At that moment, Admiral Radlov was probably the most powerful man in the World, west of the Tyne delta. And so had been his predecessors, the Admirals of the Fleet, down through a thousand years of history. Under them the Dresau Islands had become mighty beyond all measuring and had imposed their wise rule over seven hundred miles of eastern coastline and thirty major islands. The Islands were also the last archaic holdout of the First World.
Captain Pendred commanded the most powerful weapon in this most powerful of nations, the cruiser Havengore. This ship, along with the frigates Blackthorne and Frostfire, composed what the World called either in legend or in direct report, The Fleet.
It was a bright morning in early Spring when the Tal-bight estuary was ridding itself of ice, and the mountain streams on Guthrun, the main island, were flushed from the first thaws. The girl had just been escorted from Radlov'soffice after an extensive interview.
Pendred was then summoned. Although almost twenty years the Admiral's junior, his counsel was often asked in matters of pressing import.
Pendred left his greatcoat in the foyer and entered the office. Admiral Radlov was seated behind a large oaken desk carved from the transom of the ship of the line Hell Hawk, of Blackwoods Bay fame. Radlov was an old man, and he showed it more than he cared to admit. The Sea had been a cruel companion to him and had sapped his strength until he could only stand "like a piece of driftwood" and watch the ships. Most of his hair had been torn out by the northern gales and the salt water had eroded his skin until he looked like an abandoned hulk rotting on the mudflats south of Duncarin.
Pendred was merely Radlov twenty years before.
After the preliminary pleasantries and the compliments on the Havengore's recent expedition against the corsairs of New Svald, the Admiral confronted Pendred with the Ship. The Myth of the Ship, the Victory itself, the Grand Revolution, and the state of the western World were all related to Pendred from the written testimony of the girl. Pendred, of course, expressed the predictable amazement and then the rapture that most men experienced when they were told of the real and/or professed aims of the Ship. But the delight was not all that Toriman would have wished it to be, because Pendred and the Dresau Islands still lived, albeit tenuously, in the First World, and they retained that age's fierce confidence in itself; what Toriman had sought to resurrect in the Caroline had not yet died on Guthrun.
Radlov stopped reading and laid down the report; he sat back in his chair and silently looked out over Kingsgate Bay. A trim gray schooner was tacking outbound with the afternoon tide. Pendred let all the facts sink in for a moment and then spoke. "And if all of what this woman tells us is true, sir, what are we to do? Even if the People do finish this machine and try to fly it, it will almost certainly kill them all. It can't be intended as a weapon—they could build fifty Fleets or a hundred air forces with the effort that they pour into one decade on this Victory. I just can't see how this could affect us."
"You're right there; if the Ship is just that, a vehicle to carry the scum of the earth to a more comfortable garbage heap, then it will not affect us. But the original purpose of the Ship was a part of a hoax. What if it is still part of a hoax, a bigger and much more insidious one than the one the Caroline originally had in mind?"
"Then anything might happen."
"Correct. And to help things along, Pendred, I shall tell you an old seaman's tale. Some of this you'll know, but other parts are strictly from legends that the Government does not care to see in textbooks and histories.
"Approximately, say, two thousand years ago, there arose in the center of the World a nation that was supposed to have rivaled the First World in its power and technical magnificence. Salasar was its name, Ashdown was its capital. It is said that Salasar was originally responsible for the Grayfields and perhaps the Berota Wall, but of course, none of this is readily confirmable.
"Anyway, in their millennial heyday the people of Salasar became much too enamored with their devices and their raw power, leading to corruption and ultimate ruin. An old story.
"It is told, though, that before her demise as an organized nation Salasar's roads, trucks, and aircraft once kept seventy percent of the whole World under her virtually absolute dominion. Eventually, I suppose, even the dominion decayed into outright tyranny. They turned their machines into gods and their rulers into priests." Pendred stirred uneasily and stared at the testimony of the Admiral's desk. "The glory of the First World was first twisted into the shame of this World and then into something much worse."
"If such a thing were possible!"
Radlov sighed. "Much too possible. So the inevitable insurrections and revolutions broke out. Each one was put down with progressively greater brutality until the fires finally caught hold in what is now Mourne and then in the mountain lands of Enom. Warfare spread all around the heart of Salasar and they resorted to . . . to what the peasants call 'unholy' acts in their efforts to preserve their evil rule.
