Heirs of Empire

Chapter Thirteen

“We’ve got another one, Admiral.”

Ninhursag MacMahan grimaced and took the chip from Captain Jabr. She dropped it into the reader on her desk, and the two of them watched through their neural feeds as the report played itself to them. When it ended, she sighed and shook her head, trying to understand how the slaughter of nineteen power service employees possibly served the “holy” ends of the Sword of God.

“I wish we’d gotten at least one of them,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Jabr rubbed his bearded jaw, dark eyes hard. “I would have liked to entertain those gentlemen myself.”

“Now, now, Sayed. We can’t have you backsliding to your bloodthirsty Bedouin ancestors. Not that you might not be onto something.” She drummed on her desk for a moment, then shrugged. “Pass it on to Commander Wadisclaw. It sounds like part of his bailiwick.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Captain Jabr carried the chip away, and Ninhursag rubbed weary eyes, propped her chin in cupped palms, and stared sightlessly at the wall.

The “Sword of God’s” escalating attacks worried her. One or two, like the one on Gus, had hurt them badly, and even the ones that weren’t doing that much damage—except, she amended with a wince, to the people who died—achieved the classic terrorist goal of proving they could strike targets despite the authorities. Open societies couldn’t protect every power station, transit terminal, and pedestrian belt landing, but anyone with the IQ of a rock knew that, and at least this time humanity seemed to have learned its lesson. Not even the intellectuals were suggesting the Sword might, for all its deplorable choice of tactics, have “a legitimate demand” to give it some sort of sick quasirespectability. Yet as long as these animals were willing to select targets virtually at random, no analyst could predict where they’d strike next, and they were killing people she was supposed to protect. Which was why they had to get someone inside the Sword if they ever expected to stop them.

She winced again as her roving thoughts reminded her of the single agent they had gotten inside. Janice Coatsworth had been an FBI field agent before the Siege, and Gus had been delighted to get her. She’d been one of his star performers—one of his “aces” as he called them—and she’d died the same day he had. Somehow she’d been made by the Sword, and they’d dumped what was left of her body on Gus’s lawn the same day they killed him, his wife, and two of their four children. Four of his personal security staff had died, as well, two of them shielding his surviving children with their own bodies.

Ninhursag’s eyes were colder and harder by far than Captain Jabr’s had been. If anything could be called a “legitimate” terrorist target, it was certainly the head of the opposing security force, but she’d been as astounded as any by the attack. Indeed, the van Gelder murders had shaken everyone into a reevaluation of the Sword’s capabilities, for Gus’s security had been tight. Penetrating it had taken meticulous pla

She chewed her lip and frowned over a familiar, nagging question. Why was the Sword so … spotty? One day they carried out a meaningless massacre of defenseless power workers and left clues all over the countryside; on another they executed a precision attack on a high-security target and left the forensic people damn-all. She knew the Sword was intricately compartmented, but did it have a split personality, too? And where had a bunch of yahoos who could be as clumsy as that power station attack gotten a tight, cellular organization in the first place? Anyone who could put that together could choose more effective targets, and hit them more cleanly, too.

She sighed and put the thought aside once more. So far, they had no idea how the Sword was organized. For all she knew, the meaningless attacks were the work of some splinter group or faction. For that matter, they might actually be the work of some totally different organization which was simply hiding behind the Sword while it pursued an agenda all its own! They needed a better look inside to answer those kinds of questions, and that was up to the folks on Earth, where the Sword operated. Gus had managed it once, and since his death, Lawrence Jefferson had managed to break no less than three of its cells. It was unfortunate that none of them had led to any others—indeed, it seemed likely they were among the more inept members of their murderous brotherhood or they wouldn’t have been so easy to crack—but they were a start.

And, she reminded herself, at least the slaughter of Gus’s family had given them a reason to beef up Horus’s security at White Tower without arousing their real enemy’s suspicions.

“Sweet mother of God!” Gerald Hatcher blurted. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m not!” Ninhursag snarled back. “I just thought pretending I was would be really hilarious!”

She quivered with frightened anger Colin understood only too well, and he touched her shoulder, watching her relax with a hissing sigh before he turned his attention back to Hatcher’s hologram. Vlad Chernikov also attended by holo image from his office aboard Orbital Yard Seventeen, but Tsien was present with Colin and Ninhursag in the flesh.

“Sorry, ’Hursag,” Hatcher muttered. “It’s just that— Well, Jesus, how did you expect us to react?”

“About the same way I did,” Ninhursag admitted with a crooked grin. Then real humor flickered in her eyes. “Which, I might add, you did. You should’ve heard what I said when Dahak told me!”

“But there is no question?” Tsien’s deep voice was harder than usual, for it was his files which had been penetrated this time.

“None, Star Marshal,” Dahak replied. “I have checked my findings no less than five times with identical results.”

“Shit.” Colin rubbed the fatigue lines which had formed in the long, dreary months since his children died. After almost a year and a half they were still playing catch-up. Ninhursag and Lawrence Jefferson had managed to pick off a few Sword of God cells, a few score terrorists had been killed in shoot-outs with security forces when they’d struck at guarded sites, and they’d identified exactly seven spies in their military.

And each of those spies had been dead by the time they found him.

“The bastards have us penetrated six ways to Sunday,” he said through his fingers, tugging on his nose while his other hand pushed the chip of Ninhursag’s report in an aimless circle.

“Yes and no, Colin,” Dahak said. “True, we are uncovering evidence of past penetration, yet we are also clearing a progressively higher number of senior perso

“Yeah, but it looks like we just found out we didn’t get the door locked till after the barn burned down!”

“Perhaps and perhaps not.” For a moment Tsien sounded so much like Dahak Colin suspected him of deliberate humor, but that wasn’t Tao-ling’s style.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, Colin, that this particular piece of hardware, while undoubtedly dangerous, is of limited utility to whoever has it.”

“What do—” Hatcher began, then stopped. “Yeah, you’ve got something, Tao-ling. What the hell can they do with it even if they’ve got it?”

“I would not invest too much confidence in that belief, Admiral Hatcher,” Dahak said, “but my own analysis does tentatively support it.”