Empire's End (19 page)

Cheered, he sought out his compatriots in revolution.

He found them packing.

Cind explained. She might speak for the Bhor, but they were an engine—actually a juggernaut—that mostly ran of itself. Her other ostensible duty, bodyguarding Sten, was already well covered by the Gurkhas.

Besides, she had suddenly felt her horizons open, even before Otho had used his ploy—and was starting to see the limitations in just being a headbanger and tactical leader of headbangers.

She had become interested in AM2, and found a possibly unique avenue of exploration, Cind went on. The privy council had looked very hard for the material, and found nothing. She was investigating—as best she could from this distance and without being able to get near Prime—any trail they had gone down.

“A‘ firs’,” Alex interrupted, “when th‘ lass told me aboot th’ notion, Ah crook’t a wee brow an‘ wonder’t why, since th’ council went up blind alleys, ‘stablished, what’s th’ in’trest?

“An‘ a course Cind remind’t me thae’s no better way’t’ save time thae’t‘ know whae y’r pred’cessor did wrong, an’ y‘ noo hae’t’ waste time duplicatin‘ th’ effort.”

Cind continued.

The initial investigation hadn’t produced much of interest, and she was wondering if maybe the time
was
wasted. Then she ran across, in a declassified overview of the council’s final months, that they’d appointed a special energy czar—with the title of AM2 secretary. A Sr. Lagguth, who had suddenly vanished not too long after the first full-member meeting of the council in some time, a meeting, rumor had it, that was an emergency called to deal with the AM2 crisis.

“So,” Sten wondered. “He probably stood up, announced ‘I ain’t got none,’ and they geeked him.”

“Maybe,” Cind said. “But he was taken under Kyes’s wing first.”

Kyes. The ET artificial-intelligence specialist, who’d also dis-appeared, shortly after the council lifted Poyndex from his post as head of Mercury to a seat on the council itself. No explanation for that disappearance, either.

Sten had, in fact, investigated as part of his general work investigating the council. He’d discovered that Kyes’s race was symbiotic, its real intelligence provided by a parasite. In time, the parasite claimed its due, and a Grb’chev went into drooling senility. Kyes, well past that well-known age, had most likely been discovered one fine morning watching sunlight crawl across a windowsill, murmuring “It’s shiny,” and been quietly medevacked to the Grb’chev Home for the Terminally Bewildered.

“Possibly,” Cind allowed. “The Cult of the Eternal Emperor believes he was taken directly to commune with the Holy Spheres, whatever the hell they are.

“However, consider what we have here. Kyes, a computer genius, and his cohort, another specialist in the field. Both interested in AM2. Oh yes. One further thing. When Kyes became Lagguth’s rabbi, all data that the council had stored on AM2 was removed. It vanished, too.”

“Uh-uh,” Sten said, alarm signals going off. “I think your report’s a mickey. The Emperor had somebody wipe those files—
after
his return. And then put out the fiche you’re using as disinformation.”

“Could be,” she said. “However, I’m off to Lagguth’s home world. Just to ask some dumb questions. Unless you have something better in mind?”

Sten did—but it wouldn’t further any cause beyond his own morale.

“And you’re going with her,” he inquired of Alex.

“Thae’s a big clottin‘ naaaaaay, ae i’ Ah was a foalin’t mare. Ah’m off’t‘ see th’ weasand. Or whae Ah hope i‘ th’ Emp’s windpipe, at any rate.

“Th‘ lass’ thinkin’t makit a wee bit ae sense, Sten. An’ Ah took th‘ same tactic. ’Cept Ah went peepin’t aboot th‘ Emp. Y’ rec’lect whae we were i‘ th’ Altaics, oop’t‘ our pits i’ ter’rists, y‘ were skreekin’t frae th’ Emp and c’dnae get a response? A’ter Iskra massacreed th‘ students?”

Sten did. Very well. He had made call after call on the secure hotline between the embassy and the Imperial palace on Prime. The Emperor, he had been told, was indisposed.

“I always thought,” Sten said, “that he was just ducking me.

For some reason I never figured out, and haven’t really considered since.“

“Aye. Mayhap th‘ Emp dinnae want’t’ chat wi‘ y’, lad. But Ah took th‘ trouble ae checkin’t. Thae’s still secure h’nes onto Prime, i’ y‘ hae old friends who retired frae Mantis’t’ a sin’cure wi‘ Imperial Communications, aye? An’ more mates who’ve gone hit‘ private security.

“In’trestin‘ thing Ah hae discovered. Aboot th’ same time, though no one’s runnin’t ae timetable, th‘ Emp wen’‘t’ Earth. Wi‘ no notice, wi’ no fanfare.”

