Читать книгу The Return of the Emperor (Sten #6) - Allan Cole - Страница 11

CHAPTER SIX

STEN’S FIRST STEP, once clear of Smallbridge, was to go to ground. Mahoney had a planned refuge—which Sten rejected. Sten had his own very secure hideout. Where—he hoped—Kilgour, if he had been warned in time, would meet him.

The hideout was Farwestern, and there Sten saw firsthand the effect the dwindling of AM2 and the privy council’s incompetence at managing what fuel there was.

Farwestern had been—and to a degree, still was—a shipping hub near the center of a galaxy. At one time it had provided everything a shipper could want—from shipyards to chandleries, recworlds to warehousing, hotels to emergency services, all cluttered in a system-wide assemblage of containers. “Containers” was about the most specific description that could be used, since the entrepreneurs who had gathered around Farwestern used everything from small asteroids to decommissioned and disarmed Imperial warships to house their businesses. Almost anything legal and absolutely anything illegal could be scored in and around Farwestern, including anonymity.

Years earlier Sten and Alex, on one of their Mantis team missions, had run through Farwestern. They found its cheerful anarchy to their liking. Most especially, they fell in love with a small planetoid named Poppajoe. Poppajoe was jointly owned by a pair of rogues named Moretti and Manetti. Having acquired fortunes elsewhere under almost certainly shadowy circumstances, they had discovered Farwestern and decided that there was their home. The question was: what service could they provide that wasn’t available? The answer was luxury and invisibility.

They reasoned that there would be beings passing through who would want to be well taken care of and might prefer that their presence not be broadcast. This applied to criminals as well as to executives on their way to make a deal best kept secret until the stock manipulations were complete.

Moretti and Manetti had thrived in peace. In the recent war they had doubled their fortunes. Now times were a little hard. Not bad enough to drive them under, but ticklish. They survived because they were owed so many favors by so many beings, from magnates to tramp skippers.

There were still people who needed the shadows. Moretti and Manetti catered to them. All room entrances were individual. Guests could dine publicly, or remain in their suites. Privacy was guaranteed. Their food was still the finest to be found—fine and simple, from Earth-steak to jellied hypoornin served in its own atmosphere and gravity.

When Sten and Kilgour had run across Poppajoe, they had made a very quiet resolution that if things ever got Very Very Hairy, this would be their private rendezvous point.

As Sten’s ship entered the Farwestern system, neither he nor Mahoney looked particularly military. As a matter of fact, neither looked particularly anything.

Beings frequently go to too much trouble when they decide, for whatever reason, that they would rather not be recognized as themselves. All that is necessary—unless the person is unfortunately gifted with the face of a matinee idol or an abnormal body—is to appear (A) unlike who they really are; and (B) like no one in particular. Dress neither poorly nor expensively. Eat what everyone else is eating. Travel neither first class nor steerage. Try to become that mythical entity, the average citizen. Mercury Corps called the tactic, for some unknown reason, a “Great Lorenzo.”

Sten and Mahoney were now businessmen, successful enough for their corporation to have provided them with fuel and a ship, but not so successful that they had their own pilot, and the ship was a little rundown at the edges. Three days’ work at a smuggler’s conversion yard had turned Sten’s gleaming white yacht into just another commercial/private—but only as long as no one looked at the engines or the com room, or figured out that some of the compartments were much tinier than they should have been, and that behind those bulkheads were enough arms to outfit a small army.

Mahoney had worried that the ship could be traced by its numbers. Sten was glad to find that his ex-boss did not know everything. The ship and every serial-numbered item on it was trebly sterile—another product of Sten’s professional paranoia that was now paying off.

So they arrived on Poppajoe and were greeted by Messrs. Moretti and Manetti as if they were both long-lost cousins and complete but respected strangers.

Poppajoe may have been surviving, but Farwestern was not. Commercial travel was a trickle. Between the fuel shortages and the cutbacks in the military, even Imperial ships were a rarity. A lot of orbital stations had sealed their ports, and their people had gone dirtside to one of Farwestern’s planets or moved on.

“But we will make it,” Moretti explained. “We’re like the old mining town that struck it rich. A group of émigrés moved in and discovered that no one likes to do his own washing. They were willing to provide the services. Eventually the minerals played out and the miners headed for the next strike. However, the laundrybeings stayed—and all became millionaires doing each other’s laundry.”

