Fleet of the Damned (22 page)

These precautions were ludicrously easy to subvert.

Oddly enough, the Tahn may have felt it dishonorable not to attack the Emperor—but, on the other hand, they preferred to do the dirty work through a cutout. "Honor" in a militaristic society is most often Rabelaisian: "Do what thou wilt shalt be the whole of the law."

Three highly committed Tahn immigrants—revolutionaries from the late Godfrey Alain's Fringe World movement—had been chosen and moved into position by Tahn intelligence two years previously. One was instructed to find a minor job at Fowler's port, Soward. A second found employment as a barkeep. The third was hired as a gardener by the occupants of one of the luxurious estates that ringed the Imperial grounds. He was an excellent gardener—the merchant prince who employed him swore he had never had a harder or more conscientious worker.

The method of attack would be by missile, a rather specially designed missile. The Tahn surmised correctly that Arundel was faced with nuclear shielding, so a conventional nuke within practical limits would not provide complete destruction. The final missile looked most odd. It was approximately ten meters long and was configured to provide a very specific sensor profile, a profile closely matching that of a much larger Guard gravlighter.

Inside it were two nuclear devices. Tahn science had figured out how to utilize the ancient shaped-charge effect—the Munro effect—with atomics. For shrouding and cone they used imperium, the shielding normally used to handle Anti-Matter Two, the Empire's primary power source. Behind the first device was the guidance mechanism, and back of that was the second device. The missile's nose was sharply pointed, less for aerodynamics than for blast effect.

Besides the guidance system, the missile also contained a duplicate of the IFF box that would be used by the grav-lighters on Empire Day.

The missile had been smuggled, in three sections, onto Prime World some months previously, transported to a leased warehouse, assembled, and set in its launch rack by a team of Tahn scientists.

The three Tahn from the Fringe Worlds were never told the location of the missile; they were merely instructed to be in certain locations with certain equipment at a certain time.

Two days before Empire Day, the Tahn who was a ramp rat at Soward installed a small timer-equipped device in a specified gravlighter's McLean generator.

One day before Empire Day, the controller for the three men boarded an offworld flight and disappeared.

At 1100 on Empire Day, the three men were in place.

The gardener sat ready behind the controls of one of his employer's gravsleds. No one in the mansion would notice—two canisters of a binary blood gas had seen to that.

The other two were atop a building in Soward, near the launch site, one watching a timer, the other counting grav-lighters as they lifted off toward Arundel.

Number seven was "theirs."

On the field, the pilot of the sabotaged gravlighter applied power. The lighter raised, belched smoke, and clanked down. The field's dispatcher swore and ordered a standby unit up to cross-load the passengers.

On the building, the timer touched zero, and the first man fingered a switch on his control box. At the warehouse, explosive charges blew a ragged hole in the roof. McLean-assist takeoff units lifted the missile into the air, then dropped away as the Yukawa drive cut in and the missile smashed forward at full power.

Kilometers away, the third man also went into action. At the commanded time, he lifted the gravsled straight up. His mouth was very dry as he hoped that the palace's aerial sensors would be a little slow.

His own control panel beeped at him—the missile was within range. He focused the riflelike device toward Arundel, dim in the morning haze, and touched a switch. A low-power laser illuminated Arundel's gateway. A second beep informed him that the missile had acquired the target.

For the three Tahn, their mission was accomplished.

Now their orders were to evade capture and make their way to a given rendezvous point outside Soward. Of course, Tahn intelligence had no intention either of making a pickup or of leaving a trail. Both the launch and the aiming control boxes contained secondary timers and explosive charges. Seconds after the missile signaled, they went off.

No one saw the explosion that vaporized the Tahn as they scurried toward a ladder, but a watch officer at Arundel saw the gravsled ball into flame and pinwheel down. His hand was halfway to an alert button when the automatic sensors correctly interpreted that the gravlighter headed for the palace was moving at a speed far beyond reason and screamed warning.

