Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  "Uh… Yes, Your Majesty!"

  "Walsh."

  "Yes, Your Highness."

  "What's the status on the AM2 tax bill?"

  "I'm not sure we have enough votes to carry Parliament, sir."

  "What's the hangup?"

  "The Back Benchers are arguing that the tax increase goes against your promise."

  "Big deal. They break promises all the time. Why can't I? It goes with the territory. Which is politics. Which is nothing more than lies and damned lies."

  "Yessir. But they don't feel the same now they've given up their independence. We offered AM2 at bargain-basement prices if they became Dominions of the Empire."

  "Sure, I remember. I also remember that I'm the boy with the hand on the AM2 nozzle. I'm the sole supplier. Ergo, I get to set the price."

  "Yessir. I know that, sir. It's the other members of Parliament. They say they've all got deficits that are choking them."

  "Well, tell them they're going to have to join the club. Because that's why I've got to have my tax increase. My treasury is tapped out. Nary a bone in the cupboard. I can't believe those people. Clot, I'm the one with the whole burden. Without me, they've got zip. I figured six years of being under the thumb of the privy council would have proven that."

  "True, Your Highness. But I've heard some whispers in the halls that maybe things weren't so bad, uh, when you, uh, were gone, and the privy council was running things."

  "Don't worry about whispers in the hall… Kenna?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty."

  "I want you to help Walsh on this."

  "Delighted, sir. As always."

  "I want Dusable behind me when it comes to a vote. I want a big push. And I want a bigger vote margin. Unanimous would be nice, but I'll settle for 99 percent."

  "I'm not sure that's possible, sir."

  "Dusable is one fat and sassy system right now, is it not?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty."

  "I've made you guys a principal AM2 depot. Which means you get to skim all you like."

  "I protest, Your Majesty. The good citizens of Dusable—"

  "Knock it off, Kenna. If you weren't stealing I'd be suspicious. Point is, I've been giving you all the goodies. Made you one of the top jewels in my crown. Now it's time to pay the piper. And get out the vote."

  "I'll do my best, sir."

  "That's not good enough. Theft is required. And arm breaking. I want this Parliament brought into line. At least until it recesses. I can always pack it with more of our own people afterward."

  "Consider it done, Your Highness."

  "Bleick."

  "Yessir."

  "You're working with Poyndex on that high priestess character, aren't you? What was her name?"

  "Zoran, sir. High priestess of the Cult of the Emperor."

  "That's the fruitcake I mean."

  "Yessir. I have that assignment."

  "What's going on? I was expecting a few godheads in my pocket by now. I badly need to boost my image with the ignorant masses. Damn, but the poor can be hard on a ruler. We've got riots all over the place. Bad for business."

  "A few temples built in my honor could restore faith in the economy, and seriously trim this depression."

  "To be frank, sir… I haven't had much luck with the woman. She's either not available, or, when she is, she talks in circles and giggles a lot. I think she's crazy."

  "Like a fox, Bleick. She's a nut, for sure. But she's smarter than most people in this room. Tell her I'm getting tired of pouring credits into her organization. With no return."

  "I spelled that out for her, sir. In absolute no-nonsense terms."

  "Hmmm. I smell a skunk. Fine. Forget her. Exile her or something. Tell her it's time for her to reflect on the Spheres. Tell Poyndex to have her sent to her proper reward. Something quick, and not painful. Then suborn her second-in-command.

  "If that doesn't work, keep going down the list until you find somebody with big eyes and a small brain. Talk to Poyndex. He'll know what I mean."

  The door hissed open. Poyndex entered—with the pinched bad-news look on his face again.

  The Eternal Emperor made immediate motions for his staff to make themselves scarce. They did.

  "Sit."

  Poyndex obeyed, sitting stiff in his seat, almost at attention. The Emperor pulled a bottle of Scotch from his desk. The ancient Earth whisky had taken him years to reinvent. He poured a glass and braced himself with a long swallow. The Emperor pointedly didn't offer Poyndex any.

  "Okay. What's happening this time?"

  "It's Sten, sir."

  "I figured that. What about him?"

