Death Match, page 57
part #3 of Sten Omnibus Series
“That is true.”
Paen drained his cup—a duplicate in miniature of a drinking horn—folded it, and put it away.
“Shall we collect our new friend?”
Both beings slid out of the gravlighter, careful to not shut the doors behind them—the sound of a slamming door carries forever on a silent night. Around them, hidden in the blackness of this thicket, were twenty heavily armed Bhor policemen.
Above them the spy touched buttons, and her rate of descent slowed as much as the McLean generator could overcome gravity. The age of the fantasized strap-on-your-back personal flier still hadn’t arrived, even with the antigrav capabilities of the McLean system. But at least it had replaced all varieties of the incredibly dangerous parachute.
The spy directed her descent toward one end of the huge open meadow that was the dropzone, the final end of delivery system M. Below her was tranquil forest. Far, far away—at least five klicks, she estimated—she saw the lights of a tiny farmhouse.
Just as planned. No ambush waiting.
Perhaps, she thought with a chill, her friends—the Imperial spymaster whose cover name was Hohne, or his chosen representatives—weren’t at the rendezvous, either. But, that was not a problem. She would go to ground for one planet-day as instructed. There were rations and heat tabs in her case, and her jumpsuit would keep her very warm.
Even if they didn’t materialize then, she would still be all right. Bury the jumpsuit and McLean pack, and make her way to the capital city. She had memorized three alternate pickup points.
Groundrush—under twenty-five meters—as she swung toward the snow.
She forced her eyes off the earth below, earth she knew had needle-sharp stones just under that innocent-looking snowy blanket, and onto the horizon. She suddenly remembered the dispatcher’s warning, and her hand slammed the knob on her harness, letting the dropbag unspool on its five-meter cord so it wouldn’t still be attached to her leg on the landing slam.
The bag with the transmitter dropped less than half a meter when the ground came up and smote the spy.
She did a classic three-point PLF: toes, knees, nose, and the pain crashed. She blurted, then buried an outcry and lay motionless in the snow.
“Clot,” Marl swore, as the police spread out toward the spy. She and Paen hurried toward the sprawled agent. “If she ruined the com, I’ll use the thumbscrews. We’re two back now as it is.”
Building a replica of one of the Empire’s secret, compact superpower transmitters took a great deal of time—time when a spy would be out of circuit and would have to come up with some explanations when she reopened contact.
And there was no question in Marl’s mind that this agent would eventually be tamed. Or else she would be brainscanned for her code phrases, contacts, electronic “fist,” and then executed.
Only three Internal Security agents had chosen Patriotism and the Road to Tyburn so far—three of the twenty-nine whom Poyndex had ordered into the Wolf Worlds in response to Hohne’s bleating about Sten’s imminent arrival.
The other twenty-six were quite comfortable in quarters on various worlds that weren’t quite prisons but were certainly not freedom, broadcasting exactly what they were fed.
Marl, and through her, Kilgour, and through him, Sten, were running the Eternal Emperor’s entire espionage net in the Wolf Worlds.
Just as Alex had planned.
Some time before, a colleague of Rykor’s had been given an unusual assignment. A specialist in military recruiting, she had been ordered to prepare a campaign intended for the defeated Tahn worlds. At first Rykor had thought the idea somewhat unsavory, but she was pragmatic enough to realize that the military always recruits from its defeated and most generally downtrodden enemies.
But her colleague had gone on to explain that her orders had specifically stated that the campaign was to focus around a resurrection of the old Tahn samurai culture, a deathway the Emperor had sworn to extirpate after he had defeated the Tahn.
Interesting—and Rykor found it aberrational that the Emperor could believe that poverty could be cured by putting the poor in uniforms. But there was more to the concept than just that—and a full analysis revealed another indication of the Emperor’s growing psychopathy. He was evidently building an army that he planned to use. Since there was no known external foe requiring a huge army to stand off, this newly restructured military would have as its purpose to destroy the enemy within. In other words, the citizens of the Empire.
