Imperial Stars

Book 146: Gateway Essentials

by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Stephen Goldin, Stephen Goldin

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Empire of Earth, spanning more than a thousand solar systems, is threatened by a conspiracy from within. Now, with more than three-quarters of the Galaxy ready to fall into enemy hands, the Empire is forced to call on its top-secret weapon: the renowned Circus of the Galaxy featuring the d'Alembert family, a clan of circus performers with uncanny abilities. But even these super agents may not be in time to save the Empire. The Imperial Stars is the first book in the "Family D'Alembert" series.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 144

Sample

By the year 2447, the Empire of Earth would have looked remarkably healthy to an outside observer. In the almost two centuries since its formation, it had nearly doubled its size in terms of subject planets, while trade between inhabited worlds was proceeding at a smooth and industrious pace. Hunger and need had been, if not obliterated, at least confined to small pockets of despair. Yet even the most vigorous body politic can harbor a cancer that, if not excised quickly, will eat away at the insides and leave just a useless shell as evidence of its passing. Such a cancer was, in that year, threatening the very existence of the Empire, (M’benge, The Empire – Yesterday and Today, slot 427.)

The first man was dressed in black from head to toe, the only break in that color scheme being the goggles over his eyes – and even they were smoky gray. The dark cloth was smooth and pliable; it made not even the slightest swishing sound as he moved.

The man’s belt was divided into a series of compartments, each housing a useful and, in several cases, lethal tool. Outside, the clothing was completely insulated against electrical shock; inside, between the black fabric and the man’s skin, was another layer of insulation, this designed to keep the man’s body heat in so that he would not register on an infrared detector. Because of this insulation, the interior of the suit was hellishly hot, but the wearer did not complain. Better to be uncomfortable than dead, was his belief.

The night around him was cool and dark. The planet Durward had three small moons, but only one – the smallest – was shining tonight. Its light was scarcely more powerful than a flashlight at a thousand paces – hardly a threat to give him away.

The house in front of him was another matter. Set out in the open countryside, kilometers away from its nearest neighbor, it looked to his trained eyes like nothing so much as an enormous booby trap. One false step, one misguided movement would certainly mean the end of his life … and possibly worse than that. The fate of the Empire could be resting on his skill, but the thought didn’t make him hesitate. There were some risks that had to be taken.

There were no guards patrolling the wall that surrounded the house, and that fact worried him more than if there had been a regiment. No guards meant that the wall itself was hazard enough, and that the people behind it expected very few survivors to cross to the interior yard.

Reaching into his belt, the man in black took out a sensitive energy detector and gave the wall a quick scan. He felt no surprise to learn that the barrier was composed of only a thin shell of stone, inside which was a plethora of electronic equipment. The sensors within the wall could detect heat, electromagnetic discharge, pressure, or an attempt to alter the circuit functions. The scattered bodies of birds, insects and small animals at the base of the barrier gave mute testimony to the fate of anything coming in contact with that wall.

The man had come prepared for this eventuality. Beside him on the ground was a long fiberglass pole. Picking it up, he backed off some twenty meters from the wall and then ran at it full tilt. Well-trained leg muscles helped push him upward as he dug the shaft into the ground and polevaulted over the barrier. Four meters high the wall went, but he cleared it with easily twenty centimeters to spare.

He hit the ground beyond with his legs coiled under him; he rolled over and used his momentum to propel him into a running start across the open courtyard between the wall and the house. This was a dangerous stretch, for there was no cover but the darkness. He crossed the fifty meters of ground silently, then pulled up panting alongside the building. As far as he knew he was still undetected. He was sweating profusely inside his insulated clothing, but gave not a thought to his discomfort. There were bigger matters demanding his attention.

He walked slowly all around the house, checking the windows. None were open – he hadn’t expected them to be – but the alarm system on them was of the standard variety. Reaching into his belt again he took out two wires and clamped them to the edges of the window frame, thus jumping the alarm circuit. With this done, opening the window and slithering inside was a routine matter.

