“Can we not send at least one of our number through with our freight?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. We’ll be right at the limits of our available power, and Regs prohibit me from sending passengers under those conditions.”
“Is there risk to our freight?” The question was sharp for a Narhani.
“No, sir,” Bergren soothed. “Not if it’s not alive. The regulations are so specific because a power fluctuation that won’t harm inanimate objects can cause serious neural damage in living passengers. It’s just a precaution.”
“I see.” The spokesman looked back at his companions for a moment, then twitched his crest in the Narhani equivalent of a shrug. “We would prefer to wait until your power systems have been repaired,” he told Bergren, “but our schedule is very tight. Can you assure us our freight will arrive undamaged?”
“Yes, sir,” Bergren said confidently.
“Very well,” the Narhani sighed. He spoke to his companions in their own language again, and all five of them stepped off the platform and moved back behind the safety line.
“Thank you, sir,” Bergren said, and his fold-com implant sent a brief, prerecorded burst transmission to a waiting relay as he began to prep for transmission.
“Alert signal,” a woman said quietly in the control room on Jefferson’s screen. The two men at the main console nodded acknowledgment without ever opening their eyes, and one of them activated the stealthed sensor arrays watching Shepard Center from orbit.
“Good signal,” his companion announced in the toneless voice of a man concentrating on his neural feed. “We’ve got their field strength. Coming up nicely now.”
“Synchronizer on-line,” the third tech said. “Power up and nominal. Switching to auto sequence.”
Carl Bergren watched his readouts through his feeds. This was the tricky part that was going to earn him that big stack of credits. The settings had to be almost right, and he straightened his mouth as he felt it trying to curl in a grin of tension. The power levels were already off the optimum curve, thanks to the failure of the gamma bank, and he very carefully cut back the charge on the delta bank. Not by much. Only by a tiny, virtually undetectable fraction. But it would be enough—if whoever was in charge of the other part of the operation got his numbers right—and he sent the alert signal to Birhat and waited for the response.
Lawrence Jefferson leaned towards his com, clutching his wineglass, and his heart pounded. This was the moment, he thought. The instant towards which he’d worked so long.
“Their field’s building now,” the sensor tech murmured. “Looking good … looking good … stand by … stand by … coming up to peak … now!”
Carl Bergren sent the release code, and the capacitors screamed. The shrouded object on the platform vanished as the mat-trans sent a mighty pulse of power into hyper-space, and he held his breath. The transmission he’d sent out was almost precisely four millionths of a percent too weak to reach Birhat. It would waste its power twenty light-minutes short of the funnel waiting to catch it for the reception units, but no one would ever know if—
The control room on Lawrence Jefferson’s com screen was silent, its personnel frozen. Not even a mat-trans was truly instantaneous over an eight-hundred-light-year range, and Jefferson held his breath while he waited.
A soft tone beeped, and Carl Bergren let out a whooshing breath as the Birhat mat-trans operator acknowledged receipt. He’d done it! The person at the other end of the hypercom link didn’t realize someone else had invaded the system. He thought he’d just received Bergren’s transmission!
The lieutenant suppressed an urge to wipe his forehead. Deep inside, he hadn’t really believed his employer could pull it off, and it was hard to keep his elation out of his voice as he activated his mike.
“Birhat has confirmed reception, sir,” he told the Narhani spokesman. “If you’d step onto the platform, I can send you through now, as well.”
“We did it!” someone shouted gleefully. “They accepted the transmission!”
The staff of Jefferson’s illicit mat-trans whistled and clapped, and the Lieutenant Governor checked the computer tied into his com. Good. The exact readouts of the transmission, which just happened to carry the same identifier code as Lieutenant Bergren’s system, had been properly stored. He’d have to wait until the regular Shepard Center data collection upload late next week to exchange them for Bergren’s actual log of the transmission, but that part of the pipeline had already been tested and proved secure. It was inconvenient, since he would have preferred to make the switch sooner, yet there was nothing he could do about it. The mass readings of the transit would prove the statue Birhat had just received had not, in fact, been the solid block of marble Bergren had just destroyed, and for his Reichstag fire to work, it was vital that Battle Fleet itself discover that fact when the time came.
He smiled at the thought, then looked back at his link to the hidden control room and its celebrating personnel. Two of them had cracked bottles of champagne, and he watched them pouring their glasses full while they chattered and laughed with the release of long-held tension. They’d worked hard for this moment—and, of course, for the huge pile of credits they’d been promised—and the Lieutenant Governor leaned back in his chair with a sigh of matching relief. They deserved their moment of triumph, and he let them celebrate it for another few minutes, then pressed a button.
Half a world away, the explosive charges three long-dead technicians had installed at his orders detonated. One of the control room personnel had time for a single scream of terror before the plunging roof of the subterranean installation turned him and all his fellows into mangled gruel.
Carl Bergren dutifully logged a full report on the capacitor bank failure and completed his shift without further incident. He turned over to his relief at shift change and signed out through the security checkpoints, then walked slowly to his parked flyer while he pondered the entire operation. Whoever had arranged it, he thought, had to have incredible reach and command equally incredible resources. He’d had to gain access to the routing schedules weeks in advance to be sure Bergren would be on duty when the transmission came through. Then he’d had to get someone in to sabotage the capacitors, and he’d had to make sure the sabotage was untraceable. And he’d had to have the resources to build his own mat-trans and find a way to monitor the Shepard Center system precisely enough to time his own transmission perfectly.
It was big, Bergren told himself as he unlocked his flyer, climbed in, and settled into the flight couch. It was really big, and there couldn’t be more than a dozen people—probably less—who could have put it all together. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which of those dozen or so it had really been, and little Carl Bergren would live high on the hog for the rest of his natural life.
He smiled and activated his flyer’s drive, and the resultant explosion blew two entire levels of the parking garage and thirty-six innocent bystanders into very tiny pieces. Forty minutes later, an anonymous spokesman for the Sword of the Lord claimed responsibility for the blast.
Chapter Thirty-Five