Empire's End (21 page)

She shied away from the fourth reason, which was Why The Clot Not, because that might imply that pilots are frequently lacking in any sense, let alone that of the common type. Especially tacship drivers.

She listened to Sten’s briefing aboard the
Aoife
with some degree of skepticism, which Sten noted with amusement.

“You have a question, Lieutenant? Sorry, Captain. Congrats on the promo, by the way.”

La Ciotat shrugged. More stars on the shoulder meant only more credits on the O-club bar payday night since sergeant-pilots and admiral-pilots still flew the same ships—and bore in.

“Last time you had this great plan,” she began as tactfully as she knew how, which meant not very, “it was, ‘Hey there, Hannelore, let’s you and me ambush a battlewagon.’

“Dumb, dumb, truly dumb, but we blindsided the clot, and got away with it. Now you want to try again, except even bigger. As I understand it, my tacship, supported by one lousy non-Imperial tincan—”

Sten interrupted. “The
Aoife’s
only there to pull our tails out of the crack. She won’t be there for the binga-banga-bonga.”

“Even more wonderful. One spitkit,
not
supported by one lousy non-Imperial DD, to jump an entire convoy, a convoy carrying what’s only the most important resource the Empire’s got, and you think we’re gonna accomplish the mission?

“Hell, I don’t think we’ll limp away, let alone do what you’ve got in mind. Who’s gonna take care of the escorts?”

“There won’t be any.”

“Hoo. You weren’t listening… by the way, what the clot do I call you? Besides ‘sir’? I mean, what’s your post-rebellion rank? Leader? Hero? I assume you’ve given yourself more tabs than just clottin‘ Admiral.”

‘Try Sten. No rank. No ’sir.‘ “

“Right. Anyway, you’re saying the Empire lets its goodies travel unescorted?”

“I am.”

“Sten, I gotta question how good your skinny is.”

“You can question the intelligence and you can ask, La Ciotat. But you aren’t going to get an answer. Need-to-know and all that.”

La Ciotat stared at Sten for a long moment. “I’m not hot for your carcass,” she finally said. “Nor needing any kind of an adrenaline rush. But I’m thinking I’m gonna be party to this silly-ass operation. So it’s gotta be that I was born twins, and Momma said drown the dumb one and Daddy blew it. Okay, skipper. I’ll brief my crew.

“They’re gonna love this. Fearless Volunteers Into the Valley of Slok and all that. One of these years I gotta ask them before I toss them into the crapper, I guess.”

Just beyond the dead system, Sten, La Ciotat, and her crew boarded the tacship, the
Sterns
. The com link was opened between the
Aoife
, the
Sterns
, and the Bhor ELINT ship, the

Heomt
, still monitoring from its silent parking orbit not too far off the relay-station world.

And then they waited.

La Ciotat, as was her custom before battle, retired to the tiny cubbyhole that was the captain’s cabin, which meant on a tacship a closet-size room with a pulldown desk. But a cabin for all of that—there was a drawcurtain that everyone on a tacship called a door. She depilled from head to foot and bathed in water she had brought over from the
Aoife’s
supply, water that had been augmented with aromatic oils from her home world. She painted her face in the ancestral battlepattern of her house, and then cleared her mind of evil, of lust, of desires.

She was ready for battle.

She wondered what Sten—who occupied the only other cabin on the tacship—formerly belonging to the XO and engineer, given up at their request—was doing. What customs did
his
world practice? If any?

She considered the possibility of imminent nonexistence. And the ramifications if she were to pull on a wrap, slip through the curtain, walk two meters to the next compartment, tap politely, and…

She caught herself. She went through the exercises again, forcibly clearing lust or ambition from her mind.

Besides, what was she worrying about, knowing that the void only beckoned her enemies, not her? She put on a fresh flightsuit and tried to sleep.

Sten, in the next compartment, slept deeply. Woke. Ate. Thinking of nothing except the taste of what he had put in his mouth, the hum of the air freshers in the background, the drone of the ship’s internal power, the small jokes and large laughter at the mess table, as all thirteen beings on the
Sterns
waited for battle, trying not to snarl at or massacre the being beside them.

He slept once more. Perhaps he dreamed.

If he did, his mind chose not to record them when he woke to the yammer of the GQ siren.

