by Chris Bunch
"Pretty." Kurshayne said.
They were. Sten/Alex/Kurshayne's own target was the Jann design center, specifically the complex design computers in the building's basement.
But the booths for the designers were hung with sketches and models. Some of them, Sten knew, must have been made by people who loved the clean, swept beauty of interstellar ships.
So? Sten pulled the toggle on the twenty-second timer, and electricity pulsed through the portuguese-man-of-war-swirl that the det blocks and wiring made across the building's floor.
Kurshayne was still staring, fascinated, at one ship model.
Sten grabbed the model and shoved it deep into the man's nearly empty backpack. "Move, man, if you don't want to go into orbit."
As the three men doubled-timed out of the building, the charges rumbled and then went off and the center fell into its own basement.
No, Ffillips decided. No man, even a Jann, should die like that.
She and three commando teams were crouched behind a ruined building. Across the square from them was a skirmish line of Jann. And, above them, a huge tank of chem fuel.
Between the two forces one of Ffillips' men lay wounded in the center of the square.
"Recovery!" one of Ffillips' men shouted, and she sprinted out into the open. A Jann calmly broke cover, aimed, and put a shell through the would-be rescuer. Then switched his aim and gut-shot the wounded man.
Which effectively made up Ffillips' mind, and she sprayed rounds into the chem tank above the Jann. Liquid fire turned the black-uniformed killers into dancing puppets of death.
"All first-wave units committed. General," the Jann said.
"Thank you, Sigfehr," Khorea returned, and eyed his battle screen. Very well, very well. My first wave has held the mercenaries in place. Now my second wave will break their lines and the third wave will wipe them out.
He was curious as to what possible intentions the mercenary captain had—he still could see no rationale for the suicide raid.
The charges on the Atherston were quadruple-fused, just to make sure nothing could go wrong. Even so, two of them had been smashed out-of-circuit in the landing.
But two more ticked away their small, molecular-decay timers.
Brave men of the Jann reinfiltrated back to their AA positions, and slowly the weapons pits returned to life. Suddenly it was worth a Bhor's life for him to lift his lighter higher than the port's buildings.
The commando team edged forward, out of the shadows toward their target. As they moved into the open, a Jann missile lost its intended target—a Bhor lighter—in ground-clutter and impacted into a building.
All those commandos might have heard was the explosion of the missile and then the crumble as the ten-story structure poured down on them.
Their target would not be destroyed, and, for years afterward, some of their friends would wonder, over narcobeers, just what had happened.
The second wave of Jann, Khorea observed, was moving most efficiently. They did seem to be making inroads against the raiders' perimeter.
The third wave, now that the Bhor tac/air ships had to keep their distance, was drawn up in attack formation on the landing field, close to that ruined freighter.
Very well, Khorea thought. Now the Jann will show their courage.
Sten sighted carefully through his projectile weapon's sights and touched the trigger. Eight hundred meters away a Jann Sigfehr convulsed, threw his weapon high into the air, and collapsed.
Sten slid back into the nest of rubble he, Otho, Kurshayne, and Alex were occupying.
Kurshayne had dug out the model Sten had given him and was evidently staring at it in fascination. Sten started to snap something about children, toys, and their proper places when he noticed the small blue hole just above one of Kurshayne's eyes.
Alex crawled up beside Sten, and they looked at Kurshayne's corpse, then at each other. Wordlessly they clambered back up to the top of the rubble heap.
Contrary to the livies, even good men died at the least dramatic time.
A dusty and battered Egan checked his watch, peered out at the wreckage of the Atherston, then decided to see how far under the nearest boulder he could crawl.
"Men of the Jann." Khorea's voice rang through the PA.
"You have the enemy before you. I need not tell you what to do. Sigfehrs! Take charge of your echelons and move them to the attack!"
As that third wave of Jann doubled forward—more than three thousand elite soldiers—past the wreck of the Atherston, a decay switch ran out of molecules.
