His Majesty's Starship Read Online Free Page A

chance for both our species to make a fresh start. We of the First Breed hope that you will take it.’
    The entire text of the Rusties’ invitation was burned into his mind: he had memorised it and looked at it backwards, forwards, left to right, right to left and upside down.
    They wanted something. Nothing was so simple, so straightforward as the invitation made out: life wasn’t like that. In the opinion of R.V. Krishnamurthy, life was far too short for riddles and far too short for being expected to answer them. He believed in taking the simplest solution, and with solving riddles the simplest solution was to ask someone already in the know. This was precisely what he expected to do here, in this remote lodge in the Himalayas, with no one as yet but his loyal assistant and 20 elite NVN soldiers for company.
    “We have them on radar, Excellency.” The speaker was a slim, nervous man in his mid thirties – twenty years younger than his master.
    “Thank you, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said.
    Subhas Ranjitsinhji was one of those people who was permanently making Krishnamurthy ask himself why he tolerated them. And yet tolerate him he did: the man had been by his side for years. Ranjitsinhji could handle Krishnamurthy’s network of spies and informers, and all the other fiddling but necessary details that frankly bored his master. A useful subordinate and occasionally a handy scapegoat or just plain kicking stool.
    Krishnamurthy deliberately did not get out of his chair but turned another page in his book. A shame about the appearance he had to keep up, he thought, because outside the great studio windows of the lodge the view of the Himalayas gleaming in the sun was stupendous. He had spent many happy holidays here and he was well aware of its isolation, so when he had heard that a party of Rusties visiting Katmandu wanted to look at Everest ...
    Now he could hear the engines of their flyer, echoing along the valley. He slowly put down his book and got up, stretched and wandered over to the balcony. Someone handed him a pair of binoculars and he put them to his eyes. His paid-for, tame pilot was flying down this particular valley with no questions asked, which was as well because the man would have taken much more persuading if he had known about the bomb.
    A puff of smoke and flame burst out from one of the flyer’s engines and the whole craft yawed. Krishnamurthy set the binoculars to autofocus and followed the trail of smoke down, holding the plunging flyer in the middle of his circle of vision. At the same time the noise of the explosion reached them in the lodge, and the sound of the tortured engines that were trying to hold the flyer up.
    “Recovery team, stand by,” said the NVN major.
    The flyer came down onto the valley floor in an exploding cloud of smoke and sparks and dust. It skidded along the ground, still wavering from side to side, ploughing out a scorched furrow behind it, until it slammed sideways into a boulder. It tilted up and for a moment looked as if it might somersault over, but then it fell back down and settled right way up with a mighty crash. It was directly below the lodge on the floor of the valley, two hundred yards away. It couldn’t have been better.
    The recovery team was already scrambling down towards it. Much as he regretted it, Krishnamurthy turned away from the scene – image was everything – and returned to his chair. “Time to finish my chapter, I think,” he said. “Get the ski masks ready.”
    Armed men in masks stood around the mangled four-legged form on the floor. Krishnamurthy had ordered that only one survivor be left but it looked as if he had been lucky to get even that one. The flyer had come down more heavily than intended.
    He squatted down by its head and poked it. The Rustie shuddered in pain.
    “Can you hear me?” he said.
    No answer, except a rattling noise which could have been their usual speech or could have been a gasp of pain that its translator