Кристофер Банч - Revenge of the Damned

Senior Captain Lo Prek was aiming very carefully. He had followed the assault wave into Koldyeze, and no one had bothered asking who the hell he was.

He had found a position inside Koldyeze itself and waited. Perhaps Sten was outside the walls, or perhaps inside. But he knew that he would have his chance.

He ignored the destruction of Wichman's soldiers and the victorious Imperials. That was not a part of his war.

And at that point he was rewarded, seeing below him the man who had murdered his brother.

As his sights found Sten, his heart thundered and he aimed, knowing he would get only a single shot.

Sten and the Guards general went down as Kilgour fired a long, chattered snap-burst that blew apart the cathedral window above them.

Kilgour lowered the rifle.

"What was—" Sten managed, and Alex waved the barrel.

A body slumped forward out of the window and hung, motionless.

"Clottin' sniper," Kilgour said.

Sten picked himself up. That was it. For him, the war was over.

The body of Senior Captain Lo Prek was eventually picked up by a press gang of Tahn civilians under the direction of an Imperial sanitation expert, loaded onto a gravsled, and taken outside the city. It was cremated, along with several thousand other, equally nameless bodies.

And the war was over.

The surrender document was a small off-white sheet of parchment. There were very few words penned on the document itself, because there were no terms. The surrender was unconditional.

From the moment the document was signed and then countersigned, the Tahn would have to depend on the charity and mercy of the Eternal Emperor.

The document sat upon a small linen-covered table. Behind the table sat Ian Mahoney, the Emperor's representative and newly appointed governor-general of what had once been the Tahn Empire. The table and chair were the only furnishings in the yawning main banquet room of the Normandie .

It was in that room that the incident that had triggered the war had taken place. On that day it had been crammed with tables laden with delicacies to be enjoyed by the cream of Tahn diplomacy. It was there that an entirely different sort of document was to have been signed: a declaration of peace.

And the Emperor himself had presided. But the incident had ended in murder and the betrayal of both camps.

Now the Emperor was nowhere in sight. His deliberate absence was a calculated act to add to the Tahn's humiliation. Instead, there was Mahoney, his two chief aides standing at full attention on either side of him, and, lined up along the walls of the room, the top officers of the Emperor's fleets and armies.

On the far side of the room, partially hidden by a hastily hung curtain, was a livie crew filming the event for Empire-wide broadcast.

The main portal hissed open, and Colonel Pastour stepped in. He was the sole surviving member of the Tahn High Council. In a moment he would be just citizen Pastour. The Emperor had decreed that once the surrender had been signed, there would be no ranks or titles permitted in the lands of the Tahn.

As Pastour started the long, slow march toward the table, two other Tahn trailed behind him. One was dressed in the ragged uniform of a customs officer. The other wore that of a postal official. They were the highest Tahn officials anyone could find. Pastour himself, at the demand of the Emperor, wore civilian clothes.

Pastour came to a stop just in front of the table. The only movement in the room was Mahoney's head as it lifted. Two eyes below bushy, forbidding eyebrows bored into him. Pastour hesitated, unsure what to do next. He thought of his people watching on the public-square screens that the Imperials had erected in every major city. He knew it was his duty to abase himself for them. But how much humiliation would be required?

Mahoney slid the document toward him.

"Sign!" was all he said.

Pastour fumbled for a pen and scratched his name. Mahoney flipped the document over and signed his name beneath Pastour's. He handed it to one of his aides. Then he looked up at Pastour, his eyes filled with hate. Oddly, the hate was comforting. That Pastour understood.

"That's all," Mahoney said.

And in total silence, citizen Pastour turned and stumbled away.

Admiral Sten paced back and forth in the passageway. A commentator's voice crackled from speakers mounted on either end of the corridor, analyzing the events that were unfolding for his audience. As Sten paced, he kept glancing at the door that led to the Emperor's stateroom. And any moment, he would be called into his commander in chief's presence. Sten was one of the few people who were aware that the Eternal Emperor was aboard the Normandie .

"He said it was his damned show," Mahoney had explained, "and he planned to have a ringside seat, even if he couldn't allow himself to be there in person."

Sten understood that, just as he admired the Emperor's willpower in staying away from the ceremony itself. If it were Sten, protocol be damned, he would want to see his enemy squirm close up. But that was not what he was thinking as he paced nervously.

His head was buzzing with questions, which mostly boiled down to, What did the boss want of him next? Sten was sick of anything vaguely involving official violence. He was sick of killing. Sick of manipulations. Sick of giving orders and sick of seeing his fellow beings dying carrying them out. He was wearing his new admiral's uniform for the first time, and he was already sick of that, as well. Sten was fuzzily imagining some kind of life that had nothing to do with the military. He was not sure what he would do with it, but he felt good just wondering.

St. Clair and L'n were in the process of selling the K'ton Club. Maybe he would join them in whatever venture they had in mind. Clot, after the bundle Ida had made for him, he could bankroll streets and streets of nightclubs. Sten in show biz? Nah. Wouldn't wash. Maybe he should talk to Kilgour. Maybe they could team up and do a little poking around some frontier systems. See what the Indians were up to.

He was casually considering the prospector's life and wondering if St. Clair or Haines might fit in, when the door whooshed open and a Gurkha beckoned him inside.

The Eternal Emperor palmed the switch that cut the vidscreen off as Sten entered and came to full attention.

"Knock it off, Admiral," the Emperor said impatiently, "I've had it with ceremony. And I hope it doesn't offend your military sensibilities when I inform you that soldiering of any kind is starting to give me a pain in my royal behind."

Sten laughed, not offended at all, and slumped into a chair. The Emperor got up, fetched a bottle of stregg and two shot glasses, and filled them both to the brim.

"We've got time for one of these and then one more before I chase you out of here," the Emperor said. "Soon as those clottin' Tahn clear the Normandie , I'm taking off."

"Going home, sir?" Sten asked.

"No such luck," the Emperor said. "I've got a lot of fence mending to do. You know the drill: shake hands, kiss babies, have my picture taken with people I've allowed to think are important, thank my allies for missing every time they tried to stab me in the back, and generally pump up my popularity polls.

"Hell, I won't see Prime World inside of six months. And I'm already fed up with the whole thing. Shows what a rotten attitude I've got."

He raised his glass in toast. "Here's to rotten attitudes."

Sten chinked his glass with his boss's, and the two of them choked back the raw stregg. The Emperor refilled the glasses. One more shot to go, and Sten's time was up. And he was… free?