Empire's End (8 page)

The Emperor fell silent a moment. “No. This is something I have to do,” he finally said. “Damn his eyes!” And the Eternal Emperor drained the glass.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HOME.

It was strewn across a thousand thousand kilometers of space, a slowly whirling sargasso of industrial junk.

Vulcan.

Sten stared at the ruins through his suit’s faceplate. The sound of his breathing seemed loud.

This was the hellworld where Sten had been born, an artificial factory planet built and run as a violent, dangerous industrial plant by The Company. His parents, Migrant/Unskilled laborers, and his brothers and sisters had died here, killed by an executive’s callous decision about secrecy.

The boy that was Sten exploded into futile rebellion. He was caught, and sentenced to Exotic Section, an experimental area where the workers were assured of a slow, painful death. But Sten survived. Survived, learned to fight, and—his fingers touched the deathneedle sheathed in his arm—“built” his knife from alien crystal.

He had escaped Exotic Section, and become a Delinq, living in the secret ducts and deserted storehouses of the planet, trying to stay one theft ahead of The Company’s Sociopatrolmen and brainburn. He had met Bet here, his first real love. And here he had been saved from death by Ian Mahoney, coldcocked after a blown raid and drafted into the Imperial Guard.

Mahoney had again “volunteered” him—this time from infantry assault training into Mahoney’s own covert force: Mantis—where he learned the dark alleys of intelligence and the darker skills of secret violence. How to kill any being without leaving a mark. Or, more importantly, how to seduce or corrupt them into your service, without them ever realizing they’d been used.

And then Mahoney had sent him back to Vulcan with

Kilgour and the rest of his Mantis Team. Mission: destroy the man who killed Sten’s family.

His first great success. In the course of that destruction, Sten, three ETs and three humans, including Ida the Gypsy, had created and led a planetwide revolution.

That minirising brought in the Imperial Guard, and Sten’s team came out, Sten himself on a life-support system.

He had never found out what happened afterward to Vulcan. And he had never wanted to know. He assumed that new management had come in Vulcan as an only slightly less lethal factory.

Evidently not, he thought, looking at the shambles in front of him. Or, anyway, not for very long. Even if it was needed for defense during the Tahn war, the privy-council era would have made Vulcan unprofitable—AM2 had simply become too rare and expensive to waste running a heavy-industry vacuum-based plant.

Vulcan had been abandoned, looted, and gutted. At its height it resembled a junkyard anyway—factories, quarters, and warehouses had been built, used, and discarded without being wrecked out.

But now it looked as if the gods of Chaos had looked on man’s work, found it amateurish, and decided to improve matters.

Somewhere in this scatter would be—or so Sten hoped— whatever secret Mahoney had guided him toward.

At first, when Sten considered Mahoney’s cryptic shout, he had thought of Smallbridge—the world Sten had bought some years earlier that was the only home he had ever known, besides Imperial Service.

Improbable. If Mahoney meant “home” to be something useful to Sten—best theory: a weapon against the Emperor—he would not have stashed it in a place known to Sten’s friends and enemies. Plus, to the best of Sten’s knowledge, Mahoney had been on Smallbridge exactly once, and that was to warn him the privy council’s goon squad was on its way. Not exactly time enough to build a hidey-hole.

No—not Smallbridge. It was far too obvious—even considering a purloined-letter device—for an Irisher as subtle as Mahoney.

And so Sten had forced himself to look up the interstellar coordinates to Vulcan and issue the orders. Even if nothing is here, he thought, this is an adequate temporary hideout. Destroy-ing Thoresen had been a nonrecord Highest Authority mission, which meant Vulcan’s importance and its relation to the Grand Traitor wouldn’t show up, even on Sten’s fairly accurate, highly classified Mantis file. Sten, experienced soldier that he was, was operating on the assumption that Mahoney’s trick program hadn’t worked and the Empire knew everything.

Of course, there’s yet another possibility, his mind went on, spinning further into the double- triple- quadruple-think that eventually drives all counterintelligence types into the gaga ward. If the Emperor’s got a real fine memory, and has put together his own private termination file, then he’s just liable to remember the orders to destroy that mysterious Bravo Project on Sten’s home world.

“Ladr

Sten came back to the present thankfully, before he took this feedback nonthinking any further and attempted to disappear down his own throat.

