Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “No.” Roger leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, and stared Catrone in the eye. “Being in that pressure cooker taught me more than just how to swing a sword, Tomcat. It made me a pretty fair judge of human nature, too. And I mean you love her. Not as a primary, not as the Empress—as a woman. Tell me I lie.”

  Catrone leaned back and crossed his own arms. He looked away from Roger’s modded brown eyes, then looked back.

  “What if I do?” he asked. “What business is that of yours?”

  “Just this.” Roger leaned back in turn. “Which do you love more—her, or the Empire?” He watched the sergeant major’s face for a moment, then nodded. “Ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it? If it comes down to a choice between Alexandra MacClintock and the Empire, can you decide?”

  “That’s hypothetical,” Catrone argued. “And it’s impossible to judge—”

  “It’s an important hypothetical,” Roger interrupted. “Face it, if we succeed, we will be the kingmakers. And people—everyone on Old Earth, in the Navy, in the Corps, the Lords, the Commons, all of them—are going to want to know, right away, who’s in charge.” He made a cutting motion with his hand in emphasis. “Right then. Who’s giving the orders. Who holds the reins. Not to mention the planetary defense control codes. My information is that Mother’s in no condition to assume that responsibility. What do your sources say?”

  “That she’s . . . impaired.” Catrone’s face was obsidian-hard. “That they’re using psychotropic drugs, toot controls, and . . . sexual controls to keep her in line.”

  “What?” Roger said very, very softly.

  “They’re using psychotropic—”

  “No. That last part.”

  “That’s why the Earl is involved,” Catrone said, and paused, looking at the prince. “You didn’t know,” he said quietly after a moment.

  “No.” Roger’s fists bunched. His arms quivered, and his face went set and hard. For the first time, Thomas Catrone felt an actual trickle of fear as he looked at the young man across the table from him.

  “I did not know,” Prince Roger MacClintock said.

  “It’s a . . . refinement.” Catrone’s own jaw worked. “Keeping Alex in line is apparently pretty hard. New Madrid figured out how.” He paused and took a deep breath, getting himself under control. “It’s his . . . style.”

  Roger had his head down, hands together, nose and lips resting on the ends of his fingers, as if he were praying. He was still quivering.

  “If you go in now, guns blazing, Prince Roger,” Catrone said softly, “we’re all going to die. And it won’t help your mother.”

  Roger nodded his head, ever so slightly.

  “I’ve had some time to get over it,” Catrone said, gazing at something only he could see, his voice distant, almost detached. “Marinau brought me the word. All of it. He brought it in person, along with a couple of the other guys.”

  “They have to hold you down?” Roger asked quietly. His head was still bent, but he’d managed to stop the whole-body quivers.

  “I nearly broke his arm,” Catrone said, speaking each word carefully, in a sort of high, soft voice of memory. He licked his lips and shook his head. “It catches me, sometimes. I’ve been wracking my brain over what to do, other than getting myself killed. I don’t have a problem with that, but it wouldn’t have helped Alex one bit. Which is why I didn’t hesitate, except long enough for some tradecraft, when you turned up. I want those bastards, Your Highness. I want them so bad I can taste it. I’ve never wanted to kill anyone like I want to kill New Madrid. I want a new meaning of pain for him.”

  “Until this moment,” Roger said quietly, calmly, “we’ve been in very different places, Sergeant Major.”

  “Explain,” Catrone said, shaking himself like a dog, shaking off the cold, drenching hatred of memory to refocus on the prince.

  “I knew rescuing Mother was a necessity.” Roger looked up at last, and the retired NCO saw tears running down his cheeks. “But frankly, if the mission would have worked better, if it would have been safer, ignoring Mother, I would have been more than willing to ignore her.”

  “What?” Catrone said angrily.

  “Don’t get on your high horse, Sergeant Major,” Roger snapped. “First of all, let’s keep in mind the safety of the Empire. If keeping the Empire together meant playing my mother as a pawn, that would be the right course. Mother would insist it was the right course. Agreed?”

  Catrone’s lips were pinched and white with anger, but he nodded.

