Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1

by Stephen Goldin

  “They’re part of the imperial collection.”

  “They’re also out of character. They don’t fit the rest of the image.” She removed the six rings, the platinum pin and the silver chain with the large diamond stone. Then she picked up another piece of discarded fabric and tied it into a tiny bundle around the jewels. With the bundle safely knotted, she tucked it down inside her cleavage. “No one we don’t trust will get it now. Smooth, we’re off. It’s showtime.”

  “I can’t go outside looking like this,” Natalia complained. “What if people see me?”

  “Then they’ll see you, not the tsaritsa. Take my hand. The show must go on.”

  Eva took Natalia’s hand and led the reluctant girl out the door and back into the maze of hallways. “How can you know where you’re going?” Natalia asked. “I’m totally lost.”

  “I felt the same way in your palace. Here, at least, they have signs to help.”

  Now that she was less afraid of being spotted, Eva dared take them through some of the more public areas of the spaceport terminal. The chaos had mostly died down; once the rioters achieved their objective of blowing up the Argosy, they moved elsewhere. The terminal was still swarming with militsia, but they were mostly there to instill a sense of order after the horrible events. They weren’t yet looking for an escaped tsaritsa, so paid scant attention to the two young oddly-dressed ladies who stayed mostly to the edge of the crowd. Eva navigated to a taxi zone and called for a cab.

  “Don’t say anything while we’re in the cab,” she told Natalia quietly. “They’re usually monitored, and someone may recognize your voice pattern. Let me do all the talking until I say it’s safe to speak.”

  They got in and Eva pressed her wristcom against the activation plate. “Destination?” asked a disembodied voice.

  “We need a cheap hotel near the spaceport for a couple days during our layover. What’s available?”

  “Do you require special amenities?”

  “A double bed and a bathroom would be nice. Other than that, we’re easy.”

  “The Starline is five kilometers away. It’s thirty-two rublei a night. They have a vacancy.”

  “Perfect. We’ll take it.”

  As they rode, Eva took her first opportunity to tune her wristcom to the news webnews. It was nothing but a litany of disasters, what the news media were already calling the blackest day in the Empire’s history. It started with the death of Tsar Vasiliy, then reports of widespread rioting on dozens of worlds, and topped off by the tragic death of the young tsaritsa right here on Languor. Speculation was rife that the Sovyet Knyazey would be calling an unprecedented emergency session to decide the order of succession, although there still were a couple of very distant candidates who had minor claims.

  Natalia listened to this news with a clenched jaw and equally clenched fists, but true to Eva’s instructions she said nothing. Eva tried half-heartedly to lighten the moment by saying, “What a shame about Natalia. She seemed so promising.” But the attempt at humor fell very flat; Natalia was beyond being amused.

  They made it up to their room, which was spartan indeed: a double bed, a small writing desk with a mirror behind it, a chair, and a dingy bathroom with a stall shower so small it was a good thing neither of them was very chubby.

  The instant Eva nodded it was all right to speak, Natalia exploded with a string of furious invective, using words no well-bred young dvoryanka should even know existed. Aside from cautioning Natalia to keep the volume down because the walls probably weren’t soundproof, Eva let her rant for nearly five minutes until she wound down to just a fit of shaking. By that time she had gone into vivid detail about the traitors’ executions and cursed the conspirators back at least four generations.

  “I’m hungry,” Natalia finally announced, as though expecting Eva to produce some food mysteriously out of thin air.

  Eva checked the service screen. “Well, we’re out of luck there; this hotel’s too cheap for room service, and we’re not going out again tonight. Go take a shower instead. I know you’re not happy covered in dirt, and a shower should relax you and help you sleep.”

  Natalia spent a long time in the shower while Eva sat at the small table and made contingency plans. The poor kid’s miserable. Her whole world, her whole identity’s been stripped away in an instant, with nothing certain to replace it.

  The girl came out of the shower eventually, wearing her underwear and a towel around her hair like a turban. “Feeling any better?” Eva asked.

