Empire's End (59 page)

Just a thud. Silence. Another thud. Another silence, even longer. A splash, finally, as the late’tPoyndex hit bottom. Kilgour wondered, once again, just
what
was’tat the bottom of the shaft? He shone his tiny flash down into blackness. Nothing.

He touched the flagstone, and it smoothly swung back into place, waiting for the next weight to land on it.

Was it a garbage disposal? A sewelr?

Alex shook his head.

He would never know.

He considered what had just happened and, after some reflection, nodded thoughtfully.

Assuming Poyndex’s body wasn’t discovered, at least for a while, what would the effect be? On Internal Security and, most importantly, the Emperor himself?

A wee bit scary, Kilgour concluded. I* fact, all thae’s been sacrificed by giein‘ Poyndex a braw clout i’ y’r original dreamscheme wi‘ th’ brainscan.

Nae a bad night’s work, he thought. Ah’m noo th‘ gowk Ah thought, a few min ago.

He allowed he deserved a pint and a dram. And perhaps a wee walk in the moonlight with Marl and Hotsco.

Feeling romantic—and thirsty—Kilgour headed for home.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

THE CREATURE EYED Sten -through its enormous compound eyes for a very long moment. Sten remained motionless, lying on his belly on the ocean’s floor. Three meters above him, waves crested and crashed against a rocky island.

The animal had a three-segmented body, with hard jointed segments extending off in all directions. It looked hostile, but then, anything over a meter long with pincer-jaws usually was logged as unfriendly by Sten. Especially when it was about twenty centimeters from his face.

Eventually, some sort of sitrep was achieved by what passed for the creature’s brain: You are the biggest thing in this ocean. No, you are not. There is something that is bigger than you. It is sitting just in front of you. You are a predator. You can devour anything that is in this ocean, No, you cannot. You tried to snag a morsel off this creature. Your pincers did not snag a morsel. This is not a familiar situation. You are in trouble. You should go somewhere, somewhere this creature is not.

The huge “trilobite,” or so Sten had labeled him, flurried its “legs,” and was gone, vanished into a floating drift of algae.

Very good. Sten resumed his final mental briefing before he charged wildly off in all directions. It wasn’t that the arthopod was any danger to Sten—especially since Sten was wearing a spacesuit. But those clotting pincers snapping on his faceplate made it hard to think.

That transmission beam that had almost been missed, ‘casting from the mansion, had led the
Victory
farther out into the back of beyond, into barely explored space. It intersected no system or object for light-centuries.

But then there was a solar system. Three worlds, one moon, and a sun. Not a dead system, like the relay station Kyes had discovered, the relay station that had self-destructed on him. Life was just creating itself here.

Sten had kept the
Victory
on the solar system’s fringes, terrified that one mistake would snap the thin lead, like so many others had before. Then, they would have to find another one of the luxury safehouses/way stations, and attempt to duplicate Cind’s success. Or else follow that other beam far out into the unknown. It would probably take no more than a lifetime or two to find whatever pot of gold was at the end of that nearly infinite straight-line rainbow.

Preston again returned to his first skill, the com board. He had absolutely guaranteed Sten that the com beam from the mansion impacted on the second world from the sun.

Sten transferred Freston, Preston’s com specialists, Hannelore La Ciotat, and himself to the
Aoife
, and again remoraed La Ciotat’s tacship to the destroyer.

Very slowly, the
Aoife
closed on ‘the world. Very young, indeed. Continents slowly sinking, seas shallowing and spreading across the world. Cambrian was the description, or so Cind informed him, suggesting that he might wish to take some basic geology courses one of these centuries, hi his spare time.

They looked hard. Visually, electronically, actively, passively. It took an E-week before Freston had something. He had picked up some odd indicators from the coast of one of the small subcontinents in the southern hemisphere.iSomething was down there, something that appeared artificial, put every surface scan, from IR to scope, said the area was just one more rocky outcropping on the still-sterile land.

Freston chanced simulcasting a beam from the
Aoife
on the same freq as the continuous beam from the mansion, ‘cast for less than a second. He picked up some bounced radiation. It was his theory that an antenna, or more likely several of them, had been inletted into the planet’s surface in that area. Capable of receiving, transmitting, or retransmitting.

