There was a second city, a thick crescent, to the south and east. The
old maps placed the Zeggensburg spaceport there, but not a trace of that
remained. In its place was what was evidently an industrial district,
located where the prevailing winds would carry away the dust and smoke.
There was quite a bit of both, but the surprising thing was the streets,
long curved ones, and shorter ones crossing at regular intervals to form
blocks. He had never seen a city with streets before, and he doubted if
anybody else on the Empire ships had. Long boulevards to give
unobstructed passage to low-level air-traffic, of course, and short
winding walkways, but not things like these. Pictures, of course, of
native cities on planets colonized at the time of the Federation, and
even very ancient ones of cities on pre-Atomic Terra. But these people
had contragravity; the towering, wide-spaced city beside this
cross-gridded anachronism proved that.
They knew so little about this planet which they had come to bring under
Imperial rule. It had been colonized thirteen centuries ago, during the
last burst of expansion before the System States War and the
disintegration of the Terran Federation, and it had been named Aditya,
in the fashion of the times, for some forgotten deity of some obscure
and ancient polytheism. A century or so later, it had seceded from or
been abandoned by the Federation, then breaking up. That much they had
gleaned from old Federation records still existing on Baldur. After
that, darkness, lighted only by a brief flicker when more records had
turned up on Morglay.
Morglay was one of the Sword-Worlds, settled by refugee rebels from the
System States planets. Mostly they had been soldiers and spacemen; there
had been many women with them, and many were skilled technicians,
engineers, scientists. They had managed to carry off considerable
equipment with them, and for three centuries they had lived in
isolation, spreading over a dozen hitherto undiscovered planets.
Excalibur, Tizona, Gram, Morglay, Durendal, Flamberge, Curtana,
Quernbiter; the names were a roll-call of fabulous blades of Old Terran
legend.
Then they had erupted, suddenly and calamitously, into what was left of
the Terran Federation as the Space Vikings, carrying pillage and
destruction, until the newborn Empire rose to vanquish them. In the
sixth Century Pre-Empire, one of their fleets had come from Morglay to
Aditya.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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