spilled your belief–and you ought to know–that, if events broke
favorably, he’d seize the chance to rebel. Depending on circumstances,
he’d either try for the throne, or carry out the same plan as the late
Duke Alfred was nursing along, to rip a sizable region loose from the
Empire and place it under Merseian protection.
“Which, of course”–Flandry lifted his gaze again–“would give the
Roidhunate a bridgehead right in that frontier. Do you wonder that the
treatment you got was rough?”
Kossara sprang from her chair. “How crazy do you think we are?” she
yelled.
“We’re bound for Diomedes to find out,” he said.
“Why not straight to Dennitza like an honest man?”
“Others will, never fear. Detective work on an entire nation, or just on
its leaders, takes personnel and patience. A singleton like me does best
vis-a-vis a small operation, as I suppose the one on Diomedes
necessarily is.”
Flandry’s eyes narrowed. “If you want your liberty back, my dear, rather
than being resold when I decide you’re not worth your keep, you will
cooperate,” he said. “Think of it not as betraying your folk, but as
helping save them from disastrously wrong-headed adventurers.
“We have a libraryful of material on Diomedes aboard. Study it. Ponder
it. Something may jog your memory; a lot that you’ve forgotten is
probably not irretrievably lost. Or you should be able to make
deductions–you’re a smart girl–deductions about likely rendezvous
points remaining, where we can snare more agents. Or, better yet, I’d
guess: Diomedeans involved in the movement, never identified by our
people, they should recognize you, if you show yourself in the proper
ways. They should make contact and–do you see?”
“Yes!” she screamed. “And I won’t!”
She fled.
The man sat quiet for a while before he said to the empty air, “Very
well, if you wish, Chives will bring you your meals in your cabin.”
VI
—
As Flandry conned the Hooligan, Diomedes grew huge in the screens before
him. Too heavily clouded for oceans and continents to show as anything
but blurs, the dayside glowed amber-orange, with tinges of rose and
violet, under the light of a dull sun. The nighted part gave pale
whiteness back to moons and stars, reflections off ice and snow. When
Kossara last came here, equinox was not long past; now absolute winter
lay upon fully half the planet
Flandry’s attention was concentrated on piloting. Ordinarily he would
have left that to the automatics, or to Chives if no ground-control
facilities existed. But this time he must use both skill and the secret
data he had commandeered back on Terra, to elude the Imperial space
sentries.
Most were small detector-computer units in orbit, such as supervised
traffic around any world of the Empire which got any appreciable amount
of it, guarding against smugglers, hostiles, recklessness, or equipment
failures. Flandry had long since rigged his speedster to evade them
without much effort, given foreknowledge of their paths. But surely the
unrest on Diomedes, the suspicion of outside interference, had caused
spacecraft to be added. Sneaking past these required an artist. He
enjoyed it.
Just the same, somewhere at the back of awareness, memory rehearsed what
he had learned about his goal. Pictures and passages of text flickered
by:
“Among the bodies which men have named Diomedes–among all the planets
we know–in many respects, this one is unique.
“Though not unusually old, the system is metal-poor. To explain that,
Montoya suggested chemical fractionation of the original cloud of dust
and gas by the electromagnetic action of a passing neutron star … As a
result, while Diomedes has a mass of 4.75 Terra, the low net density
gives it a surface gravity of only 1.10 standard. However, so large an
object was bound to generate an extensive atmosphere. Between
gravitational potential resulting from a diameter twice Terran, and low
temperature and irradiation resulting from the G8 sun, much gas was
retained. Life has modified it. Today mean sea-level pressure is 6.2
bars; the partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide are
about the same as on Terra, the rest of the air consisting chiefly of
neon …
“Through some cosmic accident, the spin axis of Diomedes, like that of