Jefferson shuddered, and the panicked part of his brain gibbered to give it up. They didn't know who he was yet. If he folded his hand and faded away, they might never know. In time, if they continued to trust him, he might actually have the chance to try again. But he couldn't count on eluding their net, not when he didn't know how much they'd already learned, and the gambler in his soul shouted to go banco. It was all on the table, everything he had, all he'd hoped and dreamed and worked for. Success or failure, absolute power or death: all of it hinged on whether or not Colin MacIntyre agreed to leave Birhat within the next twelve hours, and Jefferson wanted to scream. He was a chess master who calculated with painstaking precision. How was he supposed to calculate this? All he could do was guess, and if he guessed wrong, he died.
He pounded his knee one more time, and then his shoulders relaxed. If he stopped now and they found him out, the crimes he'd already committed would demand his execution, and that meant it was really no choice at all, didn't it?
"—so Adrienne's parasites are embarking their first loads now, and my Marines have taken over at the mat-trans," Hector MacMahan reported. "So far, there seems to be more shock than panic, but I don't expect that to last."
"Do you have enough men to control a panic if it starts?" Hatcher asked. "I can reinforce with Fleet personnel if you need them."
"I'll take you up on that," MacMahan said gratefully.
"Done. And now," Hatcher's holo-image turned to Colin, "will you please get aboard a ship and move out beyond the threat zone?"
"No."
"For Maker's sake, Colin!" Ninhursag exploded. "Do you want this thing to kill you?"
"No, but if it hasn't gone off yet, maybe it won't unless we set it off."
"And maybe the goddamned thing is ticking down right now!" MacMahan snapped. "Colin, if you don't get out of here willingly, then I'll have a battalion of Marines drag your ass off this planet!"
"No, you won't!"
"I'm responsible for your safety, and—"
"And I am your goddamned Emperor! I never wanted the fucking job, but I've got it, and I will by God do it!"
"Good. Fine! Shoot me at dawn—if we're both still alive!" MacMahan snarled. "Now get your butt in gear, Sir, because I'm sending in the troops!"
"Call him off, Gerald," Colin said in a quiet, deadly voice, but Hatcher's holo-image shook its head.
"I can't do that. He's right."
"Call him off, or I'll have Mother do it for you!"
"You can try," Hatcher said grimly, "but only the hardware listens to her. Or are you saying that if Hector drags you aboard a ship with a million civilian evacuees you'll have Mother order its comp cent not to leave orbit?"
Colin's furious eyes locked with those of Hatcher's image, but the admiral refused to look away. A moment of terrible tension hovered in the conference room, and then Colin's shoulders slumped.
"All right," he grated, and his voice was thick with hatred. Hatred that was all the worse because he knew his friends were right. "All right, goddamn it! But I'll go aboard Dahak, not another ship."
"Good!" MacMahan snapped, then sighed and looked away. "Colin, I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. But I can't let you stay. I just can't."
"I know, Hector." It was Colin's turn to turn away, and his voice was heavy and old, no longer hot. "I know," he repeated quietly.
Brigadier Alex Jourdain sealed his Security tunic and looked around his comfortable apartment. He'd lived well for the last ten years; now the orders he'd just received were likely to take it all away, and more, yet he was in far too deep to back out, and if they pulled it off after all—
He drew a deep breath, checked his grav gun, and headed for the transit shaft.
" 'Tanni, I—" Horus cut himself off as Jiltanith, still in her nightgown, turned from the window and he saw her tears. His face twisted, and he closed his mouth and started to leave, but she held out a hand.
"Nay, Father," she said softly. He turned back to her, then reached out to take her hand, and she smiled and pulled him closer. "Poor Father," she whispered. "How many ways the world hath wounded thee. Forgive my anger."