He glanced at the overhead telltale. It was less than four ship-days since he had arrived insystem. Freston might have crystal balls and talent beyond that of being a mere battleship commander.

Heomt
: “All stations! I have incoming—”

Aoife
: “At battle stations!”

Sterns
: “We have them.”

Sten, from
Sterns
: “All stations! Maintain silence!”

The three ships watched the huge convoy bulk out of hyper-space toward them.

AM2. Twice the size of the convoy the rebels had ambushed off Dusable.

A com officer on the
Heorot
picked up a convoy relay-station blurt—a response to the convoy’s initial inquiry from the planet He resisted a temptation to run an analysis. Instead, he reported the transmission.

“All stations,” Sten said calmly. “All recorders, all sensors on full. Stand by… stand by… stand by…
Now
! Captain! Full drive!”

La Ciotat obeyed. The
Stems
flashed toward the monster convoy.

The com officer on the
Heorot
“saw” the convoy panic. Nothing physical happened, but the convoy began broadcasting on many frequencies.

“Ms. La Ciotat,” Sten went on, “I would like a Kali launch… individual control… area target… convoy on main screen… on my command…”

“Ms. Castaglione,” Hannelore said in turn to her weapons officer.

“Acquired___”

‘Target acquired, sir.“

“Launch,” Sten ordered.

“Fire.”

The huge shipkilling missile lurched out of the center firing tube of the
Sterns
.

Screens flashed on the
Heorot
.

“We have a convoy-station ‘cast,” the Bhor corn officer reported. “We have a response from the relay station… direction unknown, power strength massive… we have a signal transmitted on EM subspectrum… unclassifiable single spectrum… computers suggest between Omicron Sub Two and Xeta Three… no known previous use of spectrum by any known—
by the clottin’ beard of my clottin‘ mother
?”

The fairly irregular interjection from the com officer occurred as his screens told him that the entire convoy had committed seppuku, a monstrous blast as if a star had gone nova! The explosion was beyond even the cataclysm that had resulted when the smaller AM2 convoy off Dusable had been hit by the
Victory’s
Kalis.

A second later, another screen showed him the robot relay station on the dead planet had also self-destructed.

Aboard the
Stems
all screens overloaded and blew out.

Finally, one emergency screen cleared. It was a tertiary screen, ‘casting from the Kali missile. It showed a great deal of nothing. Castaglione ran the pickup through all available bands.

Nothing but parsecs and parsecs of parsecs and parsecs.

La Ciotat forced herself to appear quite calm, as if a thousand-ship convoy suddenly blew itself up in her sights every E-day or so.

“All right,” she grudged. “Your intelligence is One-A. But what a piddle-poor excuse for a battle this was.”

Sten didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he picked up the open mike on the three-way circuit.

“
Heorot. Stems
. Six Actual. Trap? Angle?”

“
Heomt
. Affirm both.”

“Do you have a receiving station?”

“Negative. None known. Analysis will continue.”

“
Sterns
clear.”

And now Sten smiled. “It was clottin‘ wonderful,” he said.

“So what did we get?”

“We’ve got,” Sten said accurately, “an Emperor with a major case of the hips, which is almost a case of the ass. We’ve just cut off a big chunk of the AM2 he’d be doling out to his cronies and allies. A
big
chunk.”

His smile grew larger. La Ciotat looked at him skeptically— she wasn’t sure she was hearing all of it.

She wasn’t, although the fact that merely jumping out of the bushes and shouting boo had been enough to make the Big Bad Wolf drop dead of heart failure was significant—and certainly a tactic that could be repeated indefinitely, if they could continue finding the courses of the AM2 convoys.

Sten was realizing that one of the Eternal Emperor’s primary weapons—that
no one
but the Emperor was permitted to get close to wherever AM2 came from—was a double-edged sword. Just as the shutdown of AM2 subsequent to the Emperor’s disappearance would destroy any coup, so, too, Sten’s boo-shouting could wreak economic havoc on the Emperor himself.

Possibly. Or at least until the Eternal Emperor figured out a response.

More importantly, the
Heorot
had recorded a second, equally mysterious signal to nowhere, this time from the relay station.

If they could home on its target… Sten would be one step closer to finding the AM2.

And one step closer to destroying the Emperor.

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