Since the Tahn Way encouraged xenophobia, a racial superiority, the belief that mercy was a weakness, and the firm conviction that the strong had rights over the weak, this new model army of the Emperor’s would be barbaric.
Rykor had subtly investigated—and found that other worlds with their own feral cultures were suddenly the focus of Imperial recruiters.
Very interesting.
Fortunately the campaign was very easy—at least easy for a being with Rykor’s skills in mass psychology—to destroy.
Rykor had swept up every psychologist or psychological student she could find who was able to fulfill some fairly basic requirements: Do you like to travel? Do you mind being alone? Can you tell a necessary lie without feeling guilty? Can you take on a job that you will not be able to see the results of? Can you accomplish a task and accept that you will not be rewarded immediately? And so on and so forth.
It was unfortunate she wasn’t able to field battalions of counterpropaganda specialists, as she would have had she still been serving the Eternal Emperor.
But the antitoxin to this murderous psychological virus spread rapidly enough by itself. It worked because it addressed the Emperor’s campaign at the root—and contained just enough truth to be unpleasant.
For instance, one of Rykor’s volunteers was named Stengers. He was given a clean background and inserted on an Imperial world where he traveled openly as a student of sociology to Heath—the former capital of the Tahn. It was purest chance his wanderings were just behind an undercover Imperial Recruiting advance man, and just ahead of the recruiting team itself.
All Stengers did was ask some puzzled questions, especially to those young Tahn who were considering taking the Imperial shilling.
Questions such as: “Well, if the Emperor wants you to rise up and redeem the honor of the Tahn, why does he want you to serve so far from your home? It is hard to gain honor in the darkness, as one of your own proverbs states.”
Sometimes, he was a bit more direct: “Interesting. You say that eighteen Tahn from this farm district alone have gone off to serve? And none of them have returned from Imperial duties? Two of them have died? How sad to die, so far from home, serving someone who seems to never notice such a sacrifice.”
Or closer to the bone: “If the Emperor suddenly thinks so highly of the Tahn, and their elders, why is this district pig-drakh poor? With all of the Empire’s riches, why are we shivering in front of this peat-bog fire? Why, the world I come from, which is no richer than this, and I live far in the hills, has AM2 heating in every home. I don’t understand.”
Or brutal: “Seems to me a pretty good way for the Tahn to never amount to anything if the Emperor’s taking your best and sending them out to the fringe worlds to die.”
Stengers and his fellows planted livie items, a revival of carefully chosen Tahn war ballads that centered around the belief that the Emperor and all his minions were worms beneath a Tahn’s feet…
The next overall recruiting report to Prime contained some disappointing statistics about the sudden drop in volunteers to the Eternal Emperor’s armed services…
Sten had cautioned Kilgour to be most careful on Earth. Even though the blown mission on the Umpqua River was against the privy council, security beings are security beings. There was a very good likelihood that the goons who would be wandering around the near-abandoned hamlet of Coos Bay, which Sten and Alex had used for their base, might still be carrying the same occupational specialty but serving another master. Gestapo is gestapo, as the seemingly meaningless archaism put it.
No problem, Kilgour swore. He planned to stay well away from the province of Oregon. Alex hoped that the secret he was looking for—the purpose of the Eternal Emperor’s mysterious trip to Earth—was far, far away. In this case, far away meant the nearest full-range spaceport.
San Francisco, California’s biggest city, boasted a population of almost 100,000. The young lovers—Hotsco, at least, qualified—claimed to have arrived in California Province on a shuttlehop into one of the desert retirement communities to the south, around the tiny province capital of Santa Ana. From there they had boarded one of the luxury gravcraft that swept over the San Joaquin Marshlands at the hamlet of Bakersfield, and leisurely found their way north.
Actually, Hotsco’s smuggling ship was parked fifty meters underwater in the city’s great bay near the Isle of Pelicans. One beep from Hotsco’s transponder, and robot rescue would be inbound.
