Revenge of the Damned (33 page)

"Go on," Fehrle said a little sharply, trying to prod the man into giving him an opening.

"But… perhaps there is some way we can make use of some of these people first."

Wichman almost exploded at that. He came halfway to his feet. "How dare—"

"Exactly my thinking," Fehrle said.

Wichman mumped back down. "What? Oh, yeah! Good idea. Uh… right!" Then the poor bewildered man could not help himself any longer. "Clot! What am I saying? What's a good idea?"

Fehrle and Pastour laughed, and Wichman, after a moment, had the good grace to laugh with them. They had more drinks while Fehrle laid it out for them.

He did have a way of making use of the leakers, but in a contorted way that even the Eternal Emperor would have admired. In fact, he had taken the whole plan right out of the Emperor's book.

Fehrle planned to pull hope out of the ashes of the ruins of the High Council's palace. They had all been puzzled at the Emperor's behavior after they had launched their own sneak attack on his headquarters in the opening blow of the war. The Emperor had immediately flooded the airways with an endless series of propaganda portraits showing him shaking his fist at the Tahn in defiance. At first it had seemed like empty gesturing. What did that accomplish? Immediately after that, they were surprised at how many of his straying allies returned to the Emperor's camp. There was nothing empty about the campaign at all. It brought in badly needed ships and troops in a swell of public opinion.

Fehrle was proposing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. He wanted to launch a grand tour of twenty-two systems in which he would personally appear with the leaders of said systems, giving the Emperor the finger at every opportunity.

The lonely Tahn, fighting on despite the odds against the warmongering running dog Imperialist giant. Vowing to win against all odds. That sort of thing. Privately, he would use a heavy cudgel to stiffen the spine of their allies. He would convince them all to dig into the trenches and fight to the last being. If it worked, any victory the Emperor hoped for would come at an exceedingly high price that Fehrle doubted he would be willing to pay.

Wichman loved it. Pastour, grudgingly, admitted there might be some wisdom in it. Still, he remembered the bloodbath of the bombing raid on the city and the strange appearance of Sten in his heavily guarded domain. If the Emperor could do all that at will…

"I fear for your life, my lord," he finally said. "What is to prevent the Emperor from learning of your plan and then attacking when you least expect it? If you were assassinated, I'm not sure how the people would behave."

"I
want
the Emperor to learn about it," Fehrle said.

Once again, Wichman was surprised. Pastour, however, got it right away. Fehrle would have his staff plan two itineraries. The first would show the tour commencing on Arbroath. On the surface, that would seem like a logical choice, since the Arbroath were totally loyal to the Tahn. They would grovel at Fehrle's knees and praise him, making for wonderful propaganda. That itinerary would be leaked. In reality, Arbroath was a rotten jumping-off point. The people were so stupidly and blindly loyal that they would fight on anyway until they were all dead.

The real stepping-off point would be Cormarthen. Pastour saw the wisdom in that right off. The people there were wild rebels—a semi-Celtic splinter cult whose sole motivation for aiding the Tahn was their unreasoning hatred of the Empire. When the war was over—assuming the Tahn won—they were sure to instantly turn on their allies. In fact, after the string of recent defeats they were already wavering. Fehrle planned to put a stop to that immediately. On day one of the twenty-two system tour he would be able to present his people with a diplomatic victory.

The rest of the tour would be plotted the same way. False clues would be planted with the Imperialists while Fehrle maddeningly popped up at the least expected places to flip off the Eternal Emperor.

Pastour and Wichman pledged enthusiastic support. They would work on their own people as well as lobby the other factions. Fehrle was guaranteed unanimous acceptance when the proposal was formally presented to the High Council.

While Fehrle and Wichman were congratulating each other on the yet-to-be success, Pastour remembered Sten. And Koldyeze. He had thought about the young man's odd request. He had recently seen a way not only to make good his promise but to bump the value of the pot 1,000 percent.

During the course of the conflict the Tahn had taken millions of prisoners of all kinds. But a very few of those prisoners presented special difficulties.

