Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  All Sten had to do was get to that entrance, figure out how to pick the lock, and voila.

  Voila, Sten said cynically. And then worry about how big a bomb is located inside. Freston tsked. He couldn't be expected to do everything, could he? Being just an underpaid captain, and all.

  Sten laughed and threw him out. Then he sat down to figure out the rest of the insertion plan. Thinking about underwater gave him the rest of the scheme. He sent for La Ciotat, kissed Cind, and moved out.

  The tacship entered atmosphere in a trajectory exactly like that of a meteorite. A big one, but that couldn't be helped. It splashed down just beyond the horizon, but short of the bounce-reflection of any sensor on the subcontinent. La Ciotat sent her ship toward land below the surface, muttering if she'd wanted to run a submarine, she would have been incarnated as a dolphin. Or a Rykor.

  About a kilometer offshore, a reef rose to just below the surface. Sten ordered La Ciotat to bottom the tacship behind the reef.

  He went out the airlock and began the long trudge toward shore. In the livies, the suit's little reaction jets would have worked splendidly in water and gravity, as they did in space, and sent him zooming like a speedboat toward his rendezvous with whatever. But even with the suit's McLean pack on full, mass was still mass. Sten chugged toward shore at the stately speed of a ferryboat, giving him plenty of time to tourist.

  If the land above was barren, the sea was not. Algae in sheets. Ribbonweed thickets. Some things that looked like small crabs. Nautilus-coiled snails. And trilobites, from barely visible to… to large enough to make Sten think of big centipedes intermarried with scorpions.

  As the bottom shelved, he cut power, and took her down. At three meters, he considered his situation and, until it wove away, the universe's biggest trilobite.

  So far, there hadn't been any loud bangs that would indicate he had set off any of the booby traps he knew the relay station was equipped with. Very well. So they were still waiting for him. He wished he could figure out what those booby traps or booby trap could be. None could be that sensitive—the Emperor would hardly want his return slowed because a relay turned the fire on unexpectedly, and a heat sensor blew. Or a motion detector went crackers at an earth tremor. Trick stuff sometimes went off from its own cleverness. Nor, Sten thought, would the Emperor want to spend his time elaborately defusing some really sophisticated diabolism—he had heard the Emperor curse at puzzles and hurl them across rooms minutes after he had picked them up, back when…

  Just back when, Sten. Stick to the subject at hand.

  What the booby trap would most likely be, he concluded, was something the Emperor wouldn't have to worry about, but something that would send any intruder airborne in very small pieces. A retina-coded lock? A pore-pattern lock? Hardly, considering the device's reliability had to be conceivably measured in centuries.

  Sten went ashore, wading through the surf, onto dry land. Dry rock. Nothing but rock, of various shades of gray and black. Dark sand at the water's edge. A beach, almost half a meter wide. Sten spotted something and knelt, his mission forgotten for a brief moment. There, just in the surfwash, was a bit of green. Life. Some kind of plant, he thought. Algae? He didn't know. Go on back to the sea, he thought. You don't know what you're starting.

  He rose and trudged up toward the shelf where the station would be located. His suit's sensors said the air was breathable, although oxygen poor. But he stayed in the suit. Again, part of his caution. He didn't think that an infrared sensor would be used to set off the self-destruct mechanism—but the spacesuit would sure keep such a device from starting the Big Bang.

  The ground flattened. Sten crouched behind a large boulder, and turned on the helmet display. He consulted the map projected above his faceplate.

  Over there would be the door. A slant of solid rock. Sten moved as surreptitiously as the bulky suit would allow to the closest cover. He was thirty meters away. He dropped binocs down over his faceplate and minutely examined the rock. Twice he stopped, eyes starting to see things that were or weren't there.

  At full magnification, his field of vision was less than a third of a meter on a side. Back and forth, back and forth his eyes moved, just like a photointerpreter scanning a mosaic, looking for the camouflaged enemy.

  Ah. Perfectly round. Which rarely exists in nature.

  A keyhole.

  Punched in the rock about where a keyhole should be… for an Emperor-sized being.

  All Sten needed was the key.

  He went across the open ground like a trundling armadillo. Expecting the shatterblast. Nothing.

  He knelt next to the keyhole and unsealed a pouch. After some thought, back aboard Victory, he had realized the key would be the simplest part of this operation. The Emperor couldn't wander around carrying some elaborate hex-pattem-coded special key in his return to the throne. Or, anyway, Sten wouldn't plan things that way, if he had been setting this whole paranoiac rigmarole up. So the key would have to be something that the Emperor could procure or have made at the appropriate time. Also, the key wouldn't be part of an exotic locking system that might be unobtainable—or superseded by the time he returned.

  Sten took out a standard, Mercury-issue electronic lockpick. Round, eh? He found a pickup of the correct size. He fitted it to the analyzer and inserted the pickup in the hole, wanting to put his fingers in his ears against the blast, even though the pickup was made of completely neutral Imperium X. The analyzer buzzed, and told him what code would open the door. Sten detached the pickup, and plugged it into the sender. He touched the

  TRANSMIT button…

  … and the door lifted up, Sten tumbling back out of pure fear reaction, seeing a ramp leading down into blackness. Sten waited until his heart began beating again. He took a flash from the pouch and, lying flat against the ground in the event this was the trigger, sent the beam around the inside of the passage. Nothing. He looked down. Just a ramp.

