Cind was about ready to rip his face off. Even with Mahoney and Kilgour prodding, Sten had stubbornly refused to go. He was too busy, he said. Up-to-his-ears-in-drakh busy.
Remarkably, however, she now watched him step in. Instead of barking orders, he slipped a sheaf of credits out of his pocket and waved it under the attendant's nose.
"You could always bring your lunch along," he said.
The attendant snatched the bills, motioned with the sandwich-filled hand, and trotted off. They followed.
"It's the only way to get a bureaucrat's attention," Sten muttered to her. "Yelling just makes them stubborner-and stupider."
The attendant was moving along the drawered crypts. "Let's see... Where'd I put that Jon Doe?" He aimed a remote box, pressed the button, and a corpse drawer rolled out with a crash. Cold air blasted from the crypt.
The attendant peered into the drawer. A drip of red sauce fell onto the body. He wiped it up with a thumb, then licked his thumb clean.
"Nope. Wrong guy." He jabbed the button and the drawer slammed shut. The attendant laughed. "Sorry to stiff you with the stiff."
Nobody laughed at his joke. He shrugged. "We been pretty busy since the Khaqan died," he said. "Got more clients than we got time."
He laughed again. "My wife's happier'n pig in drakh. I been on golden overtime for months. One more big shootin' match and we can go buy that retirement cottage we been dreamin' about."
"How fortunate for you," Cind said.
The attendant caught her tone. "Wasn't me that put 'em here, lady," he said. "That's your job. You frag 'em, I bag 'em. That's my motto."
He aimed the remote at another crypt and pressed the button. The drawer slid out. He peered into it. "Yep. That's the Doe you laid down your dough for. Still dead, too. Ha-ha. Belly up to the bones, boys. And see your future." He snickered at Cind. "You too, lady."
But it was Mahoney who looked first. His reaction was quick. And it was massive.
"Mother of Mercy," he intoned. "It's Venloe!"
Sten was rocked back. "It can't be." He took his own look. "Damn! It's Venloe all right."
"Thae's noo possible," Alex said as he was confirming their view. "But i' bloody is!"
Cind didn't know what they were talking about at first. Then she remembered. Venloe was the man responsible for killing the Emperor!
"I thought he was—"
"In a maximum clottin' security prison,'' Sten finished for her. "Last I heard, he was so far under the ground they had to pipe in the sunlight."
"He must have escaped," Cind said.
"Another impossibility," Sten said. He looked again. "But... there he is."
"Top part a' him, anyways," Alex said.
Mahoney frowned at the waxen features staring up at him. He remembered the day he had brought Venloe to ground. And their subsequent conversation. Venloe was a being who could squirm out of just about any situation—even the Emperor's most secure prison.
"But—what was he doing here?" Cind asked. "Who could have—"
The rest of her question was cut off by Mahoney's emergency beeper. He whipped it from his belt and keyed in. "Mahoney, here."
The officer's voice rasped through the speaker. "You better get back here fast, sir. We just picked up a fleet heading for Jochi. They're confirmed unfriendlies, sir."
Mahoney was already running as he keyed out. The others sprinted after him.
Venloe lay cold in his drawer behind them, his mystery forgotten in the impending attack.
The morgue attendant—who had overheard the news—hustled off to make his wife an even happier woman.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Admiral Han Langsdorff had obviously either slept through or cut his class in Basic Military Mistakes some fifty years earlier.
He took the three Imperial battleship flotillas out to stop the Suzdal/Bogazi invasion fleets full of confidence and contempt. This would be a simple, if bloody, mission. First he expected these primitive beings—Langsdorff concealed it rather well, but he was a xenophobe—to freeze when confronted with the mailed fist of the Empire. After they recovered from their awe and terror, they might, at worst, form a battle line and attempt a frontal engagement.
Langsdorff dangled one cruiser squadron as bait and arranged his main battle force in a lopsided wing behind and to one side of the decoys.
The enemy would attempt to attack the Imperial force, and it would be simple for Langsdorff to turn their flank and have all of them enfilade.
It was not a complex plan. But simplicity was a virtue in battle. Besides, how could any consortium of oversize avians and canines stand against the Empire?
He certainly wasn't the first battle leader to hold his foe in utter contempt. History has made a very full list of occasions when the same thing happened:
The Hsiung-Nu long-term disaster in Turkestan. The Little Horn. Isandhlwana. Magersfontein. Suomussalmi. Dien Bien Phu. Saragossa. And on, and on, and on.
Even the name of his flagship might have helped. Langsdorff vaguely know that the Repulse, many incarnations before, had been a water-borne warship. He even vaguely remembered it was something called a battle cruiser. That was the sum of his knowledge.
He did not know that the Repulse's namesake—and an accompanying battleship—had sailed calmly into harm's way, confident that the mere presence of battleships would create paralytic terror in the enemy; that no one would hazard land-based aircraft over the open sea; and that certainly no one from the never-sufficiently-despised Mongoloid subspecies of the human race would dare confront these magnificent examples of Empire.
It took the Japanese land-based atmospheric bombers just under one hour to sink both warships.
Langsdorff scanned the screen. The longer-ranging Imperial sensors had picked up the Suzdal/Bogazi fleets. He snorted. These beings could do nothing right. If he were invading a cluster's home world, he would certainly have come up with more warships than he was looking at—even if he had to bolt missile tubes to every lunar ferry he could requisition.
Two hostile cruiser squadrons smashed at the Imperial cruisers in a frontal assault. Bare minutes later, two more Suzdal/Bogazi formations—these formed around tacship carriers and heavy cruisers—came down on the Imperials from above and below, like the closing jaws of a nutcracker.
The Imperial cruisers fought back—but were outgunned.
The battle was joined. Admiral Langsdorff ordered his battle-wagons in, to envelop the Suzdal/Bogazi left flank, just as the human Turks had attempted in the sea battle called Lepanto. But unlike the Ottomans, he kept none of his forces in reserve.
The Suzdal/Bogazi fleet commanders believed, just as Langsdorff did, that in battle simplest is best. Their tactics were taken from the clichй drawing of a minnow being swallowed by a slightly larger fish being swallowed by a shark being swallowed by a whale.
Because farther above and below the jaws that had closed on the Imperial cruisers were the real Suzdal/Bogazi heavies. Their admirals waited until Langsdorff's battleship formations were irretrievably committed.
And then they closed the bigger jaws on the far richer prize: the entire Imperial strike force.
Langsdorff was dead before he could bleat for help—help that just didn't exist.
The battle was a catastrophe—for the Empire.
The Suzdal/Bogazi lost five cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and a scattering of lighter craft.
The Imperial survivors were one battleship, three cruisers, one tacship carrier, and twenty troops.