"There's nothing to forgive," he whispered back, and pressed his cheek to her shining hair. "Oh, 'Tanni! If I could undo my life, make it all different—"
"Then would we be gods, Father, and none of us the people life hath made us. In all I have ever known of thee, thou hast done the best that man might do. 'Twas ever thy fate to fight upon thy knees, yet never didst thou yield. Not to Anu, nor to the Achuultani, nor to Hell itself. How many, thinkest thou, might say as much?"
"But I built my Hell myself," he said quietly. "Brick by brick, and I dragged you into it with me." He closed his eyes and held her tight. "Do . . . do you remember the last thing you ever said to me in Universal, 'Tanni?"
She stiffened in his arms, but she didn't pull away, and after a moment, she shook her head.
"Father, I recall so little of those days." She pressed her face harder into his shoulder. " 'Tis like some dark, horrible dream, one that e'en now haunteth my sleep on unquiet nights, yet when waking—"
"Hush. Hush," he whispered, and pressed his lips into her hair. "I don't want to hurt you. Maker knows I've done too much of that. But I want you to understand, 'Tanni." He drew a deep breath. "The last thing you ever said was 'Why didn't you come, Poppa? Why didn't you love us?' " Her shoulders shook under his hands, and his own voice was unsteady. " 'Tanni, I always loved you, and your mother, but you were right to hate me." She tried to protest, but he shook his head. "No, listen to me, please. Let me say it." She drew a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, and he closed his eyes.
" 'Tanni, I talked your mother into supporting Anu. I didn't realize what a monster he was—then—but I was the one who convinced her. Everything that happened to you—to her—was my fault. It was, and I know it, and I've always known it, and, O Maker, I would sell my very soul never to have done it. But I could never undo it, never find the magic to make it as if it had never happened. A father is supposed to protect his children, to keep them safe, and that—" his voice broke, but he made himself go on "—that was why I put you back into stasis. Because I knew I'd failed. Because I'd proven I couldn't keep you safe any other way. Because . . . I was afraid."
"Father, Father! Dost'a think I knew that not?" She shook her head.
"But I never told you," he said softly. "I cost us both so much, and I never had the courage to tell you I knew what I'd done and ask you to forgive me."
Colin paced the conference room like a caged animal, fists pounding together before him while he awaited his own cutter, and his brain raced. The evacuation Adrienne and Hatcher had planned but never been able to rehearse was going more smoothly than he would have believed possible, but all of them knew they weren't going to get everyone out. Unless they could deactivate the bomb, millions of people would die, yet how in God's name did you deactivate something you couldn't approach with as much as a scanpack, much less the weapons to—
He stopped suddenly, then slammed himself down in his chair and opened his neural feed to Dahak wide.
"Give me everything on the Mark Ninety," he said sharply.
The door chime sounded, and Horus turned from Jiltanith to answer it.
"Yes?"
"Your Grace, it's Captain Chin," an urgent voice said. "Sir, I think you'd better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down."
"That's impossible," Horus said reasonably. "Did you call Maintenance?"
"I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com." The captain drew a deep breath. "Your Grace, it didn't work either."
"What?" Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.
"It didn't work, Sir, and I've never seen anything like it. There's no obvious jamming, the coms just don't work, and it'd take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space." The captain faced Horus squarely. "Your Grace, with all d
ue respect, we'd better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now."
"You know, it might just work," Vlad Chernikov murmured.
"Or set the thing the hell off!" Hector MacMahan objected.
"A possibility," Dahak agreed, "yet the likelihood is small, assuming the force of the explosion were sufficient. What Colin suggests is, admittedly, a brute force solution, yet it has a certain conceptual elegance."
"Let me get this straight," MacMahan said. "We can't get near the thing, but you people want to pile explosives on top of it and set them off? Are you out of your frigging minds?"
"The operative point, General," Dahak said, "is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats."
"So?"
"So we don't use Imperial technology," Colin said. "We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax."
"HE from where?" MacMahan demanded. "There isn't any on Birhat. For that matter, I doubt there's any on Terra after this long!"
