CHAPTER THIRTY

Digging out the Guard's barracks was three days of grimness. Five hundred and eighty soldiers had been inside when the monster bomb of the gravlighter had detonated.

Four hundred and thirty-seven dead. One hundred and twenty-one injured—most with major traumatic injuries requiring amputation so severe that the embassy's surgical team doubted if more than half would accept limb regeneration. Twenty-three uninjured—physically uninjured.

There had been twenty-six, at first. Three soldiers had been dug out of the rubble seemingly unscathed. One of them had stood up, grinned, said "Thanks, clots, now, who's pourin'?" taken five steps, and dropped dead. The others just died quietly in their hospital beds. And the twenty-three survivors were all psychological casualties, of course. No one ever knew—or reported, at any rate—how many Jochi civilian workers had also died in the blast.

But it was three days before the last screamer, lost in the maze that had been a palace building, rasped into silence and death.

This battalion of the Third Guard had ceased to exist. Otho found the battalion flag buried near Jerety's body and had it cased for shipment to the division's home depot.

The battalion might be reconstituted after an appropriate interval. Or it might never exist again.

The wounded, and the injured Guardsmen who had been outside their barracks, were loaded on the Victory and evacked.

Sten had put Mason in charge of the rescue operation, and he himself had spent as much time as he could digging with the rest of the Imperials. Then he had ordered Mason to take the Victory to Prime and unload the casualties. He had sent Prime a copy of Mason's orders, but had not much cared whether they would be met with Imperial approval or not. He was slightly surprised to receive that approval—and a brief, coded addendum that further support would be provided immediately.

The next communiqué from Prime had been announcing medals. Some were given to Gurkhas or Bhor that Sten had commended. Others went to Colonel Jerety and the top-ranked officers of the Guard's battalion. If these officers had survived the blast, of course, they would have been relieved and at the very least shot for criminal incompetence.

Sten, Kilgour, and Mason were also gonged. To them the awards were meaningless medals to be tossed in a drawer and forgotten. The disaster should have been studied for its lessons—not memorialized with tin and ribbon. But that is the nature of any military unit.

By then, Sten had other problems.

The blast that destroyed the Guard unit seemed to be the catalyst. Jochi went somewhat berserk.

Suddenly, the Empire was the enemy of the Altaic Cluster. The Empire must be taught a lesson. The Empire must not meddle.

Sten admired—slightly—the campaign. To a degree it was spontaneous—peasants never seemed to need much direction for their latest pogrom—but mostly it was carefully choreographed.

At first, Sten had been in a reactive position: filing the correct protests with Dr. Iskra and what Iskra laughingly called a government; filing the appropriate responses, trying to keep the livie reporters off his ass… and incidentally keeping the embassy functioning and his staff alive.

He had immediately declared Jochi a high-threat world and informed all Imperial worlds that any citizen visiting the Altaic Cluster did so at extreme personal risk. He insisted that Prime require a visa for anyone coming to the cluster.

He sent out teams of well-armed Gurkhas and Bhor to find all Imperial citizens and escort them to the safety of the embassy.

Most Imperial visitors—thank some non-Altaic god—had been professional businessbeings, who were skilled at sensing trouble and scooting out of its way. But there were always the exceptions: the elderly couple who were determined to see a part of the universe they had never visited; the honeymooners who, it seemed, had picked Jochi out of an archaic travel fiche. Sten rescued the old people. He wasn't in time for the newly married beings.

And then the embassy itself came under siege.

At first it was just small groups of Jochians, and any person or vehicle attempting to enter or exit the embassy was stoned. Sten consulted with Kilgour. Yes, Alex agreed.

The situation looked to be worsening.

"Then we'll show them how to throw a real riot."

"Aye, boss."

And Kilgour set to work, readying the response. He could have done it in his sleep by now. This was hardly the first time he and Sten had been besieged by "civilian mobs'' on a "peaceful world.'' They had a very effective standard defusing order prepared.

The crowds grew bigger. Instead of rocks, they were throwing firebombs and nail-wrapped improvised grenades built out of low-grade explosives.

According to Dr. Iskra's flunky, J'Dean, these people represented the righteous wrath of Jochi. Wrath about what, Sten did not bother to ask. J'Dean told him that Dr.

Iskra, who was quite busy at the moment, would happily send out troops to clear the area, if Sten so requested it. Right, Sten thought. Another massacre, which will be clearly and positively laid at my hands, since I know this conversation is being recorded.

"No," Sten said politely. "The Empire will not harm innocent Jochians freely expressing their political opinions as is their right.'' He broke the connection. He didn't think even Iskra's tape doctors could butcher that into a statement of slaughter.

