Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 (2 page)

“Good. I have a mission that requires the
utmost discretion, and I can’t entrust it to anyone too close to
me, if you get my meaning.”

“I’m not sure I do, sir, but I’m not sure I
need to, either.”

“The perfect answer. I chose the right man.”
He reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a small object,
which he slid along the top of the desk toward Chin. “This is a
key. Pick it up and go through this door.” He indicated the door
closest to the window on the east side of the room. “Go down that
corridor to a door numbered 278. The key will open that door. Go
inside. A woman will meet you there. She will give you a large
envelope, which you will then bring back here to me unopened.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“Yes, for now. If you perform well, there may
be other small but crucial assignments as well—with, I might add,
corresponding bonuses.”

Chin picked up the key. It was an electronic
key, made of lightweight plastic. “Thank you sir. With your
permission …?”

Kuznyetz dismissed him with a wave of his
hand. By the time Captain Chin had reached the indicated door, the
knyaz already seemed occupied with another matter.

Chin found himself in a long corridor with
doors on either side. The numbers started in the low 200s, so he
had quite a distance to walk before he came to 278. The corridor
made several turns, but didn’t branch off anywhere, so there was no
question of which way he needed to go.

At last he reached door 278. He placed the
key against the lock and there was the faintest of clicks as it
unlatched. The door slid silently open and he entered. The door
slid shut again behind him.

The room was large and totally bare of
furnishing. The walls, ceiling and floor were pure white except for
a bright red rectangular touchplate high up on the opposite wall,
right where it met the ceiling. Chin wondered vaguely what it was
doing up there; it was certainly too high for anyone to reach
conveniently.

There was no woman in the room at the moment,
but Chin wasn’t worried. Kuznyetz had said she would meet him here,
not that she’d be waiting. The captain supposed it was
his
job to do the waiting. With no furniture to sit on, he stood
casually and waited.

A large section of the wall opposite the door
slid open, rapidly and silently. The sudden movement startled
Captain Chin, but far more disturbing was what was revealed on the
other side. Two enormous catlike creatures were walking up a ramp
toward him. They walked on four legs, and their shoulders were as
high as his head. They had sleek gray and yellow dappled fur, long
white fangs and yellow eyes that glared at him with feral
intensity.

Chin didn’t know precisely what was going on,
but he did know he didn’t want to be in the same room with those
creatures. He turned back to where he’d entered, but the door had
seamlessly joined with the wall. He tried pressing the plastic key
against where he thought the latch should be, but nothing happened.
There was no escape in that direction.

The creatures were now fully in the large
room with him, and the door slid quickly shut behind them. Chin
realized far too late that he’d been set up. He was trapped in here
with two vicious creatures and no defense against them.

The creature on his right was close enough to
swipe at him with its left paw. He tried to dodge, but the blow
came too swiftly; claws like bayonets ripped across his right arm,
slashing his uniform sleeve and drawing blood from two large
gashes. He choked back a scream and tried to spin away to his left,
but that only brought him within range of the second beast. It
actually seemed to be waiting for him; a vicious swipe of its right
front paw was already in motion as he stepped into the blow. The
nails ripped open his abdomen, and blood suddenly splashed across
the walls of this previously immaculate room.

He could make no effort now to stifle the
scream that escaped his throat. He couldn’t think through the pain,
he could only react—and that weakly. The force of the blow spun him
completely around and he stumbled to his right knee. He struggled
to regain his footing, but the wounds he’d already suffered made
him far too slow. The giant paw of the creature on his right came
down on his back, knocking him the rest of the way down and pinning
him to the floor. Even if he hadn’t already been severely weakened
by his wounds, the powerfully muscled arm would have held him in
place.

Chin’s struggles were over within seconds as
the efficient hunting team did its work with well-honed precision.
The pain was intense as he died, but it did not last long, and soon
his body lay lifeless and bloody on the stone floor. The creatures
who’d killed him parceled him out and greedily devoured his flesh,
even eating portions of his uniform to make sure no significant
parts were wasted. The only parts they couldn’t eat were his feet,
shod in leather boots that were too hard to get the meat out
of.

