Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 (23 page)

Judah shook her hand, but asked, “What about
me What do you need me to do next?”

“For now, return to the knyaz’s service. I’ll
leave word that from now on, you or any of your reports should be
forwarded straight to me.”

Judah was a little disappointed that she
didn’t have an exciting new assignment for him, but he duly left to
return to the Scorpio compound.

Hasina, meanwhile, rode the gravtube to her
father’s office on the top floor. Knyaz Nkosi was seated at his
desk, staring at a barrage of computer screens rather than out the
panoramic window with its forty-third floor panoramic view of
nighttime Moscow. The bright lights of the city below just seemed
to mock the gloomy mood that had overwhelmed him at seeing his
worst nightmares for the Empire’s future playing out in real life.
Even though he wasn’t at the nerve center of the Empire any more,
he still received enough reports from different places to let him
know how badly things were going.

He hadn’t been sleeping well these past few
days, and it showed in his face. The normal fire in his eyes was
banked, and the bags under them were noticeable. Hasina had never
seen her father looking so beaten down before. She stood before his
desk and, without waiting for him to acknowledge her presence, she
repeated Judah’s story about Kuznyetz’s family history and his
theory about Natalia still being alive.

Wettig didn’t react immediately, but Hasina
waited patiently in front of him. Finally the big man shifted in
his chair and sighed. “If I’d known all this a month ago I might
have been able to—”

He slammed his fist down suddenly on his
desktop. “No!” he bellowed. “I won’t accept defeatist talk from
others, and I certainly won’t hear it from my own lips.” He
swiveled his chair around to face outside, but it wasn’t the
beautiful cityscape he was looking at.

“We now have knowledge,” he mused aloud. “We
just have to apply it judiciously. And we don’t have much time—the
Sovyet’s in less than thirty-six hours.” His voice became more
commanding, more authoritative. “Get me Knyaz Lin-Tao on a secure
line as soon as he reaches Earth; he’s the strongest ally I can
count on. And get me Legal. I don’t care who you wake up, I need
them
now
. I know there was some sort of proclamation
removing Nikolai from the line of succession. I don’t know if that
applies to his heirs. I need legal precedents to stand on. Not that
it’ll matter much when people are flailing around hopelessly, but
it’ll help me stall.”

He stood up and took a deep breath. “We’d
better hope young Bar Nahum is right about Natalia’s survival. If
she can’t get here in time, the whole Empire’s likely to be
dangling by a thread.”

The lighting in the ship’s hold, never bright
to begin with, dimmed instantly to a faint emergency red. At the
same time, the artificial gravity cut out, leaving everything
floating weightless. Those things, combined with the deafening
alarms, made Eva yell up to the control room “Are we hit?”

Fortier’s gruff voice came back down to them.
“Nah. Just need extra power for maneuvering, that’s all. Might want
to hold onto something, though. This might get a bit rough.”

Even as his words came to them, the ship
lurched violently to port, tossing both passengers hard against the
wall. Natalia’s shoulder slammed hard against the bulkhead, and she
cried out in pain.

“Curl up in a ball,” Eva advised the girl.
“Protect your head at all costs.”

Their momentum in weightless condition sent
them banging against the walls like balls in a pachinko machine as
the ship dodged and darted through space in its effort to avoid
enemy fire. At this point they didn’t know who was shooting at
them, whether it was the rebel forces or the Imperial Navy. It
hardly mattered; each side would have been just as happy to shoot
them down.

“Can’t we get a message out?” Natalia called
up to the captain.

“Wouldn’t do no good,” he replied. “Both
sides think we’re a spy for the other, and they’re both jamming us.
Gotta weave between them and hope they shoot each other instead of
us. It’s gonna be fun.”

“Fun?” Natalia asked. Even in the strange red
emergency lighting, Eva could tell her face was pale.

“Better’n sitting around, playing music and
waving your hands in the air,” the captain said. “Now be quiet and
let me concentrate.”