Then the sniping started. Projectile weapons, being fired by marksmen who had seen at least some training. One secretary was shot in the leg, and one clerk was temporarily blinded when a near miss shrapneled rock from a wall into her face.

That was enough. Sten ordered everyone nonmilitary inside, and only essential movement to be made during daylight hours even by troops.

Naturally, the next stage would be a direct attack.

Sten put all nonessential personnel into the many levels of sub-basements under the embassy building. He stationed anyone with any military training or weapons familiarity near the entrances and exits to the compound buildings.

The Bhor had been quite busy following Kilgour's blueprints. The somewhat monstrous beings may have been thought of as barbaric killers—which they were, of course—but they were also sophisticated traders and pilots. Which meant that each of them had, by now almost at a genetically transmitted level, talents as shade-tree mechanics. Any of them could, for instance, weld anything, up to and including radioactive materials, by hand, safely, and with minimum shielding. Or rebuild a broken engine never seen before—given no more than hobbyist's machine tools and an hour to puzzle it out.

The embassy already had two elderly riot-control armored vehicles. The guns were stripped off, and Alex rearmed the clunkers with his own choice of devices. Four embassy vehicles, including the stretched luxury ceremonial gravlighter that Sten had inherited from his predecessor, were stripped, given improvised armor, and equipped with the same weaponry as the riot vehicles.

Four of the Gurkha trooplighters were also modified, with heavy iron vee-blades welded to their prows. These four were stationed near one of the embassy compound's sally ports.

Sten and Alex were building and camouflaging bombs, then planting them at ground level on the compound's outer walls.

That night, Lalbahadur Thapa, who Sten had commissioned Jemedar, took two unmodified lighters and a platoon of Gurkhas out a side gate on a smash and grab on a central hardware depot. He returned having taken zero casualties and having accomplished his mission, although, he told Sten, he had never seen a mongery so large but with so little stock in trade. "How can these Jochians find so much time to be killing their neighbor and have so little time to be taking care of their own food and shelter?"

Sten didn't know, either.

Kilgour told off twelve members of the embassy's own security staff for special duties. They would be armed with the stolen "weaponry" and were dubbed, with Alex's archaic sense of humor, Tomcat Teams.

By dawn, the embassy was ready. Sten thought the assault would come sometime between noon and dusk—it takes time to organize, fuel, oil, and motivate any mob.

The Gurkhas and the Bhor were put on standby for reaction forces, in the event the mob made it through the gates or over the wall, or if a charge became necessary.

That left two tasks.

Alex took care of the first—he ran a last-minute, complete check on the embassy's security, concentrating on any structures outside the embassy grounds that had line of sight on the compound and could be used as command centers. These included two buildings—one a new office structure, the other one of the near-abandoned vertical slums. Each had a new com antenna on the roof.

They were marked.

Cind had her best riflemen in the embassy courtyard, and targets set up. The range was subminiature, of course, and was intended only to let the snipers make sure the sights of their weaponry hadn't been jarred or shifted since fired last.

Cind was grateful that the rounds to be fired were AM2 and not projectile-type, so she did not have to calculate at what centimetric range a target would give the same zero as the desired thousand-meter flat zero or any other stone-age nonsense. The AM2

went, without deflection and with a straight-line trajectory, straight for its target.

Their weapons were Imperial sniper rifles. These ultralethal devices were modified-issue willyguns, using the standard AM2 round.

But the "propellant" was not a laser, as on the standard infantry rifles, but modified linear accelerators hung around the barrels. A conventional-looking sight automatically found the range to the target. If the target had moved out of sight—behind a wall, perhaps—the scope was twisted until its cross hairs were where the sniper imagined the target to be, invisible on the other side of the wall. A touch of the trigger, and the weapon shot around corners.

Cind had her own personally modified sniper rifle, fitted with every comfort known, from thumbhole stock to set trigger to heavy barrel. One of the Gurkhas, Naik Ganjabahadur Rai, spotted for her.

Sten hoped the crash of gunfire from behind the embassy walls might deter some of the prospective rioters' enthusiasm, but he doubted it.

They waited.

The day built, with shouts, rocks, bottles, and chants coming over the embassy walls. It was midafternoon before Sten felt the mob was all frenzied up and ready to be dealt with. It probably took so long since the day was raw and windy—not exactly perfect weather to destroy an embassy.

He moved Cind's snipers to the roof of the embassy. One floor below, lurking in an office with the windows removed, Alex waited with two Bhor antimissile teams.

All of Sten's assault troops were on a single command freek, which normally would produce instant com babble. But since he was using the superexperienced Gurkha and Bhor soldiery, Sten thought he could keep the gabble within reasonable limits. Their coms were also set for an instant-override section band.

