Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 (9 page)

Standing on one foot,
Eva thought, but
merely nodded.

From then on, Eva felt more like Cinderella
at the mercy of the evil stepsisters. While the other girls looked
down on her as an interloper, they kept finding more and more work
to pile on her shoulders—thereby leaving themselves more leisure
time for eating and gossiping. Of course, the chores they assigned
her were all back-stage work; she only caught fleeting glimpses of
the Velikaya Knyaghinya from time to time. Still, this back-stage
work was so much simpler than it was in show business that Eva
never felt overburdened.

The morning the Velikaya Knyaghinya was to
depart, Lady Elena came to give the team a pep talk. She would not
be going on the trip because she had too many duties back in the
palace, but said she was confident her girls would make her proud
of them and take care of the Velikaya Knyaghinya perfectly. Eva
wondered how confident she’d be if she knew how smoothly the team
was functioning so far.

Lady Elena then introduced them all to Col.
Groenwald, the leader of the ISIS team sent to guard the Velikaya
Knyaghinya on her journey. He was a tall man, fifty-ish, with a
rigorous expression and posture to match. Eva was immediately
relieved that she hadn’t been assigned to his detail; Groenwald had
probably long ago memorized the entire ISIS rule book and thought
it covered every eventuality. Wettig had certainly been right about
a lack of imagination handicapping ISIS; if Eva had been subject to
this man’s orders, she’d never be able to do anything.

Col. Groenwald briefly outlined the security
arrangements he felt these girls should know. Eva found the
information sketchy at best, but she could infer more details
beyond what the officer said and agreed that these measures would
be sufficient to cover everyday situations. She was here to cover
the extraordinary ones.

Their luggage had already been packed, and
was loaded by servants into a special car that took it all to Tsar
Gregoriy Spaceport. The imperial family and staff had special
secure facilities there so they wouldn’t have to mix with the
general populace. The luggage was sent through the underground
tubeways to be loaded aboard the ship. The ship’s crew boarded
through the passenger tube. Only after everyone else was aboard did
the Velikaya Knyaghinya herself board through the private
underground tube, so no one could see her.

The imperial space yacht
Argosy
was a
tall, beautiful structure. In size it compared favorably with one
of the small luxury liners that were such popular interstellar
transports for the dvoryane. Inside, however, it was even more
luxurious. It didn’t have to allow room for expensive boutiques,
casinos and other diversions to distract paying customers from the
long boredom of interstellar flight. Instead, the interior was
designed to provide the maximum in comfort to the royal
inhabitants. The living quarters and public rooms were large and
fancy, with a well-stocked library, tridee shows and other
diversions. The meals were all banquets; even though she didn’t eat
at the Velikaya Knyaghinya’s table herself, Eva had to admit she’d
never eaten so consistently well in all her life.
It’ll really
be hard to adjust to ordinary food again when this assignment’s
over,
she thought.

The
Argosy
took off without incident,
and the four-day journey to Languor proved totally uneventful. The
other girls took great advantage of Eva’s presence to divest
themselves of any chores they felt were beneath them. Eva didn’t
mind. She was right where she needed to be. She might not be at the
Velikaya Knyaghinya’s right hand—but if any trouble started, she
would be right in the thick of it.

When Judah was assigned to his new post
inside the palace, it turned out to be less than he’d hoped for. He
was on the graveyard shift, standing in a long corridor with a door
at the end. His job was to guard the door. He had to check the
identification of every person who wanted to go through the door
and make sure only authorized people went in. He was to check the
identification of every person who came through from the other side
to make sure they were who they claimed to be. Other than that, he
stood his watches in the dead of night for seven hours out of every
twenty-one hour Kyrby day, until he was relieved.

If the hallway were busy, it might have
relieved the monotony. But with only one or two people an hour, the
task rapidly sank to the depths of tedium. He itched to see his
first action, but it never came. He had to take comfort in what
Ilya Uzi had once said: “Ninety-five percent of being a spy is
waiting. You start hoping someone will try to kill you, just for a
change of pace.”

