“I’ll try to, anyway. If I can ship out with an off-world merchant, I can get to the Rim.”
She gave him a sad, despairing look. “I don’t suppose I could come with you?”
He tried to keep his expression neither cold nor harsh, but simply noncommittal. “It’ll be hard enough to avoid detection alone. I’d never make it with you with me. Besides, what would you do on a ship?”
“I don’t know. But I’m willing to learn to do almost anything.”
Alexander began to button his shirt. “This is pointless. Besides, they’ll probably catch me at the spaceport. This will give me away.” He touched his face near the tattoo.
“Can’t you have it removed?”
Alexander gave her a grim smile. “It’s surgically implanted. I’d need a doctor to do it, and according to the officer who administered the oath to my squad, there’s a small implosive charge and a detonator buried right in the cheekbone with the holographic chip. If I tried to have it removed, it would implode inside my skull.”
Cassandra’s anxious expression condensed to a look of horror. “No wonder you hate me.”
He shook his head. “I told you I don’t hate you.” She was giving him a speculative glance and Alexander decided to change the subject before she made overtures to an action he wouldn’t be able to consummate so soon after the last time. “Do you need anything before I go?”
“No,” she said in a small voice. “Thank you for the clothes. It’s nice not to have to wear the same thing every day.”
It was the least he could do, especially since he was going to leave her entirely alone. “You’re welcome. You should have plenty of food. I’ll leave first thing in the morning and I should be gone about five or six days. It’ll take me two just to get to the Aquitaine in the skimmer, and then I’ll have to be very inconspicuous while I look for Mother and Junia.”
She looked utterly defeated. “You’re not coming back, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” Alexander insisted, susceptible to the suggestion that he was abandoning her. “I got you out of the palace, didn’t I? I keep my promises.”
Cassandra looked away and then began to pull on her shirt. “At least we’ll have tonight.”
Alexander didn’t say anything while he finished dressing, and then he went to his room and packed his things. He told himself he was doing what he had to do, but he still felt twinges of guilt every time he looked at Cassandra.
• • •
Antonio du Plessis was getting impatient with the duties of leading the Imperium. Someone was always making demands on his time, and he found it annoying to have to deal with crisis after crisis. Only Sergei Paznowski truly seemed to understand Antonio’s needs and took care of obstacles for him. The others all insisted that he listen to some tedious description of a problem and make a decision as to what should be done.
Right now, the man in front of him was waiting impatiently for an answer. Antonio was more than a little annoyed at having to give him one.
“Oh, all right,” he said crossly. “What do you recommend, Baron?”
“If you could address the Parliament yourself, Excellency,” Baron Urquart said, “it would help immeasurably. The nobles are worried by the unrest in their domains. They need to know that you’re taking their concerns seriously.”
Antonio sighed. Leaving the palace was tiresome these days because the Corps insisted on such tight security; it made travel tedious in the extreme. “Very well. I’ll speak to Colonel Beaumont tomorrow.”
“If you please, Excellency,” Urquart said, a hint of warning in his voice, “the sooner the better. Time is of the essence in our current state of unrest.”
“Oh, very well,” Antonio said. “I’ll speak to him today and go to Parliament tomorrow. Will that be soon enough?”
Baron Urquart ignored the sarcasm in Antonio’s tone and bowed with the all the deference for which he was so renowned. “That would be commendable, Excellency.”
“I’m glad my plans meet with your approval,” Antonio said, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “Just be certain everything is ready at your end.”
“I shall endeavor to do so, Excellency,” Urquart said with another bow.
After he had gone, Antonio glanced over at a picture on the wall to his left. “You can come out now, Sergei.”
The door to his inner office opened and Sergei Paznowski stepped through. He bowed to Antonio and then, when his Emperor waved a hand at a chair, he sat down.
“What did you think?” Antonio said.
“The situation sounds serious, Excellency,” Paznowski said, “but I wouldn’t refine too much on it. The Empire has faced other such crises.”
“I know that,” Antonio said sharply. “But I don’t care for that man. He worries me.”
Paznowski looked surprised. “Baron Urquart has always served the Empire well. And he has a gift for consensus—for compromise, if you will.”
“I don’t like compromise. I like to win.”
Paznowski smiled, the same warm, admiring smile that had first made Antonio quite like the man. “As is your right, Excellency. You are the Emperor, after all.”
“Yes. Is there any news in the search for my sister?”
Paznowski shrugged noncommittally. “Has your Excellency seen the holo of Helena Barranca’s interrogation?”
“No. Should I?”
“I think so. I have a copy with me, if you’d care to watch it now.”
When Antonio indicated his approval, Paznowski went to the cabinet by the far wall and placed a cylinder in the holographic projector inside it. In a moment, an image appeared in front of Antonio du Plessis, and he leaned forward in his chair to study it intently.
The woman who was now his sister’s sister-in-law was young, much younger than Peter Barranca. Her hair and clothes were in disarray and there were bruises on her face and neck. She was bound to a chair, and a man standing in front of her had just administered a hypospray. Colonel Roger Beaumont moved into view as the other man backed away. The Colonel sat down in front of Helena Barranca and began to ask her questions.
