Authors: Chris Bunch; Allan Cole
Empire's End (15 page)
“And he said he especially wanted to thank the workers of SDT. He said he wanted you all to know that without the great shipping unions of our Empire, all his struggles would be for naught.”
The crowd took forty-five seconds to thank the Emperor back.
“But as you all know,” Kenna said when the applause waned, “the Eternal Emperor is not just a being of words. And I’m here to tell you this day, that once again he’s putting his thanks into action.”
Kenna lofted a large, old-fashioned piece of parchment. The news cameras pushed in to show the Imperial seal at the bottom. Then panned up to Kenna.
“First off, our brand-spanking-new AM2 depot—orbiting now high above our blessed world—has just been raised to a Triple A rating!”
The crowd really took off on this. A triple A rating would bring even more business and work to the port.
“But, that’s not all,” Kenna said. “Along with our new rating, comes an even greater responsibility.
“My friends, I’m pleased to announce the Emperor has diverted an enormous AM2 shipment from a less deserving sys-tern. The amount is enough to supply all the needs of this entire sector for two E-years.
“As we speak, this AM2 shipment is approaching Dusable. And when this shipment is safely stowed away in our state-of-the-art depot—constructed, I might add, by our own talented people—Dusable will be able to rightly boast of the Emperor’s respect and faith in us.
“For, from this glorious day forward, Dusable will be ihe only supplier for AM2 in this sector. And that, my friends, is anyone’s definition of loyalty repaid.”
The applause, cheers, and general pandemonium greeting this statement rolled across Dusable’s capitol. Beings in distant wards looked up and wondered at thunder on such a cloudless day.
Aboard the
Pai Kow
—sixty-seven million miles away—the cheers became a sudden blast mat nearly cracked the com unit’s speaker cells.
Captain Hotsco chopped the volume, chortling to herself over Solon Kenna’s lavish promises of AM2 aplenty. She hit a monitor touchpad and Kenna’s face—silently mouthing the words of his speech—became a small window in the right-hand corner of the screen. Space filled the remainder.
Hotsco scanned the monitor, singing, “Mushi, mushi ano nay, ano nay… mushi, mushi ano nay…”
Then she saw it. Lights winked at three o’clock.
“Ah so desca.” Hotsco laughed. “Come to Momma, bright eyes.” She glanced at Kenna’s round face, still flapping its jaws to the union masses. The captain gave Kenna a mock salute. “Solidarity, brother!”
Fingers brushed touchpads and Kenna’s face vanished. The winking lights shifted to dead center. And the monitor snap-zoomed in.
Hotsco sucked in her breath as the robo “train” came into view. The lead element looked like an Imperial battleship chopped in half. In a way, it was. The ship had been turned out decades ago in one of the late, not so great, Tanz Sullamora’s yards. The command and weapons part of the ship had been buzzsawed, a new nosecone installed, and now it consisted almost entirely of engine. Tractor beams ringed the center. Starboard was a hump that was the brains of the ship.
The sole job of this giant engine was to tow the eighty-kilometer formation of barges trailing behind.
Hotsco started an automatic count of the container ships, then quit in awe as the sum reached into the scores.
And each and every one of them was filled with the most precious substance in the Empire—AM2.
Captain Hotsco, part-time pirate, full-time smuggler, was gazing upon a dream prize. The value of the AM2 train bound for Dusable’s depot was unimaginable. Even allowing for a Kenna lie involving the quantity—clot, cut it in half—Hotsco knew she was looking at not one fortune, but as many as the number of ships in the convoy.
And it was just sitting there for the taking. Okay, she couldn’t get it all. But she could certainly cut out enough to buy two or three systems the size of the Cairenes.
Wild would be livid enough to cut her pretty throat.
Clot Wild.
But, what about that cute Kilgour? It was his intelligence that had turned up word of the AM2 shipment. She had fallen in lust with the tubby Scotsman as he had laid out the plan to Wild and a group of his captains—which had included Hotsco.
The drill was for the smugglers to use their normal runs to the Cairenes—usually carrying expensive illegals for the pols and their cronies—as a cover to sniff out the AM2 train.
It was a damned good plan, too. Proof was looking out at her from the monitor.