  Poyndex leaned forward across the desk. The man was honestly bewildered. "Sir. My people have been over every connection you gave us a hundred times. And we've come up with many more. But, it's no dice, sir. No one, but no one, knows him, sir. Except in passing. We've brainscanned people. Had them worked over by experts. But as near as I can tell… Sten doesn't have a friend in the Empire."

  The Emperor wooshed, then took another heavy slug of his drink. Poyndex noted that his once-clear features were getting puffy and there was a small red web of a blemish beside his nose.

  "That doesn't scan," the Emperor said. "Even the lowest being in the Empire has at least one friend. Even the misguided attract their own. Or, I should say, especially the misguided."

  Poyndex turned his hands palms up. "It's true, just the same, sir. The real trouble is, with all the records on Sten and Kilgour wiped… we don't have much to go on."

  "Except my memory."

  "Which is excellent, sir. The few breaks we've had have all come from you."

  The Emperor stared at Poyndex, reading his face. No. The man wasn't catering to his ego. He meant it. The Emperor wondered for a moment if maybe he was beginning to lean on Poyndex more than was healthy.

  Beings could get very dangerous ideas… if one depended on them too much. Only Poyndex, for example, knew of the bomb that had once been planted in his gut. A bomb wired to that… that thing.

  That great ship, out there beyond the Alva Sector, through the discontinuity.

  The great ship that controlled him.

  The Emperor's mind shuddered at the thought of the ship with the white room and the disembodied voice that spoke to him.

  He shivered. Took another drink. Then he remembered. Correction: former controller. It was Poyndex who'd set up the special surgical team that had removed the bomb from his body and cut his link with the controller.

  Another drink. Yesss. Much better now. He was the last Eternal Emperor. Until the Empire's end… Which would be?

  Never.

  He pulled himself together. "There's only one thing to be done, then," he said. "Somehow, I have to make more time. Get an interrogation team on standby. Every spare second I have, I'll devote to my memories of Sten. Any detail the team digs up from me, you can get cracking on immediately."

  Poyndex hesitated. "Are you sure that's wise, sir?"

  The Emperor frowned. "I know it's not wise. I've already fallen into the jimmycarter, for crying out loud. Micromanaging every detail in my empire. Next thing you know, I'll be going over the damned newyear's greeting list with Bleick. But… dammit… what choice do I have?"

  "Sten is just one being, Your Majesty," Poyndex said. "Let us deal with him."

  "I can't take that chance. Sten is the symbol of everything that's gone wrong. Citizens have no faith. They won't follow orders. They question my every pronouncement. When I'm the only one who really cares about them."

  "Who else can take the long view? I mean the really long view. I see things not in years, but generations."

  The Emperor fell silent a moment. "No. This is something I have to do," he finally said. "Damn his eyes!" And the Eternal Emperor drained the glass.

  Chapter Eight

  HOME.

  It was strewn across a thousand thousand kilometers of space, a slowly whirling sargasso of industrial junk.

  Vulca
n.

  Sten stared at the ruins through his suit's faceplate. The sound of his breathing seemed loud.

  This was the hellworld where Sten had been born, an artificial factory planet built and run as a violent, dangerous industrial plant by The Company. His parents, Migrant/Unskilled laborers, and his brothers and sisters had died here, killed by an executive's callous decision about secrecy.

  The boy that was Sten exploded into futile rebellion. He was caught, and sentenced to Exotic Section, an experimental area where the workers were assured of a slow, painful death. But Sten survived. Survived, learned to fight, and—his fingers touched the deathneedle sheathed in his arm—"built" his knife from alien crystal.

  He had escaped Exotic Section, and become a Delinq, living in the secret ducts and deserted storehouses of the planet, trying to stay one theft ahead of The Company's Sociopatrolmen and brainburn. He had met Bet here, his first real love. And here he had been saved from death by Ian Mahoney, coldcocked after a blown raid and drafted into the Imperial Guard.

  Mahoney had again "volunteered" him—this time from infantry assault training into Mahoney's own covert force: Mantis—where he learned the dark alleys of intelligence and the darker skills of secret violence. How to kill any being without leaving a mark. Or, more importantly, how to seduce or corrupt them into your service, without them ever realizing they'd been used.