"All sections, all troops," he opened. "On standby, this band. Section leaders, make your com check, both freeks, and report. Sten, out."

He was broadcasting en clair, since there was no time for codes, and no particular need, either. If whoever was masterminding this "spontaneous demonstration'' wanted to listen in and try to react, that was fine with Sten.

All elements checked in five-by and zed probs, except that one section leader had to replace two com units. One of these centuries, Sten thought, they will actually come up with an infantry radio that is reliable five meters beyond the manufacturer's bench. But not this one.

Sten moved a tripod-mounted high-power set of binocs into position and decided it was time to check the street scene outside.

Shouts. Banners. Horn blasts. Screaming rabble-rousers. Barricades blocking the side streets. The dull crack of a couple of small-caliber weapons, aimed at he knew not.

The embassy was completely surrounded by a sea of madness. The mob swayed, roaring.

Roaring like that wind in the Place of Smokes, he thought, and then turned that part of his mind off.

Quite a crowd, he estimated. Nearly… let's see. He guessed over a hundred thousand beings.

"How do you know there's that many?" Cind wondered, from her sprawl two meters away from him.

"Easy," he said. "I just count their legs and divide by two. Hang on. Cind. Targets.

Alpha. Thirteen thirty. Five hundred meters. Bravo. Fifteen hundred. Four—correction, three hundred seventy-five. Charlie. Sixteen hundred, four hundred. One more—Delta.

Zero nine hundred, six hundred meters. Looks like he might be the big Limburger.

Monitor, please. Sten, clear."

He was using a clock locator, with twelve hundred being the central boulevard that ran from the embassy to the palace, and ranges in meters.

The spotters reported promptly. All targets that he had suggested were beyond the crowd swirl. He had looked for beings who were standing on top of things, speechifying, organizing, rabble-rousing.

Crowd roar was getting louder. Now, Sten thought, if these speech makers are just angry citizenry, concerned about injustice, in a few moments they'll shout their way to the front of the mob.

But they were not moving.

Professional-type rabble-rousers, then. Ones that whoever's throwing this masked ball would rather not sacrifice if bullets start zipping about. Or else they're just cowards, in which case I'm almost sorry for what's about to happen.

"Alex."

"Aye, lad."

"When you take your two, we'll take the windbags."

"Aye, skip. Hae y' a mo' f'r some incidental intelligence?"

"No… yes."

"Ah hae m' wee ticky ticky wi' me. Th' one thae's th' twig f'r thae flashy popper w'

hae oot there?"

Sten thought…oh. Alex was talking about the detector that was linked to the bug in that elaborate pistol they had bugged in that back-alley arsenal.

"GA."

"As y' said. Th' whoppin' Camembert hae i'."

Son of a bitch, Sten thought. So. As he had thought, this "mob" was being created, built, and driven. And whoever was running this operation was also involved with a little private terrorism. And, he was morally willing to believe, even if it wasn't justified enough for an intelligence summary, willing to send a suicide bomber in to kill over four hundred Imperial Guardsmen.

"You're detached, Alex. Don't lose that ticker."

"Ah thought y'd say thae, boss. An' Ah' wish't y' t' be impress't, an' owe me one, frae bein't so self-sacrificing. Ah'm off th' net, an'll be mon'trin' frae com central. Alex, clear."

"Cind?" Sten had his hand over the com mouthpiece.

"I heard.'' She spoke into her open mike to her sniper section.

"This is Sniper Six Actual. Delta is a negative target. I say again, Delta is a negative.

Over."

That target—that being—that Sten had spotted far beyond the mob's reach and surmised to be the horde-officer-in-charge was carrying the bugged pistol. As much as he wanted to hit Delta now, the target must be taken later.

"Here they come!"

"Unknown unit! ID yourself!"

"Sorry. Main Central."

Sten swung his binocs. Indeed, here came a thrust of people toward the main gate.

A stumble, really. Sten gave an order.

Irritant gas hissed from projectors atop the embassy walls. A very thin spray, and the gas was cut ten-to-one. It was dyed yellow and would stain anyone it touched. This was in case Sten or anyone else needed to ID any rioters at a later date, since the dye would take at least seven baths to scrub off.

The gas was intended to be no more than an annoyance, but was also intended to be a suggestion that worse things could happen.

The first wave fell back, blinking. Then the now-tawny troublemakers surged forward. This time they were brandishing knives, improvised spears, and firebombs.

