CHAPTER FOURTEEN

41413… 31146… 00983… 01507…

Far beyond the stretch of the most sensitive sensor, far beyond die Bhor picketlines, an Imperial destroyer, modified into a special-missions delivery craft, dumped a tacship into space and fled.

The tacship, completely unarmed, its weapons systems replaced with massive electronic suites, slid toward Vi, the Bhor home world and capital of the Lupus Cluster. There were just five crewmen aboard, plus one Internal Security agent, fresh from her training and initial intern assignment.

09856… 37731… 20691…

It found a parking orbit offworld, hiding behind one of the planet’s moons until the ordered time came around.

Then, under partial and muffled drive, it set a landing trajectory. A somewhat unusual one. From the ground, it would appear that the tacship was coming “straight down,” toward one point on the planet—a wilderness near the capital city. Speed was kept low to reduce skinheating and subsequent infrared printing by Bhor scanners.

It was still waiting for the correct moment, which came when one of the great Bhor intercontinental suborbital transports lifted from a field and bellowed for nearspace.

The tacship went for ground, using the cover of the transport’s electronic, infrared, and physical turbulence.

On board, the dispatcher waited next to the spy. The compartment was lit with eye-saving red nightlights.

The spy was heavy-laden, McLean pack on her chest and a backpack containing a weapon and a travel case that would pass unnoticed as a civilian’s valise. Inside the case were clothes, normal espionage gadgetry, plus a great sheaf of Imperial credits and Bhor currency.

Strapped to her leg was the heavy dropbag containing that most necessary and dangerous tool of a spy, a transmitter/ receiver. The com buzzed.

“Coming in on Delta Zulu,” the tacship pilot announced.

“Aye, sir,” the dispatcher said.

“We’re at dropspeed. On approach.”

The dispatcher felt the tacship chop power and level out of its dive.

“Aye, sir. Hatch opening.”

The dispatcher touched a button, and a circular hatch yawned. There was moonlit night and, far below, gleaming snow. Two corrugated steel plates slid out, into the middle of the open hatch. To one side, the dispatcher could see the flickering from the Bhor transport’s stern as it drove on and upward, unseeing.

The spy shivered. But the compartment was heated.

“Looks cold down there.”

“Your friends’ll be waiting,” the dispatcher soothed. “Now. Position.” The spy stepped onto the plates. She swayed in the airblast from the hatch, men recovered. As trained, she locked her hands tightly on the two handles of the McLean pack. One of them held the drive activation switch.

“Count thirty before you drop your bag,” the dispatcher reminded. The spy nodded, not really hearing.

The com buzzed.

“Ten count… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… GO!” The steel plates snapped back into their housing, and the spy plummeted down toward Vi. The dispatcher keyed the mike, as the hatch slid shut.

“One away, sir.”

“Affirm. Return to your post.”

The tacship lifted toward space. The temptation was to hit full drive and hare away. But the tacship pilot was a professional—the drive signature at full power would very likely be picked up, wasting all the trouble they’d gone to for the insertion. The dispatcher looked down, at the now-closed hatch.

“May all your eggs,” he said, “be double-yolked.”

A spy needed all the luck that could be wished for.

43491… 29875… 01507…

Marl, now promoted out of tech ranks and commissioned as ensign, and the Bhor constable, Paen, watched one of the nightscreens in their gravlighter.

The image blurred, and Marl touched a button, and the picture was razor-sharp.

“You would not ever get me leaving a perfectly good tacship in flight,” Paen observed.

“Nor me,” Marl agreed.

The message had been coded and blurted out from Vi toward an Imperial Intelligence receiving station, located as close as safety would permit to the Lupus worlds: 41413 urgently

31146 require

00983 additional

01507 agent(s)

30924 reports

32149 ‘s

37762 ‘t

11709 e

23249 n

03975 begins (beginning?)

26840 plans

41446 to use

37731 system(s)

03844 the basalt has come in again

09856 delivery

37731 system

20691 in

43491 will

29875 recover

01507 agent(s)

Marl was particularly proud of 03844, since she’d observed that Hohne was not exactly the most skilled of coders. Kilgour had been right in thinking Hohne a bit of an amateur since he was using an extant code. It wasn’t significant to Alex that at least Hohne had chosen a prehistoric system, dating back to the dark ages when idiocies like obsidian daggers and onetime pads had been used.

She figured the Imperial who decoded the message would swear a lot, scratch his/her/its head(s), reconsult the code fiche, substitute 03843, meaning for a base, and the message would make sense. The mad Scotsman would be proud of her sneaki-ness.

Damn, but she was starting to miss Alex. When he got back, now that she was commissioned and all, and he was technically not in her chain of command, she planned to cozen him into drinks, dinner, and…

who knows?

If nothing else, she wanted to find out the truth about that title, Laird Kilgour of Kilgour. If he was really some land of baron, what was he doing in this revolt, instead of sucking up to the Emperor?

“The human looks cold,” the Bhor said, not a shred of sympathy to his rumble.

“She does.”

Marl felt momentarily empathetic for the doomed spy drifting toward them, still about a kilometer above the ground. She pushed it away. The woman has a choice.

“More stregg?” Constable Paen asked.

“I say again my last—humans can’t be swilling stregg like you folks, and still function.”

“Kilgour can.”

“Kilgour isn’t human, either.”

“That is true.”

Paen drained his cup— & duplicate in miniature of a drinking horn—folded it, and put it away.

“Shall we collect our new friend?”

Both beings slid out of the gravlighter, careful to not shut the doors behind them—the sound of a slamming door carries forever on a silent night. Around them, hidden in the blackness of this thicket, were twenty heavily armed Bhor policemen.

Above them the spy touched buttons, and her rate of descent slowed as much as the McLean generator could overcome gravity. The age of the fantasized strap-on-your-back personal flier still hadn’t arrived, even with the antigrav capabilities of the McLean system. But at least it had replaced all varieties of the incredibly dangerous parachute.