  And then Mahoney had sent him back to Vulcan with Kilgour and the rest of his Mantis Team. Mission: destroy the man who killed Sten's family.

  His first great success. In the course of that destruction, Sten, three ETs and three humans, including Ida the Gypsy, had created and led a planetwide revolution.

  That minirising brought in the Imperial Guard, and Sten's team came out, Sten himself on a life-support system.

  He had never found out what happened afterward to Vulcan. And he had never wanted to know. He assumed that new management had come in Vulcan as an only slightly less lethal factory.

  Evidently not, he thought, looking at the shambles in front of him. Or, anyway, not for very long. Even if it was needed for defense during the Tahn war, the privy-council era would have made Vulcan unprofitable—AM2 had simply become too rare and expensive to waste running a heavy-industry vacuum-based plant.

  Vulcan had been abandoned, looted, and gutted. At its height it resembled a junkyard anyway—factories, quarters, and warehouses had been built, used, and discarded without being wrecked out.

  But now it looked as if the gods of Chaos had looked on man's work, found it amateurish, and decided to improve matters.

  Somewhere in this scatter would be—or so Sten hoped—whatever secret Mahoney had guided him toward.

  At first, when Sten considered Mahoney's cryptic shout, he had thought of Smallbridge—the world Sten had bought some years earlier that was the only home he had ever known, besides Imperial Service.

  Improbable. If Mahoney meant "home" to be something useful to Sten—best theory: a weapon against the Emperor—he would not have stashed it in a place known to Sten's friends and enemies. Plus, to the best of Sten's knowledge, Mahoney had been on Smallbridge exactly once, and that was to warn him the privy council's goon squad was on its way. Not exactly time enough to build a hidey-hole.

  No—not Smallbridge. It was far too obvious—even considering a purloined-letter device—for an Irisher as subtle as Mahoney.

  And so Sten had forced himself to look up the interstellar coordinates to Vulcan and issue the orders. Even if nothing is here, he thought, this is an adequate temporary hideout. Destroying Thoresen had been a nonrecord Highest Authority mission, which meant Vulcan's importance and its relation to the Grand Traitor wouldn't show up, even on Sten's fairly accurate, highly classified Mantis file. Sten, experienced soldier that he was, was operating on the assumption that Mahoney's trick program hadn't worked and the Empire knew everything.

  Of course, there's yet another possibility, his mind went on, spinning further into the double- triple- quadruple-think that eventually drives all counterintelligence types into the gaga ward. If the Emperor's got a real fine memory, and has put together his own private termination file, then he's just liable to remember the orders to destroy that mysterious Bravo Project on Sten's home world.

  "Lad,"

  Sten came back to the present thankfully, before he took this feedback nonthinking any further and attempted to disappear down his own throat.

  "Ah dinnae want to seem like Ah'm noodgin', but i's gettin' on, 'n Ah'm noo lookin't forward't' bein't a Resurrection Man. Shall we be gettin' at it?"

  The Mantis soldiers who had died on Vulcan—Jorgensen, Frick, Frack—had been friends of Kilgour's as well. Alex himself had almost died, defusing a nuke.

  Sten nodded, then realized there was no way Alex could see the gesture through the thick alloy helmet.

  "Let's move."

  He touched controls and sent his suit jetting forward, on its tiny Yukawa drive, toward the main clump of wreckage—Vulcan's central core.

  He was probably being foolish, but rather than use one of the deep-space worksuits—which were really small spaceships with a tiny bicycle-type seat and room enough to scratch when and where it inevitably itched—he and Kilgour had corseted themselves into fighting armor.

  Vulcan, he had rationalized, might still have a McLean generator on, and some gravity. Or maybe its whirling bulk would give some weight, and it would be better walking rather than trying to fly the canister-shaped deep-space suits through the corridors.

  Behind him the Victory hung, with the destroyer Aoife as screen. He had ordered the Bennington and Aisling to proceed directly to Sten's eventual final destination, after his minifleet had spent several ship-days after the raid pursuing nonrational trajectories, eluding pursuit.

  Beyond the Victory he also had a full flotilla of tacships on CAP around Vulcan.

  A trap was unlikely.

