive!” said the sector commander. “He’s yelling for blood, and if it’s a choice between yours and mine, you know who will do the donating!”

  “But, sir,” quavered Krogson to the figure on the screen, “I can’t do anything more than I am doing. I’ve had double security checks running since the last time there was an alert, and they haven’t turned up a thing. And I’m so shorthanded now that if I pull another random purge, I won’t have enough techs left to work the base.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine,” said the sector commander coldly. “All I know is that rumors have got to the Protector that an organized underground is being built up and that Carr is behind it. The Protector wants action now. If he doesn’t get it, heads are going to roll!”

  “I’ll do what I can, sir,” promised Krogson.

  “I’m sure you will,” said the sector commander viciously, “because I’m giving you exactly ten days to produce something that is big enough to take the heat off me. If you don’t, I’ll break you, Krogson. If I’m sent to the mines, you’ll be sweating right alongside me. That’s a promise!”

  Krogson’s face blanched.

  “Any questions?” snapped the sector commander.

  “Yes,” said Krogson.

  “Well, don’t bother me with them. I’ve got troubles of my own!” The screen went dark.

  Krogson slumped into his chair and sat staring dully at the blank screen. Finally he roused himself with an effort and let out a bellow that rattled the windows of his dusty office.

  “Schninkle! Get in here!”

  A gnomelike little figure scuttled in through the door and bobbed obsequiously before him.

  “Yes, commander?”

  “Switch on your think tank,” said Krogson. “The Lord Protector has the shakes again and the heat’s on!”

  “What is it this time?” asked Schninkle.

  “General Carr!” said the commander gloomily, “the ex-Number Two.”

  “I thought he’d been liquidated.”

  “So did I,” said Krogson, “but he must have slipped out some way. The Protector thinks he’s started up an underground.”

  “He’d be a fool if he didn’t,” said the little man. “The Lord Protector isn’t as young as he once was and his grip is getting a little shaky.”

  “Maybe so, but he’s still strong enough to get us before General Carr gets him. The Sector Commander just passed the buck down to me. We produce or else!”

  “We?” said Schninkle unhappily.

  “Of course,” snapped Krogson, “we’re in this together. Now let’s get to work! If you were Carr, where would be the logical place for you to hide out?”

  “Well,” said Schninkle thoughtfully, “if I were as smart as Carr is supposed to be, I’d find myself a hideout right on Prime Base. Everything’s so fouled up there that they’d never find me.”

  “That’s out for us,” said Krogson. “We can’t go rooting around in the Lord Protector’s own back yard. What would Carr’s next best bet be?”

  Schninkle thought for a moment. “He might go out to one of the deserted systems,” he said slowly. “There must be half a hundred stars in our own base area that haven’t been visited since the old empire broke up. Our ships don’t get around the way they used to and the chances are mighty slim that anybody would stumble on to him accidentally.”

  “It’s a possibility,” said the commander thoughtfully, “a bare possibility.” His right fist slapped into his left palm in a gesture of sudden resolution. “But by the Planets! at least it’s something! Alert all section heads for a staff meeting in half an hour. I want every scout out on a quick check of every system in our area!”

  “Beg pardon, commander,” said Schninkle, “but half our light ships are red-lined for essential maintenance and the other half should be. Anyway it would take months to check every possible hideout in this area even if we used the whole fleet.”

  “I know,” said Krogson, “but we’ll have to do what we can with what we have. At least I’ll be able to report to sector that we’re doing something! Tell Astrogation to set up a series of search patterns. We won’t have to check every planet. A single quick sweep through each system will do the trick. Even Carr can’t run a base without power. Where there’s power, there’s radiation, and radiation can be detec
ted a long way off. Put all electronic techs on double shifts and have all detection gear double-checked.”

  “Can’t do that either,” said Schninkle. “There aren’t more than a dozen electronic techs left. Most of them were transferred to Prime Base last week.”

  Commander Krogson blew up. “How in the name of the Bloody Blue Pleiades am I supposed to keep a war base going without technicians? You tell me, Schninkle, you always seem to know all the answers.”