The spy directed her descent toward one end of the huge open meadow that was the dropzone, the final end of delivery system M. Below her was tranquil forest. Far, far away—at least five klicks, she estimated—she saw the lights of a tiny farmhouse.

Just as planned. No ambush waiting.

Perhaps, she thought with a chill, her friends—the Imperial spymaster whose cover name was Hohne, or his chosen representatives—weren’t at the rendezvous, either. But, that was not a problem. She would go to ground for one planet-day as instructed. There were rations and heat tabs in her case, and her jumpsuit would keep her very warm.

Even if they didn’t materialize then, she would still be all right. Bury the jumpsuit and McLean pack, and make her way to the capital city. She had memorized three alternate pickup points.

Groundrush—under twenty-five meters—as she swung toward the snow.

She forced her eyes off the earth below, earth she knew had needle-sharp stones just under that innocent-looking snowy blanket, and onto the horizon. She suddenly remembered the dispatcher’s warning, and her hand slammed the knob on her harness, letting the dropbag unspool on its five-meter cord so it wouldn’t still be attached to her leg on the landing slam.

The bag with the transmitter dropped less than half a meter when the ground came up and smote the spy.

She did a classic three-point PLF: toes, knees, nose… and the pain crashed. She blurted, then buried an outcry and lay motionless in the snow.

“Clot,” Marl swore, as the police spread out toward the spy. She and Paen hurried toward the sprawled agent. “If she ruined the com, I’ll use the thumbscrews. We’re two back now as it is.” Building a replica of one of the Empire’s secret, compact superpower transmitters took a great deal of time—time when a spy would be out of circuit and would have to come up with some explanations when she reopened contact.

And there was no question in Marl’s mind that this agent would eventually be tamed. Or else she would be brainscanned for her code phrases, contacts, electronic “fist,” and then executed.

Only three Internal Security agents had chosen Patriotism and the Road to Tyburn so far—three of the twenty-nine whom Poyndex had ordered into the Wolf Worlds in response to Hohne’s bleating about Sten’s imminent arrival.

The other twenty-six were quite comfortable in quarters on various worlds that weren’t quite prisons but were certainly not freedom, broadcasting exactly what they were fed.

Marl, and through her, Kilgour, and through him, Sten, were running the Eterrnal Emperor’s entire espionage net in the Wolf

Worlds.

Just as Alex had planned.

Some time before, a colleague of Rykor’s had been given an unusual assignment. A specialist in military recruiting, she had been ordered to prepare a campaign intended for the defeated Tahn worlds. At first Rykor had thought the idea somewhat unsavory, but she was pragmatic enough to realize that the military always recruits from its defeated and most generally downtrodden enemies.

But her colleague had gone on to explain that her orders had specifically stated that the campaign was to focus around a resurrection of the old Tahn samurai culture, a deathway the Emperor had sworn to extirpate after he had defeated the Tahn.

Interesting—and Rykor found it aberrational that the Emperor could believe that poverty could be cured by putting the poor in uniforms. But there was more to the concept than just that—and a full analysis revealed another indication of the Emperor’s growing psychopathy. He was evidently building an army that he planned to use. Since there was no known external foe requiring a huge army to stand off, this newly restructured military would have as its purpose to destroy the enemy within. In other words, the citizens of the Empire.

Since the Tahn Way encouraged xenophobia, a racial superiority, the belief that mercy was a weakness, and the firm conviction that the strong had rights over the weak, this new model army of the Emperor’s would be barbaric.

Rykor had subtly investigated—and found that other worlds with their own feral cultures were suddenly the focus of Imperial recruiters.

Very interesting.

Fortunately the campaign was very easy—at least easy for a being with Rykor’s skills in mass psychology—to destroy.

Rykor had swept up every psychologist or psychological student she could find who was able to fulfill some fairly basic requirements: Do you like to travel? Do you mind being alone? Can you tell a necessary lie without feeling guilty? Can you take on a job that you will not be able to see the results of? Can you accomplish a task and accept that you will not be rewarded immediately? And so on and so form.

It was unfortunate she wasn’t able to field battalions of coun-terpropaganda specialists, as she would have had she still been serving the Eternal Emperor.

But the antitoxin to this murderous psychological virus spread rapidly enough by itself. It worked because it addressed the Emperor’s campaign at the root—and contained just enough truth to be unpleasant.

For instance, one of Rykor’s volunteers was named Stengers. He was given a clean background and inserted on an Imperial world where he traveled openly as a student of sociology to Heath—the former capital of the Tahn. It was purest chance his wanderings were just behind an undercover Imperial Recruiting advance man, and just ahead of the recruiting team itself.

All Stengers did was ask some puzzled questions, especially to those young Tahn who were considering taking the Imperial shilling.

Questions such as: “Well, if the Emperor wants you to rise up and redeem the honor of the Tahn, why does he want you to serve so far from your home? It is hard to gain honor in the darkness, as one of your own proverbs states.”

Sometimes, he was a bit more direct: “Interesting. You say that eighteen Tahn from this farm district alone have gone off to serve? And none of them have returned from Imperial duties? Two of them have died? How sad to die, so far from home, serving someone who seems to never notice such a sacrifice.” Or closer to the bone: “If the Emperor suddenly thinks so highly of the Tahn, and their elders, why is this district pig-drakh poor? With all of the Empire’s riches, why are we shivering in front of this peat-bog fire? Why, the world I come from, which is no richer than this, and I live far in the hills, has AM2 heating in every home. I don’t understand.”

Or brutal: “Seems to me a pretty good way for the Tahn to never amount to anything if the Emperor’s taking your best and sending them out to the fringe worlds to die.” Stengers and his fellows planted livie items, a revival of carefully chosen Tahn war ballads that centered around the belief that the Emperor and all his minions were worms beneath a Tahn’s feet…

The next overall recruiting report to Prime contained some disappointing statistics about the sudden drop in volunteers to the Eternal Emperor’s armed services…

Sten had cautioned Kilgour to be most careful on Earth. Even though the blown mission on the Umpqua River was against the privy council, security beings are security beings. There was a very good likelihood that the goons who would be wandering around the near-abandoned hamlet of Coos Bay, which Sten and Alex had used for their base, might still be carrying the same occupational specialty but serving another master. Gestapo is ge-stapo, as the seemingly meaningless archaism put it.

