by Chris Bunch
"So," Sten wondered. "He probably stood up, announced 'I ain't got none,' and they geeked him."
"Maybe," Cind said. "But he was taken under Kyes's wing first."
Kyes. The ET artificial-intelligence specialist, who'd also disappeared, shortly after the council lifted Poyndex from his post as head of Mercury to a seat on the council itself. No explanation for that disappearance, either.
Sten had, in fact, investigated as part of his general work investigating the council. He'd discovered that Kyes's race was symbiotic, its real intelligence provided by a parasite. In time, the parasite claimed its due, and a Grb'chev went into drooling senility. Kyes, well past that well-known age, had most likely been discovered one fine morning watching sunlight crawl across a windowsill, murmuring "It's shiny," and been quietly medevacked to the Grb'chev Home for the Terminally Bewildered.
"Possibly," Cind allowed. "The Cult of the Eternal Emperor believes he was taken directly to commune with the Holy Spheres, whatever the hell they are.
"However, consider what we have here. Kyes, a computer genius, and his cohort, another specialist in the field. Both interested in AM2. Oh yes. One further thing. When Kyes became Lagguth's rabbi, all data that the council had stored on AM2 was removed. It vanished, too."
"Uh-uh," Sten said, alarm signals going off. "I think your report's a mickey. The Emperor had somebody wipe those files—after his return. And then put out the fiche you're using as disinformation."
"Could be," she said. "However, I'm off to Lagguth's home world. Just to ask some dumb questions. Unless you have something better in mind?"
Sten did—but it wouldn't further any cause beyond his own morale.
"And you're going with her," he inquired of Alex.
"Thae's a big clottin' naaaaaay, ae i' Ah was a foalin't mare. Ah'm off't' see th' weasand. Or whae Ah hope i' th' Emp's windpipe, at any rate.
"Th' lass' thinkin't makit a wee bit ae sense, Sten. An' Ah took th' same tactic. 'Cept Ah went peepin't aboot th' Emp. Y' rec'lect whae we were i' th' Altaics, oop't' our pits i' ter'rists, y' were skreekin't frae th' Emp and c'dnae get a response? A'ter Iskra massacreed th' students?"
Sten did. Very well. He had made call after call on the secure hotline between the embassy and the Imperial palace on Prime. The Emperor, he had been told, was indisposed.
"I always thought," Sten said, "that he was just ducking me. For some reason I never figured out, and haven't really considered since."
"Aye. Mayhap th' Emp dinnae want't' chat wi' y', lad. But Ah took th' trouble ae checkin't. Thae's still secure h'nes onto Prime, i' y' hae old friends who retired frae Mantis't' a sin'cure wi' Imperial Communications, aye? An' more mates who've gone hit' private security.
"In'trestin' thing Ah hae discovered. Aboot th' same time, though no one's runnin't ae timetable, th' Emp wen' t' Earth. Wi' no notice, wi' no fanfare."
"Why?"
"Ah c'd nae find e'en a theory. But i' dinnae wash thae he'd gie himself a fishin't vacation whae th' drakh's hittin' th' fan e'erywhere. Th' lad's nae prone't' kenn'dy oot ae th' wee'est prov'cation.
"An' one other wee thing Ah hae heard, fraw m' sources wi'in th' Emp's soldiery. At aboot th' same time ae th' Emp wae goin't fishin, some laddies frae th' service wae detached, on spec'l duties, 't' th' Imperial Household itself. EOD laddies."
EOD—explosive ordnance disposal. Bomb-defusing and countermeasure experts. Why would the Emperor want them on Earth? Sten thought for a moment, then nodded. It was time to filter somebody onto Earth and find out what the hell had happened.
"Ah'm away," Alex said, seeing the nod. "Altho' Ah dinnae hae pleasure i' this. Thae's bad thoughts oop thae, i' th' mist an' th' fog."
There were. Sten had led an assassination team against the privy council onto Earth, where they'd held a summit meeting at a palatial retreat up Oregon Province's Umpqua River from the Emperor's old fishing grounds.
Of the ten beings in the contact team, Sten had been the only survivor. And all of them had been longtime Mantis operatives, friends as well as fellow operatives, of Sten and Alex.