He found that quite funny. Sten did not. What he saw, and had seen from the time he and Mahoney had fled Smallbridge, was the slow grinding down of the Empire. He had felt it going on even in his isolation on Smallbridge, but witnessing it was another thing. Beingkind was pulling in its horns—or was being forced to. Entropy was well and good as a thermodynamic principle. As a social phenomenon it was damned scary.

Mahoney gave him as big a picture as he could—which was hardly complete, he admitted. Worlds, systems, clusters, even some galaxies had slipped out of contact. By choice, rejecting the hamwitted leadership of the council? By war? By—barely conceivable—disease?

As Sten well knew, AM2 had been the skein holding the Empire together. Without the shattering energy release of Anti-Matter Two, star drives were almost impossible to power. And of course, since AM2 had been very inexpensive—price determined by the Emperor—and fairly available—depending on the Emperor, once more—it was easy to take the lazy way out and run anything and everything on the substance. Interstellar communications... weaponry... factories... manufacturing... the list ran on.

When the Emperor was murdered the supply of AM2 stopped. Sten had found that hard to swallow the first time Mahoney had said it. He was still having trouble. Back on Smallbridge, he had assumed that the privy council—for profiteering reasons of their own, as well as base incompetency—had merely been keeping the supply at a trickle.

“Not true,” Mahoney had said. “They haven’t a clue to where the goodies are. That’s why the council wanted to pick you up—and anybody else who might’ve had a private beer with the Emperor—then gently loosen your toenails until you told them The Secret.”

“They’re clottin’ mad.”

“So they are. Consider this, boy. The entire universe is bonkers,” Mahoney said. “Except for me and thee. Heh... heh... heh... and I’ll be slippin’ slowly away in a bit if you don’t find a bottle and uncap it.”

Sten followed orders. He drank—heavily—from the bottle before handing it to Ian.

“Ring down for another one. If your prog circuits are DNCing now, it will get far worse.”

Again, Sten followed orders. “Okay, Mahoney. We are now on the thin edge.”

Mahoney chortled. “Not even close yet, boy. But proceed.”

There was a tap at the door. “Y’r order, sir.”

Mahoney was on his feet, a pistol snaking out of his sleeve. “A little too efficient.” He moved toward the door.

“Relax, Fleet Marshal,” Sten said dryly. Then turned to address the door: “It’s open, Mr. Kilgour.”

After a pause, the door came open, and Alex entered pushing a drink tray and wearing a disappointed expression.

“Did I noo hae y’goin’t frae e’en a second?” he asked hopefully.

“You gotta do something about the way you talk, man.”

“Thae’s some think it charmin’,” Alex said, mock-hurt.

Sten and Alex looked at one another.

“How close did they get to you?” Sten asked.

Kilgour told them of the near-ambush and the battle in the icy streets.

“Ah’m assum’t,” he said, “frae the fact th’ warnin’ wae in gen’ral code, nae whae Sten and I hae set up, y’re responsible f’r tippin’ me th’ wink.”

“I was,” Mahoney said.

“Ah’m also assum’t, sir, thae’s reason beyon’ y’r fas’nation wi’ m’ girlish legs an’ giggle. Who d’ye want iced?”

“Quick thinking, Mr. Kilgour. But sit down. You too, Admiral. The debriefing—and the plan—will take awhile. You’ll guess the target—correction, targets—as I go along. The suspense will be good for you.”

Mahoney began with what had happened to him from the day of the Emperor’s funeral, when he had looked at the Council of Five standing on the grassy knoll that was the Emperor’s grave and knew that he was looking at five assassins.

He hesitated, then told them the impossible part. After the funeral, he had gone into the Emperor’s study, dug out a bottle of the vile swill the Emperor called Scotch, and planned a quiet, private farewell toast. Stuck to the bottle was a handwritten note:

“Stick around, Ian. I’ll be right back.”

It was in the handwriting of the Eternal Emperor.

Mahoney stopped, expecting complete disbelief. He got it, masked on both men’s faces by expressions of bright interest—and a slow shift by Sten toward Mahoney’s gun-hand.

“That’s—very interesting, Fleet Marshal. Sir. How do you suppose it got there? Are you saying the man who got assassinated was a double?”

“No. That was the Emperor.”

“So he somehow survived getting shot a dozen or so times and then being blown up?”

“Don’t clot around, Sten. He was dead.”