  Sten set the flash's beam on full diffuse and started down, a centimeter at a time, a step taking a lifetime, moving forward as he had back on Vulcan so very, very long ago…

  … and then he had it.

  Or he thought he did.

  All this slok about IR detectors, prox detectors, motion sensors, sensor sensors… that wasn't it. The Eternal Emperor had been an engineer. A good one. So his protection would have been conceived using one principle: Keep It Stupid, Simple.

  Sten's foot came down more confidently, and he took another step. Another. Another.

  The door dropped closed behind him. Sten flinched, but not much—he was increasingly sure he was right. An overhead light went on. There was a standard monitor panel against the wall. It showed an environmental system had gone on, and was bringing the shelter up to an E-normal condition. There was a counter display on the panel. The counter showed 0. Sten started past it, then saw, from the corner of his eye, the counter change to 1.

  That was it.

  There was a door in front of him. With a palmswitch. Sten touched it, and the door opened.

  Living quarters inside. Small, but well-equipped.

  Beyond them, a doorway.

  Sten, trying not to hurry, went through it.

  The room was huge. Instrument-filled. Coms and controls.

  He'd done it! He was alive and inside the relay station.

  Unless something went bang in the next few seconds, Sten's dazzling perception had been correct.

  What was the one thing the Emperor would do, but no one else would dare?

  To show up solo. No one else would. Anyone smart enough and brave enough to get this close to the heart of power would have allies or subordinates. He didn't know where the sensor was—overhead, in the floor, or in the walls. There could be one, there could be many of them.

  Christ, Sten thought with a chill. If Kilgour wasn't off on his run against Poyndex… he might have taken him along. Even Mantis killers like someone guarding their back, and Sten and Alex had been friends too long.

&n
bsp; Count one . . count two .

  And this gleaming room would have been melted-down shambles.

  He looked around at the keys to the kingdom. There were four secondary boards in the room. Reporting stations, Sten theorized. Three of them showed identical readouts, the fourth was zero/zero. That would be the station Kyes or Kyes's men had discovered, and, in the discovery, destroyed.

  In the center of the room was a great circular control panel. Readouts and controls.

  Sten touched nothing as he examined that carefully. Most of them were unlabeled—that wouldn't be necessary for one operator, the operator who'd designed the entire system. But there were enough marked so he could tell what the panel was intended for.

  This was the secret of the universe. Sten felt a chill.

  From here, the Eternal Emperor could turn the "power" on or off. Direct those great robot convoys to deliver the AM2 to the depot he directed. Increase the amount of AM2 for each depot. His decisions would be repeated at the three surviving relay stations.

  And from here his commands would be transmitted out. Out toward another universe. Somewhere out there, somewhere beyond, was the discontinuity. All that was necessary was for Sten to plot the transmission coordinates of the beam from this station and send them up to Preston on the Victory. Simple triangulation with the beam from the mansion would locate the discontinuity.

  "All right," Sten whispered, not aware that he spoke aloud. "All right, you bastard. It's all over now."

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  THE ETERNAL EMPEROR stormed down the corridor to his office. The long, broad hallway bristled with guards. On one side were the Internal Security thugs. On the other, a grizzled detachment of veteran Imperial Guardsmen.

  He had a pistol at his belt and he kept a ready hand on the butt as he rushed by them. His eyes swept their ranks as he moved. At the slightest hint of a threat he was braced to draw and fire.

  But not a being's eyes met his as he hurried to the relative safety of his quarters. They were all too busy watching one another. The atmosphere was so thick with suspicion, a sneeze would have set off a full-scale battle.

  His chamberlain was writing by the door. "What are you doing here, Bleick?" the Emperor snarled. "I didn't send for you."

  Bleick's weasel eyes took on a startled cast "I was only here to report—"

  The Emperor chopped in. "Search him!"

  Bleick gave a bleat of fear as four guards—two IS men and two troopers—hurled him to the floor and put him through a humiliating body search. They followed this up with a thorough scanning, to make sure no assassination devices had been surgically implanted.

  When they were done, Bleick scrambled to his feet. "I am so deeply sorry, Your Highness," he whined, "if my presence gave you even the slightest cause to worry."

  "Shut up, Bleick," the Emperor said. "My orders were clear. No one is to come near me unannounced."

  "But I thought—"

  "Did I say you had permission to speak?"

  "No, Your Highness."

  "That's your problem, Bleick. You attempt to mimic the thought process. Instead of-following orders."

  The Emperor turned slightly to the side, so he could keep both Bleick and the corridor in view.

  "All right," he said. "As long as you're here, you might as well tell me what you had to say."

  "It's only about Poyndex, Your Majesty."

  "Only? Only? What the clot's wrong with you, man? My chief of security disappears from the face of Prime World, and you call that only? For crying out loud, don't you—" He broke off, disgusted. "What a load of drakh. Okay. Speak up. I'm tired of making like a target in my own damned hallway."

