Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  Then, under partial and muffled drive, it set a landing trajectory. A somewhat unusual one. From the ground, it would appear that the tacship was coming "straight down," toward one point on the planet—a wilderness near the capital city. Speed was kept low to reduce skinheating and subsequent infrared printing by Bhor scanners.

  It was still waiting for the correct moment, which came when one of the great Bhor intercontinental suborbital transports lifted from a field and bellowed for nearspace.

  The tacship went for ground, using the cover of the transport's electronic, infrared, and physical turbulence.

  On board, the dispatcher waited next to the spy. The compartment was lit with eye-saving red nightlights.

  The spy was heavy-laden, McLean pack on her chest and a backpack containing a weapon and a travel case that would pass unnoticed as a civilian's valise. Inside the case were clothes, normal espionage gadgetry, plus a great sheaf of Imperial credits and Bhor currency.

  Strapped to her leg was the heavy dropbag containing that most necessary and dangerous tool of a spy, a transmitter/receiver. The com buzzed.

  "Coming in on Delta Zulu," the tacship pilot announced.

  "Aye, sir," the dispatcher said.

  "We're at dropspeed. On approach."

  The dispatcher felt the tacship chop power and level out of its dive.

  "Aye, sir. Hatch opening."

  The dispatcher touched a button, and a circular hatch yawned. There was moonlit night and, far below, gleaming snow. Two corrugated steel plates slid out, into the middle of the open hatch. To one side, the dispatcher could see the flickering from the Bhor transport's stern as it drove on and upward, unseeing.

  The spy shivered. But the compartment was heated.

  "Looks cold down there."

  "Your friends'll be waiting," the dispatcher soothed. "Now. Position."

  The spy stepped onto the plates. She swayed in the airblast from the hatch, then recovered. As trained, she locked her hands tightly on the two handles of the McLean pack. One of them held the drive activation switch.

  "Count thirty before you drop your bag," the dispatcher reminded. The spy nodded, not really hearing.

  The com buzzed.

  "Ten count… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… GO!"

  The steel plates snapped back into their housing, and the spy plummeted down toward Vi. The dispatcher keyed the mike, as the hatch slid shut.

  "One away, sir."

  "Affirm. Return to your post."

  The tacship lifted toward space. The temptation was to hit full drive and hare away. But the tacship pilot was a professional—the drive signature at full power would very likely be picked up, wasting all the trouble they'd gone to for the insertion. The dispatcher looked down, at the now-closed hatch.

  "May all your eggs," he said, "be double-yolked."

  A spy needed all the luck that could be wished for.

  43491… 29875… 01507…

  Marl, now promoted out of tech ranks and commissioned as ensign, and the Bhor constable, Paen, watched one of the nightscreens in their gravlighter.

  The image blurred, and Marl touched a button, and the picture was razor-sharp.

  "You would not ever get me leaving a perfectly good tacship in flight," Paen observed.

  "Nor me," Marl agreed.

  The message had been coded and blurted out from Vi toward an Imperial Intelligence receiving station, located as close as safety would permit to the Lupus worlds:

  41413 urgently

  31146 require

  00983 additional

  01507 agent(s)

  30924 reports

  32149 's

  37762 't

  11709 e

  23249 n

  03975 begins (beginning?)

  26840 plans

  41446 to use

  37731 system(s)

  03844 the basalt has come in again

  09856 delivery

  37731 system

  20691 in

  43491 will

  29875 recover

  01507 agent(s)

  Marl was particularly proud of 03844, since she'd observed that Hohne was not exactly the most skilled of coders. Kilgour had been right in thinking Hohne a bit of an amateur since he was using an extant code. It wasn't significant to Alex that at least Hohne had chosen a prehistoric system, dating back to the dark ages when idiocies like obsidian daggers and onetime pads had been used.

  She figured the Imperial who decoded the message would swear a lot, scratch his/her/its head(s), reconsult the code fiche, substitute 03843, meaning for a base, and the message would make sense. The mad Scotsman would be proud of her sneakiness.

