by David Weber
He drew a deep breath, checked his grav gun, and headed for the transit shaft.
* * *
“ ’Tanni, I—” Horus cut himself off as Jiltanith, still in her nightgown, turned from the window and he saw her tears. His face twisted, and he closed his mouth and started to leave, but she held out a hand.
“Nay, Father,” she said softly. He turned back to her, then reached out to take her hand, and she smiled and pulled him closer. “Poor Father,” she whispered. “How many ways the world hath wounded thee. Forgive my anger.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” he whispered back, and pressed his cheek to her shining hair. “Oh, ’Tanni! If I could undo my life, make it all different—”
“Then would we be gods, Father, and none of us the people life hath made us. In all I have ever known of thee, thou hast done the best that man might do. ’Twas ever thy fate to fight upon thy knees, yet never didst thou yield. Not to Anu, nor to the Achuultani, nor to Hell itself. How many, thinkest thou, might say as much?”
“But I built my Hell myself,” he said quietly. “Brick by brick, and I dragged you into it with me.” He closed his eyes and held her tight. “Do … do you remember the last thing you ever said to me in Universal, ’Tanni?”
She stiffened in his arms, but she didn’t pull away, and after a moment, she shook her head.
“Father, I recall so little of those days.” She pressed her face harder into his shoulder. ” ’Tis like some dark, horrible dream, one that e’en now haunteth my sleep on unquiet nights, yet when waking—”
“Hush. Hush,” he whispered, and pressed his lips into her hair. “I don’t want to hurt you. Maker knows I’ve done too much of that. But I want you to understand, ’Tanni.” He drew a deep breath. “The last thing you ever said was ’Why didn’t you come, Poppa? Why didn’t you love us?’ ” Her shoulders shook under his hands, and his own voice was unsteady. ” ’Tanni, I always loved you, and your mother, but you were right to hate me.” She tried to protest, but he shook his head. “No, listen to me, please. Let me say it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, and he closed his eyes.
” ’Tanni, I talked your mother into supporting Anu. I didn’t realize what a monster he was—then—but I was the one who convinced her. Everything that happened to you—to her—was my fault. It was, and I know it, and I’ve always known it, and, O Maker, I would sell my very soul never to have done it. But I could never undo it, never find the magic to make it as if it had never happened. A father is supposed to protect his children, to keep them safe, and that—” his voice broke, but he made himself go on “—that was why I put you back into stasis. Because I knew I’d failed. Because I’d proven I couldn’t keep you safe any other way. Because … I was afraid.”
“Father, Father! Dost’a think I knew that not?” She shook her head.
“But I never told you,” he said softly. “I cost us both so much, and I never had the courage to tell you I knew what I’d done and ask you to forgive me.”
* * *
Colin paced the conference room like a caged animal, fists pounding together before him while he awaited his own cutter, and his brain raced. The evacuation Adrienne and Hatcher had planned but never been able to rehearse was going more smoothly than he would have believed possible, but all of them knew they weren’t going to get everyone out. Unless they could deactivate the bomb, millions of people would die, yet how in God’s name did you deactivate something you couldn’t approach with as much as a scanpack, much less the weapons to—
He stopped suddenly, then slammed himself down in his chair and opened his neural feed to Dahak wide.
“Give me everything on the Mark Ninety,” he said sharply.
* * *
The door chime sounded, and Horus turned from Jiltanith to answer it.
“Yes?”
“Your Grace, it’s Captain Chin,” an urgent voice said. “Sir, I think you’d better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down.”
“That’s impossible,” Horus said reasonably. “Did you call Maintenance?”
“I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com.” The captain drew a deep breath. “Your Grace, it didn’t work either.”
“What?” Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.
“It didn’t work, Sir, and I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no obvious jamming, the coms just don’t work, and it’d take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space.” The captain faced Horus squarely. “Your Grace, with all due respect, we’d better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now.”
“You know, it might just work,” Vlad Chernikov murmured.
“Or set the thing the hell off!” Hector MacMahan objected.
“A possibility,” Dahak agreed, “yet the likelihood is small, assuming the force of the explosion were sufficient. What Colin suggests is, admittedly, a brute force solution, yet it has a certain conceptual elegance.”
“Let me get this straight,” MacMahan said. “We can’t get near the thing, but you people want to pile explosives on top of it and set them off? Are you out of your frigging minds?“
“The operative point, General,” Dahak said, “is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats.”
“So?”
“So we don’t use Imperial technology,” Colin said. “We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax.”
“HE from where?” MacMahan demanded. “There isn’t any on Birhat. For that matter, I doubt there’s any on Terra after this long!”
“You are incorrect, General,” Dahak said calmly. “Marshal Tsien has the materials we require.”
“I do?” Tsien sounded surprised.
“You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago.”
“I—” Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. “As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten.” He looked at MacMahan. “Lawrence’s Security personnel stumbled across them, Hector. We believe they were cached by the previous regime before you disarmed it on Colin’s orders before the Siege. Apparently, even the individuals who hid them away had forgotten about them, and they were badly decayed—they used a tritium booster, and it had broken down. They were sent here for disposal, but we never got around to it.”