  “Agreed,” he said tightly.

  “Now we get into the personal side,” Roger continued. “My mother spent as little time with me as she possibly could. Yes, she was Empress, and she was very busy. It was a hard job, I know that. But I also know I was raised by nannies and tutors and my goddammed valet. Mother, quite frankly, generally only appeared in my life to explain to me what a little shit I was. Which, I submit, didn’t do a great deal to motivate me to be anything else, Sergeant Major. And then, when it was all coming apart, she didn’t trust me enough to keep me at her side. Instead, she sent me off to Leviathan. Instead of landing on Leviathan, which is a shithole of a planet, I ended up on Marduk—which is worse. Not exactly her fault, but let’s just say that she and her distrust figure prominently in why almost two hundred men and women who were very close and important to me died.”

  “Don’t care for Alexandra, do you?” Catrone said menacingly.

  “I just found out that blood is much, much thicker than water,” Roger replied, cheek muscles bunching. “If you’d asked me, and if I’d been willing to answer honestly, five minutes ago if I cared if Mother lived or died, the honest answer would have been: no.” He paused and stared at the sergeant major, then shook his head. “In which case, I would have been lying to myself at the same time I was trying to be honest with you.” He twisted his hands together and his arms shook. “I really, really feel the need to kill something.”

  “There’s always those atul,” Catrone pointed out, watching him work through it.

  Frankly, the prince was handling it better than he had. Maybe he didn’t care as much, but Catrone suspected that it was simply a very clear manifestation of how controlled Roger could be. Catrone understood control. You didn’t get to be sergeant major of Gold Battalion by being a nonaggressive nonentity, and he could recognize when a person was exercising enormous control. Well, enough to prevent an outright explosion, at least. He wondered—for the first time, really, despite having seen the “presentation” from Marduk—just how volcanic Roger could be when pushed. Based on the degree of control he was seeing at this moment, he suspected the answer was very volcanic. Like, Krakatoa volcanic.

  “Putting myself in the way of an atul right now would be stupid,” Roger said. “If I die, the whole plan dies. Mom dies, and she . . . shit!” He shook his head again. “Besides, I’ve killed so many of them that it just wouldn’t be satisfying enough, you know?” he added, looking at the sergeant major.

  “Oh, yeah. I know.”

  “God, that hit me.” Roger closed his eyes again. “At so many levels. Christ, I don’t want her to die. I want to strangle her myself!”

  “Don’t joke about that,” Catrone said sharply.

  “Sorry.” Roger sat motionless for another moment, then reopened his eyes. “We’ve got to get her out of there, Sergeant Major.”

  “We will,” Catrone said. “Sir.”

  “I learned, a long time ago,” Roger said, smiling faintly, his cheeks still wet with tears, “all of eleven months or so ago, the difference between being called ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Sir.’ I’m glad you’re fully on board.”

  “Nobody is that good an actor,” Catrone told him. “You didn’t know. Your . . . sources didn’t know?”

  “I . . . think they did,” Roger replied. “In which case, certain cryptic glances between members of my staff are now explained.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time staff held back something they
didn’t want their boss to know. Be glad it wasn’t something more important.”

  “Actually, this is rather important. But I take your meaning,” Roger said. “On the other hand, I think I’ll just explain to them the difference between personal and important.” He looked at the sergeant major, his face hard. “Don’t get down on me, by the way, for considering Mother as a pawn. I saw too many friends die . . .”

  “I watched,” Catrone said, nodding to where the hologram had played.

  “Yes, but even for someone who’s been on the sharp end, you can’t know,” Roger replied. “You can’t know what it’s like to have to keep going every day, watching your soldiers being picked off, one by one, losing men and women that you . . . love, and the journey seems to never end. Seeing them dying to protect you, and nothing—nothing—you can do to help them that won’t make it worse. So, I did. I did make it worse. I kept throwing myself out there. And getting them killed while they were trying to keep me alive. Until I got good enough that I was keeping them alive. Good enough that they were watching my back instead of getting between me and whatever was trying to kill us, because they knew I was, by God, the nastiest, most cold-blooded, vicious bastard on that entire fucking planet.