No problem, Kilgour swore. He planned to stay well away from the province of Oregon. Alex hoped that the secret he was looking for—the purpose of the Eternal Emperor’s mysterious trip to Earth—was far, far away. In this case, far away meant the nearest full-range spaceport.

San Francisco, California’s biggest city, boasted a population of almost 100,000. The young lovers—Hotsco, at least, qualified—claimed to have arrived in California Province on a shuttlehop into one of the desert retirement communities to the south, around the tiny province capital of Santa Ana.

From there they had boarded one of the luxury gravcraft that swept over the San Joaquin Marshlands at the hamlet of Bakersfield, and leisurely found their way north.

Actually, Hotsco’s smuggling ship was parked fifty meters underwater in the city’s great bay near the Isle of Pelicans. One beep from Hotsco’s transponder, and robot rescue would be inbound.

Playing tourist, they took lodgings in one of the new pseudo-Victorian guest houses that were being built in the wilds atop the Twin Peaks. They marveled that there had once been a bridge across the headlands, and listened as visionaries told them one day the straits would be bridged again. They declined an invitation to hunt a man-eater in the overgrown jungles of what had once been a park. They listened to arguments as to whether the foothills of the Mission District should be cleared—some swore the low mounds were rubble from high-rise buildings that had fallen in some great quake. They danced in the restoration of a huge clifftop mansion patterned after one that had been destroyed pre-Emperor and three monster earthquakes ago.

They politely refused an invitation from two rather lovely human females to join them in sexual ecstasy, in the Lovedance of the Ancient Merkins. Free. Alex thought Hotsco looked interested and then somewhat disappointed when he reminded her that, generally, new lovers are in love for a while before kinks occur.

He did make a mental note to himself that the woman appeared to have interesting recreational ideas.

And they ate. Crab they caught themselves with a rented pot near another ruined bridge which led directly across the bay. Long loaves of wonderfully sour bread. Broiled fish. Raw fish artfully arranged on pats of rice. Rack of lamb. Chicken roasted under a brick. Alex, never a sybarite, let alone a gourmand, thought of changing his ways.

And they talked. Talked to anyone and everyone. Especially in the bars and hangouts around the small spaceport just south of the city. Alex claimed to be a free-lance import/exporter in the luxury trade, and Hotsco his new business/life partner. What, they wondered, did people think could be exported from Earth, considering that it was Manhome, that would interest customers throughout the Empire? More specifically, what could be exported—legally and morally?

Six E-days—and Alex smiled to himself: these really were Earth-days—later, without anyone seeming to realize that they had been grilled, Kilgour found his being. A customs official, someone with a sense of mission—which meant a built-in nose for a grievance, especially when it meant that someone had used higher authority to avoid proper procedure. Tsk, Kilgour assured her. Neither of them would ever…

kind of thing that’s despicable… business must be run in a proper manner… matter of fact, Ms.

Tjanting… one of the more terrible things about my own profession… some traders… even heard stories of very high officials bending the laws…

The pump didn’t need much priming.

Very high officials, indeed. Straight from Prime, in fact. And during the time frame Alex was interested in.

Customs, through Earth Spaceship Control, had been notified that the province of Oregon was closed to all nonstandard in-atmosphere and nearspace traffic. Which mattered not at all to Tjanting. She knew that the Emperor had his estates up there, and what he, or his people, chose to do was none of her concern.

She might have been curious, being a good citizen, if the Emperor had been present. But of course, he had not been there.

How did she know that, Alex wondered?

Well, there would have been something on the livies, wouldn’t there? But that wasn’t why she was red-arsed, though. If the Eternal Emperor knew what liberties had been taken in his name, Tjanting knew, he would not be pleased.

About two weeks before the announcement, Tjanting went on, a commercial transport had grounded at San Fran, intending to clear customs at this entry port and then proceed immediately to its final destination—the Imperial Grounds some hundreds of kilometers away. She boarded the ship and immediately found things unusual. The ship was immaculate, and the crewmen followed orders as if they were in the Imperial Navy. But that was sheer conjecture. What had upset her was the cargo.

The skipper of the transport had, at first, refused to allow her access to the hold, claiming that what it contained was a classified cargo—property of the Imperial Household. But there was no paperwork to verify his claim. He could be carrying any sort of basic supplies to the river complex, supplies that the Emperor, like any other citizen, would have to pay duties on to the Earth government.

Tjanting insisted he open the hold—or else she would call for security and impound the ship and cargo and arrest the crew. The captain yielded gracelessly.

The cargo was medical—sophisticated equipment and supplies, as if someone were establishing a very small, but very superb, surgical ward. Or so, Tjanting said, a colleague specializing in med supplies had told her when she called back and read him the bill-of-lading fiche.

The problem wasn’t that the cargo was dutiable—it probably wasn’t, under humanitarian grounds. The question Tjanting had, and the one that wasn’t answered, was why was this equipment necessary?

Customs was also responsible for quarantine and health. Was someone in the Imperial Household ill? Or needing some kind of surgical help? For all she knew, there was a plague breeding.

She reported the matter to her superiors and was told to wait. They would contact the Emperor’s staff in Oregon. That took minutes—no one in Oregon knew of such an incoming shipment. Tjanting was sure she had uncovered a strange sort of smuggling ring whose members had the maximum amount of gall.

Then another call came from the north, and before her shift ended, she was hauled in and reprimanded severely for what her supervisor called “unwarranted snooping into the business of the Eternal Emperor.” Tjanting was also told she had a nasty reputation for being a busybody, and had best correct this character flaw lest it cause a downgrade on her next efficiency hearing.

By now the woman was seething, and Alex soothed her, and bought her another drink—a truly awful concoction of a sweet liqueur called Campari, charged water, and a brandy float on top. It was a monstrous waste of cognac, Alex thought, but said nothing.

