Empire's End (63 page)

“I suppose you could put it that way,” the Emperor said. ‘The chain was broken. It was time to begin anew. With fresh ideas. To build a new order. Of course, there are sacrifices to be made. Nothing good ever comes without sacrifice.“

“As long as it’s not your own,” Sten said.

“Do you really think that? Do you really think… I don’t suffer as well?”

“The guy pulling the trigger,” Sten said, indicating the gun, “never suffers as much as the person on the receiving end.”

“You’re too cynical.” The Emperor laughed. “You were around me too long. But facts are facts. My… predecessor… had let things go into the drakh-house.

“Letting the Tahn get out of hand, for a start. And the privy council! How the clot did… he… allow those fools so much power? It was weakness, I tell you.

“The Empire was allowed to get too fat. Too sloppy. It was time to pare things to the bone. Put things back on the right footing. An Empire is no different than any business. The rules of capitalism require a periodic shakeout.”

“Business leaders don’t usually declare themselves God,” Sten said.

The Emperor snorted. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “The image was getting rusty. It wanted brightening up. Besides, there’s a long tradition in rule by divine right.”

“Then, you don’t actually believe you are a god?”

The Emperor shrugged. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. However, last time I checked, immortality fits the definition.”

“Gods don’t climb out of vats,” Sten said.

“Oh, really? Perhaps I was misinformed. But, since you’ve obviously met so many gods, I bow to your wide experience.”

The Emperor took another drink, then replaced the glass on the tray. “You won’t live to see it,” he said, “but I do promise you things
will
be better. You can take comfort in that.”

“Better than what?” Sten growled. “You’re just a new wrinkle on an old, ugly face. I’ve led too many kids to their graves for that face. Hell,
I’ve filled
whole fields of graves, myself. For what? Twenty or thirty centuries of lies?

“You like to think of yourself as unique. The greatest Emperor of the greatest Empire in all history. Well, from where I stand—poor mortal that I am, with only a few years to spend— you’re no better… or worse than any other tyrant.”

“This is a very stimulating conversation,” the Eternal Emperor said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had such an enjoyable exchange. I wish there were some other way. I really do.”

He raised the pistol. Sten’s mind shrilled alarms. Wait! What about the brainscan? There was supposed to be more time.

“I’ve decided,” the Emperor said, “that it would be too risky for me to move you from this room. So, to be absolutely safe, I’ll have to make one of those sacrifices I was mentioning… by killing you now.”

His trigger finger tightened.

At that moment a voice blared out, “The two organisms aboard this ship are ordered to stand in place.”

Sten gaped. What the clot was going on? He saw the Emperor’s face. Bewildered… and frightened. But the gun remained steady.

“An analysis of the intentions and makeup of these organisms is now complete,” the voice continued. It had to be the ship’s command center talking.

The Emperor’s judgment machine.

“The Prime Organism’s directive to permit the intruder organism’s presence has been found in error and has been overridden. The alien organism is an enemy. And shall be killed.”

Big clottin‘ deal, Sten thought, a little wild. Dead by the gun. Or dead by the ship. What’s the difference?

“The Prime Organism has also been found wanting,” the ship’s voice said. “It has been declared flawed. And it, too, shall be killed.”

Sten saw the Emperor jump in even greater surprise. The gun drooped.

It was Sten’s first and only break.

He dove for the Emperor.

CHAPTER FORTY

STEN TUCKED IN middive, shoulder scraping the deck, sending him in a backflip to one side as the Emperor fired and the AM2 round blew a jagged hole in the deck and metal shrapneled. Feet first, he slammed into the Eternal Emperor and sent him tumbling. The Emperor took the fall, pistol aiming. Sten scissor-kicked and the gun spun away. The Emperor double-rolled and was on his feet, wrists instinctively up in a V-block as Sten’s knife came out of his arm and slashed. The block caught Sten’s knife-hand and he lost balance, recovering his stance by dropping into a momentary crouch.

Sten lunged… and the Emperor threw himself back, across the tabletop, whirling, and was on his feet.

Feint… bob…

The Emperor doublefist-smashed the table and the plas shattered. Sten’s knife flicked out… and first blood ran down the Emperor’s forearm.