  “I’m still hungry.”

  “Billions of people go to bed hungry every night, Your Majesty. You’ll survive a few more hours. Meanwhile I’ll take my own shower so you can stand being in the same room with me.”

  Eva’s shower was much shorter. When she came out, Natalia was lying in the middle of the bed. “Where are you going to sleep?” the young girl asked her.

  “Right here,” Eva said, patting the bed. “Scoot over.”

  From the sudden look of panic on the girl’s face, Eva realized immediately what the problem was. “You’ve never shared a bed before, have you?”

  Natalia shook her head nervously.

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m not a lesbian and I’m told my snoring is very gentle.” Natalia still didn’t look convinced. “There may come a time when you’ll want to share your bed with someone.”

  Natalia kept looking at her with wide, fearful eyes.

  “Well, I intend to sleep in that bed,” Eva said quietly. “You have the choice of sharing it with me or sleeping on the floor.”

  Natalia looked down at the floor, then back at Eva. Finally she moved slowly over to give Eva some room. In fact, she moved so far over to avoid touching that Eva was afraid the girl would end up on the floor anyway. But Eva said nothing. The girl would make her own adjustments at her own speed.

  Eva barely lay down facing away from Natalia when the girl suddenly said, “Why aren’t you afraid?”

  Eva avoided the temptation to make the flip comment, “Because no one’s trying to kill me.” Instead she turned over to face the girl, who was staring straight up at the ceiling. “Who says I’m not?”

  “You look so calm.”

  “Here’s a good lesson for you, Your Majesty. Courage isn’t about not being afraid. Courage means being afraid, but doing what needs to get done anyway.” She paused. “Are you afraid?”

  “A tsaritsa is never afraid,” Natalia said, trying to sound stoic.

  “You have every right to be,” Eva went on. “Half the Empire is trying to kill you, the other half already thinks you’re dead. I wouldn’t think any less of you if you needed to cry.”

  “A tsaritsa never cries,” Natalia said coldly.

  “I don’t know who’s been feeding you this line of kittledung, but you’d better get it out of your head or you won’t be worth saving. A tsaritsa who can’t be afraid, a tsaritsa who can’t cry, or laugh, or fart, or do anything else normal people can is a tsaritsa divorced from humanity. How can you possibly rule over a tsarstvo full of people if you don’t know how to be one yourself? You just lost an entire ship full of friends; it’s the most normal thing in the world to cry.”

  “A tsaritsa has no friends. They were just staff.”

  Eva made no attempt to deny the impulse; she reached out and slapped Natalia’s face, although she did pull the punch at the last second to avoid breaking the girl’s jaw. She got up and looked down at Natalia, her heart filled with righteous anger. “Don’t you dare dehumanize them like that! They were people! I worked with some of them for a while, and most of them were decent people. Yes, it was their job to take care of your needs, but that doesn’t make them less human. The crew of the ship, the military officers, the secretaries, the cooks who made you those splendid meals, even those ninnies who were your other freiliny—they all deserved a better fate than getting blown up. You’d better rethink your values fast, young lady, or I’ll walk out of here right now and leave you on your own.”

&
nbsp; In panic, Natalia reached out to her. “No, don’t! Please!”

  The fog of anger evaporated, and Eva could see the scared fourteen-year-old again. Her heart melted. She sat back down on the bed and gently took Natalia’s outstretched hand. “No, I won’t leave you,” she said. “But please don’t think of your subjects as some faceless schmoes—or this won’t be the last assassination attempt against you. The teachers who fed you all that kittledung about how a tsaritsa should act, they weren’t completely wrong. In public, the tsaritsa has to be a leader, and the people draw their emotional cues from her. Yes, she has to appear strong. But backstage, like now, you can let your feelings out. That’s the only way to stay sane.”

  Eva could hear a slight involuntary sniffle, so she decided to take a risk and continue. “And about a tsaritsa not crying—well, I was in the closet when Col. Groenwald told you the tsar was dead—”

  “You were spying on me?” Her old indignation rose again.