So, while Hotsco covered for him with chattered sympathy, Alex mused: Jus’ afore th‘ Emp dances on, some laddie wants’t’ set up an OR. An‘ it’s gowky to conceive th’ Emp’s retreat nae has a wee medical kit an‘ such. So, somethin’ special mayhap wae intended, aye? An op’ration?

On th‘ ’Ternal Emp’rer himself?

A wee bit ae surgery time’s carefully kept under th‘ rose… ?

Aye. ‘Tis odd. “Tis ver’ ver‘ odd, Kilgour thought.

Actually, ‘tis ver’ simple, he realized, considering the presence of the bomb-disposal experts at the Emperor’s compound. Surgically implanting a bomb in somebody wasn’t unknown to Kilgour—the ruse had been used successfully by fanatics before. Kilgour had also heard of brave beings having a bomb installed inside them before they went on a suicide mission, to prevent any possibility of capture, torture, and exposing their fellows.

However, taking a bomb out was a new twist. And this is what he now thought had happened.

Mmm, Alex mused. So. Noo we‘ ken where th’ boomie thae goes off whae th‘ Emp dies com’t frae, aye? I’s installed i’ th‘ loonie’s gut, p’raps where th’ ‘pendix was. I’ dinnae matter. Th‘ real puzzler i’

who put th‘ clottin’ thing in, i‘ the first place!

Th‘ further an’ further Ah dig an‘ delve, Kilgour mused, th’ less an‘ less Ah knoo thae’s f’r certain.

Ah well. I‘ y’ want’d a life where thae was naught but th‘ abs’lute, y’ coulda been a WeeFreesie. Or stay’d a common so’jer.

Alex refused to continue. Reasoning from insufficient data almost invariably produces suspect conclusions. He would think more on this later.

They fed Tjanting a couple of drinks, then announced that they had to get back to their hotel.

Tjanting watched them leave. After a moment, she frowned, and a queer expression crossed her face.

Halfway across the Empire, two men were drinking raw alk and knocking the shots back with homebrew in a portabar not far from a construction site. One man was a contact welder, the other a bank vice president, slumming.

“You heard,” the welder began, “about what happened when the Eternal Emperor picked up a joygirl?

First time he says I’m gonna ravish you and make you moan. He does and she does.

“Then he says I’m gonna ravish you and make you scream. He does and she does.

“Then he says I’m gonna make you sweat. And the joygirl pulls back and says Huh? And he says because the next time’s gonna be midsummer…”

The banker chortled politely. “Way I heard it, the Emp just thinks that there’s some things a man’s gotta take care of himself. And in his case, it’s th‘ little stuff.” The welder returned the compliment of laughter, turned serious. “You never notice, Els, that the Emperor never shows up on a livie cast when he’s somewhere doin‘ something ceremonial with a woman?”

“Why should he?”

“No reason,” the welder said. “But if you was top dog, I’d assume there’d be a ton of honey trying to lurk on you, right? Like if you got promoted Chief Suit tomorrow?”

“Maybe. But my wife’d have words about that.”

“Something else the Emperor’s lacking.”

“Maybe that’s why he lives forever,” the banker suggested. “He’s just saving his precious natural resources.”

“Assumin‘ he’s got any.”

Both men snickered, and attention was drawn to the livie screen and the gravball match’s third quarter just beginning.

Both “jokes” were the work of Rykor’s staff. Funny or not, they were intended to accomplish just what they were doing: to reduce the Eternal Emperor’s image of omnipotence. In this particular instance, quite literally.

These jokes, and a hundred hundred others, coupled with some really nasty whispered rumors and legends, were moving through the Empire at a speed slightly above stardrive.

The nighttime ritual was for Alex to check their room to see if they had been blackbagged or bugged.

Then he would wash up in the fresher. Afterward, Hotsco would get showered and powdered and join him in the great, old-fashioned feather bed. But only to sleep. Alex, the professional and the moralist, would never dream of taking advantage of a cover. Nor was he attracted to the slender young woman.

Not at all his type.

Or so he lied at increasingly frequent intervals.

He lathered and scrubbed, luxuriating in the soft water that needled against his body, remembering times and missions when there was no water for anything but drinking, and barely enough for that. He turned to adjust the shower from NEEDLE to BLAST, and a giggle sounded in his ear, a giggle whose Alex’s expert ear sonared at two centimeters’ distance.

“Move over,” Hotsco said “And give me the soap. Your back needs washing.”

“Uh, lass…”

“I said, move over.”

Alex did as he was told. Hotsco began scrubbing his back, soap moving in slow, sensual circles.

“I’m not looking,” she said. “But I have a wager on what a Scotsman has under his kilt”

“Aye?” Alex said, a smile beginning to grow across his face. “An‘ y’d like’t’ feel someat thae’s twenty-five centimeters? Reach under m‘ sporran twenty times.” Hotsco laughed. Her fingers moved on. Traced a red, ragged trough on Kilgour’s biceps.

“What’s that?” she wondered.

‘Thae’s where Ah zigged like a clot when Ah should’a zagged. Wounds are a good way’t’ keep y’r ego frae gettin‘ overweenin’t.

“Lass, thae’s noo m‘ chest y’re scrubbin’t”

“That’s all right,” Hotsco said dreamily. “That’s not the soap, either.”

“If Ah turn aroun‘,” Kilgour said, his voice a little husky, “Ah’ll be startin’‘t’ take th‘ wee game a bit seriously.”

“Mmm.”

Alex turned, reached down, and lifted Hotsco in his arms. Their lips met, and her legs closed around his thighs.

A bit later, they got out of the shower. They had to use Kilgour’s robe as a towel, since the fresher looked like the site of a water-main explosion.

Outside was the moon shining on the bay and the dying lights of San Francisco.

“An‘ noo,” Alex said, “we’ll hie ourselves’t’ th‘ feathers, an’ Ah’ll noo hae’t‘ worry aboot whether m’

McLean powers are runnin’t dry.”

