He had then rented himself an alky. He had bought the man two bottles of cheap plonk and said there would be two more if the man drank them in the park.
Then Kilgour had crawled under the gravsled and waited.
An hour before the meet, a handful of very battered vehicles had settled around the square. They lacked anodizing or washing but were equipped with very shiny McLean generators.
Oh, well.
Kilgour wanted to stick around until the bureaucrat showed up, then see about seven zillion Tahn Counterintelligence thugs swoop on that poor alky, passed out on his bench, and attempt to grill him.
But the last act was usually anticlimactic. Kilgour slid—literally—out from under the gravsled and then low-crawled around the corner away from the scene.
Nice try, lads. But nae Oscar.
Kilgour wondered who clottin' Oscar was, anyway, then headed back to the K'ton Klub and degreasing.
It took three tries before Senior Captain (Intelligence) Lo Prek was received by Lord Wichman.
The first attempt had been rejected after he had scared holy clot out of Wichman. Wichman's adjutant—so he had dubbed his executive secretary—had informed his boss that a certain captain in Intelligence wished to see the lord.
Wichman, even though honest to the point of caricature, had still turned pale. Intelligence officers, so it was said, could find guilt in their mothers if so required—and make the bones confess on vid.
The captain did not, however, have an official sanction.
His request was ignored.
When the second request was made, Wichman ordered his secretary to check into the background of the officer.
He scanned the fiche with interest, admiring Lo Prek's commendations and obvious ability. But he still saw no reason why he should waste his valuable time.
The third time Lo Prek was lucky. Wichman was bored and not interested in viewing the latest industrial projections—down—or in why things would improve shortly.
Lo Prek might have been a monomaniac, but he also knew how to present his case.
Wichman listened in increasing fascination.
The captain was determined that one man, formerly a POW in Pastour's vacation prison, was on the loose on Heath. He had already committed many depredations before being captured. Depredations, hell. Defeats.
Perhaps. A bit grandiose, but perhaps...
Now that individual—Sten—was loose and underground in Heath's society. He would strike again. Already, Lo Prek said, there were instances of sabotage, espionage, and generally antiwar sentiments abroad.
Wichman scanned the microfiche that Lo Prek had presented and marveled. This single Tahn officer, technically over leave from his assigned unit, had managed to collect this amount of data without any resources except what he could borrow.
Fascinating.
Wichman reached a decision. He thought Lo Prek to be a loon. The Imperial, whatever his name was, either had never existed or had gotten drowned in a ditch somewhere. But it could be very useful to have such a dedicated person around collecting evidence of anything that had gone wrong—what he had once heard the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Emperor call a stonebucket.
Wichman looked up from the screen and smiled. "Captain, I think that I can definitely use a man of your caliber."
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Admiral Mason's destroyer squadron made a full-power bounce on an entire planet. The planet was the Tahn home-world of Heath. The ships' noses were already heat-glowing from the atmosphere by the time the first alarms went off.
Antiaircraft crews who were more accustomed to ceremonial posturings and polishing brass fittings scrambled for battle stations trying to remember real-world target acquisition and launch procedures. Several crews lost minutes tracking down the officer with the input code for the armed missile loaders.
Civilian block wardens dug into dresser drawers for their arm bands and hard hats, fumbling through their time-passed briefings to find out what exactly they were supposed to do.
The invasion alert hammered out on a thousand channels, then rescinded, then rescreamed. Heath's workers sheep-panicked to the shelters that had never been anything more than the subject of jokes, following drills that were considered one more way to get in trouble with the police if one did not instantly obey.
The three interceptor squadrons around the capital, more familiar with providing ceremonial escort to VIP ships, took fifteen full minutes to get into the air.
By the time the first missile came out of its tube and the first gun opened fire, the destroyers were outatmosphere and under full emergency AM2 drive.
The raid was a carefully designed one-time affair. Mason's flotilla, equipped with every known ECM and spoofer, bulging with additional supply containers, and using Tahn codes broken after the debacle around Durer, took weeks to slither through the Tahn Empire.
The Eternal Emperor was making two statements.
The first was made by Mason's DD, the Burke, as it launched a lovingly tailored monster missile.
The missile was a slim needle, set with offset fins front and rear. Its AM2 drive unit had come from a Kali shipkiller and nearly-instantaneously flashed the missile to full speed. The warhead, many tons of nonnuclear explosive, was buried far behind the nose cone, which was a solid mass of Imperium X.
Six separate guidance systems, using everything from inertial navigation to a prewar street map of the capital, made sure the missile would not miss.
It did not, impacting squarely in the center of the Tahn Council chambers. And nothing much happened.
The watch commander in charge of the palace's guards had time to pick himself up from the ground where the initial shock had dropped him, recover, and grin to his second.
"Clottin' Imperials. All that trouble to drop a dud that—"
That went off.
The missile had driven nearly 300 meters underground, its Imperium X nose cone crumpling, before the detonator went off.
The explosion, far underground, created a cavern.
The original design was eons old and had been set aside as a peculiar footnote when the age of nuclear overkill had arrived. Its original designer, one Barnes Wallis, had originally described it as an "earthquake bomb," an incorrect if impressive label. More exactly, the bomb was intended to "camouflet"—to dive deep below the earth without breaking the surface. And then to detonate.
A more exact description was a "hangman's drop."
That is exactly what happened. The entire Tahn Council palace fell through the "gallows trap."
All that remained was a stinking hole whose perimeter was littered with the stone ruins of the Tahn's proudest symbol of power.
The strike had been ordered for the early hours of the morning, and so only a handful of Than noblemen died, and those low-ranking. Not only was the palace communication system destroyed, but the standby relay stations below the palace vanished.
The Emperor had not intended the strike to kill the Tahn Council. He preferred them alive, worried, and having to explain to the Tahn just how the unthinkable—an Imperial strike on Heath itself—could not only have been thought but carried out. Also, he wanted them alive to consider that he had proved he could kill them any time he felt like it. Even fanatics like those who ruled the Tahn Empire might think about that.
The second statement was made by the rest of Mason's destroyers as they contour-flew over the city, launch bays spewing thousands of tiny incendiaries.