“No plan, no matter how carefully wrought, is infallible. You have made miscalculations.”
LaNague's heated response was reflexive. “Where? When? Aren't we right on schedule? Isn't everything going according to plan?”
“Was Josef's death in the plan?”
“If you had trusted me a little more,” he said, hiding the searing pain those words caused him, “we wouldn't have this threat hanging over our heads now.”
“If you hadn't insisted on keeping Broohnin around against the advice of everyone else concerned-”
“We needed him at first. And…and I thought I could change him…bring him around.”
“You failed. And Josef is dead because of it.”
“I'm sorry, Kanya.”
“So am I,” the Flinter woman replied coldly. “But I'll see to it that he causes no further harm.” Her shoulders angled as she reached for the control switch on her vid.
“Don't kill him,” LaNague said. “He's been through a lot with us…helped us. And after all, he didn't actually fire the blast that killed Josef.”
Kanya's face flashed up briefly, inscrutably, then her image faded. LaNague slumped back in his chair. She had a right to hate him as much as she did Broohnin. He was responsible, ultimately, for Josef's death. He was responsible for all of Broohnin's folly, and for his eventual demise at Kanya's hands should she decide to kill him. She could certainly feel justified in exacting her vengeance…Broohnin seemed to be acting like a mad dog.
All his fault, really. All of it. How had he managed to be so stupid? He and Broohnin had shared a common goal-the downfall of the Imperium. He had thought that could lead to greater common ground. Yet it hadn't, and it was too clear now that there had never been the slimmest hope of that happening. There was no true common ground. Never had been.
Never could be.
At first he had likened the differences between Broohnin and himself to the differences between Flinters and Tolivians. Both cultures had started out with a common philosophy, Kyfho, and had a common goal, absolute individual sovereignty. Yet the differences were now so great. Tolivians preferred to back away from a threat, to withdraw to a safer place, to fight only when absolutely necessary: leave us alone or we'll move away. The Flinters had a bolder approach; although threatening no one, they were willing to do battle at the first sign of aggression against them: leave us alone or else. Yet the two cultures had worked well together, now that Tolive had finally decided to fight.
He had once thought a similar rapprochement possible with Broohnin; had at one point actually considered the possibility of convincing Broohnin to surrender himself to the Imperium as Robin Hood, just as LaNague was about to do.
He smiled ruefully to himself. Had he been a fool, or had he deluded himself into believing what was safest and most convenient to believe? In truth, he wished someone-anyone-else were sitting here now in this empty warehouse waiting for the Imperial Guard to break in and arrest him. The thought of giving himself over to the Imperium, of prison, locked in a cell, trapped…it made him shake. Yet it had to be done…one more thing that had to be done…Another part of the plan, the most important part. And he could ask no one else to take his place.
Wouldn't be long now. He slid his chair into the middle of the bare expanse of the warehouse floor and sat, his hands folded calmly before him, presenting an image of utter peace and tranquility. The officers in charge of the search-and-seizure force would be doing their best to whip their men up to a fever pitch. After all, they were assaulting the stronghold of the notorious Robin Hood, and there was no telling what lay in store for them within.
LaNague sat motionless and waited, assuming a completely nonthreatening pose. He didn't want anyone to do anything rash.
“IT IS UTTERLY IMPERATIVE that he be taken alive. Is that clear? Every task assigned to the Imperial Guard today has been a catastrophic failure. This is a final chance for the Guard to prove its worth. If you fail this time, there may not be another chance-for any of us!”
Haworth paused in his tirade, hoping he was striking the right chord. He had threatened, he had cajoled; if he had thought tears would work, he'd have somehow dredged them up. He had to get across to Commander Tinmer the crucial nature of what they were about to do.
“If the man inside is truly Robin Hood, and the warehouse is his base of operations-and all indications are that it may very well be-he must be taken alive, and every scrap of evidence that links him with Robin Hood must be collected and brought in with him. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: he must be taken alive, even at the risk of Guard lives.”
Lacking anything more to say, or a clearer, more forceful way of saying it, Haworth let Tinmer, who had taken personal command of the Robin Hood capture mission, fade from the screen. He turned to Metep and found him deep in drugged sleep in his chair, an empty gas vial on the floor beside him.
Haworth shook his head in disgust as he found his own chair and sank into it. Metep VII, elected leader of the Outworld Imperium, was falling apart faster than his domain. And with good reason. He, Haworth, and the other powers within the Imperium had spent their lives trying to mold out-world society along the lines of their own vision, no matter how the clay protested. And had been largely successful. After establishing a firm power base, they had been on the verge of achieving a level of control at which they could influence virtually every facet of out-world life. It was a heady brew, that kind of power. One taste led to a craving for more…and more.
Now it was all being taken away. And Jek Milian, so at home in his powerful role as Metep, was suffering acute withdrawal. The Imperium had gradually stolen control of the out-worlds from the people who lived on them, and now that control was, in turn, being stolen from it. Everything was going crazy. Why? Had it all been circumstance, or had it been planned this way? Haworth bristled at the idea that some individual or some group had been able to disrupt so completely everything he had striven to build. He wanted to believe that it had all been circumstance-needed to believe it.
And yet…there was a feather-light sensation at the far end of his mind, an ugly worm of an idea crawling around in the dark back there that whispered conspiracy… events had followed too direct a pattern…conspiracy… situations that should have taken years to gestate were coming to term in weeks or months…conspiracy… and every damaging event or detrimental situation consistently occurring at the worst possible time, always synergistically potentiating the ill effect of the previous event…conspiracy…
If it were conspiracy, there was only one possible agent: the man who had mocked the Imperium, derided it, made it look foolish time after time, and eluded capture at every turn-Robin Hood.
And it was possible-just possible-that the man or men known as Robin Hood would be in custody tonight. That bothered him a little. Why now? Why, when it looked as if all was lost, did they get a tip on the whereabouts of Robin Hood? Was this yet another part of the conspiracy against the Imperium?
He slammed his hand against the armrest of his chair. That was not a healthy thought trend. That sort of thinking left you afraid to act. If you began to see everything as conspiracy, if you thought every event was planned and calculated to manipulate you, you wound up in a state of paralysis. No…Robin Hood had finally made a mistake. One of his minions had had a falling out with him or had become otherwise disaffected and had betrayed him. That was it.