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Lawrence Jefferson leaned towards his com, clutching his wineglass, and his heart pounded. This was the moment, he thought. The instant towards which he'd worked so long.
"Their field's building now," the sensor tech murmured. "Looking good... looking good... stand by... stand by... coming up to peak... now!"
Carl Bergren sent the release code, and the capacitors screamed. The shrouded object on the platform vanished as the mat-trans sent a mighty pulse of power into hyper-space, and he held his breath. The transmission he'd sent out was almost precisely four millionths of a percent too weak to reach Birhat. It would waste its power twenty light-minutes short of the fu
The control room on Lawrence Jefferson's com screen was silent, its perso
A soft tone beeped, and Carl Bergren let out a whooshing breath as the Birhat mat-trans operator acknowledged receipt. He'd done it! The person at the other end of the hypercom link didn't realize someone else had invaded the system. He thought he'd just received Bergren's transmission!
The lieutenant suppressed an urge to wipe his forehead. Deep inside, he hadn't really believed his employer could pull it off, and it was hard to keep his elation out of his voice as he activated his mike.
"Birhat has confirmed reception, sir," he told the Narhani spokesman. "If you'd step onto the platform, I can send you through now, as well."
"We did it!" someone shouted gleefully. "They accepted the transmission!"
The staff of Jefferson's illicit mat-trans whistled and clapped, and the Lieutenant Governor checked the computer tied into his com. Good. The exact readouts of the transmission, which just happened to carry the same identifier code as Lieutenant Bergren's system, had been properly stored. He'd have to wait until the regular Shepard Center data collection upload late next week to exchange them for Bergren's actual log of the transmission, but that part of the pipeline had already been tested and proved secure. It was inconvenient, since he would have preferred to make the switch sooner, yet there was nothing he could do about it. The mass readings of the transit would prove the statue Birhat had just received had not, in fact, been the solid block of marble Bergren had just destroyed, and for his Reichstag fire to work, it was vital that Battle Fleet itself discover that fact when the time came.
He smiled at the thought, then looked back at his link to the hidden control room and its celebrating perso
Half a world away, the explosive charges three long-dead technicians had installed at his orders detonated. One of the control room perso
Carl Bergren dutifully logged a full report on the capacitor bank failure and completed his shift without further incident. He turned over to his relief at shift change and signed out through the security checkpoints, then walked slowly to his parked flyer while he pondered the entire operation. Whoever had arranged it, he thought, had to have incredible reach and command equally incredible resources. He'd had to gain access to the routing schedules weeks in advance to be sure Bergren would be on duty when the transmission came through. Then he'd had to get someone in to sabotage the capacitors, and he'd had to make sure the sabotage was untraceable. And he'd had to have the resources to build his own mat-trans and find a way to monitor the Shepard Center system precisely enough to time his own transmission perfectly.
It was big, Bergren told himself as he unlocked his flyer, climbed in, and settled into the flight couch. It was really big, and there couldn't be more than a dozen people—probably less—who could have put it all together. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which of those dozen or so it had really been, and little Carl Bergren would live high on the hog for the rest of his natural life.
He smiled and activated his flyer's drive, and the resultant explosion blew two entire levels of the parking garage and thirty-six i
Chapter Thirty-Five
The last reeking powder smoke drifted away, and Sean MacIntyre surveyed a scene that had become too familiar. The only thing that had changed were the colors the dead wore, he thought bitterly, for the eastern Temple Guard had been reduced to barely forty thousand men, and they were being held back to cover the Temple itself. He was fighting the secular lords' armies now, and he shuddered as he watched the "merely" wounded writhe among the corpses.
His army was out of the Keldark Valley at last and, as he'd known it would, marching circles about its opponents. High-Captain Terrahk had fallen back on Baricon, but he'd lacked the men to hold an attack from the west. There were too many avenues of approach, and when Tamman blasted his way through a gap with fifteen thousand men and got around his flank, Terrahk had retreated desperately. His attempt to stand had cost him his entire rearguard—another eight thousand men (most, Sean was thankful, captured and not killed)—and Sean had broken out into the rolling hills of the Duchy of Keldark.
The more open terrain offered vastly improved scope for maneuver, but every step he advanced also drew him further from the valley and exposed his supply route to counterattack. At the moment, the Temple was too hard pressed to think about cutting his communications, and he kept reminding himself they didn't really have "cavalry" in the classic Terran sense, but he also kept thinking about what a Pardalian Bedford Forrest or Phil Sheridan could do if it ever got loose in his rear. His edge in reco
He sighed and sent his branahlk mincing forward. The beast whistled unhappily at the battlefield stench, and Sean shared its distaste. Whoever had commanded the Temple's forces in this last battle should be shot, he thought grimly, assuming one of his riflemen hadn't already taken care of that. He supposed it was a sign of the Temple's desperation, but ordering forty-five thousand pikemen and only ten thousand musketeers to face him in the open had been the same as sending them straight to the executioner.
Had Sean armed his men in the classic Pardalian proportion of pikes to firearms, he could have fielded close to the quarter-million men the Temple credited him with. They had all the weapons they'd captured from the Malagoran Guard plus, effectively, all the weapons of Lord Marshal Rokas's Holy Host, including its entire artillery park, but he'd opted to call forward only enough reinforcements—and replacements, he thought bitterly, recalling the five thousand casualties Erastor had cost—to put sixty thousand infantry and dragoons and two hundred guns in the field. Two hundred battalions of rifles, most veterans of Yortown, Erastor, and Baricon, supported by a hundred and fifty arlaks and fifty chagors, had been more than enough to slaughter the secular levies of Keldark, Camathan, Sanku, and Walak. He controlled all of northeastern North Hylar, now, from the Shalokars to the sea, and he wondered dismally how many more men were going to die before the Temple agreed to negotiate. God knew he and Stomald had been asking—almost begging—it to ever since the fall of Erastor! Couldn't the I