Chapter 807: Escaped

Andrew waited until the opening behind him had closed before removing the transit marker from its place.

The formation lost the last trace of light.

No one came through after him.

He shut down the room’s remaining communication link to the abandoned staging point.

The room was quiet. Andrew listened a moment longer, then stepped away from the dead formation.

He had escaped.

Andrew put the marker away and checked his storage ring.

The Asura crystal was still there.

He brought it out only far enough to inspect the seal. The captured remains lay silent inside. The power he had used to cut Adam’s contact remained sealed with them; there was no living Asura to ask what else it could do.

The seal had held. He would study the crystal later.

Andrew put the crystal back in his ring, closed his hand and turned toward the room’s ordinary communication device.

A request from the observation post was still waiting in the list of interrupted contacts.

He erased the local request without answering it. The men there could not open the personal route he had used. Whatever they told the vampires would begin with the part of his operation he had already abandoned.

He let the marks appear in his eyes again.

Proxima came back into view where he directed his attention. The observation building had collapsed inward. Soldiers were moving the surviving staff away from the road, while the woman who had stopped the destruction examined a plate taken from the site.

Andrew looked for the supervisor.

Alive.

He had failed to complete the destruction and failed to leave before the vampires reached him.

Andrew’s expression did not change.

Some people remained useful even after capture. This one knew only the local post, its accounts and the orders Andrew had sent through it. Much of that information was already being shown in offices elsewhere in the city.

Spending effort to silence him now would draw more attention toward the remnants of the route.

Andrew stopped looking at him.

The successor’s face appeared on a public display near one of the receiving buildings. People had gathered beneath it to hear which streets were open and where the wounded were being taken.

A vampire population was organizing inside Imperial territory.

The Empire would have to answer that even if no one mentioned the Prince’s name again.

Andrew opened a blank message and began arranging the account he would give of Proxima. The awakened Progenitors, the defeated emergency force, the destruction left by the Spider Progenitor, the claim on a city the Empire considered its own.

He attached the images that showed the emergency ships firing and the vast web over the city. The image of his own observation post did not join them.

When the message reached the part asking who had directed the local response, Andrew paused. The stolen emblem had made the Empire move exactly when he wanted. Explaining how he had triggered the alarm would tie his report to the records now spreading through Proxima.

He wrote that the local command had collapsed during the outbreak and that the vampire forces had taken control of the surviving district.

Both statements would be easy to verify.

The cause was something he intended to keep contested.

Adam already knew. Andrew had met his attention and cut the connection himself; no carefully chosen report would make the Emperor forget that betrayal.

The officials receiving an account of Proxima had other concerns. Ships had been damaged, a city had lost its command, and armed vampires were organizing on Imperial ground. Andrew wanted those officials repeating the parts that justified their next operation. Anyone defending that operation would then have a reason to resist the successors’ account of it.

He sent his report through the royal channel still available to him, addressed for circulation among the offices handling Proxima. He could not know who would use it or which questions would return. But his version would reach people who had never heard Adam speak to him in the void.

He did not need them to clear him of everything. He needed the Empire busy with a threat it could publicly name.

The evidence against him would be a problem. It could become a larger one if the successors survived long enough to put it in front of people who could use it.

He would deal with that from here.

He had his eyes, the crystal and his freedom. The throne remained occupied by the same man who had held it for too long.

Losing one local operation had not made Andrew willing to abandon that ambition.

***

Alex found the surviving operator with both hands wrapped when he reached the security annex.

Mingyue had returned to Luna before he left Edonia. She had already sent him her account of the rescue and the plate recovered from the post.

The operator began to stand when Alex entered, bracing his wrapped hands on the table. Pain stopped him, and he sank back into the chair.

"I opened the lower door," he said.

"I know."

"The supervisor started the disposal before they came up."

"I know that too. Tell me what the post did before he started it."

The operator looked down at the table.

The answer took longer than his account of the rescue.

They received instructions through the private channel. They watched selected sites, kept reports available for the people above them, and maintained the equipment when those orders changed.

He named the streets they had been told to observe.

Alex recognized the city hall, the service routes near the ruined district and the approaches the emergency force had used.

The operator had known they were observing people. He claimed he had not known what Andrew meant to do to all of them.

Alex asked which reports he had sent himself.

Vesa hovered over the table and slid the small receipt plate toward him with a side hand. He pointed to his acknowledgments one by one, identifying the reports he had passed upward.

When he reached the order to destroy the site, his finger stopped.

"He knew we were there."

"Yes," Alex said.

The operator looked at him as though he had wanted a less certain answer.

The man’s own question about the lower staff had survived on the plate, followed by Andrew’s impatient reply. Alex turned it off before the voice could repeat. The operator had heard him the first time.

"He was never in the workroom?" Alex asked.

"Not while I was there."

"Did you control the opening he used?"

"No. Our equipment connected to the staging side. The personal route was his."