  Damn, but she was starting to miss Alex. When he got back, now that she was commissioned and all, and he was technically not in her chain of command, she planned to cozen him into drinks, dinner, and… who knows?

  If nothing else, she wanted to find out the truth about that title, Laird Kilgour of Kilgour. If he was really some land of baron, what was he doing in this revolt, instead of sucking up to the Emperor?

  "The human looks cold," the Bhor said, not a shred of sympathy to his rumble.

  "She does."

  Marl felt momentarily empathetic for the doomed spy drifting toward them, still about a kilometer above the ground. She pushed it away. The woman has a choice.

  "More stregg?" Constable Paen asked.

  "I say again my last—humans can't be swilling stregg like you folks, and still function."

  "Kilgour can."

  "Kilgour isn't human, either."

  "That is true."

  Paen drained his cup—& duplicate in miniature of a drinking horn—folded it, and put it away.

  "Shall we collect our new friend?"

  Both beings slid out of the gravlighter, careful to not shut the doors behind them—the sound of a slamming door carries forever on a silent night. Around them, hidden in the blackness of this thicket, were twenty heavily armed Bhor policemen.

  Above them the spy touched buttons, and her rate of descent slowed as much as the McLean generator could overcome gravity. The age of the fantasized strap-on-your-back personal flier still hadn't arrived, even with the antigrav capabilities of the McLean system. But at least it had replaced all varieties of the incredibly dangerous parachute.

  The spy directed her descent toward one end of the huge open meadow that was the dropzone, the final end of delivery system M. Below her was tranquil forest. Far, far away—at least five klicks, she estimated—she saw the lights of a tiny farmhouse.

  Just as planned. No ambush waiting.

  Perhaps, she thought with a chill, her friends—the Imperial spymaster whose cover name was Hohne, or his chosen representatives—weren't at the rendezvous, either. But, that was not a problem. She would go to ground for one planet-day as instructed. There were rations and heat tabs in her case, and her jumpsuit would keep her very warm.

  Even if they didn't materialize then, she would still be all right. Bury the jumpsuit and McLean pack, and make her way to the capital city. She had memorized three alternate pickup points.

  Groundrush—under twenty-five meters—as she swung toward the snow.

  She forced her eyes off the earth below, earth she knew had needle-sharp stones just under that innocent-looking snowy blanket, and onto the horizon. She suddenly remembered the dispatcher's warning, and her hand slammed the knob on her harness, letting the dropbag unspool on its five-meter cord so it wouldn't still be attached to her leg on the landing slam.

  The bag with the transmitter dropped less than half a meter when the ground came up and smote the spy.

  She did a classic three-point PLF: toes, knees, nose… and the pain crashed. She blurted, then buried an outcry and lay motionless in the snow.

  "Clot," Marl swore, as the police spread out toward the spy. She and Paen hurried toward the sprawled agent. "If she ruined the com, I'll use the thumbscrews. We're two back now as it is."

&nbs
p; Building a replica of one of the Empire's secret, compact superpower transmitters took a great deal of time—time when a spy would be out of circuit and would have to come up with some explanations when she reopened contact.

  And there was no question in Marl's mind that this agent would eventually be tamed. Or else she would be brainscanned for her code phrases, contacts, electronic "fist," and then executed.

  Only three Internal Security agents had chosen Patriotism and the Road to Tyburn so far—three of the twenty-nine whom Poyndex had ordered into the Wolf Worlds in response to Hohne's bleating about Sten's imminent arrival.

  The other twenty-six were quite comfortable in quarters on various worlds that weren't quite prisons but were certainly not freedom, broadcasting exactly what they were fed.

  Marl, and through her, Kilgour, and through him, Sten, were running the Eterrnal Emperor's entire espionage net in the Wolf Worlds.

  Just as Alex had planned.

