Behind his friends, Tamman worked frantically, hands flying as he fought to reconnect the neural interface. He'd never seen one quite like this, and he was working as much by guess as by knowledge. Despite his total concentration on his task, he knew the Guardsmen were grinding forward. Sean and Sandy were worth fifty unenhanced men when it came to offense, but there were only two of them. Some of the Guardsmen were slipping past them, circling around to get at the merely mortal Malagorans behind them, and despite the reach advantage of the Malagorans' bayoneted rifles, they were going down. So far none of the attackers seemed to have noticed Tamman, but it was only a matter of time before one of them—
There! He made the last connection, flipped his neural feed into the console, and demanded access. There was a moment of utter silence, and then an utterly emotionless contralto spoke.
"ID code required for implant access. Please enter code," it said, and he stared at the console in horror.
Sean gasped as another mace crunched into his left arm. The mail sleeve held and his implants overrode the pain and shock, but the blow had hurt him badly and he knew it. He staggered back, and Sandy whirled around him, graceful as a dancer as she swung her huge ax with dreadful precision. Sean's attacker went down without a scream, and he lashed out with his sword and killed another man before he could hit Sandy from behind.
"Sean! Sean, it's ID-coded!" He heard the voice, but it made no sense, and he hacked down another enemy. "Goddamn it, Sean, it's ID-coded!" Tamman bellowed, and this time he understood.
He turned his head just as Tamman hurtled past him. His friend's sword went before him, and Sean and Sandy followed. They forged forward, killing as they went, and this time there were three of them. Tamman took point, with Sean and Sandy covering his flanks, leaving a carpet of bodies in their wake, and at last, the Guardsmen began to yield. The sight of three demons—and they must be demons to wreak such carnage—coming straight for them was too much. They scattered out of their way, and Tamman reached the archway. His sword wove a deadly pattern before him, building a barricade of bodies to block the arch with the dead, and even with the weight of numbers pressing them forward, no man could break past him.
"Watch his back, Sandy!" Sean gasped, and turned back to the combat still raging in the command center. Only ten of his men still stood, but they'd formed a tight, desperate defensive knot in the center of the huge chamber, and he flung himself into the rear of their attackers.
The Guardsmen saw him coming and screamed in fear. They backed away, unwilling to face the demon, and their eyes darted to the arch by which they'd entered. Two more demons blocked it, cutting them off from their companions, but the main hatch was open, and they took to their heels, trampling one another in their desperate haste to escape with their souls.
The sounds of combat died. The tunnel was so choked with bodies no one could get to Tamman to engage him, even assuming they'd had the courage to try, and Sean leaned on his sword gasping for breath while the cold, hideous knowledge of failure filled him.
They'd come so close! Fought so hard, paid such a horrible price. Why hadn't it even occurred to him that the interface would be ID-coded?!
"Tam!" he croaked. "If the interface's coded, what about voice access?"
"Tried it," Tamman said grimly, never looking away from the tunnel while the surviving Malagoran infantry hastily reloaded and turned to cover the main hatch. "No good. They took out the regular verbal access and set up a series of stored commands when they cut out the interface. We could spend weeks trying to guess what to tell it to control the inner defenses!"
"Oh, God," Sean whispered, his face ashen. "God, what have we done? All those people—did we kill them for nothing?"
"Stop it, Sean!" Sandy was splashed from head to toe in blood, and her eyes still smoked as she rounded on him. "We don't have time for that! Think! There has to be a way in!"
"Why?" Sean demanded bitterly. "Because we want there to be one? We fucked up, Sandy. I fucked up!"
"No! There has to be—"
She froze, mouth half-open, and her eyes went huge.
"That's it," she whispered. "By all that's holy, that's it!"
"What's 'it'?" Sean demanded, and she gripped his good arm in fingers of steel.
"We can't access without the ID-code, but you can—maybe!"
"What are you talking about?"
"Sean, it's an Imperial computer. A Fourth Empire computer."
"So?" He stared at her, trying to comprehend, and she shook him violently.
"Don't you understand? It was set up by an Imperial governor. A direct representative of the Emperor!"
Comprehension wavered just beyond his grasp, and his eyes bored into hers, begging her to explain.
"You're the heir to the throne, second only to the Emperor himself in civil matters, and you've been confirmed by Mother! That means she buried the ID codes to identify you to any Imperial computer in your implants!"
"But—" Sean stared at her, and his brain lurched back into motion. "We can't be sure they were ever loaded," he argued, already turning to run towards the console. "Even if they were, it's going to take me time to work through them. Ten, fifteen minutes, minimum."
"So? You got anything else to do right now?" she demanded with graveyard humor, and he managed to smile.
"Guess not, at that," he admitted, and stopped beside the console.
"They're reforming on the stairs, Lord Sean!" one of the Malagorans called, and he turned, but Sandy shoved him back towards the console.
"You take care of the computer," she told him grimly. "We'll take care of the Guard."
"Sandy, I—" he began helplessly, and she squeezed his arm.
"I know," she said softly, then turned and ran for the hatch. "You, you, and you," she told three of the Malagorans. "Go watch the arch. Tam, over here! We've got company!"
"Here they come!" someone shouted, and Crown Prince Sean Horus MacIntyre closed his eyes and inserted his neural feed into the console.
Chapter Forty-One
Ninhursag MacMahan rubbed weary eyes and tried to feel triumphant. A planet was an enormous place to hide something as small as Tsien's super bomb, but there was little traffic to Narhan, and most of it was simple personnel movement, virtually all of which went by mat-trans. Her people had started out by checking the logs for every mat-trans transit, incoming or outgoing, with a microscope and found nothing; now a detailed search from orbit had found the same. She couldn't be absolutely positive, but it certainly appeared the bomb had never been sent to the planet.
Which, unfortunately, made Birhat the most likely target, and Birhat would be far harder to search. There were more people and vastly more traffic, and swarms of botanists, biologists, zoologists, entomologists, and tourists had fanned out across its rejuvenated surface in the last twenty years. Anyone could have smuggled the damned thing in, and Maker alone knew where they might have stashed it if they had.
Of course, if it was in one of the wilderness areas, it shouldn't be too hard to spot. Even if it was covered by a stealth field, Imperial sensors should pick it up if they looked hard enough. But if Mister X had gotten it into Phoenix, it was a whole different ball game. The capital city's mass of power sources was guaranteed to confuse her sensors. Even a block-by-block or tower-by-tower scan wouldn't find it; her people would have to cover the city literally room by room, and that was going to take weeks or even months.