For more than half an hour the ship dodged
and weaved through space, making seemingly impossible cuts and
direction changes as it tried to avoid taking fire—not just from
one fleet, but two. Even though they were holding on to whatever
they could grab, the two women were tossed around the cavernous
hold and soon were covered with bruises. Finally the bouncing
stopped, and the interior of the ship took on a preternatural
quiet.

“Is that over?” Natalia asked in a shaky
voice.

“For the moment,” Fortier said. “You ladies
didn’t tell me everybody’s out to get you. Both sides are firing at
us.”

“We’re just popular, that’s all,” Eva
said.

The captain grunted something
incomprehensible. Eva didn’t suppose it was either genteel or
flattering. “How’d you get clear?” she continued.

“Aah, those big warships ain’t much built for
atmospheric maneuverin’.”

“Are
we?
“ Eva asked.

She could almost hear the captain shrug.
“Better’n they are, at least. For a few minutes, anyway.”

“What happens after those few minutes?”
Natalia asked.

“You ladies won’t have to worry about that.
You won’t be here.”

“Where
will
we be?” asked Eva.

Fortier came down through the hatch. “In the
lifeship, where good little passengers are supposed to be. Come on,
I’ll show you.”

He led them around the wall to a section
where red-and-yellow tape marked off a sign: Emergency Exit. “You
just go in there and I’ll jettison you out.”

“What about you?” Natalia asked. “Aren’t you
coming with us?”

“Nope.”

“There’s enough room for three, isn’t there?”
Eva said.

“Plenty of room for five,” the captain said.
“But somebody’s got to stay with the ship and run it as a decoy, so
they won’t notice the lifeship.”

Natalia’s eyes went wide. “But that means
you’ll—”

“I’ve never run a lifeship before,” Eva
interrupted her. “How does it work?”

“It’s made to be simple, just a couple basic
voice commands. They’re printed on the wall.” He hesitated. “I’ve
modified it a bit over the years. A normal lifeship sends out
emergency signals; this one don’t unless you ask it special. A
normal lifeship homes in on spaceport beacons and lands at the
nearest one. This one don’t, but it hooks into the local web and
you can feed it coordinates. Kinda necessary adjustments in my line
of work.” He opened the hatch for them. “Come on, get in.”

Natalia looked about to say something else,
but Eva put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and guided her firmly
into the lifeship, then followed her through the hatch. She looked
back at the captain. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

Fortier seemed embarrassed, far more than
when he’d simply been negotiating money. “I’ve got a boy named
Paul,” he said hesitantly. “Well, a son, really. I guess he hasn’t
been a boy for a long time. He wants to work in space and I’ve
taught him all my tricks, but—well something must’ve gone wrong in
his genes. He actually wants to be official, joined the Naval
Academy and everything.” He looked straight into Natalia’s face.
“If … if you know anyone in a position to help him get through,
make a good career in the Navy—”

“We’ll see he’s looked after,” Eva said
solemnly.

The captain’s embarrassment lifted. “Well
then, good,” he said with a nod. “Smooth flying, ladies.” And he
closed and locked the hatch behind them.

Natalia was quiet for a couple of seconds.
“Why did you interrupt me? He’s going to die.”

Eva shrugged. “He’s a good man. That’s what I
saw in him. Lots of good people have died serving the tsar over the
centuries. When someone’s being heroic and noble, it’s bad manners
to point it out to them.”

There was a hint of tears in Natalia’s eyes.
Eva moved over beside her and hugged her for a minute. “In the last
few days, millions of people have died for you in one way or
another. In the next few days there’ll be millions more. No matter
how powerful you are, you can’t change that. You can give medals
and speeches all you want; the only way you can really honor them
is to go out and be the best damned tsaritsa the Empire’s ever
seen.”

The lifeship lurched as it was ejected from
the bigger ship.

Natalia clenched a fist. “I’ll take care of
his son.”

And I wish now I’d had sex with him,
Eva thought. “Take care of yourself first,” she said aloud. “We’ve
still got an Empire to reclaim.”

