Chewning wondered if Teodor was going to have a nervous breakdown.
"You promised it would work! And I believed you and went along, even though I never really wanted to." Teodor's pacing had almost carried him to the balcony door, beyond which low-flying wisps of cloud drifted among the palace's other towers in the morning sun. He stopped short and whirled around, face working tremulously. "And now look what's happened!"
"An unforeseeable mischance, sir," Chewning murmured. "Your brother turned aside at the last moment to answer a call, as his companion entered the—"
"Excuses! The point is, you failed—and failed in such a public and spectacular way that they couldn't sweep it under the rug even if they wanted to. They'll dig and dig and keep on digging. We'll be found out!"
Chewning waited until Teodor had run out of steam, then let a heartbeat of silence pass before nodding and speaking with calm deliberation. "Yes, sir, we will. It is inevitable." He didn't let his satisfaction show as Teodor's jaw dropped and his mouth hung open. He'd wanted reassurance; now Chewning had his undivided attention, and he spoke briskly. "Clearly, the time for half-measures and subterfuge is past. It is more important than ever that your brother die. We cannot wait for another opportunity to set up an apparent accident. We must act openly."
"But . . . but Father will—"
"His Imperial Majesty will approve, once you've made clear to him that you were acting to forestall a coup."
"Uh . . . ?"
"We must make certain the circumstances are such as to make it apparent that there was no other way to save his life. Which is, after all, true. Think about it, sir. Your brother can hardly leave him alive after seizing the throne, can he?"
"Well . . . no, I suppose not." Teodor drew himself up like an actor overregistering stiffened resolve. "Yes, you're right: there's no other way. We must act with maximum decisiveness! We must . . . uh, I assume you have a concrete plan setting forth what we must do?"
"There are a few details yet to be worked out, sir. But I'll have a detailed outline ready for your perusal by this time tomorrow. It will, of course, incorporate provisions for you to take an active personal part in the actual execution."
"Er . . . is that really necessary?"
"Not just necessary, sir, but absolutely fundamental to the plan's success. Remember what I said earlier about the impression we must create in His Imperial Majesty's mind. This requires that you appear to be going into action impulsively, heedless of danger, to protect him from treachery—not masterminding a prearranged plan from behind the scenes." Chewning was rather pleased with himself for getting past the word "masterminding" with a straight face.
"Hmm . . . Yes, perhaps you're right."
Chewning decided to lay it on. "And after all, sir, such action on your part will be readily believable, being so thoroughly in character."
"So it is, now that you mention it." Teodor assumed what was doubtless intended to be a look of haughty decisiveness, and gave a curt nod. "Very well. See to it."
As soon as he was gone, Vladimir Liang emerged from the shadows among the wall hangings, shaking his head skeptically. "Do you really think he'll remain controllable after the plan comes to fruition? It could shock him into unpredictable behavior."
"That's a risk," Chewning conceded.
"Perhaps we should tell him now—prepare him in advance."
"No! He couldn't function if he knew the truth. He's too unintelligent to grasp the opportunity, and too morally cowardly to act on it if he did. No," Chewning repeated with an emphatic headshake, "we'll stay with our original plan. He'll never know how it really came about—the disinformation is as much for his benefit as for everyone else's. And with a little help from us, he'll adjust to the new facts."
"Very well. I only hope your confidence is justified."
Chewning ignored the slight sulkiness in Liang's voice. He was reflecting on the odd way things had of working out. Surreptitiously disposing of Roderick Brady-Schiavona had been a bad idea from the first. But it had taken the attempt's failure to make them realize that, and force them to do what they should have done at the beginning—truly a blessing in disguise. And now, instead of having an heir to manipulate, they'd have an Emperor.
"But it doesn't make sense," Roderick repeated. It had been the general reaction around the table in Corin's quarters, since Aerenthal had informed them that the next attempt to kill Roderick was to be connected in some way with his return from an upcoming inspection tour of the Fleet bases on the moons of Cronus.
"I've been unable to learn any details of their plan, which might make it more understandable," the agent said—meaning that Omega Prime hadn't told him any such details. But he couldn't put it that way, of course. For the consumption of Roderick, Maura and Aline Tatsumo, he'd presented the news as a product of investigative work.
Roderick took a deep breath. "They must know I'm returning directly to the palace. I'll be landing at the Imperial spacefield—riding a shuttle down, assuming that the transposer system is still deactivated. Anything they try there will be completely public, and couldn't be made to look like an accident, unlike their trick with the transposers. It just doesn't fit the pattern."
For a moment, no one had any comment. Then Garth's basso broke the perplexed silence. "Maybe they don't want it to look like an accident. Maybe they're going to be completely open about it."
"But," Roderick protested, "that doesn't make sense either! It would doom Ted's chance at the succession. Father would disinherit him."
"That's true . . . if your father were still alive."
What followed wasn't really silence—there was too much indrawing of breath around the table for that. Roderick shook his head as though in uncomprehending annoyance. Then comprehension came, and the headshaking became more emphatic, almost angry.
