Revenge of the Damned (36 page)

At least that was the conventional wisdom of the bean counters. The count began on Atago's side of the table. It would move through Pastour and his group, then the troika faction. The first nine "affirms" went swiftly. Then it was time for Pastour's vote.

"Abstain," the elder secretary said automatically. "Next?"

"Excuse me," Pastour said. "I haven't spoken yet."

The elder secretary peered at him, wondering what was going on.

"I don't want to abstain," Pastour said. "I want to vote affirmative."

His words were met by instant shock—and then excitement, as everyone realized what had just happened. There was a babble of voices and a plea for order, and then the vote flashed the rest of the way around the table.

In a moment it was unanimous, and Lady Atago was affirmed as the new leader of the Tahn High Council. The victory came so swiftly and so surprisingly that the gloom dropped from everyone's shoulders. Fehrle was forgotten, and the council members were pounding each other on the shoulders and generally congratulating themselves for their political wisdom.

They had a leader. It was time to face the enemy again.

"One question, my lady," one member of the council broke in. "The Imperial news reports are filled with stories about Imperial Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney. He's sworn to return to the Fringe Worlds. Retake Cavite. How do you plan to deal with him? Or is it too early to say?"

Atago rose to her full, substantial height. Leadership glowed from her like a mythical aura—the stuff heroes were made of.

"I welcome him to try," Atago said. "I've beaten him before. Badly. In fact I took Cavite
and
the Fringe Worlds over his blasted and bleeding body. And this time I'd be glad to finish the job."

There were cheers all around, with one exception: Pastour. He poked up a finger for recognition. Atago could not help giving him a hate-edged glance. She did not know why he had backed her, but she expected that the price would be high. Then she caught herself, and the expression changed to a grim smile.

"Yes, Colonel?"

"Why is the Emperor putting so much importance on the Fringe Worlds? To me they no longer seem to be a particularly strategic target. Are we sure it's not just a ploy? To force us to commit?"

"Of course it is," Lady Atago said. "They're making it seem important so that any victory they win there will appear to take on greater meaning than it in fact would have."

"Then, if we react," Pastour said, "aren't we in danger of turning fiction into reality?"

"Only if they beat us," Atago said. "And I promise you that can't happen. I've proved it once, and I'll do it again. And we'll turn the Emperor's sword back on himself."

With that promise, Lady Atago double-thought her way into taking the Emperor's bait. And Pastour fully understood the Emperor's strategy. The only thing still puzzling him was Sten's odd comment about his health.

"Now for the next order of business," Lady Atago went on. "I have here a list. A very important list. It was stolen by our agents from Imperial files."

The council members looked at the printout she was holding in her hand. She was waving it at them like some kind of accusation.

"On it are seventy-two names. Tahn names. Traitors. And I ask full authority to purge them from our midst. And that's only the start. I want to follow their trail to wherever it might lead. No matter how high the traitor, no matter how…"

Pastour tried an experimental first cough.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

T
he cafeteria had several advantages, but they were not visible to normal citizens. To them, the large converted storage building stank of grease and the unwashed, and it was up a side street in a very bad part of the port city of Soward. It looked like a very good place to get either ptomaine or a shank inserted between the third and fourth ribs.

That was an accurate summation.

But it did have very definite advantages: It was not automated. Instead, it was run by living beings who really did not care what happened so long as the blood was mopped up afterward. Caff was a tenth-credit, and alk a half-credit. The alk, of course, had never seen an Imperial tax stamp.

Anyone was welcome to hang out as long as he, she, or it wanted. A cup of caff could be nursed for half a day, and no one would object. It was an excellent place to make an illegal drug deal, plan a job, or just hang out, as an alternative to sitting in one's apartment, letting the four walls close in.

To Chapelle, the cafeteria had still other advantages.

He could stare for hours at the blank concrete building across the street and listen to the voices. Every day he learned of a new iniquity and injustice caused by the Emperor.