They were the important diplomats, politicians, and high-ranking officers who had fallen into Tahn hands. Even the instinctive Tahn disdain for prisoners did not allow them to treat those beings with anything other than kid gloves—relatively speaking. The problem had been finding the proper guards with at least a modicum of political reality.

At the moment, that was impossible. The prisoners were spread out in camps all over the Tahn Empire.

What Pastour wanted to do was to solve that problem at one stroke. He would place them all at Koldyeze. Then he would personally oversee their treatment through his emissaries. There was also an even greater advantage in putting all his rocks in one stonebucket. If and when the Tahn were defeated, Pastour would have heavy-duty trading stock to strike his bargain for peace with the Emperor.

Obviously he could not word any of that exactly the same way if he wanted to bring Fehrle and Wichman to his side. Instead, he appealed to their blood lust.

"If we had them all in one place," he said as he came to the end of his explanation, "we'd only need one gun to hold against their heads."

"And if the Emperor refuses us," Wichman broke in, "we kill them all. I like it!"

Fehrle also added his support.

When Pastour went home some time later, a little warm and tiddly from the drink and the companionship, he thought fondly about how well the Tahn system of government worked. A few well-chosen words—out of hearing from the squabble of conflicting viewpoints of the public—and the correct measures were taken to ensure the future of the race. It made him feel proud and patriotic.

The next day, when he was sober, he would plan his next moves at Koldyeze.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

S
ten was fairly disgusted with the Tahn. What, after all, was an evil empire without an internal conspiracy or six? The Tahn were short on dissidents. Those few enemies of the regime seemed to have gotten policed up years earlier/and their dissidence was mainly made up of the idea that maybe the Tahn Council ought to say please before conquering somebody. From the limited leaks he had been able to get from Tahn CI, the current treason seemed to consist of street gossips or poor sods who complained about having to work a double shift without getting a food break.

Sneakiness abhorred a vacuum, and so Sten and Kilgour went to work, building themselves a good list of traitorous swine. They decided, just to keep things interesting, that it would be a military conspiracy.

There were three requirements:

1. The conspiring officer had to have complained about how the war was going. Even a recorded mutter into a shaving mirror made the officer eligible. So, in that manner, Admiral Whoosis on the
Sabac
made the grade.

2. The conspiring officer had to be highly respected.

3. The conspiring officer had to have served in combat, on a frontline world, or, during peacetime, on a world where there was an Imperial presence.

It was not necessary that the eager conspirator actually be anything other than a rabid believer in the Tahn right to grab anything around from anyone weaker. As a matter of fact, Sten did not want anyone like that. People with real politics made him nervous—even if he had been able to find any.

Once Sten and Kilgour had the list, they put it up on a computer screen and started cross-connecting the conspiracy. The officers chosen for links needed no particular qualifications, except that their absence would not improve Tahn efficiency. That was, for instance, how the third assistant paymaster general, the Tahn Counterintelligence number two, and the chief of the chaplain's acolyte division became dangerous threats.

Once Kilgour had the list all neat and tidy, it went out on a burst transmission to the Imperial base station located somewhere they never knew for appropriate usage.

Most of the conspiracy list was handled by Alex. Sten had another problem: Lord Fehrle's "show the flag" tour. It did not make any sense. Not that the tour made no sense—but everybody seemed to know about it. Either Tahn Security was composed of numbwits—which Sten did not dare let himself believe—or else everyone connected with the tour was suffering from terminal oral diarrhea.

He sent through the reports of when Fehrle was going, where Fehrle was going from the Arbroath worlds onward, what he would eat and drink, where he would be banqueted, and whom he would meet straight on to the Empire. All graded Category Two or lower, ranging from reliable source, personally received, down to outhouse rumor. But none of it was Category One: accepted by this station as truth.

Then one afternoon Chetwynd sent word, through the cutouts, that he wanted a meet.

They fenced recreationally for a couple of drinks. Wasn't it about time that Chetwynd's credit allowance was increased? Couldn't he be more helpful to the cause if Sten gave him some idea as to what was happening next? Had he heard anything about a new offensive failing? Then he got down to it.

"One a' my longtime cheenas hit on somethin' you might find interesting. He's one of my best agents, y' know."

"A thief, in other words."