"No. No! Ted would never . . . I mean, look, you know I have no illusions about him. But he'd never—"
"Remember, he's not really in charge. Chewning and Liang may not be telling him everything. In fact, I'm sure they're planning to make him think it's accidental . . . or your work. That way, his bereavement will actually be genuine."
"Plausible deniability," Aerenthal murmured.
"And in the meantime," Garth went on remorselessly, as Roderick's head continued to shake like a mechanism that hadn't been told to stop, "as the oldest child he's the heir apparent in the absence of a declaration to the contrary by your father. And the Fleet would support him. We can afford having him as Emperor a lot better than we can afford a succession struggle."
"But Garth," Janille asked, "how could they do it? He's surrounded by layers of state-of-the-art security."
"He's also living on a platform floating in midair, a mile above the surface."
At first, no one grasped what Garth was talking about. Children of a civilization that had tamed gravity in the far remote past, they tended to forget that it was still a part of the universe's "default setting," always ready to snap back the instant the machines that annulled it failed . . . or were sabotaged. Then, one by one, they looked at each other with awakening horror.
"We've got to get him off," Roderick half-whispered. "We've got to get everybody off!"
Corin looked grim. "Remember, we have no proof. And you know he'd never believe it of Teodor." For a moment, they all tried to imagine broaching the possibility to Ivar. Imagination failed.
"You're right," Roderick nodded. "Father wouldn't—couldn't—accept it. But," he continued, looking at each of them in turn and finally letting his gaze settle on his sister, "we've got to be prepared to get him off anyway."
Maura's eyes widened and she started to open her mouth. Then she clamped it shut and subsided into a troubled silence.
Garth spoke in a voice that only seemed loud. "We've got enough Deathstriders in Dracopolis to manage it, I think."
"But the palace is so heavily guarded!" Aline Tatsumo protested.
"The Imperial Guards are good at ceremonies and routine security, but they're not combat troops. And besides, this wouldn't be an assault; we'd be acting from the inside. We can insert our people into the palace in advance one by one, on one legitimate pretext or another . . . if we know exactly when we have to be ready, and exactly what we have to watch for." Garth gave Aerenthal a significant look.
"I will give the matter my best attention," the agent intoned.
"All right," Corin said briskly. "Garth, you and Janille will be in charge here at the palace. I'm scheduled to go out to Cronus with Rod, and we shouldn't change that at this point. So I'll be with him when he arrives at the spacefield." He didn't let himself make eye contact with Janille, but at the periphery of his vision he caught her brief stricken look as he announced he would be at the side of the man marked for death. "And as for that arrival, I have an idea. . . ."
The schematic of the palace floated in holographic translucence about a foot above the tabletop simulation of the Dracopolis oceanfront. Gazing at that foot-wide shallow bowl with its load of soaring architectural intricacy, Damiano Chewning only had eyes for the three areas of red deep within the bowl's lower regions: the contragrav units that kept that colossal structure magically motionless in the sky. Any one of them could do it. And even without that one, the two great pressor beam projectors that showed in blue just beneath the surface of the esplanade below could gently lower the palace, nudging it out beyond the sea wall to a splashdown that would spill the occupants' drinks but wouldn't kill them. Nothing had been overlooked.
Nothing but the human factor, Chewning thought, looking across the table at the man in Imperial Guards gray-and-red, although he wondered how applicable the term "human" really was where Major Andrei Ravenel-Cutlass was concerned.
"So, Major," he inquired, "has all been placed in readiness?"
"Ages ago," Ravenel-Cutlass drawled. Enduring his affectation of languid sarcasm was a small price to pay for the unique access to the palace's most sensitive areas he provided. Not for the first time, Chewning wondered how such a creature could possibly have gotten into such a critical position, especially after transferring from the Guard's atmospheric-combat branch under questionable circumstances. Family connections had doubtless helped. Chewning and Liang had recognized a useful tool the instant they'd met him, shortly after their arrival on Prometheus. Using means Teodor had put at their disposal, they'd gotten control of the bulk of the major's colossal gambling debts, and of information that could ruin even a Ravenel-Cutlass. But as it had turned out, blackmail had barely been necessary.
"Are the people you've recruited trustworthy?" Liang jittered.
"Of course not." Ravenel-Cutlass flashed the devil-may-care grin Chewning was certain he practiced in front of a mirror. "But they're controllable—at least for as long as we need them."
"This is my assessment as well," Chewning nodded, forebearing as usual to take exception to the major's "we." Let him pretend he's a member of the conspiracy, not just an employee.
"In that case," Liang ventured hopefully, "perhaps we don't really need to accompany the team that takes out the stealth installation." His eyes wandered to the relatively small green area at the very heart of the translucent bowl.
"Yes, we do," Chewning stated firmly. "There is no substitute for personal supervision, lest their commitment should waver. And that element of the operation is absolutely critical."
