“Sir.”
He jerked out of his reverie, looked around: It was the radio watch, Maureen Terwonsky. Looking worried, which was not like her.
“It’s a radiotelephone call, sir. They want to speak to you personally. They won’t give a name.”
He pulled the cigar out of his mouth and considered the chewed wet end. “If it’s those news people again, tell them to go bugger themselves,” he said. She began to speak into her equipment.
“Captain . . . Captain Armstrong, he says if you don’t listen you’ll regret it, and your family will too.”
Something cold and limp touched his spine. He leaned forward quickly, touching the control that shut off the speaker for a moment.
“Get to the auxiliary in the radio room, and get the Milice on the line. Move!”
He took up the handset with a deep breath. “This is Captain Armstrong,” he said; his voice was deadly flat with the effort of control. “Who is this?”
“This is the voice of the workers, Captain Armstrong,” the voice said. “This is the voice of the ones you think are tools to be used and thrown aside to make your riches.”
This can’t be serious, he thought. A crank call; the voice sounded a little nasal, probably North American. Not a slum dialect; educated, but not Spartan-born either.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, playing for time. With a little luck, the Milice would trace the call back through Broadcast Central. “You can’t—”
“Oh, but we can, Captain. Hear the voice of the tool. We’ve heard your voice, making speeches. Trying to grind the common people down, make them suffer even more. Now you’re going to feel our anger, now you’re going to suffer from the just wrath of the people.”
“What the fuck—” Static hiss; Terwonsky stuck her head through the hatch at the rear of the bridge.
“Milice got it, they’re working on it, Cap,” she said.
“Don’t worry, probably just a crank—” he began.
The Alicia jerked and stopped dead in the water, almost as if she had hit a shoal. Echoing silence fell as the engines cut out, broken only by yells from startled crewfolk. Lights flickered, then came on more dimly as the emergency batteries cut in. Armstrong lunged across the bridge, balance telling him the ship was already down by the stern and to starboard. His hand slapped down on the communicator, and a screen lit with a view of the engine room.
Armstrong’s stomach clenched, and he could feel his scrotum contract and try to draw his testicles up against his stomach. Nothing lit the engine compartment but the red emergency lights, and they shone on a scene out of hell. Water plumed in through the floor gratings, from a slashing cut that must run the full length of the compartment; no, beyond it, into the rear hold. The deck was already awash. The engineering crew were scrambling around the main hatchway in the bulkhead just below the pickup, battering and prying with crowbars and hand-tools.
“Sven!” Armstrong shouted. “What’s going on?”
A desperate face turned up, blood and water running down it from sodden hair and a cut across the forehead. “Jesus, it just went like a bomb! Both the hatchways are sprung, she’s flooding, we’ll be under in three minutes.”
“Hold on!” He slammed the all-stations button, and his amplified voice bellowed out throughout the Alicia.
“Now hear this! The black gang is trapped in the engine-room, and it’s flooding. McLaren, whoever’s near there, gut the cutting lance down there now, d’you hear. Now!”
“Jesus, Steve, it’s flooding faster, we can’t budge this bastard.” Panting, and an iron chung as a prybar broke under the desperate heaving of three strong men. Some of the others were shouldering in to try with their bare hands, screaming in panic.
Hurry up, hurry, up, Armstrong pleaded.
“Jesus! Jeezzzuussss—”
* * *
“Sven’s dead,” Armstrong said hoarsely, throwing off the blanket somebody was trying to put around his shoulders. There were Milice cordoning off the dock; out on the waters he could see divers jumping from a hovering helicopter.
“Oh, honey, no,” Alicia said.
“I saw it,” Armstrong mumbled. Then he shook himself, stood erect. “Come on, we’re getting you and the kids home and then I’m going to get some answers, by God.”
They pushed through the awestruck crowd toward the family van: a six-wheeler they used for vacations at their cottage up in the hills. A cameraman tried to work through to them; one of the Milice tripped him, then stamped a boot through the equipment. The sight brought a tiny sliver of chill satisfaction, something to put between himself and the vision of his oldest friend floating dead before a pickup camera. . . . Soothing the children was better, forcing him out of himself.
