by David Weber
“Are you telling me,” Colin said very carefully, “that the goddamned bomb is sitting directly under the Palace right this instant?”
“I’m telling you something is sitting under the Palace.” Ninhursag’s voice was flat. “And whatever it is, it isn’t the statue that left Narhan. The mass readings matched perfectly in the first log entry, but they’re off by over twenty percent in the second one. You have any idea why else that might be?”
“But, good God, ’Hursag, how could anyone make a switch? And if they pulled it off in the first place without our catching it, why change the logs so anyone who checked would know they had?”
“I don’t know that yet, but I think we’re going to have to reconsider our theory that Mister X and the Sword of God are two totally separate threats. I find it extremely hard to believe the Sword just coincidentally blew up the officer who oversaw the statue’s transit here the very night he did it. If Esther hadn’t caught the discrepancy in masses, we never would have connected the two events; now it hits me right in the eye.”
“Agreed. Agreed.” Colin leaned back with a worried frown. “Dahak?”
“My remotes are only now getting into position, Colin,” Dahak’s mellow voice replied from thin air. “It is most fortunate Commander Steinberg pursued this line of inquiry. It would never have occurred to me—I have what I believe humans call a blind spot in that I assume that data, once entered, will not subsequently metamorphose—and the Palace’s security systems would almost certainly have prevented our orbital scans from detecting anything. Even now—”
He broke off so suddenly Colin blinked.
“Dahak?” There was no response, and his voice sharpened. “Dahak?“
“Colin, I have made a grave error,” the computer said abruptly.
“An error?”
“I should not have inserted my remotes so promptly. I fear my scan systems have just activated the bomb.”
“The bomb?” Even now Colin hadn’t truly believed, not with his emotions, and his face went pale.
“Indeed.” The computer’s voice seldom showed emotion, but it was bitter now. “I cannot be certain it is the bomb, for I had insufficient time for detailed scans before I was forced to shut down. But there is a device of some sort within the statue—one protected by a Fleet antitampering system.”
The humans looked at one another in stunned silence, and then Ninhursag cleared her throat.
“What … what sort of system, Dahak?”
“A Mark Ninety, multi-threat remote weapon system sensor,” the computer said flatly. “My scan activated it, but it would appear I was able to shut down before it reached second-stage initiation. It is now armed, however. Any attempt to approach with additional scan systems or with anything which its systems might construe as a threat, will, in all probability, result in the device’s immediate detonation.”
* * *
“ ’Tanni! ’Tanni, wake up!”
Jiltanith sat up as quickly as her pregnant condition allowed, and the shaking hand released her. She rubbed her eyes and stared at her father, and the ghosts of sleep fled as his expression registered.
“Father? What passeth?”
“They think they’ve found the bomb,” he said grimly. Her eyes flew wide, and his mouth twisted. “It’s under the Palace, ’Tanni—hidden inside the Narhani’s statue.”
“Jesu!” Her eyes narrowed. There’d been a time when she’d personally managed Nergal’s Terra-born intelligence net against Anu, and she hadn’t lost the habits of thought that had engendered. “ ’Tis a ploy most shrewd,” she murmured now. “Should it be discovered, as, indeed, ’twould seem it hath, then would all assume ’twas the Narhani concealed it there.”
“That’s what we think,” Horus agreed, but his voice’s harshness warned her he hadn’t yet told her everything, and her eyes demanded the rest. “It’s armed and active,” he said sighing, “and it’s covered by an antitampering system. We can’t get to it to disarm it, or even to destroy it.”
“Colin!” Jiltanith whispered, and clutched her father’s arm.
“He’s all right, ’Tanni!” Horus said quickly, covering her hand with his own. “He and Gerald and Adrienne are activating the evacuation plan now. He’s fine.”
“Nay!” Her fingers tightened like talons. “Father, thou knowest him too well for that, as I! He will not flee so long as any of his folk do stand exposed to such danger!”
