Sheffield shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. He turned to Celia Howe, who had sat silently throughout the debate. “What’s the latest report?”
“We’ve been interviewing all the captured subjects, of course,” Howe replied. “It’s been assigned our highest priority. Most of them know very little about Brown, or for that matter Shadow, but they seem willing to tell us what they do know, even those immune to telepathy, though of course we can’t be sure those aren’t lying. We’ve resorted to unpleasant methods with some of them…”
“Torture,” Albright muttered. Howe ignored him.
“…and we’ve been collecting and collating the data as fast as we can. So far, we have not learned of any enemy personnel who have not surrendered to us-each subject has listed all agents known to him, and so far every single one is accounted for. This tends to support Brown’s claim that he gave up his entire network, however irrational such an action may appear to us-it may be that we’re dealing with a lunatic.”
“What about these space-warps?” Sheffield asked. “Have we learned anything more about them?”
Howe shook her head. “There are indications that the portals, as they call them, always manifested themselves in exactly the same place in the Empire, though the location of the opening on the other end might vary somewhat. However, we have been unable to establish whether this was merely a matter of convenience, or whether it’s inherent in the system.”
Markham and Albright looked at one another. Markham volunteered, “We’ve been forced to open space-warps in exactly the same spot-we can’t get them anywhere within about five hundred miles of where one previously occurred without using exactly the same place. Maybe Shadow’s method, whatever it is, has the same limitation.”
“If we put all known warp locations under heavy guard,” Albright suggested, “perhaps we could stop any further raiding.”
“Or perhaps,” Markham added reluctantly, “we’d just force Brown to move to someplace five hundred miles away. The Empire’s a big place; we can’t guard all of it.”
“At the very least, we should guard every known location on Terra,” Albright said. “Are any known here on Base One?”
Howe shook her head. “So far, we know of none on either Terra or on Base One. The Terran cell of Shadow’s network received its orders from off-world.”
“Then how’d that woman get into the Emperor’s bedroom?” Albright asked.
Howe frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that; it’s a top security matter.” She pointed at the telepath. “I certainly can’t say anything with him in the room. But it doesn’t appear to have involved a space-warp portal.”
“None of this is important,” Sheffield said, cutting off the discussion. “When I said we were going to stop the attacks I wasn’t talking about some feeble blockade.”
Markham grimaced. “Somehow, I didn’t think you meant blockading the portals. So what did you mean?”
“I thought it was obvious,” Sheffield said.
“So I’m stupid,” Markham replied. “Humor me.”
“The Galactic Empire is the natural end of political evolution,” Sheffield said. “Everyone knows that. It’s our destiny to rule the entire human species, and I see no reason that should be limited to our own universe, now that we know others exist. Shadow was an unknown quantity, but Brown-we know about Brown. We don’t know everything, but enough. He’s just a man-and an amateur, at that. It’s inevitable that we’ll add his kingdom to the Empire, and these raids he’s making just mean we need to do it now.” He smiled grimly. “We’re going to counter-attack, of course. The Imperial Army is going to flatten this upstart once and for all.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The abrupt twist in the matrix startled Pel out of a light doze. He sat up and looked around.
He was in his bed, safe in Shadow’s fortress; the light of the matrix blazed gold and crimson from the bare stone walls. The false Nancy lay naked beside him, sound asleep.
What had roused him? There wasn’t anything out of place in the bedchamber. Had he heard something?
Not through the foot-thick walls, certainly; he reached out with the matrix and opened the door, while sensing everything that lay in the corridor beyond.
Except there wasn’t anything in the corridor.
He reached out farther.
There were fetches and monsters and people going about their business, there were his dozens of hostages all secure in the dungeons and towers; all was as it should be, throughout the fortress.
The weather above was a normal, if unpleasant, drizzle; the marsh was quiet.
Then, finally, he noticed the kink.
The Imperial space-warp had opened again. It had been closed for some time; in fact, he hadn’t noticed it open since he had begun his little attempts at convincing the Empire to cooperate. He had flown out to the familiar spot by his treehouse in the Low Forest of West Sunderland a few days before to see if the Empire had come to its collective senses, if the bodies had been delivered before the warp was closed, or at some time while he was asleep or distracted, and he’d found nothing but empty air and woods.
Now it was back-but the place where the space-warp bent a strand of the matrix in an impossible direction had moved; instead of being in Sunderland it was somewhere far off in the other direction.
And it seemed larger.
Pel was now fully awake, and angry. What the hell was the Empire up to?
He would just have to go and see.
* * * *
Captain Hamilton Puckett took a deep breath, tightened his grip on his sword, and jumped, his eyes still firmly closed. His left hand was on the hilt of his blaster-he knew all the experts said it wouldn’t work, but he couldn’t help it, he still wanted that familiar reassurance, and he’d made sure his holster was slung on the outside of his space suit.
The glare of the warp abruptly vanished, and the red glow it made of the inside of his eyelids disappeared; he opened his eyes, and managed to catch himself just short of falling on his armored face. The drop seemed longer than it should; he hoped that was just an illusion caused by the transition to higher gravity.
He got himself upright, released his blaster, wiped dust from the front of his helmet, and looked around.
People were staring at him-strange people, all of them terribly tall and thin, with pale narrow faces and long black hair, wearing flowing green and white clothes. He was standing on bare dirt; in fact, his landing had stirred up a cloud of dust. Around him were crude huts made of some sort of reeds or grasses, and all in all about a dozen faces peered at him from the doorways of the huts or the spaces between them. Their expressions were odd-not fear or anger or anything he could read plainly.
They didn’t look happy, though.
Well, why should they? He’d just popped out of thin air in the middle of their village.
“Damn,” he said.
The word was oddly muffled by the helmet he wore.
He turned and groped for the warp-the scientists had said they were going to bring it in right at ground level.
They hadn’t; it was a good four feet off the ground. He had to back up and take his best running leap in order to get through it, and he imagined he looked like a particularly ridiculous sort of monster as he galloped through the middle of the village in his space suit, waving his sword about.
His jump turned into an exceptionally awkward dive-he’d misjudged either the suit’s mass or the local gravity-but he did sail back through into the blinding white light of the space-warp. His landing knocked the wind out of him, and for a moment he lay motionless on the steel walkway.
When he raised his head at last, he saw people signalling wildly to him from the observation area.
He sighed and clambered to his feet; he’d have to go up and report.