“Is that what you call it,” Hotsco wondered. She crossed to her dresser, picked up a tube of aromatic oil, and slowly began rubbing it into her skin, smiling over her shoulder as she did.

“‘If y’re th’ lass wi‘ th’ soap,” Alex volunteered, “dinnae it be justice if Ah’m th‘ lad whae goes slip-slidin’ away?”

He took the tube from her, squeezed some oil on his fingers, and then, suddenly, his instincts cut through the lust. He flipped Hotsco sideways, across the bed. She thudded into the feathers, too startled to shout—and the dressing-table mirror exploded.

Kilgour backrolled to the door, came up, pistol magically in hand, kneeling, braced… three rounds crashed as one… and out on the balcony the assassin’s chest exploded.

Someone or something crashed against the door, and Kilgour sent three more AM2 rounds through it, the wood wisping and charring. There was a scream outside.

Alex grabbed the tiny transponder that was their only back door, shoved it in his mouth, and scooped up Hotsco in one arm. He took two gigantic steps across the room, shattering what remained of the balcony door’s framework, high-stepped onto the balcony, and jumped. Hotsco yelped.

It was seven meters to the grassy turf below, and as Alex fell, he twisted his body, feet together, and used the uniformed cop who was gaping up at him as a trampoline.

The cop’s ribs snapped, and he screamed a bloody gargle. Kilgour collapsed to his knees, absorbing the shock of the landing. Then he sprang back up, and, without pausing or dropping either Hotsco in one hand or his pistol in the other, hurtled toward the brushy cover around the inn.

An AM2 round exploded turf next to him—so, i’s th‘ Emp’s boyos, Kilgour recognized—and he spun and, without bothering to aim, pumped four rounds back up into the room they had just vacated.

Then he was juggernauting again.

By the time the pickup/hit squad of San Francisco cops and Internal Security operatives recovered, the white blur that was the naked heavy-worlder had vanished into the scrub.

Sirens ululated then, and lights flashed and corns crackled.

But Kilgour was gone.

Two kilometers away, Alex stopped running. He estimated that he was somewhere in that great jungle close to the end of the peninsula, where tigers who had been freed from the zoo aeons earlier stalked the night

The tiggers, he decided, would hae’t‘ take their risks.

“Ah’m in no mood’t‘ be trifled wi’,” he announced softly. “Ah had plans f’r th‘ remaind’r ae th’ evening.” Even though Hotsco had grown up on the far side of what most beings called the law, she was not used to this sort of thing—especially when it came at a blur of lightspeed. But she was clotting damned if she would lose face in front of Alex.

“I assume,” she said, “the Empire just caught up with us.”

“Aye,” Alex said. “Thae hae willyguns. Th‘ custom’s lass narked on us. Ah dinnae catch her last name, Hotsco. Dinnae y’ ken i‘ it wae Campbell?”

He seemed completely oblivious to the fact they were both stark naked—and that their sole assets, against a city and a world that would be raising a hue and cry against them, were a pistol and a transponder.

“What next?” Hotsco asked.

“W hae twa choices,” Alex said. “First, an‘ most palatable, i’ w‘ hunt doon th’ two lassies ae th‘

Lovedance ae th’ Merkins. Thae’ll noo blanch ae th‘ sight ae a couple ae young lovers comin’t’t‘ them ae th’ Laird made them. An‘ we c’n continue whae we barely—sorry, lass—begun’t till th’ heat dies doon. I‘ y’ hae their card?”

“I left it back there,” Hotsco said. Her shock had died away, and quite suddenly she found this whole situation funny. “In the hotel. You want me to go back for it?” Alex considered.

“Nae,” he said, straight-facedly. “Twas nae but a passin‘ fancy. Option two. We’ll work our way’t’ th‘

docks, an’ either steal a curragh, or else swim oot’t‘ thae island ae th’ big-jawed birds. Alcatruss?”

“Swim. I can’t swim.”

“Nae problem, lass. Ah’ll need but one arm’t‘ be bashin’t th’ sharks away. Ah’ll hae y‘ wi’ th‘ other, an’

th‘ bangstick between m’ fangs. A braw measure ae a Scotsman.

“Kickin’t wi‘ m’ feet an‘ steerin’ wi‘ th’ rudder th‘ Laird provided. It canna be more’n a klick ’r twa awa‘. Brisk, refreshin’ dawn swim. Ah hae a strong desire’t‘ gie back’t’ th‘ wee game y’ w’re teachin‘

me wi’ a minimum ae time loss. Shall we?”

He bowed formally, took her arm, and they started south, toward the fishing village.

Fleet Admiral Anders, the Imperial Chief of Naval Operations, looked at the progs on the five wallscreens, then at the sixteen fiches projected across his desk. His face was impassive, just as he had learned a proper war leader should look in his moment of decision.

He was not sure what he thought, since he was, or so his Intel chief had assured him, the first to see, let alone have the chance to analyze, this data. After all, there was just the possibility, his mind thought vaguely, that the Eternal Emperor had not been jesting when he said some time ago that when the Sten problem was over, Anders would find himself in command of two rowboats and a tidal bank on some forgotten planet. He really didn’t want to make another mistake.

He decided to start with skepticism. Because he was a man of lists, that was the way he worded his doubts.

“Give me,” he said, “three reasons why I should believe that this system—Ystrn—will be the jumping-off point for the traitor Sten’s next raid? And why, in fact, does your intelligence suggest that Al-Sufi is, in fact, the target?”

Anders’s Two, Sheffries, wondered whether she was supposed to come up with three reasons or six, considering that he had asked two separate questions. In either case, she was disappointed in her clot of a boss. She had three threes ready.

“One: Al-Sufi is one of the three largest AM2 distribution centers in the Empire. Two: Sten has already hit one such depot. Three: Revolutionaries with limited means, such as Sten—”

“That should be the traitor Sten,” Anders interjected.

