Heirs of Empire

indicated it was under-reading by about two hundred meters. That was enough to put it into the ridge, but when I did a little discreet checking, no one seemed to know who Cruz’s family had been visiting. I did a computer search of Earth’s credit transactions—as a BuShips employee, he and his wife both held Fleet cards—and I couldn’t find a single transaction for Elena Cruz on Earth.

“I can’t prove it wasn’t an ‘accident,’ but there are too many coincidences. Especially—” Ninhursag’s hands went back behind her, clenched about one another, and her voice was very, very quiet “—when Vincente Cruz was assistant project chief for Imperial Terra’s cybernetics.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Colin whispered, and she nodded coldly.

“I haven’t checked his work logs yet—that comes next—but I’m already certain what I’m going to find,” she said, and this time Colin understood her murderous fury perfectly.

Chapter Twelve

The mood around the conference table was very different this time.

” … so there’s a fifteen-minute hole in his work log,” Ninhursag said, “smack in the middle of his work on Terra’s core software. Unfortunately, there are eight other holes, from just under a minute to almost an hour long, in the same log, and we’ve found an intermittent defect in his terminal that looks completely normal.” Her curled lip showed what she thought of that.

“But why?” Horus asked softly. “I don’t question your conclusions, ’Hursag, but in the Maker’s name, why?”

“We can’t prove ‘why’ until we know ‘who,’ ” Ninhursag’s voice was harsh, “but I see only two motives. Destroy Imperial Terra, one, because of what she was—our most powerful warship—or, two, because of who was aboard.”

“Sean and Harry,” Colin grated, and Ninhursag nodded.

“Whoever set this up went to tremendous lengths—and ran tremendous risks. What else could his objective have been?”

“Sweet Jesu,” Jiltanith whispered. “Full eighty thousand people and the children of our dearest friends to kill my babes?” Her face was drawn, but more than despair burned in her black eyes, and her knuckles were white about the hilt of the dagger she always wore.

“Bastards!” Hector MacMahan’s stylus snapped in his hand. He looked down at the broken pieces and slowly and carefully crushed each of them between enhanced fingertips.

“Agreed,” Colin’s voice was ice, “but the other kids may have been targets as well. Look how it’s affected all of us. ’Hursag blames herself for ‘slacking off,’ but have any of us done better? And whoever the son-of-a-bitch is, he damned well knew what it would do to us!”

“I must agree,” Tsien said. Amanda nodded beside him, eyes smoking, and he touched her hand where it lay upon the table. “Yet I am also certain ’Hursag’s other deduction is equally correct. Whoever did this must have a powerful organization and penetration at the highest levels. Without such an organization he could not have acted; without such penetration he could have known neither which ship to attack nor whom to use for that attack.”

“Agreed,” Gerald Hatcher sounded even grimmer. “They had to pick someone with access who was also vulnerable. Anybody this ruthless might have popped one of his own people to cut the chain of evidence, but why kill an entire family? No, they knew exactly which poor bastard to pick, held his family hostage to make him play, then killed them all to cover their tracks.”

“There’s another pointer.” Adrienne Robbins’ voice was cold; Algys McNeal had been her friend, and twenty more of her midshipmen had been aboard Imperial Terra. “Cruz didn’t pop a single security flag. He must have known how small a chance he had of getting them back alive, but he went for it without telling anyone. He never even tried to get help, so maybe he knew they had enough penetration to know if he’d talked to any of ’Hursag’s people.”

Cold, bitter silence enveloped the council room, then Colin nodded.

“All right. There’s someone out there cold enough to murder an entire family and eighty thousand of our people, and I want the son-of-a-bitch. How do we get him?”

“Dust off the lie detectors and put everybody—and I mean everybody—on them,” MacMahan grated.

“We can’t,” Horus said. Eyes turned to him, and he shrugged. “If we’re right about how far we’ve been penetrated, the bad guys—whoever they are—will know the instant we start that. If they’re our own people, well and good; all they can do is run and identify themselves for us. But if they’re tapped in from the outside, they’ll be operating through a blizzard of cutouts, and whoever’s really in charge will just pull in his horns. If he disengages, we may never get another shot at him.”

“It’s worse than that,” Colin sighed. “We don’t have ‘probable cause’ for that kind of sweep.”

“Bullshit!” MacMahan snarled. “This is a security matter. We can pull in anybody in uniform we want to!”

“No, we can’t.” MacMahan started to speak again, but Colin raised a hand. “Hold it, Hector. Just wait a minute. Goddamn it, I want this bastard as badly as you do, but think about it. We know ’Hursag’s right, but there’s not a single piece of hard evidence. Everything except the disappearance of Cruz’s family is covered by plausible ‘technical failures.’ And while it’s true his family did disappear from our records, that by itself doesn’t prove a thing. No law requires people to report their whereabouts to us—our subjects are also free citizens. The fact that we don’t know where they were actually works against us; Cruz never indicated they were being held against their will, and if we don’t even know where they were, we can hardly prove they were prisoners!

“Even if we could, we’d have to be very specific about who we questioned. The Charter provides no protection against self-incrimination, so we can ask anything we like under a lie detector … but only in a court. That particular civil right is absolutely guaranteed specifically because there’s no protection against self-incrimination.

“Now, you’re right that we can question anyone in uniform as long as we make it a security matter, but we still have to furnish them and their counsel with a list of areas we intend to cover—approved by a judge—before we start asking. There’s no way we could process legal paperwork on the scale we need without its coming to the attention of anyone with the sources to target Cruz, and what happens when our Mister X finds out about it? We don’t want his sources, Hector—we want him.”

MacMahan looked rebellious, but he subsided with a muttered curse and a grudging nod. Colin was glad to see it, and even gladder to see the life flowing back into his eyes as he realized he had an enemy. Sandy’s death was no longer a senseless act by an uncaring universe. Hector had someone besides God to hate, and perhaps that would bring those inner barricades down.

“Very well, then,” Tsien said, “what steps shall we take?”

“First we start taking security real serious,” Amanda said. “Whoever went after the kids may be religious nuts, anarchists, out of their fucking minds, or planning a coup, but they don’t get you two—or Horus—by God!”

“Damn straight,” Adrienne approved amid a snarl of agreement, and Colin swallowed. He heard their hunger to destroy whoever had done this to them, but these weren’t just his senior officers or angry, bereaved parents. These were friends, determined to protect him and Jiltanith.

“For Colin and ’Tanni, yes,” Horus said after a moment, “but not me.” Colin raised his eyebrows, and the old man shrugged. “We can reinforce your security quietly, but we can’t slap armed guards all over White Tower. Your ‘Mister X’ could hardly miss that.”

“Nay, Father! Shalt not risk thyself thus!”

“Oh, hush, ’Tanni! Who’d want to kill me? Unless we’re talking about a total maniac, and I don’t think we are, given how smoothly this whole thing went down, what possible motive could he have? Maybe after they got the two of you I’d become a target—not before.”

“I believe Horus has a point, ’Tanni,” Dahak put in. “While it is possible this was a crime of hate and not of