Sten thought about it. The moonlet Cind had visited had been hollowed out as it was equipped with antenna, a buried shelter, power, and supplies. The Emperor was smart enough to not choose the same sort of world for each relay station—but it seemed he would be using a similar construct for all of these stations, and, for safety’s sake, putting most of the station underground.

Or underwater.

Freston sneered at that—why would you bother adding the additional interference of liquid, not to mention building sediment, crustaceans with claws, and all the rest? Sten nodded— right. The station—if this is where it was—would be just at the shore.

Freston then triumphantly produced his second piece of information. He had put a tight scan on the area, a few hours after nightfall. That really gave him something. Something a searcher would have to be specifically looking for, and looking in a very small area.

The rocks held their warmth for a long time. Far longer than air. That gave Freston some interesting images, particularly when they had been computer-enhanced by an operator with imagination. Here… the lines of the buried antenna, where the material the antenna had been made of held its heat even longer than the rocks. Over here, an oblong outline, invisible without enhancement. Big. Freston thought that outline was a hangar door—the outline provided by cool air seeping through the door’s edges. Over here—Preston’s smile threatened to pass his ears and meet at the medulla oblongata—the door. People type.

All Sten had to do was get to that entrance, figure out how to pick the lock, and voila.

Voila, Sten said cynically. And then worry about how big a bomb is located inside. Freston
tsked
. He couldn’t be expected to do everything, could he? Being just an underpaid captain, and all.

Sten laughed and threw him out. Then he sat down to figure out the rest of the insertion plan. Thinking about underwater gave him the rest of the scheme. He sent for La Ciotat, kissed Cind, and moved out.

The tacship entered atmosphere in a trajectory exactly like that of a meteorite. A big one, but that couldn’t be helped. It splashed down just beyond the horizon, but short of the bounce-reflection of any sensor on the subcontinent. La Ciotat sent her ship toward land below the surface, muttering if she’d wanted to run a submarine, she would have been incarnated as a dolphin. Or a Rykor.

About a kilometer offshore, a reef rose to just below the surface. Sten ordered La Ciotat to bottom the tacship behind the reef.

He went out the airlock and began the long trudge toward shore. In the livies, the suit’s little reaction jets would have worked splendidly in water and gravity, as they did in space, and sent him zooming like a speedboat toward his rendezvous with whatever. But even with the suit’s McLean pack on full, mass was still mass. Sten chugged toward shore at the stately speed of a ferryboat, giving him plenty of time to tourist.

If the land above was barren, the sea was not. Algae in sheets. Ribbonweed thickets. Some things that looked like small crabs. Nautilus-coiled snails. And trilobites, from barely visible to… to large enough to make Sten think of big centipedes intermarried with scorpions.

As the bottom shelved, he cut power, and took her down. At three meters, he considered his situation and, until it wove away, the universe’s biggest trilobite.

So far, there hadn’t been any loud bangs that would indicate he had set off any of the booby traps he knew the relay station was equipped with. Very well. So they were still waiting for him. He wished he could figure out what those booby traps or booby trap could be. None could be that sensitive—the Emperor would hardly want his return slowed because a relay turned the fire on unexpectedly, and a heat sensor blew. Or a motion detector went crackers at an earth tremor. Trick stuff sometimes went off from its own cleverness. Nor, Sten thought, would the Emperor want to spend his time elaborately defusing some really sophisticated diabolism—he had heard the Emperor curse at puzzles and hurl them across rooms minutes after he had picked them up, back when…

Just back when, Sten. Stick to the subject kt hand.

What the booby trap would most likely be, he concluded, was something the Emperor wouldn’t have to worry about, but something that would send any intruder airborne in very small pieces. A retina-coded lock? A pore-pattern lock? Hardly, considering the device’s reliability had to be conceivably measured in centuries.

