A cursory examination of the breakout revealed to Black that Anneke"s liberators had known about the Myotan a.s.sa.s.sins and taken advantage of the surveillance suppression he had put in place.
Black had enabled his enemy"s escape.
He gritted his teeth, feeling physically ill, but with an effort pushed his sentiments aside. Perhaps, as the Envoy said, he would need his nemesis to fulfil his own destiny, fate"s manoeuvrings being opaque to the human eye.
So be it, then.
Right now, he had to save Rench. The fool, in retrospect, had moved too precipitously in firing old hands, promoting new ones ahead of their superiors, and in dismissing the task force. He had, in a short time, alienated almost everyone.
There would be a putsch. No mistake.
Black must head that off, must ensure that his puppet - or the man who would be in due course - remained in office, where Black needed him to build an even bigger, more time(), fiasco.
Keeping Rench in office would take some doing.
Black made a long-distance n-s.p.a.ce call. When he"d finished, he quickly showered and changed, then presented himself at Rench"s office.
*Where have you been, dammit?" snarled Rench, red-faced and sweaty. His collar was undone and his uniform looked as if he had slept in it.
*Sorry, sir. Took two grams of n-doze. The alarm didn"t wake me straight away."
*Well, this is a pretty mess, and no mistake," said the commander, staring at readouts on his desk"s multiscreen. He appeared lost, shipwrecked. *What am I going to do, Black?"
*Let"s take it one step at a time, sir."
Light years away, a black stealth vessel slid into a blind orbit around the rich fat world of Heliopolis. The ship featured radiation-binding nanocoating, a repulse field to cancel out its ma.s.s and a sticking field anchoring it to an uninhabited island. Eight hundred kilometres below, the lights of the southern continent glittered like stars; the largest cl.u.s.ter, north of centre, its fabulous jewel. Dozens of s.p.a.ce elevators girdled the equator, reaching hundreds of kilometres into s.p.a.ce, the conurbation known as Aurora. This was the financial and software centre for the galaxy, and had been since Earth was the capital of the Old Empire.
The vessel hung in field-anch.o.r.ed orbit for thirty Terran minutes, undetected by those below, before a dozen attack shuttles dropped from its lower bay, darting away from the mother ship. Each took a different trajectory.
In the main shuttle, plunging towards the centre of Aurora, stood the Envoy, cowled and cloaked as ever, none of the crew aware of their captain"s true nature.
The ship dropped like a stone, barely powered, making its field signature harder to pick up. By the time the field came back on, the shuttle had entered the upper boundaries of the Auroran traffic sphere. As it did so, it was pinged several times by the automatic traffic intelligence system. The shuttle returned a valid ID and the traffic AI turned its attention elsewhere.
*Two minutes," said the navigator.
The Envoy nodded. He had adopted human mannerisms since, like most species, human beings conducted linguistic exchange with the use of body language. In his own society, a nod was an insulting gesture rarely used.
*Scan the Emporium. Update our databanks."
*Already started," said the comm system specialist.
*Good." Another mollifying gesture to humans. Compliments. Oddly enough, they worked. If you told a human enough times they were good at something, frequently they became good at it.
*Thirty seconds to target."
*Battle stations, everyone," said the Envoy, his voice as calm as always, though its permanent hiss limited the calming effect on those around him. *Tactical, how go the others?"
*In place, Envoy."
*Good. Very good."
Several seconds later the shuttle fell open among the spires of an ornate building and touched down, light as a feather, onto one of its rooftops. Instantly, the back loading ramp dropped silently and three teams of six hotfooted down, peeling off in different directions.
The Envoy led the team that went left.
Black checked his wristdata. Being unable to monitor activities on Heliopolis was frustrating. It meant he was essentially operating in the dark, trusting to the Envoy"s ability to succeed.
And it had to be said, trust did not come easily to Maximus Black.
*Captain, are you listening to me?"
*Sorry, sir. I was evaluating our options."