“I’m sure—” Horus began, but she shook her head spastically and threw off the covers. She swung her feet to the floor and stood, already reaching for her clothing.
“I must go to him! Mayhap, were I there, I—”
“No, ’Tanni.” Her head snapped around, and he shook his head.
“I tell thee I am going.” Her voice was chipped ice, but he shook his head, and her tone turned colder still. “Gainsay me in this at thy peril, Father!”
“Not me, ’Tanni,” he said softly. “Colin. He’s ordered me to keep you here and keep you safe.”
Her eyes locked with his, and her fear for her husband struck him like a lash. But he refused to look away, and a dark, terrible sorrow, like a premonition of yet more loss, twisted her face.
“Father, please,” she whispered, and he closed his eyes, unable to face her pain, and shook his head once more.
“I’m sorry, ’Tanni. It was Colin’s decision, and he’s right.”
* * *
“Dahak is correct,” Vlad Chernikov said. “We dare not send any additional scanners into the gallery, but I have deployed passive systems from beyond a Mark Ninety’s activation threshold and carried out a purely optical scan using the Palace security systems. While I can find no outward visual evidence, our passive systems have detected active emissions from a broad-spectrum sensor array which are entirely consistent with a Mark Ninety’s. I fear that any remote—or, for that matter, any human with Imperial equipment—entering the gallery will cause it to detonate.”
“God.” Colin closed his eyes, propped his elbows on the conference table, and leaned his face into his palms.
“The evacuation will begin in twenty-five minutes,” Adrienne Robbins’ holo image said. “I’ll coordinate embarkation from the Academy; Gerald will handle ship-to-ship movement from Mother, but we don’t have enough ships in-system to handle the entire population.”
“Some additional transport’ll begin arriving in about ninety-three hours,” Hatcher’s image said. “Mother sent out an all-ships signal as soon as I got the word. We’ll have another six planetoids within a hundred and fifty hours; anything after that’ll take at least ten days to get here.”
“How many can we get aboard the available ships?” Colin asked tautly.
“Not enough,” Hatcher said grimly. “Dahak?”
“Assuming Dahak is used as well, and that we move as many as possible to existing deep-space life support in-system but beyond lethal radius of the weapon, we will be able to lift approximately eighty-nine percent of the Birhat population from the planet,” the computer responded. “More than that will be beyond our resources.”
“Mat-trans?” Colin said.
“On our list,” Adrienne replied, “but the system’s too big an energy hog to move people quickly, Colin. It’s going to take at least three weeks to move eleven percent of Birhat’s population through the facility.”
“We don’t have three weeks!”
“Colin, all we can do is all we can do.” Gerald Hatcher didn’t look any happier than Colin, but his voice was crisp.
“We’ve got to take that bomb out,” Colin muttered. “Damn it, there has to be a way!”
“Unfortunately,” Dahak said, “we cannot disarm it. That means we can only attempt to destroy it, which will require a weapon sufficient to guarantee its instant and complete disablement from outside the Mark Ninety’s perimeter, and the device is located in the most heavily protected structure on Birhat. While we possess many weapons which could assure its destruction, the Palace’s str
uctural strength is such that any weapon of sufficient power would effectively destroy Phoenix, as well. In short, we cannot ourselves ’take out’ the device without obliterating the Imperium’s capital, and all in it.”
* * *
“Horus! What the hell is going on?” Lawrence Jefferson had commed from Van Gelder Center, Planetary Security’s central facility, not his White Tower office, and like many of the people swarming about behind him, he looked as if he’d dressed in the dark in a hurry. Horus wondered how he’d gotten to Van Gelder so quickly, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Big trouble, Lawrence,” he replied. “Get as many of your people as you can to the mat-trans facility. We’re going to have thousands of people coming through from Birhat, starting in about—” he checked his chrono “—twelve minutes.”
