“Let him go, Kanya. He can only harm himself now. You can settle with him later when your grief is not so fresh.”
“No.”
“Kanya, you pledged yourself to my service until the revolution was over.”
“He must be found immediately.”
LaNague had an uneasy feeling that Kanya was still not telling him everything. “Why? Why immediately?”
“We dishonored ourselves,” she said, her eyes no longer meeting his. “We circumvented your authority by planting a fail-safe device in Imperium Park.”
LaNague closed his eyes. He didn’t need this. “What sort of device?” He had a sinking feeling that he already knew the answer.
“A Barsky box.”
Just what he had feared. “How big? What’s the radius of the displacement field?”
“Three kilometers.”
“Oh no!” LaNague’s eyes were open again, and he could see that Kanya’s were once more ready to meet them. “Didn’t you trust me?”
“There was always the chance that you might fail, that the Imperium would reassert control, or that Earth would move in faster than anyone anticipated. We had to have a means to ensure final destruction.”
“But a radius that size could possibly disrupt Throne’s crust to the point where there’d be global cataclysm!”
“Either way, the Imperium or the Earthie conquerors who replaced it would no longer be a threat.”
“But at a cost of millions of lives! The whole purpose of this revolution is to save lives!”
“And we’ve co-operated! The device was only to be used in the event of your failure. A new Imperium or an Earth takeover would inevitably lead to an invasion of Flint as well as Tolive. I do not know about your planet, but no one on Flint will ever submit to outside rule. Every single one of us would die defending our planet. That would be a cost of millions of lives! Flinter lives! We prefer to see millions die on Throne. We will never allow anything to threaten our way of life. Never!”
LaNague held up his hands to stop her. “All right! We’ll have this out later. What’s it all got to do with Broohnin?”
“There were two triggers to the device. Broohnin now has one of them.”
LaNague sat for a long, silent moment. Then: “Find him.”
“I will.”
“But how? He could be anywhere.”
“All the triggers are equipped with tracers in the event they’re lost. No matter where he goes, I’ll be able to locate him.”
“He’s crazy, Kanya. He’ll set that thing off just for the fun of it. He’s got to be stopped.” After another silence, shorter this time: “Why couldn’t you have trusted me?”
“No plan, no matter how carefully wrought, is infallible. You have made miscalculations.”
LaNague’s heated response was reflexive. “Where? When? Aren’t we right on schedule? Isn’t everything going according to plan?”
“Was Josef’s death in the plan?”
“If you had trusted me a little more,” he said, hiding the searing pain those words caused him, “we wouldn’t have this threat hanging over our heads now.”
“If you hadn’t insisted on keeping Broohnin around against the advice of everyone else concerned–”
“We needed him at first. And…and I thought I could change him… bring him around.”
“You failed. And Josef is dead because of it.”
“I’m sorry, Kanya.”
“So am I,” the Flinter woman replied coldly. “But I’ll see to it that he causes no further harm.” Her shoulders angled as she reached for the control switch on her vid.
“Don’t kill him,” LaNague said. “He’s been through a lot with us… helped us. And after all, he didn’t actually fire the blast that killed Josef.”
Kanya’s face flashed up briefly, inscrutably, then her image faded. LaNague slumped back in his chair. She had a right to hate him as much as she did Broohnin. He was responsible, ultimately, for Josef’s death. He was responsible for all of Broohnin’s folly, and for his eventual demise at Kanya’s hands should she decide to kill him. She could certainly feel justified in exacting her vengeance… Broohnin seemed to be acting like a mad dog.
All his fault, really. All of it. How had he managed to be so stupid? He and Broohnin had shared a common goal – the downfall of the Imperium. He had thought that could lead to greater common ground. Yet it hadn’t, and it was too clear now that there had never been the slimmest hope of that happening. There was no true common ground. Never had been.
Never could be.
At first he had likened the differences between Broohnin and himself to the differences between Flinters and Tolivians. Both cultures had started out with a common philosophy, Kyfho, and had a common goal, absolute individual sovereignty. Yet the differences were now so great. Tolivians preferred to back away from a threat, to withdraw to a safer place, to fight only when absolutely necessary: leave us alone or we’ll move away. The Flinters had a bolder approach; although threatening no one, they were willing to do battle at the first sign of aggression against them: leave us alone or else. Yet the two cultures had worked well together, now that Tolive had finally decided to fight.
He had once thought a similar rapprochement possible with Broohnin; had at one point actually considered the possibility of convincing Broohnin to surrender himself to the Imperium as Robin Hood, just as LaNague was about to do.
He smiled ruefully to himself. Had he been a fool, or had he deluded himself into believing what was safest and most convenient to believe? In truth, he wished someone – anyone – else were sitting here now in this empty warehouse waiting for the Imperial Guard to break in and arrest him. The thought of giving himself over to the Imperium, of prison, locked in a cell, trapped… it made him shake. Yet it had to be done… one more thing that had to be done… another part of the plan, the most important part. And he could ask no one else to take his place.