The plan called for Teodor—who fancied himself, not totally without reason, as an atmospheric pilot—to lead the flight of three fighters that would shoot down Roderick's shuttle as it descended to the spacefield. It was, Chewning congratulated himself, a stroke of genius to have Teodor kill his brother personally. It would get him out from underfoot while Chewning, Liang and Ravenel-Cutlass dealt with the real objective, of which he knew nothing. Three groups of the major's corrupted Guards would destroy the contragrav generators. Meanwhile, pilots Ravenel-Cutlass had recruited from among his old chums would swoop down in fighters whose skins were programmed to show Deathstrider insignia. They would destroy the pressor-beam projectors under the oceanfront's surface, secure in the assurance they'd been given that the defensive weapons that ringed the palace's outer perimeter would be deactivated. And so they would be . . . until the strike had succeeded and the pilots were about to depart to collect their reward, at which time the targeting systems would suddenly come back on-line. . . .
Chewning smiled at Ravenel-Cutlass, who had suggested the neat method of disposing of the pilots. What a totally contemptible backstabber, he reflected behind his smile, with a kind of awe. It wasn't the sort of thing Damiano Chewning normally thought concerning other people. He had no trouble understanding ambition unrestrained by any moral considerations—he needed only to look in the mirror. But he couldn't help being puzzled as to the major's motivations. He isn't really ambitious. He isn't even avaricious. The money won't be unwelcome, but that isn't what he's doing it for. No, he's doing it for the sake of doing it. He's driven by something I'll never understand: a compulsion to duplicity. An inner music to which he must dance until he dies. And, by providing the dance floor, men like me can make use of men like him . . . for a while.
And, when it becomes necessary, killing him will be childishly easy. Like all solipsists, he thinks he's immortal.
In the meantime, the important thing was their own escape. The palace's transposers were still closed down, and no outside transposer could establish a terminus point inside it. The little green area in the display marked the most sophisticated battery of sensor-confusion devices the science of the age could produce. But those would go down in an operation Chewning would personally oversee. He, Liang, and Ravenel-Cutlass—but not the others, despite what they'd been led to believe—would be snatched from the palace as it began to fall. Teodor would return from the spacefield to find himself Emperor and hear Chewning's mortified explanation of how they'd been unable to save his father from the dastardly attack by Roderick's now-deceased supporters. In time, he would doubtless get over it.
The great echoing chamber was deep in the working levels, beneath the sunlit architectural wonderland above. It had been intended as a gymnasium for the palace's Imperial Guard contingent, but for one reason or another it had remained unused. Roderick had had no trouble arranging for them to use it as a bolt-hole for the Deathstriders who'd been brought aboard the palace one by one and never seemed to leave. Sooner or later the records would be checked. But by then it would all be over, one way or another.
Now their entire strength was gathered here, for Roderick was on his way back and things must come to a head soon. Unfortunately, Aerenthal still wasn't sure just exactly how soon. And, as they knew all too well, any preemptive action was out of the question. In this matter, Ivar would accept no evidence short of a blood-red hand. They had to wait for the would-be assassins to make the first move. So they'd gone on full alert as soon as Roderick had departed the moons of Cronus. And then they had waited. And waited.
Janille halted her pacing at the balcony's railing and looked down at the troopers who lay or sat in clumps, or else had drifted off to read or dictate messages in solitude. The low rumble of desultory, often irritable conversation that rose from the groups was like the rumble of distant thunder on a stifling summer afternoon when a cloudburst stubbornly refused to come.
There was no powered combat armor here. The palace's interiors hadn't been designed to accommodate it. Instead, the troopers wore nanoplastic combat dress, flexible but programmed to lock itself into the hardness of steel at the instant of any potentially hazardous impact its embedded sensors foresaw. Most of them carried neural paralyzers and gas grenades—they didn't want to use lethal weapons inside the palace unnecessarily, and they hoped it wouldn't be necessary at all. But Garth had refused to rely on that hope. Officers and squad leaders wore bead guns as sidearms, and each squad's strongest man carried a plasma gun for getting past—or, rather, through—structural barriers when speed was the only consideration.
And, of course, their opponents wouldn't be worried about damage to a palace they meant to destroy anyway, or to the people who would die with it. . . .
Janille turned away from the dismal view and resumed her pacing on the balcony's limited confines. She was alone save for Garth, and for all his size it was possible to forget he was there, so quietly did he sit with his back propped against the wall, wrapped in a calmness that aroused her uncomprehending envy.
She stopped in front of him and spoke because she needed to banish the drawn-wire silence. "Uh, Garth, I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but . . . well, I think you've taken it awfully well."
"Huh?" Garth came out of his trance of pre-combat relaxation. "Oh, you mean . . . you and Corin." He harrumphed awkwardly. "Well, you see, I always sensed a kind of inevitability about the two of you. I sensed it even before I knew who . . . well, stood behind the two of you."
She felt her face heating up. "You know what Omega Prime said. We're really—"
"—not the same people. Yes, I know. You're not just living out a myth. But . . . it's a very powerful myth. And I can see it in the flesh when I look at the two of you."
Janille was starting to frame a reply when the immaterial intruder awoke inside her head, like the sound of Jason Aerenthal's voice but "heard" in an indescribable way that was not sound.
