"I knew that clottin' bomb shelter was a rotten idea," he chortled.
Sten did not see what was so funny, but Pastour just said never mind. It would take too long to explain.
"How do you plan getting us both out of here?" he asked instead. "I'm much too old to crawl through that thing." He pointed at the drain.
"Don't worry," Sten said. "You're staying right here."
Pastour frowned. Was it assassination, after all? Was the man a maniac? Did he plan to toy with him first and then kill him? No. There was nothing maniacal about the young man.
"So what do you have in mind?"
"Talk. That's all. It was my boss's idea."
Pastour raised an eyebrow. Boss?
"You know him as the Eternal Emperor. Anyway, he suggested we chat. See if we can come to some sort of understanding."
Pastour was beginning to doubt himself. Maybe the man was nuts. How to handle this? He warned himself that whatever he said next, he must be sure not to condescend. Before he could form his thoughts into words, Sten casually reached into a tunic pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it on the floor next to Pastour. The Tahn picked it up, glanced at it, and was jolted back. It bore the Emperor's personal seal! Pastour did not need to have it checked to know the seal was genuine.
Sten was exactly who he had said he was, an emissary of the Eternal Emperor. Questions flooded into Pastour's mind. Then one huge, glaring one wiped the others away: Why me? And he became very, very angry. Did the Eternal Emperor see some supposed flaw in his character? Did the man think he was a traitor?
"All my boss wants," Sten said, as if sensing what was going on in Pastour's mind, "is to let you know that he is aware of you. He said to consider this nothing more than the opening of a dialogue."
"And just what does he expect me to do or say?" The words were etched in heavy frost.
"Nothing right now," Sten said.
"Is anyone else being contacted?" By "anyone else" he meant other members of the High Council.
"Just you."
Sten allowed a long silence to follow. He wanted Pastour firm in his anger. He wanted hatred to build. Because when the shift came, confusion would follow. And then he set the hook.
"How did you like the little party my boss threw the other night?"
Pastour squirmed, knowing that Sten was referring to the bombing raid. To him the raid had been a sign that the Emperor could strike at will. And Sten's presence in his private garden only underscored that fact. Still...
"If the Emperor believes his cowardly attack on innocent people will in any way weaken our resolve..."
"You're sounding like a politician, Colonel," Sten said. "I hope that's not what you really think. Because if it is, you might as well kiss a lot more of your innocents good-bye."
"You didn't answer my first question," Pastour came back. "Or, if you were, you were just being glib. I don't like glib. Once again, what does he expect from me?"
"If you think my boss wants you to turn traitor," Sten said, "you're dead wrong. If you were a traitor, you'd be no use to him at all."
"And what use does he see in me?"
"At some point in time," Sten went on, "you people are going to realize that this thing is over. That you've lost. And when that happens, the Emperor would like to have someone sensible to deal with."
Pastour knew that Sten was talking about surrender. How odd, he thought. The word doesn't make me angry. The lack of feeling disturbed him. What kind of a Tahn was he? Surrender? It should have been unthinkable. Instead, it seemed... inevitable. "Go on," he said.
And by those two words, Sten knew he had struck pay dirt.
"There's not that much more. Except to say that a great deal of grief can be avoided if some sort of Tahn government survives. The Emperor is betting that it will be you."
Pastour nodded. Survival was something he knew a great deal about—unlike most of his brothers and sisters on the council.
"What else?"
Sten hesitated. What he was going to say next had nothing to do with his instructions. Then he plunged headfirst. "Koldyeze."
"What about it?" Pastour was puzzled.
"The Emperor is worried about the prisoners there," he said, lying, lying, lying. "He hopes that no matter what happens, they'll be treated humanely. And since the place was your idea to start with..."
Now it made sense to Pastour. He had heard that the Eternal Emperor had some strange ideas about the treatment of the lower classes. Even prisoners of war. Why the man bothered with the plight of cowards, he had no idea. Still, what would it cost him?
"Tell your Emperor that he need not concern himself about their fates. I'll do my best for them. As long as he doesn't interpret this as some kind of concession. Or acknowledgment from me that anything but his final defeat and humiliation is—"
Sten laughed and raised a weak hand, calling for surrender. Pastour could not help laughing with him. There he was, sounding like a politico again. Sten straightened up and headed for the mouth of the drain.
"Are you just going to leave me here?" Pastour asked. "How do you know I won't instantly call the guard?"
"There's a lot more lives at stake here than mine" was all Sten said. And then he dropped out of sight.
Pastour only had to think about that for a second. The man was right. He kicked the grate back in place and returned to tending his garden.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
A historical atlas fiche, equipped with a time tick, would show the Imperial assault on the Tahn Empire as if the war were a liquid projector. The red—or whatever color—representing the Tahn conquests would ebb back as the color assigned to the Empire and its allies flowed smoothly forward, excepting, of course, those blotches representing fortress worlds like Etan that had been isolated and left to rot.
That would suggest that the average Imperial grunt also had an idea of how the war was going.
He, she, or whatever did not.
The sailors loaded supplies and ammunition, boarded ship, and transited in minor fear and major boredom to a certain point, where they off-loaded supplies on a ramp and offloaded ammunition through launching tubes.
The soldiers trained, boarded ship, transited in major fear to a drop or landing point, and attacked. When the last Tahn lay dead, they returned to their base or were moved to a new location where they built a new base, trained, and tried to find ways to burn off the sickening realization that the only end to it all was death, wounding, madness, or victory.
Seeing the next sunrise became the only major victory.
It took twenty years, fortunately, for a statistician to come up with the cheery news that during the war against the Tahn, a combat troop could expect to survive no more than thirty personal days in battle.
Also fortunately, very few Imperials experienced those thirty days back to back.
But there were exceptions, just as, contrary to what that "liquid projector" showed, there were disasters.
One was the landing on Pelze.
The Pelze systems were priority one to the Emperor's strategists. They were at the midpoint of a galactic arm that was a longtime part of the Tahn Empire. Once the systems were taken, the Empire would have a base, a striking point to search and find the long-sought secret Tahn shipbuilding system.