The Emperor backed away, hand scooping up a razor fragment of the tabletop, nearly forty centimeters long. He held it low, close to his right side. Sten chanced a look away from the Emperor’s eyes. Noted the Emperor held the shard in the relaxed thumb-forefinger fencing grip of a trained knifefighter.

Shiphum. Feetshuffle as each of them moved, circling toward his opponent’s offside.

Sten realized he was being maneuvered… and caught the Emperor’s goal. The pistol. The Emperor sliced at Sten, and Sten back-leaned… away from the cut… chanced a riposte of his own, missed, recovered.

The Emperor’s eyes flickered, giving away his next strike, and Sten’s arm wasn’t where it’d been a moment earlier. Too long, Sten thought. You haven’t been in a real brawl in too long.

But neither have you, Sten.

Sten chanced a bravo’s fflp, tossing his blade from right to left hand—and the Emperor attacked. Sten damned near lost the knife, reeled back, cursing himself for even thinking of a grandstand play. Again he slashed at the Emperor’s wrist, recovered, slashed, blade slicing off a long curl of die plas, and Sten’s hand flashed to the deck, came up with the pistol, and the Emperor underhand-cast the plas, and it cut into Sten’s shoulder, muscle spasm on the trigger, round going somewhere, missing, pistol flipping out of his hand from recoil and…

Darkness.

The voice was calm. “
I
have determined that the intruding organism is more dangerous to my assigned duties than the aberrant one that was created. His termination will be given priority.”

Jesus. It hurt. Sten put his knife between his teeth, clenched on the machined crystal, and pulled the long shard from his shoulder. Waver of pain. Put the plas down. Wipe blood from your fingers. Feel the wound. Bleeding? Some. Badly? Not to worry about. For a while. Pain?

Sten mumbled the mantra he had been conditioned with years before, back when he had been a Guards trainee, and his body forgot the pain. He went prone on the deck. Slowly let his fingers move across the deck, looking for mat pistol. It could not be far.

Across the chamber, a clatter.

Laser aircrackle
blast
as the round hit somewhere. High, and left.

Sten’s fingers touched something.

The pistol butt.

Clot. So the Emperor had a backup gun.

“Stand by,” the voice announced. “I have the intruding organism located. Prepare to fire.”

Twin lights flashed on, glareblind, and Sten shot twice, explosion, dying into darkness, the Emperor shooting a little late, the bullet smashing down where Sten had been a few seconds earlier.

All right, you bastard, Sten thought, and, concentrating on where those lights had been, sent five rounds rapid into the general area, rolling and spinning as he fired.

If the Emperor shot back, Sten didn’t know it, as thunder rocked the room and alarms screamed. Sten thought he heard a shout. That strange voice that had to be the ship itself? The Emperor? He didn’t know. Smoke boiled, fire flashed, lights strobed. A panel was sliding closed; Sten snapped a shot through it, buckling the door.

Sten started after the Emperor, trying to stop him before he got to whatever nasty surprise he was heading for in this, his ship. Stopped, damned himself for a fool, and headed for his spacesuit He tugged it on, but left helmet and gauntlets clipped to the belt. Before he sealed the suit’s chest opening he touched his medkit to his arm, and the box clicked, clicked, feeding painkillers and disinfectants into the wound. He sprayed a dressing across it, then buttoned up.

Take your time, he thought Better to let him get a bit of a lead rather than stumble into something.

“Ship,” he panted, feeling very much a damned fool.

The voice did not respond.

Sten blew two more rounds into the biggest wallcrater. More alarms, and the flicker of flames, and the hiss of extinguishers.

“Ship! I will not harm you,” Sten lied. “You can continue your mission.”

Toneless: “Does not compute. Organisms other than the created organism are hostile and to be destroyed. Basic program applies.”

Okay, try to kill me men, Sten thought. If you can.

He went to the buckled doorpanel and started to kick it open. Stopped, cursing himself for still not having his head oil korrect, picked up a chair and hurled it through the plas. Gunslam, and an AM2 round blew the panel away. Remember, that could of been you.

He sent a doubletap down the corridor for confusion’s sake and went through. He was about to go after the Emperor when a thought struck him.