For the first time in Sten's experience, Alex had been doubtful about what would happen when charges went up."Ah ken i' th' door's gone, we'll hae ae wee fireball inside yon plant. But wha'll happit whae yon fireball hits yon back door ae th' plant, ah lad. Ah dinna ken. Ah dinna ken—"
What did happen was quite spectacular: As intended, the shaped charges on the Atherston blew straight out the open-nosed bow of the ship into the engine-hull mating plant, creating a quite impressive fireball—almost half a kilometer high. It rolled forward, at something more than l,000kps, toward the back door.
But the back door to the hangar did not drop, contrary to everyone's expectations. Instead, the fireball back-blasted, back up through the plant and back out, over the Atherston and onto the landing field itself.
From overhead the explosion might have resembled a sideways nuclear mushroom cloud as the now unrestricted blast-wave bloomed across the enormous landing ground. Directly over the charging Jann troops.
About the best that could be said is that it was a very, very quick way to die, mostly from the pressure wave, oxygen deprivation, or by being crushed by debris hurled from the hangar. Only the unlucky few on the blast's edges became human torches.
But in less than two seconds, three thousand Jann ceased to exist. As did the engine-hull mating plant. Nothing less than a high-KT nuke blast could have actually obliterated that huge building. But Sten's demo charges lifted the building straight up—and then dropped it back down on itself.
Some of Sten's men, in spite of specific orders, were too close to the blast area. They died. Others would never hear again without extensive surgery.
Sten's raid was more than satisfactory.
A side benefit—one which would ultimately save Sten's life—was that the Jann command bunker's com net was cut and Khorea, together with what little Jann command staff still lived, would be buried for at least three days.
Chapter Thirty-Five
PARRAL LEANED CLOSER to the vidscreen, watching the action from Urich with a great deal of interest. Sten's plan had more than succeeded.
But Sten had done much too well. As far as Parral was concerned, the war was over. Only one final blow was needed, and that Parral would take care of himself.
He switched circuits and keyed the command mike to his transports hanging in space off Urich. "This is Parral. All ships will break orbit. I say again: All ships will break orbit. Navigators, plot a course for home. That is all."
None of Parral's skippers, of course, protested. They were all too well trained. And, as the ships turned on Parral's vidscreen, the merchant prince was mildly sorry he didn't have a pickup down on the planet's surface, to watch Sten's final moments.
He was sure they would be terribly heroic.
Chapter Thirty-Six
STEN SHOVED A chunk of melted plas off his legs and staggered to his feet. Across the crater, Otho stared in befuddlement as Alex grinned at him.
"Dinna tha' go, lad?" Alex said proudly. "Dinna tha' be't tha most classic-like blast Ah hae e'er set?"
Sten groggily nodded, then turned as Egan stumbled into the crater, his eyes wide in panic. "Colonel," the boy shouted. "They've abandoned us!"
Sten gaped at him.
"We're stuck here! They've abandoned us!"
Then Alex was beside Egan, shaking him and not gently.
"Tha be't nae way to report, so'jer," he reproved. "Dinna y'ken hae t'be't ae so'je
r?"
Egan brought himself back under control. "Colonel Sten," he said formally, but his voice was still shaking. "My com section reports a loss of contact with Parrel's freighters. Plotting also shows all the pickup ships have disappeared from their orbits."
And then Egan lost it again. "They're leaving us here to die!"
Book Four
Riposte
Chapter Thirty-Seven
"WHAT DO YOU think?" Tanz Sullamora asked proudly.
Clot polite, the Emperor thought. "Slok," he said, quite clearly.
Sullamora's face began falling in stages.
The painting, like the others, was what the Eternal Emperor could have called Russian-heroic. It showed a tall, muscular young man. with dark hair and blazing blue eyes. Good muscle tone. The young man was armed with what the Emperor believed to be an early-model willygun and was using it to hold off a mixed horde of crazed alien- and humanoid-type fanatics.
The gallery itself was stupendous, almost a full kilometer long, and hung with what Sullamora had assured the Emperor was the largest and most valuable collection of New Art in the Empire.