And there was no one, but no one, around to know.
But if she followed her instincts, she might never learn the answer to that age-old question of what lies under a Scotsman’s kilt.
Clot the kilt.
Look at all that AM2.
After all, she hadn’t promised anything. Not really. She had only said she would take a look. And she was looking, wasn’t she?
Then a terrible, dream-souring thought trickled through. What would she do with it? Who could fence that amount? And if she tried dribbling it out, someone would eventually fink. And the Imperials would soon be hot on her trail.
Clot the Imperials. Hotsco had practically been born on the run.
Yeah… But… She had never had to run from entire fleets. Whkh is what would happen. All that AM2 double-damned-guaranteed it.
Oh, well.
Hotsco decided to do the honest thing—no matter how much it hurt.
To cheer herself, she thought of Alex’s broad, smiling face. And that short kilt.
She quickly coded the message, including the coordinates of the AM2 supply train. Then she sent it in one short, powerful blast.
Hotsco waited for two, or three breaths.
Her com unit bleeped.
It was the
Victory
.
Message received.
Hotsco quickly shut down and scooted out of the area, thinking, I hope you’re worth it, Alex Kilgour.
Dusable’s new AM2 depot was the size of a small moon. In looks, it resembled a quartered sphere. Each “slice” was placed in the corner of an imaginary square, then linked with its sisters by enormous tubes. All traffic and freight flowed through these tubes. Laid over this configuration was an elaborate spiderweb of com lines, repair walks, and pipes carrying everything from industrial liquids to recycled air and sewage from the life-form units.
The depot normally required six hundred beings to operate. But there was nothing normal about Dusable. Even here, parked in high orbit, the rules of featherbedding applied. There were twice that number lazing away when the AM2 shipment arrived.
Most of them were asleep. Or partying in the rec center. Ken-na’s announcement hadn’t been a surprise to the depot people. They had been alerted days before to get ready for the shipment. Not that there was much to do. The depot was almost entirely automated.
A sleepy operator noted the approach in his log. He half checked that ail automatic units were functioning, and then returned to his bunk and spooned up to his joyboy’s smooth back.
For a moment, he thought about waking the lad for a little fun. His loins stirred mildly. Then sleep overtook him, and he was snoring away.
On the monitor, the image of the giant AM2 train closed in. Then it stopped as the convoy reached a synchronous orbit with the station. Signals went out. The com board lit up with computer-exchanged messages.
The first container units separated from the train. They moved in a slow arc toward the depot where ‘hot units waited to snag them and guide them aboard.
If the operator had been looking, he would have seen one of those AM2 container units detach itself from the convoy and scoot away from its fellows.
The depot’s shadow fell across the scene. And all became darkness.
“I’ll never be able to hold up my head in the stregg halls again,” Otho mourned.
“It’ll do you good,” Cind said, as she jockeyed the phony barge away from the pack of container ships closing on the yawning main depot bay.
“You could stand to lose about eighty kilos. Get your girlish figure back.”
“By my mother’s beard, you have no heart, woman,” Otho said—keeping an eye out for the patrol boat it was his job to track.
He figured they had about fifty-five minutes before it completed its routine circuit.
“I, Otho, have been ordered to do a thing that is less than glorious.”
“Poor baby,” Cind mock-sympathized.
She was getting used to the controls now. It had been awkward at first. After all, she was basically piloting a hulk—except it had been gutted, and a standard ship’s lifeboat hidden inside. The only clue that the container wasn’t standard was me slight cutout in the stern for the boat’s drivetube. It was so battered from millions of light-years of travel that only a close inspection would reveal the exit bay the Victory’s sailors had cut out with torches under Kilgour’s direction. The lifeboat contained herself, Otho, and half-a-dozen Bhor warriors.
“When my good friend Sten informed me that our first target was the quisling politicians of Dusable, I thought my old heart would break with joy,” Otho said.
“By my father’s frozen buttocks, I thought, but this is a true brother of the stregghorn. For there is nothing a true Bhor loves to hate so much as a politician. And here I was offered a whole planet of these vipers to slay.
“I tell you, Cind, I dreamed of a long-old age, spinning the tale of all the thick political skulls I cracked. Their blood would flow like stregg at a blessing. The only sorrow I foresaw was that there would be so many souls to drink to hell, I would not live to honor them all.”
