The Altar at Asconel by John Brunner Page B

huge illuminated signs still declared to be the Headquarters Port of the Third Imperial Fleet. Then he took a second look at those monstrous hulls, ranged like a forest of branchless metal trees across the concrete plain, and realized he had failed to make an obvious deduction. The Empire, by all accounts, was struggling against decay and rebellion all through the galaxy—why then were so many ships out of the sky at one place and one time? And he began to spot the clues which accounted for their presence: gashed hulls from distant battles, plating removed by the hundreds of square feet to expose the vital equipment within which was being cannibalized to maintain those ships still capable of flight.
    Maybe somewhere out near the rim there was a world where ships stood like this in vast numbers, but not antiques used to the limit by reckless commanders—new ships, human-made, ready to bring inwards to the hub those who for ten millennia had been harried away from the Argian domains and had bided their time on the threshold of intergalactic emptiness, waiting for the inevitable collapse.
    If there were such a world, he thought, it would be worth hunting for. The shadow of an idea crossed his mind, and was dispelled immediately by the arrival alongside their own vessel of officials from the port controller’s staff.
    Vix vented his anger on them in a single blast of abuse and complaint. They ignored him as they might have ignored a breath of wind. Spartak, urging Vix aside, attempted to tackle them on a more rational basis, inquiring the authority for “Imperial requisition” and contesting the legality of giving orders to non-Imperial citizens.
    The officials sighed and produced guns. It seemed that this had become the standard substitute for argument on Delcadoré.
    All three of them were taken—for Vineta refused to stay alone aboard the ship after her experience on Annanworld—to wait in a large, fight anteroom outside the office of the port controller. There was no one else there apart from a man of early middle age, who to their horror lacked botha leg and an arm. They could not refrain from staring at him; on a world returning to barbarism after the withdrawal of Imperial support, such a sight might have been expected, but Delcadoré was supposed to be an outpost of the still viable Argian civilization.
    The man cracked a bitter smile as he saw their eyes covertly turning on his injuries.
    “I’m not pretty any longer, am I?” he rasped. “Well, not to wonder at that! If you’d been picked out of an airless wreck the way I was, you’d have …” A fit of coughing interrupted his angry words, and racked his body for a good minute before he could answer Spartak’s tense questions.
    “Oh, sure they’ll fix me up sooner or later. But that can wait, they tell me. I’m the only survivor from my whole team, and all they want to know is where they went wrong. I’m going to tell ’em, too! Without mincing my words!”
    “What happened?” Vix snapped.
    “Fools—gas-brained fools! I could have told them.…” The man’s eyes were unfocused, staring through the wall at a faraway disaster. “Hiring pirates, that’s what they’ve hit on as their latest brain-wave! A whole Imperial fleet revolts under a commander who thinks he can do better than the mud-heads we have in charge at the moment—and who’s to say he couldn’t? Sometimes I think I could! And what do they do to combat this? They hire a ramshackle bunch of pirate ships, thinking to keep them from pillaging some Imperial planet this way, send out a command echelon to give the orders—that’s where I got involved—and sit back and pour some more ancinard. And what happens? Exactly what any schoolchild would have said: you can’t give pirates orders, so they break and run, and the Imperial-trained rebels pick them off like scooting watersliders, and then the Imperials-that-were loot the very planet the pirates were aiming for, to make up for the