  “Well nu, that was my job, remember? But in this case I just happened to be there accidentally. I heard you crying your heart out.”

  “You had no right—”

  “No right to what? I should have closed my ears? You have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s perfectly human. You’d just lost your great-uncle—”

  “I wasn’t crying for him! “ Natalia snapped angrily. “I didn’t even like him. I hadn’t seen him since his stroke, and even before that I only saw him two or three times a year at state occasions. He was a cold man, he hated kids. If I wasn’t his only heir I don’t think he’d have cared if I lived or died.”

  “Then why were you crying?”

  Natalia didn’t answer immediately. Eva waited patiently, quietly. The silence stretched on loudly for several minutes.

  “I was crying for me, okay?” the girl blurted out angrily. “I was crying because my life is over, don’t you understand?”

  Eva continued to stare quietly, sympathetically.

  After a minute, Natalia continued. “As Velikaya Knyaghinya, I still had some freedom. Not as much as normal girls, I know, but I could still do a lot of what I wanted. I could be me, just Natalia Ilyinishna. Now I can’t. I don’t belong to just me any more. I’m the tsaritsa, I belong to the whole empire, and Natalia Ilyinishna doesn’t exist.”

  Eva reached out to stroke the girl’s hair and shoulders, but remained silent.

  “Everyone will be looking at me. I have to have all the answers. I have to make the decisions. I can’t hesitate, I can’t show any doubt. I have to be right every time. And I … I’m not ready. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’M NOT READY! “

  The tears and the sobbing came in earnest now. Eva lay back down beside the frightened girl, put her arm around the shaking body and held her tightly. Natalia occasionally tried to get out a few words from time to time, but her weeping made them incomprehensible. The events of the past day crashed over her like an emotional tsunami, carrying her away with grief.

  Finally the tears eased, and the tsaritsa of the largest empire ever known to man cried herself to sleep in Eva’s arms.

  CHAPTER 10

  Killing Ivan Borodin

  Pavel Lubikov, prime councilor to Knyaz Yevgheniy, entered his lord’s study to find Kuznyetz talking with someone on his monitor. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. Meanwhile, you go and pack. We’ll be leaving soon.”

  He signed off and turned to look at his adviser. “Yes, Pavel, what have you got for me?”

  “The tsar’s death has been confirmed.”

  “Excellent,” Kuznyetz said with a satisfied smile. “And Federico knows what his role is, so we have no worries on that score. Time to mobilize.”

  “I’ve already taken the liberty of sending out the orders, sir. Our onplanet ships should start lifting off within minutes, and our in-space forces just started moving to their rendezvous coordinates.”

  “Efficient as always. What would I do without you, Pavel?”

  Lubikov nodded curtly. “Just trying to serve you well, Your Grace.” Then he hesitated. “This just leaves the slight matter of Ivan Borodin, Wettig’s spy.”

  “Ah yes, him. I just finished talking with Marya about him. It seems she had an unpleasant encounter with him a little bit ago. She doesn’t even know he’s a spy, and even she wants him dead.”

  “I’ll be happy to dispose of him for you, sir. A quick shot to the back of the head should do the trick.”

  “Your usual efficiency. However, in this case Marya requested a particularly painful death. I know I spoil the girl, but I’ll humor her this once. Send the spy to me. I’ll see he’s taken care of.”

  * * *

  Judah Bar Nahum was trying to decide what tactic to take. He was due on duty again in just a few minutes. Should he keep his cover identity intact and stand his watch in the hallway? But that would waste seven crucial hours of inactivity, hours Wettig might need to plan an effective counter-response to the coup.

  But there was probably little more he could learn here, and the information was critical. “Your cover identity is just a means to an end,” Ilya Uzi had said, “not the end in itself.” It was time to kill Ivan Borodin, get outside the palace and into town, and make a call to Wettig. He didn’t have a Q-line, but he didn’t really need one. Even a short, totally uncoded sentence—”Kuznyetz is really Pyotr Sokolov”—would be enough of a warning for the former ISIS commissar; he’d know what to do from there. Then all Judah’d have to do is get safely off Kyrby.