“Thousands of people?” Jefferson shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter, and Horus bared his teeth.
“Some lunatic’s put a bomb under the Palace, and the damned thing’s got an active antitampering system,” he said, and watched Lawrence Jefferson go bone-white. The Lieutenant Governor said absolutely nothing for a moment, then shook himself.
“A bomb? What sort of bomb? It sounds like you’re evacuating the entire planet!”
“We are,” Horus said grimly. “This thing’s probably powerful enough to take out all of Birhat—and Mother.”
“With a single bomb? You’re joking!”
“I wish I were. We’ve been looking for the damned thing for months. Well, now we’ve found it.”
“What about the Emperor?” Jefferson demanded.
“He’s hanging in until the last minute, the damned young fool! Says he won’t leave until he can get everyone else out.”
“And Jiltanith?” Jefferson asked quickly, and Horus smiled more naturally.
“Thanks for asking, but she’s safe. She’s still in White Tower, and she’s staying here, by the Maker, if I have to chain her to the wall!”
Jefferson closed his eyes for a moment, mind racing, then nodded sharply.
“All right, Horus, I’m on it.”
“Good man! I’ll be down to give you a hand as quick as I can.”
“Don’t!” Horus raised an eyebrow at the Lieutenant Governor’s quick, sharp reply, and Jefferson shook his head angrily. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bark at you. It’s just that you can’t do anything down here that I can’t do just as well, and from your tone of voice, Her Majesty isn’t too happy at staying here on Earth.”
“That,” Horus agreed, “is putting it mildly.”
“Well, in that case you’d better stay there and keep an eye on her. God knows no one else on this planet has the seniority—or the balls!—to tell her no if she orders them out of her way. Besides, it’s going to be a madhouse down here when refugees start coming through. I’ll feel better with both of you tucked away someplace nice and safe, where whoever’s behind this can’t get at you in the confusion.”
“I—” Horus started to reply, then stopped himself and nodded unwillingly. “You may be being paranoid, but you may also be right. I can’t see why anyone would want me dead if they can’t get ’Tanni and—please the Maker—Colin, but whoever’s behind this has to be a lunatic.”
“Exactly.” Jefferson gave him a grim smile. “And if he’s a lunatic, who knows what he may do if he thinks the wheels are coming off?”
Chapter Forty-Three
Lawrence Jefferson stared at the blank com screen. How? How had they found it? Had he come this far, worked this hard, to fail at the last minute?!
A fisted hand pounded his knee under cover of his borrowed desk, and a chill stabbed him as something else Horus had said struck home. If they’d been hunting the bomb “for months,” they knew far more than he’d imagined. Ninhursag! It had to be Ninhursag, and that gave ONI’s increased activities on Earth a suddenly sinister cast. Obviously they hadn’t ID’ed him, but if they’d deduced the bomb’s existence, what else had they picked up along the way?
He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. All right. They knew the bomb was there and active, but if they’d known more, Horus would have said so. Which meant they didn’t know it would detonate twelve hours after the Mark Ninety activated. Would they assume the fact that it hadn’t instantly detonated meant it wouldn’t unless they triggered it somehow?
He bit his lip. The bomb had originally been timed to detonate during the next meeting of the Assembly of Nobles, when Horus would be on Birhat with Colin, Jiltanith, and both the Imperium’s senior military commanders. That would have gotten all five of them at once, but now they were spread out in two different star systems and they knew someone was after them, which meant the chance of recreating that opportunity was unlikely ever to come again. Yet Horus said Colin was going to “hang in” to the last possible minute, and Hatcher and Tsien must be up to their necks in the evacuation operation. Even if they guessed time was short, their efforts to save Birhat’s population were almost certain to keep the two officers within the danger zone until too late. But by the same token, both of them would be doing everything they could to convince Colin to leave, and if he gave in, he’d evacuate to Dahak. Any other ship would be unthinkable, and if Colin MacIntyre got away from Birhat aboard Dahak, very few things in the universe—and certainly nothing Lawrence Jefferson had—could get to him.