“Quit trying to soften me up, Otho,” Cind said. “First off, you’re not that old. Secondly, you’ve done more than enough killing to boast for six lifetimes. So, forget it. I’m not going to suddenly feel sorry for you, and say, ‘Well… if you feel so strongly about it, dear… let the slaughter begin.’ ”
“A slaughter wouldn’t be necessary,” Otho said. “If only I could crush a throat or two, I would be satisfied. A happy Bhor.”
“No,” Cind said. “And that’s my last word on the subject.” Just then, the container coasted against one of the depot slices. It bumped once. Twice. Then she had it steady against the steel walls.
She applied small bursts of power, edging the container along the station’s hull. Finally, it came to rest against a repair port. Cind locked on.
“Now, let’s get inside,” Cind said. “And remember, Otho… No killing. We’re freedom fighters, remember? And a bloody trail of innocent civilian victims makes for a lousy image.”
“If you insist.” Otho sniffed. “I suppose I’ll become accustomed to these modern ways in time.”
A few blurred minutes, and they’d peeled the sealed port door with a small charge and were inside.
Cind clicked her com unit twice. A moment later, there was a return click from the
Victory
.
Step one complete.
Cind had never seen an AM2 depot in person, much less been inside one. Onscreen, the mission had looked easy. The schematic Kilgour had ferreted out of a reference library showed a very dull, functional structure. Only its purpose was dramatic. A storehouse and distribution center for the most efficient power source ever discovered.
The schematic showed that almost the entire depot was devoted to this purpose. There was only AM2, in the Imperium X-shielded bays. Living and work quarters. And a big-son-of-a-clot computer to keep things humming along.
Onscreen, it looked easy…
Cind glanced around the corridor she and her squad were slipping silently along. Nothing but gray walls, gray ceiling and floor, bathed in a faint glow of indirect lighting. From the repair port, the corridor ran straight for half a klick. Then it elbowed to the left. A quarter of a klick more, and they had reached the central computer.
For a change, Cind thought, the practice looked as easy as the theory.
Then they reached the elbow. Turned. And it quit being easy.
“By the curly hair on my dear mother’s chin,” Otho groaned, “it looks like the inside of a streggan’s lair.”
His comparison was quite accurate. The streggan—a mortal enemy of the ancient Bhor, now hunted to extinction—had lived in deep caverns reached through elaborate mazes scraped out of rock. To this day, the Bhor played a complicated game based on those legendary mazes.
Cind was looking at something very similar. Dusable’s engineers had only partly followed the schematics. Instead of one corridor leading in a single direction, the main tunnel split a dozen times.
There was not a clue which entrance she should take.
“How much time do we have?” Cind asked, a little desperate.
“It doesn’t matter,” Otho said.
“Dammit, it does. If that patrol boat—”
“You have surpassed your old mentor in many things,” Otho said. “But I see there is still some things you can learn. By my father’s scrawny backside, I tell you… that gives me hope.”
His brows beetled fondly at Cind. “A maze,” he said, “is a thing of purpose. The purpose can be to amuse, or to hide.”
He glanced at the tunnels snaking out before him. Shadows deep inside each one indicated other corridors eeling off to who knew where. “The beings of Dusable,” he said, “most likely are concerned with the second. From what I have heard, the politicians have almost everything to hide.”
“Why would they want to hide their central computer?” Cind asked. “I would think quick access would be important.”
Otho nodded. He strode down the center tunnel a short distance, thumping on walls. Solid. Then a hollow sound. He lifted a belt torch from his harness and quickly cut a small opening.
Otho peered inside. Then he chortled. “I knew it.” He waved for the others to join him.
Cind peered into the hole. There was a large compartment beyond, stacked with crates and barrels of contraband.
“The depot serves a double purpose,” Otho said. ‘To store AM2 for the Empire. And to enrich the black marketeers of Dusable. You see. I was correct As usual.“
“Well, good for you,” Cind said. “But that still doesn’t tell us which corridor to take.”
“Oh…
That
. No difficulty at all,” Otho said. “I was merely curious as to the purpose of this puzzle.”