by David Weber
* * *
Lawrence Jefferson sat in his private office at home. His split-image com screen linked him to another mat-trans half a planet from Bergren’s—half showing the installation’s control room; the other half a huge, tarpaulin-covered shape waiting on the transmission platform—and he poured more sherry into his glass as he watched both images. No one at the other end knew he was observing them, and he supposed his high-tech spyhole was a bit risky, but he had no choice, and at least the Lieutenant Governor of Earth had access to the best technology available. His link had been established using a high security fold-space com that bounced its hyper frequency on a randomized pattern twice a second. That made simply detecting it all but impossible and, coupled with the physical relays through which it also bounced, meant tapping or tracing it was impossible. Besides, anyone who happened to spot it would report it to the Minister of Planetary Security, now wouldn’t they?
He chuckled at the thought and sipped sherry as he watched the purposeful activity in the control room. No one—aside from the men and women who’d built and staffed it for him—even knew it existed, and all but three of them were on duty tonight. The three absent faces had been killed in a tragic flyer accident almost two years previously, and though their deaths had been a blow, their fellows had taken up the slack without difficulty. Now his carefully chosen techs checked their equipment with absolute concentration, for the upcoming transmission—the one and only transmission the installation would ever make—had to be executed perfectly.
It would never have done for Jefferson to admit he was nervous. Nor would it have been true, for “nervous” fell far short of what he felt tonight. This was the absolutely critical phase, the one which would make him Emperor of Humanity—if it worked—and anxiety mingled with a fierce expectation. He’d worked over a decade—more than twenty-five years, if he counted from his first contact with Anu—for this moment, and even as a part of him feared it would fail, the gambler part of him could hardly wait to throw the dice.
It was odd, but, in a way, he’d actually be sorry if it worked. Not because he didn’t want the crown, and certainly not because he regretted what he had to do to get it, but because the game would be over. He would have carried out the most audacious coup in the history of mankind, but all the daring, the concentration and subtle manipulation, would be a thing of the past, and he could never share the true magnitude of his accomplishment with anyone else.
He shook his head at his own perversity, and a small smile flickered. The curse of his own makeup, he chided himself, was that he could never be entirely content, however well things went. He always wanted more, but there were limits, and he supposed he’d just have to settle for absolute power.
* * *
Bergren straightened in his chair as five Narhani entered the outbound terminal with a huge, tarpaulin-draped object on a counter-grav dolly. The centaurs fussed with their burden, placing it carefully on the platform and taking their places about it in a protective circle, and, despite all his implants could do, the lieutenant swallowed nervously as he flashed a mental command to the power sub-net. It was a routine testing order, but tonight it had another effect, and he winced as the induced surge flashed through the gamma bank of capacitors and an audio alarm shrilled.
The Narhani on the platform looked up, long-snouted heads twisting around in confusion as the high-pitched warble hurt their ears, and Bergren sent quick, fresh commands to his computer to shut it down. Then he leaned forward and keyed a microphone.
“Sorry, gentlemen,” he told the Narhani over the speakers in the terminal area. “We’ve just lost one of our main capacitor banks. Until we get it back, our transmission capacity’s down to eighty percent of max.”
“What does that mean?” the senior Narhani asked, and Bergren shrugged for the benefit of the control room security recorders.
“I’m afraid it means you’re over the limits for our available power, sir,” he replied smoothly.
“May we shift to another platform?”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t matter, sir. As you know, this system is very energy intensive. For this much mass, any of the platforms would draw on the same capacitor reserve, so you might as well stay where you are.”
“But did you not say you cannot send us?” The Narhani sounded confused, and Bergren hid a smile.
“No, sir. I just can’t transmit the entire load at once. I’ll have to send your freight through in one transmission, then send you and the other members of your party through in a second, that’s all.”
“I see.” The Narhani spokesman and his companions spoke softly and quickly in their own language. Bergren didn’t know what the object they were accompanying was, but he knew they were a security detachment, and he forced himself to sit calmly, hiding any trace of anxiety over what they might decide. After a moment, the spokesman looked back up and raised the volume of his vocoder.
“Can we not send at least one of our number through with our freight?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. We’ll be right at the limits of our available power, and Regs prohibit me from sending passengers under those conditions.”
“Is there risk to our freight?” The question was sharp for a Narhani.
“No, sir,” Bergren soothed. “Not if it’s not alive. The regulations are so specific because a power fluctuation that won’t harm inanimate objects can cause serious neural damage in living passengers. It’s just a precaution.”
“I see.” The spokesman looked back at his companions for a moment, then twitched his crest in the Narhani equivalent of a shrug. “We would prefer to wait until your power systems have been repaired,” he told Bergren, “but our schedule is very tight. Can you assure us our freight will arrive undamaged?”
“Yes, sir,” Bergren said confidently.
“Very well,” the Narhani sighed. He spoke to his companions in their own language again, and all five of them stepped off the platform and moved back behind the safety line.
“Thank you, sir,” Bergren said, and his fold-com implant sent a brief, prerecorded burst transmission to a waiting relay as he began to prep for transmission.