The Lieutenant Governor hesitated in an atypical agony of indecision. There was still a chance Colin would die with his senior military commanders. If that happened, and if Jefferson could insure Horus and Jiltanith died as well, his original plan would still work. But if Horus and Jiltanith died and Colin didn’t, he’d move in with Battle Fleet and the Imperial Marines. He’d take Earth apart stone by stone, and the hell with due process, to find the man who’d destroyed Birhat and murdered his wife, unborn children, and father-in-law, and when he did—
Jefferson shuddered, and the panicked part of his brain gibbered to give it up. They didn’t know who he was yet. If he folded his hand and faded away, they might never know. In time, if they continued to trust him, he might actually have the chance to try again. But he couldn’t count on eluding their net, not when he didn’t know how much they’d already learned, and the gambler in his soul shouted to go banco. It was all on the table, everything he had, all he’d hoped and dreamed and worked for. Success or failure, absolute power or death: all of it hinged on whether or not Colin MacIntyre agreed to leave Birhat within the next twelve hours, and Jefferson wanted to scream. He was a chess master who calculated with painstaking precision. How was he supposed to calculate this? All he could do was guess, and if he guessed wrong, he died.
He pounded his knee one more time, and then his shoulders relaxed. If he stopped now and they found him out, the crimes he’d already committed would demand his execution, and that meant it was really no choice at all, didn’t it?
* * *
“—so Adrienne’s parasites are embarking their first loads now, and my Marines have taken over at the mat-trans,” Hector MacMahan reported. “So far, there seems to be more shock than panic, but I don’t expect that to last.”
“Do you have enough men to control a panic if it starts?” Hatcher asked. “I can reinforce with Fleet personnel if you need them.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” MacMahan said gratefully.
“Done. And now,” Hatcher’s holo-image turned to Colin, “will you please get aboard a ship and move out beyond the threat zone?”
“No.”
“For Maker’s sake, Colin!” Ninhursag exploded. “Do you want this thing to kill you?”
“No, but if it hasn’t gone off yet, maybe it won’t unless we set it off.”
“And maybe the goddamned thing is ticking down right now!” MacMahan snapped. “Colin, if you don’t get out of here willingly, then I’ll have a battalion of Marines drag your ass off this planet!”
“No, you won’t!”
“I’m responsible for your safety, and—”
“Good. Fine! Shoot me at dawn—if we’re both still alive!” MacMahan snarled. “Now get your butt in gear, Sir, because I’m sending in the troops!”
“Call him off, Gerald,” Colin said in a quiet, deadly voice, but Hatcher’s holo-image shook its head.
“I can’t do that. He’s right.”
“Call him off, or I’ll have Mother do it for you!”
“You can try,” Hatcher said grimly, “but only the hardware listens to her. Or are you saying that if Hector drags you aboard a ship with a million civilian evacuees you’ll have Mother order its comp cent not to leave orbit?”
Colin’s furious eyes locked with those of Hatcher’s image, but the admiral refused to look away. A moment of terrible tension hovered in the conference room, and then Colin’s shoulders slumped.
“All right,” he grated, and his voice was thick with hatred. Hatred that was all the worse because he knew his friends were right. “All right, goddamn it! But I’ll go aboard Dahak, not another ship.”
“Good!” MacMahan snapped, then sighed and looked away. “Colin, I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But I can’t let you stay. I just can’t.”
“I know, Hector.” It was Colin’s turn to turn away, and his voice was heavy and old, no longer hot. “I know,” he repeated quietly.
* * *
Brigadier Alex Jourdain sealed his Security tunic and looked around his comfortable apartment. He’d lived well for the last ten years; now the orders he’d just received were likely to take it all away, and more, yet he was in far too deep to back out, and if they pulled it off after all—