“Why?”

“Ah c’d nae find e’en a theory. But i‘ dinnae wash thae he’d gie himself a fishin’t vacation whae th’ drakh’s hittin‘ th’ fan e’erywhere. Th‘ lad’s nae prone’t’ kenn’dy oot ae th‘ wee’est prov’cation.

“An‘ one other wee thing Ah hae heard, fraw m’ sources wi’in th‘ Emp’s soldiery. At aboot th’ same time ae th‘ Emp wae goin’t fishin, some laddies frae th’ service wae detached, on spec’l duties,‘t’ th‘ Imperial HousehoF itself. EOD laddies.”

EOD—explosive ordnance disposal. Bomb-defusing and countermeasure experts. Why would the Emperor want them on Earth? Sten thought for a moment, then nodded. It was time to filter somebody onto Earth and find out what the hell had happened.

“Ah’m away,” Alex said, seeing the nod. “Altho‘ Ah dinnae hae pleasure i’ this. Thae’s bad thoughts oop thae, i‘ th’ mist an‘ th’ fog.”

There were. Sten had led an assassination team against the privy council onto Earth, where they’d held a summit meeting at a palatial retreat up Oregon Province’s Umpqua River from the Emperor’s old fishing grounds.

Of the ten beings in the contact team, Sten had been the only survivor. And all of them had been longtime Mantis operatives, friends as well as fellow operatives, of Sten and Alex.

Another place, like Vulcan, with blood-drenched memories.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Ah hae no leads. Just wanderin‘ aroun’ keepin’t m‘ nose up i’ th‘ air an’ m‘ arse doon. Ah ask’t Sr. Wild i’ Ah c’d borrow a wee ship an‘ a pilot.

“He’s loan’t me ae zoomie, an‘ a pilot he’s claim’t b’ be one ae his slinkiest. Human lass, nam’d Hotsco. Wild’s sayin’t she volunteer’d. So we ken she’s brain-damag’t.

“Ah hae spokit’t‘ her. Pretty, i’ y’re fond ae th‘ slender las-sies wi’ wee hips an‘ boobies an’ a waist y‘ can span wi’ one paw. M’self, Ah always fear’t Ah’d gie romantic an‘ snappit such a one i’ half. But, since she’s noo hard on most human eyeballs, Ah’ll us’t th‘ old deep-i’-love duo ae m‘ cover. I’ any-body’d believe this Hotsco, wi‘ her hair hangin’t doon’t’ below her waist an‘ flashin’t eyes, hae an’ int’rest i‘ a tub like m’self, aye?”

Bhor Intelligence would monitor Alex’s work while he was gone, and he had appointed Marl, his agent-in-training and the Bhor Police Intelligence Specialist, Constable Paen, as acting case officers on his personal project, the counteragent program he was running through the successfully doubled Hohne. The Imperial spy had seen the light, just as Alex had predicted to Marl, after only a few cycles at the bottom of one of the Bhor’s more colorful prisons.

“So. Everything’s goin’t tickety-tickety, like a wee sewin’t machine. Worries me, ‘cause we’re noo i’ a sewin’t machine.

“An‘ noo Ah’m off? D’ either ae y‘ wish’t’ kiss me ‘bye? Ah brusht m’ fangs nae more’nt two epochs gone.”

Instead, Sten bought him a farewell drink. Or two. Cind found time for one herself.

He loudly mourned, over the stregg, that he had now discovered the problems of being a figurehead. He never got to have any fun.

Cind patted his cheek.

“It’s Uke the old song goes,” she said. “ ‘You just stand there looking cute/And when something moves you shoot.’ ”

Just stand there, Sten thought.

Like hell I will.

Ida, too, was disobeying Proper High Level Leadership Rule Three, SubParagraph D: Keep a Lotta Grunts Between You And Where The Bullet Goes Bang. Sten had determined to keep the Rom in the background as long as possible, and use them as deep-cover recon and for surreptitious transport of small attack forces. Eventually they would be blown—but Sten hoped to get the maximum utilization from the traders before they were exposed as the Emperor’s enemies.

That, of course, meant that Ida herself shouldn’t even consider going operational.

Ida had come up with a Grand Scheme, one that Sten had heartily approved of. She hadn’t bored him with details such as who was the field agent who would plant this “bomb.”

Ida planned to plant the Fiendish Thingie herself. Romantics, or those who had never spent any time around Kaldersash, might have thought she was providing a noble example by leading from the front or, possibly, indulging in some homesickness over the old glory days of Mantis.

Of course, the reality was that Ida had seen vast opportunities for the initiating agent to make Noble Profit, a reality Jon Wild also sensed instantly.