“What is your full name?”
The woman’s face had gone slack, almost serene. “Helena Olivia Tarrega Barranca,” she said in an emotionless voice.
“Were you a part of the plot to attack the palace and kill Emperor Lothar du Plessis?”
“Yes.”
“What part did you play?”
“I provided the identification that got the transport inside the gate.”
“How did you get it?”
“I bought it from a fence.”
“How did you know the fence?”
“A man I met in a bar gave me a com code to contact her.”
Beaumont continued to ask questions, determining that no one else in her family knew about her revolutionary activities, and that she didn’t know the names of anyone in the rebel cell of which she was a part.
“How was the attack planned?” he asked next.
“Governor planned it, with help from the others. Sentinel gave us the plan of the palace.”
“Who is Governor?”
“Governor is the leader. I don’t know his last name.”
“Do you know his first name?”
“Wizard slipped once, and called him Louis.”
“And who is Sentinel.”
“Sentinel is the guardsman.”
“What do you mean by ‘the guardsman’?”
“He was in the Emperor’s Own Corps of Guards. He had the mark on his face, like all guardsmen do.”
“There was a man among the rebels who had an imperial seal tattoo?” Beaumont’s distress was obvious as he asked this question.
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was tall and big, and he had brown hair.”
“How old was he? Was he old enough to have retired from the Corps?”
“He was young. A little older than me, maybe.”
�
�Did anyone ever call him anything except Sentinel?”
“No.”
“Did they say why he was betraying the Emperor?”
“No.’
“What days did you see him there?”
She listed two dates and Beaumont noted them down. He continued to ask for more information about Sentinel, but Helena Barranca simply didn’t know anything. Her description of his appearance was singularly unhelpful since she had been most impressed with his size.
Eventually, Sergei Paznowski switched off the projector.
“It goes on for some time, Excellency,” he said. “They found that the Barranca woman was always blindfolded when she went to meetings. Her contact would meet her in an alley, put on the blindfold, and then take her to the meeting. She did know that at least some of the meetings were in a bakery, because she could smell the bread baking, but that was all.”
“How did we know about her?” Antonio asked.
“A stricter check of all the IDs used that afternoon revealed the false one. We tracked it back to the fence, and from there we tracked all her calls back to Lady Helena. The fence had no other connection to the plot that we could find.”
Antonio stifled a yawn. “It’s annoying the Barranca woman is a dead end, but at least now we know how they got in the door.”
“Yes,” Paznowski agreed. “Beaumont is in a snit because it was a guardsman—presumably on active duty since he was too young to have served his time and retired. Beaumont is checking those dates against all the Corps duty rosters in Montmartre. He wants to know which men are suspect.”
“When he has the names,” Antonio said, “we’ll run their images past my new sister-in-law and have her identify him.”
Paznowski nodded. “Barranca won’t like further questioning, but he won’t know about it until it’s too late.”
Antonio smiled. “I don’t give a damn what Count Barranca likes or dislikes. He’s not in a position to complain.”
“True, Excellency.”
“What about Cassandra?” Antonio said, returning to his original question. “Was there anything in the plan about kidnapping her?”
“No, Excellency,” Paznowski said regretfully. “Beaumont was most insistent, but the Barranca woman had no knowledge of any advance plan to kidnap Lady Cassandra.”
“Then why did you make me watch that?” Antonio said, a trifle peeved.
“Because, Excellency,” Paznowski said smoothly, “I wanted you to know about the guardsman. Think back to where the bodies were found after the attack.”
Antonio shifted uneasily in his chair. “So?”
“There were two guardsmen killed who had been on duty at the entrance to the women’s quarters. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Antonio said, relieved that Paznowski’s discussion didn’t focus on the unusual location in which his father’s body had been found.
“They had been shot from behind, Excellency. There was no evidence that any intruders got into the palace except the group that came in through the kitchen entrance and worked their way through the house to your father’s suite. Yet someone was able to get behind these two guards and shoot them down as they ran towards the disturbance?”
“You think it was this Sentinel person, the traitorous guardsman?”
“I do. For some reason, he must have wanted to get into the women’s quarters. Perhaps he even helped the rebels for his own reasons?”
“What reasons?”
Sergei Paznowski smiled knowingly. “It must be a great temptation for the guardsmen when you think of it—being so close to the Emperor’s women. Wasn’t there a guardsman who was executed for trying to run off with one of them a few months ago?”
“Yes, there was,” Antonio said slowly. “They caught him one night, trying to sneak her out of the palace.”
“Perhaps this man learned a lesson from that?” Paznowski suggested. “If he had run off with your sister, there would be no way he could hide, but if Lady Cassandra disappeared as part of a rebel raid, everyone would assume it was a political kidnapping.”
“The little bitch might well be in on it,” Antonio said grimly.
Paznowski’s face showed a flicker of surprise at his language. “It’s possible, Excellency. Or Lady Cassandra may be the unwilling object of some crazed guardsman’s obsession with the Imperium.”