  “I wasn’t fighting this battle for Mother, Sergeant Major; I was fighting it for them. To get that damned Imperial Warrant off their heads. To make sure they could go to bed at night in reasonable certainty that they’d wake up in the morning. So that the dead could be honored in memory, their bodies brought home to lie beside the fallen heroes of the Empire, instead of being remembered only as losers in a failed coup. As incompetent traitors. That was no way to remember Armand Pahner. I’d use anyone—you, the Association, Mother, anyone—to keep them from—”

  He shrugged angrily, and his nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath.

  “But, yeah, I just found out that blood is thicker than water. Before, I only wanted Adoula . . . moved aside. He was another obstacle to be removed, period. Now . . . ?”

  “New Madrid is the real bastard,” Catrone ground out. “He’s the one—”

  “Yes, he is.” Roger flexed his jaw. “I agree with that. But I’ll tell you something else, Sergeant Major. You’re not getting your wire waistcoat.”

  “Like hell,” Catrone said uncomfortably. “You’re not going to let him walk?”

  “Of course not. And if the timing is right, you can shoot the bastard, father of mine though he is—genetically speaking, at least. Or I’ll hand you my sword, and you can cut his pretty head off. But in all likelihood, if he doesn’t get accidentally terminated during the operation, or if he’s not in a position where early termination is the best course, we’re going to turn him over to the courts and slip a nice little poison into his veins after a full and fair trial.”

  “Like hell!” Catrone repeated, angrily, this time.

  “That’s what’s going to happen,” Roger said sternly. “Because one of the things I learned in that little walk is the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys don’t torture people just because they want vengeance, Sergeant Major. No matter what the reasoning. I didn’t torture that damned Saint bastard who killed Armand Pahner after he’d ‘surrendered.’ I shot him before I left Marduk, and given the Saints’ violation of Imperial territory and the operations those Greenpeace commandos carried out under his orders—not to mention killing so many Imperial Marines right there in Marduk orbit—it was completely, legally justified. I won’t pretend for a moment that I didn’t take a certain savage satisfaction out of it; as Armand himself once pointed out to me, I am a bit of a savage—a barbarian—myself. But I didn’t torture even the sons of bitches who killed him and tried to kill me, and I never tortured a damncroc for killing Kostas. Killed quite a few, but they all went out quick. If there’s a reason to terminate New Madrid as part of this operation, he’ll be terminated. Cleanly and quickly. If not, he faces Imperial justice. Ditto for Adoula. Because we’re the good guys, whatever the bad guys may have done.”

  “Christ, you have grown up,” Catrone muttered. “Bastard.”

  “That I am,” Roger agreed. “I was born out of wedlock, but I’m my mother’s son, not my father’s. And not even he can turn me into him. Is that clear?”

  “Clear,” Catrone muttered.

  “I can’t hear you, Sergeant Major,” Roger said without a hint of playfulness.

  “Clear,” Catrone said flatly. “Damn it.”

  “Good,” Roger said. “And now that that little UNPLEASANTNESS—” he shouted “—is out of the way, I’ll give you one more thing, Sergeant Major.”

  “Oh?” Catrone regarded him warily.

  “I’ve taken a shine to you, Sergeant Major. I didn’t understand why, at first, but you remind me of someone. Not as smooth, not quite as wise, I think, but pretty similar in a lot of ways.”

  “Who?” Catrone asked.

  “Armand Pahner.” Roger swallowed. “Like I said, none of that trip would have worked without Armand. He wasn’t perfect. He had a tendency to believe his own estimates that damned near killed us a couple of times. But . . . he was very much like a father to me. I learned to trust him more than I trust ChromSten. You with me, Sergeant Major?”

  “Pahner was a hell of a man,” Catrone said. “A bit of a punk, when I first met him. No, not a punk—never a punk. He was good, even then. But, yeah, cocky as hell. And I watched him grow for a bit. I agree, he was more trustworthy than armor. Your point?”