Sullamora's operating team had removed the subaudible projectors weeks earlier. Chapelle listened to voices of his own making, and the stories they told were fascinating.

A few days earlier, he had realized that he
had
to do something. Just what, he was not sure. The only possibility he could think of was the cafeteria's other advantage—its proximity to the Democratic Education Center.

Any war, no matter how "just," had opponents. Opposition ranged from true pacifism, through a quite logical reluctance to get one's ass shot off for any reason whatsoever, and on into less savory areas.

It was a constant battle for the Emperor to keep his intelligence organizations somewhat under control. Someone who merely thought—or even said—that the Eternal Emperor was full of drakh was not a danger to society, the Emperor had to remind his CI types.

It was a nice theory. At present, however, it was not widely practiced. Freedom of speech, like many other civil liberties, was not encouraged at that time. There were many thousand dissenters, who had merely mildly suggested that the Eternal Emperor did not have all the answers, and were spending the war in internment centers.

The Democratic Education Center was something else entirely. Its philosophy was very simple: that the Empire had overreacted to the Tahn and that more peaceful means could have been used. Before the war the center had lobbied for Imperial funding to establish other centers within the Tahn Empire. The good people of the society believed that truth would win out—once a Tahn, no matter what his class, was shown that his society was inhumane, that society would be changed. Fortunately, funding was not granted, and none of the theorists ended up as missionary stew.

The Tahn being what they were, they had loudly welcomed the existence of the Democratic Education Centers as long as they were all located on Imperial worlds. And they had promptly used the organization as a front.

All the active agents had been rounded up at that point, of course. But the center continued to exist—at the Emperor's teeth-gritted acceptance. The organization provided an excellent means of locating future dissidents and was riddled with Imperial Intelligence operatives. Imperial Intelligence did not realize that if it were not for their own agents, the center would have gone bankrupt years earlier. Even a front organization required regular dues paying, and very few of the center's members were considered politically employable at anything above the janitorial level.

Chapelle had known of the center for some time. How he had learned about it, he was not sure. The information, of course, had been planted in an early subaudible broadcast.

Not that Sullamora actually wanted Chapelle to join the organization. But once the man had reached that decision, the fourth stage of his education could begin.

The problem was that Chapelle appeared to be somewhat brighter than Sullamora's profile would have suggested. Even though Chapelle was a näif, he had somehow thought that the evil Emperor's agents might have penetrated the center. His walking through that door, Chapelle knew, would be his death. The Emperor would use that as an excuse to grab and torture Chapelle and then put him into a lethal chamber, just as the voices had told him had happened to millions of others.

But there appeared to be no alternative, Chapelle brooded.

Realizing were was somebody standing beside his table, Chapelle brought himself back and cowered. Not that he had ever been threatened in the cafeteria—the other patrons realized that it was very unlikely that Chapelle had anything worth stealing. Plus there was a certain sheen in his eye that suggested that even pushing the man around for sport could produce unpleasant ramifications.

The man did not belong in this dive, Chapelle thought; in fact, he belonged even less than Chapelle did. He was older. Gray-haired. Soberly and expensively dressed. Chapelle wondered why the man had not been instantly jackrolled, then eyed the bulging muscles and the barely visible scar on the man's neck. No. The man was not an easy target.

The man looked sternly at Chapelle. "You don't belong here," he said flatly.

Chapelle stammered—and the man suddenly smiled.

"I don't, either. But I seem to have a problem."

Somehow, unasked, he was sitting across from Chapelle.

"My problem is that I'm lost." He laughed—a rich bass laugh that showed a man who had learned the vagaries of the world and appreciated them. "I thought that just because I still had that built-in compass I could find my way around a city. Wrong again, Colonel General Suvorov."

Chapelle gaped. "You're a
general
?"

"Forty years. Pioneer Development Corps. Retired. Guess it's a courtesy title now. At least the clottin' Empire hasn't figured out a way to take
that
away from me, too. Or at least not yet.

