"Why?" he asked, his face and tone as blank as it would have been to any Tahn guard.
"The agents I have on Heath are button counters. Maybe. The clotting nets I have are low-level and, I suspect, doubled by the Tahn. That's one problem. Your tubby cohort can shake them out, if he's willing to go back.
"I need someone in place on Heath as my agent. We've reached, like the man said, if not the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning. I'm looking for somebody who can be a spy—and who can sit and talk like he's a diplomat.
"I am not praising you, by the by. You're at least a century too young and several assignments too gory to be my dream square peg. Mahoney, back when you first met him on Vulcan—don't jump, I did a little refresher course—would be ideal. But he's a little long in the tooth and too clottin' good as a fleet marshal to waste on Heath.
"No offense.
"And I've wasted enough time jacking my jaws while you think about it. Decision time."
Sten had already made it. Not only could he probably do more good on Heath than as a bucko destroyer leader, but there were certain things there he wanted to deal with personally. Such as the prisoners in Koldyeze.
"Thank you, Admiral," the Emperor said without waiting for a verbalization. "My intelligence types will brief you and set up the insertion plan."
Sten got up. "I think I'd rather use my own way to get in."
"Your option. Like I said, the only boss you've got this time is me. All orders that you get will be mine. How you carry them out—and even if you do or not—is your option. You're the man in place. Oh, yeah, before I forget. Mahoney had something that might be of help. He said there was a POW at Koldyeze. I think his name was Sorensen. Is that right?"
Sten nodded, remembering the big, smiling face of the farmbeing. He and Alex had debated for hours whether Sorensen was a Mantis battle computer.
"Fine," the Emperor said. "Mahoney said to tell you that Sorensen's code word is 'Saider.' Whatever that's worth."
If the drakh came down at Koldyeze, it would be worth a lot. Sten smiled to himself, but the Emperor was not through yet.
"One favor?"
Sten waited.
"If you decide to overthrow the clottin' government, don't put some anthropoid who likes stregg and can't speak the same language I do in. Or if you do, let me know first. 'Kay?"
Sten found himself saluting a rapidly closing hatchway.
All he had to do was get the detailed briefing, listen to Kilgour tell him why it was a good idea to go back to Heath, and then track down Wild and let him know the time for fence-sitting neutral smugglers was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Volmer, publishing baron and member of the Emperor's privy council, was very proud of his complex mind.
He could sit, completely invisible, at the far end of a roaring Barbary hell, one of the rowdiest of the rowdy dock bars in Prime World's port city of Soward, and do some serious thinking, undisturbed by the noise and unnoticed by the occupants.
On one level, he was contemplating what the evening might provide. Volmer had never heard the expression "polymorphously perverse" and would have been grandly irked if he had heard it applied—after, of course, he had looked up the meaning of "polymorphous."
But that was one level of Volmer. Rich beyond comprehension and able to pay for safe, clean, comfortable sex of whatever category, he found it more interesting to look for it in the gutter. Volmer found it fully as satisfying to end up jackrolled in a gutter, Murphied, or badgered as it was to wake up next to an incredibly beautiful and insatiable sex object. That was his secret life, which only the top two percent of his reporters knew and laughed about. He had once heard a rumor that the Eternal Emperor did the same—and canned six journalists for being unable to verify it. But regardless, at least once a month Volmer gave his bodyguards and staff two days off and slipped away, in the appropriate disguise, through a hidden exit of his mansion to slink, disguised as "one of the people," onto the wild side.
He thought that he was able to blend seamlessly into the sexual underworld and that he was accepted as nothing more than a mysterious man. Actually, he had been accepted as a sicko mark. But just recently another rumor had cropped up—a rumor that would be acted upon that very night.
The second layer of Volmer's mind was pondering the recent meeting on Earth with Sullamora and the others. He had reacted, he thought, perhaps a little too quickly. Perhaps Sullamora and the others had considered their future problems more carefully than he had. Perhaps he should have been silent, or perhaps expressed more interest—if, he suddenly realized, he had even heard them correctly. Perhaps he had jumped to some incorrect conclusions. Volmer rewarded himself for considering all possibilities, even one that might not be the most ego-rewarding.
That kind of thinking, he added, was what had made him as successful and respected a media baron as he was.
He never knew that his staff referred to him as "Old Ademony-Kademony," a term lost in journalism's prehistory meaning a waffler who can never make up his mind on anything.
But if he was correct in his understanding, he went on, would he be better off informing the Emperor of his suspicions? Well, not suspicions. Actually there was not that much to report to the Emperor. Suppose he had misunderstood what Sullamora and the others were saying. Would he not appear as a prize ass, some kind of hysteroid, if he did trouble his Emperor with what had gone on?
Perhaps, he concluded, he should do nothing. Perhaps he should reapproach Tanz and let the situation develop.
Yes. That was the way to behave.
Satisfied that once again he had reached the decision to juggle, he turned his primary focus to the pleasures of the evening.
He listened with interest to the handsome young man who appeared at the bar beside him, discussing some dizzying possibilities as to sex partners, not the least of which was the young man himself. Volmer thought that a possibility—but he was more intrigued with what the young man told him about certain most unusual events that were occurring among the staff of a certain hospital, centering on that hospital's cold room.
The handsome young man was available, indeed. But not as a whore. The young man's services were available, in fact, at a much higher price, specifically to take care of annoyances.
The rumor that had spread recently about the sicko mark was that he was more than what he appeared. He was, in fact, a deep-cover copper. Why else had some of Soward's more eminent sex hustlers been arrested, charged, and convicted sans deal in the last month?
The rumor—no one knew where it came from—made perfect sense.
And for that reason it was logical for the underworld bosses, each of whom thought he was much more lethal and in charge than he in fact was, to put out an open contract on the mark. The handsome young man proposed to fill that contract.
Two hours later, as Volmer listened drunkenly and fascinatedly to the young man's descriptions of necro-pleasures, he was skillfully sandbagged below his left ear, his pockets ransacked, his jewels and half boots stolen; then the unconscious body was tipped over the railing to thud soddenly down four levels to the concrete below.
When the body was discovered and reported two days later, Tanz Sullamora expressed appropriate shock. He announced that he would, out of pocket, have his shipping security patrols widen their assignments beyond the yards themselves. That terrible incident had no doubt occurred because Volmer, a respected hands-on newsperson, was conducting his own investigation of the corruption sapping the war effort. Sullamora even posted a reward for the apprehension of the lethal muggers who had killed his friend.