Just back when, Sten. Stick to the subject kt hand.
What the booby trap would most likely be, he concluded, was something the Emperor wouldn't have to worry about, but something that would send any intruder airborne in very small pieces. A retina-coded lock? A pore-pattern lock? Hardly, considering the device's reliability had to be conceivably measured in centuries.
Sten went ashore, wading through the surf, onto dry land. Dry rock. Nothing but rock, of various shades of gray and black. Dark sand at the water's edge. A beach, almost half a meter wide. Sten spotted something and knelt, his mission forgotten for a brief moment. There, just in the surfwash, was a bit of green. Life. Some kind of plant, he thought. Algae? He didn't know. Go on back to the sea, he thought.
You don't know what you're starting.
He rose and trudged up toward the shelf where the station would be located. His suit's sensors said the air was breathable, although oxygen poor. But he stayed in the suit. Again, part of his caution. He didn't think that an infrared sensor would be used to set off the self-destruct mechanism—but the spacesuit would sure keep such a device from starting the Big Bang.
The ground flattened. Sten crouched behind a large boulder, and turned on the helmet display. He consulted the map projected above his faceplate.
Over there would be the door. A slant of solid rock. Sten moved as surreptitiously as the bulky suit would allow to the closest cover. He was thirty meters away. He dropped binocs down over his faceplate and minutely examined the rock. Twice he stopped, eyes starting to see things that were or weren't there.
At full magnification, his field of vision was less than a third of a meter on a side. Back and forth, back and forth his eyes moved, just like a photointerpreter scanning a mosaic, looking for the camouflaged enemy.
Ah. Perfectly round. Which rarely exists in nature.
A keyhole.
Punched in the rock about where a keyhole should be... for an Emperor-sized being.
All Sten needed was the key.
He went across the open ground like a trundling armadillo. Expecting the shatterblast. Nothing.
He knelt next to the keyhole and unsealed a pouch. After some thought, back aboard Victory, he had realized the key would be the simplest part of this operation. The Emperor couldn't wander around carrying some elaborate hex-pattem-coded special key in his return to the throne. Or, anyway, Sten wouldn't plan things that way, if he had been setting this whole paranoiac rigmarole up. So the key would have to be something that the Emperor could procure or have made at the appropriate time. Also, the key wouldn't be part of an exotic locking system that might be unobtainable- or superseded by the time he returned.
Sten took out a standard, Mercury-issue electronic lockpick. Round, eh? He found a pickup of the correct size. He fitted it to the analyzer and inserted the pickup in the hole, wanting to put his fingers in his ears against the blast, even though the pickup was made of completely neutral Imperium X. The analyzer buzzed, and told him what code would open the door. Sten detached the pickup, and plugged it into the sender. He touched the TRANSMIT button...
... and the door lifted up, Sten tumbling back out of pure fear reaction, seeing a ramp leading down into blackness. Sten waited until his heart began beating again. He took a flash from the pouch and, lying flat against the ground in the event this was the trigger, sent the beam around the inside of the passage. Nothing. He looked down. Just a ramp.
Sten set the flash's beam on full diffuse and started down, a centimeter at a time, a step taking a lifetime, moving forward as he had back on Vulcan so very, very long ago...
... and then he had it.
Or he thought he did.
All this slok about IR detectors, prox detectors, motion sensors, sensor sensors... that wasn't it. The Eternal Emperor had been an engineer. A good one. So his protection would have been conceived using one principle: Keep It Stupid, Simple.
Sten's foot came down more confidently, and he took another step. Another. Another.
The door dropped closed behind him. Sten flinched, but not much—he was increasingly sure he was right. An overhead light went on. There was a standard monitor panel against the wall. It, showed an environmental system had gone on, and was bringing the shelter up to an E-normal condition. There was a counter display on the panel. The counter showed 0. Sten started past it,-then saw, from the corner of his eye, the counter change to 1.
That was it.
There was a door in front of him. With a palmswitch. Sten touched it, and the door opened.
Living quarters inside. Small, but well-equipped.
Beyond them, a doorway.
Sten, trying not to hurry^went through it.
The room was huge. Instrument-filled. Corns and controls.
He'd done it! He was alive-.‘t and inside the relay station.
Unless something went bang in the next few seconds, Sten's dazzling perception had been correcft
What was the one thing the Emperor would do, but no one else would dare?
To show up solo. No one else would. Anyone smart enough and brave enough to get this close to the heart of power would have allies or subordinates. He didn't know where the sensor was—overhead, in the floor, or in the walls. There could be one, there could be many of them.
Christ, Sten thought with a chill. If Kilgour wasn't off on his run against Poyndex... he might have taken him along. Even Mantis killers like someone guarding their back, and Sten and Alex had been friends too long.
Count one . . count two .
And this gleaming room would have been melted-down shambles.
He looked around at the keys to the kingdom. There were four secondary boards in the room. Reporting stations, Sten theorized. Three of them showed identical readouts, the fourth was zero/zero. That would be the station Kyes or Kyes's men had discovered, and, in the discovery, destroyed.
In the center of the room was a great circular control panel. Readouts and controls.
Sten touched nothing as he examined that carefully. Most of them were unlabeled—mat wouldn't be necessary for one operator, the operator who'd designed the entire system. But there were enough marked so he could tell what the panel was intended for.
This was the secret of the universe. Sten felt a chill.
From here, the Eternal Emperor could turn the "power" on or off. Direct those great robot convoys to deliver the AM2 to the depot he directed. Increase the amount of AM2 for each depot. His decisions would be repeated at the three surviving relay stations.
And from here Ms commands would be transmitted out. Out toward another universe. Somewhere out there, somewhere beyond, was the discontinuity. All that was necessary was for Sten to plot the transmission coordinates of the beam from this station and send them up to Preston on the Victory. Simple triangulation with the beam from the mansion would locate the discontinuity.
"All right," Sten whispered, not aware that he spoke aloud. "All right, you bastard. It's all over now."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE ETERNAL EMPEROR storhied down the corridor to his office. The long, broad hallway bristled with guards. On one side were the Internal Security thugs. On the other, a grizzled detachment of veteran Imperial Guardsmen.