  Schninkle coughed modestly. “Well, sir,” he said, “as long as you have a situation where technicians are sent to the uranium mines for making mistakes, it’s going to be an unpopular vocation. And, as long as the Lord Protector of the moment is afraid that Number Two, Number Three, and so on have ideas about grabbing his job—which they generally do—he’s going to keep his fleet as strong as possible and their fleets so weak they aren’t dangerous. The best way to do that is to grab techs. If most of the base’s ships are sitting around waiting repair, the commander won’t be able to do much about any ambitions he may happen to have. Add that to the obvious fact that our whole technology has been on a downward spiral for the last three hundred years and you have your answer.”

  Krogson nodded gloomy agreement. “Sometimes I feel as if we were all on a dead ship falling into a dying sun,” he said. His voice suddenly altered. “But in the meantime we have our necks to save. Get going, Schninkle!”

  Schninkle bobbed and darted out of the office.

  III

  It was exactly ten o’clock in the morning when Sergeant Dixon of the Imperial Space Marines snapped to attention before his commanding officer.

  “Sergeant Dixon reporting as ordered, sir!” His voice cracked a bit in spite of his best efforts to control it.

  The colonel looked at him coldly. “Nice of you to drop in, Dixon,” he said. “Shall we go ahead with our little chat?”

  Kurt nodded nervously.

  “I have here,” said the colonel, shuffling a sheaf of papers, “a report of an unauthorized expedition made by you into Off Limits territory.”

  “Which one do you mean, sir?” asked Kurt without thinking.

  “Then there has been more than one?” asked the colonel quietly.

  Kurt started to stammer.

  Colonel Harris silenced him with a gesture of his hand. “I’m talking about the country to the north, the tableland back of the Twin Peaks.”

  “It’s a beautiful place!” burst out Kurt enthusiastically. “It’s… it’s like Imperial Headquarters must be. Dozens of little streams full of fish, trees heavy with fruit, small game so slow and stupid that they can be knocked over with a club. Why, the battalion could live there without hardly lifting a finger!”

  “I’ve no doubt that they could,” said the colonel.

  “Think of it, sir!” continued the sergeant. “No more plowing details, no more hunting details, no more nothing but taking it easy!”

  “You might add to your list of ‘no mores,’ no more tech schools,” said Colonel Harris. “I’m quite aware that the place is all you say it is, sergeant. As a result I’m placing all information that pertains to it in a ‘Top Secret’ category. That applies to what is inside your head as well!”

  “But, sir!” protested Kurt. “If you could only see the place—”

  “I have,” broke in the colonel, “thirty years ago.”

  Kurt looked at him in amazement. “Then why are we still on the plateau?”

  “Because my commanding officer did just what I’ve just done, classified the information ‘Top Secret.’ Then he gave me thirty days’ extra detail on the plows. After he took my stripes away that is.” Colonel Harris rose slowly to his feet. “Dixon,” he said softly, “it’s not every man who can be a noncommissioned officer in the Space Marines. Sometimes we guess wrong. When we do we do something about it!” There was the hissing crackle of distant summer lightning in his voice and storm clouds seemed to gather about his head. “Wipe those chevrons off!” he roared.

  Kurt looked at him in mute protest.

  “You heard me!” the colonel thundered.

  “Yes-s-s, sir,” stuttered Kurt, reluctantly drawing his forearm across his forehead and wiping off the three triangles of white grease paint that marked him a sergeant in the Imperial Space Marines. Quivering with shame, he took a tight grip on his temper and choked back the angry protests that were trying to force their way past his lips.

  “Maybe,” suggested the colonel, “you’d like to make a complaint to the I.G. He’s due in a few days and he might reverse my decision. It has happened before, you know.”

  “No, sir,” said Kurt woodenly.

  “Why not?” demanded Harris.

  “When I was sent out as a scout for the hunting parties I was given direct orders not to range farther than twenty kilometers to the north. I went sixty.” Suddenly his forced composure broke. “I couldn’t help it, sir,” he said. “There was something behind those peaks that kept pulling me and pulling me and”—he threw up his hands—“you know the rest.”

