Free Empire's End by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole

Exotic Section, and become a Delinq, living in the secret ducts and deserted storehouses of the planet, trying to stay one theft ahead of The Company’s Sociopatrolmen and brainburn. He had met Bet here, his first real love. And here he had been saved from death by Ian Mahoney, coldcocked after a blown raid and drafted into the Imperial Guard.
    Mahoney had again “volunteered” him—this time from infantry assault training into Mahoney’s own covert force: Mantis—where he learned the dark alleys of intelligence and the darker skills of secret violence. How to kill any being without leaving a mark. Or, more importantly, how to seduce or corrupt them into your service, without them ever realizing they’d been used.
    And then Mahoney had sent him back to Vulcan with
    Kilgour and the rest of his Mantis Team. Mission: destroy the man who killed Sten’s family.
    His first great success. In the course of that destruction, Sten, three ETs and three humans, including Ida the Gypsy, had created and led a planetwide revolution.
    That minirising brought in the Imperial Guard, and Sten’s team came out, Sten himself on a life-support system.
    He had never found out what happened afterward to Vulcan. And he had never wanted to know. He assumed that new management had come in Vulcan as an only slightly less lethal factory.
    Evidently not, he thought, looking at the shambles in front of him. Or, anyway, not for very long. Even if it was needed for defense during the Tahn war, the privy-council era would have made Vulcan unprofitable—AM2 had simply become too rare and expensive to waste running a heavy-industry vacuum-based plant.
    Vulcan had been abandoned, looted, and gutted. At its height it resembled a junkyard anyway—factories, quarters, and warehouses had been built, used, and discarded without being wrecked out.
    But now it looked as if the gods of Chaos had looked on man’s work, found it amateurish, and decided to improve matters.
    Somewhere in this scatter would be—or so Sten hoped— whatever secret Mahoney had guided him toward.
    At first, when Sten considered Mahoney’s cryptic shout, he had thought of Smallbridge—the world Sten had bought some years earlier that was the only home he had ever known, besides Imperial Service.
    Improbable. If Mahoney meant “home” to be something useful to Sten—best theory: a weapon against the Emperor—he would not have stashed it in a place known to Sten’s friends and enemies. Plus, to the best of Sten’s knowledge, Mahoney had been on Smallbridge exactly once, and that was to warn him the privy council’s goon squad was on its way. Not exactly time enough to build a hidey-hole.
    No—not Smallbridge. It was far too obvious—even considering a purloined-letter device—for an Irisher as subtle as Mahoney.
    And so Sten had forced himself to look up the interstellar coordinates to Vulcan and issue the orders. Even if nothing is here, he thought, this is an adequate temporary hideout. Destroy-ing Thoresen had been a nonrecord Highest Authority mission, which meant Vulcan’s importance and its relation to the Grand Traitor wouldn’t show up, even on Sten’s fairly accurate, highly classified Mantis file. Sten, experienced soldier that he was, was operating on the assumption that Mahoney’s trick program hadn’t worked and the Empire knew everything.
    Of course, there’s yet another possibility, his mind went on, spinning further into the double- triple- quadruple-think that eventually drives all counterintelligence types into the gaga ward. If the Emperor’s got a real fine memory, and has put together his own private termination file, then he’s just liable to remember the orders to destroy that mysterious Bravo Project on Sten’s home world.
    “Ladr
    Sten came back to the present thankfully, before he took this feedback nonthinking any further and attempted to disappear down his own throat.
    “Ah dinnae want to seem like Ah’m noodgin‘, but i’s