Sten touched buttons on the det panel in front of him, and his and Alex's bombs went off. They were not bombs so much as high-pressure spray cans. They had been disguised as trash bins, streetlight bases, and anything else that would have been part of a believable street scene. Each bomb contained at least twenty liters of lubricant.

It became quite hard to walk on the slick streets just around the Imperial embassy.

Then the Tomcat Teams hit, darting out from the embassy's quickly opened and shut sally ports.

They were two-man units, one man with a willygun and orders not to use it unless the team was trapped, the other with a great pack full of what had been looted from that warehouse. Ball bearings. Many, many ball bearings, grabbed by the handful and scattered underhand.

Ball bearing mousetrap.

Tomcat.

It got much harder to be a raving rebel and not be in a seated or prone position.

The mob hesitated. The front rank was suddenly unsure of what was going on, and the rear ranks wanted to find out what was going on and get in on the looting that could be no more than seconds away.

The embassy sally ports opened again, and the two riot-control vehicles, along with the four others Sten had modified, lifted out and opened fire.

Water.

Under medium pressure. Not even at a firehose blast.

The first several ranks of the crowd decided they wanted to go home. It was cold out.

Sten would oblige them, as his second wave of gravlighters boomed out of the embassy. Screams, and people dove out of the way as the dozer blades closed on them before they realized that the gravlighters were deliberately attacking at three meters above the ground.

The lighters weren't intended as weapons—they drove on at speed, toward the barricades down the side streets. They shattered against them once, spun back, and hit again, piled debris and civilian gravsleds spinning out of the way. Now the streets were clear.

The lighters turned and sped back into the embassy grounds. No casualties. Sten sighed in relief—this had been the most dangerous part of his plan, the most likely to produce Imperial casualties.

The mob was swaying, indeterminate.

That gravlighter attack was Sten's bit of humanitarianism, planned to give "his" mob a back door when the next part of the plan was implemented. He, too, wanted them to go home.

"Now!"

And now people died.

Bhor fingers touched firing switches, and missiles spat out of launch tubes. They were fire-and-forget, but even a guided or unaimed missile could not have missed. Both impacted at point of aim: one on the top floor of that slum, the other in the penthouse of the office building.

Beings who had had no intention of involving themselves in real physical violence, let alone in real jeopardy, had bare seconds to blink, as two fiery lines homed, and the missiles blew.

Blastwaves curled out… and other fingers touched triggers.

Alpha… Bravo… Charlie…

The street speakers were dead, too, even before they had time to look up to see the plume of death smoke from their superiors' lairs.

The mob was frozen.

And the gates of the embassy swung open.

The yammers, shouts, and screams stopped.

There was utter silence.

And then there came the even crunch of boots on rubble.

Sten, flanked by twenty Gurkhas, strode out the embassy gate.

All of them held kukris, the half-meter-long curved-blade knives, held at a forty-five degree angle to their chests, at the ready.

They came forward ten paces. And stopped, without orders.

Ten Bhor, willyguns leveled, came out, veed back for flank security. They, too, crashed to a halt.

There was a murmur from the crowd. These were the killers. The little brown men who took no prisoners, men who, the wild stories had said, killed and ate their own children if they were not murderous enough. All of the slanders the most skilled propagandists on Jochi had spread on the Nepalese warriors, slanders that the Gurkhas had paid no mind, now back-blasted. These men were even more terrible than the tales said. These were not men, even, but killers, who went in with the long knife, and came out leaving nothing but blood and silence behind them.

Again with no orders, Sten and the Gurkhas took one measured pace forward, then stopped.

Another pace.

Another.

In five more paces, they would close on the rabble.

The crowd broke. That mob, intent moments before on obliterating the embassy and tearing apart every being within it, became a scatter of frightened souls, interested only in getting tender behinds out of harm's way.

Howling, screaming, they pelted away, away from the knives, away from the terror.

There was not a flicker from Sten or the Gurkhas.

Sten barely nodded, and the Gurkhas, in unison, about-faced. With equally measured pace, they walked back inside the embassy grounds. The Bhor waited until the Gurkhas were inside, then port-armed and doubled after them.

The gates clanged shut.

Sten moved to a wall, made sure that he could not be seen outside, and sagged against it. A little close, he thought.

Jemedar Lalbahadur Thapa marched to him, came to attention, and saluted.

Sten returned the salute. "Very good."

"Not very good," the Gurkha said. "Anyone can frighten sheep. Or children. The dead of the Imperial Guard are unavenged."

Sten, too, turned grim. "Tonight," he promised. "Tonight, or the next night. And then we will not be playing child's games, nor with children.''

It took, in fact, three nights before that moving dot that was the telltale pistol came to rest.

Sten's operation order was verbal, with no record being made, and very short.