The paintings were all massive in canvas and theme, all painted in the superrealistic style that was the current rage. The medium was a high-viscosity paint whose colors shifted with the light as the viewer moved. Always the same color, but slightly different in tone. The "paintbrush" itself was a laser.
Each of the paintings that the Emperor had stared and then scowled at showed another heroic moment in the History of the Empire.
And each one was so realistic, a cynic like the Emperor wondered, why bother with a paintbrush when a computer-photoreconstruction would do just fine?
Sullamora was still in shock, so the Emperor decided to elaborate. "It's abysmal. A vidcomic, like everything else in this gallery. Whatever happened to the good old days of abstract art?"
Sullamora headed one of the largest entities operating under Imperial Pleasure, a conglomerate that was, basically, a vertical mining discovery-development-exploration subempire. He was very successful, very rich, and very pro-Empire.
Privately his tastes ran to the horrible art the Emperor was looking at and prenubile girls taken in tandem. Which was why he had invited the Emperor to the gallery opening, and which was also why he now slightly resembled a Saint Bernard who'd discovered his brandy barrel was empty.
Sullamora managed to cover his first reaction of pure horror and his second, which was to tell the Eternal Emperor he was a fuddy-duddy with no appreciation for modern art.
Instead, looking at the muscular, mid-thirties-appearing man who was the ruler of stars beyond memory, he backed down. Which was his first mistake. He whined, which was his second. The Eternal Emperor liked nothing better than a good argument, and he loathed nothing more than a toady.
"But I thought you would be pleased," Sullamora tried. "Don't you recognize it?"
The Emperor looked at the painting again. There was something familiar about the man, but not the incident. "Clot, no."
"But it's you." Sullamora said. "When you turned the tide at the Battle of the Gates."
The Eternal Emperor suddenly recognized himself. A little better looking, although he always considered himself moderately handsome and certainly more heroic than he felt. The Battle of the Gates, however, had him stumped.
"What battle?"
"In the early days of your reign."
And then, suddenly, the Eternal Emperor remembered. His laughter boomed across the yawning gallery. "Do you think I did that?" he chortled, pointing at the drawn blaster and the screaming hordes.
"But its well documented," Suilamora protested. "It was you who made the final stand during the Uprising seven hundred years ago."
"What kind of a fool do you think I am? Hell, man," the Emperor said, "do you think—when the drakh hit the ducts—
I stood out in front of anybody with a gun?"
"But legend—"
"Legend me arse," the Emperor said crudely. "You should know you can always buy a man with a gun. Nope, Sullamora, this is not me. During that Uprising I made clottin' sure I was far behind the lines with the bribes."
"Bribes?"
"Of course. First thing I did was put a price on the heads of the Uprising leaders.
"Like good capitalists, the rebels turned in their own leaders." He smiled at the memory. "It was horrible," he said. "Blood everywhere."
"And then what did you do with the rebel soldiers?" Sullamora blurted out, despite himself.
"What do you think?"
Sullamora puzzled this over and then smiled. He had it. "Execute them all?"
The Eternal Emperor laughed again. Sullamora shuddered; he was beginning to hate the Emperor's mocking laughter. Although he knew it wasn't directed entirely at him, his skin crawled at the feeling that it was aimed at the entire human condition.
In that, he wasn't far wrong.
"No," the Eternal Emperor said, "I hired them. Gave them all double raises. And now, next to the Imperial Guard, they're the most trusted regiment in my forces."
Sullamora filed that odd logic away. Perhaps this kind of personal insight might be of use to him. But, no, it would never work. How could you ever trust men who had tried to kill you? Better to crush them quickly, and get it over with.
He looked at the Eternal Emperor with new disrespect.
"You got anything decent to drink?" the Emperor asked.
Sullamora nodded, boldly grabbed the Emperor by the elbow, and led him to his private chambers.
The Eternal Emperor had been drinking steadily for two hours, telling obscene stories about incidents in his reign. Sullamora forced a laugh at the Emperor's latest joke and, with a great deal of distaste, realized that the Emperor always made himself the butt of all his jokes. The man's a clotting fool, he thought, and doesn't mind anyone knowing it.