(Urgency.) "It is time."
For an instant, her eyes met Garth's. He, too, had consented to this, in the teeth of what they never even thought of as a cultural taboo. For Janille, it was like consenting to unwanted sexual contact—only much worse. She didn't know how it felt to Garth. But it was the quickest way for Aerenthal to alert them when his deeply buried awareness of the crucial instant awoke. So they had agreed to drop all resistance.
With the swiftness that was always so startling in a man his size, Garth was on his feet and striding to the railing. His voice filled the chamber. "All right, this is it! Move!"
Instantly, the formless mass of boredom on the floor below transformed itself, clumping together into five understrength squads as the squad leaders barked orders. Squads Gamma, Delta and Epsilon immediately set out at a dead run for the doors that would take them to the contragrav generators, where they would ward off any intruders that might arrive or deal with any already there. The other two waited as Garth and Janille ran down the ladders from the balcony, then sprinted for their own prearranged destinations. Garth, with a final wave to Janille, led Squad Alpha toward the palace's stealth installation. Janille paused to raise Aline Tatsumo on her wristcomp and confirm that the aircar was ready on the landing flange. Then she set out with Squad Beta for the Emperor's apartments.
To Teodor Brady-Schiavona, it seemed that he rode a magical throne through the sky, without acceleration or wind. The landscape below his feet whipped past, gradually changing from countryside to suburb as the towers of Dracopolis became visible far ahead to the north, beyond the spacefield.
He thrust the thought away. He needed to concentrate. Besides, the instrument panel, seeming to float unsupported over his lap, spoiled the illusion of the cockpit's wraparound holo display, reminding him that he was really inside an AF-4 like that of his wingman, which by grace of his craft's computer he could see to starboard as it would have appeared had its liquid-crystal surface not been duplicating the sky in the background. It was an arrowhead-shaped lifting body with overpowered impellers but no gravitics save the G-damper that prevented acceleration from pressing the pilot back, unconscious, into his seat. Like a pair of invisible ghosts, they arrowed at low altitude toward the spacefield . . . and his destiny.
He checked the instrument panel again, feeling a spasm of annoyance that he had to do so—he lacked the aptitude for direct neural interfacing, unlike his wingman, an Imperial Guards atmospheric pilot named Leong suborned by that disrespectful fellow Ravenel-Cutlass. But that was all right, he told himself. Leong was merely along as an escort. He would make the kill.
As is my right, he told himself firmly. And, in fact, my duty. After all, even if Roderick wasn't really planning a coup now, it was only a matter of time. Chewning had made this clear—now there was someone who had the proper respect, who truly appreciated him . . . as Roderick never had. His initial scruples about what had to be done had grown more and more abstract, finally vanishing altogether. Now he felt only eagerness.
There! The descending shuttle appeared on his scope. He ignored the visual panorama, including the spacefield ahead, and fixated on that return. It was descending in the leisurely manner of the unarmed utility shuttle they knew it to be. He frowned momentarily at the computer's interpretation of the data. The shuttle seemed to be a utility version, not the VIP model they'd expected. And there were minor anomalies, as though it had been slightly modified. . . . But there was no time for further analysis, for he was coming into range. He activated the weapons lock-on. The shuttle became the be-all and end-all of his missiles' obsessive, suicide-compelled little brains. He touched a control and, with an almost orgasmic sense of release, felt the slight bump and watched the fiery streaks as two missiles howled away.
"Incoming!"
"Yes, I've got them," Roderick replied. "And now that the shuttle's sensors can zero in on their origin-point . . . There! Two AF-4's!" Roderick was in direct control of the shuttle, including its enhanced sensor array, from his cramped cockpit, identical to the one in which Corin nestled and listened to his voice. And now the data from those sensors was downloaded to the brains of their two AF-7's—atmospheric fighters not unlike the approaching AF-4's but smaller, near the lower limit of size and mass for a viable combat aircraft. Still, it had taken some doing to fit the fighters into the shuttle's modified cargo hold.
"Ready?" Corin asked.
"Not quite. I'll try to give you a three-count . . . No! The missiles are coming in too fast, and the AF-4's are starting to peel off. Disengaging . . . NOW!"
At Roderick's touch of a key, explosive charges blew the hatch doors away from the shuttle's belly, revealing the two tiny fighters hanging from the cargo bay's overhead. Simultaneously, magnetic clamps were deactivated and, in a sickening instant of free fall, the AF-7's dropped through the yawning hatch. Their impellers awoke with a whine of protest, and they streaked away from the now-unmanned shuttle.
Some fraction of a second later, the shuttle vanished in a double nuclear fireball behind them.
That searing backdrop, plus their own stealth features, gave them a couple of seconds before the pilots of the AF-4's, now curving off to the northeast, realized they'd ceased to be the hunters and become the hunted.
Sergeant Morell Clent of the Deathstriders rounded a corner of the passageway—the last one, his helmet HUD assured him—and scanned the corridor ahead, paralysis gun at the ready. Simultaneously, he yelled "Go!" The rest of Squad Gamma ran past him, deploying across the passageway.