  Some time before, a colleague of Rykor's had been given an unusual assignment. A specialist in military recruiting, she had been ordered to prepare a campaign intended for the defeated Tahn worlds. At first Rykor had thought the idea somewhat unsavory, but she was pragmatic enough to realize that the military always recruits from its defeated and most generally downtrodden enemies.

  But her colleague had gone on to explain that her orders had specifically stated that the campaign was to focus around a resurrection of the old Tahn samurai culture, a deathway the Emperor had sworn to extirpate after he had defeated the Tahn.

  Interesting—and Rykor found it aberrational that the Emperor could believe that poverty could be cured by putting the poor in uniforms. But there was more to the concept than just that—and a full analysis revealed another indication of the Emperor's growing psychopathy. He was evidently building an army that he planned to use. Since there was no known external foe requiring a huge army to stand off, this newly restructured military would have as its purpose to destroy the enemy within. In other words, the citizens of the Empire.

  Since the Tahn Way encouraged xenophobia, a racial superiority, the belief that mercy was a weakness, and the firm conviction that the strong had rights over the weak, this new model army of the Emperor's would be barbaric.

  Rykor had subtly investigated—and found that other worlds with their own feral cultures were suddenly the focus of Imperial recruiters.

  Very interesting.

  Fortunately the campaign was very easy—at least easy for a being with Rykor's skills in mass psychology—to destroy.

  Rykor had swept up every psychologist or psychological student she could find who was able to fulfill some fairly basic requirements: Do you like to travel? Do you mind being alone? Can you tell a necessary lie without feeling guilty? Can you take on a job that you will not be able to see the results of? Can you accomplish a task and accept that you will not be rewarded immediately? And so on and so form.

  It was unfortunate she wasn't able to field battalions of counterpropaganda specialists, as she would have had she still been serving the Eternal Emperor.

  But the antitoxin to this murderous psychological virus spread rapidly enough by itself. It worked because it addressed the Emperor's campaign at the root—and contained just enough truth to be unpleasant.

  For instance, one of Rykor's volunteers was named Stengers. He was given a clean background and inserted on an Imperial world where he traveled openly as a student of sociology to Heath—the former capital of the Tahn. It was purest chance his wanderings were just behind an undercover Imperial Recruiting advance man, and just ahead of the recruiting team itself.

  All Stengers did was ask some puzzled questions, especially to those young Tahn who were considering taking the Imperial shilling.

  Questions such as: "Well, if the Emperor wants you to rise up and redeem the honor of the Tahn, why does he want you to serve so far from your home? It is hard to gain honor in the darkness, as one of your own proverbs states."

  Sometimes, he was a bit more direct: "Interesting. You say that eighteen Tahn from this farm district alone have gone off to serve? And none of them have returned from Imperial duties? Two of them have died? How sad to die, so far from home, serving someone who seems to never notice such a sacrifice."

  Or closer to the bone: "If the Emperor suddenly thinks so highly of the Tahn, and their elders, why is this district pig-drakh poor? With all of the Empire's riches, why are we shivering in front of this peat-bog fire? Why, the world I come from, which is no richer than this, and I live far in the hills, has AM2 heating in every home. I don't understand."

  Or brutal: "Seems to me a pretty good way for the Tahn to never amount to anything if the Emperor's taking your best and sending them out to the fringe worlds to die."

  Stengers and his fellows planted livie items, a revival of carefully chosen Tahn war ballads that centered around the belief that the Emperor and all his minions were worms beneath a Tahn's feet…

  The next overall recruiting report to Prime contained some disappointing statistics about the sudden drop in volunteers to the Eternal Emperor's armed services…

  Sten had cautioned Kilgour to be most careful on Earth. Even though the blown mission on the Umpqua River was against the privy council, security beings are security beings. There was a very good likelihood that the goons who would be wandering around the near-abandoned hamlet of Coos Bay, which Sten and Alex had used for their base, might still be carrying the same occupational specialty but serving another master. Gestapo is ge-stapo, as the seemingly meaningless archaism put it.