Quickly he buried the thought, it was about time to make his move, he realized, noting the fact that the Eternal Emperor had consumed enough spirits to stun a mastodon, without benefit of anti-inebriation pills. With that reminder, Sullamora secretly popped the fourth pill of the evening. He looked at the Eternal Emperor's bleary eyes and decided the time was right.
"I hope this has been a pleasant visit," he ventured.
"Shhure, Shalia…! mean… Sha… no…Tanz. That's it, Tanz." The Emperor sloshed out another glass and belted it down.
"Great night. Now. Lesh… I mean… Let's me and you go hit a coupla port bars. Get into a fight. Get into trouble… then finda coupla ladies.
"I know some ladies with figures like"—he made curving motions—"and minds like… like…" He snapped his fingers—obviously these women were sharp, sharp. "We'll argue all night, then… then… you know… all night." The Eternal Emperor gave Sullamora a sudden, sharp, terribly sober look. It came to the man as a shock.
"Unless," the Eternal Emperor said, "you have something else on your mind."
"But… but…" Sullamora protested, "this is just a social occasion… to show you my new gallery."
The Eternal Emperor laughed that mocking laugh again. "Give me a break," he said and, ignoring Sullamora's bewilderment at the anachronism, pushed on. "You're the head of the largest mining company in this region.
"You got something on your mind. And you don't have the cojones to ask for an audience. Instead you give me all this royal treatment. Clotting artsy garbage—and lousy art at that. Try to get me drunk.
"Now you're just trying to get up the nerve to dump on me."
"I haven't the faintest—"
"Context. Tanz. Context. Clot, what do they teach corporate executives these days? Why, in my time—Hell with it. One more time—what's on your mind, Tanz?"
And Tanz, haltingly, told him. About his company's plans to follow up on the rumors in the Eryx Cluster. His spies (although he did not use that word) had assured him that the gossip about the potentially superwealthy fields was a fact… And Sullamora wanted to personally hand in his company
's application for exploration to the Eternal Emperor.
"Shoulda asked me straight out," the Eternal Emperor said. "Can't stand a man who hems and haws."
"All right," Sullamora said. "I am asking you—'straight out,' as you say. My company is willing to invest the credits to exploit this new area."
The Eternal Emperor didn't even think about it. "No." he said flatly.
He took pity on the man, filled up Sullamora's glass, and gave the corporate president time to choke down a huge swallow. "What I had in mind," he said, "was a consortium."
Sullamora spewed his drink across the table. "A consortium!" he gasped.
"Yeah," the Emperor said. "You get together with other big mining companies—I've already put out some feelers," he lied, "put together a consortium and go at Eryx as a unit—then you can exploit the clot out of it."
"But the profits," Sullamora protested. "Too many companies…"
The Eternal Emperor raised a hand, interrupting him. "Listen, I've already made my own studies. Any single mining company that attempts to exploit Eryx on its own is heading for bankruptcy. It's a frontier area, after all. Now, if you people pool your resources, you might make a go of it. That's my suggestion."
"Your suggestion?"
"Yeah. Take it or leave it. Just a thought. Oh, by the way— your latest request for an increase in your company's AM2 supply?…"
"Yes?" his voice quavered.
"Think about this consortium deal, and I might consider it."
Since the source of all power (AM2) was supplied and controlled by the Eternal Emperor, Sullamora had just been kicked in the place where it would hurt the most.
The Eternal Emperor took another drink. Slammed the glass down, making Sullamora jump about two feet.
"Tell you what," the Eternal Emperor said. "If you like my consortium suggestion, I might even double your AM2 quota. What do you think of that?"
Sullamora was not as dumb as he appeared. He liked that offer very much, thank you.
"Double their quota?" Mahoney asked in amazement. "Clot, no." his boss said. "I hate these mining companies. They're almost as bad as the Old Seven Sisters…" He waved a "forget it" at Mahoney's ignorance.