Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (55 page)

The only overhead on the catwalk was also over the only lit building, a bright red bar faced with pseudo-wood. Its holographic display morosely blinking T E COV ANTER.

He moved quite slowly down the catwalk, slipping from shadow to shadow. He saw no one and nothing outside the bar.

The man was diagonally across the catwalk from the Covenanter, on the open second floor of an unfinished warehouse. He stood well back from the window, just in case anyone was scanning the area with heat-sensitive glasses.

For two hours the bomber had been alternately sweeping the catwalk with light-enhancing binocs and swearing at the rain and his stupidity for taking the job – just as he had every night for three weeks from two hours after nightfall until the Covenanter closed.

This is a busto bum go, the bomber thought not for the first nor the five-hundredth time. Showed what happened when a man needed a job. The clots could sense it, and crawled out from the synth-work every time, somehow knowing when a real professional needed a few credits and didn’t have much choice how he got them.

The bomber’s name was Dynsman, and, contrary to his self-image, he was quite a ways from being a professional demolitionist. Dynsman was that rarity, a Prime World native. His family did not come from the wrong side of the tracks, because his older brothers would have torn those tracks up and sold them for black-market scrap. Dynsman was small, light on his feet, and occasionally quick-minded.

All else being normal, Dynsman would have followed quite a predictable pattern, growing up in petty thievery, graduating to small-scale nonviolent organized crime until a judge tired of seeing his face every year or so and deported him to a prison planet.

But Dynsman got lucky. His chance at real fame came when he slid through a heavy traffic throng to the rear of a guarded gravsled. When the guards looked the other way, Dynsman grabbed and hauled tail.

The gravsled had been loaded with demolition kits intended for the Imperial Guards. The complete demo kit, which included fuses, timer, primary charges, and the all-important instructions, had zip
value to Dynsman’s fence. He had sadly found himself sitting atop a roof and staring into a box that he’d gone to Great Risk – at least by Dynsman’s scale of danger values – to acquire. And it was worth nothing.

But Dynsman was a native Prime Worlder, one of a select group of people widely thought capable of selling after dinner flatulence as experimental music. By the time he’d removed three fingers, scared his hair straight, and been tossed out of home by his parents, Dynsman could pass – at a distance, after dark, in a fog – as an explosives expert.

Soon Dynsman was a practicing member of an old and valued profession – one of those noble souls who turned bad investments, buildings, spacecraft, slow inventory, whatever, into liquid assets – with more potential customers than he had time for. Unfortunately, the biggest of those turned out to be an undercover Imperial police officer.

And so it went – Dynsman was either in jail or in the business of high-speed disassembly.

He should have known, however, that something was wrong on
this
job. First, the man who had bought him was too sleek, too relaxed to be a crook. And he knew too much about Dynsman, including the fact that Dynsman was six cycles late on his gambling payment and that the gambler had wondered if Dynsman might look more stylish with an extra set of kneecaps.

Not that Dynsman could have turned down the stranger’s assignment at the best of times; Dynsman was known as a man who could bust out of a dice game even if he was using his own tap dice.

According to the gray-haired man, the job was simple.

Dynsman was to build a bomb into the Covenanter. Not just a
wham
-and-there-goes-everything bomb, but a very special bomb, placed in a very particular manner. Dynsman was then to wait in the uncompleted building until a certain man entered the building. He was then to wait a certain number of seconds and set the device off.

After that, Dynsman was to get the other half of his fee, plus false ID and a ticket off Prime World.

Dynsman mourned again – the fee offered was too high. Just as suspicious was the expensive equipment he was given – the night binocs, a designer sports timer, a parabolic mike with matching headphones, and the transceiver that would be used to trigger the bomb.

Dynsman was realizing he was a very small fish suddenly dumped into a pool of sharks when he spotted the man coming down the catwalk toward the Covenanter.

Dynsman scanned the approaching figure of Alain. Ah-hah. The first person to come near the bar in an hour. Expensively dressed. Holding the glasses in one hand, Dynsman slid the headphones into position and the microphone on.

Down on the catwalk Alain stopped outside the Covenanter’s entrance. Another man stepped out of the blackness – Craigwel, the Emperor’s personal diplomatic troubleshooter. He wore the flash coveralls of a spaceship engineer, and held both hands in front of him, clearly showing that he was unarmed.

‘Engineer Raschid?’ Alain said, following instructions.

‘That is the name I am using.’