  "Yessir. I only came to report, sir, that I've just finished an exhaustive study of…" Bleick saw the Emperor was about to explode again, and dropped a few self-serving modifiers. "Uh… No one on the staff has seen him for some time, sir. I double-checked every room log in the castle. And personally supervised the follow-up interrogation of the staff."

  "Who interrogated you?"

  Again, that startled look. "Ufa… Me, sir? Why… No one, Your Majesty."

  The Emperor motioned to two of the guards. Since Poyndex's disappearance he had ordered them paired at all times, so there was always an IS man watching an Imperial Guardsman—and vice versa.

  "Take him down to interrogation. Put the screws to him real good. I want to make sure he and Poyndex didn't do a little deal together."

  Bleick squealed in alarm. "But, Your Majesty. I have certainly proved my loyalty over the—"

  A beefy hand slapped over his mush, cutting off the rest of his nonsense, and he was hauled away.

  The Emperor turned back to his door. Submitted himself to a thumb- and iris-print check. Then he tapped in the code that only he knew. The door slid open. He glanced around once more to make sure he wasn't threatened, then drew his pistol and stepped inside.

  The door hissed shut behind him. He was alone. The Emperor carefully checked the new sensors he'd had installed. A little of the tension eased. His security was intact. No one had breached his office while he'd been gone. The Emperor bolstered his weapon.

  He crossed to his desk and pulled out some Scotch. He poured a glass. But before he drank, he slipped a small rodlike device from his pocket. Inserted it in the liquid. The pea light at the top of the rod beamed green.

  The drink was safe.

  He shuddered it down, then sagged into his chair. The Emperor was at the edge of exhaustion. He got out a syrette and pressed it against his arm. There was a slight stinging sensation, a tingling in his vein, then his heart gave a sudden jolt And he was filled with drug-induced energy.

  His hand shook as he reached for the bottle to refill his glass. The Emperor grimaced. It was one of the many downsides of amphets.

  Another, he realized, was paranoia. A small laugh burst from his lips. There was a slight hysterical tinge to it that annoyed him. He'd have to watch it. Be very careful. Make sure his reasoning process was his own and not something out of a pharmacy.

  On the other hand, as the man once said, even paranoiacs have enemies.

  The Eternal Emperor settled back to take stock of his situation.

  He had just returned from a personal tour of the interrogation rooms. His lips curled in disgust at the memory of the smells of blood, fear, puke, and body wastes. Only the loud screams of pain had given him any real sense of satisfaction. Not that he enjoyed that sort of thing. Not really. After all, that would be a symptom of madness.

  The satisfaction came from seeing for himself that real effort was being put into solving the mystery of Poyndex's disappearance. He had also stressed to his interrogators it was equally important to uncover any conspiracy connected to the disappearance.

  There had been a score or more confessions already. A few might even turn out to be true.

  They had played a tape of Baseeker's hysterical babblings. She had admitted her disbelief in the Emperor's godhood. Confessed her motivations were only from greed. And then further revealed that Poyndex had suborned her. That she was directly working for him.

  There were sure to be others. He would soon learn the extent of Poyndex's game playing.

  He doubted Bleick was involved. But the Emperor was not willing to chance it. Of course, the man would be useless for any kind of position when the interrogators were through with him. He would have to find a new chamberlain. Ah, well. It was a price the Emperor was willing to pay.

  The Emperor emptied his glass. He pushed the bottle aside. He would wait before having another.

  It was time to put the crisis into perspective.

  Poyndex's disappearance posed several possibilities—all of them nasty:

  1. Poyndex was dead. Slain by the enemy.

  2. He'd been kidnapped.

  In either case, it was possible that he had been tortured and had spilled his guts to an agent, or agents, of the rebel forces. Which meant some of the Emperor's deepest secrets might have been revea
led. Literally, considering it was Poyndex who'd supervised the removal of the bomb in the Emperor's gut. And that little secret could eventually lead to Alva Sector.

  3. Poyndex had suddenly decided to defect to the other side.

  4. Poyndex had been in league with the Emperor's enemies for some time, and fled because he feared his treachery was about to be uncovered.

  5. If numbers three and four were true, it was likely Poyndex had co-conspirators within Arundel itself.

  Internal Security certainly couldn't be trusted. And since Poyndex had crept into so many other areas, neither could any other branch of the Imperial Service. Once again, the Emperor's secrets were in jeopardy.

  The most glaring fact—not possibility—of all was that:

  6. Arundel, the most secure facility in the Empire, had been breached.

  On that general topic, there was another item gnawing at him. And might not belong on the list. Although he would put it down anyway.

  7. One of his safehouses had also been violated. The Shahryar mansion.

  The full report on the incident had only just reached him. The enemy agent had obviously been supremely professional. This was one of the times any of his sanctuaries had been invaded, by a burglar or otherwise. The agent was also professional enough to escape unscathed after wiping out his security force.

  However, the report had assured him the woman had been unsuccessful in getting any useful information.

  But, wait! What about the code word she'd attempted to penetrate the computer?

  Raschid!

  How did she know that name? The Emperor's secret persona?

  Poyndex?