  “My point, Tom, is that I’ve come to trust you. Maybe more than I should, but . . . I’ve gotten to be a fair judge of character. And I know you don’t want to play kingmaker . . . which is why that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  “Explain,” Catrone said, wary again.

  “When we take the Palace,” Roger said, then shrugged. “Okay, if we take the Palace. And we rescue Mother. You are going to decide—right then, right there.”

  “Decide who gets the reins?”

  “Yes, who gets the reins. If Mother is even semifunctional, I’ll step back. Give her time to get her bearings, time to find out how damaged she is. But you, Thomas Catrone, are going to make the evaluation.”

  “Shit.”

  “Do you think Adoula has this?”

  Buseh Subianto had been in the IBI for going on forty years. She’d started out as a street agent, working organized crime, and she’d done it well. There’d been something about her fresh face and dark-green eyes that had gotten men, often men who were normally close-mouthed, to talk to her. Such conversations had frequently resulted in their incarceration—frequently enough, as a matter of fact, that she’d been quickly promoted, and then transferred to counterintelligence.

  She’d been in the counter-intel business for more than twenty-five years, now, during which she’d slowly worked her way up the ladder of the bureaucracy. The face wasn’t so fresh any more. Fine lines had appeared in her skin, and there was a crease on her brow from years of concentrated thought. But the green eyes were still dark and piercing. Almost hypnotic.

  Fritz Tebic had worked for his boss long enough to know when to avoid the hypnotism. So he swallowed, then shrugged, looking away.

  “He may have it,” he replied. “He’s seen the report on the Mardukans who met with Helmut’s courier. And New Madrid was definitely having Catrone followed. Catrone went to the Mardukan restaurant here in Imperial city, and a week later, he’s meeting with the hard-core members of the Associations. But . . . there are a lot of threads. Adoula’s people might not have connected them. Might not.”

  “If they had, we’d already have an Imperial arrest warrant for treason for Catrone and . . .” she looked at the data, frowning, the thin crease getting deeper, “this Augustus Chung. What gets me is that the players don’t make any sense. And where are the materials Chung’s been receiving coming from?”

  “I don’t know,” Tebic said. “OrgCrime Division’s already looking at this Marduk House pretty closely—they thi
nk Chung is laundering money. But they don’t have the information on the shipments. I haven’t put any of this into the datanet. The original report on the meeting with Helmut’s officers is in there, but none of the connections. And . . . there are a few Mardukans running around. They don’t have any skills, so they tend to end up as heavies of one sort or another. Some do work for orgcrime, so basically, the Sixth Fleet link looks like a false-positive unless you also have the information on the equipment Chung’s been receiving. Ma’am, what are we going to do?”

  It was difficult to hide much from the Imperial Bureau of Investigation. Most money was transferred electronically, as were most messages, and everything electronic went past the IBI eventually. And the IBI had enormous computing power at its disposal, power that sifted through that enormous mass of data, looking for apparently unconnected bits. Over the years, the programs had become more and more sophisticated, with fewer and fewer false hits. Despite draconian privacy limitations which were—almost always—rigorously observed, the IBI had eyes everywhere.

  Including inside the Imperial Palace. Which meant the two of them knew very well the actual condition of the Empress.

  Tebic remembered a class from early in his Academy days. The class had been on the history of cryptography and information security, and one of the examples of successful code-breaking operations had been called Verona, a program from the earliest days of computers—even before transistors. The code-breakers had successfully penetrated an enemy spy network, only to find out that the other side had agents so high in their own government that reporting the information was tantamount to committing suicide. At the time of the class, Tebic’s sympathy for them had been purely intellectual; these days, he connected with them on a far more profound level.

  A few key people in the IBI knew that Adoula and the Earl of New Madrid had the Empress under their complete control. They even knew how. The problem was, they had no one to tell. The IBI’s director had been replaced, charged as an accessory to the “coup.” Kyoko Pedza, Director of Counterintelligence, had disappeared within a day afterwards, just before his own arrest on the same charges. It was five-to-one odds in their internal pool that he’d been assassinated by Adoula; Pedza had been a serious threat to Adoula’s power base.