“Ah dinnae want to seem like Ah’m noodgin‘, but i’s gettin’ on, ‘n Ah’m noo lookin’t forward’t’ bein’t a Resurrection Man. Shall we be gettin‘ at it?”

The Mantis soldiers who had died on Vulcan—Jorgensen, Frick, Frack—had been friends of Kilgour’s as well. Alex himself had almost died, defusing a nuke.

Sten nodded, then realized there was no way Alex could see the gesture through the thick alloy helmet.

“Let’s move.”

He touched controls and sent his suit jetting forward, on its tiny Yukawa drive, toward the main clump of wreckage— Vulcan’s central core.

He was probably being foolish, but rather than use one of the deep-space worksuits—which were really small spaceships with a tiny bicycle-type seat and room enough to scratch when and where it inevitably itched—he and Kilgour had corseted themselves into fighting armor.

Vulcan, he had rationalized, might still have a McLean generator on, and some gravity. Or maybe its whirling bulk would give some weight, and it would be better walking rather than trying to fly the canister-shaped deep-space suits through the corridors.

Behind him the
Victory
hung, with the destroyer
Aoife
as screen. He had ordered the
Bennington
and
Aisling
to proceed directly to Sten’s eventual final destination, after his minifleet had spent several ship-days after the raid pursuing nonrational trajectories, eluding pursuit.

Beyond the
Victory
he also had a full flotilla of tacships on CAP around Vulcan.

A trap was unlikely.

But Sten had not lived to his present age without being careful, native caution his training had amplified. One commandment, going back into prehistory and old Earth, was from an odd unit called Rogers’ Rangers—“Don’t never take no chances unless you have to.”

The question now was, Where in this scrapheap was he to look?

“Sten.” It was Freston, back aboard
Victory
. He had demoted himself from captain to man the com board and was sitting on an open-miked tightbeam caster to the suited men.

“I’ve got a transmission.”

“Where?”

“From Vulcan. A very weak broadband signal’s coming from the core. Weak, and erratic. Like an SAR beacon that’s running dry. I’ve gotten a triangulation from the
Aoife
. On your orientation, it’s at twelve o’clock, near the tip.”

“That was called the Eye,” Sten advised. “Stand by.”

He braked the suit, killing velocity and steering toward Alex, aiming himself so his suit’s own directional com pointed directly toward Kilgour.

“Ah heard,” Alex said, without preamble. “An* thae raises more sarky questions thae i‘ answers. If Mahoney left somethin’ aboot, p’raps he’d bolt a wee transponder to it. T‘ make life simpler f’r us.

“But Mahoney whidny hae left i‘ runnin’, i‘ i’s a truly deepy darky secret, aye? He would’a keyed it’t’ go off frae somethin‘ or someone when thae got close. Playin’ Cold an‘ Warm wi’ the bairns, as it were. Nae’t‘ mention battery life an’ such, which i‘ Preston’s watchin’ his gauges, seems to be runnin’t doon.”

“Possibly,” Sten agreed. “Which means that somebody else set it off.”

“Wi’out knowin‘ it or wi’out bein’ able to retrieve th‘ goodies. Or th’ whole thing’s boobytrapped an‘ th’ mad bomber had nae th‘ patience’t’ let us find his handiwork blind an‘ then blowin’t ourselves oop.”

“Right. Which gives us something to really worry about— once we’re onboard.”

“Aye. Noo. Home’s been narrowed, assumin’t we’re thinkin’t correct,
an‘
yon beepitybeepity’s noo a wild signal frae some bit ae forsook electronics.”

“Agreed. Home’s somewhere in the Eye. Something that we knew about. Or I did, anyway. Our hideout—that old liner—was around there. Nope. DNC. Mahoney wouldn’t know about that. Maybe his old office, when he was spying out the land, pretending to be a recruiter? Maybe—but that does not compute easily, either. Mahoney wouldn’t chance us remembering where it was, which I don’t… Oh clot,” Sten said.

“Aye. Th‘ main man. Duke, or Dynast, or wha’e’er he’d dubbed himself.”

“Baron. Thoresen.” That name he’d never forget. In a final duel, Sten had taken on the murderer of his family barehanded— and killed him.

His quarters had been just at the top of the Eye, in a palatial dome that covered Thoresen’s office, garden, and quarters.

“That’s it. But we’ll not go in direct. Nor hang up here being big fat targets anymore.”