Another place, like Vulcan, with blood-drenched memories.
"Are you looking for anything in particular?"
"Ah hae no leads. Just wanderin' aroun' keepin't m' nose up i' th' air an' m' arse doon. Ah ask't Sr. Wild i' Ah c'd borrow a wee ship an' a pilot.
"He's loan't me ae zoomie, an' a pilot he's claim't b' be one ae his slinkiest. Human lass, nam'd Hotsco. Wild's sayin't she volunteer'd. So we ken she's brain-damag't.
"Ah hae spokit't' her. Pretty, i' y're fond ae th' slender las-sies wi' wee hips an' boobies an' a waist y' can span wi' one paw. M'self, Ah always fear't Ah'd gie romantic an' snappit such a one i' half. But, since she's noo hard on most human eyeballs, Ah'll us't th' old deep-i'-love duo ae m' cover. I' any-body'd believe this Hotsco, wi' her hair hangin't doon't' below her waist an' flashin't eyes, hae an' int'rest i' a tub like m'self, aye?"
Bhor Intelligence would monitor Alex's work while he was gone, and he had appointed Marl, his agent-in-training and the Bhor Police Intelligence Specialist, Constable Paen, as acting case officers on his personal project, the counteragent program he was running through the successfully doubled Hohne. The Imperial spy had seen the light, just as Alex had predicted to Marl, after only a few cycles at the bottom of one of the Bhor's more colorful prisons.
"So. Everything's goin't tickety-tickety, like a wee sewin't machine. Worries me, 'cause we're noo i' a sewin't machine.
"An' noo Ah'm off? D' either ae y' wish't' kiss me 'bye? Ah brusht m' fangs nae more'nt two epochs gone."
Instead, Sten bought him a farewell drink. Or two. Cind found time for one herself.
He loudly mourned, over the stregg, that he had now discovered the problems of being a figurehead. He never got to have any fun.
Cind patted his cheek.
"It's like the old song goes," she said. " 'You just stand there looking cute/And when something moves you shoot.' "
Just stand there, Sten thought.
Like hell I will.
Ida, too, was disobeying Proper High Level Leadership Rule Three, SubParagraph D: Keep a Lotta Grunts Between You And Where The Bullet Goes Bang. Sten had determined to keep the Rom in the background as long as possible, and use them as deep-cover recon and for surreptitious transport of small attack forces. Eventually they would be blown—but Sten hoped to get the maximum utilization from the traders before they were exposed as the Emperor's enemies.
That, of course, meant that Ida herself shouldn't even consider going operational.
Ida had come up with a Grand Scheme, one that Sten had heartily approved of. She hadn't bored him with details such as who was the field agent who would plant this "bomb."
Ida planned to plant the Fiendish Thingie herself. Romantics, or those who had never spent any time around Kaldersash, might have thought she was providing a noble example by leading from the front or, possibly, indulging in some homesickness over the old glory days of Mantis.
Of course, the reality was that Ida had seen vast opportunities for the initiating agent to make Noble Profit, a reality Jon Wild also sensed instantly.
And so a grossly overweight and overbearing woman, accompanied by her mousy husband, arrived on the trading world of Giro. It appeared that he had the money, but she had the clout. But since they arrived with several millions in hard credits, E-transmitted one day after their arrival, no one cared about their personal arrangements.
Civilizations, human or otherwise, tend to accept certain fictions. One of the most convenient is that securities—stocks, bonds, and the like—actually have some relationship to the actual prosperity of the government/corporation they're issued by. The Bourse, Wall Street, Al-Manamah, the Drks'l System, all have worked about the same over the centuries.
Ida had figured out a long time before that the two best rules of security trading are: (1) Avoid the perceived wisdom, and (2) The stock is not the company. Her non-Aristotelian approa
ch to the market as pari-mutuel system had made her several squillion credits.
One of the many odd facts she had collected in her periodic economic looting/maiming expeditions was that Giro was one of the worlds specializing in securities/finance where the entire system's main computers were housed.
