Again with no orders, Sten and the Gurkhas took one measured pace forward, then stopped.
Another pace.
Another.
In five more paces, they would close on the rabble.
The crowd broke. That mob, intent moments before on obliterating the embassy and tearing apart every being within it, became a scatter of frightened souls, interested only in getting tender behinds out of harm's way.
Howling, screaming, they pelted away, away from the knives, away from the terror.
There was not a flicker from Sten or the Gurkhas.
Sten barely nodded, and the Gurkhas, in unison, about-faced. With equally measured pace, they walked back inside the embassy grounds. The Bhor waited until the Gurkhas were inside, then port-armed and doubled after them.
The gates clanged shut.
Sten moved to a wall, made sure that he could not be seen outside, and sagged against it. A little close, he thought.
Jemedar Lalbahadur Thapa marched to him, came to attention, and saluted.
Sten returned the salute. "Very good."
"Not very good," the Gurkha said. "Anyone can frighten sheep. Or children. The dead of the Imperial Guard are unavenged."
Sten, too, turned grim. "Tonight," he promised. "Tonight, or the next night. And then we will not be playing child's games, nor with children.''
It took, in fact, three nights before that moving dot that was the telltale pistol came to rest.
Sten's operation order was verbal, with no record being made, and very short.
Twenty Gurkhas. Volunteers. Standby for special duties at 2300 hours. Sidearms only. Barracks dress.
Alex had lifted an eyebrow at that last: Why not the phototropic cammies?
"I'll want no one to wonder about this later," Sten said shortly. "This is authorized slaughter, not private revenge."
The entire Gurkha detachment volunteered, of course.
Eight Bhor. All master-pilot rated. Four gravlighters. Basic weapons.
Again, Cind told him her entire team wanted to go in. Starting with her, she added.
Sten had said nothing about the nature of the special duties. Evidently he did not have to.
The soldiers assembled at 2200 hours. Outside, the sky was partially overcast, black clouds racing across the face of the four currently visible moons.
There was none of the Gurkha's usual prebattle barracking. They knew. As did, somehow, everyone in the embassy. The canteens and hallways were deserted.
Sten and Alex blackened their faces, put on cammies, and checked their weapons. Sten had his kukri, the knife, and a pistol. Alex had a handgun and a meter-long solid-steel bar he had wrapped with ordnance nonslip tape.
Alex went to the com room for a final look at the target-they had not only the pistol's beeper broadcasting, but four Frick & Fracks orbiting the area, and eight more grounded for area intelligence.
The Gurkhas and their eight Bhor pilots were drawn up in an embassy garage. Cind was in front of the formation.
Sten returned her salute and ordered the troops to open ranks for inspection. The Gurkhas had their kukris drawn. The chin straps of their slouch hats were tight under their lower lips-and their eyes were fixed on infinity.
Sten passed down the ranks. Merely as a formality, he checked one or two of their blades. They were, of course, hand-honed into razors.
He turned the formation back to Cind, and she ordered the weapons sheathed and ranks closed. Alex hurried out of a stairwell, a most grim smile on his face.
"W hae a feast a' friends," he said. "Alive-o, alive-o she cried. Th' sensors hae fifteen vultures gatherin't. Thae'll be havin't a conference or p'raps a party, but i' looks like th' whole clottin' cell's i' place."
Sten's acknowledging smile was equally humorless.
He gave the mission orders:
Four-man teams. After grounding, move to the target zone. Wait for the assault command. No guns to be used unless in complete emergency.
And:
No wounded. No prisoners.
They doubled out into the courtyard, where the gravlighters waited. The Bhor slid behind the controls, the Gurkhas boarded the first two—the others would be used for cleanup—and the lighters lifted, flying nap of the city toward the attack zone.
The target was less than twenty minutes flight time away. No one spoke. Sten, hanging over the pilot's right seat, saw the large-projection map on-screen and the blinking dot that represented that pistol and their objective.
It had come to rest two days earlier in a large mansion, surrounded by extended grounds, on a riverbank just outside and upstream from Rurik. A headquarters? A safe house?
Sten did not much care. He and Alex would shake the place—afterward.
The lighters grounded a few hundred meters from the sprawling house.
There was a half-alert sentry at the front and another at the rear. They were silenced.
Alex checked the main entrance for sensors or alarms. There were none.
Sten drew his kukri, and in a ripple, twenty-one other knives flashed in moonlight.
Then the corpse-glow vanished, obscured by clouds.
They went in.
The task took five minutes. There had been no outcry. When it was over, the bodies of fifteen butchered terrorists, and the two sentries, were lined up on the overgrown lawn. Cind searched the bodies for identification and anything intelligence-worthy. There was very little.
Sten and Alex took porta lights from one gravlighter and searched the mansion, in the high-speed, fine-tooth manner they had learned in basic intelligence. Neither of them spoke.
Alex broke the silence. "Ah hae indicators. Th' mob wae big fans ae Iskra. Look't all th' prop'ganda. All th' same. Jochi for Jochians an' thae. But Ah noo hae aught thae'll link th' quack solid."
"Nor do I."
"Clot. Whyn't the bassid happen t' slip oot ae th' evenin', t' hae a brew wi' his thugs, an' we'd find him here."
"That only happens in the livies."
"Ah know thae too. But a lad can dream, canna he? C'mon, Sten. Thae's nae f'r us here. Do Ah fire th' place?"
"Yes."
The bodies had already been loaded onto the two spare grav-lighters. Sten waited until he could see flames build inside the mansion, then he ordered withdrawal.
The seventeen bodies would be weighted and dumped far out at sea.
Terrorism, properly implemented, was a double-edged sword. Dr. Iskra's people might have a bit of trouble recruiting more action cells after this one vanished into the night and fog.
Then the killers departed, having gone in with the long knife, and come out leaving nothing but blood and silence behind them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Few socio-historians would argue that at the height of his reign the Eternal Emperor held more raw power than any being who had come before him.
His admirers—and they had always been legion—wrote that for most of that reign he chose not to exercise that power. The cynics say that was the key reason he held it for so long: The Emperor was the ideal third-party solution to many heated and bloody disputes.
In short, power was conferred because it was the safest place to put it.
So, when the Emperor set out to win more power still and to wield it against his enemies, he faced a formidable task. As soon as his intentions became clear he knew he would be opposed by despot and democrat alike.
He also knew that the first target his opponents would choose was his competency to rule. The Emperor was too much of a political fox not to understand that all his pluses had a flip-side negative.