In the Balance

He was back in his suite, busy with the infinite minutiae that accompanied command, when his door buzzer squawked. He looked up from the computer screen with a start. No one was scheduled to interrupt him at this time, and the Race did not lightly break routine. Emergency in space was improbable in the extreme, but who would dare disturb him for anything less?

“Enter,” he growled.

The junior officer who came into the suite looked nervous; his tail stump twitched and his eyes swiveled quickly, now this way, now that, as if he were scanning the room for danger. “Exalted Fleetlord, kinsmale of the Emperor, as you know, we draw very near the Tosev system,” he said, his voice hardly louder than a whisper.

“I had better know that,” Atvar said with heavy sarcasm.

“Y-yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” The junior officer, almost on the point’ of bolting, visibly gathered himself before continuing: “Exalted Fleetlord, I am Subleader Erewlo, in the communications section. For the past few ship’s days, I have detected unusual radio transmissions coming from that system. These appear to be artificial in nature, and, and”-now he had to force himself to go on and face Atvar’s certain wrath-“from tiny doppler shifts in the signal frequency, appear to be emanating from Tosev 3.”

In fact, the fleetlord was too startled to be furious. “That is ridiculous,” he said. “How dare you presume to tell me that the animal-riding savages our probes photographed have moved in the historic swivel of an eye turret up to electronics when we required tens of millennia for the same advance?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I presume nothing,” Erewlo quavered. “I merely report to you anomalous data which may be of import to our mission and therefore to the Race.”

“Get out,” Atvar said, his voice flat and deadly dangerous. Erewlo fled.

The fleetlord glared after him. The report was ridiculous, on the face of it. The Race changed but slowly, in tiny, sensible increments. Though both the Rabotevs and the Hallessi were conquered before they developed radio, they had had comparably long, comparably leisurely developments. Surely that was the norm among intelligent races.

Atvar spoke to his computer. The data the subleader had mentioned came up on his screen. He studied them, asked the machine for their implications. The implications were as Erewlo had said: with a probability that approached one, those were artificial radio signals coming from Tosev 3.

The fleetlord snarled a command the computer was not anatomically equipped to obey. If the natives of Tosev 3 had somehow stumbled across radio, what else did they know?

Just as the hologram of Tosev 3 had looked like a world floating in space, so the world itself, seen through an armorglass window, resembled nothing so much as a holographic image. But to get round to its other side now, Atvar would have to wait for the 127th Emperor Hetto to finish half an orbit.

The fleetlord glared down at the planet below. He had been glaring at it ever since the fleet arrived, one of his own years before. No one in all the vast history of the Race had ever been handed such a poisonous dilemma. The assembled shiplords stood waiting for Atvar to give them their orders. His the responsibility, his the rewards-and the risks.

“The natives of Tosev 3 are more technologically advanced than we believed they would be when we undertook this expedition,” he said, seeing if gross understatement would pry a reaction from them.

As one, they dipped their heads slightly in assent. Atvar tightened his jaws-would that he might bite down on his officers’ necks. They were going to give him no help at all. His the responsibility. He could not even ask the Emperor for instructions. A message Home would take twenty-four Home years to arrive, the reply another twenty-four. The invasion force could go back into cold sleep and wait-but who could say what the Tosevites would have invented by then?

Atvar said, “The Tosevites appear at the moment to be fighting several wars among themselves. History tells us their disunity will work to our advantage.” Ancient history, he thought; the Empire had had a single rule so long that no one, had any practice playing on the politics of disunion. But the manuals said such a thing was possible, and the manuals generally knew what they were talking about.

Kirel assumed the stooping posture of respect, a polite way to show he wished to speak. Atvar turned both eyes on him, relieved someone would say at least part of what he thought. The shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto said, “Is it certain we can successfully overcome the Tosevites, Fleetlord? Along with radio and radar, they have aircraft of their own, as well as armored fighting vehicles-our probes have shown them clearly.”