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Raschid, laughing happily, picked up the fourth man by the lapels. . .and the broken-armed third officer kicked his legs out from under him.

  Raschid crashed down, the fourth man flailing punches at him. The old captain, wheezing like a grampus, danced—very deftly for a man his age—around the edge of the roiling mass, occasionally putting the boot into Raschid's ribs.

  Two hands came from nowhere and slammed against the captain's ears. He slumped. Pole-axed.

  Raschid scrambled to his feet, nodded at the new man in the fight, then picked up the third officer and slung him through the air at his sudden ally, a gray-haired behemoth with a nose that'd been broken too many times for anyone to be interested in setting it. He thoughtfully dangled the third officer with one hand, making up his mind. Then slammed the heel of his hand down just above the bridge of the man's nose, dropped him, and looked around for someone else.

  The man who wore the Raschid nametag was sitting atop the fourth spaceman. He had a double handful of the man's hair, and was systematically dribbling his head on the bar floor.

  The gray-haired man walked over, picked up the mate's unfinished beer and drained it. Then he grunted.

  "I think you've made your point."

  Raschid peeled back the man's eyelids, and reluctantly let the man's head slam finally to the floor and stood.

  The two looked each other up and down.

  "Well, colonel?"

  The gray-haired man snorted. "H. E. Raschid. They get dumber every year. Or anyway somebody does."

  "That smacks of insubordination, colonel."

  "Sorry. Would the all-highest Eternal Emperor of a Billion Suns, Ruler of a Zillion Planets, and Kind Overseer of Too Many Goddamned People care to accompany his good and faithful servant back to the palace, where important business awaits, or—or you wanna stay the hell with it and go look for some more action?"

  "Later, colonel. Later. Don't wanna corrupt the young."

  The Eternal Emperor threw an arm around his aide—Col. Ian Mahoney, O. C. Mercury Corps, the shadowy Imperial force responsible for intelligence, espionage, and covert operations—and the two men walked, laughing, into the thin sunlight of Prime World.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BARON WAITED in the anteroom, pacing nervously, glancing now and then at the two huge Imperial Guardsmen playing statue at the entrance to the Eternal Emperor's chambers. If he thought about it—and Thoresen was trying hard not to right now—he was scared. Not a familiar emotion for the Baron.

  He had been summoned by the Emperor across half the galaxy with none of the usual Imperial Palace formal politeness. The Baron had simply been told to come. Now. With no explanations. Thoresen hoped it had nothing to do with Bravo Project, although he was sure that even the Emperor's elaborate spy system wouldn't have uncovered it. Otherwise Thoresen was as good as dead.

  Finally, the doors hissed open and a tiny robed clerk stepped out to bow him in. Thoresen was only slightly relieved when the guards remained at their stations. The clerk withdrew and the Baron was left in an immense chamber filled with exotic items collected by the Emperor over his thousand years of life. Odd mounted beasts from hunting expeditions on alien worlds, strange art objects, ancient books opened to wonderful illustrations far beyond any computer art conceivable.

  The Baron gawked about him, feeling very much like some rube from a border world. Eventually he noticed man waiting far across the chamber. His back was to Thoresen and he was apparently looking out over the Prime World capital through the large curved glass wall. He was dressed in simple white robes.

  The Eternal Emperor turned as Thoresen approached and made his bows.

  "We were told by our aides," the Emperor said, "that you had a reputation for promptness. Apparently they misinformed us."

  The Baron gobbled. "I left as soon as—"

  The Emperor waved him into silence. He turned and looked outside again. A long silence. The Baron fidgeted, wondering.

  "If it's about the Company's latest prospectus, your highness, I can assure you there was no exaggeration. I'd stake my reputation on—"

  "Look at that," the Emperor said. Confused, Thoresen peered outside. Below, members of the Royal Court flitted about in an elaborate lawn dance on the Palace grounds.

  "Simpering fools. They think that because they are titled the Empire revolves around them. Billions of citizens work so they can play."

