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

know what I just said. He’s died before. Been killed. Various ways. Several accidents. At least two assassinations.”

      “And you won’t accept a double.”

      “I will not. But here is what happened, at least concerning the incidents I was able to document: First, the Emperor dies. Second, there is, immediately afterward, a big goddamned explosion, destroying the body and anything around. Just like that bomb that went off after Chapelle killed the Emperor.”

      “Every time?”

      “Everyone I can find. And then—the AM2 stops. Wham. Just like that.

      “Then the Emperor comes back. As does the AM2. And things start back to normal.”

      “Ian, now you’ve got me playing loony games on your turf,” Sten said. “Okay. How long does he usually vanish? Not that I am believing one damned word of what you are saying.”

      Mahoney looked worried. “Accident—perhaps three or four months. Murder—as long as a year or two. Maybe time enough for people to realize how much they need him.”

      “Six years an’ more hae gone noo,” Alex pointed out.

      “I know.”

      “But you still believe the Eternal Emperor is gonna appear in a pink cloud or some kind of clottin’ seashell in the surf and the world will be happy and gay once more?” Sten scoffed.

      “You don’t believe me,” Mahoney said, pouring himself a drink. “Would it help if I let you go through the files? I have them hidden away.”

      “No. I still wouldn’t believe you. But set that aside. What else did you get?”

      “I worked forward. And I got lucky, indeed. Remember your friend Haines?”

      Sten did. She had been a homicide cop, and she and Sten had been up to their elbows unraveling the strange assassination plot that had inadvertently sparked the recent Tahn wars. She and Sten had also been lovers.

      “She’s still a cop. She’s still on Prime. Homicide chief now,” Mahoney told Sten.

      He had gone to her for permission to access the files on Chapelle, the Emperor’s assassin. He’d had the highest clearances—volume one of the biography had been published to great acclaim. “Complete tissue, of course,” he assured them.

      “Anyway, your Haines. She’s still as honest as ever, boy.”

      Mahoney had asked some questions—and one day Haines had gotten the idea that the ex-Intelligence head was not in his dotage, indulging a private passion.

      “She said the only reason she was doing it is because you’d spoken well of me. For a, ahem, clottin’ general. You remember a young lad named Volmer?”

      Sten did. Volmer was a publishing baron—or, more correctly, the waffling heir to a media empire. Part of the privy council. Murdered one night outside a tawdry ambisexual cruising bar in the port city of Soward. The released story was that he had been planning a series on the corruption around the war effort. A more cynical—and popular—version was that Volmer liked his sex rough and strange and had picked up the wrong hustler.

      Haines, Mahoney said, had something different. She had been stalking a contract killer for about a year—a professional. She didn’t give a damn about a triggerman, but wanted to know who had hired him. She got him—and with enough evidence concerning the disappearance of a gang boss to get at least an indictment.

      The young man evidently agreed with Haines as to the worth of the evidence. He offered to make a deal. Haines thought that a wonderful idea. She might not care, particularly, if underworld types slaughtered each other on a daily basis. But when they kept leaving the bodies out on the street to worry the citizens—then action had to be taken.

      The man offered her something better. He confessed that he had killed Volmer. The word had been that the freako was an undercover type. There had been an open contract. The killer had filled it—and then found out later whom he had touched.

      Haines wanted to know who had paid. The man named an underworld boss, now deceased. Haines punted him back to his cell, told him to think about corroborative evidence, and tried to figure out what it all meant. The assassin “suicided” in his cell that night.

      “That’s all she had?”

      “That’s all she had.”

      “So who terminated Volmer?”

      “Perhaps his brothers on the privy council? Maybe Volmer wasn’t going along with the program? I don’t know—yet. But there was the first member of the council dead.

      “Then Sullamora. Blown up with the Emperor.

      “Something funny about that lone hit man, Chapelle. He came out of Spaceport Control. I did a little research on him, as well. Seems he felt the Emperor was after him personally.”

      “Yeah. I saw the livies, too. A head case.”

      “He was that. But he was set up to become one. Somebody—somebody who could have played with his career—arranged for him to get his face shoved in it every time he turned around. To this day nobody knows, for instance, why he suddenly lost his job and ended up on bum row.

      “Spaceport Control. Ports, shipping—that was Sullamora’s responsibility on the privy council. And now he’s dead, too.”

      Sten started to pour himself another drink, then thought better of it and walked to the viewpanel and stared out.

      “All right, Mahoney. You’ve got some interesting things. Maybe. And maybe you’re a head case like this Chapelle. Maybe all you’ve got is that thieves fall out. A Mantis op on his second run could tell you that.

      “Fill in the blanks. What happened next? And come to think about it, what happens next?”

      Mahoney told them. About the time he had talked to Haines, he had started feeling a bit insecure. The council, he had realized, had not a clue as to the source of AM2. Mahoney thought it was a matter of time before they started rounding up the usual suspects and probing their brains for this had-to-be-somewhere secret.

      “Brainscan’s an uncomfortable feeling, I understand. Frequently fatal. So I died. Laundered my investments by somehow getting swindled. Paid the swindler ten percent of the money he stole. Then I drowned. A stupid boating accident. There were whispers that it was because I’d lost my entire fortune.”

      Dead and invisible, Mahoney went to work. Part and parcel of his research was looking up all his old service friends, anyone who might have had any knowledge of the Emperor.

      “Many of them still serve. And most of them think we are heading for absolute chaos unless the council is removed.”

      Sten and Kilgour exchanged looks. Removed. Yes.

      “Then... then we have access to everything the Emperor left on Prime. I know—knew—that man. He would have hidden the secret somewhere. Hell, for all I know, in one of those glue pots he used trying to make a gutter.”

      “Guitar,” Sten corrected absently.

      “Because that’s the only chance we have,” Mahoney said. “Probably you were right. Probably I am quite mad believing the Emperor will return. Maybe that he ever did. Indulge an old man’s eccentricity.

      “But if someone does not do something—this Empire, which maybe it’s done things wrong, and even some evils, has still held civilization together for two millennia and longer.

      “If nothing’s done, it will all vanish in a few lifetimes.”

      Sten was looking closely at Mahoney—a not especially friendly look.

      “So you get me out of harm’s way, get word to Kilgour. And all you want in return is for us to kill the five beings who happen to rule the known universe.”

      Mahoney chose not to see the