Other arrivals trickled in, gray, quiet beings without faces. They were ex-Mercury Corps operatives, technicians, recruited by Mahoney. They were intended to secure the security.
Mahoney assumed that when the world had been screened by the privy council, part of that had included bugging everything. He was correct. But it was a simple matter for his own techs to find the bugs and key them. None were destroyed—although Mahoney thought it appropriate that some of them were reported to the proper authorities. The proper authorities expressed dismay and disconnected those bugs.
The rest were left in place and fed false information. Sometimes they were given blank time, as if nothing were happening in that particular chamber. Others were fed meetings that had been prescripted and then voice-synthesized, so that General X would be discussing with his staff whether or not transports would be available to move his units, and how much of their basic equipment load could be carried; whereas in fact General X was sitting with Ian Mahoney, talking about how many of his troops could be depended upon, once The Day was announced, to move out and seize barracks held by one of the Kraa twins' private thuggeries, and how many would have to be sent on leave or confined to barracks.
There were a few counterintelligence agents in attendance. They were quickly ID'd and beeped, their movements tracked constantly. Only one agent found anything suspicious, and he was skillfully terminated before he could either report or get off world.
Mahoney was disappointed in his enemies—he had seen and run better CI when he was an assistant patrol leader in the Imperial Youth Corps.
Sten and Alex held well in the background. Both of them were quite hot—especially Sten.
All of the conspirators were told when the operation would be mounted. They were further instructed to have their troops on standby on that date, with those orders to be issued as unobtrusively as possible.
There were a few who wanted more. They had faith in Mahoney, to be sure, but they were beings who took very little just on faith. For them, Sten would be trotted onstage. To some, he was little more than a hero of the early stages of the Tahn wars. But the fact that an admiral would be willing to lead, in person, the raid on Earth seemed to satisfy them.
The most suspicious, generally, were those high-rankers with some intelligence background or training. For that reason, most of them had heard of Sten or known him—if not by fiche, then by reputation. In their eyes, he was a thoroughly acceptable head of the murder squad.
Near the end of the gaming Sten collected Mahoney and took him to an ultraclean room. Quite baldly he asked the fleet marshal if he really believed that all of these beings would swing into motion as ordered when ordered.
"Of course not," Mahoney snapped. "As your pet thug might say, I'm mad but I'm hardly daft.
"Assuming you carry out your end... prog: seventy-five percent follow their orders and we'll not only have the murderers dead, but the transition of power will be painless.
"Fifty percent... it'll be a little bloody. But I still think it'll come off. That's assuming those who get the collywobbles don't try to stop us.
"Less than that...
"Less than that, lad, and you'd best have the luck of the heavens and be in excellent running condition.
"Now, Admiral. You're in motion. Collect your assistants and start putting them through whatever rehearsals you need."
As he and Alex slipped offworld, Sten ran his own prognostication. He had even less faith than Mahoney that the conspiracy, in its entirety, would succeed. There were too many people involved, too much time had passed, and Sten had damn-all confidence in any conspiracy when the conspirators had a vested interest—no matter how loudly denied—in the state. Generals and admirals made lousy dissidents.
But as far as his and Alex's end... the murder in a ditch?
Just less, he calculated, than fifty-fifty.
Hell, for a Mantis operative, that was a sure thing. So very well. Eliminate the privy council, and what would happen, would happen. That was for others to decide—after the bodies stopped bouncing.
It was a pity Sten had never met Brigadier Mavis Sims—and never would.
CHAPTER TEN
Sten was in a thoroughly crappy mood. He shut down play function and removed the helmet. Repressing the urge to punt it across the room, he glowered out at the rain.
Clottin' poor mission briefing, he thought. Suicide run for sure. Sten was in a rotten mood—the intelligence data he had fed into the interactive livie machine gave him no more or less details than many, many missions he had already run and survived.
His mood may have been caused by the rain. Here in this forested province called Oregon, the sun seemed proscribed. The degrees of weather ranged from overcast threatening rain through drizzle to downpour to here comes another storm. He sort of wanted a drink. But he and the other team members were now temperance clots until they extracted.
Kilgour broke Sten's mood. Pushing the door to their rented A-frame—(a building Sten suspected had been made from real wood)—he said cheerily, "Oop an' away, boss. Y're gettin' fat an' sloppy sittin' here. Time f'r th' old pant-an-wheeze."
Sten pulled on running shoes, grabbed a rainproof, and they went out into the streets of Coos Bay. The village itself might have been the root of Sten's depression. Old—thousand-year-type old—ruins were one thing. But buildings only a couple of hundred years gone were different. People had lived there before it became a hamlet of rotting, collapsing buildings and shattered streets.
The city, Sten had been told, had once had nearly twenty-thousand inhabitants—farmers, loggers, sea-shippers. That must have been long ago. Now there were less than a thousand. A few fished, some were artists who made their credits off-Earth; there were a few tribal groups existing on their own, internal economy; and other residents catered to the sprinkling of tourists who arrived intent on the area's big game, a fish they called the salmon. They raved about its fighting qualities and wariness.
At first Sten thought they were talking about some woodsy predator before he realized. He found the salmon tasty, just as he did the area's crabs, oysters, bass, and a very ugly fish they called a sturgeon. Fishing could be worthwhile, he thought. Short-fuse an explosive charge, toss it in a pool, and you had dinner for a platoon. But these people used line as thin as a climbing thread, hand-constructed bits of plas supposed to resemble insects, and a casting rod. Often they merely had themselves photographed with their catch and then released it. Very odd.
"Which way today, boss?"
"Doesn't matter. Ruins, rocks, and trees in any direction."
Kilgour waved a direction arbitrarily and they ground into motion—starting up a hill, of course.
Run a klick, walk a half kilometer, run ten kilometers. A half hour of exercises, then run back. Standard Imperial dictates for combat troops.
Sten thought further on this depressed province of Oregon. Historically, he had read, it had always been an area of future dreams and present depression. But its current state of decline had three causes: the inhuman—to Sten, at least—climate; the constant drain offworld of its young people who couldn't find work at home; and finally The Eternal Emperor.
That last factor was only three hundred years old. About twenty-five kilometers north of Coos Bay was the mouth of the Umpqua River. The Emperor had decided he wanted to go salmon fishing. He put political influence to bear on the province's politicos. They granted him the river in perpetuity—from headwaters to where it rushed into the ocean. That had cost several fortunes in bribes and promises.