The Return of the Emperor (Sten #6). Allan Cole

Where did all that money come from? Payoffs? From the Emperor, himself, perhaps? For what purpose?

      Kyes added one and one and got an instant six: Sten must be among the very few that the Emperor had entrusted with his secrets. When the admiral had been located in his distant exile, Kyes had demanded that a crack team be sent to capture him. He had gotten gilt-edged assurances that only the very best would be sent. Obviously he had been fed a sop. After all, how good could those Mantis beings have actually been? Wiped out by one man? Clot!

      Kyes had packed his steel teeth for this meeting. Some heavy ass-chewing was in order.

      Out on the street, Kyes spotted three beings in dirty orange robes and bare feet. They were making their way through the motley crowd, handing out leaflets and proselytizing. He couldn’t hear what they were saying from the soundproof comfort of his car, but he didn’t need to. He knew who they were: members of the Cult of the Eternal Emperor.

      All over the Empire, there were countless individuals who firmly believed that the Emperor had not died. A few thought it was a plot by his enemies: The Emperor had been kidnapped and was being kept under heavy guard. Others claimed it was a clever ploy by the Emperor himself: He had deliberately staged his death and was hiding out until his subjects realized just how terribly he was needed. Eventually, he would return to restore order.

      The cultists were at the absolute extreme. They believed the Emperor was truly immortal, that he was a holy emissary of the Holy Spheres, who wore a body for convenience to carry around his glowing soul. His death, they said, was self-martyrdom. An offering to the Supreme Ether for all the sins of his mortal subjects. They also firmly believed in his resurrection. The Eternal Emperor, they preached, would soon return to his benign reign, and all would be well again.

      Kyes was a kindred spirit of the cultists. Because he, too, believed the Emperor was alive and would return. Kyes was a business being, who had once disdained all thinking based on wishes rather than reason as a weak prop for his mental and economic inferiors. But that was no longer so. If the Eternal Emperor were truly dead, then Kyes was lost. Therefore, he believed. To think otherwise was to risk madness.

      There were ancient tales of his own kind that directly addressed the issue of immortality, or, at least, extremely long life. They were part of a Methuselah legend, based on the fatal flaw of his species.

      Kyes—and all of the Grb’chev—were the result of the joining of two distinct life forms. One was the body that Kyes walked about in. It was a tall, handsome, silvery creature, whose chief assets were strength, almost miraculous health, and an ability to adapt to and absorb any life-threatening force. It also was as stupid as a tuber.

      The second was visible only by the red splash throbbing at his skull. It once had been nothing more than a simple, hardy entity—which could be best compared to a virus. Calling it a virus, however, would not be accurate, only descriptive. Its strengths were extreme virulence, an ability to penetrate the defensive proteins of any cell it encountered, and the potential for developing intelligence. Its chief weakness was a genetic clock that ticked to a stop at the average age of one hundred and twenty-six years.

      Kyes should have been “dead” already, that fine brain nothing more than a small, blackened ball of rotting cells. His body—the handsome frame that performed all the natural functions of the Grb’chev—might continue on for another century or so, but it would be nothing more than a gibbering, drooling shell.

      When Kyes had thrown his lot in with the other members of the privy council, it was not power he sought—but rescue. Riches had no attraction to him. It was life he wanted. Intelligent life.

      He cared nothing for the AM2, although he whispered not a hint of that to his colleagues. To reveal his weakness would bring his doom. When the Emperor had been slain and the desperate search launched for the source of the Emperor’s never-diminishing fuel cache, Kyes had been looking equally as desperately for something else: What made the Eternal Emperor immortal?

      At first he had been as sure of finding it in the Emperor’s classified archives as the others were of locating the AM2. But it had proved to be equally as elusive.

      When the murderous act had been committed, Kyes had been 121 years old. That meant he had just five years to live. Now a little more than six years had passed—and Kyes was still alive!

      In the intervening years he had become a near-hysteric about his mental powers, constantly aware of the clock that was running out. Even the smallest lapse of memory sent him into a panic. A forgotten appointment plunged him into black moods difficult to hide from his peers. That was the chief reason he had stayed away from Prime World for so long.

      He had no more notion why he continued to live than he had of the Emperor’s greatest secret. No being of his species had ever survived beyond the 126-year natural border.

      Well, that wasn’t absolutely correct. There had been one, according to that myth—the myth of the Grb’chev Methuselah.

      It was during the prehistory of the intertwined life-forms that the legend began. All was conflict and chaos during that long, dark era, the story went. Then along came an individual who was entirely different from the others. The being’s name had been lost, which put the reality of his actual existence in extreme doubt but made the legend more compelling.

      According to the myth, the being declared his immortality while still an adolescent. And in the hundred or more years that followed, he became noted as a wandering thinker and philosopher who confounded the greatest minds of his time. The year of his deathdate, the entire kingdom took up the watch, waiting daily for the heralds to announce his demise. The year passed. Then another. And another. Until his immortality became an accepted fact. That first—and only—long-lived Grb’chev became the ruler of the kingdom. An age of great enlightenment dawned, lasting for many centuries, perhaps a thousand years. From that time on the future of the race was ensured—at least that’s what the tale-tellers said.

      The last part of the legend was what interested Kyes the most: the prophesy that someday another Methuselah would be born, and that immortal Grb’chev would lead the species to even greater successes.

      Lately Kyes wondered if he might be that chosen one.

      But this was only during his most hysterical fantasizing. More likely, the extra span he had been allotted was due to nothing more than a small genetic blip. In reality at any moment he would “die.”

      If he was to have any future, Kyes would have to seize it himself. He would find the secret and become the new savior of his kind.

      Kyes looked out the window. The car was moving through a working-class neighborhood of tall, drab tenements facing across a broad avenue. The traffic was mostly on foot. The AM2 squeeze prohibited public transport, much less the boxy little flits favored by the lower middle class. Kyes saw a long line snaking out of a soya shop. A tattered sign overhead pegged the cost at ten credits an ounce. The condition of the sign mocked even that outrageous price.

      Two armored cops were guarding the entrance of the shop. Kyes saw a woman exit with a bundle under her arms. The crowd immediately began hooting at her, clawing at the package. One big cop moved tentatively forward. Kyes’s car glided on before he saw what happened next.

      “... been like that ever since the food riots,” the driver was saying. “Course, security costs somethin’ fierce, so the prices gotta go up, don’t they? But you can’t make folks understand that. I was tellin’ my hub — “

      “What food riots?” Kyes burst through.

      “Dincha hear?” The driver craned her neck around, gaping in amazement that a member of the privy council was somehow not in the know.

      “I was advised of disturbances,” Kyes said. “But not... riots.”

      “Oh, disturbances,” the driver said. “Much better’n riots. That’s what they was, all right. Disturbances. Musta had twenty, thirty thousand lazy, filthy types disturbin’ drakh all over the place. Cops went easy. Didn’t kill more’n half a hundred or so. Course, three, four thousand was shot up some and...”

      Furious,