Wouldn’t be long now. He slid his chair into the middle of the bare expanse of the warehouse floor and sat, his hands folded calmly before him, presenting an image of utter peace and tranquillity. The officers in charge of the search-and-seizure force would be doing their best to whip their men up to a fever pitch. After all, they were assaulting the stronghold of the notorious Robin Hood, and there was no telling what lay in store for them within.
LaNague sat motionless and waited, assuming a completely non-threatening pose. He didn’t want anyone to do anything rash.
“IT IS UTTERLY IMPERATIVE that he be taken alive. Is that clear? Every task assigned to the Imperial Guard today has been a catastrophic failure. This is a final chance for the Guard to prove its worth. If you fail this time, there may not be another chance – for any of us!”
Haworth paused in his tirade, hoping he was striking the right chord. He had threatened, he had cajoled; if he had thought tears would work, he’d have somehow dredged them up. He had to get across to Commander Tinmer the crucial nature of what they were about to do.
“If the man inside is truly Robin Hood, and the warehouse is his base of operations – and all indications are that it may very well be – he must be taken alive, and every scrap of evidence that links him with Robin Hood must be collected and brought in with him. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: he must be taken alive, even at the risk of Guard lives.”
Lacking anything more to say, or a clearer, more forceful way of saying it, Haworth let Tinmer, who had taken personal command of the Robin Hood capture mission, fade from the screen. He turned to Metep and found him deep in drugged sleep in his chair, an empty gas vial on the floor beside him.
Haworth shook his head in disgust as he found his own chair and sank into it. Metep VII, elected leader of the Out-world Imperium, was falling apart faster than his domain. And with good reason. He, Haworth, and the other powers within the Imperium had spent their lives trying to mold out-world society along the lines of their own vision, no matter how the clay protested. And had been lar
gely successful. After establishing a firm power base, they had been on the verge of achieving a level of control at which they could influence virtually every facet of out-world life. A heady brew, that kind of power. One taste led to a craving for more… and more.
Now it was all being taken away. And Jek Milian, so at home in his powerful role as Metep, was suffering acute withdrawal. The Imperium had gradually stolen control of the out-worlds from the people who lived on them, and now that control was, in turn, being stolen from it. Everything was going crazy. Why? Had it all been circumstance, or had it been planned this way? Haworth bristled at the idea that some individual or some group had been able to disrupt so completely everything he had striven to build. He wanted to believe that it had all been circumstance – needed to believe it.
And yet…there was a feather-light sensation at the far end of his mind, an ugly worm of an idea crawling around in the dark back there that whispered conspiracy… events had followed too direct a pattern… conspiracy… situations that should have taken years to gestate were coming to term in weeks or months… conspiracy… and every damaging event or detrimental situation consistently occurring at the worst possible time, always synergistically potentiating the ill effect of the previous event… conspiracy…
If it were conspiracy, there was only one possible agent: the man who had mocked the Imperium, derided it, made it look foolish time after time, and eluded capture at every turn – Robin Hood.
And it was possible – just possible – that the man or men known as Robin Hood would be in custody tonight. That bothered him a little. Why now? Why, when it looked as if all was lost, did they get a tip on the whereabouts of Robin Hood? Was this yet another part of the conspiracy against the Imperium?
He slammed his hand against the armrest of his chair. That was not a healthy thought trend. That sort of thinking left you afraid to act. If you began to see everything as conspiracy, if you thought every event was planned and calculated to manipulate you, you wound up in a state of paralysis. No… Robin Hood had finally made a mistake. One of his minions had had a falling out with him or had become otherwise disaffected and had betrayed him. That was it.
Tonight, if all went right, if the Imperial Guard didn’t make fools of themselves again – he shook his head here, still unwilling to believe that the probe pilot had slipped through their fingers twice in one day – he would face Robin Hood. And then he would know if it had all been planned. If true, that very fact could be turned to the Imperium’s advantage. He would not only know whom and what he was fighting against and how they had managed to get the best of him, but he would have undeniable proof that the blame for the current chaos did not lie with the Imperium. He would have a scapegoat – the Imperium badly needed one.
Robin Hood was his last chance to turn aside the tide of rage welling up around the Imperium. He had apparently lost the probe pilot as a possible source of distraction. Only Robin Hood was left to save them all from drowning. And only if taken alive. Dead, he was a martyr… useless.
THE DOORS BLEW OPEN with a roar that reverberated through the empty warehouse. Imperial Guardsmen charged in through the clouds of settling dust and fanned out efficiently in all directions. So intent were they on finding snipers and booby traps that LaNague went temporarily unnoticed. It wasn’t long before he became the center of attention, however.
“Who are you?” said someone who appeared to be an officer. He aimed his hand weapon at the middle of LaNague’s forehead as he spoke, making this the second time in one day he had been at the wrong end of a blaster.
“The name is LaNague. Peter LaNague. And I’m alone here.” He held his palms flat against his thighs to keep his hands from shaking, and worked at keeping his voice steady. He refused to show the terror that gnawed at him from within.
“This your place?”
“Not exactly. I lease it.”
An excited young guardsman ran up to the first. “This is the place, sir. No doubt about it!”
“What’ve you found?”
“High speed duplicators, stacks of various issues of The Robin Hood Reader, and boxes full of those little cards that were dropped with the money. Plus a dozen or so holosuits. Should we try one on to see what kind of image we get?”