The corridor had the same grimly functional look as all the palace's working levels, very different from what rose above them. But Clent wasn't concerned with atmosphere, only with assuring that there were no intruders. Satisfied, he motioned to Squad Gamma to follow him. They set out at a trot toward the massive doors beyond which lay the contragrav generator that was their responsibility.
"All right," he rapped, "it looks like we got here first. Go to defensive deployment out here in the passageway. Sayid, stand by with the plasma gun; I'll call in for further orders, find out if we need to—"
Without any warning, a thundercrash overwhelmed their helmets' sound-damping capacities and the deck jumped beneath their feet. The great doors bucked outward, and smoke billowed outward through the rents, but the explosion hadn't been powerful enough to blast them away altogether.
As he picked himself up, Clent felt another concussion through the deck, and then another. But these were distant—as distant, he knew, as the other two generators, where Squads Delta and Epsilon likewise stood guard against intruders who weren't going to materialize.
As he activated his wristcomp to report in to General Krona, it belatedly occurred to him to wonder why the palace wasn't falling.
"What's happened?" Vladimir Liang demanded. "Why isn't the palace descending?" There should have been a momentary dropping sensation, followed by a slow lowering as the ground-mounted pressor beams took hold.
"I don't know," muttered Ravenel-Cutlass, his usual insolent sangfroid in abeyance. "I'm trying to find out, damn it!"
Liang seemed about to fire off a retort, but Chewning shushed him. When the three shudders of distant explosions hadn't had the expected result, they'd halted in a side alcove of the passageway and sat waiting as the major had tried to raise a crony who'd been in charge of booby-trapping the contragrav generators. He was still trying.
A few more moments passed, with Ravenel-Cutlass repeating requests for acknowledgment and Liang barely able to control himself. Finally, the major's communicator beeped, and after a hurried exchange he turned to Chewning.
"It seems only part of the charges detonated at generator number three. A short circuit, I imagine. At any rate, it's still functioning."
Liang seemed about to go to pieces, but Chewning spoke so quickly as to forestall him. "Do you realize what this means?" he hissed. "That one generator is enough to keep the palace aloft! Even when the pressor beams are destroyed—"
"Compose yourself." Ravenel-Cutlass was rapidly regaining his aplomb. "I'm assured that the installation has been badly weakened by the charges that did go off. It's operating on auxiliary systems—the shudder we felt through our feet wasn't just concussion, it was also a momentary lapse in the lift as those systems cut in. And it can't last. It's only a matter of time—and not much of it—before it fails. By then, the pressor beams will have been taken out. When the final failure occurs, the palace will drop like a stone!"
"Very well," said Chewning, mollified. "Let's proceed."
He stood up, awkward in the combat dress that suited his dumpy frame so poorly. The others followed: Liang, still looking jittery, Ravenel-Cutlass, and five enlisted Imperial Guards who had proven amenable to the princely sums the major had offered. More would only have further compromised the conspiracy, and wouldn't have been necessary to overpower the technicians manning the sensor-confusion control center that was their destination. They resumed their quick-time march along the dimly lit passageway.
Laser weapons were of limited utility in atmosphere. They were restricted to the visible-light wavelengths, for atmosphere absorbed the more energetic X-rays of spacecraft weaponry. As such, they were short-ranged and readily blocked by smoke and fog, to say nothing of defensive aerosols.
Still, Corin reflected as he brought the bandit into his sights, on a bright and sunny day like this there was a lot to be said for a weapon which struck at the speed of light.
Roderick's delay in releasing them from the doomed shuttle had provided the edge they'd needed. From what he'd seen of the craft he was tracking, it was pretty obvious that its pilot was a professional who was mind-linked with his AF-4. Corin had checked out on the AF-7 a long time ago, and he'd taken advantage of the transit time to and from Cronus to refresh himself with deep-learning courses. But he was still no expert . . . and neither was Roderick. Yet they'd appeared out of nowhere as the two bogies had peeled away from the shuttle's thermonuclear funeral pyre, blissfully unaware that any danger threatened from their aft quarter.
The targeting solution firmed up, and Corin touched his laser weapon's firing stud. A flash of glancing contact with the AF-4's tail section showed on visual. It was enough. The bogie began to spin out of control.
"Got him!" he yelled to Roderick. He found an instant to worry about the effect of his quarry's crash, for the endless cityscape of Dracopolis had begun to unfold below them as the dogfight had carried them northward.
"Outstanding! I'm still trying to get a firm fix on the one I'm after . . . looks like we're going to go almost the whole way to the oceanfront . . . Hell and damnation! What's that?"
Corin, though further south, could see exactly what Roderick was talking about. A vee-formation of three atmospheric fighters—no, spaceplanes capable of fleeing beyond the atmosphere—screamed down in a power dive, glowing with the heat of atmospheric friction, homing in on the oceanfront just to the east of the area directly beneath the palace. Deep-penetrator kinetic-kill munitions flashed downward, piling their own velocity atop that of the craft that launched them, striking the grand esplanade that paralleled the ocean. Gouts of flame and geysers of dust and smoke appeared, followed seconds later by a low rumble.