  He started toward a side exit of the palace, but he barely got a dozen meters when he met Cdr. Aab. “Borodin!” the officer said. “Just the man I was looking for. I’ve got orders to take you directly to the knyaz. Follow me.”

  Judah met more indecision. Should he break and make a run for it? But he was still deep within hostile territory, and an alarm raised now could be fatal. He had no reason to suspect his cover had been blown; this could be a perfectly innocent situation.

  “Improvise and trust your wits,” was Ilya Uzi’s constant mantra. He decided to play along and see where this would lead.

  He followed the officer to the most inner portion of the palace, where he was passed off to another officer who took him directly to Kuznyetz’s office. He had to surrender his beamer before he could enter. Then the door slid open for him and he walked in alone.

  Kuznyetz was sitting in a large green leather chair behind his desk, staring intently at the built-in monitor. Judah stood at attention for over two minutes, while Kuznyetz appeared not to see him. Then the knyaz looked up and spoke. “Lt. Borodin, I presume.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” Judah said with crisp formality.

  “Events are happening, lieutenant—events far above your head, but of empire-wide significance. Do you understand?”

  “No sir,” Judah said more slowly, even though he knew exactly what Kuznyetz meant. Playing dumb might gain him more information.

  “I don’t have time to explain it now. Just know that I am about to receive a critical package, and it’s imperative that the messenger not recognize whom he gives the package too. My staff and I are all too well known. As the newest officer of my kavalergardy, you would not be recognizable. Do you understand now?”

  “I believe so, sir. You want me to receive the package on your behalf.”

  “Exactly. Then you will return it here to me. Can you do that?”

  Judah was actually thinking of various possibilities. Here he was, alone in a room with Kuznyetz, maybe five meters of space between them. All he’d have to do is leap across the desk and snap the man’s neck to end Kuznyetz’s threat to the imperial succession.

  But then the Ilya Uzi part of his brain started ticking off the reasons why that would be a bad idea. One: Kuznyetz was paranoid enough to have automated defenses against assassination, particularly in his lair. While Judah’s reflexes were much faster than those of an unmodified human being, he couldn’t beat the electronic speed of automated weapons. At most he could get in one incredibl
y brief attempt to kill Kuznyetz before he himself was killed. That might not be enough to accomplish his goal. He was prepared to die to save the Empire—but dying in a useless attempt would be worse than simple failure.

  Two: The tsar was already dead, which was certainly the signal for the rebellion to start. Even if he killed the strongest claimant to the throne, there’d be plenty of others. They wouldn’t stop just because Kuznyetz was dead; if anything, that would probably make the fighting fiercer as the different factions fought for control. It could be years, possibly decades, before the fighting ceased; the Empire might even end up as a bunch of independent principalities with no unifying sense of order. It had almost happened before, and sensible people shivered at the mere thought of what that would be like.

  Three: Well, to look at it bluntly, he’d never killed anyone before. He’d trained as a dancer, not an assassin. In theory he knew what must be done—but there was an unspannable distance between theory and practice. He had the physical strength to snap a person’s neck—but when it came right down to the act, could he do it? Or would he hesitate, even a tiny bit, just enough to ensure failure?

  All these factors flashed through his mind in a split second. Discretion would definitely be the better part of valor in this case. He’d play the game out and see how it developed.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” he said mildly. “I can do that.”

  “Good. Here is the key you’ll need. Go through that door and down the hallway to room 278. Your contact will meet you there.”

  After Judah left the room, Lubikov re-entered. “We really must be going now, Your Grace. The ships are all ready to launch. I still think a beamer ray to his head would have been quicker and more efficient.”

  Kuznyetz nodded. “I’m sure you’re right, Pavel. But I’ll set the room to record the events. I’m sure Marya will derive great satisfaction from watching them when we get back.”