Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “A tisket, a tasket, a head in a basket,” Dave said in a high voice. “No matter how you try, it cannot answer the questions you ask it!”

  “Have you got any idea where we are?” Krindi asked over the crackling roar of flames. Fortunately, their environment suits were flame resistant, and they’d lowered their face shields and activated their filters. But the air was getting low on oxygen, and even inside the suits, it was bloody hot.

  “Second floor?” Erkum suggested uncertainly. He was training the gun around, delighted to have it operational again as he looked for targets.

  “Third floor, third floor,” Krindi muttered, looking up. “Oh, hell. Erkum, look, very carefully . . .”

  Catrone grabbed Despreaux as the rocking concussion of an explosion slammed into the room. The entire office seemed to lift and then drop, sliding downward and to the side in an uncontrolled fall as the desk toppled towards the right wall. It crunched to a halt at an angle, listing to the right.

  Dave threw himself over Trey, trying to get a finger hold on the carpet.

  Pedi rolled onto her stomach, gripped a fold of the deep-pile carpet in her teeth, and flung out all four arms. She managed to snag Catrone with her lower right, Dave and Trey with the upper left, and Clovis, as he slid past, with her upper right.

  “Okay,” she muttered through tightly clenched teeth. “What do we do now?” The floor her lips were pressed against was getting distinctively warm.

  “Slip sliding away,” Dave sang in a high tenor, holding onto the unconscious Trey with one arm and gripping the carpet between thumb and forefinger with the other hand. “Slip sliding away, hey!”

  “I hate classical music,” Clovis said as he drew a knife and very slowly lifted it in Dave’s direction, then slapped it into the carpet as a temporary piton. “I really, really do . . .”

  Honal banked left, almost clipping a building with his tail, then flipped right and down the next road, then left again, and pulled up sharply, rolling the stingship over on its back. As the Empress’ Own stingship rounded the corner, he let it have a burst from his forward plasma guns and rolled back upright.

  “Way’s clear,” he said. “Roll the shuttles!”

  “Where’s Alpha Six?” Flight Ops asked as Honal flew over the remains of the stingship sticking out of a building. Only the tail was visible, with the markings of a squadron commander.

  “Alpha Six won’t be joining us,” Honal said, pulling up and over the building in salute to a fallen comrade. “Roll the shuttles.”

  Time to go and join Rastar. He was probably having fun at the gate.

  “At least the Navy is still out of it,” Ops said. “Rolling shuttles now.”

  “Citizens of the Empire!”

  Prince Jackson Adoula’s face appeared on every active info-terminal in Imperial city. He looked grave, concerned, yet grimly determined, and uniformed men and women bustled purposefully about behind him as he sat at a command station. Holo displays in the background showed smoke towering over the unmistakable silhouette of the Palace.

  “Citizens of the Empire, it is my grave responsibility to confirm the initial reports already circulating through the datanet. The traitor, Roger MacClintock, has indeed returned to launch yet another attempt to seize the Throne. Not content with the murder of his own brother, sister, and nieces and nephews, he is now attempting to seize the Palace and the person of the Empress herself.

  “I urge all citizens not to panic. The valiant soldiers of the Empress’ Own are fighting courageously to defend her person. We do not yet know how the traitors managed to initially penetrate Palace security, but I fear we have confirmation that at least some Navy elements have been suborned into supporting this treasonous act of violence.

  “All government ministers and all members of Parliament are being dispersed to places of safety. This precaution is necessary because it is evident that this time the traitors are targeting more than simply the Palace. My own offices in the Imperial Tower were destroyed by a precision-guided weapon in the opening moments of the attack, and my home—and my staff, many of whom, as you know, have been with me for years—was totally destroyed within minutes of the start of the attack on the Palace.”

  A spasm of obvious pain twisted his features for a moment, but he regained his composure after a visible struggle and looked squarely into the pickup.