“Ah. Soo he ris’t oot’n th’ grave’t’ leave ye a wee love note?” said Alex.

“Again, no. He must’ve left instructions with one of the Gurkkhas. Or a palace servant. I asked. Nobody knew anything.”

“Let’s ignore how the note got there for a sec, Ian. Are you listening to what you’ve just been saying? Either you’re mad—or else you’ve joined up with that cult that goes around saying the Emperor has lived forever. And remembering six years plus is a long time for you just to be sticking around. Which is how long it’s been.”

“Neither one—or maybe I am bonkers. But will you keep listening?”

“ ‘Mought’s well. Whae’s time’t’ a clottin’ hog?” Kilgour said. He poured himself a drink of quill—but still kept a wary eye on Mahoney.

Mahoney went on. He had made his own plans that day. He was going after the privy council.

“Did you consider maybe they’d think you were the type to carry a grudge?” Sten asked.

“I did—and covered my ass.”

Mahoney put in for early retirement. The privy council, in the mad rush to get rid of the bloated and incredibly expensive military after the Tahn wars, was more than willing to let anyone and everyone out, few questions asked. Sten nodded—that was exactly how he and Kilgour had been able to slip into retirement and obscurity.

The council was especially happy to be rid of Mahoney, who was not only the Emperor’s best-loved Fleet Marshal, architect of victory, but also once head of Mercury Corps—Imperial Intelligence—for many, many years.

“But I didn’t want them to think I was going to create any mischief. I found a cover.”

Mahoney’s cover, loudly announced, was that he planned to do a complete biography of the Eternal Emperor, the greatest man who ever lived. That plan fit quite well into the council’s martyr-building.

“What I was, of course, doing was building my stone bucket. Hell if I knew what I would do with it—but I had to do it.”

Mahoney dived into the archives—he planned to spend a year or so researching The Early Years. By then he figured the council would have lost interest in him, and he could go for the real target. A little sheepishly, he told Sten and Alex that he had always loved raw research. Maybe—if things had been different, and he had not come from a military family—he would have ended up poking through archives trying to figure out The Compleat History of the Fork. Or something.

He was not the first, the hundredth, or the millionth person to bio the Emperor. But he discovered something interesting. All of the bios were crocks.

“So what?” Sten asked, disinterested. “If you were up there on the right hand of God, wouldn’t you want everybody to make nice on you?”

“That is not what I meant.” Mahoney said. He had seen a pattern. Biographers were encouraged to write about the Emperor. However, they were mostly of the type who would work hard to either find Deep-seated Humanity in Tamerlane, or else write a psychological biography of the poet Homer.

“Let’s say there might have been a great number of sloppy historians. But somehow their work was still encouraged. They won the big contracts. Their fiche were picked up for the livies. And so on and so forth.

“I’m telling you, lads, no one was really encouraged to look at source material—that hasn’t somehow, and I quote, vanished in the mists of time, end quote.”

“So what was our late leader trying to hide?”

“Damned near everything, from where he came from to how he got where he is. You might spend a lifetime daring insanity trying to make sense out of the seventeen or eighteen thousand versions of events, each of them seemingly given the Emperor’s imprimatur.

“I’ll just mention two of the murkiest areas, besides where the clot the AM2 is. First is that the son of a bitch is—or was, anyway, immortal.”

“Drakh. No such animal.”

“Believe it. And the second thing is—he’s been killed before.”

“But you just said—”

“I know what I just said. He’s died before. Been killed. Various ways. Several accidents. At least two assassinations.”

“And you won’t accept a double.”

“I will not. But here is what happened, at least concerning the incidents I was able to document: First, the Emperor dies. Second, there is, immediately afterward, a big goddamned explosion, destroying the body and anything around. Just like that bomb that went off after Chapelle killed the Emperor.”

“Every time?”

“Everyone I can find. And then—the AM2 stops. Wham. Just like that.

“Then the Emperor comes back. As does the AM2. And things start back to normal.”

“Ian, now you’ve got me playing loony games on your turf,” Sten said. “Okay. How long does he usually vanish? Not that I am believing one damned word of what you are saying.”

Mahoney looked worried. “Accident—perhaps three or four months. Murder—as long as a year or two. Maybe time enough for people to realize how much they need him.”

“Six years an’ more hae gone noo,” Alex pointed out.

“I know.”

“But you still believe the Eternal Emperor is gonna appear in a pink cloud or some kind of clottin’ seashell in the surf and the world will be happy and gay once more?” Sten scoffed.