Playing tourist, they took lodgings in one of the new pseudo-Victorian guest houses that were being built in the wilds atop the Twin Peaks. They marveled that there had once been a bridge across the headlands, and listened as visionaries told them one day the straits would be bridged again. They declined an invitation to hunt a man-eater in the overgrown jungles of what had once been a park. They listened to arguments as to whether the foothills of the Mission District should be cleared—some swore the low mounds were rubble from high-rise buildings that had fallen in some great quake. They danced in the restoration of a huge clifftop mansion patterned after one that had been destroyed pre-Emperor and three monster earthquakes ago.
They politely refused an invitation from two rather lovely human females to join them in sexual ecstasy, in the Lovedance of the Ancient Merkins. Free. Alex thought Hotsco looked interested and then somewhat disappointed when he reminded her that, generally, new lovers are in love for a while before kinks occur. He did make a mental note to himself that the woman appeared to have interesting recreational ideas.
And they ate. Crab they caught themselves with a rented pot near another ruined bridge which led directly across the bay. Long loaves of wonderfully sour bread. Broiled fish. Raw fish artfully arranged on pats of rice. Rack of lamb. Chicken roasted under a brick. Alex, never a sybarite, let alone a gourmand, thought of changing his ways.
And they talked. Talked to anyone and everyone. Especially in the bars and hangouts around the small spaceport just south of the city. Alex claimed to be a free-lance import/exporter in the luxury trade, and Hotsco his new business/life partner. What, they wondered, did people think could be exported from Earth, considering that it was Manhome, that would interest customers throughout the Empire? More specifically, what could be exported—legally and morally?
Six E-days—and Alex smiled to himself: these really were Earth-days—later, without anyone seeming to realize that they had been grilled, Kilgour found his being. A customs official, someone with a sense of mission—which meant a built-in nose for a grievance, especially when it meant that someone had used higher authority to avoid proper procedure. Tsk, Kilgour assured her. Neither of them would ever…kind of thing that’s despicable…business must be run in a proper manner…matter of fact, Ms. Tjanting…one of the more terrible things about my own profession…some traders…even heard stories of very high officials bending the laws…
The pump didn’t need much priming.
Very high officials, indeed. Straight from Prime, in fact. And during the time frame Alex was interested in.
Customs, through Earth Spaceship Control, had been notified that the province of Oregon was closed to all nonstandard in-atmosphere and nearspace traffic. Which mattered not at all to Tjanting. She knew that the Emperor had his estates up there, and what he, or his people, chose to do was none of her concern. She might have been curious, being a good citizen, if the Emperor had been present. But of course, he had not been there.
How did she know that, Alex wondered?
Well, there would have been something on the livies, wouldn’t there? But that wasn’t why she was red-arsed, though. If the Eternal Emperor knew what liberties had been taken in his name, Tjanting knew, he would not be pleased.
About two weeks before the announcement, Tjanting went on, a commercial transport had grounded at San Fran, intending to clear customs at this entry port and then proceed immediately to its final destination—the Imperial Grounds some hundreds of kilometers away. She boarded the ship and immediately found things unusual. The ship was immaculate, and the crewmen followed orders as if they were in the Imperial Navy. But that was sheer conjecture. What had upset her was the cargo.
The skipper of the transport had, at first, refused to allow her access to the hold, claiming that what it contained was a classified cargo—property of the Imperial Household. But there was no paperwork to verify his claim. He could be carrying any sort of basic supplies to the river complex, supplies that the Emperor, like any other citizen, would have to pay duties on to the Earth government.
Tjanting insisted he open the hold—or else she would call for security and impound the ship and cargo and arrest the crew. The captain yielded gracelessly.
The cargo was medical—sophisticated equipment and supplies, as if someone were establishing a very small, but very superb, surgical ward. Or so, Tjanting said, a colleague specializing in med supplies had told her when she called back and read him the bill-of-lading fiche.
The problem wasn’t that the cargo was dutiable—it probably wasn’t, under humanitarian grounds. The question Tjanting had, and the one that wasn’t answered, was why was this equipment necessary? Customs was also responsible for quarantine and health. Was someone in the Imperial Household ill? Or needing some kind of surgical help? For all she knew, there was a plague breeding.