“Beg pardon. Traitors like Sten, who have little in the way of combat ships and troops, normally become enamored of spectacular targets. Particularly if those targets appear to provide the maximum damage to the enemy, sorry, the home worlds, they’re rebelling against. The term is ‘panacea targets.’ In other words—”

“In other words,” Anders went on, “he somehow had a small measure of success against Dusable, which is why he’ll hit Al-Sufi next.”

“Thank you, sir. You summarized my thinking admirably. Four The Al-Sufi/Durer battle, commonly called Durer by the masses, was one of the Emperor’s biggest victories during the Tahn war. Therefore it makes perfect sense that the traitor Sten would want to ruin this image.

“Five. Since Sten was evidently, although we still have incomplete data, not serving with the Imperial forces during the Al-Sufi/Durer battle—”

Anders waved Sheffries to silence. “Very well,” he said. “You have convinced me.

“Three fleets will be required for this operation. Alert my staff. I shall brief them on what the oplan shall consist of.”

“Three fleets, sir?”

“Exactly. I propose to obliterate, at one stroke, this rebellion. So I shall wish all of my sailors to be aware of their participation in this moment of destiny.”

“Sir. My plus/minus of accuracy on the prog is only eighty percent. And I haven’t run any progs as to whether Sten—I mean, the traitor Sten—would be personally in charge of the raid.”

“Of course he would,” Anders said impatiently. “I would. You would.” He smiled. “The Eternal Emperor will be very glad of this news. When the traitor Sten is finished, Sheffries, I shall personally see that you are rewarded with flag rank.”

Sheffries managed to express delight, saluted, and was gone. Wonderful, she thought glumly. And if anything goes wrong, it’ll be, Commander Sheffries, would you mind crossing your legs? We only have three nails…

Sten was plotting the “raid of Al-Sufi,” and just how the rendezvous point in the Ystrn system should appear, when the EYES ONLY message from Sr. Ecu, on Seilichi, was hand-carried up from the message center.

He swore, found a decoding machine, and keyed in pore pattern, retina flash, personal code, and all the rest.

Then he scanned the covering message and that appeal from Marr and Senn.

Clot. He knew who the other being was. Haines, of course. Yes, he remembered only too well, his body stirring, the party and the garden and the black ball against the moon.

It made sense that the madman who called himself the Eternal Emperor would be rounding up anyone who knew Sten for brainscan.

He was glad that somehow Haines had escaped the net. Then he wondered if the Emperor and his satrap Poyndex had cast again, and gotten her. Or if they had widened their quest and gone after Marr and Senn, after they had sent the “flier.” Yet a third and even more likely possibility was that Poyndex’s IS

elements had discovered Marr and Senn’s amateur attempt at cryptography and had laid an ambush.

First response. Saddle up and go for a rescue.

Stopped cold in its adrenaline rush.

Like hell. You are beyond that, now. You have had the gall to stand up and declare yourself outlaw and rebel against the Empire. Which is fine. Any being is entitled to find his own suicide.

But there are others who’ve joined you. You’re responsible for them, aren’t you? So you sure as hell can’t head out on some forlorn hope, can you? You’ve got to worry about the bigger things.

Besides, this wouldn’t be the first time that you’ve had to abandon a friend or even a lover to accomplish the mission, right?

Of course.

The com buzzed. Sten slugged the contact switch.

“GA.”

“Mister Kilgour,” the com officer reported. “Inbound. ETA one E-hour. Mission accomplished. I have him onbeam now.”

Sten started to say that he would talk to Alex when he grounded, then stopped.

“Sealed?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Patch it through.”

The screen cleared. Onscreen was Alex; to one side of him was a demurely smiling woman. Oh yes, Sten thought. That must be the smuggler captain who volunteered to insert Kilgour onto Earth. Sten looked at his friend.

“Welcome home,” he said.

“Thanks, boss.”

“No offense. But you look like slok.”

“Lad, i‘ wae a noisesome task Ah set myself.”

“You were blown?”

“Aye. But noo by th‘ Emp, thoo Ah hae an in’trestin’ run in wi‘ India Sierra as we w’re runnin’t th’

mission. An‘ noo on Earth. An Ah’ll noo ’splain. But Ah hae traces ae whae Ah wen‘ lookin’t for, which Ah’ll noo ’splain till we face-t‘-face.

“Whae’s been th‘ haps i’ m‘ absence?”

And Sten found himself briefing Alex. Further, telling him about the com from Ecu/Marr/Senn. He stopped short, without mentioning his decision.

“Ah.” Alex nodded. “Ah ken. Y‘ noo hae a choice, do y’?”

Sten didn’t answer.

“Ah’ll hae th‘ Victory packed an’ liftin‘ wi’in an E-day after Ah return, lad.” Sten blinked.

Alex smiled. “Y‘ noo thought thae was whae Ah meant, did y’? Y‘ were thinkin’t aboot duty an’

respons’bility, aye?”

“Something like that.”

“Well… consider all thae lads an‘ lassies thae went rebel wi’ y. Some went oot frae selfish reasons, some went oot frae reasons ae‘ aidin’ th‘ gran’ cause ae civil’zation. But more went oot ‘cause they’re servin’t y’r wee smilin’t face, lad.

“F some ways, ‘tis noo a good part ae life, wee Sten. We all should mak’t decisions wi’ logic an‘ frae th’

good ae all livin’t things.

“But thae’s noo how it works.

“An‘ i’ the foolish ones who’re servin’t you because y’re one wee mon, shouldnae you be thinkin’t th‘

same? Willin’‘t’ spend y’rself f r th‘ life ae one wee fellow rebel? ’Cause if you’re noo willin’t‘t’ go doon i‘ flames like thae, then we’re noo dif’frent thae the Emp, and p’raps should cast i’ our lot immed’jately.

“V sh’d noo be sendi’t frae which fool th‘ bell tolls frae, an’ thae, aye?

“Ah reck y‘ hae noo choice othern’t to gie y’self a’ter Haines an’ th‘ two furballs.” It was completely wrong, and one of the more stupid things that Sten could do. And why he decided to go for it. What the clot, the rebellion was doomed anyway. He had zip-burp chance of toppling the Empire. So why not go down in flames on a noble gesture?