“You don’t believe me,” Mahoney said, pouring himself a drink. “Would it help if I let you go through the files? I have them hidden away.”

“No. I still wouldn’t believe you. But set that aside. What else did you get?”

“I worked forward. And I got lucky, indeed. Remember your friend Haines?”

Sten did. She had been a homicide cop, and she and Sten had been up to their elbows unraveling the strange assassination plot that had inadvertently sparked the recent Tahn wars. She and Sten had also been lovers.

“She’s still a cop. She’s still on Prime. Homicide chief now,” Mahoney told Sten.

He had gone to her for permission to access the files on Chapelle, the Emperor’s assassin. He’d had the highest clearances—volume one of the biography had been published to great acclaim. “Complete tissue, of course,” he assured them.

“Anyway, your Haines. She’s still as honest as ever, boy.”

Mahoney had asked some questions—and one day Haines had gotten the idea that the ex-Intelligence head was not in his dotage, indulging a private passion.

“She said the only reason she was doing it is because you’d spoken well of me. For a, ahem, clottin’ general. You remember a young lad named Volmer?”

Sten did. Volmer was a publishing baron—or, more correctly, the waffling heir to a media empire. Part of the privy council. Murdered one night outside a tawdry ambisexual cruising bar in the port city of Soward. The released story was that he had been planning a series on the corruption around the war effort. A more cynical—and popular—version was that Volmer liked his sex rough and strange and had picked up the wrong hustler.

Haines, Mahoney said, had something different. She had been stalking a contract killer for about a year—a professional. She didn’t give a damn about a triggerman, but wanted to know who had hired him. She got him—and with enough evidence concerning the disappearance of a gang boss to get at least an indictment.

The young man evidently agreed with Haines as to the worth of the evidence. He offered to make a deal. Haines thought that a wonderful idea. She might not care, particularly, if underworld types slaughtered each other on a daily basis. But when they kept leaving the bodies out on the street to worry the citizens—then action had to be taken.

The man offered her something better. He confessed that he had killed Volmer. The word had been that the freako was an undercover type. There had been an open contract. The killer had filled it—and then found out later whom he had touched.

Haines wanted to know who had paid. The man named an underworld boss, now deceased. Haines punted him back to his cell, told him to think about corroborative evidence, and tried to figure out what it all meant. The assassin “suicided” in his cell that night.

“That’s all she had?”

“That’s all she had.”

“So who terminated Volmer?”

“Perhaps his brothers on the privy council? Maybe Volmer wasn’t going along with the program? I don’t know—yet. But there was the first member of the council dead.

“Then Sullamora. Blown up with the Emperor.

“Something funny about that lone hit man, Chapelle. He came out of Spaceport Control. I did a little research on him, as well. Seems he felt the Emperor was after him personally.”

“Yeah. I saw the livies, too. A head case.”

“He was that. But he was set up to become one. Somebody—somebody who could have played with his career—arranged for him to get his face shoved in it every time he turned around. To this day nobody knows, for instance, why he suddenly lost his job and ended up on bum row.

“Spaceport Control. Ports, shipping—that was Sullamora’s responsibility on the privy council. And now he’s dead, too.”

Sten started to pour himself another drink, then thought better of it and walked to the viewpanel and stared out.

“All right, Mahoney. You’ve got some interesting things. Maybe. And maybe you’re a head case like this Chapelle. Maybe all you’ve got is that thieves fall out. A Mantis op on his second run could tell you that.

“Fill in the blanks. What happened next? And come to think about it, what happens next?”

Mahoney told them. About the time he had talked to Haines, he had started feeling a bit insecure. The council, he had realized, had not a clue as to the source of AM2. Mahoney thought it was a matter of time before they started rounding up the usual suspects and probing their brains for this had-to-be-somewhere secret.

“Brainscan’s an uncomfortable feeling, I understand. Frequently fatal. So I died. Laundered my investments by somehow getting swindled. Paid the swindler ten percent of the money he stole. Then I drowned. A stupid boating accident. There were whispers that it was because I’d lost my entire fortune.”

Dead and invisible, Mahoney went to work. Part and parcel of his research was looking up all his old service friends, anyone who might have had any knowledge of the Emperor.

“Many of them still serve. And most of them think we are heading for absolute chaos unless the council is removed.”

Sten and Kilgour exchanged looks. Removed. Yes.