In barely half an hour the animals had
finished their meal. One of them reared up on its haunches and
swatted at the red touchplate near the ceiling. The wall through
which they’d entered slid aside and, with nothing further to
interest them here, the creatures returned down the ramp the way
they’d come. The wall slid back into place behind them and a panel
opened in the floor, exposing a large drain. High-pressure jets of
water erupted from nozzles hidden in the walls, washing the final
traces of the late Captain Wong Chin into the disposal system. Next
came a cleansing disinfectant spray to remove all traces of blood
and other impurities. Within minutes, Room 278 was pure and
antiseptic once more.

Captain Chin may have been gone, but he was
not forgotten. He was, indeed, the focal point of a discussion in
the study between Kuznyetz and his prime councilor, Pavel Lubikov.
“I’m sorry we weren’t able to weed him out earlier,” Lubikov said.
“It seems he got off a message this afternoon before he
returned.”

The knyaz appeared largely unconcerned. “What
did it say?”

“I don’t know for certain; it’s well
encrypted and could take days to break. I’m sure it had no critical
details—Chin had no access to the ultimate plan or its timetable.
Maybe some names of our allies, numbers and disposition of some of
our forces, other things we wouldn’t want advertised but which
won’t stop the operations from taking place. I can confirm who the
message was sent to.”

“I
know
who the message was sent to,”
Kuznyetz said languidly. “That doesn’t bother me. Nkosi has been
de-fanged for years. He’s just a frustrated old man moving the few
straggling pawns he has left over the squares of a decaying
chessboard. Even if we sent him a detailed blueprint, he has no
authority to act. Let him frustrate himself even further. It’ll
just make our victory that much sweeter.”

Lubikov’s eyes wandered to Captain Chin’s
package, still sitting untouched on the corner of the desk. “Should
I dispose of that for you, sir?” he asked.

“Certainly not. I promised to deliver it to
the late captain’s mother, and I shall keep my word. After all, she
no longer has a son. The least she should have is a music box.

“And see that she gets a nice letter of
condolence that her son died in the course of his duties,” he added
as an afterthought. “Mothers are very important, Pavel. They must
be treated with the utmost respect.”

* * *

It was unofficially called the Blue Room,
logically enough, because it was a room and it was blue. Not just
any blue; it was, in fact, a tribute to
all
blues. Starting
from the baseboards of the eastern wall, which were the palest
pastel, the shades progressed like a canopy arch, darkening
imperceptibly as the colors gradually merged until they reached the
darkest navy blue, almost indistinguishable from black, along the
bottom of the western wall. Many of the room’s prior occupants over
the decades had proclaimed the effect quite restful and relaxing;
its current occupant, however, was unmoved by any such soothing
effects.

Nkosi Wettig, knyaz of Orion sector, was a
large man by almost any standards, nearly two meters tall and
massing about a hundred and twenty kilograms. Adding to this was
his demeanor, a commanding presence that radiated intelligence and
decisiveness, and an attitude that brooked no incompetence. The
brown eyes above his broad, flat nose seemed to see not only
everything within range, but all the implications of those things
as well. The mahogany-colored skin of his face was unmarked with
lines of worry despite his age—and despite the fact that he worried
all the time. He was used to making
other
people develop
worry lines.

His face was also unmarked by smile lines,
because Nkosi Wettig seldom smiled. Given all that he knew and all
that he saw, he found little to smile about.

The Blue Room had been designed by Wettig’s
great-grandfather, a man of far less spartan tastes. It served as
Wettig’s principal office when he was at home on his estate—not
because of its soothing atmosphere, but because it was suitably
large and centrally convenient to other rooms and resources. But
even if the knyaz were normally inclined to a relaxed disposition,
the information on the screens set in the desk before him would
have jarred him out of that mood.