Antonio waved a hand impatiently. “In any event, you’re saying that it’s not likely that this was a kidnapping for ransom.”
Paznowski seemed unwilling to rule the possibility out. “I wouldn’t say that it was likely, but I wouldn’t say it was impossible, either. But if money was his object, I would have expected to receive a ransom demand by now. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless this traitor helped the rebels, thinking all the while that their plan was doomed to failure. He may well have expected the assassins to all die in a futile attempt to kill your father. In that case, he would have been dealing with Emperor Lothar, rather than with you. And he wouldn’t have the present political crisis as a distraction.”
Antonio pondered this possibility. “Do you think that’s plausible?”
“Oh, yes, Excellency. A guardsman might well expect a group of only eight men to die before they ever breached the Emperor’s door.”
“They were lucky,” Antonio said flatly.
“Yes, Excellency,” Paznowski said. “This Sentinel couldn’t have predicted how events would occur. Nor could he have known his accomplices would drag the Emperor off and execute him with no regard to his dignity.”
“Yes, well,” Antonio said determinedly, “that explains how he got in. It doesn’t answer the question of how he got Cassandra out of the palace.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Excellency. It seems to me that a guardsman who had been on duty here for some time would know the routine of the house quite well.”
“So?”
“Your Excellency may have never bothered to think about it, but this household generates quite a lot of waste. Several hundred kilos of trash and garbage leave the grounds every week.”
“So?” Antonio repeated.
“Trash removal is completely automated, Excellency. The carts arrive twice a week from the recycling center; they go through the scanners and a visual inspection at the gate, and then they hook up to the proper portal in the cellar under the house and exchange an empty canister for a full one. What’s more, they’re merely scanned on the way out. There’s no visual inspection of their contents.”
“I see,” Antonio said slowly. “You think this guardsman hid Cassandra in a trash cart?”
“It’s the most likely method I can see. There was a pickup at dawn the day after the attack, and it’s certainly possible to fool a scanner—if you have enough credits to buy contraband off-world equipment.”
The more Antonio thought it over, the more plausible it sounded. “She must have been drugged or stunned. Otherwise, she’d have had a hard time staying quiet inside a trash cart for that long.”
“That’s a possibility, Excellency.”
“What about the rebel guardsman? Was he with her?”
Paznowski shook his head. “I doubt it. You can’t open the canisters from inside. I checked. He’d need to stay free to get her out later, after the cart left the palace the next day.”
“It’s damned clever,” Antonio said, a trace of reluctant admiration in his voice. “I heard Beaumont issue the orders to his men after the attack. ‘No one leaves the palace,’ he said. Not a word about automated equipment. Doubtless the men at the gates never bothered to stop the cart once they scanned it.”
“Beaumont has no imagination, Excellency,” Paznowski said. “He’s as loyal as a dog, but he hasn’t had a creative thought in years. He never even came up with a reason for the rebels to drag your father off to another room, two corridors away from his suite to execute him.”
Antonio’s eyes flickered in a flash of excitement and fear. “And have you, my
dear Sergei?” he asked, his voice soft with contained menace.
Paznowski bowed in his chair. “Of course, Excellency. I explained it to the Colonel as soon as I found out about the traitorous guardsman. Undoubtedly, he had promised the rebels he would get them out of the palace as well as in. They captured the Emperor intending to hold him hostage. Once they understood that the traitor had betrayed them as well as his Emperor, they opted to kill your father right where they were, before they lost their chance.”
Antonio couldn’t repress a smile of appreciation. Sergei was clever. There was no denying that. “And what did Beaumont say to this suggestion?”
“I’m happy to say that I relieved the Colonel’s mind of a great weight. The situation had been puzzling him for some time, and he was glad to have a solution to the problem of how the Emperor came to die where he did.”
“As you say,” Antonio said dryly, “he has no imagination.”
“True, Excellency. And also, he was unaware of your late father’s preference for a laser pistol—a most barbaric weapon, I always thought. But then, it does have its uses.”
“Yes.” It was too bad Sergei would have to die. The man had been very useful.
“It was a shame about the woman,” Paznowski said calmly. “Your father enjoyed her greatly. It must have pained him to have to dispose of her so summarily.”
“It did.” Antonio smiled as he pulled an energy pistol from his sleeve. “It was very foolish of you to tell me this, Sergei.”
“Nonsense, Excellency.” Paznowski seemed unfazed by the weapon. “I want there to be complete trust between us. How can I serve you well unless you know the extent of my devotion?”
Antonio opened his eyes wide. What did the man mean? With such a clever opponent, he would have to be careful. “Your devotion?”
“Naturally, Excellency. How can I not be devoted when I see the greatness of which you are capable?”
It did have a nice ring to it when he put it like that. “You think so?”
“I know it, Excellency,” Paznowski said, his eyes lighting with appreciation, almost with fondness. “What other du Plessis would have had the nerve, the coolness to seize the opportunity for glory as you did? I was stunned when I realized it. Your father was well enough in his day, but nothing in him prepared me for the scope of your vision.”
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