He bought a round for his boyos.
He sipped the shot he wanted to slug down.
He held court, awarded and withheld approval, granted or withheld favors—and told the latest joke:
"A mister finally gets the vid. He's on the list. Through priorities. His gravsled is fin'ly available.
"He goes bug. 'Bout time. Paid for it six years ago. When is he gonna get it?
"Salesclot says four years down. Whitsl-cycle. Fourth day.
"Mister asks that be in the morning or afternoon?
"Salesman says, 'Mister, that be four years away! Why do you care if it's morning or night?'
" 'Cause I got the plumber coming in the morning.'
During the laughter he blasted down the rest of the shot and waved for another.
Court business over with, his cronies drifted away to let the great man be alone with his thoughts. Chetwynd, rerunning the angles, was not pleased to have his concentration broken by two boiler-suited, drakh-reeking dock scrapers sliding into his booth. He was about to summon ancillary thugs for the slaughter when he recognized them and sprayed his mouthful of quill across the booth.
Alex smiled at him in sympathy. "Dinnae be wastin' thae lifewater, lad. Tha'll come ae time when y' regret it."
Sten was motioning for the barmaid. "Chien," he said, "you look like you need a carafe."
Chetwynd did. "I thought all of you'd be heading for the woods," he managed, proud of not having asked any of the usual boring questions or made any of the expected responses.
"Can't speak for the others," Sten said. "But I'm a city boy. Scared of the dark, out there in the bushes."
"The bully patrols check in here regular," Chetwynd said.
"Ah hae nae problem," Kilgour said. "We're sittin' wi' our respect'd friend. Kickin't thae gong around."
Chetwynd grudged defeat. He could shout and scream—and the two escapees would be taken. He would be eligible for some kind of reward. However, he thought, if the official word is that all these clots were shot attempting to escape, how would my masters explain two suddenly alive Imperials?
"Besides," Sten said, reading Chetwynd's thinking, "we'd both be up for brain scan—and both of us have been spending five minutes a day thinking about how much we love you."
Chetwynd did not believe that—he did not figure that anyone, even these obviously talented Imperial Intelligence types, could precondition themselves to provide false information to the Tahn torturers. The problem was, his belly rumbled, he did not think the Tahn believed that.
"Excellent, cheenas. There are back rooms. There are 'freshers. You two stink. But first—what are you looking for?"
Sten explained. They had slid out the prison and gone to ground with no escape route or anything other than the most superficial false ID. They wanted identification—not false. They wanted to become real citizens of Heath. Sten—correctly—assumed that as the manpower barrel drained, the Tahn were drafting the young, the out of work, the criminal, and the dissident—all of which sounded as if they could be friends of Chetwynd.
Sten and Alex planned to replace any two of Chetwynd's cronies who were up for the high jump. They then would volunteer for the Tahn military. Certainly no one would look for two Imperials in the service. Chetwynd's cohorts could then go on about their business. "Ah'm assumin't," Alex added, "thae y' noo hae problems gie'in a bein' another name."
Once in the military Sten and Alex knew they could go through training easily, volunteer for a combat assignment, and then slither through the lines, ground or spatial, to make their home run.
At that point, Chetwynd started gurgling. Not in protest, Sten realized, but in laughter.
"Cheenas, cheenas," he finally said. "Now I see why you Imperials ended up in this war in the first place."
He stood waving—and Sten's knife slid out of his arm. Two barmaids bounced up.
"My friends," Chetwynd said, "need almost everything. They want a quiet room. Baths. Two baths. Each. Food. From my private supplies. Any alk they order. And someone to rub their backs." He turned back to Sten and Alex. "Women satisfactory?"
There was no dissent—Kilgour and Sten were gaping.
"Clean ones. And another pitcher now."
Chetwynd sat back down. For the first time in days, his angles coincided, and he knew what to do next.
"You want me to do all that, in the vague hopes that you two orphans can get home? Cheenas, let me tell you. All of my people are so safe from this war, it is disgusting. Your deal is the worst I've heard of late.
"Correction. The only worse one I can think of is if I recaptured you two clots.
"Now. Shall I tell you what is going to happen?
"There are chambers below this hellhole. You will disappear into them. You will be fattened and battened, dighted and knighted until a certain date.
"When I order, you shall be moved quietly through the streets to a certain place, where I shall introduce you to a charming man named Wild. Jon Wild."
Chetwynd was most surprised when first Sten and then Alex started laughing. Jon Wild was the urbane smuggler they had carefully cultivated years ago, before the beginning of the war. Sten had promised Wild to leave his operation alone provided that Wild smuggled no war goods into the Tahn Empire and was willing to provide intelligence. When the war had started, Wild's home base of Romney had been destroyed, and Sten assumed that Wild and his people had stuck around a little too long even though the warehouses were empty and there were no baddies in the ruins.
Maybe he had spent too long being one of the emperor's cafe society toughs in Mantis Section—but Sten was privately delighted that Wild and his operation were surviving comfortably.
"We know him," Sten said. "Go ahead."
Sails somewhat sagging, Chetwynd finished. Wild would take them out of the Tahn systems and deliver them to a neutral world. They would be provided with whatever money and identity they needed to get to an Imperial world from there.
"I'll finish," Sten broke in. "Since you obviously assume that we are connected, you would like a little gold carat in your fiche, so that when the Empire lands on Heath you don't get stuck in my old cell on Koldyeze."
"Of course."
And Chetwynd never realized how much that response meant to men who had spent years hearing of defeat and death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Tanz Sullamora had constructed his fishing retreat in a time when he not only still believed in heroes but imagined the Eternal Emperor as the leader of any laughing band of handsome devils. It was built out of his desire to emulate the Emperor in every way.
The Emperor loved cooking, so Sullamora slavishly copied his recipes and presented them at elaborate banquets for his friends. Except that everything tasted like drakh—which Sullamora, having no palate, did not know, and he was too rich and powerful a businessman for his friends to tell him.
Then there was fishing. The Emperor loved fishing to such a point that he had invested over 300 years of effort and a large fortune to re-create a fishing camp on the banks of the Umpqua River in the ancient region of Oregon on the planet Earth. Sullamora built his own camp—on a vastly smaller scale—many kilometers upstream from the Emperor. He threw himself into fishing with great enthusiasm and no talent at all.
For several years he would celebrate the end of any difficult business negotiations by taking off—with great fanfare—to the wilds of Oregon to relax on the banks of his retreat. After a suitable period he would return, boasting to everyone within hearing distance about how relaxed he was and about how a being could not really know his own inner nature until he had tested himself against a canny salmon fighting to escape his hook. What he did not admit to anyone, much less himself, was that he hated everything to do with fishing. After his first trip he hired gillies to catch the salmon for him, and after another trip he even refused to eat his catch and fed the fish to his servants and aides instead.