At some point during those seconds, it dawned on Corin that those weapons had impacted in the area of the pressor beam projectors that were the palace's last line of defense against Prometheus' gravity. The palace that held the Emperor. And Garth. And Janille.
Why don't the palace's defenses do something? he wondered, a calm thought at the epicenter of a maelstrom of horror.
His question was instantly answered. As the attackers decelerated with a howl of overstressed impellers just short of the ground and began to pull up, the strangely silent defensive installations suddenly came to life. The crackling lines of ionized air that marked the passage of weapon-grade lasers stabbed out from the rim of the palace, and the attackers exploded in rapid succession, showering their debris over the oceanfront. On a nice afternoon like this, there must have been a lot of people on the beach.
Corin forcibly emptied his mind of all thoughts save two. First, the palace still hung serenely in the sky, so at least one of its internal contragrav generators still functioned. And secondly, Roderick was still in pursuit of their other attacker—the one that had launched the shuttle-destroying missiles. And he was closing in.
Another grenade explosion forced Garth and the surviving members of Squad Alpha to flatten against the bulkhead. He tried to ignore it, but had to raise his voice and shout into the communicator.
"The pressors wrecked? Both of them?"
"Totally." Janille's voice came in a shout of her own. "I'm not even trying to sort out all the news at this point. The bottom line is that—"
"We're still aloft," Garth finished for her. "So at least one of the palace contragrav generators must still be in business. But the hostiles we're engaging are still trying to hold us up, keep us from interfering as they force their way into the palace stealth center. Which means they must still be entertaining a hope of victory. Which, in turn, means it may not continue in business . . ." He forced himself to stop thinking out loud. "All right, Janille. Your orders are unchanged—except that instead of getting His Imperial Majesty out, you're now to get him out fast. And be prepared to get him out by transposing him out if that turns out to be practicable."
"What? You mean . . . ?"
"Yes. The palace's sensor-confusion equipment may very well be down by then. So get in touch with Maura and tell her to be prepared to flick her father out of there." Maura rode a battlecruiser in a low orbit designed to be over this hemisphere of Prometheus at the time of Roderick's scheduled landing.
"But, Garth—"
"Signing off." Garth cut the connection, hefted his paralysis gun, and considered the current state of affairs. Whatever impression others might hold, he'd always regarded himself as a businessman rather than a warrior, bringing a dispassionate cost/benefit analysis to bear on all applications of violence. Hard to imagine how people got their ideas. But . . . this was an emergency. With an ear-bruising roar, he swung out from the bulkhead and ran down the passageway, paralyzer on rapid fire. After a stunned instant, Squad Alpha followed him, screaming.
The sheer fury of the assault caught the hostiles' holding force by surprise. One man stepped out to return fire. Garth caught him full-on and he toppled over to lie motionless. Garth ran on, toward the control center whose headquarters troops were, at last report, still resisting behind an improvised barricade. Another hostile jumped out in front of him, weapon already leveled. Before he could even try to react, there was a thunderous roar and a blinding flash from which his helmet faceplate's antiglare feature protected him, and the hostile was enveloped in flame. He looked over his shoulder and exchanged grins with Corporal Malwe, the squad plasma gunner. Then the two of them rounded the last corner. The barricade was ahead—or what was left of it—and what was left of its defenders. Garth took just enough time to regret some of the thoughts he'd entertained about headquarters troops. Then he charged past . . . just in time to be thrown off his feet by the concussion as an explosion erupted up ahead, flinging an armored door into the corridor.
Picking himself up, bewildered, Garth glimpsed figures scurrying down a side corridor to the right. To his left, Malwe was also rising from the floor. Beyond him, the rest of the squad's survivors were pursuing their fleeing opponents down another corridor. "This way," Garth snapped, and bounded off to the right. Malwe hastened to follow, soon drawing level with him.
It was at that moment that a figure stepped out from the shadows to the side, gauss pistol held in both hands and aimed at point-blank range. He could have put a heavy needle of grav-compressed steel into either target. It was sheer chance that Malwe's faceplate shattered and the back of his helmet exploded outward in a shower of blood and brains.
The gauss pistol began to swing toward Garth, seemingly in slow motion.
At this range, the rifle-length neural paralyzer was unwieldy. Garth didn't waste time he didn't have by trying to aim it. He let it fall even as he was springing forward.
The other man flinched involuntarily in the face of that headlong charge. It was enough to throw his aim off from the vulnerable faceplate. The needle struck Garth's shoulder, and shattered harmlessly as the combat dress's nanoplastic rigidified for the millisecond of contact. The impact staggered Garth, but momentum carried him forward. He crashed awkwardly into his opponent.
For a moment, they grappled. Garth gripped the wrist of the gun hand and gave a squeeze that brought a scream and sent the gauss pistol flying. Then he yanked the arm up behind his opponent and grasped him around the neck. He jerked sideways with a strength inherited from dozens of generations of ancestors who'd lived and given birth in high gravity. The man's faceplate had come open in the fight, and his shriek was audible until a sharp crack! cut it off. He went limp. Dropping the form to the floor, Garth recognized the features of Vladimir Liang.