Chetwynd looked ponderously injured. "Clot, Sten, don't be so suspicious. The clot's a hard-core freedom fighter."

"I stand corrected. A
good
thief."

"He was out last night. Around the 23YXL area of the port. Y' know, that's where most of the bonded warehouses are. He was looking for good intelligence and—" Chetwynd chuckled and drank. "—anything else that wasn't riveted down.

"Came on this warehouse. Security up the yahoo. Which was interestin'. He got up on the rooftop and snaked in. All of a sudden couple Tahn plainclothes come out from behind a vent. Damn near popped him.

"He come off that roof and said the place was crawlin' with rozzers. Funny—he said he knew a couple of 'em. CI, they was.

"Dunno what's in that warehouse. But thought you might want to be tipped the wink."

Chetwynd waited. Sten dug out a wad of credits and passed them across. They were not given with any pretense on either side that they were intended for Chetwynd's organization. Maybe Chetwynd's tier ranger, if he was indeed a longtime cheena, might see a little of it. But probably not.

Kilgour swept the warehouse with a palm-size set of available-light binocs and hissed through his teeth. "Thae tub's wae bein't conservative. Thae's more screws around yon warehouse thae a Campbell hae fleas."

There were other interesting things happening. A ship had landed about half a kilometer beyond the warehouse. Sten IDd it as being a standard armed transport—but with very non-standard security around it. The ship sat on an absolutely bare stretch of tarmac. There were three, no, four rings of guards around it, uniformed soldiery, each bashing his beat in a military manner. Between the rings, searchlights mounted on portable towers on the field's edges swept the darkness.

"The ship's bein't loaded," Kilgour whispered. "An' by a braw crew ae stevedores."

He passed the binocs to Sten, who looked and nodded.

"The only civilian thing about them is they ain't in step."

Fascinating. Not only did the warehouse obviously hold something enormously valuable—which made it enormously interesting for Imperial Intelligence—it was being loaded by soldiers in the dead of night. Sten rather wanted to pry open one or another of those unmarked crates. They were being loaded very carefully, he noted, as if they contained delicate merchandise.

Kilgour, mumbling, had a tiny multifunction computer dug out of his boot and was tapping keys and staring intently at the ship. Sten concentrated on the warehouse and put his Mantis joint-casing skills to work.

Can we sneak in? Not unless somebody happens to come up with an invisibility suit. Can we go in over the roof? We've got to be sneakier than Chetwynd's boyo. Unlikely. Under? No time to play caver—at the rate they're moving, the ship will be loaded by dawn. What about a simple walk-up? Pretending to be some kind of warehouse inspector? A superior officer? Negative on both. Not that we can't get out if we're blown—but I have this feeling I'm not going to want anybody to know we were here. Join the loading party? Nope. Ten-man teams. Even the Tahn noncoms would notice if there were more spear-carriers than the number of fingers on each hand.

"Ah think w' kin do it, boss," Kilgour broke in. "Ah've been runnin't a timer on thae guards. There are lapses. An' thae searchlights dinnae cross-sweep like thae should."

Sten stared at the completely bare expanse between the building they crouched next to and the ship and gulped in a cowardly manner. "Choreograph it, Mr. Kilgour."

Five minutes later:

"On thae count… be following man twinkli't toes… three… two… now!"

And the two black-clad men trotted out toward the ship.

"Sixteen… seventeen… down, boss! One, two, three, four, five… up. Twenty paces… down!"

They became part of the tarmac as the searchlight beam passed very close to them.

"Eleven, twelve, now! Three, four, five… six and freeze!"

The only music they "danced" to as they crossed the field was their own hoarse breathing.

"The skid, boss. Straight for it an' look like a shock absorber. Two, one, on th' way, lad!"

Sten flattened himself next to the huge, grease-stained landing skid, wondering if he actually did look like an oleo strut.

"Na," Alex growled in his ear, "if Ah'm right, we'll be doublin't up thae gangplank shortly. Y' ken thae ramp watch is posted behin' an' under thae ramp. Lookit like he nae like thae glare when the beams hit him. So be goin't up softly, wee Sten. W' dinnae want thae thunder ae y' hooves alertin' him."