Кристофер Банч - Empire's End

"Okay. What's happening this time?"

"It's Sten, sir."

"I figured that. What about him?"

Poyndex leaned forward across the desk. The man was honestly bewildered. "Sir. My people have been over every connection you gave us a hundred times. And we've come up with many more. But, it's no dice, sir. No one, but no one, knows him, sir. Except in passing. We've brainscanned people. Had them worked over by experts. But as near as I can tell… Sten doesn't have a friend in the Empire."

The Emperor wooshed , then took another heavy slug of his drink. Poyndex noted that his once-clear features were getting puffy and there was a small red web of a blemish beside his nose.

"That doesn't scan," the Emperor said. "Even the lowest being in the Empire has at least one friend. Even the misguided attract their own. Or, I should say, especially the misguided."

Poyndex turned his hands palms up. "It's true, just the same, sir . The real trouble is, with all the records on Sten and Kilgour wiped… we don't have much to go on."

"Except my memory."

"Which is excellent, sir. The few breaks we've had have all come from you."

The Emperor stared at Poyndex, reading his face. No. The man wasn't catering to his ego. He meant it. The Emperor wondered for a moment if maybe he was beginning to lean on Poyndex more than was healthy.

Beings could get very dangerous ideas… if one depended on them too much. Only Poyndex, for example, knew of the bomb that had once been planted in his gut. A bomb wired to that… that thing .

That great ship, out there beyond the Alva Sector, through the discontinuity.

The great ship that controlled him.

The Emperor's mind shuddered at the thought of the ship with the white room and the disembodied voice that spoke to him.

He shivered. Took another drink. Then he remembered. Correction: former controller. It was Poyndex who'd set up the special surgical team that had removed the bomb from his body and cut his link with the controller.

Another drink. Yesss. Much better now. He was the last Eternal Emperor. Until the Empire's end… Which would be?

Never.

He pulled himself together. "There's only one thing to be done, then," he said. "Somehow, I have to make more time. Get an interrogation team on standby. Every spare second I have, I'll devote to my memories of Sten. Any detail the team digs up from me, you can get cracking on immediately."

Poyndex hesitated. "Are you sure that's wise, sir?"

The Emperor frowned. "I know it's not wise. I've already fallen into the jimmycarter, for crying out loud. Micromanaging every detail in my empire. Next thing you know, I'll be going over the damned newyear's greeting list with Bleick. But… dammit… what choice do I have?"

"Sten is just one being, Your Majesty," Poyndex said. "Let us deal with him."

"I can't take that chance. Sten is the symbol of everything that's gone wrong. Citizens have no faith. They won't follow orders. They question my every pronouncement. When I'm the only one who really cares about them."

"Who else can take the long view? I mean the really long view. I see things not in years, but generations."

The Emperor fell silent a moment. "No. This is something I have to do," he finally said. "Damn his eyes!" And the Eternal Emperor drained the glass.

HOME.

It was strewn across a thousand thousand kilometers of space, a slowly whirling sargasso of industrial junk.

Vulcan.

Sten stared at the ruins through his suit's faceplate. The sound of his breathing seemed loud.

This was the hellworld where Sten had been born, an artificial factory planet built and run as a violent, dangerous industrial plant by The Company. His parents, Migrant/Unskilled laborers, and his brothers and sisters had died here, killed by an executive's callous decision about secrecy.

The boy that was Sten exploded into futile rebellion. He was caught, and sentenced to Exotic Section, an experimental area where the workers were assured of a slow, painful death. But Sten survived. Survived, learned to fight, and—his fingers touched the deathneedle sheathed in his arm—"built" his knife from alien crystal.

He had escaped Exotic Section, and become a Delinq, living in the secret ducts and deserted storehouses of the planet, trying to stay one theft ahead of The Company's Sociopatrolmen and brainburn. He had met Bet here, his first real love. And here he had been saved from death by Ian Mahoney, coldcocked after a blown raid and drafted into the Imperial Guard.

Mahoney had again "volunteered" him—this time from infantry assault training into Mahoney's own covert force: Mantis—where he learned the dark alleys of intelligence and the darker skills of secret violence. How to kill any being without leaving a mark. Or, more importantly, how to seduce or corrupt them into your service, without them ever realizing they'd been used.

And then Mahoney had sent him back to Vulcan with Kilgour and the rest of his Mantis Team. Mission: destroy the man who killed Sten's family.

His first great success. In the course of that destruction, Sten, three ETs and three humans, including Ida the Gypsy, had created and led a planetwide revolution.

That minirising brought in the Imperial Guard, and Sten's team came out, Sten himself on a life-support system.

He had never found out what happened afterward to Vulcan. And he had never wanted to know. He assumed that new management had come in Vulcan as an only slightly less lethal factory.

Evidently not, he thought, looking at the shambles in front of him. Or, anyway, not for very long. Even if it was needed for defense during the Tahn war, the privy-council era would have made Vulcan unprofitable—AM 2had simply become too rare and expensive to waste running a heavy-industry vacuum-based plant.

Vulcan had been abandoned, looted, and gutted. At its height it resembled a junkyard anyway—factories, quarters, and warehouses had been built, used, and discarded without being wrecked out.

But now it looked as if the gods of Chaos had looked on man's work, found it amateurish, and decided to improve matters.

Somewhere in this scatter would be—or so Sten hoped—whatever secret Mahoney had guided him toward.

At first, when Sten considered Mahoney's cryptic shout, he had thought of Smallbridge—the world Sten had bought some years earlier that was the only home he had ever known, besides Imperial Service.

Improbable. If Mahoney meant "home" to be something useful to Sten—best theory: a weapon against the Emperor—he would not have stashed it in a place known to Sten's friends and enemies. Plus, to the best of Sten's knowledge, Mahoney had been on Smallbridge exactly once, and that was to warn him the privy council's goon squad was on its way. Not exactly time enough to build a hidey-hole.

No—not Smallbridge. It was far too obvious—even considering a purloined-letter device—for an Irisher as subtle as Mahoney.

And so Sten had forced himself to look up the interstellar coordinates to Vulcan and issue the orders. Even if nothing is here, he thought, this is an adequate temporary hideout. Destroying Thoresen had been a nonrecord Highest Authority mission, which meant Vulcan's importance and its relation to the Grand Traitor wouldn't show up, even on Sten's fairly accurate, highly classified Mantis file. Sten, experienced soldier that he was, was operating on the assumption that Mahoney's trick program hadn't worked and the Empire knew everything.

Of course, there's yet another possibility, his mind went on, spinning further into the double- triple- quadruple-think that eventually drives all counterintelligence types into the gaga ward. If the Emperor's got a real fine memory, and has put together his own private termination file, then he's just liable to remember the orders to destroy that mysterious Bravo Project on Sten's home world.