The left-hand screen displayed the decrypted
message he’d received from Wong Chin. In fine detail it described
the number, classes and disposition of the ships in Kuznyetz’s
private fleet. Though ostensibly the ships were all either merchant
craft or local law enforcement vessels, all were heavily armed—and
so numerous that the total firepower was nearly one-third that of
the Imperial Navy itself. Though the militsia vessels should have
been spread uniformly throughout Scorpio sector, and the merchant
ships should have been traveling to many destinations around the
Empire, the vast majority of these ships seemed to be maneuvering
in and out of a small space that just happened to be the part of
Kuznyetz’s sector closest to Earth.

Chin’s report also contained a list of names
of people he’d confirmed had made alliances with Kuznyetz. Chin
admitted the list was incomplete, but even so it was impressive:
ten other knyazya, eighty-seven grafy, sixteen admirals, five
members of the Sovyet Knyazey and dozens of other assorted
boyare.

A very thorough report. Chin had been the
best of Wettig’s people to follow him into exile.

From his other sources, dwindling as they
were, Wettig had traced a money trail leading from Kuznyetz to
several dozen “separatist” movements on various planets, groups
that were becoming increasingly more daring and increasingly more
violent. Reports of their activities filled the news virtually
every day now.

It didn’t take someone with Wettig’s
extraordinary perception to supply a title for this portrait:
treason. Treason in its purest form. Kuznyetz was planning an
uprising, and soon.

Next to the screen with Chin’s report was
another that held a flattie video message from Kuznyetz himself.
“Nkosi, I have some news that may disturb you. I had an officer in
my kavalergardy, a Captain Wong Chin. He died today under highly
suspicious circumstances. My investigators are looking into it, but
since I believe you were one of his past employers I thought you
might know him and care about what happened to him. Please accept
my deepest sympathies.” And there the message ended.

The nerve of that man! To kill a fine officer
like Chin and then to brag about it like this. He thinks there’s
nothing I can do about it—and he may be right.

He stared ahead for a long moment of
reflection. But maybe not.

“Intercom: Hasina.”

After a moment his daughter’s face appeared
on the screen. “What did you want, Father?”

“Pack your bags for an offworld trip.”

Hasina, used to her father’s quirky orders,
could only smile. “Anywhere in particular?”

“I’ll have to check their schedule. There’s a
show I want you to see.”

The planet Turtello in Centaurus sector had
only been settled within the last thirty years; it was not on the
beaten trail and the population was still small compared to more
established worlds within the Empire. On the one hand this was
good; the people were starved for live entertainment and were
enthusiastically appreciative of everything that came their way. On
the other hand this meant there were no large theaters to play in;
the stage of the largest theater was barely big enough to
accommodate the full show, and the backstage facilities were—to put
it kindly—provincial.

Even though he was one of the headliners,
Judah Bar Nahum’s dressing room was tiny. And worse, he had to
share it with his cousin and partner, Eva, which made it difficult
to pace back and forth. But Judah paced back and forth anyway. He
was a pacer, a worrier. He did it on a grand scale, and he wasn’t
going to let a mere lack of physical space stay him from his
appointed rounds.

At the moment there was more room to pace
because Eva wasn’t there. That wasn’t entirely a good thing,
though, since that was the reason he needed to pace: Eva wasn’t
there.

The company had arrived at the theater and
Eva wasn’t there. The doors had opened and Eva wasn’t there. The
music had started and Eva wasn’t there. The curtain had risen more
than an hour ago and Eva wasn’t there. And, as usual, she refused
to answer her pages.

Eva had been late before. Hell, he could
scarcely remember a time she
hadn’t
been late. And her
performances were always perfect. The two of them made an ideal
team; even he had to admit she was at least as talented as he was.
But she cut everything so close to the edge. He looked to his
wristcom for the time ….