In his off-hours, though, he had plenty of
time to wander around and explore the palace. There were areas
where a junior lieutenant was not permitted, but not as many as
he’d feared. The B.O.Q., of course, was where he stowed his meager
gear, and the mess hall served meals to both the kavalergardy and
regular militsia. There was a natural rivalry between these two
groups, of course, and not entirely on a friendly level. Each
considered itself superior to the other; the militsia protected the
peace and the kavalergardy protected the palace.

Bedrooms of the occupants were some of the
places that were off-limits, but there were libraries, meeting
rooms, game rooms and other public areas where people could gather.
The palace also had extensive grounds, but Judah wasn’t
particularly interested in them. They weren’t likely to give him
clues to what Kuznyetz was planning.

He talked with his fellow kavalergardy in the
B.O.Q., which were separate from those of the troops. The
kavalergardy knew there was something afoot; there were an
increasing number of strangers coming and going from the palace at
all hours., many of whom seemed to be kuptsy of different levels.
But aside from making them show appropriate ID, the guards had very
little interaction with them.

It was pretty clear that the kavalergardy
wouldn’t take part in whatever insurrection might occur; they would
stay here and guard the palace. It was the militsia and the navy
crews who would be seeing the action first-hand. If there was any
scuttlebutt to be learned, it would be from them.

Technically, of course, individual
dvoryane—particularly knyazya, who ranked just below the imperial
family—were forbidden to have private navies. There’d been too many
rebellions by people who thought they might have a better claim to
the throne. The Imperial Navy was the only military force charged
with preserving order in the vast distances between the stars.

But those distances were vast indeed, and
knyazya held dominion over broad volumes of space, often with
thirty or more planetary systems under their control. Pirates
constantly prowled the space lanes looking for victims. Smugglers
continually challenged authority to deliver contraband from one
planet to another. There were legitimate reasons why knyazya needed
armed patrol ships to deal with local threats the Imperial Navy
couldn’t always be spared to handle.

Technically these were “militsia” vessels,
authorized to use their weapons to take on pirate ships and shields
to protect themselves from attack. The weapons were strictly the
ship-to-ship variety. Bombs and other space-to-ground weaponry were
utterly prohibited. No one wanted a repeat of the early
interplanetary wars that were fought at the very beginnings of the
Empire; to this day, too many worlds bore the horrific scars of
those pitched battles.

Of course, sophisticated space-to-ground
weapons were hardly necessary. A space-going vessel could just as
easily lob rocks down the gravity well to wreak incalculable havoc.
But civilized society operated on a wink-and-a-nod basis to ignore
this simple fact of physics; “if I ignore this, you will too and it
won’t exist” was a rule that had worked for centuries.

Cargo and passenger ships also routinely
traveled armed through space. This was a gray area of interstellar
law, but it was generally acknowledged that no one wanted to leave
these ships defenseless against pirate attacks.

In the mess hall, Judah could see lots of
people in the uniform of Kuznyetz’s space militsia. He finally
commented on it to a fellow kavalergard.

“You should’ve seen it a year ago,” the other
man replied. “The place was so crowded with militsia you
practically had to eat standing up.”

“Is the knyaz reducing his troop strength,
then?” Judah asked.

“Not hardly. If anything, he’s laying on
more
militsia.”

“Then where are they all?”

“Shipping out as fast as they can,” another
kavalergard said, joining the conversation. “The shipyard’s working
to capacity building more and more ships. My cousin works there and
she told me so.”

“And not just on Kyrby,” chimed in yet
another kavalergard. “I hear all the shipyards in the sector are
working overtime.”

“Wow! What’s he need all those ships
for?”

“Maybe there’s been a big surge in piracy,”
the first guard said, shrugging his shoulders. “Who knows? Your
guess is as good as mine.”