“I doubt that will be necessary,” the officer said, then turned to LaNague. The other members of the unduly large assault force were slowly clustering around as their commander asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Are you Robin Hood?”
LaNague nodded. His throat was tight, as if unwilling to admit it. Finally: “I go by that name now and then.”
An awed murmur rustled through the ranks of the guardsmen like wind through a forest. The officer silenced his command with a quick, angry glare.
“You are under arrest for crimes against the Imperium,” he told LaNague. “Where are the rest of your followers?”
LaNague looked directly into the officer’s eyes. “Look around you.”
He did, and saw only his own troops, each struggling to peek over the other’s shoulder or to push his way to the front for a glimpse of the man who was Robin Hood. And suddenly the meaning was clear.
“To your posts!” the commander barked. “Start packing up the evidence immediately!”
After the duty assignments were given, the officer turned the task of overseeing the warehouse end of the operation to a subordinate while he took personal command of a squad of Guard to lead LaNague back to the Imperium Complex.
In a state of self-induced emotional anesthesia, LaNague allowed himself to be led away. Fighting off a sudden awful feeling that he would never return, he cast a final backward glance and saw that every guardsman in the building had stopped what he was doing to watch Robin Hood’s exit.
FINALLY! FINALLY something had gone right!
“And there’s proof?” Haworth said. “Incontestable proof?”
Tinmer beamed as he spoke. “Ten times more than any jury could want.”
“He’ll never see a jury. But how do we know he’s the Robin Hood, not just one of his lackeys? I’m sure he gave you a good story as to why he happened to be there.”
“Not at all. He admitted it. Said straight out he was Robin Hood.”
The elated tingle of victory that had been coursing along every nerve fiber in Haworth’s body suddenly slowed, faltered.
“Freely?”
“Yes! Said his name was Peter LaNague and that he had authored the flyers and planned the raids. According to the census computer, though, he doesn’t exist. None of his identity factors match with anyone on Throne.”
“Which means he’s from one of the other out-worlds.”
“Or Earth.”
Haworth doubted that, especially now that he remembered a certain weapon used to save Metep VII’s life almost five years ago, about the same time The Robin Hood Reader began to appear. A weapon made on Flint. Things were fitting together at last.
“Check with the other planets – the ones still speaking to us. And with Earth.” Haworth knew the replies would all be negative, but decided to keep Tinmer busy.
“You going to interrogate him now?”
Haworth hesitated here. The prisoner probably expected to be hustled into the Complex and immediately filled with drugs to make him talk. Let him wait instead, Haworth thought. Let him spend the night in one of those claustrophobic cells wondering when the interrogation would begin. He’d lie awake wondering while Haworth caught up on some much-needed rest.
“Throw him in maximum security and tell your men not to be too rough on him. I want him able to talk in the morning.”
“That won’t be a problem.” Tinmer’s expression was grim and dour. “They’ve been treating him like a visiting dignitary, like a VIP, like… like an officer!”
Haworth again felt a twinge of anxiety, a chill, as if someone had briefly opened and closed a door to the night air. It wasn’t right for the Guard to give the man who had outrun and outfoxed them all these years su
ch treatment. They should hate him, they should want to get even. Apparently they didn’t. Inappropriate behavior, to be sure. But why did it bother him so? He broke the connection and slowly turned away from the set.
Haworth didn’t bother attempting to rouse Metep to tell him the news. Tomorrow he’d be in much better shape to deal with it. He was tired. It had been a long, harrowing day and fatigue was beginning to get the best of him. There was no chance for Robin Hood… no… stop calling him that. He was Peter LaNague now. He had a name just like everybody else; time to start de-mythifying this character. There was no chance for Peter LaNague to escape from the max-sec area. What Haworth needed now was sleep. A dose of one of the stims would keep him going, but beyond cosmetics he didn’t approve of artificial means to anything where his body was concerned. The closest he got to a drug was the alpha cap he wore at night. It guaranteed him whatever length of restful slumber he desired, taking him up and down through the various levels of sleep during the set period, allowing him to awaken on schedule, ready to function at his peak.
Despite his fatigue, Daro Haworth’s step was light as he strode toward his temporary quarters in the Imperium Complex. Members of the Council of Five and other higher-ups had been moved into the Complex last month, ostensibly to devote all their efforts to curing the ills that afflicted the Imperium, but in reality to escape the marauding bands wandering the countryside, laying siege to the luxury homes and estates occupied by the Imperium’s top-level bureaucrats. He would not mind the cramped quarters at all tonight. For tomorrow evening, after six hours under the cap, he’d be fresh and ready to face Ro – No! Peter LaNague.
AFTER AN HOUR IN THE CELL, LaNague had to admit that it really wasn’t so bad. Perhaps his quaking terror at the thought of prison had been an overreaction. Everything had been routine: the trip to the Imperium Complex and the walk to the maximum security section had been uneventful; the recording of his fingerprints, retinal patterns, and the taking of skin and blood samples for genotyping had all gone smoothly. Only his entry into the max-sec cellblock had held a surprise.