What he did not realize was that Pastour was suffering from a nearly terminal case of guilty conscience. Did Fehrle suspect him? Were there guards waiting with drawn guns just behind the door? If so, why did the man keep looking over at him, as if he were looking for help? Gradually, he realized that was exactly what Fehrle wanted. But help doing what? What the clot! He already had his genitalia on the table. Maybe it was time to dare the knife.
"Forgive me, my lord," he said. "Along with you, and my Lord Wichman, I certainly deplore the situation you are outlining. We should take drastic action. But..."
"Go on," Fehrle said a little sharply, trying to prod the man into giving him an opening.
"But... perhaps there is some way we can make use of some of these people first."
Wichman almost exploded at that. He came halfway to his feet. "How dare—"
"Exactly my thinking," Fehrle said.
Wichman mumped back down. "What? Oh, yeah! Good idea. Uh... right!" Then the poor bewildered man could not help himself any longer. "Clot! What am I saying? What's a good idea?"
Fehrle and Pastour laughed, and Wichman, after a moment, had the good grace to laugh with them. They had more drinks while Fehrle laid it out for them.
He did have a way of making use of the leakers, but in a contorted way that even the Eternal Emperor would have admired. In fact, he had taken the whole plan right out of the Emperor's book.
Fehrle planned to pull hope out of the ashes of the ruins of the High Council's palace. They had all been puzzled at the Emperor's behavior after they had launched their own sneak attack on his headquarters in the opening blow of the war. The Emperor had immediately flooded the airways with an endless series of propaganda portraits showing him shaking his fist at the Tahn in defiance. At first it had seemed like empty gesturing. What did that accomplish? Immediately after that, they were surprised at how many of his straying allies returned to the Emperor's camp. There was nothing empty about the campaign at all. It brought in badly needed ships and troops in a swell of public opinion.
Fehrle was proposing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. He wanted to launch a grand tour of twenty-two systems in which he would personally appear with the leaders of said systems, giving the Emperor the finger at every opportunity.
The lonely Tahn, fighting on despite the odds against the warmongering running dog Imperialist giant. Vowing to win against all odds. That sort of thing. Privately, he would use a heavy cudgel to stiffen the spine of their allies. He would convince them all to dig into the trenches and fight to the last being. If it worked, any victory the Emperor hoped for would come at an exceedingly high price that Fehrle doubted he would be willing to pay.
Wichman loved it. Pastour, grudgingly, admitted there might be some wisdom in it. Still, he remembered the bloodbath of the bombing raid on the city and the strange appearance of Sten in his heavily guarded domain. If the Emperor could do all that at will...
"I fear for your life, my lord," he finally said. "What is to prevent the Emperor from learning of your plan and then attacking when you least expect it? If you were assassinated, I'm not sure how the people would behave."
"I want the Emperor to learn about it," Fehrle said.
Once again, Wichman was surprised. Pastour, however, got it right away. Fehrle would have his staff plan two itineraries. The first would show the tour commencing on Arbroath. On the surface, that would seem like a logical choice, since the Arbroath were totally loyal to the Tahn. They would grovel at Fehrle's knees and praise him, making for wonderful propaganda. That itinerary would be leaked. In reality, Arbroath was a rotten jumping-off point. The people were so stupidly and blindly loyal that they would fight on anyway until they were all dead.
The real stepping-off point would be Cormarthen. Pastour saw the wisdom in that right off. The people there were wild rebels—a semi-Celtic splinter cult whose sole motivation for aiding the Tahn was their unreasoning hatred of the Empire. When the war was over—assuming the Tahn won—they were sure to instantly turn on their allies. In fact, after the string of recent defeats they were already wavering. Fehrle planned to put a stop to that immediately. On day one of the twenty-two system tour he would be able to present his people with a diplomatic victory.
The rest of the tour would be plotted the same way. False clues would be planted with the Imperialists while Fehrle maddeningly popped up at the least expected places to flip off the Eternal Emperor.
Pastour and Wichman pledged enthusiastic support. They would work on their own people as well as lobby the other factions. Fehrle was guaranteed unanimous acceptance when the proposal was formally presented to the High Council.
While Fehrle and Wichman were congratulating each other on the yet-to-be success, Pastour remembered Sten. And Koldyeze. He had thought about the young man's odd request. He had recently seen a way not only to make good his promise but to bump the value of the pot 1,000 percent.
During the course of the conflict the Tahn had taken millions of prisoners of all kinds. But a very few of those prisoners presented special difficulties.
They were the important diplomats, politicians, and high-ranking officers who had fallen into Tahn hands. Even the instinctive Tahn disdain for prisoners did not allow them to treat those beings with anything other than kid gloves—relatively speaking. The problem had been finding the proper guards with at least a modicum of political reality.
At the moment, that was impossible. The prisoners were spread out in camps all over the Tahn Empire.
What Pastour wanted to do was to solve that problem at one stroke. He would place them all at Koldyeze. Then he would personally oversee their treatment through his emissaries. There was also an even greater advantage in putting all his rocks in one stonebucket. If and when the Tahn were defeated, Pastour would have heavy-duty trading stock to strike his bargain for peace with the Emperor.
Obviously he could not word any of that exactly the same way if he wanted to bring Fehrle and Wichman to his side. Instead, he appealed to their blood lust.
"If we had them all in one place," he said as he came to the end of his explanation, "we'd only need one gun to hold against their heads."
"And if the Emperor refuses us," Wichman broke in, "we kill them all. I like it!"
Fehrle also added his support.
When Pastour went home some time later, a little warm and tiddly from the drink and the companionship, he thought fondly about how well the Tahn system of government worked. A few well-chosen words—out of hearing from the squabble of conflicting viewpoints of the public—and the correct measures were taken to ensure the future of the race. It made him feel proud and patriotic.
The next day, when he was sober, he would plan his next moves at Koldyeze.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Sten was fairly disgusted with the Tahn. What, after all, was an evil empire without an internal conspiracy or six? The Tahn were short on dissidents. Those few enemies of the regime seemed to have gotten policed up years earlier/and their dissidence was mainly made up of the idea that maybe the Tahn Council ought to say please before conquering somebody. From the limited leaks he had been able to get from Tahn CI, the current treason seemed to consist of street gossips or poor sods who complained about having to work a double shift without getting a food break.
Sneakiness abhorred a vacuum, and so Sten and Kilgour went to work, building themselves a good list of traitorous swine. They decided, just to keep things interesting, that it would be a military conspiracy.