Berserker Throne by Fred Saberhagen

she had very recently assumed command. Looking up, she saw the Radiant as a sunlike object, not much bigger than a point in its apparent size, though only about four kilometers directly above her head. The reversed gravitational influence of the Radiant naturally prevailed here, and the sunlike point would be in the same directly overhead position for anyone standing anywhere on the inner surface of the Fortress, whose basic shape was that of an enormous hollow sphere.
    The reasons why that form of construction had been used—or indeed the reasons for the Fortress having been built at all—were lost, along with much else in the early history of its creators, the Dardanians. They had disappeared from Galactic society centuries ago, and to historians of the present day they formed one of the most enigmatic branches of Earth-descended humanity.
    Still, the thought behind one aspect of the construction was obvious; the inner surface of the Fortress had been fixed at a distance of approximately four kilometers from the Radiant itself, because at that distance the reverse gravity of the Radiant, pushing the inhabitants of the Fortress against the faintly concave surface, was equal to Earth-standard normal.
    Commander Blenheim stood, neatly uniformed, just outside the main gate of the Templar base; around her the little, self-contained world rose up in all directions. One square kilometer after another mapped itself out conveniently for inspection on the interior of the surrounding and supporting globe of rock and metal. The inner surface was lined with streets, dotted with houses, with buildings of all sorts except that none were very tall. The commander knew that many of the buildings, possibly even a majority of them, were now unused.
    There were also great blank spaces on the map, kilometers of raw rock that might once have been occupied, but had been scraped clean of surface detail in some remodeling project of centuries ago, and were now abandoned. Now again remodeling activity was in progress, especially in and around the Templar base itself. There was a lot of greenery in sight too, plants from Earth and other worlds genetically redesigned to thrive in this mild steady light. This massive effort at planting was a development that Anne Blenheim understood was fairly new, and of which she heartily approved both aesthetically and as an affirmation of life. Orchards and single trees and even miniature forests were visible everywhere across the inner sphere that made itself a sky.
    Close by the small parklike space where the commander was now standing, the main gate of the Templar compound was busy with pedestrian and vehicular traffic, either military people or those on business with the military. A great many of the people passing through glanced at Commander Blenheim as they went by; she had been on board the Fortress for only one standard day, and her arrival as the new commanding officer was, she was sure, the biggest topic of conversation among the few thousand people who made up the whole civilian and military population here.
    Because she was now standing just outside the gate and not inside it, salutes from the passing military were not forthcoming, and the commander was spared the distraction of having to return them. But the quick glances at her continued. Military and civilian passersby alike were all doubtless wondering just why the new base commander might be standing here in apparent idleness—taking a traffic count, perhaps? Waiting for someone?—but in the twenty-four hours she had been on the Radiant, no one had become a close enough acquaintance to pause and try to find out.
    In her imagination she framed an answer anyway: "Waiting to make a diplomatic contact of sorts. With a certain—gentleman." Then she smiled at the strange gaze that answer evoked from her imaginary questioner. A diplomatic contact, here? The Templars were of course as active in that field as anyone else, if not more so—they had to