Кристофер Банч - The Return of the Emperor

"Dam' confident, ain't you? Like a fellow who thinks like that. Name's Weenchlors." The driver stuck out a paw. The man touched thumbs with him. "You?"

"I use the name Raschid," the man said.

He leaned back against the raggedy plas seats and stared ahead toward the lightening sky—toward the spaceport.

An hour after dawn, Security let the five members of the privy council out of their shielded bunkers into the fog-hung compound. They looked at the craters where the assassins had exploded as they died, the two rows where the dead Security beings lay covered, the torn wire, and the shrapnel-ripped buildings. They could not see the hilltop, where smoke trailed up from the N'Ran's launch site, and the warship Alex's blind-launched Goblins had flambéed was a radioactive cloud, drifting and contaminating its way inland.

Four of them shared anger—how could this have happened? The other, Kyes, was trying to label what emotion he did feel. In all his years, no one had ever tried to harm him physically. Destroy his career and life—but that was in bloodless executive chambers.

All of them were outraged. Who and why?

The Kraas, hardly strangers to physical violence, were pure rage, but with something else behind it: the instinct of cunning.

"We want the bosses. This un's a conspiracy, not a buncha wildcats on a bust-out."

"I agree," Kyes put in.

"The real bosses c'n wait," the thin one said. She had understood exactly what her sister was hinting. "Till Monday, anyway. What we want are th' evil beings who planned this atrocity. Nobody else but th' Honjo."

"Clot that clottin' tacship," the fat one said. "We got us some real bodies now."

Lovett, as always, reached the bottom line. "Conspiracy. Indeed. Far superior to any violation of territorial limits by a tacship."

"I will issue the orders to the fleet," Malperin snapped, and was inside.

"Righto," one Kraa said. "First we snag the AM2. Then we kill—slow—whoever actually come a'ter us.

"Them," her sister agreed, "an' some others. We've been needin' an excuse for some housecleanin'."

It was a peculiar curiosity that social entities could take on a personality of their own—a personality that remained the same for many years, even though the beings who first established the entity's policies which had given it that personality were long dead and forgotten. To psycho-historians, such an organization was an "Iisner." The same could be applied, on occasion, to military formations. One of the most famous examples was a tiny unit called the Seventh Cavalry. The unit, from inception, was fairly poorly led and suffered enormous casualties in combat, culminating in one entire element being wiped out to the last man. Over the next hundred E-years, in three successive wars, even though they had been modernized with wheeled or in-atmosphere transport, they were still abysmally generaled and regularly decimated.

A more modern example was the Imperial 23rd Fleet, now ordered to attack the Honjo worlds and seize their AM2 caches. When the Tahn wars had begun, the 23rd had been obliterated, mostly due to the incompetence of its admiral, who had had the good grace to be killed during that obliteration.

A new fleet was formed. It fought through the rest of the war, officered indifferently at best and known throughout the Imperial Services as a good outfit for anyone curious about reincarnation.

For some completely unknown reason, the 23rd was kept on the rolls when the war ended, when far superior, more famous, and "luckier" formations were broken up and their cased colors returned to depot.

Its admiral—until recently the fleet's vice-admiral—was one Gregor. He had replaced his CO, Mason, when Mason refused to follow the privy council's orders and requested relief.

Oddly enough, both the relieved and reliever had crossed Sten's orbit. Mason had been Sten's brutal nemesis during flight school and a particularly lethal destroyer commander in the Tahn wars. He was a man without pity or bowels for his own sailors or the enemy, but he was one of the best leaders the Empire had.

Gregor, on the other hand, had begun his military career as a failure. He had been in Sten's Imperial Guards' Basic Company and had been washed out for slavishly ordering, as trainee company commander, a by-the-book attack that was obvious suicide. He had returned to the tourist world where his father was a muckety—not as much of one as Gregor bragged, but still one with clout. The old man had sighed, put another tick mark in Gregor's failure list, and put him to work in an area where he could screw nothing up. Gregor's father was an optimist. By the time the Tahn wars began, Gregor wanted out—out of the division he had bankrupted, out of the relationship he had ruined, and away.

The Empire took almost anyone in wartime. They took Gregor—and commissioned him. This time Gregor discovered the path to success: Think about your orders first. If they aren't obvious booby traps, follow them slavishly. Develop a reputation for being hard. No one, during time of war, will be that curious about things like prisoner policy or retaliation. Gregor got promoted.

He decided that Imperial Service—particularly with the political connections he had been careful to make—was his forte. Particularly with the AM2 shortage. Tourist worlds without tourists were not, to him, the pattern of the future.

He had arrived with his reputation in front of him.

Mason, a real hard man, had taken two weeks to decide that Gregor was not only an incompetent but someone destined to preside over a future version of Cone's's obliteration of the Aztecs.

He was correct. Unfortunately, Mason ran out of time.

The privy council had looked carefully for exactly the right admiral to head the attack on the Honjo system. In a way, they chose correctly. Mason would have followed orders and used just enough surgical force to convince the Honjo they were outgunned and outnumbered.

But they went too far. The Kraa twins had decided that, in addition to their other talents, they had a freshly discovered talent for military tactics. Their concept of "good tactics" was as subtle as the way they handled labor disputes in the mines.

Mason asked to be relieved. He was. Disgusted, he decided to disappear for a long vacation, helping some retired friends restore old combat spacecraft for a museum. It saved his life.

Seconds after the change in orders from the privy council, Gregor ordered the 23rd Fleet into action. His fleet still looked impressive, even though some of the weapons systems were off-line, waiting for replacement parts that would never arrive; the ships themselves were at seventy percent or less of full complement, and the command "Full emergency power" from any power-plant engineer would have been regarded as an order for "Full public sodomy."

Peace had struck hard at the Imperial Military, especially in personnel. The privy council had offered nothing but encouragement to anyone who wanted to leave the service. Many did. There was still a scattering of the dedicated in the fleet. And hard times on civvy street had provided other qualified sailors. But more than not, the 23rd's personnel were what should be expected: those who fell, dropped, or were pushed out of civilian life.

Still worse, most of them knew themselves to be marginal. Pay was sporadic, punishments arbitrary, and privileges awarded and withdrawn haphazardly. Morale was just a word in the dictionary between mildew and mud.

Ten worlds were chosen for the first attack—as an "example in frightfulness." Two were the AM2 "warehouse" worlds. The other eight were system capitals. For both targets, the weapons and their deployment were the same.