“You want to use nukes?” MacMahan yelped.
“No,” Dahak said calmly, “but these are Terran warheads, which rely on shaped chemical charges to initiate criticality, and each of them contains several kilograms of the compound Octol.”
“And how do you get the explosives into position?” MacMahan asked more normally.
“Somebody walks in, sets them, fuses them, and walks back out again,” Colin said. MacMahan raised an eyebrow, and Colin shrugged. “It should work, as long as he doesn’t have any active Imperial hardware on him.”
“Background radioactivity?” Hatcher asked. “If this stuff’s been squirreled away inside a nuclear warhead for twenty-odd years, it’s bound to have picked up some contamination.”
“Not sufficient to cross a Mark Ninety’s threshold,” Dahak replied.
“You’re certain?” Hatcher pressed, then waved a hand. “Forget that. You never make unqualified statements if you aren’t certain, do you?”
“Such habits imply a certain imprecision of thought,” Dahak observed, and despite the tension, Colin smiled, then sobered.
“I think we have to try it. It’s a risk, but it’s the smallest one I can come up with, and you may be right about a timer, Hector. We don’t have time to come up with an ideal, no-risk solution.”
“Agreed. How long to strip out the explosives and get them down here, Dahak?”
&nbs
p; “I have already initiated the process, General. I estimate that they could be delivered to the Palace within twenty minutes in their present state, but I would prefer to reshape them into a proper configuration for maximum destructive effect, which will require an additional hour.”
“Eighty minutes?” MacMahan rubbed his chin, then nodded. “All right, Colin, I’ll vote for it.”
“Gerald? Tao-ling?” Both officers nodded, and Colin glanced at Chernikov.
“I, too,” the Russian said. “In fact, I would prefer to place the charge myself.”
“I don’t know, Vlad—” Colin began, but MacMahan interrupted crisply.
“If you were thinking about doing it yourself, you can just rethink. Whatever happens down here, you, personally, are going to be aboard Dahak and outside the lethal zone when we set it off. And if you know anybody better equipped for the job than Vlad, I don’t.” Colin opened his mouth, but MacMahan fixed him with a challenging eye and he closed it again.
“Good,” MacMahan said.
* * *
“Suppressor’s active, Brigadier,” the Security tech said, never looking up from his remote panel. “Their coms are blocked.”
“Elevators and switchboard?” Brigadier Jourdain asked, and another man looked up.
“Shut down. They’ve pulled almost all the regular Security people for crowd control, and I’ve cut the links to the lobby station. We’re placing the charges to blow the switchboard when we leave now; it’ll look just like a Sword of God hit, Sir.”
“All right.” Jourdain faced his handpicked traitors. “Remember, these are Imperial Marines. There’s only twelve of them, but they’re tough, well trained, and if they’ve tried their coms since the suppressor went on-line, they’re going to be ready. Our coms are out, too, so stick to the plan. Don’t improvise unless you have to.”
His men nodded grimly.
“All right. Let’s do it.”
* * *
Horus stood outside Jiltanith’s bedroom while she jerked on clothes, and his mind raced. It was preposterous. He was in his own HQ building in the middle of Earth’s capital city, and he couldn’t even place a com call! There could be only one reason for that, but how had “Mister X” pulled it off? Captain Chin was right. The only thing that could shut down fold coms without active jamming was close proximity to a warp suppressor, but a suppressor powerful enough to do the job was far too large to have been smuggled through White Tower’s security … which meant someone on his own security staff must have brought it in, and if he’d been penetrated that completely—
He crossed to his desk and touched a button, and the desktop swung smoothly up. The habits of millennia of warfare die hard, and despite his fear, he smiled wolfishly as he lifted the energy gun from its nest. He punched the self-test button, and the ready light glowed just as the bedroom door opened … and Captain Chin half-ran into his office.
“Your Grace,” the Chinese officer said flatly, “the elevators are out, too.”
“Shit!” Horus closed his eyes, then shook himself. “Stairs?”
“We can try them, Sir, but if they’ve cut the coms and elevators, they’re already on their way. And without the elevators—”
“Without the elevators, they’re coming up the stairs,” Horus grunted. Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful! Head down the stairs and they risked running into the bastards head-on. For a moment, he was tempted anyway, but Imperial weapons were too destructive. If they got caught in a stairwell, a single shot might take out all their men—and ’Tanni. But if they didn’t try to break out, they left the initiative to the other side. On the other hand—
Jiltanith stepped out of the bedroom, convoyed by four stocky, black-and-tan rottweilers. Her dagger glittered on her belt, and Horus’ mouth tightened as she reached out and took Captain Chin’s grav gun from its holster. The Marine didn’t protest; he simply shifted his energy gun to his left hand and passed over his ammunition belt with his right, and she gave him a strained smile. The belt wouldn’t fit around her pregnancy-swollen waist, so she hung it over her shoulder like a bandolier.