“GA,” he started. Then he caught himself, and an evil smile spread across his face. He remembered a scam he had worked once before on a prison break, and thought he could ring yet another change on it.

“Negative, Mister Kilgour. I won’t need the Victory. All I need is one Bhor robohulk and the Aoife.

There’s no reason I have to be a complete Don Quickshot. Oh yeah. And one livie crew and some actors. I want three pilot sorts, two goons, and one idiot with steel teeth. Unbathed and whacko-looking.

All human. Oh yeah. I need about fifteen or so terrified cute children.

“Now, get your butt down here. I have need of your talents. And somebody to hold the fort while I’m off playing Sir Gawaine. Clear.”

Sten’s plan took less than half a day to accomplish.

He was still going out to his death, but at least in a sneaky, dirty, underhanded sort of way instead of the imbecilic “charge in full dress uniform waving an ivory-hilted can opener” that he had always despised.

“Soward Control, this is the transport Juliette. Now in normal space, coordinates transmitted… now.

Using commercial orbit Quebec Niner Seven. Request landing instructions. Over.” And so terror came to Prime World.

“Juliette, this is Soward Control. Have your coordinates. Transmitting landing data… now. Please enter data and activate ALS at termination of your orbit Quebec Niner Seven, over.”

“Soward, this is Juliette. Wait one… uh, I’ve got a slight problem with your data, Control. That’ll park us on the far southeast corner of the field, correct?”

“That’s an affirm.”

“Got a favor to ask, Soward. Any possibility of getting closer? I’ve got a shipload of scholarship kids aboard, and they’d get a boot out of seeing things a little closer. Plus that’s a long walk to the terminal.

Can we get a shuttle?”

“This is Soward. No problem. We’ll tuck you right over here, near the tower. Transmitting new data…

now. And for a shuttle… all we’ve got is commercial. Shall I notify a carrier?”

“This is Juliette. Thanks for the shift. And, uh, negative on that commercial carrier. My kids don’t have a lot of money. This is one of those starving-students hops.”

“Roger. Maybe we can—”

And the Juliette’s signal cut.

“Juliette, this is Soward Control. Juliette, please respond to this transmission.” Static. No response. The controller automatically hit EMERGENCY and STANDBY buttons.

“This is the tower,” he said. “I’ve got an inbound, closing on final, and they went off the air. Info from pilot said they’ve got children aboard. Stand by.”

Rescue crews rolled into their vehicles.

The controller fingered a touchpad, and went to both the standard landing and the Imperial Standard emergency freqs.

“Juliette, this is—”

“Who is this?” It was a new voice, from the Juliette.

“This is Soward Landing Control. Identify yourself. Is this the JttlietteT

A laugh.

“Yeah. Yeah. Is this the visual-transmit switch… yeah. Here we go.” A acreen cleared, and showed an appalling scene. It was the control room of the Juliette. The four beings in the flight crew sprawled in bloody pools. In front of the pickup was a wild-eyed man, wearing a filthy, stained shipsuit. He held a gun.

Behind him were two equally repellent assistants. Each of them held a wriggling child in one arm—and held a knife pressed to that child’s throat.

“See what you got,” the man said. “Now. I want a straight patch to an Imperial livie station. Now!”

“I can’t—”

The man gestured, and one of his assistants slashed a throat. Blood gouted, the other child screamed, and a body flopped on the deck.

“Get another one,” the man said, and his pet goon vanished, and came back dragging another preteenager. “You see? We ain’t drakhin‘ around. Get a—”

And the dispatcher was hitting keys.

“You better sound convincing,” the hijacker said. “Because I got me another fourteen crumbsnatchers I don’t mind thin-slicin‘. Or doin’… some other things to them. Stuff that’s worse.” So began the drama of the Juliette. The feed went live on K-B-N-S-O, back on the air, but broadcasting from a temporary, planetary headquarters.

Prime World came to a stop as the battered transport orbited over Soward Spaceport. The man announced what he wanted.

“I want a link to the Eternal Emperor. Not on a clottin‘ com like this. But face to face. He’s gotta settle something. He’s gotta stop doing to my family what he done. It ain’t right for nobody that big to be feuding like he was some kind of backcountry pencilneck, it ain’t. And it’s gonna come to an end, it is.

My family’s near wiped out.

“HeD, if there ain’t no clottin‘ change, I’m subject to send this clottin’ transport at full drive straight into that clottin‘ palace of his. You tell the Emperor that.”

Hostage-rescue teams were assembled, and waited to see if they’d be called on for the last resort of boarding the Juliette. The Imperial fleet patrolling offworld closed on Prime. Arun-del’s already alert security elements were ready with AA missiles held one count from launch, and would fire if the Juliette headed toward the Emperor’s palace.

Of course there would be, there could be, no meeting between the Eternal Emperor and the men aboard the Juliette. Terror must not be surrendered to.

Negotiators began the long slow drone, trying to bore the hijackers into surrender. But the hijackers didn’t respond—the only response they made was either to repeat their preposterous demand, to stare blankly at the pickup, or occasionally to shut down without a warning.

The livies ate it with a spoon. The story had everything. Crazed terrorists. The cutest on-camera kids since they caught child star Shirlee Rich in bed with her orangutan. Understanding shrinks analyzing everything endlessly. Experts trying to figure out just what world the still-unknown hijackers could have come from. Warships blasting back and forth across the sky. Unknown movement of forces that not even the biggest sleaze livie show host would speculate on, to avoid possibly exposing a secret rescue plan. Lloyds insurance executives explaining what might have happened to the transport Juliette since it had disappeared into Imperial Special Service all the way back during the Tahn war. Noble-looking special-weapons teams ready to sacrifice their all.

Best of all, it was real.

The only challenge the Aoife got as it closed on Prime was mechanical, perfunctory, and at least three cycles out of date. Berhal Waldman didn’t even have to analyze the challenge, but found it in a standard code-fiche. Everybody was preoccupied.

The Aoife went straight in for a landing.