He found himself in an unknown room cluttered with furniture. He dared not bump into anything and make a noise; and turning on a light, of course, would have been sheerest folly. Flipping a tiny switch on his belt, he turned on a portable radar device, a type invented for blind people. Instantly, the returning radio echoes painted a picture of the room’s layout for him. The door he wanted was three meters away; it would only be a matter of navigating past a few chairs.

Still he didn’t move. Reaching again into a belt compartment, he pulled out the sensor he had first used on the wall to check the floor. It was free of electronic gadgetry, so he walked silently across the room to the door.

The portal was also wired with an alarm. He bypassed it the same way he had taken care of the window, opened the door and looked out into the hallway. It, too, was dark, and there were no sounds anywhere along its length. His radar vision informed him that the corridor was free of obstructions, but the scanner indicated that certain planks in the wooden floor were pressure sensitive, and would give him away if he trod upon them. Exercising the greatest of caution, he stepped gingerly out into the hall, moving toward the staircase one agonizingly slow step at a time. Involuntarily, he found himself holding his breath, fearful that even such a slight chest movement would set off the alarms with which this house was boobytrapped.

He reached the stairs and stopped again. According to his informant – a totally reliable one, since he had been incapable of lying under the influence of nitrobarb – the room he sought was on the second floor. Checking out the stairway, he found that a majority of the treads were wired for detection, and that the banister was carrying enough electrical current to light a small city. The man in black set his jaw determinedly and proceeded to climb the stairs two, three, and sometimes four at a time to avoid stepping on the alarms.

‘Third door on the right at the top of the stairs,’ his involuntary informant had told him. Tracing his way around the sensors in the floor, he arrived at the desired door. The handle, his instruments told him, was a bomb that would explode at his touch, blowing him into more pieces than he cared to think about. But there had to be some way of getting into the room and he was going to find it. He scanned the wall and found that it was loaded with electrical circuitry. His eyes read the schematics and discovered that one inconspicuous nailhead in the wall beside the doorsill was really the button that would open the portal.

Still he did not enter immediately. He had been lucky so far in that he had not met up with any living beings. Inside this room, that was bound to change. Human guards would be stationed around the safe night and day, adding extra protection for its invaluable contents. The man in black had no way of knowing a priori how many guards there would be; from here on, he would have to rely on luck and his reflexes.

Stun-gun drawn and set on ten – its highest setting – he braced himself for the invasion. The door opened quickly as he pressed the nailhead, a point for him; a slow opening would have alerted the men inside and given them time to prepare for his coming.

As it was, he was almost too slow. There were five guards and two ferocious dogs inside the room. Three of the men were in his direct line of vision and fell instantly as his deadly beams swept across them. The dogs leaped at him from two different directions. He shot the one on his right, but the momentum of its leap carried its dead body crashing into him. Trained athlete that he was, he used that to advantage, falling over backward with the dog’s corpse on top of him. His fall caused the second dog’s leap to be high, and one of the two surviving guards, who had now had time to draw his blaster, also missed him. The man in black had truer aim; even as he hit the floor, he felled the fourth guard with the beam of his stunner.

The fifth guard also had his weapon out and was using it. But he could not get a clear shot, since his target was covered by the body of the dog. The blaster bolt burned its way uselessly into the already-dead animal, while the invader’s reflexes helped him recover quickly. After hitting the floor he rolled to his feet again in one continuous motion, stunner beaming. The fifth guard dropped, as did the second dog. The man in black was now alone in the room with the safe and the valuable piece of parchment it contained.

Speed was what counted now. Though he was almost certain that none of the guards had had the time to set off an alarm, he couldn’t afford to bet his life on it. Racing over to the safe, he gave it a quick scan and learned that it was a combination type, wired all over with alarms. The man worked swiftly to neutralize the alarms; when that was done, he used magnetic scanners to guide him through the combination.

