Free The Court of a Thousand Suns by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Page A

professional crush: Filling up one corner was a many-layered map of the castle, the surrounding buildings, and the castle grounds. Each hinged section was at least two meters high, and showed a two-dimensional view of every alley and cranny and drawing room of the entire structure. Sten had traced the sectional map down in a dusty archive after his first month on the job, when he realized that the sheer size of the castle and its grounds made it impossible for him to ever see it all on foot. And without personal, detailed knowledge of every Imperial centimeter of the area, he would not be able to perform his primary function—which was to keep the Emperor safe.
    Crammed a few meters away from the map was the other major feature in Sten's current life. Sitting on a fold-up field table was a very expensive miniholoprocessor. It was the biggest expense in Sten's life, not even counting the thousands of hours of time invested in the tiny box lying next to it.
    The little box contained Sten's hobby—Model building: not ordinary glue-gun models set into paste-metal dioramas but complete, working and living holographic displays ranging from simple ancient engines to tiny factories manned by their workers. Each was contained on a tiny card, jammed with complex computer equations.
    Sten was then building a replica of a logging mill. He had imprinted, byte by byte, everything that theoretically made the mill work, including the workers, their job functions, their tools, and the spare parts. Also programmed were other details, such as the wear-factor on a belt drive, the drunken behavior of the head mechanic, etc. When the card slid into the holoprocessor it projected a full-color holographic display of the mill at work. Occasionally, if Sten didn't have his voila moves down, a worker would stumble, or a log would jam, and the whole edifice would tumble apart into a blaze of colored dots.
    Sten glanced at the model box guiltily. He hadn't worked on it more than a few hours since he started the job. And, no, there wasn't time now—he had to get to work.
    He palmed the video display and the news menu crawled across the screen, terrorist dies in spaceport bar
    EXPLOSION.
    Sten thumbed up the story and quickly scanned the details of the Covenanter tragedy. There wasn't much to it at the moment, except for the fact that Godfrey Alain, a high-ranking Fringe World revolutionary, had died in an accident at some seedy bar near the spaceport. It was believed that a few others had also died, but their names had not yet been released. Mostly the article talked about what was not known—like what Alain was doing on Prime World, especially in a bar like the Covenanter.
    Sten yawned at the story. He had little or no interest in the fate of terrorists. In fact, he had marked paid to many terrorist careers in his time. Clot Godfrey Alain, as far as he was concerned. He noticed, however, that there were as yet no official statements on Alain's presence.
    The only thing he was sure of was that the press had it wrong about the explosion being an "accident."
    Terrorists do not die accidentally. Sten idly wondered if someone in Mantis Section had sent Alain on to meet his revolutionary maker.
    Sten yawned again and began to scroll on just as he got the call. The Eternal Emperor wanted him.
    Immediately, if not sooner.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    The Eternal Emperor was an entirely different person from the man Sten had drunk with. He looked many years older, the flesh on his face was sagging, and pouches had appeared beneath his eyes. His complexion was gray underneath the perfect tan. More importantly, the man Sten was observing was stern and grim, with hatred burning just beneath the surface. Sten stirred uneasily in his seat, goose-bumps on the back of his neck. Something was frightening there, and although Sten hadn't the faintest idea what was going on, he hoped to hell it didn't involve a transgression on his part. Sten would not have liked to be the being the