No one noticed, even in the tiny village at the far end of the narrow valley. That abominable monster aboard the Juliette had just butchered another child.

The destroyer may have been a tiny ship—in space, and compared to a battlewagon/carrier like the Victory, or on the wide, bare tarmac of a landing field where the eye couldn’t provide any scale. But it made the tower it landed beside into a toy. Waldman’s fingers ran across the keys, keeping the Aoife hanging just clear of the ground on its McLean generators. It would not do to leave a five-meter-deep impression in the middle of the beautifully-laid-out garden. Not only for aesthetic reasons, but that might suggest to the curious what had happened.

There was no movement from the tower.

The Aoife’s chainguns swept the pinnacle, Honjo fingers hovering above firing keys.

The ship’s ramp slid down, and Sten came out. He was wearing combat armor, and carried a willygun.

But his helmet face was open.

Waldman thought that was truly insane—Internal Security could be waiting just inside. But Sten couldn’t figure out any other way to let beings know they were being rescued, not attacked.

He was nearly at the door before it opened.

Marr and Senn stood there.

“I must say,” Marr said. “You certainly arrive in a baroque manner, my young captain.”

“Yeah. Baroque. Let’s get the clot out of here before somebody baroques us in half. Later for the aphorisms, troops.”

And Haines was there, in the doorway.

‘Took you long enough.“

“Sorry. Hadda stop and tie my bootlaces.”

Behind Haines, a human male. Slender. Balding. Early middle age. Dressed about ten years out of style.

Sten flashguessed that was Haines’s husband. Not at all the sort of man he would have expected her to end up with.

Don’t be considering that, idiot. Like you just told everybody else. Book.

Senn, Haines, and Sam’l ran for the ship. Marr hesitated for a moment, then bent and picked up a small, multihued pebble.

“There might be nothing left to come back to.”

And then he, too, boarded the Aoife, Sten close behind him.

“Lift, sir?” Waldman asked as Sten boiled into the control room.

“Wait one.”

He looked at a screen, which showed the bridge of the Juliette. No one was in front of the pickup, either hostage or terrorist.

“Send it.”

“Yessir.” The com operator next to the screen hit a button, and the Aoife broadcast a single letter in code to the Juliette.

Onscreen chaos.

Shouts. Screams. The hijackers, bellowing incomprehensibly. A young girl broke away and tried to run.

She was shot down. The hijacker was shrieking in some never-to-be-translated tongue. His pistol swayed, then blasted. Straight into the pickup! Dead air.

“Oh my dear, oh my dear,” Marr moaned, arms around Senn. “Those poor baby humans!”

“Yep,” Sten said. “Terrible, terrible. And it’s going to get worse. Berhal Waldman, take us up. About five hundred meters, please.”

The Aoife shot skyward.

Sten was quite a prophet, as a second screen went to life, this time on a commercial station.

Blur… snap-focus… a battered spaceship… McLean units off… haze from the ship’s stern as the Yukawa drive went to full…

Screaming incoherence from some liviecaster: “Horror… Horror… oh the horror of it all…”

“Full drive, if you please. Home, James.”

The Aoife slammed into hyperspace, sonic boom as air rushed to fill the vacuum left by the destroyer.

That explosion went unheard, buried by a greater one as the Juliette crashed straight into the center of Soward’s main landing field. There was no fire, no rubble. Just a smoking crater.

Sten turned sadly as the Aoife’s pickup lost the commercial ‘cast.

“What an awful thing,” he said. “All those beautiful little children, spread over the landscape like so much strawberry preserves. Strawberry? Tomato. Saltier-tasting.

“And so coincidental, too. Unfortunate for them, although they’d probably all grow up to be ax-murderers or lawyers or something, but certainly providential for us.

“As Mister Kilgour says, God never takes away with one hand but he gives with the other.” Marr and Senn uncurled from their woe and their great eyes focused on Sten. Haines verbalized it

“You know, you’re an utter bastard, Sten.”

“That’s what my mother always said,” Sten agreed happily.

“Thanks,” she said, quite seriously.

“Hey. It wasn’t that much. You know me. Saint Sten. Slayer of Virtuous Maidens. Rescuer of Dragons.” Amid the banter Sten felt very, very good about himself. And very surprised they’d gotten away with it.

Officially, the Juliette incident remained a tragic event, another example of the growing collective psychopathology of an overcomplex civilization. Privately, though, investigators were fairly sure they had been snookered. Not that any trace of the tape Sten’s actors had carefully prepared during the flight out from Vi remained. Nothing remained of the Bhor robohulk except a hole in the tarmac and a wisp or six of greasy smoke. But investigators knew they would have found some carbon traces of the eighteen or more beings who died before or in the crash, no matter how thorough the splatter.

When Sten heard that, as a passed-along rumor, he swore mightily. If he had given the situation one more thought, he could have scored ten or so beef carcasses from a butcher shop, and no one would ever have known.

Three mighty Imperial battlefleets flashed out of hyperspace in the Ystm system, all weapons stations manned and ready to obliterate the rebellion.

Six worlds and their moons and moonlets orbited a dead star.

Nothingness.

No Sten.

No rebel fleet.

No nothing.

And as far as the most sophisticated analysis could determine, no known ship had ever entered this system. It had been named on a star chart and never explored. Not that there was anything worth exploring.

Sten’s big con had worked. Or, rather, was working. He had never considered raiding Al-Sufi, of course, nor going anywhere that close to Prime World with his tiny battlefleet.

The deception that had been leaked through Hohne’s doubled net and other agents around the Empire was just the first step.

Sten was playing liar’s poker with the Emperor.

This time, there was nothing there.

Next time, in another system, there might be traces that Sten or some of his ships had recently passed through.

Not only was this game something that could be played over and over again—the Emperor could not and would not ignore any reports of Sten’s presence—and burn AM2, Imperial ships and supplies, whatever faith the Imperial Navy had in its intelligence, and the Eternal Emperor’s arse, but it would have a payoff.

One that would shake the Imperial forces to their souls.