He recognized something else attached to the dead man's belt. A link. Thoughtfully, he appropriated it. Then he retrieved his paralyzer, and—with difficulty, even for him—picked up Malwe's plasma gun one-handed. Then he advanced, his weapons cradled one in each arm and pointed ahead. He rounded the final corner.
Two men turned toward him. He had the drop on them.
One of them evidently knew a plasma gun by sight. He immediately dropped his gauss weapon and stepped forward empty-handed, opening his faceplate. "Don't shoot! I am Major Ravenel-Cutlass of the Imperial Guards, and I ask for quarter."
Behind him, Garth saw the other man making a motion. He started to point his paralyzer, but Ravenel-Cutlass was in the way. And the man hadn't been reaching for a weapon after all . . . only touching a button on what looked unmistakably like a detonator.
The explosive device which had been concealed inside the Guards major's helmet clearly wasn't a very powerful one. The helmet itself contained a good part of its force. So while grayish-pink gore sprayed in all directions, the bulk of it followed the line of least resistance out the open faceplate, splattering Garth. For a second or so, the headless corpse stood swaying before crumpling to the floor.
The second man opened his own faceplate. "Always knew that would be necessary sooner or later," he remarked, more to himself than to Garth. Then his rabbitlike face formed an innocuous smile. "I was just about to establish a transposer connection. You see, the explosion a few moments ago—"
"—took out the palace's sensor-confusion installation," Garth finished for him.
The rabbit-faced man frowned momentarily, as though the voice from behind the faceplate awoke a memory. "Yes. Quite. So you'll appreciate that it is now possible for a transposition to be performed from outside. And I'm prepared to allow you to transpose with me, in exchange for my life. That's the only way off this palace before it falls. Because, you see—"
"—the pressor beam projectors have been destroyed," Garth interposed again. "And the one contragrav generator holding us up is going to fail any time."
This time the frown intensified. "You seem very well-informed. Who are you? Your voice sounds vaguely familiar."
"It should—although it's been six years now. Think back. The time Liang's fleet attacked Sol."
Understanding slowly awoke in Damiano Chewning's face. "No," he whispered, staring at Garth's faceplate as though he could see behind it.
"Yes."
Chewning's tongue darted out like a frightened animal and he licked his lips. He managed to keep his voice steady. "Look, General Krona, let's be sensible. When this is over, Teodor Brady-Schiavona is going to be Emperor. And I control him! You have no idea what I'll be able to offer you! I can—" Chewning's voice box froze into immobility along with the rest of his voluntary muscles at the touch of the paralysis beam. He toppled forward like a conscious statue. His nose and teeth hit the floor with an impact he couldn't in any way soften. He also couldn't scream.
Garth dropped the paralyzer and opened his faceplate with the free hand. Then he used a foot to roll Chewning over onto his back. He gazed silently into the bloody face for a moment.
Chewning could move his eyes only with great slowness. But they were pointed in the right direction to see the orifice of the plasma gun coming into line.
The vast cityscape of Dracopolis was unfolding below, and the palace was looming up ahead and to the left. Teodor barely noticed how far north his flight had brought him. He was trying to keep from sobbing as he fled.
He still couldn't comprehend what he'd seen. Who had piloted the mysterious aircraft that had attacked the pressor-beam installations? And what was the point of their attack, when the palace's contragrav generators would hold it up anyway?
He might have deduced the truth, given the leisure to think it through. But the pursuer who had appeared from out of the glare of his own warheads had dogged him relentlessly, despite the evasive maneuvers that had carried them over the city.
Now, with the ocean showing cobalt blue beyond the tall buildings that lined the esplanade like a barricade, it belatedly occurred to him that a surrender might be accepted.
Yes! That was it. All he had to do was reach the ground alive. Father would understand.
Frantically, he hailed the pursuing craft on the universal Fleet frequency.
He was just completing his authenticator when the AF-4's brain squealed that it had been acquired by targeting radar. A split second later, before he could react, it announced that the pursuing craft had launched a missile.
At appreciably the same instant, his communicator activated, and he saw his hunter's face on a holographically projected display screen identical to the one on which the other was seeing his. And for a moment the two brothers wore identical expressions of horror-stricken recognition.
A high-pitched warning from Teodor's craft shattered the moment. The missile, about which he'd forgotten in that timeless moment, was about to impact. Acting without thinking, he wrenched the AF-4 into a tight turn. But the doomed craft's wail—it couldn't really be one of terror, for this wasn't a sentient computer—went on. Convulsively, he jabbed the seat ejector.
He was barely clear when the missile detonated, and the thermal bloom from the explosion sent him tumbling across the sky. He was stunned, but his gravchute activated itself automatically. Only then did he become aware of the pain, where a chunk of debris had struck his left foot.