He aimed back into the ruined compartment and blew five carefully aimed shells into the deepening hole in the wall. He flashsaw metal peel/girder strips/smoke boiling into another chamber and then the smoke and fire closed in as a new alarm
DEEdawDEEdawDEEdawed
…

This one he knew. This one was standard—
Ship holed/ Atmosphere being lost
.

His ears popped as the ship lost air. Sten scrabbled for his helmet He had it on and was ready to slam the faceplate when pressure returned to normal. The ship was self-repairing. Having given the ship something to busy itself with, Sten ran down the corridor after the Emperor.

He understood none of the rooms he searched, any more than he had the first time through. Some were tiny, yet packed with consoles and equipment. Others were huge and completely bare.

It was in the first of those that the ship tried to kill him, as the McLean generator went off, and Sten floated up toward the ceiling, and then gravity slammed back on, but you didn’t wait enough to let the fall kill me, as Sten dropped back, landing cat-quick on his feet. He put two rounds, out of spite, straight down, into the deck. One worry he did not have was ammo—the ammo tube contained five hundred of the Imm-diameter AM2 rounds in their Imperium X shield.

The blast tincanned the decking, and Sten looked down, into another level. He quickly ran a three-D prog in his head. The Emperor would probably be farther along this deck I’m on, so if I can get down there and circle up behind…

Sten dropped through the hole.

“The intruding organism is now on Golf Deck,” the voice narked. “Proceeding toward medical station.”

Clot. He looked around, to see if he could spot a telltale eye to shoot out. Nothing.

Okay. Bad idea. He would just as soon be back where he had come from. Idea. He stepped into the middle of the passage, the rent in the decking just above him, and the ship took its lead and spun the gravity yet again, sending Sten falling “up” toward the hole he had come down through. But as he fell he thumbed a bester grenade out. Heard it
tink
against the passageway’s upper deck. He fell through the hole toward the overhead deck now twenty meters above/below him, locking a bootheel under a curl of debris, and gravity went back to normal as the grenade went off.

Sten waited—but the voice said nothing about his return. Did the time-loss grenades operate against it? Improbable.

Now what? The Emperor could be anywhere in this great polygon of a ship/station. He would have a spacecraft decked somewhere—probably in the same place that ships would be parked the Emperor would use to begin his return journey.

This is his turf, not yours. Exactly. And it is his to defend.

Therefore:

Return to your first plan. Except you don’t just want to turn off the AM2 now.

The control room is… Sten reoriented himself… one deck up. And back a short distance. We’ll do it the easy way. Don’t worry about the ship—just don’t let it get you into wide open spaces, and it can play up with down all day long. If that’s the worst it can manage, it wasn’t that great a danger. Sten wondered why it hadn’t been built with some sort of robot guncars or something—and then he realized the ship would have to be suicidal to allow shooting in its own “body.” But he still worried—this last bastion wasn’t well defended at all.

A few seconds later, the ship made its first real attack.

The corridor was long. Closed hatches led off to unknown compartments at periodic intervals. Somewhere down near its end, Sten thought he would find a stairwell leading up to the control deck. He heard a sound, like a hundred locks banging closed. Then he saw the far wall of the corridor was coming toward him. As was the near one, he saw, glancing behind him. We’ll just divert through this hatch… which is bolted. As were the next two he tried. Sten knelt, held a two-handed firing stance, and sent four rounds slamming into the four corners of the oncoming wall.

Blast, smoke, fire… but nothing else. The “piston” kept closing in the cylinder.

Imperium X. Used as armor-plating. Why not? If you had enough of it…

The moving walls, he guessed, weren’t a livie nightmare impossibility—they were most likely intended to help the ship repair itself. Close off an injured section, and send in repair robots.

So the ship was improvising and learning how to modify its resources into weapons.

Sten shot a door panel apart, as the moving walls were only a few meters away, and darted into the compartment. It was bare. Outside, in the corridor, the two walls stopped on either side of the doorway.

Stalemate. The ship would likely let Sten sit here for the rest of his life. The air was thick, he noticed. The ship must’ve shut off the corridor’s air circulation. He could close his suit’s faceplate, which would give him another, what, six E-hours before he ran out of air?