When the last tumbler clicked into place, he gripped the handle tightly. Opening the safe would probably set off some sort of alarm, no matter how many he’d disconnected. But that wouldn’t matter – once he had the document, the two personal rocket tubes on the back of his belt could take him out the window and away from here before any possible pursuit could be mounted. With a sigh of relief, then, he yanked down on the handle and swung the magnisteel door open.

He had time for just an instant of astonishment as the blaster beam from the ceiling, triggered by the opening of the door, turned his body to a charcoal powder. The charred remains of the expert agent lay in a tidy heap in front of the totally empty safe.

The second man was dressed in robes of crimson satin, the long flowing sleeves of which were edged with three centimeters of white nohar fur – the rarest and most expensive kind in the Galaxy. The satin draped softly over his tall, spare frame, giving him a majestic – if somewhat satanic – appearance. His red satin skull cap, embroidered with gold, clung tightly to his thick mane of black-turning-gray hair.

He turned his head leisurely as the messenger brought him the decoded note, then held the folded piece of paper in his hands for a moment, not even bothering to open it. His long, tapering fingers – which were almost invisible beneath layers of ruby and diamond rings – caressed the smoothness of the paper. He dismissed the messenger and at last opened the missive. The news it contained brought a smile to his sharp features – a smile that would have chilled the heart of anyone observing it. The man unconsciously brought a hand up to his chin to stroke his black goatee as he thought, That’s one more, Zander. You don’t have too many left, you know. Then the game will be mine.

He put the note down on an ornately carved solentawood table beside his chair and picked up the large piece of parchment that had been resting there. In one corner was the colorful achievement containing three gold dragons on a purple background, a bar sinister and thirteen spots on a field of blood. Idly his eyes roamed over the wording of the proclamation beneath the crest:

‘Be it known to all people of the Empire … Banion is the true son of my flesh … Prince of Durward, and all its dominions … legitimate heir and successor …’

There was no need for him to read the proclamation in detail – he had long since committed the short but important message to his memory. Taking the Patent from its special vault was a dangerous luxury, he knew, but holding it in his hands gave him such a feeling of power that it could warm even the coldest of nights.

This, however, was far from a cold night. No matter what the temperature outside, the news of this SOTE agent’s death provided the warm glow of triumph. Handing the Patent to his most trusted vassal to return to its vault, the man in red stood up impatiently.

Time, he thought. I’ve waited so long and worked so slowly. I’m not as young as I once was, can I wait until the plan is finished? Will I live to see that glorious day Mother prophesied?

This room, lavishly decorated though it was with brocade curtains and silken tapestries, was not soothing enough to the frustrations of his delayed dreams. With long, catlike strides he exited impulsively from the room. He pressed his hand against the secret panel – which was coded to his prints – and a section of the wall slid back to reveal a private elevator tube. A cushion of air solidified under his feet as he stepped in, and dropped him safely and efficiently to a depth of more than fifteen meters below ground level. He left the tube and found himself enveloped by the eerie darkness of the Planning Room.

Walls, ceiling and floor of this room were all black, a total black, a blackness that greedily absorbed all light like some ravening beast. It was a blackness that hurt the eyes – to see. But the room itself was not completely dark, for in the center – floor to ceiling – was a sphere seven meters in diameter. Inside the sphere glowed countless thousands of pinpoint lights, scattered seemingly at random – a three-dimensional scale map of human-occupied space. The globe towered over the man’s head, an enormous symbol of his vast ambitions.

Blue was the color of Empire, clean and unsullied. Red was the color of his own network. White was unexplored territory, mainly around the edges. Key systems that he controlled were flashing green. There were two yellow dots – Durward, to the top right, and Earth, dead center.

There was still some blue, primarily around the periphery. He dismissed those with a mental wave of his hand. Mopping up operations, he thought; a nuisance rather than an obstacle. The central core, too, was blue, stretching from Newhope and DesPlaines on one side to improbable Purity on the other. It was a comparatively small volume, and shrinking fast. He came in here at least once a week to check on his progress, and the results were most gratifying. A time-lapse film would have shown a crimson fire devouring the Empire, its tongues of flame licking at the few remaining strongholds.. . .