Across the street, Dynsman almost danced in joy. This was it! This was finally it! He shut off the mike, dropped it, and scooped up the radio-detonator and the sports timer.

As the two men went into the Covenanter, Dynsman thumbed the timer’s start button.

TEN SECONDS:

Janiz Kerleh was co-owner, cook, bartender, and main waiter at the Covenanter. The bar itself was her own personal masterpiece.

Janiz had no poor-farm-girl-led-into-trouble background, though she was from a farming planet. Fifteen years of watching her logger parents chew wood chips from dawn to dusk dedicated her to finding a way out. The way out proved to be a traveling salesman specializing in log-snaking elephants.

The elephant salesman took Janiz to the nearest city. Janiz took twenty minutes to find the center of action and ten more to line up her first client.

Being a joygirl wasn’t exactly a thrill a minute – for one thing, she could never understand why so many people who wanted sex never bothered to use a mouthwash first – but it was a great deal better than staring at an elephant’s anus for a lifetime. The joygirl became a madame successful enough to finance a move to Prime World.

To her total disappointment, Janiz found that what she had figured would be a gold mine was less than that. Not only were hookers falling out of Prime World’s ears, but more than enough amateurs were willing to cooperate for something as absurd as being presented at Court.

Janiz Kerleh, then, was on hard times when she met Chief Engineer Raschid. They’d bedded, found a certain similarity in humor, and started spending time in positions other than horizontal.

Pillow talk – and pillow talk for Janiz was the bar she’d always wanted to open. Twenty years’ worth of dreaming, sketching, even putting little pasteboard models together when the vice squad pulled the occasional plug on her operation.

Paralyzed was probably the best way to describe her reaction when Raschid, a year or so after they’d known each other, and sex had become less of an overriding interest than just a friendly thing to do, handed her a bank draft and said, ‘You wanna open up your bar? Here. I’m part owner.’

Raschid’s only specification was that one booth – Booth C, he’d told her to name it – was to be designed somewhat differently than the others. It was to be absolutely clean. State-of-the-art debugging and alarm devices were delivered and installed by anonymous coveralled men. The booth itself was soundproofed so that any conversation could not be overheard a meter away from the table. A security service swept the booth once a week.

Raschid told Janiz that he wanted to use the booth for meetings. Nobody was permitted to sit there except him – or anyone who came in and used his name.

Janiz, who had a pretty good idea how much money a ship’s engineer made, and knew it was nowhere near enough to front an ex-joygirl in her hobby, figured Raschid had other things going. The man was probably a smuggler. Or … or she really didn’t care.

The Covenanter was quite successful, giving dockers and ship crewmen a quiet place to drink, a place where the riot squad never got called if evenings got interesting, and a place to meet colorful girls without colorful diseases. Raschid himself dropped by twice a Prime year or so, and then would vanish again. Janiz had tried to figure what ship he was on by following the outbound columns in the press, but she could never connect Raschid with any ship or even a shipping line. Nor could she figure who Raschid’s ‘friends’ were, since they ranged from well-dressed richies to obvious thugs.

So when the two men, Alain and Craigwel, asked for Booth C, in an otherwise totally deserted bar, she had no reaction other than to ask what they were drinking.

SEVENTY-TWO SECONDS:

When Dynsman had broken into the Covenanter to plant the bomb a week earlier, he had also paced out the detonation time. His man would enter the bar. Ten seconds. Look around. Fifteen seconds. Walk to the bar. 7.5 seconds. Order a drink. One minute. Pick up the drink and walk across the room to Booth C. The bomber made allowances for possible crowding – which the Covenanter certainly was not that night – then gave his time-sequence another two minutes just to be sure.

Alain eyed the vast array of liquors on display, then picked the safe bet. ‘Synthalk. With water. Tall and with ice, at your favor.’

Craigwel, the professional diplomat, ordered the same. His next statement would kill both men. It was intended only to lubricate the discussion that was to follow. ‘Have you ever tried Metaxa?’

‘No,’ Alain said.

‘Good stuff on a night like this.’

‘Non-narcotic?’ Alain asked suspiciously.

‘Alcohol only. It’s also a good hullpaint remover.’

Janiz poured the two shots, then busied herself making the synthalk drinks.

Alain lifted his shot glass. ‘To peace.’

Craigwel nodded sincerely, and tossed his glass back.

Time ran out. On timer cue, Dynsman touched the radio det button.

The bomb exploded.

High-grade explosive, covered with ball bearings, crashed.