  “I swear to you that this monumental treachery, this act of treason against not only the Empire, not simply the Empress, but against Roger MacClintock’s own family, shall not succeed or go unpunished. Again, I urge all loyal citizens to remain calm, to stay tuned to their information channels, and to stand ready to obey the instructions of the military and police authorities.”

  He stared out of the thousands upon thousands of displays throughout Imperial City, his expression resolute, as the image faded to a standard Navy Department wallpaper.

  “Calm down, Kjer,” Prokourov said ten minutes after Kjerulf’s reply, calmly ignoring the outburst. “I’m probably on your side. Taking out Greenberg was a necessity, distasteful as it may have been. But I want to know what you know, what you suspect, and what’s going on.”

  “Ms. Nejad, she still busy,” the Mardukan said, coming back into the monitor’s field of view. “Gonna be staying busy.”

  “Tell her to get unbusy!” Kjerulf snapped. “All right, Admiral. All I really ask is that you keep out of this. My main worry is CarRon Fourteen. We’ve shut down the Moonbase fighter wing, and it turns out that they’re pretty unhappy with Gianetto, anyway. I’ve got a small squadron of loyal ships holding the orbitals. All I need is for the rest of the squadrons to stay out of it.”

  He turned off his mike and looked over at Tactical.

  “Any more movement?”

  “No, Sir,” Sensor Five said. “But Communications just intercepted a clear-language transmission from Defense HQ to all the outer-system squadrons. General Gianetto’s declared a state of insurrection, informed them that Moonbase is in mutinous hands, and ordered a least-time concentration in Old Earth orbit.”

  “Crap,” Kjerulf muttered, and keyed his mike. “Admiral Prokourov, I take that back. We may need active support—”

  “Captain Kjerulf,” Eleanora O’Casey said, appearing on his other monitor. “What’s happening?”

  The door looked like oak. And, in fact, it was—a centimeter slab of polished oak over a ChromSten core. Most bank vaults would have been flimsy by comparison, but it was the last major blast door between them and Roger’s mother. And, unfortunately, it was on internal control.

  Roger lifted the plasma cannon—his third since the assault began—and aimed at the door.

  “My treat, Your Highness,” one of the Mardukans said, carefully but inexorably pushing Roger away from the door.

  The prince nodded and stepped back, automatically checking to be sure the team was watching in every direction. They were down to ten, including himself. But there should be only two more corridors between them and his mother, and if the information in the command center’s computers was correct, there were no automated defenses and no armored guards still in front of them. They were there. If only she was alive.

  The Mardukan carefully keyed in the sequence to override the safety protocols, then triggered a stream of plasma from the tank cannon at the door. But that door had been intended to protect the Empress of Man. It was extraordinarily thick, and it resisted the blasts. It bulged inward, but it held stubbornly through seven consecutive shots.

  On the eighth shot, the overheated firing chamber detonated.

  Roger felt himself lifted up by a giant and slammed through the merely mortal walls of the approach corridor. He came to a halt two rooms away, in one he recognized in confusion as a servant’s chambers.

  “I don’t sleep with the help,” he said muzzily, picking himself out of the rumpled tapestries and ancient statuary.

  “Your Highness?” someone said.

  He tried to put a finger into one of his ears,
both of which were ringing badly, but his armor’s helmet stopped him. So he shook his head, instead.

  “I don’t sleep with the help,” he repeated, and then he realized the room was on fire. The overworked sprinkler system was sending a fresh downpour over him, but plasma flash had a tendency to start really hot fires. These continued to blaze away, adding billowing waves of steam to the hellish environment.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked, looking around and backing away from the flames. “Why is the room on fire?”

  “Your Highness!” the voice said again, then someone took his elbow.

  “Dogzard,” Roger said suddenly, and darted back into the flames. “Dogzard!” He shouted, using his armor’s external amplifiers.

  The scorched dog-lizard came creeping out from under a mattress, a couple of rooms away, wearing a sheepish expression. She’d been following well behind the group. From her relatively minor damage, she’d probably run and hidden at the explosion.