Actually, Judah’s guess was far better than
his comrade’s. As Wettig had surmised, Kuznyetz was building up his
fleet as fast as he could. And Judah could think of only one
reasonable explanation for that: insurrection. And soon.

But how soon, that was the big question. So
far he hadn’t learned anything new, just confirmed a guess. Wettig
wasn’t Commissar of ISIS any more; he needed hard evidence before
he could take action—and even then he didn’t have the authority to
take unilateral steps. And the Imperial Navy was scattered all
across the Empire; if the other kavalergardy were any indication,
even it would have trouble standing against Kuznyetz’s fleet.

And if Kuznyetz did make a play for the
throne, could he expect to win? Tsar Vasiliy had been lying in a
coma for five years, and doctors said he could hang on for a lot
longer without regaining consciousness. And if he did pass on,
there was a legitimate heir already waiting—and Eva was protecting
the Velikaya Knyaghinya, so he knew she’d be safe.

There were lots of people who owed their
allegiance to the throne. How could Kuznyetz ever hope to win them
over? Sure, he was a knyaz—but only by marriage. There were dozens,
if not hundreds, of other people who had closer blood ties to the
throne, even if there were a lot of mysterious accidents as Wettig
claimed—and lots of
them
had private fleets, too. Maybe not
big enough to completely counter Kuznyetz’s—but if some of them
allied together, they could present a significant challenge.

The Empire would fracture. With different
sides staking claims to the throne, all of them stronger than
Kuznyetz’s, the galaxy would be politically ripped apart. Different
navies would be staking out claims to different portions, whatever
they could control. It would make the Knyazya Rebellion of fifty
years ago seem like a tea party. You’d have to go all the way back
to the establishment of the Empire itself to find a bloodier, more
chaotic period. And the chaos could last for decades, perhaps much
longer, before any form of stability could be restored.

And all the deaths! At first it would be
fleet against fleet in the depths of space, but as angers and
animosities built up, it would be inevitable for the bombardments
to begin. Millions upon millions of civilian casualties would
destroy worlds and cultures.

The Empire was far from perfect, and far from
universally just—but it held people together by a common bond, a
common history. Remove that, destroy the unity, and you’d have
people suffering in numbers that would stagger the imagination.

It must not be allowed to happen.

But how to get the information Wettig needed?
This was the question that haunted his thoughts as he stood each
day, guarding a door in a lightly traveled, unimportant corridor.
He conceived and discarded dozens of ideas on his long, boring
shifts—and to make matters worse he had to stand at his post. He
couldn’t even pace the hallway—and Judah Bar Nahum thought best
when he paced.

One thing was clear: the answer would not
come to him standing in this empty hallway. The information doesn’t
come to the spy, Ilya Uzi had said. The spy goes to the
information.

So where would the information be? Well, one
certain spot would be Kuznyetz’s computer, which would undoubtedly
be well-guarded. That would have to be a target of last resort,
when he had to risk blowing his identity because there was no other
way.

There had to be more than one copy of the
battle plans; Kuznyetz’s officers would need copies in advance so
they could implement it on a moment’s notice. The full plan would
probably only be known to a handful of top officers; fleet leaders
and ship’s captains would have instructions for their individual
roles in the plan, but those pieces might be easier to steal. If he
got enough of the pieces, that might let Wettig deduce the
rest.

As he stood at his post trying to decide
which commanders might make the best targets, a woman turned the
corner at the far end of the hall and began walking toward him.
Judah recognized her at once from his research: Marya Kuznyetza,
the knyaz’s daughter. He stood up especially straight.

She walked casually down the hall, not even
looking at him. She started to walk past, but he stepped in front
of her. “Excuse me, Your Ladyship, but I’m required to ask for your
identification.”

She looked at him as though seeing him for
the first time, the way she’d look after inadvertently stepping in
a slimy puddle. “Who are you?” she asked.