“All right, Captain,” Horus said. “We have to let them come to us. The stairs merge into the central core one floor down; have ten of your people set up to cover the landings. Leave the other two here to cover the access to my office. ’Tanni, lock your bedroom door, then go to my room and lock yourself in. Hopefully, if anyone gets this far, they’ll head for your room first.”
“Father, I—” she began, and he shook his head savagely.
“I know, ’Tanni, but you’re going to have to leave this to us. We can’t risk you, and even if we could—” He waved at her swollen belly, the gesture both tender and oddly apologetic, and she nodded unhappily.
“Art right,” she sighed, and looked down at the bio-enhanced dogs.
“Go thou wi’ Captain Chin,” she told them, “and watch thyselves.”
“We go, pack lady,” Galahad’s vocoder said, “but keep Gwynevere with you.” She nodded, and Horus looked at Chin as the other three dogs leapt away.
“We’re out of communication, and we’re going to be spread out. Watch your rears as well as your fronts.”
“Yes, Your Grace!” Chin saluted and vanished after the dogs, and Horus turned to the two Marines who’d been left behind.
“Anyone who gets this far will have to come up the last stair. After that, they’ll go for ’Tanni’s bedroom first. Pick yourselves positions to cover the stairs. If you have to fall back, head this way; don’t head for my room. We want them to keep on thinking she’s in her room as long as we can.”
“Yes, Sir.” The senior Marine jerked his head at his companion, and they ran towards the tower’s central access core.
“Go, ’Tanni!” Horus said urgently.
“I go, Father,” she said softly, yet she paused just long enough to throw one arm about him and kiss him before she wheeled away. He watched her go, Gwynevere trotting ahead of her like a scout, and turned to survey his office one more time. He’d accomplished a lot from this place. Commanded the Siege of Earth, directed the reconstruction in its wake, coordinated the introduction of an entire planet to Imperial technology… He’d never expected to fight for his daughter’s life from it, but if he had to do that too, then, by the Maker, he would.
He walked slowly to the office foyer. It was the only way into his personal quarters, and he upended his receptionist’s desk and piled furniture about it. He built a sturdy barricade facing the entry, then stepped away from it to the wall beside the entry and settled his back into a corner.
* * *
“The explosives have arrived at the Palace, Colin,” Dahak said as Colin entered the command deck of the computer’s starship body.
“Good.” Officers popped to their feet as their Emperor and Warlord strode across to the captain’s couch, but he waved them back to their duties. Dahak had moved beyond the weapon’s threat radius, and Colin felt a sick surge of guilt as he realized that, whatever happened, he personally was safe. It seemed a betrayal of all his subjects, and knowing Hector and Gerald were right to insist upon it only made his guilt worse.
He settled into the command couch. The display was centered on Birhat, not Dahak, and he watched sublight craft streaming from the planetary surface to the waiting planetoids. Like Dahak, all those starships were beyond threat range, and thousands more of his subjects were embarking aboard them as he watched, but it was taking time. Too much time they might not have. He drew a deep, deep breath and pressed himself back in his couch.
“Tell them to proceed, Dahak.”
* * *
Brigadier Jourdain followed his men up the stairs. There were only twelve Marines, one tired old man, and a pregnant woman to stop them, while he had over a hundred men, all fully enhanced courtesy of Earth Security. It would be more than enough, he told himself yet again. Some were going to get killed, but not enough to stop them, and dead Security men would be convincing proof of how hard Brigadier Jourd
ain and his men had fought to protect their Empress.
He bared mirthless teeth at the thought as his point man approached the landing. They were one floor below Duke Horus’s office and living quarters, and they hadn’t seen a soul. Perhaps he’d worried too much. Surely if the Marines had figured anything out—
Something rattled. The lead Security man saw the small object skitter past his feet, and his eyes flared. No! His implant scanners hadn’t picked up a thing, so how—
Eleven men died in a blast of fury, and the Marine who’d thrown the grenade grinned savagely as he and his partner reactivated their own implants and brought their energy guns to bear on the smoke-streaming door.
* * *
Captain Chin’s head jerked up as the explosion rattled. Please, God, let someone else have heard it! he prayed, then settled back down in firing position.
* * *
Brigadier Jourdain’s ears cringed as thunder filled the stairwell. The screams of the merely wounded were faint and tiny in the explosion’s wake, and he swore viciously. So much for surprise!
“Clancey! Get up there!” he barked, and Corporal Clancey settled his automatic grenade launcher into firing position. He jerked his head at the other three members of his section, and the four of them pushed forward through the men above them on the stair.
The waiting Marines had their own implant sensors on-line now, but there was a limit to what the devices could tell them. They knew the stairs were full of men, but they couldn’t tell what weapons they carried or precisely what they were doing. The second Marine held a grenade, ready to throw it, but the same suppressor that blocked their coms from hyper-space would smother any hyper grenade’s small field, and they’d had only one HE grenade each. He couldn’t afford to waste it, and so he gritted his teeth and waited.