* * *

The interior of the lifeship was spartan. It
was mostly bare metal with a tiny galley and tinier head. There was
a banquette of padded seating for when the lifeship was under
acceleration or gravity conditions, and harnesses to strap yourself
into in freefall. The lighting was dim, but still bright enough to
see after the emergency lighting in the ship. The air smelled stale
and long-unused; it was a bit chillier than comfortable, and the
recycler made a louder hiss than it needed to. But, as the captain
had said, it was big enough for five friendly people.

There was no window, but there was a forward
view screen that relayed images from cameras in the ship’s hull. In
the darkness of space they could see the ship pulling rapidly away
from them, its hull heated slightly red from atmospheric contact.
It zoomed away from them in a rolling, looping motion. It quickly
disappeared into the blackness, and for a minute the women thought
it might have escaped safely—but then there was a blinding flash,
and they knew it was gone. Eva set her jaw tightly, and Natalia
tried to look stoic, but they were both surprisingly shaken by the
loss of a man they only barely knew.

Eva finally broke the silence. “Any ideas
where we should go?”

“Moscow,” Natalia said instantly.

“Not directly. If we go straight in we’ll be
shot out of the skies.”

“Can’t we identify ourselves?”

“(A), they might not believe us, considering
there are reliable reports of your death. And (B), that will alert
the rebel forces where we are, too. We don’t want to give them a
chance to zero in on us. I was thinking some area outside the city,
where we might not be noticed. Got any ideas?”

Natalia shook her head. “The only times I got
out of the palace were when I went to some official function, or
when I went to some of our other estates. I really don’t know my
way around.”

Eva shrugged. “No matter. That’s what the
web’s for.” As Fortier had said, the lifeship had plugged itself
into Earth’s web and there were plenty of aerial images and maps
for her to study. Moscow, as capital of the interstellar Empire,
had grown over the centuries to a sprawling megalopolis that seemed
to go on forever. So much of it was urbanized that finding any open
area nearby where they could land unobserved looked hopeless.
Russia still had vast areas of undeveloped land, but none close to
the city.

Finally Eva chose a small area about fifty
kilometers southwest of the city limits. It had large plots of open
farmlands and a few wooded sections around—not the forest she might
ideally have hoped for, but not heavily populated and with enough
trees to give them modest cover.

She pointed at the screen. “That might do.
What do you think, Your Majesty?”

“That looks smooth to me,” the girl said.
“But how do we get from there into the city? It’s much too far to
walk.”

“One step at a time. Right now I’ve just got
more a scheme than a plan. Once we’re there, some solution will
undoubtedly present itself. It looks like late afternoon there.
We’ll wait till nightfall to land.”

As they sat around waiting, Eva said, “I know
my circumstances are much different than yours, but you might want
to consider getting out more. Once this contretemps is over, of
course. Some of my most wonderful experiences have come when I went
out adventuring on my own. And I wasn’t too much older than you are
when I first started.”

“And you didn’t have people around you
planning your every step, worrying about your every sniffle,”
Natalia countered. “You think I haven’t felt imprisoned? But if I
go off on my own, there’s a general panic in the palace. Then they
clamp down worse than ever.”

“There’s got to be some middle ground,” Eva
said. “Tell them you want to go to the theater, or a soccer game,
or a department store or a park. Someplace ordinary people go.
Who’s the tsaritsa, you or them?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

The two women lapsed into contemplative
silence until Eva finally declared it was dark enough for
planetfall. “Land,” she ordered the ship-, and gave the coordinates
she’d chosen. Obediently the ship accelerated out of orbit and down
to Earth.

It didn’t go straight in, however. Always
wary of possible detection, Captain Fortier had programmed the
lifeship to take circuitous routes. They zigged and zagged, looped
and swooped in a sometimes crazy fall designed to throw off any
pursuit and avoid easy tracking. The ground loomed larger and
larger in the scope until they came in skimming the treetops so
close they could almost hear the branches scraping the ship’s side.
Then they touched down as gently as a butterfly lighting on a
flower petal.

They opened the hatch and stepped out into
the darkness. The air had the crisp bite of late autumn, and
smelled intoxicating after the stale recycled air of the lifeship.
They both breathed in a couple of deep lungsful, and then Natalia
said, “Where do we go now?”