"At any rate, I'm new here on Prime World. Thought I knew my way around. Got lost. Looked for somebody who might be able to help. Everybody I saw looked like the only help they'd give me is into a dark alley.

"Except you."

Chapelle was embarrassed.

"I'd be grateful," the man who called himself Suvorov said, "if I could get a guide back to the nearest pneumostation and out of this slum."

Chapelle was only too grateful to volunteer.

At the station Suvorov checked the schedule and muttered. "Typical. Very typical." He elaborated—the first pneumosubway run out to where he had rented quarters was an hour away. "Talk about your bureaucracies. Makes sense not to schedule runs out to where people who can pay live. But not when you've blocked all the gravcabs out of business.

"Wartime contingencies.

"You know, Sr. Chapelle, and I probably shouldn't be saying this to a stranger, but this is sure a good example of the way the Emperor thinks."

Chapelle nodded eagerly.

"Although," Suvorov went on, "you'd have to have been out on some of the Pioneer Sectors to see what it's really like. Out where there aren't any laws. Except the kind one person makes.

"And out there, you better not talk too loudly about things like that.

"Guess I was lucky. All that happened to me was I got requested to resign. And then the agrofarm I'd built up got requisitioned by the Imperial Quartermaster Corps.

"Why I'm here on Prime. Hoping I'd be able to get my toady rep to do something. Should've known better. He's been bought and sold so many times, he ought to have his soul in for a rebuild.

"Sorry. Man doesn't respect somebody whining."

During the wait, it was very natural for Suvorov to buy Chapelle a meal at a very expensive restaurant—and express amazement when he found out that Chapelle was an ex-landing controller.

"Did a lot of things. Have to, when you're out on the frontiers. But I could never handle all the things you people have to keep in your mind." He paused. "Not prying… but what the hell are you doing stuck down there in that slum? You don't have to answer."

Chapelle did, of course.

Suvorov was aghast. "Guess you feel sorry for yourself for not having shoes till you run across the man with prosthetics," he said. "You really got the shaft."

He ordered a second bottle of wine.

Chapelle, being a near-teetotaler even when he had credits, got a little drunk. And so did Suvorov.

"You know, Chapelle," he said over dessert. "One thing I'm sorry I never had was a son. Nothing left behind once I'm gone.

"Clotting Emperor—sorry for the language—is going to make sure of that."

They had brandies, and he called for the bill.

Outside the restaurant, Suvorov looked at Chapelle and apologized. He had gotten his guide and new friend drunk. It sure as hell would not be safe for the young man to go down those mean streets in his condition.

Chapelle should come stay with him. Hell, that clotting mansion he was leasing had room for a whole recon force.

Chapelle, stomach and mind full, found it easy to agree.

He also found it easy to agree the next day when Suvorov suggested that Chapelle might consider staying on. "Guess we both know I need a guide around this clotting planet. Besides, you're easy to talk to, son.

"I really like what you've been telling me about the Emperor. Learning a lot, I am."

Six weeks later Suvorov presented Chapelle with a willy-gun—and showed him the previously sealed shooting gallery below the mansion.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

L
ady Atago's headquarters/home was as Spartan and single-purpose as her mind. The furnishings were sparse and deliberately uncomfortable. It was not a place for lounging but for quick decision making. Aides came with their reports, sat on hard nervous edges for her decision or comments, and then were quickly gone, to be replaced by others.

The only thing on her desk was a small, framed fading fax print of the Eternal Emperor. She kept it there to focus herself constantly on her enemy. Atago would have been mildly surprised to learn that her opponent had done something similar; her picture had recently gone up in place of Lord Fehrle's in the Eternal Emperor's office.

On the far black-glass wall was a constantly changing map of the disputed areas. The Imperial positions were in red, the Tahn in green. The green areas had been swiftly dwindling of late, pinching in from the sides, with a red spearhead driving toward the Fringe Worlds. Even Erebus, that distant system Lady Atago had single-handedly turned into one of the great war factories of history, was firmly in Imperial control.