  “How many?” Roger said, shaking his head again and looking at the person who’d called him. It was Master Sergeant Penalosa, Raoux’s second in command. “Where’s Raoux?”

  “Down,” Penalosa said. “Hurt bad. We’ve got five left, Sir.”

  “Plus me and you?” Roger asked, pulling up a casualty list. “No, including me and you,” he answered himself.

  “Yes, Sir,” the master sergeant replied tightly.

  “Okay,” Roger said, and then swore as a blast of plasma came out of the small hole his Mardukan had managed to blow in the door. So much for the CP’s information that there were no guards beyond. “What are we on? Plan Z?” he said. “No, no, calm, right? Got to be calm.”

  “Yes, Sir,” the sergeant said.

  “Plan Z it is, then,” Roger said. “Follow me.”

  “Sir, we just lost the feed from the system recon net,” Senior Captain Marjorie Erhardt, CO HMS Carlyle said.

  “We have, have we?” Admiral Henry Niedermayer frowned thoughtfully and checked the time display. “Any explanation of why, Captain?”

  “No, Sir. The feed just went down.”

  “Um. Obviously something is happening in-system, isn’t it?” Niedermayer mused.

  “Yes, Sir. And it’s not supposed to be,” Erhardt agreed grimly.

  “No, but it was allowed for,” Niedermayer pointed out in return, with maddening imperturbability.

  “Should we head in-system, Sir?” Erhardt pressed.

  “No, we should not,” the admiral said with just a hint of frost. “You know our orders as well as I do, Captain. We have no idea exactly what’s going on on Old Earth right this minute, and any precipitous action on our part could simply make things enormously worse. No, we’ll stay right here. But go ahead and bring the task group to readiness for movement—low-powered movement. Given the timing, we may need to adjust our position slightly, and I want strict emissions control if we do.”

  Larry Gianetto’s face was grim as the icons and sidebars in his displays changed. Whatever his political loyalties, he was a professional Marine officer, one of the best around when it came to his own specialty, and keeping track of the apparently overwhelming information flow was second nature to him.

  Which meant he could see exactly how bad things looked.

  The attack on the Palace had been only minutes old when he ordered additional Marines into the capital to suppress it. Now, over half an hour later, not a single unit had moved. Not one. Some were simply sitting in place, either refusing to acknowledge movement orders or stalling for time by requesting endless “clarification.” But others were stopped where they were because their personnel were too busy shooting at each other to obey. And most worrying of all, even in the units which had tried to obey his orders, the personnel loyal to him seemed to be badly outnumbered.

  If the defenders already in the Palace couldn’t stop these lunatics, then it was highly unlikely that anyone else on the planet would be willing to help him retake it afterward.

  He looked at a side monitor, showing a fresh broadcast from Prince Jackson, and bared his teeth in a cynical, mirthless smile. The viewing public had no way of knowing that the bustling command post behind Adoula did not exist outside one of the most sophisticated VR software packages in existence. By now, Adoula was actually aboard the Hannah P. McAllister, an apparently down-at-the-heels tramp freighter in orbit around the planet. His public statements were recorded aboard the ship, beamed down to a secure ground station, plugged into the VR software, and then rebroadcast through the public information channels with real-time images from the Palace inserted. The illusion that Adoula was actually still in the city—or, at least, near at hand—was seamless and perfect.

  And if things continued to to go to hell in a handbasket the way they were, it was about time Gianetto started considering implementing his own bug-out strategy.

  “Christ, the cavalry at last,” Marinau said as the first shuttle landed in the courtyard. He and what was left of his teams and the Mardukans had held the North Courtyard over twice as long as the ops plan had specified. They’d paid cash for it, too. But at least the bogus Empress’ Own’s armored reaction squad had gone in pursuit of Roger, thank God! And thank God the so-called troops Adoula had found as replacements weren’t real combat troops. If they had been, there would have been no one left to greet the incoming shuttle.