  He turned to Thoresen. A warm smile on his face. "But the two of us know better, don't we, Baron? We know what it is to get our hands dirty. We know what it is to work."

  Now Thoresen was really confused. The man was blowing hot and cold. What did he want? Were the rumors about his senility true? No, he cautioned himself. How could they be? After all, the Baron had started them. "Well?" the Emperor asked.

  "Well, what, sir?"

  "Why did you request this audience? Get to the point, man. We have delegations waiting from twenty or thirty planets."

  "Uh, your highness, perhaps there was some mistake—not yours, of course. But—uh. . .I thought you wanted to—"

  "We're glad you came, anyway, Baron," the Emperor interrupted. "We've been wanting to talk to you about some rather disturbing reports." He began to stroll through the room and Thoresen fell in beside him, trying hopelessly to get his mind on top of the situation. Whatever that was.

  "About what, your highness?"

  "We're sure it's nothing, but some of your agents have been making certain comments to select customers that a few of our—ahem—representatives construe as possibly being, shall we say, treasonous?"

  "Like what, your highness?" Feigned shock from Thoresen.

  "Oh, nothing concrete comes to our mind. Just little suggestions, apparently, that certain services performed by the Empire could possibly be done best by the Company."

  "Who? Who said that? I'll have them immediately—"

  "We're sure you will, Baron. But don't be too harsh on them. We imagine it's just a case of overzealous loyalty."

  "Still. The Company cannot be a party to such talk. Our policy—in fact it's in our bylaws—is absolute."

  "Yes. Yes. We know. Your grandfather drew up those bylaws. Approved them myself as a rider to your charter. Quite a man, your grandfather. How is he, by the way?"

  "Uh, dead, your highness. A few hundred years—"

  "Oh, yes. My sympathies."

  They were back at the door and it was opening and the little clerk was stepping forward to lead an absolutely bewildered Thoresen out the door. The Emperor started to turn away and then paused.

  "Ah, Baron?"

  "Yes, your highness?"

  "You forgot to tell us why you were here. Is there some problem, or special favor we can grant?"

  Long pause from Thoresen. "No, thank you. I just happened to be on Prime World and I stopped by to inquire—I mean, I just wanted to say. . .hello."

  "Very thoughtful of you, Baron. But everything is proceeding exactly as we planned. Now, if you'll excuse us."

  The door hissed closed. Behind the Emperor there was a rustling sound, and then the sound of someone choking—perhaps fatally—and a curtain parted. Mahoney stepped out from behind it. Doubled up with laughter.

  The Emperor grinned, walked over to an ancient wooden rolltop desk and slid open a drawer. Out came a bottle and two glasses. He poured drinks. "Ever try this?"

  Mahoney was suspicious. His boss was known for a perverse sense of humor in certain sodden circles. "What it it?"

  "After twenty years of research it's as close as I can come to what I remember as a hell of a drink. Used to call it bourbon."

  "You made it, huh?"

  "I had help. Lab delivered it this morning." Mahoney took a deep breath. Then gulped the liquid down. The Emperor watched with great interest. A long pause. Then Mahoney nodded. "Not bad."

  He poured himself another while the Emperor took a sip. Rolled it around on his tongue and then swallowed. "Not even close. In fact, it tastes like crap."

  The E
mperor drank it down and refilled his glass. "So? What do you think of him?"

  "The Baron? He's so crooked he screws his socks on in the morning. He ain't no toady, though, no matter how it looked when you were playing him like a fish."

  "You caught that, huh? Tell you what, if I weren't the biggest kid on the block I think he woulda cut my throat. Or tried, anyway."

  The Emperor topped off their drinks and then eased back in his chair, feet on his desk. "Okay. We had our face to face—good suggestion, by the way. And I agree the man is just dumb enough and power hungry enough to be dangerous to the Empire. Now. Spit it out. What should I be worrying my royal head about?"

  Mahoney scraped up another chair, settled into it and put his feet up beside the Emperor's.

  "A whole lot of things. But nothing we can prove. Best bit I got is that a real good source tells me that Thoresen is spending credits by the bundle on a thing he calls Bravo Project."

