David Weber - Empire from the Ashes

"Yes, Sir." Urthank looked into Marhn's face for a moment, then turned away. "You heard the High-Captain! Sound parley!" he barked, and another officer fled to pass the order.

"Here, boy!" Marhn said gruffly, catching Rukhan's wounded messenger as he began to collapse. He took the young man's weight in his arms and eased him down into a camp chair, then looked back up at Urthank. "Call the healers and have this man seen to," he said.

Lieutenant Carl Bergren was grateful for his bio-enhancement. Without it, he'd have been sweating so hard the security pukes would have arrested him the moment he reported for duty tonight.

His adrenaline tried to spike again, but he pushed it back down and told himself (again) the risk was acceptable. If it all blew up on him, he could find himself facing charges for willful destruction of private property and end up dishonorably discharged with five or ten years in prison, which was hardly an attractive proposition. On the other hand, it wasn't as if anyone were going to be hurt—in fact, he was going to have to separate any passengers from the freight—and it wasn't every night a mere Battle Fleet lieutenant earned eight million credits. That payoff was sufficient compensation for any risks which might come his way. He told himself that firmly enough to manage a natural smile as he walked into the control room and nodded to Lieutenant Deng.

"You're early tonight, Carl." Deng had learned his English before he was enhanced, and its stubbornly persistent British accent always seemed odd to Bergren coming from a Chinese.

"Only a couple of minutes," he replied. "Commander Jackson's on Birhat, and I stole her parking spot."

"A court-martial offense if ever I heard one." Deng chuckled, and rose to stretch. "Very well, Leftenant, your throne awaits."

"Some throne!" Bergren snorted. He dropped into the control chair and flipped his feed into the computers, scanning the evening's traffic. "Not much business tonight."

"Not yet, but there's something special coming through from Narhan."

"Special? Special how?" Bergren's tone was a bit too casual, but Deng failed to notice.

"Some sort of high-priority freight for the Palace." He shrugged. "I don't know what, but the mass readings are quite high, so you might want to watch the gamma bank capacitors. We're getting a drop at peak loads, and Maintenance hasn't found the problem yet."

"No?" Bergren checked the files in case Deng was watching, but he already knew all about the power fluctuation. He didn't know how it had been arranged, but he knew why, and he damped another adrenaline surge at the thought. "You're right," he observed aloud. "Thanks. I'll keep an eye on them."

"Good." Deng gathered up his personal gear and cocked his head. "Everything else green?"

"Looks that way," Bergren agreed. "You're relieved."

"Thanks. See you tomorrow!"

Deng wandered out, and Bergren leaned back in his chair. He was alone now, and he allowed a small smile to hover on his lips. He had no idea who his mysterious patron was, nor had he cared... until tonight. Whoever it was paid well enough to support his taste for fast flyers and faster women, and that had been enough for him. But the services he'd performed so far had all been small potatoes beside tonight, and his smile became a thoughtful frown.

He hadn't realized, until he received his latest orders, how powerful his unknown employer must be, but pulling this off required more than mere wealth. No, whoever could arrange something like this had to have access not simply to highly restricted technology but to Shepard Center's security at the very highest levels. There couldn't be many people who had both those things, and the lieutenant had already opened a mental file of possible candidates. After all, if whoever it was had paid so well for relatively minor services in the past, he'd pay still better in the future for Bergren's silence.

A soft tone sounded, and he shrugged his thoughts aside to concentrate on his duties. He plugged into the computer net and checked the passenger manifest against the people actually boarding the mat-trans. Two of them were technically overweight for their baggage, but it was well within the system's max load parameters, and he decided to let it pass. He made the necessary adjustments to field strength and checked his figures twice, then sent the hypercom transit warning to Birhat. An answering hypercom pulse told him Birhat was up and ready, awaiting reception of the controlled hyper-space anomaly he was about to create, and he sent the transit computer the release code. The control room's soundproofing was excellent, but he still heard the whine of the charging capacitors, and then his readouts peaked as the transmitter kicked over. Another clutch of bureaucrats, temporarily converted into something they were no doubt just as happy they couldn't understand, disappeared into a massive, artificially induced "fold" in hyper-space. The waiting Birhat station couldn't "see" them coming, but, alerted by Bergren's hypercom signal, its receivers formed a vast, funnel-shaped trap in hyper-space. At eight hundred-plus light-years, even the vastest funnel was an impossibly tiny target, but Bergren's calculations flicked the disembodied bureaucrats expertly into its bell-shaped mouth. In his mind's eye, the lieutenant always pictured his passengers rattling and bouncing as they zinged down the funnel and then—instantaneously, as far as they could tell, but 8.5 seconds later by the clocks of the rest of the universe—blinked back into existence on distant Birhat.

Now he sat waiting, then nodded to himself as Birhat's hypercommed receipt tone sounded seventeen seconds later. He noted the routine transit in his log and checked the schedule. Traffic really was light tonight, and it was getting lighter as the hour got later. Shepard Center Station was only one of six mat-trans stations Earth now boasted, and it handled mostly North American traffic, though it also caught a heavier percentage of the through-traffic from Narhan to Birhat and vice versa. The receiving platforms were far busier than the outbound stations, but, then, it was midmorning in Phoenix on Birhat and only early evening in Andhurkahn on Narhan. He had a good five minutes before his next scheduled transmission, and he returned once more to his speculations.

Lawrence Jefferson sat in his private office at home. His split-image com screen linked him to another mat-trans half a planet from Bergren's—half showing the installation's control room; the other half a huge, tarpaulin-covered shape waiting on the transmission platform—and he poured more sherry into his glass as he watched both images. No one at the other end knew he was observing them, and he supposed his high-tech spyhole was a bit risky, but he had no choice, and at least the Lieutenant Governor of Earth had access to the best technology available. His link had been established using a high security fold-space com that bounced its hyper frequency on a randomized pattern twice a second. That made simply detecting it all but impossible and, coupled with the physical relays through which it also bounced, meant tapping or tracing it was impossible. Besides, anyone who happened to spot it would report it to the Minister of Planetary Security, now wouldn't they?

He chuckled at the thought and sipped sherry as he watched the purposeful activity in the control room. No one—aside from the men and women who'd built and staffed it for him—even knew it existed, and all but three of them were on duty tonight. The three absent faces had been killed in a tragic flyer accident almost two years previously, and though their deaths had been a blow, their fellows had taken up the slack without difficulty. Now his carefully chosen techs checked their equipment with absolute concentration, for the upcoming transmission—the one and only transmission the installation would ever make—had to be executed perfectly.