  No problem, Kilgour swore. He planned to stay well away from the province of Oregon. Alex hoped that the secret he was looking for—the purpose of the Eternal Emperor's mysterious trip to Earth—was far, far away. In this case, far away meant the nearest full-range spaceport.

  San Francisco, California's biggest city, boasted a population of almost 100,000. The young lovers—Hotsco, at least, qualified—claimed to have arrived in California Province on a shuttlehop into one of the desert retirement communities to the south, around the tiny province capital of Santa Ana. From there they had boarded one of the luxury gravcraft that swept over the San Joaquin Marshlands at the hamlet of Bakersfield, and leisurely found their way north.

  Actually, Hotsco's smuggling ship was parked fifty meters underwater in the city's great bay near the Isle of Pelicans. One beep from Hotsco's transponder, and robot rescue would be inbound.

  Playing tourist, they took lodgings in one of the new pseudo-Victorian guest houses that were being built in the wilds atop the Twin Peaks. They marveled that there had once been a bridge across the headlands, and listened as visionaries told them one day the straits would be bridged again. They declined an invitation to hunt a man-eater in the overgrown jungles of what had once been a park. They listened to arguments as to whether the foothills of the Mission District should be cleared—some swore the low mounds were rubble from high-rise buildings that had fallen in some great quake. They danced in the restoration of a huge clifftop mansion patterned after one that had been destroyed pre-Emperor and three monster earthquakes ago.

  They politely refused an invitation from two rather lovely human females to join them in sexual ecstasy, in the Lovedance of the Ancient Merkins. Free. Alex thought Hotsco looked interested and then somewhat disappointed when he reminded her that, generally, new lovers are in love for a while before kinks occur. He did make a mental note to himself that the woman appeared to have interesting recreational ideas.

  And they ate. Crab they caught themselves with a rented pot near another ruined bridge which led directly across the bay. Long loaves of wonderfully sour bread. Broiled fish. Raw fish artfully arranged on pats of rice. Rack of lamb. Chicken roasted under a brick. Alex, never a sybarite, let alone a gourmand, thought of changing his ways.

  And they talked. Talked to anyone and everyone. Especially in the bars and hangouts around the small spaceport just south of the city. Alex claimed to be a free-
lance import/exporter in the luxury trade, and Hotsco his new business/life partner. What, they wondered, did people think could be exported from Earth, considering that it was Manhome, that would interest customers throughout the Empire? More specifically, what could be exported—legally and morally?

  Six E-days—and Alex smiled to himself: these really were Earth-days—later, without anyone seeming to realize that they had been grilled, Kilgour found his being. A customs official, someone with a sense of mission—which meant a built-in nose for a grievance, especially when it meant that someone had used higher authority to avoid proper procedure. Tsk, Kilgour assured her. Neither of them would ever… kind of thing that's despicable… business must be run in a proper manner… matter of fact, Ms. Tjanting… one of the more terrible things about my own profession… some traders… even heard stories of very high officials bending the laws…

  The pump didn't need much priming.

  Very high officials, indeed. Straight from Prime, in fact. And during the time frame Alex was interested in.

  Customs, through Earth Spaceship Control, had been notified that the province of Oregon was closed to all nonstandard in-atmosphere and nearspace traffic. Which mattered not at all to Tjanting. She knew that the Emperor had his estates up there, and what he, or his people, chose to do was none of her concern. She might have been curious, being a good citizen, if the Emperor had been present. But of course, he had not been there.

  How did she know that, Alex wondered?

  Well, there would have been something on the livies, wouldn't there? But that wasn't why she was red-arsed, though. If the Eternal Emperor knew what liberties had been taken in his name, Tjanting knew, he would not be pleased.

  About two weeks before the announcement, Tjanting went on, a commercial transport had grounded at San Fran, intending to clear customs at this entry port and then proceed immediately to its final destination—the Imperial Grounds some hundreds of kilometers away. She boarded the ship and immediately found things unusual. The ship was immaculate, and the crewmen followed orders as if they were in the Imperial Navy. But that was sheer conjecture. What had upset her was the cargo.