"You are incorrect, General," Dahak said calmly. "Marshal Tsien has the materials we require."
"I do?" Tsien sounded surprised.
"You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago."
"I—" Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. "As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten." He looked at MacMahan. "Lawrence's Security personnel stumbled across them, Hector. We believe they were cached by the previous regime before you disarmed it on Colin's orders before the Siege. Apparently, even the individuals who hid them away had forgotten about them, and they were badly decayed—they used a tritium booster, and it had broken down. They were sent here for disposal, but we never got around to it."
"You want to use nukes?" MacMahan yelped.
"No," Dahak said calmly, "but these are Terran warheads, which rely on shaped chemical charges to initiate criticality, and each of them contains several kilograms of the compound Octol."
"And how do you get the explosives into position?" MacMahan asked more normally.
"Somebody walks in, sets them, fuses them, and walks back out again," Colin said. MacMahan raised an eyebrow, and Colin shrugged. "It should work, as long as he doesn't have any active Imperial hardware on him."
"Background radioactivity?" Hatcher asked. "If this stuff's been squirreled away inside a nuclear warhead for twenty-odd years, it's bound to have picked up some contamination."
"Not sufficient to cross a Mark Ninety's threshold," Dahak replied.
"You're certain?" Hatcher pressed, then waved a hand. "Forget that. You never make unqualified statements if you aren't certain, do you?"
"Such habits imply a certain imprecision of thought," Dahak observed, and despite the tension, Colin smiled, then sobered.
"I think we have to try it. It's a risk, but it's the smallest one I can come up with, and you may be right about a timer, Hector. We don't have time to come up with an ideal, no-risk solution."
"Agreed. How long to strip out the explosives and get them down here, Dahak?"
"I have already initiated the process, General. I estimate that they could be delivered to the Palace within twenty minutes in their present state, but I would prefer to reshape them into a proper configuration for maximum destructive effect, which will require an additional hour."
"Eighty minutes?" MacMahan rubbed his chin, then nodded. "All right, Colin, I'll vote for it."
"Gerald? Tao-ling?" Both officers nodded, and Colin glanced at Chernikov.
"I, too," the Russian said. "In fact, I would prefer to place the charge myself."
"I don't know, Vlad—" Colin began, but MacMahan interrupted crisply.
"If you were thinking about doing it yourself, you can just rethink. Whatever happens down here, you, personally, are going to be aboard Dahak and outside the lethal zone when we set it off. And if you know anybody better equipped for the job than Vlad, I don't." Colin opened his mouth, but MacMahan fixed him with a challenging eye and he closed it again.
"Good," MacMahan said.
"Suppressor's active, Brigadier," the Security tech said, never looking up from his remote panel. "Their coms are blocked."
"Elevators and switchboard?" Brigadier Jourdain asked, and another man looked up.
"Shut down. They've pulled almost all the regular Security people for crowd control, and I've cut the links to the lobby station. We're placing the charges to blow the switchboard when we leave now; it'll look just like a Sword of God hit, Sir."
"All right." Jourdain faced his handpicked traitors. "Remember, these are Imperial Marines. There's only twelve of them, but they're tough, well trained, and if they've tried their coms since the suppressor went on-line, they're going to be ready. Our coms are out, too, so stick to the plan. Don't improvise unless you have to."
His men nodded grimly.
"All right. Let's do it."
Horus stood outside Jiltanith's bedroom while she jerked on clothes, and his mind raced. It was preposterous. He was in his own HQ building in the middle of Earth's capital city, and he couldn't even place a com call! There could be only one reason for that, but how had "Mister X" pulled it off? Captain Chin was right. The only thing that could shut down fold coms without active jamming was close proximity to a warp suppressor, but a suppressor powerful enough to do the job was far too large to have been smuggled through White Tower's security . . . which meant someone on his own security staff must have brought it in, and if he'd been penetrated that completely—
He crossed to his desk and touched a button, and the desktop swung smoothly up. The habits of millennia of warfare die hard, and despite his fear, he smiled wolfishly as he lifted the energy gun from its nest. He punched the self-test button, and the ready light glowed just as the bedroom door opened . . . and Captain Chin half-ran into his office.
