Empire's End (16 page)

“You mean you know the way?”

“Certainly. These dimwits of Dusable would have chosen the most basic maze design. We take the tunnel on the far left. From then on, no matter what opportunity presents itself, you always choose the left. Eventually, we will arrive.”

“If you’re wrong,” Cind said, “then we could be lost for hours. The entire mission blown. Not to mention our own buttocks being held against the fire.”

“You doubt me? I, Otho. The master of the maze game?” Otho’s red-rimmed eyes were wide at her lack of confidence.

Cind hesitated, then shrugged. “Lead on,” she said.

Otho did. They moved quickly down the left-hand corridor, which twisted and turned and then spread out into many other possible routes. But Otho always chose the left. Sometimes this route would dead-end. And they would have to retrace their steps. Then plunge on.

Suddenly, the corridor made a left elbow like the first that had confounded them. Ahead was a door. Behind the door came a gentle hum of electronics.

With high drama, Otho waved a hand at the door. “Our destination,” he intoned. He beamed at Cind, expecting a gush of admiration.

Cind simply nodded and raced for the door. She unsnapped a listening device from her harness. Put it to the door and bent an ear. A moment later, she signaled the all-clear, palmed a switch, and the door hissed open.

Light flooded across the elaborate computer that controlled all functions of the AM2 depot.

Cind plunged inside, went directly to the computer. She stared at the various options, touched some keys, grinned, and then took a programmed fiche from a beltpouch and fed it into the machine.

Otho and the other Bhor took their preplanned security positions. “The young are so rude, these days,” Otho complained. ‘They do not see value in the experience of their elders. Why, when I was a stripling—too young to drink stregg unless it was in my milk—my mother would have skinned me for showing so little respect.

“Oh… well… No sense complaining. At least I had the joy of playing the maze game.”

He mumped his corporal’s back. “Was that not a most splendiferous achievement?”

Before the corporal could respond, there came an incredible shrieking wail, followed by a loud hooting of alarms.

Cind sprinted out of the control center as the computer voice blared down the corridor and sounded all over the depot.

“The depot has just been impacted by a meteorite. Point of impact, the main AM2 storage center. An AM2 explosion is imminent. All personnel are ordered to abandon the depot immediately. Use emergency procedures 1422A. Do not panic. Repeat do not panic. Impact.”

“Let’s get the clot out of here before they do,” Cind shouted. And they raced away—this time bearing to the right as they wound their way back through the maze.

All over the depot, beings scrambled for the lifeboats. As the alarms hooted and the computer advised them not to panic, they scratched and fought for positions aboard the boats. In a few minutes the depot had emptied. And a small area of space was filled with lifeboats hurtling for the safety of the planet’s surface.

Cind’s container craft quietly kicked off.

She clicked her com three times.

Mission accomplished.

Aboard the
Victory
, Freston keyed acknowledgment. Then he gave swift orders for the
Aoife
to scoop the team up and head for home.

Freston turned to Sten. “Ready, sir.”

“Proceed.”

As the AM2 train and abandoned depot swung in their orbits, the
Victory
suddenly appeared out of hyperspace. Missile ports swung open, baring the
Victory’s
teeth. Six Kalis spat out.

Before they struck, the
Victory
was gone.

On Dusable, there was no sound as the Kalis hit home and set off the massive AM2 explosion. Kenna and the thousands of SDT workers still gathered at the shipyard election party were suddenly aware that something was different. It was an odd, swimming sensation as all objects suddenly lost dimension. As if they had all been transported to a world of dots on paper.

They looked up at the sky. And it was gone.

All they could see was blinding white light.

There were loud screams. The crowd wavered as a gut-gripping hysteria swept over it.

Kenna fought for self-control. He raised a hand—to plead for calm.

Then all was abruptly normal. The white light gone. Dimension returned.

Kenna sucked in breath. Then his heart jammed against his ribs as he saw the enormous vid screen at the edge of the crowd wiped clean of his transmitted image.

Another man’s face looked down on them. Vague familiarity clawed at his memory. There were loud, frightened mutters from the crowd. Then Kenna knew.

