"I tell thee I am going." Her voice was chipped ice, but he shook his head, and her tone turned colder still. "Gainsay me in this at thy peril, Father!"
"Not me, 'Tanni," he said softly. "Colin. He's ordered me to keep you here and keep you safe."
Her eyes locked with his, and her fear for her husband struck him like a lash. But he refused to look away, and a dark, terrible sorrow, like a premonition of yet more loss, twisted her face.
"Father, please," she whispered, and he closed his eyes, unable to face her pain, and shook his head once more.
"I'm sorry, 'Tanni. It was Colin's decision, and he's right."
"Dahak is correct," Vlad Chernikov said. "We dare not send any additional scanners into the gallery, but I have deployed passive systems from beyond a Mark Ninety's activation threshold and carried out a purely optical scan using the Palace security systems. While I can find no outward visual evidence, our passive systems have detected active emissions from a broad-spectrum sensor array which are entirely consistent with a Mark Ninety's. I fear that any remote—or, for that matter, any human with Imperial equipment—entering the gallery will cause it to detonate."
"God." Colin closed his eyes, propped his elbows on the conference table, and leaned his face into his palms.
"The evacuation will begin in twenty-five minutes," Adrienne Robbins' holo image said. "I'll coordinate embarkation from the Academy; Gerald will handle ship-to-ship movement from Mother, but we don't have enough ships in-system to handle the entire population."
"Some additional transport'll begin arriving in about ninety-three hours," Hatcher's image said. "Mother sent out an all-ships signal as soon as I got the word. We'll have another six planetoids within a hundred and fifty hours; anything after that'll take at least ten days to get here."
"How many can we get aboard the available ships?" Colin asked tautly.
"Not enough," Hatcher said grimly. "Dahak?"
"Assuming Dahak is used as well, and that we move as many as possible to existing deep-space life support in-system but beyond lethal radius of the weapon, we will be able to lift approximately eighty-nine percent of the Birhat population from the planet," the computer responded. "More than that will be beyond our resources."
"Mat-trans?" Colin said.
"On our list," Adrienne replied, "but the system's too big an energy hog to move people quickly, Colin. It's going to take at least three weeks to move eleven percent of Birhat's population through the facility."
"We don't have three weeks!"
"Colin, all we can do is all we can do." Gerald Hatcher didn't look any happier than Colin, but his voice was crisp.
"We've got to take that bomb out," Colin muttered. "Damn it, there has to be a way!"
"Unfortunately," Dahak said, "we cannot disarm it. That means we can only attempt to destroy it, which will require a weapon sufficient to guarantee its instant and complete disablement from outside the Mark Ninety's perimeter, and the device is located in the most heavily protected structure on Birhat. While we possess many weapons which could assure its destruction, the Palace's structural strength is such that any weapon of sufficient power would effectively destroy Phoenix, as well. In short, we cannot ourselves 'take out' the device without obliterating the Imperium's capital, and all in it."
"Horus! What the hell is going on?" Lawrence Jefferson had commed from Van Gelder Center, Planetary Security's central facility, not his White Tower office, and like many of the people swarming about behind him, he looked as if he'd dressed in the dark in a hurry. Horus wondered how he'd gotten to Van Gelder so quickly, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"Big trouble, Lawrence," he replied. "Get as many of your people as you can to the mat-trans facility. We're going to have thousands of people coming through from Birhat, starting in about—" he checked his chrono "—twelve minutes."
"Thousands of people?" Jefferson shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter, and Horus bared his teeth.
"Some lunatic's put a bomb under the Palace, and the damned thing's got an active antitampering system," he said, and watched Lawrence Jefferson go bone-white. The Lieutenant Governor said absolutely nothing for a moment, then shook himself.
"A bomb? What sort of bomb? It sounds like you're evacuating the entire planet!"
"We are," Horus said grimly. "This thing's probably powerful enough to take out all of Birhat—and Mother."
"With a single bomb? You're joking!"
"I wish I were. We've been looking for the damned thing for months. Well, now we've found it."
"What about the Emperor?" Jefferson demanded.
"He's hanging in until the last minute, the damned young fool! Says he won't leave until he can get everyone else out."
"And Jiltanith?" Jefferson asked quickly, and Horus smiled more naturally.
"Thanks for asking, but she's safe. She's still in White Tower, and she's staying here, by the Maker, if I have to chain her to the wall!"
Jefferson closed his eyes for a moment, mind racing, then nodded sharply.
"All right, Horus, I'm on it."
"Good man! I'll be down to give you a hand as quick as I can."
"Don't!" Horus raised an eyebrow at the Lieutenant Governor's quick, sharp reply, and Jefferson shook his head angrily. "Sorry. Didn't mean to bark at you. It's just that you can't do anything down here that I can't do just as well, and from your tone of voice, Her Majesty isn't too happy at staying here on Earth."
"That," Horus agreed, "is putting it mildly."
"Well, in that case you'd better stay there and keep an eye on her. God knows no one else on this planet has the seniority—or the balls!—to tell her no if she orders them out of her way. Besides, it's going to be a madhouse down here when refugees start coming through. I'll feel better with both of you tucked away someplace nice and safe, where whoever's behind this can't get at you in the confusion."
"I—" Horus started to reply, then stopped himself and nodded unwillingly. "You may be being paranoid, but you may also be right. I can't see why anyone would want me dead if they can't get 'Tanni and—please the Maker—Colin, but whoever's behind this has to be a lunatic."
"Exactly." Jefferson gave him a grim smile. "And if he's a lunatic, who knows what he may do if he thinks the wheels are coming off?"
Chapter Forty-Three
Lawrence Jefferson stared at the blank com screen. How? How had they found it? Had he come this far, worked this hard, to fail at the last minute?!
A fisted hand pounded his knee under cover of his borrowed desk, and a chill stabbed him as something else Horus had said struck home. If they'd been hunting the bomb "for months," they knew far more than he'd imagined. Ninhursag! It had to be Ninhursag, and that gave ONI's increased activities on Earth a suddenly sinister cast. Obviously they hadn't ID'ed him, but if they'd deduced the bomb's existence, what else had they picked up along the way?
He drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. All right. They knew the bomb was there and active, but if they'd known more, Horus would have said so. Which meant they didn't know it would detonate twelve hours after the Mark Ninety activated. Would they assume the fact that it hadn't instantly detonated meant it wouldn't unless they triggered it somehow?
He bit his lip. The bomb had originally been timed to detonate during the next meeting of the Assembly of Nobles, when Horus would be on Birhat with Colin, Jiltanith, and both the Imperium's senior military commanders. That would have gotten all five of them at once, but now they were spread out in two different star systems and they knew someone was after them, which meant the chance of recreating that opportunity was unlikely ever to come again. Yet Horus said Colin was going to "hang in" to the last possible minute, and Hatcher and Tsien must be up to their necks in the evacuation operation. Even if they guessed time was short, their efforts to save Birhat's population were almost certain to keep the two officers within the danger zone until too late. But by the same token, both of them would be doing everything they could to convince Colin to leave, and if he gave in, he'd evacuate to Dahak. Any other ship would be unthinkable, and if Colin MacIntyre got away from Birhat aboard Dahak, very few things in the universe—and certainly nothing Lawrence Jefferson had—could get to him.