"Your Grace," the Chinese officer said flatly, "the elevators are out, too."
"Shit!" Horus closed his eyes, then shook himself. "Stairs?"
"We can try them, Sir, but if they've cut the coms and elevators, they're already on their way. And without the elevators—"
"Without the elevators, they're coming up the stairs," Horus grunted. Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful! Head down the stairs and they risked running into the bastards head-on. For a moment, he was tempted anyway, but Imperial weapons were too destructive. If they got caught in a stairwell, a single shot might take out all their men—and 'Tanni. But if they didn't try to break out, they left the initiative to the other side. On the other hand—
Jiltanith stepped out of the bedroom, convoyed by four stocky, black-and-tan rottweilers. Her dagger glittered on her belt, and Horus' mouth tightened as she reached out and took Captain Chin's grav gun from its holster. The Marine didn't protest; he simply shifted his energy gun to his left hand and passed over his ammunition belt with his right, and she gave him a strained smile. The belt wouldn't fit around her pregnancy-swollen waist, so she hung it over her shoulder like a bandolier.
"All right, Captain," Horus said. "We have to let them come to us. The stairs merge into the central core one floor down; have ten of your people set up to cover the landings. Leave the other two here to cover the access to my office. 'Tanni, lock your bedroom door, then go to my room and lock yourself in. Hopefully, if anyone gets this far, they'll head for your room first."
"Father, I—" she began, and he shook his head savagely.
"I know, 'Tanni, but you're going to have to leave this to us. We can't risk you, and even if we could—" He waved at her swollen belly, the gesture both tender and oddly apologetic, and she nodded unhappily.
"Art right," she sighed, and looked down at the bio-enhanced dogs.
"Go thou wi' Captain Chin," she told them, "and watch thyselves."
"We go, pack lady," Galahad's vocoder said, "but keep
Gwynevere with you." She nodded, and Horus looked at Chin as the other three dogs leapt away.
"We're out of communication, and we're going to be spread out. Watch your rears as well as your fronts."
"Yes, Your Grace!" Chin saluted and vanished after the dogs, and Horus turned to the two Marines who'd been left behind.
"Anyone who gets this far will have to come up the last stair. After that, they'll go for 'Tanni's bedroom first. Pick yourselves positions to cover the stairs. If you have to fall back, head this way; don't head for my room. We want them to keep on thinking she's in her room as long as we can."
"Yes, Sir." The senior Marine jerked his head at his companion, and they ran towards the tower's central access core.
"Go, 'Tanni!" Horus said urgently.
"I go, Father," she said softly, yet she paused just long enough to throw one arm about him and kiss him before she wheeled away. He watched her go, Gwynevere trotting ahead of her like a scout, and turned to survey his office one more time. He'd accomplished a lot from this place. Commanded the Siege of Earth, directed the reconstruction in its wake, coordinated the introduction of an entire planet to Imperial technology. . . . He'd never expected to fight for his daughter's life from it, but if he had to do that too, then, by the Maker, he would.
He walked slowly to the office foyer. It was the only way into his personal quarters, and he upended his receptionist's desk and piled furniture about it. He built a sturdy barricade facing the entry, then stepped away from it to the wall beside the entry and settled his back into a corner.
"The explosives have arrived at the Palace, Colin," Dahak said as Colin entered the command deck of the computer's starship body.
"Good." Officers popped to their feet as their Emperor and Warlord strode across to the captain's couch, but he waved them back to their duties. Dahak had moved beyond the weapon's threat radius, and Colin felt a sick surge of guilt as he realized that, whatever happened, he personally was safe. It seemed a betrayal of all his subjects, and knowing Hector and Gerald were right to insist upon it only made his guilt worse.