Ostensibly, however, Ida's—and oh, yes, her husband's—reason for being on Giro, instead of using one of the brokerage houses on her—unnamed—home world to trade was that she liked to be in the center of things. That also wasn't particularly interesting to anyone.
She and Wild made their grand entrance one morning, when the trading firm of Chinmil, Bosky, Trout & Grossfreund opened. Ida had chosen the firm carefully, not for its massive size and far-scattered branch offices, but because CBT&G were known for their "liberal" interpretations of the Empire's security laws. Ida knew that a white-collar crook is one of the easiest to hoodwink. He's not only convinced he's the first to come up with whatever scam he's running, but is convinced that everyone else, from the coppers to the marks, are utter fools.
Ida and Wild announced their intent of increasing and broadening their holdings beyond their home system, and mentioned the huge amount they were prepared to play with, and were rapidly passed through the hands of a receptionist to a junior trader to a senior trader to a partner, Sr. Bosky himself.
Ida pretended to listen to his advice, accessed a central terminal, and began buying. And selling.
Talking in a steady stream as she did:
"Sr. Bosky, now, if I do as you advise, and go long on TransMig, keep what I have in Cibinium, consider this new issue of Trelawny… Jonathan, stop fidgeting, we know what we're doing… ah, getting out of Soward five percent municipals… see that quote… I could have told them… good advice, Sr. Bosky, as I was saying that I consider Trelawny, although the prospectus hardly seemed to be complete—-"
She had completely lost Bosky in one-half an E-day.
Ida sneered inwardly—she figured anyone as crooked as Chinmil et al. were, most especially a partner, would have to be able to see which walnut Ida's pea was under for a day or so. But she continued her prattle as money went here, there, and everywhere.
Bosky was tempted to tell this annoying woman to go away—but he noticed that within two trading days, Ida had doubled her investment.
He started listening. Hard. And spending his own, and the firm's, money, chasing Ida's investments.
Of course, what Ida was really doing with her capital was very different than what Bosky thought, but it would take at least one cycle for the confusion to subside and Bosky to figure out just how many megacredits he had lost.
He also failed to notice that Wild, in the chatter, had been unobtrusively feeding a program into the firm's main computer. Stage One. It took one E-week to get the program exactly positioned.
That night, Stage Two was mounted. Ida and Wild, well after midnight, slipped out of their hotel suite to a completely clean and anonymous gravsled Wild had procured and lifted into the night.
The next day, Ida got the obligatory terrible message from home. A cheap, hack, dumb device that'd get her busted out of Basic Extraction Tactics 101 at any spy academy. But businesspeople, in spite of loud boastings that they study history/ espionage/military strategy, in fact do nothing more than memorize enough catchphrases to convince their fellow drinkers they're Tigers.
Ida promised Bosky they would return shortly.
And they departed on a great luxury liner, a liner they immediately left at the first planetfall, where they picked up one of Wild's ships that had been prepositioned for them. Then they disappeared completely. Even the ship they had used for their escape was completely wiped and given new registry, from engines to nav equipment to hull numbers. That was but one of the cultural specialties of the Rom.
Even before they had gotten off the liner, Stage Three, a completely automatic program previously fed into one of CBT&G's smallest branch offices half a galaxy away, activated.
All of Ida's investments were liquidated immediately into hard currency, and the credits E-moved. Later investigators managed to follow the money through three laundries before the trail vanished.
Both Ida and Wild, already rich enough to consider hiring Croesus as a flunky, had trebled their personal fortunes. They had made so much, in fact, that Ida had felt almost guilty, and made Sten and Kilgour an additional bundle, just for recreational purposes. "How clottin' nice it is," Ida observed, "to be able to do well by doing good, or whichever way the grammarians say I should put it."
Stage Two went off, predawn, just as the market opened for the next trading "day."
Literally.
Twenty-six small but exceptionally dirty nuclear demolition charges blew Giro's automated computer center—which meant the Empire's main securities computer—off the face of the planet. The charges had been designed and built by Kilgour, the super-mad-bomber, before he had wandered off on his own mission.
Total casualties: one custodian who had passed out in a mess area instead of clocking out in a mess area, and a handful of security goons.