And so a grossly overweight and overbearing woman, accompanied by her mousy husband, arrived on the trading world of Giro. It appeared that he had the money, but she had the clout. But since they arrived with several millions in hard credits, E-transmitted one day after their arrival, no one cared about their personal arrangements.

Civilizations, human or otherwise, tend to accept certain fictions. One of the most convenient is that securities—stocks, bonds, and the like—actually have some relationship to the actual prosperity of the government/corporation they’re issued by. The Bourse, Wall Street, Al-Manamah, the Drks’l System, all have worked about the same over the centuries.

Ida had figured out a long time before that the two best rules of security trading are: (1) Avoid the perceived wisdom, and (2) The stock is not the company. Her non-Aristotelian approach to the market as pari-mutuel system had made her several squillion credits.

One of the many odd facts she had collected in her periodic economic looting/maiming expeditions was that Giro was one of the worlds specializing in securities/finance where the entire system’s main computers were housed.

Ostensibly, however, Ida’s—and oh, yes, her husband’s— reason for being on Giro, instead of using one of the brokerage houses on her—unnamed—home world to trade was that she liked to be in the center of things. That also wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone.

She and Wild made their grand entrance one morning, when the trading firm of Chinmil, Bosky, Trout & Grossfreund opened. Ida had chosen the firm carefully, not for its massive size and far-scattered branch offices, but because CBT&G were known for their “liberal” interpretations of the Empire’s security laws. Ida knew that a white-collar crook is one of the easiest to hoodwink. He’s not only convinced he’s the first to come up with whatever scam he’s running, but is convinced that everyone else, from the coppers to the marks, are utter fools.

Ida and Wild announced their intent of increasing and broadening their holdings beyond their home system, and mentioned the huge amount they were prepared to play with, and were rapidly passed through the hands of a receptionist to a junior trader to a senior trader to a partner, Sr. Bosky himself.

Ida pretended to listen to his advice, accessed a central terminal, and began buying. And selling.

Talking in a steady stream as she did:

“Sr. Bosky, now, if I do as you advise, and go long on TransMig, keep what I have in Cibinium, consider this new issue of Trelawny… Jonathan, stop fidgeting, we know what we’re doing… ah, getting out of Soward five percent municipals… see
that
quote… I could have told them… good advice, Sr. Bosky, as I was saying that I consider Trelawny, although the prospectus hardly seemed to be complete—”

She had completely lost Bosky in one-half an E-day.

Ida sneered inwardly—she figured anyone as crooked as Chinmil et al. were, most especially a partner, would have to be able to see which walnut Ida’s pea was under for a day or so. But she continued her prattle as money went here, there, and everywhere.

Bosky was tempted to tell this annoying woman to go away—but he noticed that within two trading days, Ida had doubled her investment.

He started listening. Hard. And spending his own, and the firm’s, money, chasing Ida’s investments.

Of course, what Ida was really doing with her capital was very different than what Bosky thought, but it would take at least one cycle for the confusion to subside and Bosky to figure out just how many megacredits he had lost.

He also failed to notice that Wild, in the chatter, had been unobtrusively feeding a program into the firm’s main computer. Stage One. It took one E-week to get the program exactly positioned.

That night, Stage Two was mounted. Ida and Wild, well after midnight, sbd out of their hotel suite to a completely clean and anonymous gravsled Wild had procured and lifted into the night.

The next day, Ida got the obligatory terrible message from home. A cheap, hack, dumb device that’d get her busted out of Basic Extraction Tactics 101 at any spy academy. But businesspeople, in spite of loud boastings that they study history/ espionage/military strategy, in fact do nothing more than memo-rize enough catchphrases to convince their fellow drinkers they’re Tigers.

Ida promised Bosky they would return shortly.

And they departed on a great luxury liner, a liner they immediately left at the first planetfall, where they picked up one of Wild’s ships that had been prepositioned for them. Then they disappeared completely. Even the ship they had used for their escape was completely wiped and given new registry, from engines to nav equipment to hull numbers. That was but one of the cultural specialties of the Rom.

Even before they had gotten off the liner, Stage Three, a completely automatic program previously fed into one of CBT&G’s smallest branch offices half a galaxy away, activated.

All of Ida’s investments were liquidated immediately into hard currency, and the credits E-moved. Later investigators managed to follow the money through three laundries before the trail vanished.

Both Ida and Wild, already rich enough to consider hiring Croesus as a flunky, had trebled their personal fortunes. They had made so much, in fact, that Ida had felt almost guilty, and made Sten and Kilgour an additional bundle, just for recreational purposes. “How clottin‘ nice it is,” Ida observed, “to be able to do well by doing good, or whichever way the grammarians say I should put it.”