She reported the matter to her superiors and was told to wait. They would contact the Emperor’s staff in Oregon. That took minutes—no one in Oregon knew of such an incoming shipment. Tjanting was sure she had uncovered a strange sort of smuggling ring whose members had the maximum amount of gall.
Then another call came from the north, and before her shift ended, she was hauled in and reprimanded severely for what her supervisor called “unwarranted snooping into the business of the Eternal Emperor.” Tjanting was also told she had a nasty reputation for being a busybody, and had best correct this character flaw lest it cause a downgrade on her next efficiency hearing.
By now the woman was seething, and Alex soothed her, and bought her another drink—a truly awful concoction of a sweet liqueur called Campari, charged water, and a brandy float on top. It was a monstrous waste of cognac, Alex thought, but said nothing.
So, while Hotsco covered for him with chattered sympathy, Alex mused: Jus’ afore th’ Emp dances on, some laddie wants’t’ set up an OR. An’ it’s gowky to conceive th’ Emp’s retreat nae has a wee medical kit an’ such. So, somethin’ special mayhap wae intended, aye? An op’ration?
On th’ ’Ternal Emp’rer himself?
A wee bit ae surgery time’s carefully kept under th’ rose?
Aye. ’Tis odd. ’Tis ver’ ver’ odd, Kilgour thought.
Actually, ’tis ver’ simple, he realized, considering the presence of the bomb-disposal experts at the Emperor’s compound. Surgically implanting a bomb in somebody wasn’t unknown to Kilgour—the ruse had been used successfully by fanatics before. Kilgour had also heard of brave beings having a bomb installed inside them before they went on a suicide mission, to prevent any possibility of capture, torture, and exposing their fellows.
However, taking a bomb out was a new twist. And this is what he now thought had happened.
Mmm, Alex mused. So. Noo we’ ken where th’ boomie thae goes off whae th’ Emp dies com’t frae, aye? I’s installed i’ th’ loonie’s gut, p’raps where th’ ’pendix was. I’ dinnae matter. Th’ real puzzler i’ who put th’ clottin’ thing in, i’ the first place!
Th’ further an’ further Ah dig an’ delve, Kilgour mused, th’ less an’ less Ah knoo thae’s f r certain.
Ah well. I’ y’ want’d a life where thae was naught but th’ abs’lute, y’ coulda been a WeeFreesie. Or stay’d a common so’jer.
Alex refused to continue. Reasoning from insufficient data almost invariably produces suspect conclusions. He would think more on this later.
They fed Tjanting a couple of drinks, then announced that they had to get back to their hotel.
Tjanting watched them leave. After a moment, she frowned, and a queer expression crossed her face.
Halfway across the Empire, two men were drinking raw alk and knocking the shots back with homebrew in a portabar not far from a construction site. One man was a contact welder, the other a bank vice president, slumming.
“You heard,” the welder began, “about what happened when the Eternal Emperor picked up a joygirl? First time he says I’m gonna ravish you and make you moan. He does and she does.
“Then he says I’m gonna ravish you and make you scream. He does and she does.
“Then he says I’m gonna make you sweat. And the joygirl pulls back and says Huh? And he says because the next time’s gonna be midsummer.”
The banker chortled politely. “Way I heard it, the Emp just thinks that there’s some things a man’s gotta take care of himself. And in his case, it’s th’ little stuff.”
The welder returned the compliment of laughter, turned serious. “You never notice, Els, that the Emperor never shows up on a livie cast when he’s somewhere doin’ something ceremonial with a woman?”
“Why should he?”
“No reason,” the welder said. “But if you was top dog, I’d assume there’d be a ton of honey trying to lurk on you, right? Like if you got promoted Chief Suit tomorrow?”
“Maybe. But my wife’d have words about that.”
“Something else the Emperor’s lacking.”
“Maybe that’s why he lives forever,” the banker suggested. “He’s just saving his precious natural resources.”
“Assumin’ he’s got any.”
