Heirs of Empire

stairwell door, and he drew his grav gun and reached for the latch. He gripped it firmly and yanked the door open, then relaxed. It was only a dog, one of Empress Jiltanith’s.

But Oscar Sanders’s relief vanished suddenly, and his gun snapped back up as he realized the dog was covered with blood. He almost squeezed the trigger, but his brain caught up with his instincts first. The dog was not only covered with blood; one of its forelegs was a mangled stub, and the door was slick with blood where the injured animal had tried repeatedly to spring the crash bar latch with its remaining leg.

It took only a fraction of a second for Sanders’ stunned brain to put all that together—and then, with a sudden burst of horror, to remember whose dog this was. He jerked back, a thousand questions flaring through his mind, and that was when the strangest thing of all happened.

“Help!” Gaheris’s vocoder said just before he collapsed. “Men come to kill Jiltanith! Help her!”

* * *

Vlad Chernikov turned the last corner, and the magnificent statue stood before him. Even now he felt a stir of awe for its beauty, but he hadn’t come to admire it, and he advanced cautiously.

The shaped charge on his back seemed to take on weight with every stride. It was silly, of course. He was already well inside a Mark Ninety’s interdiction perimeter; if the thing was going to decide the charge was a weapon, it would already have blown up the planet.

That, unfortunately, made him feel no less naked and vulnerable, and he missed his implants’ ability to manipulate his adrenaline level as he stepped around the inert scanner remote still lying where it had fallen when Dahak hastily deactivated it.

He moved to within two meters of the sculpture and studied it carefully. The problem was that his weapon was insufficient to reduce the entire statue to gravel, so he had to be certain that whatever bit he chose to blow up contained the bomb. And since neither he nor Dahak could scan the thing, he could only try to estimate where the bomb was.

It would help, he thought irritably, if they knew its dimensions. It was tempting to assume they’d used Tsien’s blueprints without alteration, but if that assumption proved inaccurate, the consequences would be extreme.

Well, there were certain constraints Mister X’s bomb-makers couldn’t avoid. The primary emitter, for example, had to be at least two meters long and twenty centimeters in diameter, and the focusing coils would each add another thirty centimeters to the emitter’s length. That gave him a minimum length of two hundred sixty centimeters, which meant the bomb couldn’t be inside the human half of the statue. It would have had to be in his torso, and while the Marine was more than life-sized, he wasn’t that much larger, so the bomb itself had to be inside the Narhani. Unfortunately, the Narhani was big enough that the thing could be oriented at any of several angles, and he couldn’t afford to miss. Of course, the power source for the bomb was a fair-sized target all on its own, and the designers had had to squeeze in the Mark 90, too. They’d undoubtedly put at least part of the hardware inside the Marine, but which part?

They’d counted on the bomb’s never being detected, Vlad thought, so they probably hadn’t considered the need to design it to sustain damage and still function, which might mean the power source was inside the Marine and the rest of the hardware was inside the Narhani. That was a seductively attractive supposition, but again, he couldn’t afford to guess wrong.

He stepped even closer to the statue, considering the angle of the Narhani’s body as it reared against its chains. All right, the bomb wasn’t inside the human and it was the next best thing to three meters long. It couldn’t be placed vertically in the Narhani’s torso, either, because there wasn’t enough length. It could be partly inside the torso and angled down into the body’s barrel, though. The arch of the Narhani’s spine would make that placement tricky, but it was feasible.

He rocked back on his heels and wiped sweat from his forehead as the unhappy conclusion forced itself upon him. The possible bomb dimensions simply left too many possibilities. To be certain, he had to split the statue cleanly in two, and to be sure the break came within the critical length, he’d have to come up from below.

He sighed, wishing he dared activate his com implant to consult with Dahak, then shrugged. He couldn’t, and even if he could have, he already knew what Dahak would say.

He wiped his forehead one more time, took the bomb from his back, and bent cautiously to edge it under the marble Narhani’s belly.

* * *

The last exchange of fire faded into silence, and Brigadier Jourdain’s mouth was a bitter, angry line. Ten more of his men lay dead around the head of the ruined stairs. Two more were down, one so badly mangled only his implants kept him alive, and they wouldn’t do that much longer, but at least they’d accounted for the last two Marines.

He glared at the closed door to the foyer of Horus’s office and cranked his implant sensors to maximum power. Damn it, he knew the Governor was in there somewhere, but the cunning old bastard must have shut his implants down, like the Marines covering that first stairwell. As long as he stayed put without moving, Jourdain couldn’t pick him up without implant emissions.

Well, there were drawbacks to that sort of game, the brigadier told himself grimly. If Horus had his implants down, he couldn’t see Jourdain or his men, either. He was limited to his natural senses. That ought to make him a bit slower off the mark when he opened fire, and even if he’d found an ambush position to let him get the first few men through the door, he’d reveal his position to the others the instant he fired.

“All right,” the brigadier said to his seven remaining men. “Here’s how we’re going to do this.”

* * *

Franklin Detmore ripped off another burst of grenades and grimaced. Whoever that Marine up there was, he was too damned good for Detmore’s taste. The ten men assigned to mop him up had been reduced to five, and Detmore was delighted to be the only remaining grenadier. He vastly preferred laying down covering fire to being the next poor son-of-a-bitch to rush the bastard.

He fed a fresh belt into his launcher and looked up. Luis Esteben was the senior man, and he looked profoundly unhappy. Their orders were to leave no witnesses; sooner or later, someone was going to have to go in after the last survivor, and Esteben had a sinking suspicion who Brigadier Jourdain was going to pick for the job if he hadn’t gotten it done by the time the Brigadier got here.

“All right,” he said finally. “We’re not going to take this bastard out with a frontal assault.” His fellows nodded, and he bared his teeth at their relieved expressions. “What we need to do is get in behind him.”

“We can’t. That’s a blind corridor,” someone pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’s got walls, and we’ve got energy guns,” Esteben pointed out. “Frank, you keep him busy, and the rest of us’ll go back and circle around to get into the conference room next door. We can blow through the wall from there and flank him out.”

“Suits me,” Detmore agreed, “but—” He broke off and his eyes widened. “What the hell is that?” he demanded, staring back up the corridor.

Esteben was still turning when Galahad and Gawain exploded into the Security men’s rear.

* * *

Vlad settled the charge delicately and sighed in relief. He was still alive; that was the good news. The bad news was that he couldn’t be certain this was going to work … and there was only one way to find out.

He set the timer, turned, and ran like hell.

* * *