Nanoseconds later, the disaster rippled out, across livie channels and business "wires." Panic. Who… why… what could anyone… how could anyone… anarchy… atrocity… against the rules of something or other…
The market free-fell hundreds of thousands of points. And then instantly recovered, as sanity returned.
The horror was not that horrible. There were backup computers, of course. And certainly the monster who could even think of destroying a staple of civilization wouldn't know that.
The main backup computer went online.
Wild's program began running.
A junior trader saw it first, as he activated his workstation. The screen, instead of giving him a market display, showed a portrait of the Eternal Emperor. Scowling. In full uniform. Finger pointing directly at the clerk. The voicesynth boomed, "YOUR EMPIRE NEEDS YOU." And the image hung there, hung there, and the trader swore something about clotting politicians and clotting—stopped, broke off, looked guiltily around, since Internal Security had begun investigating the business community, and rebooted.
The rebooting activated Ida's virus, and quite suddenly the Empire wanted everybody, and everybody swore to themselves just as they swore when the omnipresent antipiracy warning came on their screen when they fired up their stations and then they rebooted…
… and the virus spread some more. Spread and grew and spread and grew…
… and the backup computer system blew, and, as it blew, sent the virus on to yet another backup system.
The Empire's securities trading network went to La-La Land.
It was almost a full cycle before any trading floor approached normalcy. The first panic reaction of a good capitalist is to go for the gold Liquidate everything into something secure.
Orders went out—but could not be implemented. Several exchanges were closed for trading. Banks declared holidays. Some very healthy corporations were forced into bankruptcy as shareholders dumped their holdings. And, conversely, some truly hemorrhaging entities were not only given a prolonged lease on life, but able to establish themselves firmly as successes. Traders sometimes had to actually keep notes—in hand writing. Buy/sell orders were handled verbally and manually!
Sten was quite pleased. Especially since Ida's grand scheme produced the desired end result: as investors liquidated, and bought into safety, which of course was the AM2-secured Imperial credit, those credits became more expensive as they became scarcer. And for a while, no matter how many credits the Empire's main bankers dumped out, the crash seemed unstoppable. Eventually the Empire's emergency financial dumping worked and the pendulum stopped swinging.
But the midget had swung his feather—and the ball had moved. It was yet another beginning on another front of Sten's total war.
Sten was rather morosely preparing himself a solitary meal, trying to remind himself that the best revenge is living well. Yet another pastime he had sort
of picked up from the Eternal Emperor.
His meal was, by description, a simple Earth sandwich. Its filling would be a rib-eye steak from a steer.
But it may have been the Ultimate Steak Sandwich.
Earlier that day, before the paperwork and Go Higher And Hither orders had a chance to consume him as usual, he'd cut diagonal slices in the three-centimeter piece of meat. The steak went into a marinade—one-third extra-virgin olive oil, two-thirds Guinness—the remarkable dark beer he had been introduced to just before his last face-to-face meeting with the Eternal Emperor—salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic.
Now it was ready for the charbroiler.
He took softened butter, and beat a teaspoon of dried parsley, a teaspoon of tarragon, a teaspoon of thyme, and a teaspoon of oregano into it. He spread the butter on a freshly baked soft roll, foil-wrapped the roll, and put the roll in to warm.
Next he sliced onions. A lot of onions. He sauteed them in butter and paprika. As they started to sizzle, he warmed, in a double broiler, a half liter of sour cream mixed with three tablespoons of horseradish.
Next he'd charbroil the steak just until it stopped moving, thin-slice it on the diagonal, put the meat on the roll, onions on the meat, sour cream on the onions, and commit cholesterolcide.
For a side dish he had thin-sliced garden tomatoes with a vinegar/olive oil/basil/thin-chopped chive dressing and beer.
The com signaled. It was Freston.
He asked if Sten's com was shielded and scrambled. It was, of course. Freston said he had just finished an interesting analysis on that strange signal that had been beamed into nowhere from the lead ship in the AM2 convoy as it arrived in the Dusable system and robotically realized it was under attack.
Sten decided to wait until Freston was finished before eating his ass out and reminding the officer he was no longer a technowonk communications specialist but a combat leader with his own ship, and to leave his clottin' com techs alone.