  But Sten had not lived to his present age without being careful, native caution his training had amplified. One commandment, going back into prehistory and old Earth, was from an odd unit called Rogers' Rangers—"Don't never take no chances unless you have to."

  The question now was, Where in this scrapheap was he to look?

  "Sten." It was Freston, back aboard Victory. He had demoted himself from captain to man the com board and was sitting on an open-miked tightbeam caster to the suited men.

  "I've got a transmission."

  "Where?"

  "From Vulcan. A very weak broadband signal's coming from the core. Weak, and erratic. Like an SAR beacon that's running dry. I've gotten a triangulation from the Aoife. On your orientation, it's at twelve o'clock, near the tip."

  "That was called the Eye," Sten advised. "Stand by."

  He braked the suit, killing velocity and steering toward Alex, aiming himself so his suit's own directional com pointed directly toward Kilgour.

  "Ah heard," Alex said, without preamble. "An' thae raises more sarky questions thae i' answers. If Mahoney left somethin' aboot, p'raps he'd bolt a wee transponder to it. T' make life simpler f'r us.

  "But Mahoney whidny hae left i' runnin', i' i's a truly deepy darky secret, aye? He would'a keyed it't' go off frae somethin' or someone when thae got close. Playin' Cold an' Warm wi' the bairns, as it were. Nae't' mention battery life an' such, which i' Preston's watchin' his gauges, seems to be runnin't doon."

  "Possibly," Sten agreed. "Which means that somebody else set it off."

  "Wi'out knowin' it or wi'out bein' able to retrieve th' goodies. Or th' whole thing's boobytrapped an' th' mad bomber had nae th' patience't' let us find his handiwork blind an' then blowin't ourselves oop."

  "Right. Which gives us something to really worry about—once we're onboard."

  "Aye. Noo. Home's been narrowed, assumin't we're thinkin't correct, an' yon beepitybeepity's noo a wild signal frae some bit ae forsook electronics."

  "Agreed. Home's somewhere in the Eye. Something that we knew about. Or I did, anyway. Our h
ideout—that old liner—was around there. Nope. DNC. Mahoney wouldn't know about that. Maybe his old office, when he was spying out the land, pretending to be a recruiter? Maybe—but that does not compute easily, either. Mahoney wouldn't chance us remembering where it was, which I don't… Oh clot," Sten said.

  "Aye. Th' main man. Duke, or Dynast, or wha'e'er he'd dubbed himself."

  "Baron. Thoresen." That name he'd never forget. In a final duel, Sten had taken on the murderer of his family barehanded—and killed him.

  His quarters had been just at the top of the Eye, in a palatial dome that covered Thoresen's office, garden, and quarters.

  "That's it. But we'll not go in direct. Nor hang up here being big fat targets anymore."

  Sten put full drive on his suit and, Kilgour in his wake, eye-calculated a trajectory that would intersect Vulcan just above the old ship-porting area. He would not chance that dockyard—that was too easy to booby-trap.

  To one side, as they flew "over" Vulcan, was the great rip in the planet's skin where the laboratory that was Bravo Project had been until Kilgour's bombs went off.

  That also meant that somewhere below Sten was the cramped apartment he had grown up in. For all he knew, the muraliv that haunted him might still be mounted on the wall, the snowy landscape on a frontier world that his mother had sold six months of his life for, a muraliv that had broken in less than a year. Sten had unconsciously duplicated that scene in reality on Smallbridge—a cluster of domes sitting in his planet's arctic regions.

  No. He would not—could not—go there. It would be too much.

  He shut that part of his mind off. They were closing on Vulcan.

  Sten landed on a bare stretch of hull. Finger-point. Make me a door, Alex.

  Kilgour took a prepared charge from a carrying case, extended its small legs, and clipped the charge to Vulcan's skin. He started a timer, then motioned Sten away. Alex, demolitions expert that he was, pushed off into space unhurriedly and hovered a safe few meters away.

  The timer went to zero, and the charge blew, blasting a stream of molten metal through the hull in a widening cone. It was a violent but relatively silent way to B&E. No air whooshed out. Vulcan—or at least this part of it—had lost its atmosphere.