"The final drive began here, on Guthrun and the rest of the Dresau Islands." The Admiral's eyes sparkled faintly with the memories. "A thousand years ago, it was, when the ships and aircraft that had either remained from the First World or had escaped from Salasar gathered in our bays and on our fields. A thousand years ago. Have you heard of the Armageddon legend, Pendred?"
"Yes," the Captain said quietly, "a very, very old story from the First World."
"That's what they thought it was, Armageddon. Sallying forth to defeat the forces of Evil, the Powers of Darkness, to save their immortal souls and end creation.
"So the Fleets, seven thousand ships and fifteen thousand aircraft, left, in conjunction with land forces driving in from the east and north, they engaged Salasar on the plain west of the Tyne delta.
"They didn't end creation, though they might as well have, but perhaps they did save their souls, for they drove the blackest, most dreadful force to ever see the light of day, back across the western mountains to the barren, blasted wastes that lay beyond. The losses"—Radlov's voice trailed off—"the losses were enough to turn that plain into a graveyard fifty by a hundred miles in size.
"The survivors of this misfired Armageddon built the Tyne Fortress to guard the beaten Powers; Gun Hill had been wrecked in the whirl of battle. They built the Westwatch to serve as the eyes of the Fortress. Of the Yards there is no mention; oblique references are seen in the histories of some men, but it is really a moot question.
"The aircraft returned to the Grayfields to sleep and for their pilots to die; the soldiers went home to found new nations, to compose songs of their exploits, but mostly just to forget. The ships—there were less than four thousand now—and their crews returned to the Dresau Islands, founded the Maritime Republics and established the Fleet. But despite all that these survivors did, The First World had just about died. Because it had used the tools of hated Salasar, it became feared by the World it had freed. Of course, the First World is admired today, but most of this World still thinks that a gun kills only people and a wrench can build only destructive machines. I guess that after Aberdeen went down the drain we were just about the only ones left with the old machines and the old, ah, mentality—for what that's worth. The Caroline now has taken its peasants by the hand and shown them that they are the masters of any machine—that it can do nothing unless they will it."
Pendred asked cautiously, "But what has this to do with the Victory?"
"Can't you see it? Can't you feel it?" the Admiral said with unexpected intensity.
"Feel what?"
"The hand of the Powers. Look, this whole thing starts when a general that almost nobody ever heard of suddenly calls this Limpkin up to his castle and lays out a beautiful play to rebuild the World. Involving, I might add, a place that no man can say existed before the Powers were defeated; so maybe the Yards aren't as fabulously ancient as the Caroline thought.
"Look at the leadership that sprung up, unassisted if we are to believe the girl, among the People. There are the Armories which somebody set up and secretly geared to assist in the take-over of the Ship and the Caroline." The Admiral glanced around him in frustration. "Well, dammit, Pendred, I can't offer a single shred of concrete proof, not a single definite fact, but the whole cast of the thing, the whole fabric into which these events seem to be woven reeks of a plot of such colossal malignity that the Powers are the only ones that could possibly be behind it."
Pendred began to reexamine the testimony of the girl; he was about to ask a question, but Radlov started up again. "One more thing, Captain, something I neglected to read you from the report. You remember that Coral offered all the Technos their freedom. She says she had no intention of leaving; I suspect that she loves the Victory as much as any of them, and the promise of Home more than most."
"Then why . . . ?"
"One of Coral's men, not one of the People's militia, came up behind her and put a bayonet to her back. She was forced to move out and make it appear that she desired to leave. By this time, I gather, she was quite upset and didn't have the slightest idea of what she should do. But she remembers that Coral had smiled at her in a strange manner, motioned, and then a single coach, with provisions for one passenger, took her away before she could collect herself. Further, when she was deposited at the Yuma border, she was told quite pointedly that the central World had become most dangerous for Technos ,. ."
"I still don't. . . "
". . .and that the only place where she would find safety would be on Guthrun, in the Dresau Islands. And, as 'luck' would have it, she instantly met an out of work mercenary who offered to convey her hither, asking no other reward than her, ah, favors. Interesting chap, from what she tells: tall, middle-aged but still in the flower of his manhood. A scarred face and real martial bearing.