Sten put full drive on his suit and, Kilgour in his wake, eye-calculated a trajectory that would intersect Vulcan just above the old ship-porting area. He would not chance that dockyard—that was too easy to booby-trap.

To one side, as they flew “over” Vulcan, was the great rip in the planet’s skin where the laboratory that was Bravo Project had been until Kilgour’s bombs went off.

That also meant that somewhere below Sten was the cramped apartment he had grown up in. For all he knew, the muraliv that haunted him might still be mounted on the wall, the snowy landscape on a frontier world that his mother had sold six months of his life for, a muraliv that had broken in less than a year. Sten had unconsciously duplicated that scene in reality on Smallbridge—a cluster of domes sitting in his planet’s arctic regions.

No. He would not—could not—go there. It would be too much.

He shut that part of his mind off. They were closing on Vulcan.

Sten landed on a bare stretch of hull. Finger-point. Make me a door, Alex.

Kilgour took a prepared charge from a carrying case, extended its small legs, and clipped the charge to Vulcan’s skin. He started a timer, then motioned Sten away. Alex, demolitions expert that he was, pushed off into space unhurriedly and hovered a safe few meters away.

The timer went to zero, and the charge blew, blasting a stream of molten metal through the hull in a widening cone. It was a violent but relatively silent way to B&E. No air
whooshed
out. Vulcan—or at least this part of it—had lost its atmosphere.

Kilgour the perfectionist then trimmed a few ragged edges, ripping them off with his hands. Massively strong heavy-worlder that he was, he almost certainly could have done it without the suit’s pseudomusculature cutting in. But he felt lazy.

They winkled through the hole.

Blackness. Both of them turned on their helmet spotlights. They were in some kind of machine shop.

Sten pointed himself back through the hole.

“Inside,” he broadcast back to the
Victory
. “No prob. Tag on. Moving.”

He set his suit’s inertial navigation system as a guide toward the Eye, in the probable event of Vulcan’s twisting corridors getting them lost, and they started out. His “tag”—a transmitter broadcasting on an unlikely freq—would tell the
Victory
where, in this metal maze, they were.

Zero air, zero gravity.

It was quicker to use the suit’s drive and “fly” toward the Eye. Sten wondered what the seventeen-year-old Delinq that had been Sten would have thought, given a bit of clairvoyance, seeing somebody actually fly inside Vulcan.

He would probably think it wonderful and then promptly figure out how to use the newly accessed dimension in a raid.

It was tempting to increase their speed, particularly when their course led through some of the huge open assembly lines. Tempting—but that could be quickly fatal if there
was
a trap. Or if something jagged lurked at the end of an insufficiently braked swoop.

They moved on, “up” into the docking area. Huge ship-size airlocks yawned into vacuum, and fittings had been roughly cut or blasted off. The scavengers hadn’t bothered to close the doors behind them.

A slideway—or where a slideway had been. Someone had ripped the alloy top away, exposing the aircushion plates below. The slideway led due “north”—toward the Eye.

Suddenly there was a great gap, a rip of metal extending through several decks directly out into space. Here was where one of the Imperial assault ships had deliberately smashed into

Vulcan’s skin, making a breach for the Imperial Guardsmen to pour through.

“You should be within range of that broadcast,” Preston’s voice whispered. ‘Tune Six-Three-Kilo-Four.“ Sten obeyed on a secondary com. He heard it. A whine that broke off now and again, and whose note rose and fell. It did, indeed, sound like a search-and-rescue transmitter whose power was about dry.

Now they were close to the “top” of the Eye, close to Thoresen’s dome.

Even though he wanted to go faster, Sten forced himself to slow. Ahead was a great door. One of the periodic emergency barriers—airlocks—intended to keep an accidental rupture from dumping Vulcan’s entire atmosphere into space.

Alex started to push on it, then caught himself before Sten could warn him.

Resistance. How interesting. That probably meant there was atmosphere on the other side.

And then Six-Three-Kilo-Four fell silent.

The link to the
Victory
opened, and Freston began a transmission, probably to tell Sten what had just ceased happening.

“Received,” Sten said in a whisper. “Break ‘cast. Monitor. Do not transmit. Click code.”

He’d always known it couldn’t be this easy.

Kilgour curled his hand, and his willygun slid down on its harness. A lifted eyebrow. Shall I blow the door, boss?