  It came under heavy fire, but from small arms and armor-portable cannon only. The heavy antiair/antispace emplacements had all been knocked out, and the shuttle was giving as good as it got. It laid down a hail of heavy plasma blasts on the positions which had the attackers pinned down, and as big—huge—armored Mardukans piled out of the hatches, more fire came from the sky, dropping across the positions of the mercenaries still holding the Palace.

  “No,” Kuddusi said, raising up to fire a stream of beads at the defensive positions. “The cavalry went in first.”

  “Let’s move,” Marinau said. “Punch left.”

  “Where are we going?” Penalosa asked as Roger led them down an apparently deserted corridor.

  “To here.” Roger stopped by an ancient picture of a group of men chasing foxes. He lifted an ornamental candlestick out of a sconce, and a door opened in the wall.

  “This is a shortcut to Mother’s room,” he said.

  “Then why in hell didn’t we use it before?” Penalosa demanded.

  “Because,” Roger thumbed a sensor ball and tossed it into the passageway, “I’m pretty sure Adoula knows about it.”

  “Holy . . .” Penalosa muttered, blanching behind her armored visor as the sensor ball’s findings were relayed to her HUD. There were more than a dozen defense-points in the short corridor. Even as she watched, one of them destroyed the sensor ball.

  “Yep,” Roger agreed, “and they’re on Adoula’s IFF.” He keyed his communicator. “Jin, you getting anywhere?”

  “Negative, Your Highness,” Jin admitted. “I’ve been trying to crack Adoula’s defensive net, but it’s heavily encrypted. He’s using a two-thousand-bit—”

  “You know I don’t go for the technical gobbledygook,” Roger said. “A simple ‘no’ would suffice. You see what we see?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Jin said, looking at the relayed readouts.

  “Suggestions?”

  “Find another route?”

  “There aren’t any,” Roger muttered, and switched frequencies. “God damn it.” He hefted the replacement plasma cannon he’d picked up and tossed it to Penalosa. “If this doesn’t work, get to Mother. Somehow,” he added, and drew both pistols.

  “No!” Penalosa dropped the cannon and grabbed vainly for the prince as he leapt into the corridor.

  “That’s it,” Gianetto said. “I won’t say it’s all over but the shouting, but there are insertion teams deep into the Palace, they’ve secured an LZ inside the inner parameter, and they’re lifting in additional troops. CarRon 14’s moving, and so are Prokourov and La Paz. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single goddamned idea wha
t Prokourov is going to do when he gets here, and he’s going to get here well before CarRon 13. The ground units here planet-side are either refusing to move at all, or else fighting internally about whose orders to take, and the commanders loyal to us don’t seem to be winning. That means Gajelis is the closest available relief—with the head start he got, he’s going to be here about twenty minutes before CarRon 12, even if Prokorouv’s feeling loyal to us. And it’s still going to take Gajelis another three hours-plus to get here. We may still be able to turn this thing around—or at least decapitate the opposition—if we can get control of the orbitals, but in the meantime, we’re royally screwed dirtside. It’s time to leave, Your Highness.”

  “I cannot believe that little shit could put something like this together!” Adoula snarled.

  “It doesn’t matter whether it was him, or someone else. Or even whether or not he’s really still alive,” Gianetto pointed out. “What matters is that the shit has well and truly hit the fan. I’ll be issuing the official dispersal order in ten minutes.”

  “Understood,” Adoula replied, and looked at his loyal chauffeur once again. “Duauf, go inform the captain that we’ll be leaving shortly.”

  “At once, Your Highness,” the chauffeur murmured, and Adoula nodded. It was so good to have at least one competent subordinate, he reflected. Then he pursed his lips in irritation as another thought occurred to him. One more thing to take care of, he thought irritatedly. Loose ends everywhere.

  “We’re holding the inner perimeter, Your Highness,” “Major” Khalid said. “But we’ve lost the stingship squadron, and they’re shuttling in reinforcements. They’ve got us cut off from the main Palace, and so far, they’ve thrown back every try to break out we’ve made. We need support, Sir. Soon.”