*And coming up with a solution, I hope," Rench said, slightly less florid, only slightly more calm, than when Black had arrived eight hours earlier. And much had happened in that time. A formal vote of confidence had been announced. If it was pushed through the RIM Electoral College, then Rench"s position would be decided by secret vote.
Black could not allow that. Even he could not *get to" that many officers and agents in so short a time. For one impractical moment he considered disabling the building"s AI and adding a slave narcotic to the internal RIM air conditioning, and enslaving the whole d.a.m.n lot of them. Having to resort to subterfuge to get things done vexed him.
*We must head off the confidence vote," said Black.
*Make sure it never comes to that."
*Great. Any ideas?" Rench asked sarcastically. Black eyed him briefly. When this was over, when he had no more use for the flabby fool, he would make sure Rench had an interesting accident. Painfully interesting.
*Yes, sir. I believe we need not only a distraction, but also a scapegoat. Perhaps if you would allow me -?"
Rench"s eyes narrowed. *What are you up to, Black?"
*Sir, it"s better that you do not know. Plausible deniability, and all that. I will take full responsibility for my actions."
Rench considered this. He certainly did not mind the kid sticking his neck out, or even losing his head in the process, just so long as he, Rench, kept his.
*I have no idea what you"re talking about, Black," Rench enunciated carefully, giving Black the tiniest of nods.
*Of course, sir. I spoke out of turn, sir."
Turning on his heel, Black left the room. Rench watched him go, a faint unease furrowing his brow. For a second, as ludicrous as it sounded, it had seemed that Black was the Commander, and Rench his underling.
The Envoy"s team, like the others striking that night in Aurora, moved with the silent swiftness of ninjas, a deadly purpose driving their steps.
They nullified rooftop fields and took out two guards lounging in a room one floor below, more intent on the bodyball game they were viewing than on any pretence at guarding. Security was lax, just as Black had said it would be.
Down and down and down they went, planting timed explosives along the way, each located to hit vital superconducting conduits. The bombs were not set to detonate until they had returned to the mother ship.
On Level One they encountered their first serious opposition.
Clearly, an alarm had gone off, alerting guards on this level that something was amiss. Their level was two floors above the vault and the AI Hub that ran the central financial and software emporium for the whole of Heliopolis and the galactic sector.
But from their reaction it was just as clear it was not a security alarm that had sounded. Instead, it was an internal sensor, responded to as a matter of protocol, but eliciting groans of impatience rather than an awareness of danger.
Even so, the guards were well trained. Trivial as the faulty sensor must have seemed, the guards moved with armed caution to investigate.
The Envoy acknowledged this as he shot two of them down.
From then on, it was bedlam.
As befitted a major financial inst.i.tution, it employed more than a hundred guards. And in all, the Envoy"s troops numbered eighteen.
Nonetheless, the guards never had a chance.
A firefight broke out in the main lobby. Guards hunkered down behind stone counters and ornate sculptures, blocking the Envoy"s access to the elevators which led down to the Hub, his target.
Disruptor beams and reeker pulses hissed back and forth. One of the Envoy"s men, standing next to him, took a hit in the throat, screaming silently before he died.
*Concentrate your fire on their left flank," said the Envoy. *Make them think we plan to charge there." His troops complied. The feint worked, with guards starting to bunch in that area, as the Envoy wanted. No sooner had they gathered, than another team burst from behind and opened up on the guards" unprotected rear.
With that, the Envoy gave the signal to charge.
As one, his team leapt to their feet and quickly crossed the distance to the *barricades". Two more went down in the sprint, but by then the third team was firing from a mezzanine balcony two floors up.
When the security guard complement was down to nine men and women, the guard captain surrendered. The Envoy wanted eyewitnesses left alive and accepted their surrender. He had them locked in a part of the building that would survive the detonations.
A few minutes later, they were in the Hub, breaking down multi-layered encryption codes and anti-hacker firewalls.