It was Sten.

“Citizens of Dusable,” Sten’s voice boomed. “I bring you grim news. Your leaders have callously chosen to gamble with your lives. And they have sold your right to be a free and independent people to the Eternal Emperor. And now you are his slavish allies.”

Kenna shouted frantically for his tech to wipe Sten’s face from the monitor. But it was no use. And it wasn’t only at the shipyards that people were hearing and watching Sten speak. The broadcast was overpowering all transmissions, all freqs on the planet.

“Considering Dusable’s importance to the Empire of Evil, I have no choice but to remove it as a threat to me and all freedom-loving beings.

“The first attack has already been launched. We have destroyed the AM2 depot the traitor Solon Kenna was boasting about. We have also destroyed the AM2 shipment that was the price your Judas leaders set for your betrayal.”

The crowd was transfixed, hanging on every word that fell from those gigantic lips on the vid screen. Kenna was looking for a bolt hole.

“My forces are launching a series of attacks on your world,” Sten said.

People in the crowd looked wildly about, as if missiles were going to fall at any moment.

“However,” Sten said, “it is not our wish to harm innocent civilians. Therefore, I now give you warning on which military targets we shall strike. I urge you all to abandon those areas immediately.”

Sten held up his doomsday list And began to read out: “In Ward Three, the arms facility… In Ward Fifty-six, the tooling facility… In Ward Eighty-nine, the shipyard…”

Kenna and the union minions didn’t wait to hear the rest of the list. Sten had just named the shipyard where they all stood and gaped.

Screaming, weeping, calling to forgotten gods for mercy, the crowd poured out of the yard and raced away for safety.

Kenna was too scared to be ashamed to be among them.

The missile swooped lazily out of the sky, dropped to twenty feet above the broad boulevard, and slowly made its way along the avenue, on a hastily installed McLean drive. Broadcasting as it went:

“Warning. I am a Kali missile. I carry a low-yield nuclear device. Please do not interfere with my progress. I have no wish to harm innocent civilians.”

All over the street, beings scurried for cover. Windows slammed as the missile cruised by at second-story height.

In one apartment, a child reached out with a stick to touch the missile. His mother grabbed him just in time and pulled him back.

In Ward Three, the workers at the targeted arms factory dashed out of the sprawling complex. Fleeing on foot, gravcar, and occasionally on one another’s back.

A Kali slowly approached, skimming over their heads.

“Danger. Danger. I am a Kali missile. My target is this arms factory. Please clear the area immediately. Do not panic at my impact. I am set to explode in fifteen minutes.”

Still broadcasting, the Kali sailed through an open door of plant headquarters.

A plant supervisor watched in awe as the missile entered the main work area. Then settled to the floor.

“You now have fifteen minutes to evacuate. Please leave at once. I have no wish to harm innocent civilians… You now have fourteen minutes and fifty seconds to evacuate. Please leave at…”

The supervisor and his team needed no further prodding. They ran.

At a bearing factory in Ward Forty-five, a missile was buried up to its nose in a crater.

“…
please abandon this area. I am armed with twenty-four explosive devices. The first will detonate in one hour. Please do not return to the area after the first explosion. The other explosives have been programmed to explode every hour on the hour. Warning. I am a Kali missile. Please
—”

A burly ward boss, frustrated at being cheated out of contracted overtime, rushed forward. Swinging a two-meter-long hunk of steel.

He connected. Then disappeared from the face of Dusable as the Kali exploded.

Two factory buildings collapsed as the force of the blast hammered out. But only the ward boss and four of his crew were dead. Good sense saved the thirteen thousand other workers. They had fled long ago.

Dusable’s biggest shipyard was now empty of politicians, hangers-on, and sentient life. Scattered all over were hundreds of abandoned freighters, transports, liners, and private flitters.

Kalis rained down. These fell with no warning.

In two awful minutes the yard was a smoking hole. Surrounded by twisted frames and molten metal.

And every launch pad had been turned into craters. The port would be useless for decades.

Sten studied the damage on the monitor. Image after image of destruction leaped up at him.

Factories gone.