  "What's that?"

  "Hell if I know. Couple years ago I had my boy risk his old butt and come right out and ask. Thoresen ain't sayin'. Except that it's, quote, vital to the interests of the Company, endquote."

  "Who's your man?"

  Mahoney grimaced. "I can't say."

  "Colonel! I asked you a question!"

  Mahoney sat up straight. He knew where the chain of command started. "Yessir. It's a guy on the board of directors. Named Lester."

  "Lester. . .I know him. I was at his birth ceremony. Absolutely trustworthy in matters concerning the Empire. 'Course, in a hand of poker—well, nobody's perfect. So Lester is suspicious of this Bravo Project, huh?"

  "Very. Thoresen is practically bleeding the Company dry to pay for it. He's maintaining barely enough profit to keep the stockholders happy. Even then, Lester thinks he's messing with the books."

  "That's not much to go on. Even I can't put the Guard on Vulcan on mere suspicion. I'd lose all credibility. Hell, I founded this Empire on the principles of free enterprise and zip government interference."

  "Do you have to believe your own propaganda?"

  The Emperor thought about it a second. Then answered regretfully, "Yes."

  "So what do we do about it?"

  The Emperor frowned, then sighed and chugged his drink down. "Hate to do this, but I got no other choice."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning, I'm about to lose a great drinking buddy. For a while, anyway."

  Outraged, Mahoney came to his feet. "You're not sending me to that godforsaken hole? Vulcan's so far out of the way even comets duck it!"

  "Got any better ideas?"

  Mahoney ran it over. Then shook his head. Slugged down his drink. "When do I leave?"

  "You mean you're still here?"

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE AIRLOCK CYCLE clanked to an end. Thick yellow gas billowed into the chamber. Sten could barely see the other workers against the opposite wall.

  The interior lock door slid open, and Sten walked toward his job station, across the kilometer-wide hemisphere of Work Area 35.

  He figured that two years had passed, plus or minus a cycle or six, since he'd begun his sentence. How the time flies when you're having fun, he thought sourly.

  The floor-level vats bubbled and boiled, gray slime crawling up onto the catwalks. Sten threaded his way around the scum, around huge, growing lumps of crystal.

  He stopped at his first station, and checked the nutrient gauges feeding into one of the meters-high boulders. It took Sten half a very sweaty hour to torch off the spiraling whorls of a granular cancer from the second boulder in his area. He fed the crumbly residue to the atmosphere plants in the nearest vat, and went on through the roiling yellow atmosphere.

  Area 35 was an artificial duplicate of a faraway world, where metals assumed a life of their own. Minerals "grew," "blossomed," and "died."

  Samples of the various metals indicated one with rare properties—incredible lightness, yet with a tensile strength far in excess of any known alloy or element.

  The Company's geologists found the mineral interesting and with enormous commercial potential. There were only two problems:

  Its homeworld was a man-killer. That was the easiest part. The Company's engineers could duplicate almost any conditions. And with the condemned Migs of the Exotic Section to harvest the minerals, the casualty rate was "unimportant."

  The second, and bigger, problem was working the material. After years of experimentation, metal-based "virii" on the mineral's homeworld were mutated, then used as biological tools to machine the crystal.

  The shaped metal was used for superstressed applications: driveship emergency overrides and atomic plant core sensor supports as well as the ultimate in snob's jewelry. The cost, of course, was astronomical. Sten's foreman once estimated a fist-size chunk as worth an Exec's contract pay for a year.

  The growth rate and size of each boulder were carefully controlled and computer monitored. But Sten had found a way to override the nutrient controls on one boulder. For six cycles, a small, unnoticed lump had been cultured, gram by gram, on one boulder.

  Sten checked "his" boulder. The lump was ready for harvesting—and machining into a useful little tool that Sten wasn't planning to tell the Company about.

  He unclipped a small canister of a cutting virus from the bulkhead, and triggered its nozzle near the base of his lump. A near-invisible red spray jetted. Sten outlined the base of the growth with it.