The Eternal Emperor was in his apartments alternately cursing to the head of his Gurkha bodyguards about the necessity to wear full-dress uniform and pinning on various decorations. Captain Chittahang Limbu was half listening and smiling agreeably. Limbu was still somewhat in awe of his current position. Formerly a Subadar major, he had been promoted to Sten's old job as head of the Emperor's bodyguard. This was the highest position a Gurkha had ever held in Imperial history.

He was fondly remembering the celebration his home village had thrown for him on his last leave, when the overhead alarm bansheed its warning.

The Emperor jumped, sticking himself with a medal pin. Limbu was a stocky brown blur, slapping a switch on the panel at his waist and then manhandling the Emperor forward, toward a suddenly gaping hole in the wall.

Whatever was happening, his orders were clear and in no way allowed for the Gurkhas' love of combat.

The missile's impact point was almost perfect. The thin nose squashed as designed, allowing the missile to hang in place for a microsecond. The first nuke blew, and its directional blast tore through the shielding. The missile continued to crumple, and then the second bomb exploded.

And Arundel, heart of the Empire, vanished into the center of a newborn sun.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

S
ten itemized chaos as he slowly steered his combat car over the rubble that had been Cavite City's main street. This was not the first city or world that he had been on when the talking stopped and the shooting started. But this appeared to be the first time he had been in on the ground floor of a Empirewide war.

Experience is valuable, he reminded himself, which avoided his worry about Brijit.

Sten had brought his miraculously undamaged ships down onto Cavite Base at nightfall. Sometimes dishonesty pays—he had located his supply base in a disused warehouse in the test yards. As a result, the weaponry and supplies that Sutton had acquired had not been touched by the Tahn attack.

He ordered his boats to resupply and return to low orbit immediately. He would try to find out from fleet headquarters how bad things really were.

Cavite Base was a boil and confusion of smoke and flame.

Sten commandeered a combat car and headed for the Carlton Hotel. If it still stood, he assumed that what remained of van Doorman's command staff would be there.

Cavite City hadn't suffered major damage, Sten estimated. Imperial Boulevard—the central street—had absorbed some incendiary and AP bombs or rockets, but most of the buildings still stood. There weren't any civilians on the night-hung streets other than rescue workers and fire-fighting teams. Contrary to legend, disaster generally made people pull together or retreat into their homes—rioting in the streets had always been a myth.

Sten veered the combat car aside as a gravsled, hastily painted with red crosses on the landing pads, whistled past. In the distance, he could hear the sounds of combat. That was the storming of the Siglnt center—since the Tahn had not been able to land, those revolutionaries who had occupied the center had died to the last man.

Sten did not know, or much care, what the shooting signified—the situation was bad enough right now for him. He grounded the combat car outside the Carlton and started for the entrance.

Security, he noted wryly, had improved—three sets of SP men checked him before he hit the main doors. But some things did not change. The two dress-uniformed patrolmen still snapped their willyguns to salute as he came up the steps. Sten wondered if either of them realized that their uniforms were now spattered with muck, blood, and what appeared to be vomit.

If Cavite City was chaos, Admiral van Doorman's headquarters was worse. Sten desperately needed to know how bad the damage was and what his orders should be. He started at the fleet operations office. It was dark and deserted. Only the computer terminals flashed and analyzed the disaster of the day. A passing tech told him that all operations personnel appeared to have died in the attack.

Fine. He would try fleet intelligence.

Sten should have known what was going on when he saw that the door to the intelligence center yawned wide, with no sentries.

Inside, he found madness—quite literally.

Ship Captain Ladislaw sat behind a terminal, programming and reprogramming. He greeted Sten happily and then showed him what dispositions would be made on the morrow, moving the gradated dots that were the ships of the 23rd Fleet across the starchart covering one wall.

The Tahn would be repelled handily, he said. Sten knew that most of the ships he was chessboarding around were broken and smoking on the landing field at the base.