The three humans died very quickly but very messily. Dynsman had erred slightly in his calculations, since the bearings also slammed into the bar stock itself.

Across the street, Dynsman dumped his equipment into a case, ran to the rear of the building, dropped the thread ladder down two levels, and quickly descended. When he hit the second level, he touched the disconnect button, and the ladder dropped down into his hands. That ladder also went into the case, and Dynsman faded into the shadows, headed for his own personal hideaway, deep inside one of Prime World’s nonhumanoid conclaves.

Ears still ringing from the explosion, he did not hear the clatter of boots on the catwalk above as they ran toward the shattered ruin that had been the Covenanter.

Moments before the explosion, Sergeant Armus had been trying to soothe the injured feelings of the other member of his tac squad. The sector was so quiet and the duty so boring that it felt like a punishment tour. They were an elite, after all, a special unit that was supposed to be thrown into high-crime-potential areas to put the lid back on, and then turn the area over to normal patrols.

Instead, they had been on nothing duty for nearly a month. Sergeant Armus listened to his corporal run over the complaints for the fiftieth time. Tac Chief Kreuger must really have it in for them. Nothing was going on in the sector that one lone Black Maria couldn’t deal with. Armus didn’t tell the man that he had been making the same complaint nightly! He had to admit there was a great deal of justification for his squad’s complaints. Kreuger must be out of his
clotting mind, assigning them to a dead sector, especially with the festival going on. Maybe the crime stat computer hiccupped. Maybe Kreuger had a joygirl in the area who had complained about getting roughed up. Who could fathom what passed for the mind of a clotting captain?

In the interest of maintaining proper decorum, Armus kept all that to himself. Instead he ran the overtime bit past his squad members again – which was another thing that was odd. Because of the pressures of the festival, there were very few tac soldiers to spare, and the entire unit had been on overtime from almost the beginning. Now, how the clot was the chief going to explain that?

And then came the shock wave of the explosion. Almost before the sound stopped, the squad was thundering down the rampway and turning the corner – sprinting for the ruin that had been the Covenanter. Armus took one look at the shattered building and three thoughts flashed across his brain: fire, survivors, and ambulance. And, as he thought, he acted. Although no flames were visible in the ruins of the bar, he smashed an armored fist into an industrial extinguisher button and a ton or more of suds dumped into the building. He shouted orders to his men to grab any tool in sight, and thumbed his mike to call for an ambulance. Then he stopped as an ambulance lifted over the catwalk and hissed toward the bar. What was
that
doing here? He hadn`t even called yet! But he had no time to waste; he unhooked his belt prybar and plunged into the ruins after his men.

BOOK TWO

LUNETTE

Sten pulled back to give the letter a disbelieving glance. Kilgour! He didn’t recognize him without the thick Scots accent. But then, of course even Alex wouldn’t write with a burr. He laughed, and dove back into the letter.

Sten chuckled to himself as he blanked out the letter. Same old Alex, grousing when the tour is too hot, and grousing when it’s too soft. He did, however, have a point about Prime World. It looked
soft, and felt soft – dangerously so. Sten had pored over the records his predecessors had left. For the last few centuries, they were almost depressing in their lack of action. However, the few times things did happen, he noticed, the situation tended to get very bloody and very potitical. After his years in Mantis Section, blood didn’t bother Sten much. But potitics – politics could make your skin crawl.

Forgetting how small his quarters were, Sten leaned back in his chair, bumping his head against a wall. He groaned as the thump reminded him of the royal hangover he was suffering from. The only effect the Angelo stew had was to mask the alcohol and allow him to stay up even later with the Emperor. Somehow, he had stumbled through his job the next day, leaving him no other cure the following night than to try to drink the residual pain and agony away. Sten had sworn to himself last night that today he would be pristine pure. Not a drop of the evil Stregg would wet his tips. That was the only way out of it. The trouble was, just then, it wasn’t Stregg he wanted, but a nice cold beer.

He scraped the thought out of his mind, drank a saintly gulp of water, and looked around his room. The homely-looking woman on the wall stared back at him. Sten gave another mental groan and searched for another place to rest his grating eyes – only to find the same woman giving him the same stare. In fact, wherever he looked, there she was again, the skinny-faced homely woman with the loving eyes.