She said that she might have grown to like him, but it seemed to her that his collections of his due on the journey were performed almost totally without passion, as if the man were on some distasteful mission and this were just part of the job and nothing more. Finally our wandering lass remembered that the man carried a gold signet ring, inscribed with a mailed fist and winged horse."
"The crest of Mourne," Pendred said slowly.
"Quite. Mourne, home of such diverse and illustrious personages as our General Toriman, the 'ghost' of Miolnor IV, and more recently Coral, Liberator of the People. Now can you smell it?" The Admiral's voice shaded off from ridicule into a controlled, simmering anger. "Mourne, once the preserver of the World's freedom, now a puppet of the Powers."
Pendred was at a loss to explain his superior's uncharacteristic display of emotion; the Admiral returned to watching the Bay. As Pendred thought harder about what he had just learned, seemingly unrelated facts, little details in the testimony began to change shape and fit with frightening ease into a design whose overall nature still eluded comprehension. "This girl, it would seem that she was selected and brought here specifically to let us know what was going on. Unusual, I should think, for forces engaged in dark plottings."
"Hardly unusual. It's a trap of course," said Radlov impatiently. "Or rather one should say, an invitation. Pendred, we're the last holdout of the First World, the only place on Earth that would be vaguely recognizable to a man from the First Days. The First World should have died at the Tyne Apocalypse, but it didn't—there were survivors. I know that a prophet with a halo on his head, coming walking to us on top of the Sea would suit our preconceptions better than a simple girl, but I cannot help but feel that this will be a final Armageddon for the First World."
"Just for us?" croaked Pendred.
"The First World and its beliefs still live, I hope, in other men and in other nations, although in so small a quantity as to be almost useless. But they will hear this call—indeed, I propose to tell them—and if there is some of the First World in their souls they will move and commit themselves either for or against the new masters of the Dark Powers. Those who do not move—and this will be most of the World's people—will live on. They will not go to the Tyne Delta."
"And this will end, once and for all, the First World."
"And the World, with all its physical horrors and grotesqueries shall reign unchallenged in the universe. Things will be as they should have been."
Pendred's mind was incapable of cogent thought; he blundered around in a fog of forgotten religious myths, new horrors, and now this: the supernatural reduced to brutally natural terms, the spiritual become physical. "What must we do at the Yards if this is the case?"
"We shall attempt to destroy the Ship, a thing which we both know by now to be impossible, and then we shall die."
"And things will be as they should have been," mumbled Pendred bleakly, looking at the floor.
Radlov smiled like a man who has found some small measure of satisfaction in his own impending death. "Captain, we are dying now, anyway. Kingsgate Bay used to be choked with steel ships and what do we have now?
A collection of small sailing ships and three incredibly overage steamships. Give us another hundred years and we'll have trouble defeating a school of tuna. If we just ignore this thing and allow ourselves and all that we value to just crumble into . . . into the World, then we will be no better than the World, and we will deserve its eventual fate. We must go to the Yards, and even if we can't touch the Victory, then at least we will give meaning to ourselves in the attempt."
Pendred nodded accord; his heart accepted all that Radlov had said for he had believed it long before he had heard of the Ship, but his mind still weakly fought it. Pendred got up and headed out of the office; the Admiral swung his chair around to face Kingsgate Bay, now rippling gold and silver in the sunset.
"What, specifically, do you plan to do?" Pendred asked at the door.
"Tell the Cabinet, I suppose." Radlov's voice was like dust in the quiet room. "I'll not tell them all, though, of what I've told you; I suspect that several feel such a thing is imminent. I'll just tell them the Ship is a threat to us that we cannot ignore. Then I will recommend that the Fleet be readied and that word be sent to every nation we can find assistance from. The Grayfields will, if at all possible, be resurrected." He said it so resignedly, Penred thought, so calmly did this man call the half-dead corpse of the First World to arms and battle. Radlov continued: "And on some day, more than eighty years from now—it will take at least that long for the Fleet to be completely refitted and for the World to raise its army and forge its weapons, so very many obstacles and difficulties do I see—then we will converge on the Yards."
Pendred shut the door gently and left Navy House.