Sten went ashore, wading through the surf, onto dry land. Dry rock. Nothing but rock, of various shades of gray and black. Dark sand at the water’s edge. A beach, almost half a meter wide. Sten spotted something and knelt, his mission forgotten for a brief moment. There, just in the surfwash, was a bit of green. Life. Some kind of plant, he thought. Algae? He didn’t know. Go on back to the sea, he thought. You don’t know what you’re starting.

He rose and trudged up toward the shelf where the station would be located. His suit’s sensors said the air was breathable, although oxygen poor. But he stayed in the suit. Again, part of his caution. He didn’t think that an infrared sensor would be used to set off the self-destruct mechanism—but the spacesuit would sure keep such a device from starting the Big Bang.

The ground flattened. Sten crouched behind a large boulder, and turned on the helmet display. He consulted the map projected above his faceplate.

Over there would be the door. A slant of solid rock. Sten moved as surreptitiously as the bulky suit would allow to the closest cover. He was thirty meters away. He dropped binocs down over his faceplate and minutely examined the rock. Twice he stopped, eyes starting to see things that were or weren’t there.

At full magnification, his field of vision was less than a third of a meter on a side. Back and forth, back and forth his eyes moved, just like a photointerpreter scanning a mosaic, looking for the camouflaged enemy.

Ah. Perfectly round. Which rarely exists in nature.

A keyhole.

Punched in the rock about where a keyhole should be… for an Emperor-sized being.

All Sten needed was the key.

He went across the open ground like a trundling armadillo. Expecting the shatterblast. Nothing.

He knelt next to the keyhole and unsealed a pouch. After some thought, back aboard
Victory
, he had realized the key would be the simplest part of this operation. The Emperor couldn’t wander around carrying some elaborate hex-pattem-coded special key in his return to the throne. Or, anyway, Sten wouldn’t plan things that way, if he had been setting this whole paranoiac rigmarole up. So the key would have to be something that the Emperor could procure or have made at the appropriate time. Also, the key wouldn’t be part of an exotic locking system that might be unobtainable- or superseded by the time he returned.

Sten took out a standard, Mercury-issue electronic lockpick. Round, eh? He found a pickup of the correct size. He fitted it to the analyzer and inserted the pickup in the hole, wanting to put his fingers in his ears against the blast, even though the pickup was made of completely neutral Imperium X. The analyzer buzzed, and told him what code would open the door. Sten detached the pickup, and plugged it into the sender. He touched the

TRANSMIT
button…

… and the door lifted up, Sten tumbling back out of pure fear reaction, seeing a ramp leading down into blackness. Sten waited until his heart began beating again. He took a flash from the pouch and, lying flat against the ground in the event
this
was the trigger, sent the beam around the inside of the passage. Nothing. He looked down. Just a ramp.

Sten set the flash’s beam on full diffuse and started down, a centimeter at a time, a step taking a lifetime, moving forward as he had back on Vulcan so very, very long ago…

… and then he had it.

Or he thought he did.

All this slok about IR detectors, prox detectors, motion sensors, sensor sensors… that wasn’t it. The Eternal Emperor had been an engineer. A good one. So his protection would have been conceived using one principle: Keep It Stupid, Simple.

Sten’s foot came down more confidently, and he took another step. Another. Another.

The door dropped closed behind him. Sten flinched, but not much—he was increasingly sure he was right. An overhead light went on. There was a standard monitor panel against the wall. It, showed an environmental system had gone on, and was bringing the shelter up to an E-normal condition. There was a counter display on the panel. The counter showed 0. Sten started past it,-then saw, from the corner of his eye, the counter change to 1.

That
was
it.

There was a door in front of him. With a palmswitch. Sten touched it, and the door opened.

Living quarters inside. Small, but well-equipped.

Beyond them, a doorway.

Sten, trying not to hurry^went through it.

The room was huge. Instrument-filled. Corns and controls.

He’d done it! He was alive-.‘t and inside the relay station.

Unless something went bang in the next few seconds, Sten’s dazzling perception had been correcft

What was the one thing the Emperor would do, but no one else would dare?

To show up solo. No one else would. Anyone smart enough and brave enough to get this close to the heart of power would have allies or subordinates. He didn’t know where the sensor was—overhead, in the floor, or in the walls. There could be one, there could be many of them.