Smoke and fire bursting upward from other points as delayed explosions went off.

Not just one, but thirty shipyards in total ruin.

It would be a long time before Dusable would be a threat—or a support to anyone again.

As the mind-clouding scenes of destruction swept by, he had a sudden, giddy moment He felt lightheaded. Powerful.

Almost… godlike?

For just a heartbeat he knew what it must be like to be the Eternal Emperor.

Sten shuddered and turned away, disgusted at himself.

Captain Freston stopped him just as he was about to exit the bridge. He had a puzzled frown on his face. “A strange thing has happened, sir,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“That AM2 shipment? Well, according to the com officer, just before the missiles hit, there was an odd transmission.”

“You’re sure it was from the ship?”

“Yessir. I double-checked it myself. The message was coded. Naturally.”

“Where was the signal being sent?” Sten asked.

‘That’s even stranger, sir,“ Freston said. ”I’ve run the coordinates over again myself. And I keep on coming up with the same answer.“

“Which is?”

‘To nowhere, sir. It was being beamed to nowhere.“

BOOK TWO

POISON PAWN

CHAPTER TWELVE

STEM’S HAMMER BLOW to Dusable caught the Eternal Emperor completely unprepared. As Sten had hoped, he was still in a reactive mode, concentrating his energies on the massive hunt he had launched for the ragtag band of rebels.

When word of the attack was flashed to Arundel, the Emperor went into instant overdrive. Military and political aides were scrambled. Whole fleets were diverted to guard other AM2 depots. Diplomats were yanked from their posts and flung across the Empire to shore up weak alliances.

The hunt for Sten was doubled and then redoubled again in intensity.

Before he ordered any of these things, however, the Emperor cracked down with the heaviest news blackout in the history of his reign. All over the Empire, news organization CEOs got the word: there was to be no mention of Dusable or the Cairenes until further notice.

The Emperor’s emissaries didn’t bother mentioning what the penalty might be if the edict was violated.

They left it to the corporate chieftains’ vivid imaginations.

But between the orders and their implementation, there fell one brief moment.

A journalistic no-man’s-land…

“This is Ranett reporting live from Dusable.

“A terrible blow was struck against the Eternal Emperor today, when the fugitive rebel leader, Sten, launched a surprise attack against the Emperor’s most important ally.

“In one swift action, Sten’s forces destroyed a crucial AM2 depot, along with what local sources claim is two E-years’ worth of AM2 supplies. The attack was followed up with a devastating series of surgical strikes against key military and transportation facilities.

“High officials on Dusable say it will be a decade or more before these facilities can be rebuilt… if ever.

“Eyewitnesses to the attacks say Sten’s forces appeared to purposely avoid civilian population centers. Casualties to civilians were described as extremely minimal.

“The precision strikes apparently lasted only a few hours. But during that time, sources in Dusable say, this once-thriving port planet was effectively eliminated as a key transport and energy-storage facility.

“The devastation wrought here—which experts say will easily mount into several trillion credits—may have an even broader impact on the Empire at large.

“High-placed sources say Sten’s raid did even greater damage to the Eternal Emperor’s prestige. Many allies, they say, will question the Emperor’s ability to guard his friends against similar action.

“One source said the humiliation the Emperor suffered, and the David versus Goliath image the rebel Sten—”

Ranett reeled back as her image on the monitor shattered into a bliz/ard of interference. The shriek of a powerful jammer howled from the speaker cells.

She wasted no time deciphering what had happened. Actually, Ranett was mildly surprised her broadcast had been allowed to run so long. At best, she had hoped to deliver the first two graphs of her report before the Emperor’s censors pulled the plug.

Ranett punched in the commands that would blast her small ship from its hiding place in a grove near Dusable’s now-ruined main port. The craft was a luxury yacht she’d muscled out of a businessman who owed her big-time for keeping his name out of a series on slave labor.

In reality, her inaction had been no favor at all. Crucial evidence had been lacking to really nail the scrote to the wall. It was a missed opportunity she had always regretted. But the injustice would now be corrected when Imperial agents hunting Ranett knocked on his door with the registry numbers of his yacht.