He smiled, agreed with Ladislaw, then stepped behind him, one-handed a sopor injection from his belt medpak, and shot it into the base of the ship captain's spine. Ladislaw folded instantly across his printout of impossibilities, and Sten headed for van Doorman's office.

Admiral Xavier Rijn van Doorman was quite calm and quite collected. His command center was an oasis of peace.

Sten saw Brijit peering in from the half-open door that led to van Doorman's quarters and thanked Someone that she was still alive.

Van Doorman was studying the status board over his desk. Sten glanced at it and winced—the situation was even worse than he had anticipated. For all intents and purposes, the 23rd Fleet had ceased to exist.

At dawn that morning, the 23rd Fleet strength consisted of one heavy cruiser, the
Swampscott
, two light cruisers, some thirteen destroyers, fifty-six assorted obsolete patrol-craft, minelayer/sweepers, Sten's TacDiv, one hospital ship, and the usual gaggle of supply and maintenance craft.

The status readout showed one light cruiser destroyed, and one heavily damaged. Six destroyers were out of action, as were about half of the light combat ships and support elements.

The oddness was that the
Swampscott
was untouched. It had survived because of Sten's attack on the
Forez
. The
Swampscott
had been one of Atago's self-assigned targets.

Sten's orders were simple—to keep his tacships in space. Van Doorman would provide any support necessary until the situation straightened itself out. Sten was given complete freedom of command. Any assistance Intelligence or Operations could provide was his for the asking—one madman, and corpses.

Just wonderful, Sten thought.

Yessir, Admiral.

His snappy salute was returned with equal fervor. He saw the blankness in van Doorman's eyes and wondered.

In the corridor, Brijit was in his arms and explaining. Her mother had died in the attack. There was nothing left. Nothing at all.

Probably Sten should have stayed with her that night. But the coldness that was Sten's sheath, the coldness that had come from the death of his parents years before on Vulcan, the coldness that had seen too many drinking friends die, stopped him. Instead there was a hug, and he was hurrying toward the com center. He wanted the
Gamble
in for a pickup.

As the
Gamble
flared in, settling in the middle of the boulevard outside the Carlton, Sten found time to be amazed at van Doorman's ability to control himself.

That was another cipher. But one to watch very carefully, Sten thought, as the
Gamble's
port yawned and he ran toward it.

He had already forgotten van Doorman, Brijit, and the likelihood that he and his people would die in the Caltor System.

His mind was hearing only "independent command…"

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

T
he eternal emperor spotted something and waddled, bulky in his radiation suit, through the nuclear ruin that had been one of his rose gardens. Behind him, willyguns ready, moved two suited Gurkhas—Captain Limbu and a naik. Above and to their rear floated a combat car, guns sweeping the grounds.

Limbu had been successful in shoving the Emperor into the McLean-controlled slide tube that led 2,000 meters into the underground sanctuary and control center under the castle, then had dived after him. Radiation-proof air locks had slammed closed as they fell.

Very few others aboveground had lived—there were only a handful of Gurkhas, less than one platoon of the newly reformed Praetorian guard, and fewer than a dozen members of the Imperial household staff. Arundel and its immediate grounds were leveled. The outer layer of the bailey walls had been peeled, but there had been little damage to the administrative offices inside them.

The only structure still standing inside the palace grounds was the Imperial Parliament building, some ten kilometers from ground zero. This was ironic, because its survival was owed to the fact that the Emperor, not wishing to look at his politicians' headquarters, had built a kilometer-high mountain between the palace and the Parliament building, a mountain that successfully diverted the blast from the twinned bombs.

Civilian casualties on the planet were very slight, most of the destruction having been restricted to the Emperor's own fifty-five-kilometer palace grounds.

The Emperor bent, awkwardly picked something up from the ground, and held it out for the Gurkhas' admiration. Somehow, one solitary rose had been burnt to instant ash yet had held together. The Gurkhas looked at the rose, faces expressionless through their face shields, then spun, hearing the whine of a McLean generator. Their guns were up aiming.