you said, it was out of the way and no one noticed me. What do you consider my `proper
role’ to be?’
Lady A gave her a long, frowning stare. “Have you forgotten your heritage this
easily-you, the only child of Emperor Stanley Nine’s oldest son? You have a better claim
to the throne than the silly little snip who sits there now!”
A trace of Boros’s old haughtiness returned. Straightening her back, she said, “Of course
I haven’t forgotten. But it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.”
“It matters to me,” Lady A said with conviction. “This revolution is dedicated to restoring
the proper order of things. ”
“Am I to be made Empress, then?” No matter how sincere the woman’s voice was,
Boros could not bring herself to believe Lady A was going to all this trouble purely for her
benefit.
A tiny hint of a smile touched the corners of Lady A’s lips. “Well, perhaps not yet. I was
reserving that for myself. But you will receive a position commensurate with your
heritage. I have special plans for you, my dear, that you can’t even begin to guess.”
“And what does C say to all this?”
The smile broadened on Lady A’s face. “To show you how much I trust you, I’ll let you in
on the best-kept secret in the Galaxy: There is no one named C. He is purely a myth
created to confuse our enemies into thinking the conspiracy is more complex than it really
is. All orders from C are my orders relayed through a special switchboard to appear as
though they’re coming from elsewhere. No such human being exists. You’re now only the
second person in the universe to know that.”
Again Boros felt uneasiness creep over her. Lady A was being far too open, and that
was suspicious. “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked.
Lady A’s mood shifted instantly to anger. “I open my heart to you and receive distrust.”
She stood again, and in three long strides she was before Boros’s chair. Lifting the
younger woman effortlessly by the front of her tunic collar, Lady A held her a few
centimeters off the ground and said with crystalline enunciation, “You now have two
choices, my dear. You either pledge me your unswerving, undivided loyalty and love, or
I’ll crush your skull until your brains trickle down your neck. You do not leave this room
alive until I am assured the information you have is safe. You betrayed your father with a
few inadvertent words; I’ll not have you do the same to me. Do I make myself clear?”
For a long moment, Tanya Boros was too frightened to say anything. She knew her life
was dangling by a very slender thread, and the wrong word-or even the right word with
the wrong inflection-would give that thread a sudden snap. She considered her next
words very carefully.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said slowly. “I am completely loyal to you. No one can doubt that. I’ve
obeyed you completely from the first moment I met you on Gastonia. It’s just … I didn’t
expect … I … I was surprised . . . I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Another eternity passed as those intense green eyes pierced all the way to her soul.
Then slowly Lady A lowered the younger woman to the floor and loosened her grip on
the front of the tunic. Boros was shaken. She had not known her superior was that
strong. Even now, looking at the other woman’s slender frame, she found it difficult to
believe.
“You must never question me or my motives again,” Lady A said in calm tones as she
resumed her place in the glowing egg. “I have reasons for everything I do and say. It’s
not your place to understand them, merely to obey commands. If you do, you’ll be richer
for it; if you don’t, you’ll be dead. That should be reason enough.”
“Yes, Gospozha.”
The traces of a smile returned to Lady A’s lips. “That’s much better. Always respect your
elders, child. Now that I’ve made my point, I will explain some of my thinking not because
you asked, but because I think it’s better if you know something of what’s going on.
“As I was saying, the failure of Operation Annihilate hurt our cause badly. We are not
strong enough to make another frontal attack on the Empire for quite some time. We’re
far from defeat-the Empire still does not realize how thoroughly we have infiltrated and
undermined their structure-but we’ll have to return to more guerilla-style tactics for a
while.
“What we need primarily is time to build up our strength again. We were able to do that
the first time because SOTE spent so much time chasing your father we could work in
virtual obscurity. Given those conditions, we could rebuild our forces in just a short while.
“Unfortunately, we no longer have such an effective smokescreen. The Service of the
Empire now knows we exist, and they won’t stand idly by and let us re-arm ourselves.
We have the power to cause such chaos that SOTE would be too busy fighting a
thousand different small fires to pay much attention to us-but that would tip our hand
prematurely. That is something we will not do; we must preserve a few secrets until the
final confrontation is assured.
“Therefore we must declare war on SOTE itself. So far the Service has been but an
annoying pest, but it distracted us just enough from our true goal that we miscalculated.
The time has come to rid ourselves of the peskier elements within that organization. You
will play a key part in that campaign. We have a command post called Battle station G-6.
. . . ”
“That’s one of the automated ones. isn’t it?” Boros blurted.Lady A stopped and looked
hard at the younger woman. “I can see,” she said after a moment, “that our internal
security needs tightening. That was supposed to be secret. Don’t worry, the fault is not
yours,” she added as Boros began to quiver again. “You can’t help what you overhear.
It’s the people who did the talking who are in trouble.” Her fingers moved quickly over the
keyboard in the side of the egg as she entered into the computer a reminder to deal with
the problem.
“But returning to your question, yes, G-6 is almost entirely automated. You will be the
only person aboard. I want a live person there to supervise the activities.”
To say that Tanya Boros was disappointed with her assignment would have been a vast
understatement. She was a social creature who liked to have other people around
her-particularly men. Even among Earth’s decadent elite, she had been notorious as one
of the more promiscuous members. Gastonia had been a hardship for her. Even though
Lady A had arranged for her to stay at the command house rather than in the village with
the other condemned traitors and Boros still could not understand why she’d been so
favored-there had been no men except the guards, and they were an unimaginative
group at best. Occasionally she had kidnaped men from the village for her pleasure. Of
course, since only a few people in the village were allowed to know about the house’s
existence, she couldn’t let the kidnaped men return, and had been forced to have them
killed after a while. Still, Gastonia had provided her with some of life’s simple pleasures.
But now she was being sent to an automated battle station; with no companionship
except robots and computers. It seemed she was merely trading one exile for another.
She was quite careful, though, not to let her disappointment show on her face. She’d
already experienced Lady A’s anger once, and she wasn’t about to risk it a second time.
She merely said, in as neutral a voice as she could muster, “What’s my assignment?”
“Your orders will be waiting for you there when you arrive; that way, if anything should
happen to you en route you can’t give away the plan. You’ll travel in a special ship that
will allow you to dock with the battle station. That is the only ship the station will allow to
approach it; any others will be before they can get close. The station can defend itself
automatically; you’ll be perfectly safe once you get there.”
Tanya Boros left Lady A’s office feeling scarcely better than when she’d entered.
Weeks later, many parsecs away on the planet Arcta in Sector Twenty-Nine, a call came
into SOTE’s planetary headquarters. Its priority coding was Class Six, “critical,” so it
received instant attention from Colonel Patrick Hein, the officer in charge. Even if it had
been coded as Class One, however, Hein would have paid attention-for the call came
from two agents who identified themselves only as Wombat and Periwinkle.
Those two codenames commanded instant respect within the Service of the Empire, for