The Imperial Guardsman peered cautiously around the doorframe's edge. Emboldened, he stepped out into the opening, gauss rifle at high port. It was all Janille needed. Pivoting around from where she'd stood flat against the other side of the wall, she sent his weapon flying with a flying side-kick. As she landed, she brought her paralyzer up with a fluid motion and shot him full in the face. Then, from a crouch, she quickly surveyed the antechamber beyond. Finding it empty, she stood up and motioned what was left of Squad Beta to follow her toward the ornate door in the opposite wall.
She was about to give an order to the plasma gunner, but it wasn't necessary. The door slid open. A tall, massively built man stepped out. He wore a plain gray uniform—or at least it would have seemed plain to anyone who hadn't known what the small golden dragon that was its sole ornamentation meant.
Janille realized that, like everyone else in the squad, she had come to a halt under the frown of that craggy face.
"What's the meaning of this, Colonel?" The deep voice was quiet and controlled, nothing like the bellow Janille had expected. But, without intending to, she came to a position of attention.
"Sir," she addressed him, for they were both in uniform, "the gravitic devices keeping this palace aloft have been sabotaged by conspirators. It is imperative that you get off it."
The gray eyes narrowed. "What `conspirators'? Who's behind this? And under what authority are you acting?"
Janille gulped. She'd known the question was unavoidable. And she couldn't answer it—not now, when they hadn't a minute to waste. The truth about Teodor's involvement would have been so unacceptable as to render Ivar unable to believe what he must believe: the urgency of his situation. "Sir, that's unimportant now. The point is that the palace is going to fall any minute. Your daughter is now in orbit overhead, prepared to transpose you up."
The Emperor's eyebrows shot up, furrowing the forehead under the bald crown. "Maura? She's involved in this? But she can't locate a transposer focus in here!"
"She can now, sir. The palace's sensor-confusion devices have also been sabotaged." Garth had communicated the news to her just before her squad had reached the innermost Imperial apartments. He'd told her to force her way through those last few corridors a little faster than was humanly possible, while he directed Maura to pick up all the Deathstriders he could locate. The others were sprinting for the landing flange and Aline Tatsumo's aircar.
"What about Teodor?" the Emperor demanded. "And Roderick—he's just returning from Cronus. They must be targets too! You must save them first!"
"Your sons aren't in the palace, sir." True, as far as it goes, Janille told herself. "Don't worry about them. It's your life that's in danger. We must move without delay!"
The Emperor's lips thinned into a straight line of stubbornness. "I will not be sent running from my own palace by any conspiracy—especially without knowing the whereabouts of my sons. And not at the behest of an officer who has forced her way into my apartments, and whose own role is far from clear!"
For a moment that seemed longer than it was, Janille met the eyes of the man she'd respected even before he'd become her Emperor. Then, without actually pointing it at him, she raised her paralyzer. From behind her, she heard the hiss of Squad Beta's collective indrawn breath.
"Your Imperial Majesty," she said very quietly, "you must go . . . one way or another."
Their eye contact remained unbroken, as Ivar's expression went from mulishness to tightly controlled outrage, and finally to grudging respect. He gave a small, wordless nod.
Janille stepped beside him. She gestured to her squad, and they fell in around the pair in a tight clump.
"Wait!" Everyone froze at the tone in the Emperor's voice. He looked Janille in the eye and pointed to the Guardsman she had paralyzed, lying in the doorway.
Janille gulped. "Of course, sir." She motioned to two of her men. They ran to the motionless form and carried it back to the magic circle of the transposer focus. Only then did she take out her communicator. "Maura? This is Janille. I'm with him. Get us out now. And then get Garth. He refused to budge until we had the Emperor."
"Right," came Maura's voice. "We've got your link located. Powering up now."
"Acknowledged. Signing off." Janille made an adjustment to her communicator. "Garth? We've got him. Stand by to be transposed immediately, you big—"
Before she could finish, the antechamber was empty. For a few moments, all was still. Then, loose objects jumped as the floor began to drop.
Teodor had come down on the esplanade, amid the rubble of the pressor beam projectors. Not another living soul was in sight as he dragged himself painfully away from the gravchute. One of the attacking aircraft had crashed on the beach below, and its smoking ruin added to the vista of deserted desolation.
He forced himself not to give in to the agony of his shattered left foot. He had to find someone who could help him. He got to his feet, sobbing with pain and self-pity, and began to hobble toward the nearest building.
The sun went in.
Odd, he thought. There haven't been any clouds all day.
But this shadow was too dark to be that of a cloud. It was more like an eclipse.
He looked up. The palace was overhead, of course. But it was never supposed to cast a shadow on the land.
Then he realized it was filling more of the sky than it should. And it filled still more of it even as the realization formed in his mind.
He broke into a clinically impossible run. He heard himself screaming, only partly from the transcendent pain of his foot, whose broken bones ground audibly together with every lurching, hobbling step.
With an indescribable sound of rending metal, the tops of the high-rise buildings began to crumple under the descending tonnage.
Teodor's hysterical pain suppression gave way, and his left leg collapsed under him. As he rolled on the ground, he had time to look up again.
The downrushing palace filled the entire sky. It filled the entire universe.