Twenty Gurkhas. Volunteers. Standby for special duties at 2300 hours. Sidearms only. Barracks dress.

Alex had lifted an eyebrow at that last: Why not the phototropic cammies?

"I'll want no one to wonder about this later," Sten said shortly. "This is authorized slaughter, not private revenge."

The entire Gurkha detachment volunteered, of course.

Eight Bhor. All master-pilot rated. Four gravlighters. Basic weapons.

Again, Cind told him her entire team wanted to go in. Starting with her, she added.

Sten had said nothing about the nature of the special duties. Evidently he did not have to.

The soldiers assembled at 2200 hours. Outside, the sky was partially overcast, black clouds racing across the face of the four currently visible moons.

There was none of the Gurkha's usual prebattle barracking. They knew. As did, somehow, everyone in the embassy. The canteens and hallways were deserted.

Sten and Alex blackened their faces, put on cammies, and checked their weapons.

Sten had his kukri, the knife, and a pistol. Alex had a handgun and a meter-long solid-steel bar he had wrapped with ordnance nonslip tape.

Alex went to the com room for a final look at the target—they had not only the pistol's beeper broadcasting, but four Frick & Fracks orbiting the area, and eight more grounded for area intelligence.

The Gurkhas and their eight Bhor pilots were drawn up in an embassy garage. Cind was in front of the formation.

Sten returned her salute and ordered the troops to open ranks for inspection. The Gurkhas had their kukris drawn. The chin straps of their slouch hats were tight under their lower lips—and their eyes were fixed on infinity.

Sten passed down the ranks. Merely as a formality, he checked one or two of their blades. They were, of course, hand-honed into razors.

He turned the formation back to Cind, and she ordered the weapons sheathed and ranks closed. Alex hurried out of a stairwell, a most grim smile on his face.

"W hae a feast a' friends," he said. "Alive-o, alive-o she cried. Th' sensors hae fifteen vultures gatherin't. Thae'll be havin't a conference or p'raps a party, but i' looks like th'

whole clottin' cell's i' place."

Sten's acknowledging smile was equally humorless.

He gave the mission orders:

Four-man teams. After grounding, move to the target zone. Wait for the assault command. No guns to be used unless in complete emergency.

And:

No wounded. No prisoners.

They doubled out into the courtyard, where the gravlighters waited. The Bhor slid behind the controls, the Gurkhas boarded the first two—the others would be used for cleanup—and the lighters lifted, flying nap of the city toward the attack zone.

The target was less than twenty minutes flight time away. No one spoke. Sten, hanging over the pilot's right seat, saw the large-projection map on-screen and the blinking dot that represented that pistol and their objective.

It had come to rest two days earlier in a large mansion, surrounded by extended grounds, on a riverbank just outside and upstream from Rurik. A headquarters? A safe house?

Sten did not much care. He and Alex would shake the place—afterward.

The lighters grounded a few hundred meters from the sprawling house.

There was a half-alert sentry at the front and another at the rear. They were silenced.

Alex checked the main entrance for sensors or alarms. There were none.

Sten drew his kukri, and in a ripple, twenty-one other knives flashed in moonlight.

Then the corpse-glow vanished, obscured by clouds.

They went in.

The task took five minutes. There had been no outcry. When it was over, the bodies of fifteen butchered terrorists, and the two sentries, were lined up on the overgrown lawn. Cind searched the bodies for identification and anything intelligence-worthy.

There was very little.

Sten and Alex took porta lights from one gravlighter and searched the mansion, in the high-speed, fine-tooth manner they had learned in basic intelligence. Neither of them spoke.

Alex broke the silence. "Ah hae indicators. Th' mob wae big fans ae Iskra. Look't all th' prop'ganda. All th' same. Jochi for Jochians an' thae. But Ah noo hae aught thae'll link th' quack solid."

"Nor do I."

"Clot. Whyn't the bassid happen t' slip oot ae th' evenin', t' hae a brew wi' his thugs, an' we'd find him here."

"That only happens in the livies."

"Ah know thae too. But a lad can dream, canna he? C'mon, Sten. Thae's nae f'r us here. Do Ah fire th' place?"

"Yes."

The bodies had already been loaded onto the two spare grav-lighters. Sten waited until he could see flames build inside the mansion, then he ordered withdrawal.

The seventeen bodies would be weighted and dumped far out at sea.

Terrorism, properly implemented, was a double-edged sword. Dr. Iskra's people might have a bit of trouble recruiting more action cells after this one vanished into the night and fog.

Then the killers departed, having gone in with the long knife, and come out leaving nothing but blood and silence behind them.