* * *
“Alert signal,” a woman said quietly in the control room on Jefferson’s screen. The two men at the main console nodded acknowledgment without ever opening their eyes, and one of them activated the stealthed sensor arrays watching Shepard Center from orbit.
“Good signal,” his companion announced in the toneless voice of a man concentrating on his neural feed. “We’ve got their field strength. Coming up nicely now.”
“Synchronizer on-line,” the third tech said. “Power up and nominal. Switching to auto sequence.”
* * *
Carl Bergren watched his readouts through his feeds. This was the tricky part that was going to earn him that big stack of credits. The settings had to be almost right, and he straightened his mouth as he felt it trying to curl in a grin of tension. The power levels were already off the optimum curve, thanks to the failure of the gamma bank, and he very carefully cut back the charge on the delta bank. Not by much. Only by a tiny, virtually undetectable fraction. But it would be enough—if whoever was in charge of the other part of the operation got his numbers right—and he sent the alert signal to Birhat and waited for the response.
* * *
Lawrence Jefferson leaned towards his com, clutching his wineglass, and his heart pounded. This was the moment, he thought. The instant towards which he’d worked so long.
“Their field’s building now,” the sensor tech murmured. “Looking good … looking good … stand by … stand by … coming up to peak … now!”
* * *
Carl Bergren sent the release code, and the capacitors screamed. The shrouded object on the platform vanished as the mat-trans sent a mighty pulse of power into hyper-space, and he held his breath. The transmission he’d sent out was almost precisely four millionths of a percent too weak to reach Birhat. It would waste its power twenty
light-minutes short of the funnel waiting to catch it for the reception units, but no one would ever know if—
* * *
The control room on Lawrence Jefferson’s com screen was silent, its personnel frozen. Not even a mat-trans was truly instantaneous over an eight-hundred-light-year range, and Jefferson held his breath while he waited.
* * *
A soft tone beeped, and Carl Bergren let out a whooshing breath as the Birhat mat-trans operator acknowledged receipt. He’d done it! The person at the other end of the hypercom link didn’t realize someone else had invaded the system. He thought he’d just received Bergren’s transmission!
The lieutenant suppressed an urge to wipe his forehead. Deep inside, he hadn’t really believed his employer could pull it off, and it was hard to keep his elation out of his voice as he activated his mike.
“Birhat has confirmed reception, sir,” he told the Narhani spokesman. “If you’d step onto the platform, I can send you through now, as well.”
“We did it!” someone shouted gleefully. “They accepted the transmission!”
The staff of Jefferson’s illicit mat-trans whistled and clapped, and the Lieutenant Governor checked the computer tied into his com. Good. The exact readouts of the transmission, which just happened to carry the same identifier code as Lieutenant Bergren’s system, had been properly stored. He’d have to wait until the regular Shepard Center data collection upload late next week to exchange them for Bergren’s actual log of the transmission, but that part of the pipeline had already been tested and proved secure. It was inconvenient, since he would have preferred to make the switch sooner, yet there was nothing he could do about it. The mass readings of the transit would prove the statue Birhat had just received had not, in fact, been the solid block of marble Bergren had just destroyed, and for his Reichstag fire to work, it was vital that Battle Fleet itself discover that fact when the time came.
He smiled at the thought, then looked back at his link to the hidden control room and its celebrating personnel. Two of them had cracked bottles of champagne, and he watched them pouring their glasses full while they chattered and laughed with the release of long-held tension. They’d worked hard for this moment—and, of course, for the huge pile of credits they’d been promised—and the Lieutenant Governor leaned back in his chair with a sigh of matching relief. They deserved their moment of triumph, and he let them celebrate it for another few minutes, then pressed a button.
Half a world away, the explosive charges three long-dead technicians had installed at his orders detonated. One of the control room personnel had time for a single scream of terror before the plunging roof of the subterranean installation turned him and all his fellows into mangled gruel.
* * *
Carl Bergren dutifully logged a full report on the capacitor bank failure and completed his shift without further incident. He turned over to his relief at shift change and signed out through the security checkpoints, then walked slowly to his parked flyer while he pondered the entire operation. Whoever had arranged it, he thought, had to have incredible reach and command equally incredible resources. He’d had to gain access to the routing schedules weeks in advance to be sure Bergren would be on duty when the transmission came through. Then he’d had to get someone in to sabotage the capacitors, and he’d had to make sure the sabotage was untraceable. And he’d had to have the resources to build his own mat-trans and find a way to monitor the Shepard Center system precisely enough to time his own transmission perfectly.
It was big, Bergren told himself as he unlocked his flyer, climbed in, and settled into the flight couch. It was really big, and there couldn’t be more than a dozen people—probably less—who could have put it all together. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which of those dozen or so it had really been, and little Carl Bergren would live high on the hog for the rest of his natural life.
He smiled and activated his flyer’s drive, and the resultant explosion blew two entire levels of the parking garage and thirty-six innocent bystanders into very tiny pieces. Forty minutes later, an anonymous spokesman for the Sword of the Lord claimed responsibility for the blast.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The last reeking powder smoke drifted away, and Sean MacIntyre surveyed a scene that had become too familiar. The only thing that had changed were the colors the dead wore, he thought bitterly, for the eastern Temple Guard had been reduced to barely forty thousand men, and they were being held back to cover the Temple itself. He was fighting the secular lords’ armies now, and he shuddered as he watched the “merely” wounded writhe among the corpses.
