The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Read Free

has authored the popular comic Hoka series. His short story “Call Me Joe” was chosen for inclusion in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1974, and his short fiction has been collected in several volumes, notably
The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, All One Universe,
and
The Best of Poul Anderson.

Poul Anderson
    HIS EXCELLENCY M’KATZE UNDUMA, Ambassador of the Terrestrial Federation to the Double Kingdom, was not accustomed to being kept waiting. But as the minutes dragged into an hour, anger faded before a chill deduction.
    In this bleakly clock-bound society a short delay was bad manners, even if it were unintentional. But if you kept a man of rank cooling his heels for an entire sixty minutes, you offered him an unforgivable insult. Rusch was a barbarian but he was too canny to humiliate Earth’s representative without reason.
    Which bore out everything that Terrestrial Intelligence had discovered. From a drunken junior officer, weeping in his cups because Old Earth, Civilization, was going to be attacked and the campus where he had once learned and loved would be scorched to ruin by
his
fire guns—to the battle plans and annotations thereon, which six men had died to smuggle out of the Royal War College—and now, this degradation of the ambassador himself—everything fitted.
    The Margrave of Drakenstane had sold out Civilization.
    Unduma shuddered, beneath the iridescent cloak, embroidered robe, and ostrich-plume headdress of his rank. He swept the antechamber with the eyes of a trapped animal.
    This castle was ancient, dating back some eight hundred years to the first settlement of Norstad. The grim square massiveness of it, fused stone piled into a turreted mountain, was not much relieved by modern fittings. Tableservs, loungers, drapes, jewel mosaics, and biomurals only clashed with those fortress walls and ringing flagstones; fluorosheets did not light up all the dark corners, there was perpetual dusk up among the rafters where the old battle banners hung.
    A dozen guards were posted around the room, in breastplate and plumed helmet but with very modern blast rifles. They were identical seven-foot blonds, and none of them moved at all, you couldn’t even see them breathe. It was an unnerving sight for a Civilized man.
    Unduma snubbed out his cigar, swore miserably to himself, and wished he had at least brought along a book.
    The inner door opened on noiseless hinges and a shavepate officer emerged. He clicked his heels and bowed at Unduma. “His Lordship will be honored to receive you now, excellency.”
    The ambassador throttled his anger, nodded, and stood up. He was a tall thin man, the relatively light skin and sharp features of Bantu stock predominant in him. Earth’s emissaries were normally chosen to approximate a local ideal of beauty—hard to do for some of those weird little cultures scattered through the galaxy—and Norstad-Ostarik had been settled by a rather extreme Caucasoid type which had almost entirely emigrated from the home planet.
    The aide showed him through the door and disappeared. Hans von Thoma Rusch, Margrave of Drakenstane, Lawman of the Western Folkmote, Hereditary Guardian of the White River Gates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, sat waiting behind a desk at the end of an enormous black-and-red tile floor. He had a book in his hands, and didn’t close it till Unduma, sandals whispering on the great chessboard squares, had come near. Then he stood up and made a short ironic bow.
    “How do you do, your excellency,” he said. “I am sorry to be so late. Please sit.” Such curtness was no apology at all, and both of them knew it.
    Unduma lowered himself to a chair in front of the desk. He would
not
show temper, he thought, he was here for a greater purpose. His teeth clamped together.
    “Thank you, your lordship,” he said tonelessly. “I hope you will have time to talk with me in some detail. I have come on a matter of grave importance.”
    Rusch’s right