Best of all, it was real.
The only challenge the Aoife got as it closed on Prime was mechanical, perfunctory, and at least three cycles out of date. Berhal Waldman didn't even have to analyze the challenge, but found it in a standard code-fiche. Everybody was preoccupied.
The Aoife went straight in for a landing.
No one noticed, even in the tiny village at the far end of the narrow valley. That abominable monster aboard the Juliette had just butchered another child.
The destroyer may have been a tiny ship—in space, and compared to a battlewagon/carrier like the Victory, or on the wide, bare tarmac of a landing field where the eye couldn't provide any scale. But it made the tower it landed beside into a toy. Waldman's fingers ran across the keys, keeping the Aoife hanging just clear of the ground on its McLean generators. It would not do to leave a five-meter-deep impression in the middle of the beautifully-laid-out garden. Not only for aesthetic reasons, but that might suggest to the curious what had happened.
There was no movement from the tower.
The Aoife's chainguns swept the pinnacle, Honjo fingers hovering above firing keys.
The ship's ramp slid down, and Sten came out. He was wearing combat armor, and carried a willygun. But his helmet face was open.
Waldman thought that was truly insane—Internal Security could be waiting just inside. But Sten couldn't figure out any other way to let beings know they were being rescued, not attacked.
He was nearly at the door before it opened.
Marr and Senn stood there.
"I must say," Marr said. "You certainly arrive in a baroque manner, my young captain."
"Yeah. Baroque. Let's get the clot out of here before somebody baroques us in half. Later for the aphorisms, troops."
And Haines was there, in the doorway.
‘Took you long enough."
"Sorry. Hadda stop and tie my bootlaces."
Behind Haines, a human male. Slender. Balding. Early middle age. Dressed about ten years out of style. Sten flashguessed that was Haines's husband. Not at all the sort of man he would have expected her to end up with.
Don't be considering that, idiot. Like you just told everybody else. Book.
Senn, Haines, and Sam'l ran for the ship. Marr hesitated for a moment, then bent and picked up a small, multihued pebble.
"There might be nothing left to come back to."
And then he, too, boarded the Aoife, Sten close behind him.
"Lift, sir?" Waldman asked as Sten boiled into the control room.
"Wait one."
He looked at a screen, which showed the bridge of the Juliette. No one was in front of the pickup, either hostage or terrorist.
"Send it."
"Yessir." The com operator next to the screen hit a button, and the Aoife broadcast a single letter in code to the Juliette.
Onscreen chaos.
Shouts. Screams. The hijackers, bellowing incomprehensibly. A young girl broke away and tried to run. She was shot down. The hijacker was shrieking in some never-to-be-translated tongue. His pistol swayed, then blasted. Straight into the pickup! Dead air.
"Oh my dear, oh my dear," Marr moaned, arms around Senn. "Those poor baby humans!"
"Yep," Sten said. "Terrible, terrible. And it's going to get worse. Berhal Waldman, take us up. About five hundred meters, please."
The Aoife shot skyward.
Sten was quite a prophet, as a second screen went to life, this time on a commercial station.
Blur... snap-focus... a battered spaceship... McLean units off... haze from the ship's stern as the Yukawa drive went to full...
Screaming incoherence from some liviecaster: "Horror... Horror... oh the horror of it all..."
"Full drive, if you please. Home, James."
The Aoife slammed into hyperspace, sonic boom as air rushed to fill the vacuum left by the destroyer.
That explosion went unheard, buried by a greater one as the Juliette crashed straight into the center of Soward's main landing field. There was no fire, no rubble. Just a smoking crater.
Sten turned sadly as the Aoife's pickup lost the commercial ‘cast.
"What an awful thing," he said. "All those beautiful little children, spread over the landscape like so much strawberry preserves. Strawberry? Tomato. Saltier-tasting.
"And so coincidental, too. Unfortunate for them, although they'd probably all grow up to be ax-murderers or lawyers or something, but certainly providential for us.
"As Mister Kilgour says, God never takes away with one hand but he gives with the other."
Marr and Senn uncurled from their woe and their great eyes focused on Sten. Haines verbalized it
"You know, you're an utter bastard, Sten."
"That's what my mother always said," Sten agreed happily.
"Thanks," she said, quite seriously.
"Hey. It wasn't that much. You know me. Saint Sten. Slayer of Virtuous Maidens. Rescuer of Dragons."
Amid the banter Sten felt very, very good about himself. And very surprised they'd gotten away with it.
Officially, the Juliette incident remained a tragic event, another example of the growing collective psychopathology of an overcomplex civilization. Privately, though, investigators were fairly sure they had been snookered. Not that any trace of the tape Sten's actors had carefully prepared during the flight out from Vi remained. Nothing remained of the Bhor robohulk except a hole in the tarmac and a wisp or six of greasy smoke. But investigators knew they would have found some carbon traces of the eighteen or more beings who died before or in the crash, no matter how thorough the splatter.
When Sten heard that, as a passed-along rumor, he swore mightily. If he had given the situation one more thought, he could have scored ten or so beef carcasses from a butcher shop, and no one would ever have known.
Three mighty Imperial battlefleets flashed out of hyperspace in the Ystm system, all weapons stations manned and ready to obliterate the rebellion.
Six worlds and their moons and moonlets orbited a dead star.
Nothingness.
No Sten.
No rebel fleet.
No nothing.
And as far as the most sophisticated analysis could determine, no known ship had ever entered this system. It had been named on a star chart and never explored. Not that there was anything worth exploring.
Sten's big con had worked. Or, rather, was working. He had never considered raiding Al-Sufi, of course, nor going anywhere that close to Prime World with his tiny battlefleet.
The deception that had been leaked through Hohne's doubled net and other agents around the Empire was just the first step.
Sten was playing liar's poker with the Emperor.
This time, there was nothing there.
Next time, in another system, there might be traces that Sten or some of his ships had recently passed through.
Not only was this game something that could be played over and over again—the Emperor could not and would not ignore any reports of Sten's presence—and burn AM2, Imperial ships and supplies, whatever faith the Imperial Navy had in its intelligence, and the Eternal Emperor's arse, but it would have a payoff.