“Then... then we have access to everything the Emperor left on Prime. I know—knew—that man. He would have hidden the secret somewhere. Hell, for all I know, in one of those glue pots he used trying to make a gutter.”

“Guitar,” Sten corrected absently.

“Because that’s the only chance we have,” Mahoney said. “Probably you were right. Probably I am quite mad believing the Emperor will return. Maybe that he ever did. Indulge an old man’s eccentricity.

“But if someone does not do something—this Empire, which maybe it’s done things wrong, and even some evils, has still held civilization together for two millennia and longer.

“If nothing’s done, it will all vanish in a few lifetimes.”

Sten was looking closely at Mahoney—a not especially friendly look.

“So you get me out of harm’s way, get word to Kilgour. And all you want in return is for us to kill the five beings who happen to rule the known universe.”

Mahoney chose not to see the sarcasm. “Exactly. No impeachments. No trials. No confusion. Which is why I wanted you, Sten. This is the linchpin to the whole operation. You’ve done it before. In clean, out clean—with five bodies behind you.”

* * * *

Sten and Alex sat, wordless, staring out the plate into deep space. They had told Mahoney they had to talk, then thrown him out of their quarters. There had not been much talk. They had capped the alk and called for caff.

Sten ordered his thoughts. Could he somehow take out the privy council? Yes, his Mantis arrogance said. Maybe. It was the “out clean” that bothered him. Sten had always agreed with his first basic sergeant, who had said he wanted soldiers who would “help the soldier on the other side die for his country.”

The privy council had tried to kill him—and probably grabbed all of his wealth and pauperized him as well. So? Credits were not important. They could be made as well as lost. As far as the killing—once the shooting had stopped, Sten, who prided himself as being a professional, had bought narcobeers for his ex-enemies on many occasions.

Were the privy council members evil—which would somehow justify their deaths? Define evil, he thought. Evil is... what does not work.

Thus, another list:

Was the privy council incompetent? Certainly. Especially if one believed what Mahoney had said. Once more, So? The worlds Sten had lived in, from Vulcan to the Imperial Military itself, were more often than not governed by incompetents.

The Empire was running down. For a third time, So? Sten, veteran of a hundred battles and a thousand-plus worlds, could not visualize that amorphous thing called an Empire.

Another list. This time, a short one.

All Sten had known—like his father and his father before him —was The Eternal Emperor. That, in fact, was what Sten thought of when he considered the Empire.

He had sworn an oath. Sworn it twice, in fact, “...to defend the Eternal Emperor and the Empire with your life... to obey lawful orders given you and to honor and follow the traditions of the Imperial Guard as the Empire requires.” The first had been administered after he had been cold-cocked by Mahoney, eons before, back on Vulcan. But he had retaken the oath when they had commissioned him.

And he had meant it.

If the council members had tried to kill the Emperor—and failed—would he have considered it his duty to hunt them down and, if necessary, kill them? Of course. And did he believe the privy council had killed the Emperor? Yes. Absolutely.

He thought of an old Tahn proverb: “Duty is heavier than lead, death lighter than a feather.” It did not help.

That oath still stood, as did the duty. Sten felt somewhat embarrassed. He looked across at Kilgour and cleared his throat. Such were not things to be said aloud.

Kilgour was avoiding Sten’s glance. “Ae course, thae’s th’ option ae findin’t ae deep, rich hole, pullin’ it in behind us, an’ lettin’ the universe swing,” he said suddenly.

“I’d just as soon not spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”

“Y’lack confidence, lad. We c’d do’t. Nae problem. But if we did, m’mither’d nae hae aught to brag on, come market day. So. Empire-topplin’ it is? Sten?”

Sten managed a grin. Better this way. Let the real reasons stay inside. He stuck out his hand.

“Nae, we c’n gie lushed wi’ a clear conscience,” Kilgour sighed. He groped for a bottle.

“Ah noo ken whae Ah nae lik’t thae livies. Here’s a braw decision made. In ae hotel flat by a fat man dressed like ae commercial traveler an’ a wee lad resemblin’t ae gig’lo. Nae a sword, gleamin’t armor or wavin’t banner amongst us, Whae a world.” He drank.

“Nae. How filthy d’ we scrag thae’ bastards?”

So Sten and Kilgour went into partnership with an ex-Fleet Marshal who both of them considered, privately, was a bit round the bend.