  There was a sudden change in the colonel’s face as a warm human smile swept across it, and he broke into a peal of laughter. “It’s a hell of a feeling, isn’t it, son? You know you shouldn’t, but at the same time there’s something inside you that says you’ve got to know what’s behind those peaks or die. When you get a few more years under your belt you’ll find that it isn’t just mountains that make you feel like that. Here, boy, have a seat.” He gestured toward a woven wicker chair that stood by his desk.

  Kurt shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, stunned by the colonel’s sudden change of attitude and embarrassed by his request. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but we aren’t out on work detail, and—”

  The colonel laughed. “And enlisted men not on work detail don’t sit in the presence of officers. Doesn’t the way we do things ever strike you as odd, Dixon? On one hand you’d see nothing strange about being yoked to a plow with a major, and on the other, you’d never dream of sitting in his presence off duty.”

  Kurt looked puzzled. “Work details are different,” he said. “We all have to work if we’re going to eat. But in the garrison, officers are officers and enlisted men are enlisted men and that’s the way it’s always been.”

  Still smiling, the colonel reached into his desk drawer, fished out something, and tossed it to Kurt.

  “Stick this in your scalp lock,” he said.

  Kurt looked at it, stunned. It was a golden feather crossed with a single black bar, the insignia of rank of a second lieutenant of the Imperial Space Marines. The room swirled before his eyes.

  “Now,” said the older officer, “sit down!”

  Kurt slowly lowered himself into the chair and looked at the colonel through bemused eyes.

  “Stop gawking!” said Colonel Harris. “You’re an officer now! When a man gets too big for his sandals, we give him a new pair—after we let him sweat a while!”

  He suddenly grew serious. “Now that you’re one of the family, you have a right to know why I’m hushing up the matter of the tableland to the north. What I have to say won’t make much sense at first. Later I’m hoping it will. Tell me,” he said suddenly, “where did the battalion come from?”

  “We’ve always been here, I guess,” said Kurt. “When I was a recruit, Granddad used to tell me stories about us being brought from some place else a long time ago by an iron bird, but it stands to reason that something that heavy can’t fly!”

  A faraway look came into the colonel’s eyes. “Six generations,” he mused, “and history becomes legend. Another six and the legends themselves become tales for children. Yes, Kurt,” he said softly, “it stands to reason that something that heavy couldn’t fly so we’ll forget it for a while. We did come from some place else though. Once there was a great empire, so great that all the stars you see at night were only part of it. And then, as things do when age rests too heavily on them, it began to crumble. Commanders fell to fighting among themselv
es and the Emperor grew weak. The battalion was set down here to operate a forward maintenance station for his ships. We waited but no ships came. For five hundred years no ships have come,” said the colonel somberly. “Perhaps they tried to relieve us and couldn’t, perhaps the Empire fell with such a crash that we were lost in the wreckage. There are a thousand perhapses that a man can tick off in his mind when the nights are long and sleep comes hard! Lost… forgotten… who knows?”

  Kurt stared at him with a blank expression on his face. Most of what the colonel had said made no sense at all. Wherever Imperial Headquarters was, it hadn’t forgotten them. The I.G. still made his inspection every year or so.

  The colonel continued as if talking to himself. “But our operational orders said that we would stand by to give all necessary maintenance to Imperial warcraft until properly relieved, and stand by we have.”

  The old officer’s voice seemed to be coming from a place far distant in time and space.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Kurt, “but I don’t follow you. If all these things did happen, it was so long ago that they mean nothing to us now.”

  “But they do!” said Colonel Harris vigorously. “It’s because of them that things like your rediscovery of the tableland to the north have to be suppressed for the good of the battalion! Here on the plateau the living is hard. Our work in the fields and the meat brought in by our hunting parties give us just enough to get by on. But here we have the garrison and the Tech Schools—and vague as it has become— a reason for remaining together as the battalion. Out there where the living is easy we’d lose that. We almost did once. A wise commander stopped it before it went too far. There are still a few signs of that time left—left deliberately as reminders of what can happen if commanding officers forget why we’re here!”

  “What things?” asked Kurt curiously.

  “Well, son,” said the colonel, picking up his great war bonnet from the desk and gazing at it quizzically, “I don’t think you’re quite ready for that information yet. Now take off and strut your feather. I’ve got work to do!”