"There won't be any."
"Hoo. You weren't listening... by the way, what the clot do I call you? Besides ‘sir'? I mean, what's your post-rebellion rank? Leader? Hero? I assume you've given yourself more tabs than just clottin‘ Admiral."
‘Try Sten. No rank. No 'sir.‘ "
"Right. Anyway, you're saying the Empire lets its goodies travel unescorted?"
"I am."
"Sten, I gotta question how good your skinny is."
"You can question the intelligence and you can ask, La Ciotat. But you aren't going to get an answer. Need-to-know and all that."
La Ciotat stared at Sten for a long moment. "I'm not hot for your carcass," she finally said. "Nor needing any kind of an adrenaline rush. But I'm thinking I'm gonna be party to this silly-ass operation. So it's gotta be that I was born twins, and Momma said drown the dumb one and Daddy blew it. Okay, skipper. I'll brief my crew.
"They're gonna love this. Fearless Volunteers Into the Valley of Slok and all that. One of these years I gotta ask them before I toss them into the crapper, I guess."
Just beyond the dead system, Sten, La Ciotat, and her crew boarded the tacship, the Sterns. The com link was opened between the Aoife, the Sterns, and the Bhor ELINT ship, the
Heomt, still monitoring from its silent parking orbit not too far off the relay-station world.
And then they waited.
La Ciotat, as was her custom before battle, retired to the tiny cubbyhole that was the captain's cabin, which meant on a tacship a closet-size room with a pulldown desk. But a cabin for all of that—there was a drawcurtain that everyone on a tacship called a door. She depilled from head to foot and bathed in water she had brought over from the Aoife's supply, water that had been augmented with aromatic oils from her home world. She painted her face in the ancestral battlepattern of her house, and then cleared her mind of evil, of lust, of desires.
She was ready for battle.
She wondered what Sten—who occupied the only other cabin on the tacship—formerly belonging to the XO and engineer, given up at their request—was doing. What customs did his world practice? If any?
She considered the possibility of imminent nonexistence. And the ramifications if she were to pull on a wrap, slip through the curtain, walk two meters to the next compartment, tap politely, and...
She caught herself. She went through the exercises again, forcibly clearing lust or ambition from her mind.
Besides, what was she worrying about, knowing that the void only beckoned her enemies, not her? She put on a fresh flightsuit and tried to sleep.
Sten, in the next compartment, slept deeply. Woke. Ate. Thinking of nothing except the taste of what he had put in his mouth, the hum of the air freshers in the background, the drone of the ship's internal power, the small jokes and large laughter at the mess table, as all thirteen beings on the Sterns waited for battle, trying not to snarl at or massacre the being beside them.
He slept once more. Perhaps he dreamed.
If he did, his mind chose not to record them when he woke to the yammer of the GQ siren.
He glanced at the overhead telltale. It was less than four ship-days since he had arrived insystem. Freston might have crystal balls and talent beyond that of being a mere battleship commander.
Heomt: "All stations! I have incoming—"
Aoife: "At battle stations!"
Sterns: "We have them."
Sten, from Sterns: "All stations! Maintain silence!"
The three ships watched the huge convoy bulk out of hyper-space toward them.
AM2. Twice the size of the convoy the rebels had ambushed off Dusable.
A com officer on the Heorot picked up a convoy relay-station blurt—a response to the convoy's initial inquiry from the planet He resisted a temptation to run an analysis. Instead, he reported the transmission.
"All stations," Sten said calmly. "All recorders, all sensors on full. Stand by... stand by... stand by... Now! Captain! Full drive!"
La Ciotat obeyed. The Stems flashed toward the monster convoy.
The com officer on the Heorot "saw" the convoy panic. Nothing physical happened, but the convoy began broadcasting on many frequencies.
"Ms. La Ciotat," Sten went on, "I would like a Kali launch... individual control... area target... convoy on main screen... on my command..."
"Ms. Castaglione," Hannelore said in turn to her weapons officer.
"Acquired___"
‘Target acquired, sir."
"Launch," Sten ordered.
"Fire."
The huge shipkilling missile lurched out of the center firing tube of the Sterns.
Screens flashed on the Heorot.
"We have a convoy-station ‘cast," the Bhor corn officer reported. "We have a response from the relay station... direction unknown, power strength massive... we have a signal transmitted on EM subspectrum... unclassifiable single spectrum... computers suggest between Omicron Sub Two and Xeta Three... no known previous use of spectrum by any known—by the clottin' beard of my clottin‘ mother?"
The fairly irregular interjection from the com officer occurred as his screens told him that the entire convoy had committed seppuku, a monstrous blast as if a star had gone nova! The explosion was beyond even the cataclysm that had resulted when the smaller AM2 convoy off Dusable had been hit by the Victory's Kalis.
A second later, another screen showed him the robot relay station on the dead planet had also self-destructed.
Aboard the Stems all screens overloaded and blew out.
Finally, one emergency screen cleared. It was a tertiary screen, ‘casting from the Kali missile. It showed a great deal of nothing. Castaglione ran the pickup through all available bands.
Nothing but parsecs and parsecs of parsecs and parsecs.
La Ciotat forced herself to appear quite calm, as if a thousand-ship convoy suddenly blew itself up in her sights every E-day or so.
"All right," she grudged. "Your intelligence is One-A. But what a piddle-poor excuse for a battle this was."
Sten didn't answer immediately. Instead, he picked up the open mike on the three-way circuit.
" Heorot. Stems. Six Actual. Trap? Angle?"
" Heomt. Affirm both."
"Do you have a receiving station?"
"Negative. None known. Analysis will continue."
" Sterns clear."
And now Sten smiled. "It was clottin‘ wonderful," he said.
"So what did we get?"
"We've got," Sten said accurately, "an Emperor with a major case of the hips, which is almost a case of the ass. We've just cut off a big chunk of the AM2 he'd be doling out to his cronies and allies. A big chunk."
His smile grew larger. La Ciotat looked at him skeptically— she wasn't sure she was hearing all of it.
She wasn't, although the fact that merely jumping out of the bushes and shouting boo had been enough to make the Big Bad Wolf drop dead of heart failure was significant—and certainly a tactic that could be repeated indefinitely, if they could continue finding the courses of the AM2 convoys.
Sten was realizing that one of the Eternal Emperor's primary weapons—that no one but the Emperor was permitted to get close to wherever AM2 came from—was a double-edged sword. Just as the shutdown of AM2 subsequent to the Emperor's disappearance would destroy any coup, so, too, Sten's boo-shouting could wreak economic havoc on the Emperor himself.