This, of course, would take longer than the attack, which so far, from when the shuttle had alighted on the rooftop to this point, had lasted only eleven minutes.
*Progress?" he asked his chief hacker, a young man of barely twenty Earth years, kept protectively in the rear by team number three.
*We are on track. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, sir."
*I presume your mixed metaphors mean that you will soon have penetrated the Hub and neutralised its defences?"
The young hacker grinned. Like most computer nerds he had a flamboyant att.i.tude to authority, especially to the chain of command. The Envoy approved of it.
*Good. Keep at it."
The Envoy stood still as a rock, thinking. Where a human would have paced, he froze into immobility, concentrating his physical resources on re-examining the mission, looking for flaws. He also monitored outside broadcasts and searched surveillance spectrums for alarms.
So far, their presence on Heliopolis had gone undetected outside of the Hub.
As the Envoy was thinking, an alarm blared in grid 606-D, a kilometre north of the Hub. The Imperial Standard Mercantile Bank.
The target of other shuttles.
*The hunkies have smelt a rat," said the Envoy. He too could employ metaphors.
He turned to his third team, with the least casualties. *Hit the vault now. No more need for concealment. The opposite, in fact."
*Yes, sir." The team leader saluted hastily and raced off followed by her squad. Black did not need the money, data and bush robotics hidden in the vault, but it would look better, especially when the team vaporised what they could not carry.
Jake Ferren. Black should have known. What was it with the Anneke Longshadow clan, even when they were only a *family" in the loosest sense possible? What was that old saying? Birds of a feather flock together?
He"d have to go bird hunting. And he had just the man for the job.
Meanwhile, he needed to head off the confidence vote for another three hours. Ferren had been gathering support all night, ever since the breakout and the accompanying penetration of RIM HQhad become known.
Now morning, the confidence vote would be at noon. It didn"t give Black much time.
He summoned Esprin Harbage to his office, switching on dampening fields and using a personal voice disruptor for close conversations.
*What do you want?" Esprin asked, a dejected look in his eyes.
*Cheer up, Esprin. I"m about to do you a favour."
*Yeah, right. What are my chances that I"ll live through this "favour"?"
*Oh, sixty-forty."
*I take it that"s sixty against?"
*Actually, there"s a sixty percent likelihood you"ll live."
*Great. What do I have to do?"
*Killjake Ferren."
Esprin"s eyes widened. *What?"
*According to your medical report, you"re not dea(*
*Why on earth do you want me to kill Colonel Ferren?" Esprin turned red. Black knew that the agent liked and admired Ferren. So did a lot of people. Esprin didn"t know it, but that fact was responsible for the sixty percent. It would suggest outside coercion. Myotan coercion.
It would also put off a confidence vote until later in the day, if not longer. Which was all Black needed.
Esprin would have to disappear. Permanently. When Black had said the young agent would live, he only meant the initial a.s.sa.s.sination, not the aftermath Black had planned. It paid, Black reflected, not for the first time, to pay attention to words. Like small print in contracts, loopholes abounded.
*I suppose if I don"t, you"ll just let me die."
*Horribly, may I remind you. Did you get the viewing cube I sent you, showing the guy dying of that poison?"
Esprin spoke like he was already dead. *It was gross."
*Trust me, it was worse for the lead actor." Black, increasingly worried Esprin might do something n.o.ble and stupid, had sent the agent the cube six months earlier, soon after Anneke supposedly died a hero"s death. Black had learnt long ago that heroism was infectious and needed to be stamped out immediately. In any case, Black soothed his disquiet at the murder of the youth with the thought that it would be less ugly and painful than the one the poison in his bloodstream could inflict.
The lesser of two evils. For Black, that almost amounted to friendship.
Esprin was shaking as he checked the charge on his laser. Why was he doing this? Did he love his own life so much? Was he afraid of death? Well, yes, he was afraid - no, actually he was terrified of the death Black had in store for him.
So why not vaporise his own brain?