  He'd once seen what happened when a worker let a bit of the virus spray across his suit. The worker didn't even have time to neutralize the virus before it ate through and he exploded, a greasy fireball barely visible through the roiling yellow haze as the suit's air supply and Area 35's atmosphere combined.

  Sten waited a few seconds, then neutralized the virus and tapped the lump free of its mother boulder.

  He took the lump to his biomill and clamped it into position, closed and sealed the mill's work area, and hooked his laboriously breadboarded bluebox into circuit so the mill's time wouldn't be logged in Area 35's control section.

  Sten set the biomill's controls on manual, and tapped keys. Virus sprayed across the metal lump. Sten waited until the virus was neutralized, then resprayed.

  And he waited.

  There were only two ways of telling time in Exotic Section. One was by counting deaths. But when the attrition rate was well over 100 percent per year, that just reminded Sten he was riding on the far edge of the statistics.

  The other way was with a handful of memories.

  The hogjowled foreman had waited until the guards unshackled Sten and hastily exited back into Vulcan's main section. Then he swung a beefy fist into Sten's face.

  Sten went down, then climbed back to his feet, tasting blood.

  "Ain't you gonna ask what that was for?"

  Sten was silent.

  "That was for nothing. You do something, and it's a whole lot worse.

  "You're in Exotics now. We don't run loose here like they do up North. Here Migs do what they're told.

  "Exotic's split up into different areas. Ever' one of them's a different environment. You'll work in sealed suits, mostly. All the areas are what they call High Hazard Envir'ments. Which means only volunteers work in them. That's you. You're a volunteer.

  "You mess, sleep, and rec in Barracks. That's the next capsule down from Guard Section, which is where you are now.

  "You don't come north of Barracks unless you figure your area ain't killin' you quick enough.

  "One more thing. What goes on in Barracks ain't our business. All that matters is the machines are manned every shift and you don't try to get out. Those is the only rules."

  He jerked his head, and two of the Exotic Section's guards pulled Sten out.

  The lump was almost down to the right dimensions. Sten rechecked his "farm" and corrected the nutrients, then returned to the biomill and set up for the final shaping cut.

  Sten's first area was what the foreman called a cinch shift.

  I
t was a prototype high-speed wiremill. Nitrogen atmosphere. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite right yet. Extruder feeds jammed. Drawers put on too much pressure, or, most commonly, the drum-coiler gears stripped.

  And every time the plant went down, someone died. Raw wire piling up behind the jammed extruder tore off a man's arm. Broken wire whiplashed through a man like a sword. A coil of wire lifted from its bin curled around a momentarily inattentive inspector's neck and guillotined him.

  About a hundred "volunteers" worked in that area. Sten figured there was one death per cycle.

  He figured the foreman had been being funny. Until he graduated and found out how fast other areas killed Migs.

  The virus had shaped that lump into a dull black rectangle, 10 X 15 x 30 cm. Sten tapped the STORE button, and the neutralizer control, then walked to another console. He quickly built up the three-dimensional model of the tool he would build, which included measurements of the inside of Sten's loosely closed fist.

  This tool would fit only one man.

  "Ya gon' gimme your synthalk for as long as I want?"

  "That's right."

  "What'ya want?"

  "You know how to fight. Foreman—his bullies—don't mess with you."

  "Clottin'-A they don't. Learned how to tight-corner all over the galaxy. Boy, I even had some guards training!" The little man beamed proudly. "You want to be taught?"

  "That's it."

  "Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Ain't nothin' else to do down here. 'Cept wait to die."

  Sten hit the TRANSFER switch and input his model, set up as a machining program, into the biomill. Waited until the PROGRAM ACTIVE light went on, then touched the START button.

  Small, medium-power lasers glowed and moved toward the block of metal. Virus sprayed onto the block, and more metal crumbled away. Then the lasers "masked" areas, and the virus shaped that block into the reality of Sten's model.

  The shift hours dragged past, and the mill hummed on happily. Once Sten had to shut down when a guard came through. But he didn't stop at Sten's machine.