His army was out of the Keldark Valley at last and, as he’d known it would, marching circles about its opponents. High-Captain Terrahk had fallen back on Baricon, but he’d lacked the men to hold an attack from the west. There were too many avenues of approach, and when Tamman blasted his way through a gap with fifteen thousand men and got around his flank, Terrahk had retreated desperately. His attempt to stand had cost him his entire rearguard—another eight thousand men (most, Sean was thankful, captured and not killed)—and Sean had broken out into the rolling hills of the Duchy of Keldark.
The more open terrain offered vastly improved scope for maneuver, but every step he advanced also drew him further from the valley and exposed his supply route to counterattack. At the moment, the Temple was too hard pressed to think about cutting his communications, and he kept reminding himself they didn’t really have “cavalry” in the classic Terran sense, but he also kept thinking about what a Pardalian Bedford Forrest or Phil Sheridan could do if it ever got loose in his rear. His edge in reconnaissance would make it hard for them to get past him, but he simply didn’t have the men to garrison his supply line properly. He could have freed them up, but only by reducing his field army, which, in turn, would have reduced his ability to keep advancing.
He sighed and sent his branahlk mincing forward. The beast whistled unhappily at the battlefield stench, and Sean shared its distaste. Whoever had commanded the Temple’s forces in this last battle should be shot, he thought grimly, assuming one of his riflemen hadn’t already taken care of that. He supposed it was a sign of the Temple’s desperation, but ordering forty-five thousand pikemen and only ten thousand musketeers to face him in the open had been the same as sending them straight to the executioner.
Had Sean armed his men in the classic Pardalian proportion of pikes to firearms, he could have fielded close to the quarter-million men the Temple credited him with. They had all the weapons they’d captured from the Malagoran Guard plus, effectively, all the weapons of Lord Marshal Rokas’s Holy Host, including its entire artillery park, but he’d opted to call forward only enough reinforcements—and replacements, he thought bitterly, recalling the five thousand casualties Erastor had cost—to put sixty thousand infantry and dragoons and two hundred guns in the field. Two hundred battalions of rifles, most veterans of Yortown, Erastor, and Baricon, supported by a hundred and fifty arlaks and fifty chagors, had been more than enough to slaughter the secular levies of Keldark, Camathan, Sanku, and Walak. He controlled all of northeastern North Hylar, now, from the Shalokars to the sea, and he wondered dismally how many more men were going to die before the Temple agreed to negotiate. God knew he and Stomald had been asking—almost begging—it to ever since the fall of Erastor! Couldn’t the Inner Circle understand they didn’t want to kill its troops? Brashan still couldn’t get any of his remotes inside the hundred-kilometer zone around the Temple, so they couldn’t know what was passing in Vroxhan’s council meetings, but the prelates seemed willing to send every fighting man in North Hylar to his death before they’d even talk to “demon-worshipers”!
The litter-bearers were already busy. Theirs was the most horrible duty of all, yet they went about it with a compassion which still surprised him. The Angels’ Army recognized its tactical superiority as well as its commander did, and, like Sean, most of its troops knew the men littering the field had been utterly outclassed
. His own casualties, dead and wounded alike, had been under a thousand, and most of his men had come, in their own ways, to share his sickness at slaughtering their foes. It was too one-sided, and the men they were killing weren’t the ones they wanted. With every battle, every army they smashed, their hatred of the Inner Circle grew, yet it wasn’t a religious hatred. “The Angels” had always been careful not to deliver an actual religious message—other than backing the Malagoran hankering for freedom of conscience—and since Harry’s revelation of the truth, Stomald had begun stressing the Temple’s political tyranny and enormous, self-serving wealth far more strongly. The Angels’ Army longed to settle accounts once and for all with the old men in Aris who kept sending other people out to die, but more even than that, it wanted simply to be rid of them.
Sean drew rein and watched a group of litter-bearers troop past with their pitiful, broken burdens. Walking wounded limped and staggered back with them, and at least Harry, coached by Brashan and Israel’s med computers, had been teaching the Malagoran surgeons things they’d never dreamed were possible. The introduction of ether, alone, had revolutionized Pardalian medicine, and Sean had sworn a solemn oath that the first thing he would have sent to Pardal from Birhat would be medical teams with proper regeneration gear. He couldn’t breathe life back into the dead, but he could, by God, give the maimed, whichever side they’d fought upon, their lives back!
His lip curled as he wondered how much of that fierce determination was an effort to assuage his own guilt. With today’s body count, the war he and his friends had inadvertently started had cost over a hundred thousand battlefield deaths. He had no idea how many more had perished of the diseases that always ravaged nonindustrial armies, and he was terrified of what the number would finally be. He could trace every step of the journey which had led them to this, and given their options as they took each of those steps, he still saw no other course they might have chosen, yet all this death and brutal agony seemed an obscene price to buy five marooned people a ticket home.
