The Lost King Read Free

had managed to
catch their collective breath, if Stavros had been a good professor.
    "Admiral Aks,"
he spoke into the commlink, "I want every object within a
one-hundred-kilometer radius of where I am standing destroyed."
    "My lord?"
The admiral's tone indicated he did not believe he had heard
correctly.
    "Destroyed,"
the Warlord repeated slowly and distinctly. "I trust we are not
experiencing a communications malfunction, Admiral Aks?"
    "N-no, my lord."
Aks ventured a protest. "The university is extremely popular, my
lord. This will create a most unpleasant incident in the solar
system."
    "Then it will give
our diplomats something to do besides shuttling from one pleasure spa
to another. Inform the ruler of this world—"
    "Governor, my
lord."
    "Governor, then!
Inform him that no one, not even the so-called intelligentsia, is
above the law. These people knew what Stavros was, yet they harbored
him. I will show them, as I have shown others, what happens to those
who shelter the Guardians. If the governor has any complaints, he may
send them to the Congress through the official channels."
    "As you command,
my lord." The Admiral's voice crackled and went out.
    Dr. Giesk was the last
to board the shuttle, arriving in a flurry of white lab coat,
clanking instruments, trailing wires, and fluttering necktie. The
hatch slammed shut behind him, the airlock sealed. Fancifully
designed and painted to resemble a phoenix, the red and gold
shuttlecraft tucked its landing gear neatly up into its sleek body
and lifted off-planet swiftly, spiraling up into the sky.
    Out on the fringes of
the solar system, waiting to receive its commander, was the Warlord's
flagship. When it had been determined that the shuttle had broken
free of the planet's gravitational pull and was safely away, a beam
of laser light shot from a lascannon to the surface of the planet
below. The bombardment lasted only seconds, then ceased. The Warlord
arrived aboard his ship to find the course to Syrac Seven already
plotted. The flagship, Phoenix, sailed into the chartered
paths of hyperspace and vanished from sight.
    On the planet below,
searing flames reduced to ash the university and the beautiful
countryside surrounding it, creating a ghastly, gigantic funeral pyre
for one corpse.

Chapter Two
    Adieu, adieu, adieu!
remember me.
    William Shakespeare, Hamlet , Act I, Scene IV

    The dock foreman
snarled impatiently when a shadow fell across his clipboard. The
shadow was not caused by clouds obscuring the sun—a rare
occurrence on the desertlike Syrac Seven. The shadow was caused by a
human body coming to stand between the dock foreman and the sun. And
thus the foreman snarled. He was a harassed and busy man. If the day
had been a year long on Syrac Seven—as it was, by report, on
Syrac Nine—he would not have had time enough to get everything
done.
    Syrac Seven was at the
cross-routes of one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in
the galaxy. Huge space freighters were either in orbit waiting to
dock, on land waiting to be loaded, on land waiting to be unloaded,
or on land awaiting permission to get off. Their captains, ever
conscious that time is money, were invariably furious over
delays—real and imagined. Their crews were always
undisciplined—what could you expect of merchant seamen?—and
picked fights with the foreman's longshoremen, And, as if the foreman
needed any more trouble, the Syracusian government sent officials by
on a regular basis to throw everything into confusion.
    One such personage had
been around that morning, accusing the dock foreman of turning a
blind eye to the theft of computer parts shipments en route to
underdeveloped planets; planets who were trying desperately to take
their places in the Republic, and who had been assured that computers
were the answer—provided the planet had electricity, of course.
The dock foreman recalled with pleasure his conversation with the
government official in