And then Mahoney had sent him back to Vulcan with
Kilgour and the rest of his Mantis Team. Mission: destroy the man who killed Sten's family.
His first great success. In the course of that destruction, Sten, three ETs and three humans, including Ida the Gypsy, had created and led a planetwide revolution.
That minirising brought in the Imperial Guard, and Sten's team came out, Sten himself on a life-support system.
He had never found out what happened afterward to Vulcan. And he had never wanted to know. He assumed that new management had come in Vulcan as an only slightly less lethal factory.
Evidently not, he thought, looking at the shambles in front of him. Or, anyway, not for very long. Even if it was needed for defense during the Tahn war, the privy-council era would have made Vulcan unprofitable—AM2 had simply become too rare and expensive to waste running a heavy-industry vacuum-based plant.
Vulcan had been abandoned, looted, and gutted. At its height it resembled a junkyard anyway—factories, quarters, and warehouses had been built, used, and discarded without being wrecked out.
But now it looked as if the gods of Chaos had looked on man's work, found it amateurish, and decided to improve matters.
Somewhere in this scatter would be—or so Sten hoped— whatever secret Mahoney had guided him toward.
At first, when Sten considered Mahoney's cryptic shout, he had thought of Smallbridge—the world Sten had bought some years earlier that was the only home he had ever known, besides Imperial Service.
Improbable. If Mahoney meant "home" to be something useful to Sten—best theory: a weapon against the Emperor—he would not have stashed it in a place known to Sten's friends and enemies. Plus, to the best of Sten's knowledge, Mahoney had been on Smallbridge exactly once, and that was to warn him the privy council's goon squad was on its way. Not exactly time enough to build a hidey-hole.
No—not Smallbridge. It was far too obvious—even considering a purloined-letter device—for an Irisher as subtle as Mahoney.
And so Sten had forced himself to look up the interstellar coordinates to Vulcan and issue the orders. Even if nothing is here, he thought, this is an adequate temporary hideout. Destroy-ing Thoresen had been a nonrecord Highest Authority mission, which meant Vulcan's importance and its relation to the Grand Traitor wouldn't show up, even on Sten's fairly accurate, highly classified Mantis file. Sten, experienced soldier that he was, was operating on the assumption that Mahoney's trick program hadn't worked and the Empire knew everything.
Of course, there's yet another possibility, his mind went on, spinning further into the double- triple-quadruple-think that eventually drives all counterintelligence types into the gaga ward. If the Emperor's got a real fine memory, and has put together his own private termination file, then he's just liable to remember the orders to destroy that mysterious Bravo Project on Sten's home world.
"Lad?"
Sten came back to the present thankfully, before he took this feedback nonthinking any further and attempted to disappear down his own throat.
"Ah dinnae want to seem like Ah'm noodgin‘, but i's gettin' on, ‘n Ah'm noo lookin't forward't' bein't a Resurrection Man. Shall we be gettin‘ at it?"
The Mantis soldiers who had died on Vulcan—Jorgensen, Frick, Frack—had been friends of Kilgour's as well. Alex himself had almost died, defusing a nuke.
Sten nodded, then realized there was no way Alex could see the gesture through the thick alloy helmet.
"Let's move."
He touched controls and sent his suit jetting forward, on its tiny Yukawa drive, toward the main clump of wreckage— Vulcan's central core.
He was probably being foolish, but rather than use one of the deep-space worksuits—which were really small spaceships with a tiny bicycle-type seat and room enough to scratch when and where it inevitably itched—he and Kilgour had corseted themselves into fighting armor.
Vulcan, he had rationalized, might still have a McLean generator on, and some gravity. Or maybe its whirling bulk would give some weight, and it would be better walking rather than trying to fly the canister-shaped deep-space suits through the corridors.
Behind him the Victory hung, with the destroyer Aoife as screen. He had ordered the Bennington and Aisling to proceed directly to Sten's eventual final destination, after his minifleet had spent several ship-days after the raid pursuing nonrational trajectories, eluding pursuit.
Beyond the Victory he also had a full flotilla of tacships on CAP around Vulcan.
A trap was unlikely.
But Sten had not lived to his present age without being careful, native caution his training had amplified. One commandment, going back into prehistory and old Earth, was from an odd unit called Rogers' Rangers—"Don't never take no chances unless you have to."
The question now was, Where in this scrapheap was he to look?
"Sten." It was Freston, back aboard Victory. He had demoted himself from captain to man the com board and was sitting on an open-miked tightbeam caster to the suited men.
"I've got a transmission."
"Where?"
"From Vulcan. A very weak broadband signal's coming from the core. Weak, and erratic. Like an SAR beacon that's running dry. I've gotten a triangulation from the Aoife. On your orientation, it's at twelve o'clock, near the tip."
"That was called the Eye," Sten advised. "Stand by."
He braked the suit, killing velocity and steering toward Alex, aiming himself so his suit's own directional com pointed directly toward Kilgour.
"Ah heard," Alex said, without preamble. "An* thae raises more sarky questions thae i‘ answers. If Mahoney left somethin' aboot, p'raps he'd bolt a wee transponder to it. T‘ make life simpler f'r us.
"But Mahoney whidny hae left i‘ runnin', i‘ i's a truly deepy darky secret, aye? He would'a keyed it't' go off frae somethin‘ or someone when thae got close. Playin' Cold an‘ Warm wi' the bairns, as it were. Nae't‘ mention battery life an' such, which i‘ Preston's watchin' his gauges, seems to be runnin't doon."
"Possibly," Sten agreed. "Which means that somebody else set it off."
"Wi'out knowin‘ it or wi'out bein' able to retrieve th‘ goodies. Or th' whole thing's boobytrapped an‘ th' mad bomber had nae th‘ patience't' let us find his handiwork blind an‘ then blowin't ourselves oop."
"Right. Which gives us something to really worry about— once we're onboard."
"Aye. Noo. Home's been narrowed, assumin't we're thinkin't correct, an‘ yon beepitybeepity's noo a wild signal frae some bit ae forsook electronics."
"Agreed. Home's somewhere in the Eye. Something that we knew about. Or I did, anyway. Our hideout—that old liner—was around there. Nope. DNC. Mahoney wouldn't know about that. Maybe his old office, when he was spying out the land, pretending to be a recruiter? Maybe—but that does not compute easily, either. Mahoney wouldn't chance us remembering where it was, which I don't... Oh clot," Sten said.
"Aye. Th‘ main man. Duke, or Dynast, or wha'e'er he'd dubbed himself."
"Baron. Thoresen." That name he'd never forget. In a final duel, Sten had taken on the murderer of his family barehanded— and killed him.
His quarters had been just at the top of the Eye, in a palatial dome that covered Thoresen's office, garden, and quarters.
"That's it. But we'll not go in direct. Nor hang up here being big fat targets anymore."
Sten put full drive on his suit and, Kilgour in his wake, eye-calculated a trajectory that would intersect Vulcan just above the old ship-porting area. He would not chance that dockyard—that was too easy to booby-trap.