The Eternal Emperor had taken a long moment before agreeing.
Stage One was assembling the surgical team. Years earlier, when Poyndex had graduated from field agent through agent runner to planner, he learned he had held three major myths about the medical profession:
A) A doctor had ethics or a code requiring him to believe in and maintain the sanctity of life. The truth was that a doctor was no more or less idealistic than any other member of society. Which to Poyndex meant without any morality beyond self-interest, profit, or the drooling current beliefs of that doctor's society. It was quite easy to involve doctors in projects on the physiology of torture, mass euthanasia, or involuntary sterilization of society's misfits, to name only a few areas that Poyndex had been involved with over the years.
B) The only doctors who would perform "illegal" actions were less than competent. The fact was that he had never found it difficult to recruit the highest level professionals—provided they were given the appropriate sop of "patriotism," or "duty to the Empire," or even, in extreme cases, "duty to life."
C) That after performing the required deed, a doctor might be stricken with guilt or even just a desire to discuss what happened. The fact was that the only guilt Poyndex had ever seen a medico evince was when the mores of the society changed without the doctor being aware of the change, the fee had not been paid, or his malpractice insurance did not cover the deed. And every doctor seemed to hate every other doctor, which kept shoptalk from ever being worrisome.
For this operation, it had taken no more than two hours for Poyndex to find his surgical team. Among them were the best and the brightest of the Empire's doctors. And all of them had been on Poyndex's payroll for years.
The cover story—which Poyndex had planted no more heavily than a casual mention to an OR nurse who was a Mercury operative—was that the operation would be performed on one of the Emperor's doubles. Everyone "knew" the Emperor had doubles, who were sent into high-risk or high-boredom assignments. In fact, there were none and never had been, a blatant stupidity that Poyndex meant to bring up with the Emperor at an early date.
Once assembled, the team was sent to Earth. The Emperor had been right: the site was perfect.
Aeons earlier, the Emperor had decided he liked salmon fishing. He had bought from Earth's government, and from the local government of the province of Oregon, the entire Umpqua River, from its headwaters to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean. Over the decades he had also bought out everyone who lived or worked on or near the river. A few locals were permitted to live and work near the Umpqua—after all, provisions, guides, game wardens, and so forth were necessary. The Emperor then went fishing, using sites that were no more than level ground that a few tents could be pitched upon.
But on that river an industrialist, Tanz Sullamora, had also built a camp. Sullamora, however, had found he couldn't stand either the wilderness or fishing, so his camp had been turned into a luxurious retreat. Sullamora, once the Emperor's most loyal supporter/groupie, became a bitter enemy and the leader of the assassination plot. But he died when that bomb destroyed the Emperor, as well.
His secluded resort became a place where the rest of the conspirators, the self-named privy council, went for consultations.
Now...
Now it was where the Emperor went to take a long-needed—as the livies praised—rest from his onerous duties.
This time the Emperor never knew that he had traveled to Earth.
Days before the departure date, his food had been gently drugged with sopors. The Emperor didn't realize he was receding into a fog. He continued to perform, his duties and consult with his aides on important issues.
He did not realize that these aides—none of whom he recognized—were carefully trained Mercury Corps operatives, presenting him with problems that grew simpler and simpler. Eventually they were so easy a one-celled protozoa, Amoeba quaylus, could have solved them. The entire scenario was a traditional operation, called a reagan/baker, devised to maintain a senile ruler in power as long as possible.
Poyndex and his technicians took the Emperor down and down, until he was unconscious. But they continued the slow dosage, now in an intravenous solution that everyone nursing the comatose being thought was just nourishment.
Poyndex was taking no chances.
Eventually his technicians reported that the Emperor was one stage above the suspended animation the early longliners had used, the animation that had killed most of the passengers and crew on those monster ships that had stumbled out from Earth for the nearest stars before stardrive had been devised, and before AM2 had been discovered to make that drive a practicality.
Poyndex then ordered the Emperor stabilized and transferred to the Normandie, the Emperor's yacht-battleship that officially did not even exist.
The Emperor held, very comfortably and safely, in that state. Poyndex felt a bit of pride.
Next, the nature of the device—or devices—hidden inside the Emperor's body should have been examined electronically. Poyndex could not. He was fairly sure there were no antiexamination booby traps on them. The Emperor, after all, could stride through security screens without anything happening.
But he was only fairly sure.
Therefore, feeling as if he were living in the Dark Ages, he ordered his chief surgeon to begin exploratory surgery. The surgeon was further told that the operation must be done at speed, as if he were in a trauma center, with only seconds to keep the patient from dying.
It was well that Poyndex gave those instructions. He had scrubbed and gowned and gone into the operating theater, an arena he was quite familiar with. The first incision opened the body cavity, and Poyndex saw the device. He brushed the surgeon's hand aside and held the back of his fingers against the plas ovoid. It was growing warm.
"Excise it," he snapped.
"But—"
The surgeon's scalpel lased twice, and the device was free. Bastard, Poyndex thought. Got you before you could detonate.
"There. Another one."
"But there's hemorrhaging!"
"Screw that! Cut!"
A second device.
"What are the vital signs?" Poyndex asked hoarsely.
"Stable."
"Good. Doctor, open the rib cage."
The heavy bone-cutting laser made the cut.
"There. Another one. Take it out."
The cuts were made. Poyndex was sweating. There could be one more. But he couldn't just send in the machete team.
"Survey. Scan the medulla oblongata area."
"Yes, sir."
Time stopped.
"There appears to be... some kind of short-range transmitting device. Very short-range—one third of a meter. If you wanted an opinion, I'd say it was a very sophisticated encephalograph. But that's all it is."
Poyndex almost sagged.
"Then that's all. You can slow down. Stabilize him. Stop the bleeding. And button him up."
"What about these?" The second surgeon indicated the three man-made devices that had been cut out of the Emperor's body.
"Mine. You did not see them."
The three plas objects went to immediate tech analysis.
The first devise was a sophisticated bomb, using conventional matter for the detonator and Anti-Matter Two for the explosive. It would have been enough to create a one-eighth-kilometer parking lot with the OR as ground zero. Poyndex grinned tightly. Now he knew where that mysterious blast had come from that went off microseconds after the privy council's assassin had shot the Emperor. The bomb was intended to prevent autopsies, at the very least.
The second device was a combination receiver and booby trap set to detonate if the Emperor was ever cut open. It further contained certain programmed circumstances. It took Poyndex some hours to puzzle out the purpose of the device. The electroencephalograph still in the Imperial skull would continually transmit the Emperor's thoughts. If those thoughts deviated beyond the programmed circumstances, the bomb would detonate.