The walls of the room were covered with her portrait, a legacy, Sten had learned, from the man who had proceeded him. Naik Rai, Sten’s batman, had assured him that the previous CO had been an excellent Captain of the Guard. Maybe so, but he sure was a lousy painter – almost as lousy as his taste in women. At least, that’s what Sten had thought at first, when he had stared at the murals crowding his walls. After the first week living with the lady, he had ordered her image removed – blasted off, if necessary. But then she began to haunt him, and he had countermanded the order – he wasn’t sure why. And then it came to him: the man must have
really
loved the woman, no matter how homely.

The records proved it: the captain had been every bit as hardworking, dedicated, and professional as any being before him. Although older than Sten, he had been assured of a long and promising career. Instead, he had pulled every string possible to win a lateral transfer into a deadend job on some frontier post. And, just before he left, he had married the woman in the picture. The emperor had given the bride away. In his gut, Sten knew what had
happened. In the few months he had been there, Sten had realized that his particular post was for a bachelor, or someone who cared very little about spouse and family. There just weren’t enough hours in the day to do the job properly. And the good captain had realized that enough to throw it all away for the homely lady in the pictures.

Sten thought he had been a very wise man.

Once you got past the murals, the rest of Sten’s room dissolved into a bachelor officer’s dilemma: a jungle of items both personal and work-related. It wasn’t that Sten didn’t know where everything was; his was a carefully ordered mind that heaped things into their proper mounds. The trouble was, mounds kept sliding into one another, a bit like his current interests. His professional studies, for example, blended into a gnawing hunger for history – anyone’s history, it didn’t matter. And, along with that, the obvious technical tracts a fortieth-century military being might need, as well as Sten’s Vulcan-born tech-related curiosity. Also, since leaving Vulcan, he had become an avid reader of almost everything in general.

Two particular things in the room illustrated the personal and professional crush. Filling up one corner was a many-layered map of the castle, the surrounding buildings, and the castle grounds. Each hinged section was at least two meters high, and showed a two-dimensional view of every alley and cranny and drawing room of the entire structure. Sten had traced the sectional map down in a dusty archive after his first month on the job, when he realized that the sheer size of the castle and its grounds made it impossible for him to ever see it all on foot. And without personal, detailed knowledge of every Imperial centimeter of the area, he would not be able to perform his primary function – which was to keep the Emperor safe.

Crammed a few meters away from the map was the other major feature in Sten’s current life. Sitting on a fold-up field table was a very expensive mini-holoprocessor. It was the biggest expense in Sten’s life, not even counting the thousands of hours of time invested in the tiny box lying next to it.

The little box contained Sten’s hobby – model building: not ordinary glue-gun models set into paste-metal dioramas but complete, working and living holographic displays ranging from simple ancient engines to tiny factories manned by their workers. Each was contained on a tiny card, jammed with complex computer equations.

Sten was then building a replica of a logging mill. He had imprinted, byte by byte, everything that theoretically made the mill work, including the workers, their job functions, their tools, and the spare parts. Also programmed were other details, such as the
wear-factor on a belt drive, the drunken behavior of the head mechanic, etc. When the card slid into the holoprocessor it projected a full-color holographic display of the mill at work. Occasionally, if Sten didn’t have his
voilà
moves down, a worker would stumble, or a log would jam, and the whole edifice would tumble apart into a blaze of colored dots.

Sten glanced at the model box guiltily. He hadn’t worked on it more than a few hours since he started the job. And, no, there wasn’t time now – he had to get to work.

He palmed the video display and the news menu crawled across the screen.
TERRORIST DIES IN SPACEPORT BAR EXPLOSION.

Sten thumbed up the story and quickly scanned the details of the Covenanter tragedy. There wasn’t much to it at the moment, except for the fact that Godfrey Alain, a high-ranking Fringe World revolutionary, had died in an accident at some seedy bar near the spaceport. It was believed that a few others had also died, but their names had not yet been released. Mostly the article talked about what was
not
known – like what Alain was doing on Prime World, especially in a bar like the Covenanter.

Sten yawned at the story. He had little or no interest in the fate of terrorists. In fact, he had marked PAID to many terrorist careers in his time. Clot Godfrey Alain, as far as he was concerned. He noticed, however, that there were as yet no official statements on Alain’s presence.

The only thing he was sure of was that the press had it wrong about the explosion being an ‘accident.’ Terrorists do not die accidentally. Sten idly wondered if someone in Mantis Section had sent Alain on to meet his revolutionary maker.

Sten yawned again and began to scroll on just as he got the call. The Eternal Emperor wanted him. Immediately, if not sooner.