"Father, Father! Dost'a think I knew that not?" She shook her head.
"But I never told you," he said softly. "I cost us both so much, and I never had the courage to tell you I knew what I'd done and ask you to forgive me."
Colin paced the conference room like a caged animal, fists pounding together before him while he awaited his own cutter, and his brain raced. The evacuation Adrienne and Hatcher had planned but never been able to rehearse was going more smoothly than he would have believed possible, but all of them knew they weren't going to get everyone out. Unless they could deactivate the bomb, millions of people would die, yet how in God's name did you deactivate something you couldn't approach with as much as a scanpack, much less the weapons to—
He stopped suddenly, then slammed himself down in his chair and opened his neural feed to Dahak wide.
"Give me everything on the Mark Ninety," he said sharply.
The door chime sounded, and Horus turned from Jiltanith to answer it.
"Yes?"
"Your Grace, it's Captain Chin," an urgent voice said. "Sir, I think you'd better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down."
"That's impossible," Horus said reasonably. "Did you call Maintenance?"
"I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com." The captain drew a deep breath. "Your Grace, it didn't work either."
"What?" Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.
"It didn't work, Sir, and I've never seen anything like it. There's no obvious jamming, the coms just don't work, and it'd take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space." The captain faced Horus squarely. "Your Grace, with all due respect, we'd better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now."
"You know, it might just work," Vlad Chernikov murmured.
"Or set the thing the hell off!" Hector MacMahan objected.
"A possibility," Dahak agreed, "yet the likelihood is small, assuming the force of the explosion were sufficient. What Colin suggests is, admittedly, a brute force solution, yet it has a certain conceptual elegance."
"Let me get this straight," MacMahan said. "We can't get near the thing, but you people want to pile explosives on top of it and set them off? Are you out of your frigging minds?"
"The operative point, General," Dahak said, "is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats."
"So?"
"So we don't use Imperial technology," Colin said. "We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax."
"HE from where?" MacMahan demanded. "There isn't any on Birhat. For that matter, I doubt there's any on Terra after this long!"
"You are incorrect, General," Dahak said calmly. "Marshal Tsien has the materials we require."
"I do?" Tsien sounded surprised.
"You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago."
"I—" Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. "As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten." He looked at MacMahan. "Lawrence's Security personnel stumbled across them, Hector. We believe they were cached by the previous regime before you disarmed it on Colin's orders before the Siege. Apparently, even the individuals who hid them away had forgotten about them, and they were badly decayed—they used a tritium booster, and it had broken down. They were sent here for disposal, but we never got around to it."
"You want to use nukes?" MacMahan yelped.
"No," Dahak said calmly, "but these are Terran warheads, which rely on shaped chemical charges to initiate criticality, and each of them contains several kilograms of the compound Octol."
"And how do you get the explosives into position?" MacMahan asked more normally.
"Somebody walks in, sets them, fuses them, and walks back out again," Colin said. MacMahan raised an eyebrow, and Colin shrugged. "It should work, as long as he doesn't have any active Imperial hardware on him."
"Background radioactivity?" Hatcher asked. "If this stuff's been squirreled away inside a nuclear warhead for twenty-odd years, it's bound to have picked up some contamination."
"Not sufficient to cross a Mark Ninety's threshold," Dahak replied.
"You're certain?" Hatcher pressed, then waved a hand. "Forget that. You never make unqualified statements if you aren't certain, do you?"
"Such habits imply a certain imprecision of thought," Dahak observed, and despite the tension, Colin smiled, then sobered.
"I think we have to try it. It's a risk, but it's the smallest one I can come up with, and you may be right about a timer, Hector. We don't have time to come up with an ideal, no-risk solution."
"Agreed. How long to strip out the explosives and get them down here, Dahak?"
"I have already initiated the process, General. I estimate that they could be delivered to the Palace within twenty minutes in their present state, but I would prefer to reshape them into a proper configuration for maximum destructive effect, which will require an additional hour."
"Eighty minutes?" MacMahan rubbed his chin, then nodded. "All right, Colin, I'll vote for it."
"Gerald? Tao-ling?" Both officers nodded, and Colin glanced at Chernikov.
"I, too," the Russian said. "In fact, I would prefer to place the charge myself."
"I don't know, Vlad—" Colin began, but MacMahan interrupted crisply.
"If you were thinking about doing it yourself, you can just rethink. Whatever happens down here, you, personally, are going to be aboard Dahak and outside the lethal zone when we set it off. And if you know anybody better equipped for the job than Vlad, I don't." Colin opened his mouth, but MacMahan fixed him with a challenging eye and he closed it again.
"Good," MacMahan said.
"Suppressor's active, Brigadier," the Security tech said, never looking up from his remote panel. "Their coms are blocked."
"Elevators and switchboard?" Brigadier Jourdain asked, and another man looked up.
"Shut down. They've pulled almost all the regular Security people for crowd control, and I've cut the links to the lobby station. We're placing the charges to blow the switchboard when we leave now; it'll look just like a Sword of God hit, Sir."
"All right." Jourdain faced his handpicked traitors. "Remember, these are Imperial Marines. There's only twelve of them, but they're tough, well trained, and if they've tried their coms since the suppressor went on-line, they're going to be ready. Our coms are out, too, so stick to the plan. Don't improvise unless you have to."
His men nodded grimly.
"All right. Let's do it."
Horus stood outside Jiltanith's bedroom while she jerked on clothes, and his mind raced. It was preposterous. He was in his own HQ building in the middle of Earth's capital city, and he couldn't even place a com call! There could be only one reason for that, but how had "Mister X" pulled it off? Captain Chin was right. The only thing that could shut down fold coms without active jamming was close proximity to a warp suppressor, but a suppressor powerful enough to do the job was far too large to have been smuggled through White Tower's security... which meant someone on his own security staff must have brought it in, and if he'd been penetrated that completely—