“Honey, you sure I shouldn’t stay?”
“No, not in your condition. Get them back to the house, Fred’s sending some of his people over”—his brother-in-law, and a commander in the police—”and stay there until I call. OK, sweetheart?”
She bit her lip, nodded, kissed him and slid into the driver’s seat. He waited until the big vehicle was safely out of the parking lot, before he turned and looked at the death of a lifetime’s dream. Half an hour, he thought, dazed. Half a flipping hour. It’s impossible.
The explosion was not quite enough to knock him down; it did send him staggering half a dozen steps forward. Even as he turned and ran, the van blossomed in a circle of fire as the ruptured fuel-tank blew. He could hear his children screaming quite clearly over the roar, as he wrenched at the burning metal.
Steven Armstrong was screaming himself as they pulled him away from the wreckage where nothing lived, although not from the pain of his charred hands or the third-degree burns across most of the front of his body. He was still screaming as the paramedics dragged him back, until they hyposprayed enough sedative into his veins to turn a bull toes-up.
* * *
“I am ashamed. I have failed,” the Meijian said.
Murasaki nodded; they were alone in the plain white room of his lodgings, which with the equipment he had brought was as secure as any building on Sparta. The floor was covered with local bamboo matting; his futon was neatly rolled in one corner, and beyond that there was only the low table between them, an incense burner, and one spray of willow-buds in a simple jar. Sandalwood perfumed the air; a cricket chirped from its tiny cage of silver wire.
“I must expiate my shame,” his follower said.
They knelt facing each other across the table, dressed in dark kimonos. The technoninja drew a knife and laid the smooth curve of it on the lacquered wood before him, then began to tie a handkerchief tightly about the base of the smallest finger of his left hand.
“Wait,” Kenjiro Murasaki said. For some time they did only that, moving solely to breathe. At last:
“You are in error. You have not failed.”
“Roshi,” his follower said, bowing his head to the mats between his palms. “Yet Armstrong lives.”
“Beware of the illusions of specificity. Although Armstrong lives, circumstance is such that he will serve our purposes none the less. For the Armstrong we wished to die, has died; in his place is born another.
“So.”
“So.”
Silence stretched.
CHAPTER NINE
Crofton’s Encyclopedia of the Inhabited Planets
(2nd Edition):
Sparta, Royal University of: Institution of postsecondary education, sole university of the Dual Monarchy of Sparta (q.v.). Founded in 2040, only a few years after the arrival of the first settlers of the Constitutionalist Society (q.v.), the University of Sparta embodies many interesting organizational principles and fulfills a number of functions.
The University is organized as a cooperative corporation, with the Crown, the faculty and individual professors holding shares. Some state revenues are “dedicated” to the University; other sources of income include endowments, extensive property holdings, fees, service charges for research work, and patent revenues. Individual faculty are paid a basic salary, with bonuses determined by number of students enrolled and by a complicated, results-oriented testing process. Some chairs are separately endowed, and the endowing individual or authority may nominate the holder subject to a Dean and Faculty veto.
Enrollment is by two methods; scholarship examination, and fee payment. The scholarship tests are severely selective, but confer free tuition, preference for work-study occupations, and in some cases rent-free student accommodations and a stipend. Those entering via fee payment need not take the entrance exams but may and often are disqualified during their course of study; fees are not refunded. Additional supplements are also offered to those willing to contract for public service work (e.g., primary school teaching in remote locations) after their graduation.
All the common courses are taught, together with some unique to Sparta such as Introductory Military Science; there is no law school, as formal qualifications are unnecessary for practice on Sparta. The University is affiliated with St. Thomas Royal Hospital and the McGregor Oceanographic Institute; it cooperates closely with the research departments of many private businesses, and undertakes contract and freelance research work on an extensive basis. The University also operates an extensive correspondence degree section, and many students take the academic portions of their courses by mail or Tri-V link, coming to the campus only for laboratory work or oral examinations.