If Dannie had a mouth, he might have been yelling something. Lacking a corporeal body, he chose instead to repeat a string of swear words over and over to himself. The star system he had so enthusiastically thrown himself into was slightly more complicated than he thought, and he found himself dodging gravity wells on all sides.
Although, 'dodging' wouldn't be the most appropriate word to use. Like a marble rolled along a rippled beach, Dannie tended to move along the dips and curves in space-time made by whatever celestial bodies happened to be nearby. He did have some control over where he went, but it was the kind of control that depended heavily on pre-planning, and he certainly hadn't planned for the presence of several large gas giants that his maps had somehow failed to mention. As well as that, the system's star was twice as big as he thought it would be, and he was in severe danger of being sucked right into it.
At last, he sensed the presence of an Alliance beacon. It was on a moon of one of the solid planets and was itself only a few feet across, but it's field of influence was massive. Dannie had a few seconds to brace himself before he popped back into existence, several feet in the air. He screamed and threw his arms out in front of him, hit the spongy forest floor, and rolled to an ignominious halt against a tree.
When he climbed to his feet, he found his left arm hanging at a grotesque angle. It swung from side to side as if it was on a hinge, and for one horrible moment he thought that the only thing keeping it attached was the sleeve of his heavy brown coat. He extracted it from his sleeve and wiggled it from side to side experimentally.
Interesting, he mused. His satchel had ended up tangled in the tree's roots, and it took some work to get it free one-handed. By now Dannie was beginning to feel the pain from the broken bone, and he quickly pulled a gelatinous pouch from his battered satchel. He set his arm in place carefully, wincing, and slapped the pouch onto it. It immediately expanded and clung to his skin with a faint hissing sound. The pain faded, and Dannie flexed the limb a few times.
“Good as new,” he muttered, putting his coat back on. The Alliance beacon was in a bad state of disrepair, with thick vines growing all along its base and a generous covering of moss, but still seemed to be working fine. Dannie took a pistol from his pocket and shot it a few times. His would-be captors would have a hard time following him now. With any luck, they'd all end up materializing in the middle of a planet.
Of course, the drawback to destroying the beacon was that he couldn't leave in a hurry. This world was inhabited by the descendants of the Alliance colonists who had left the beacon there, but their society had long since collapsed into feudalism. Dannie knew little about them, having picked his destination in a hurry, but he did know that they had basic spaceships.
“You! Stop!”
Dannie put his hands in the air a few seconds before he realized there was a gun trained on him. It was an automatic reaction at this point. A slightly  demented looking young soldier was waving a rifle at him erratically, wearing the wide-eyed stare of someone who's just seen a man appear out of thin air when he least expected it.
“Hello there. You were guarding that thing, I assume?” Dannie asked cheerfully. The man replied with a string of words that meant nothing to Dannie. “I'm afraid you'll have to speak Standard. Stan-dard,” he repeated, adopting the exaggerated tone beloved of tourists all over the galaxy.
“You shoot! Why?” the man repeated, in what barely passed for the universal language of the Alliance. When this was greeted with a blank stare, he pointed wildly at the destroyed beacon.
“Oh. So I don't get shot. You know, like this,” Dannie said, panto-miming someone firing a gun. This turned out to be a bad idea, as the soldier jumped backwards and thrust his rifle out in front of him. His finger was compressed dangerously on the trigger.
They stayed like this for several more minutes, with the soldier trying unsuccessfully to communicate in his native dialect, before a large truck came smashing through the forest towards them. Although it was bristling with guns, Dannie thought it was probably more adept at killing trees than anything else; it's metal frame was completely unblemished by weapon fire. A man in a soldier's uniform jumped out and approached them at a brisk pace.
“Hello,” Dannie said.
“Who are you?” he demanded, in surprisingly good Standard. He barked an order at the other soldier, who immediately lowered his rifle.
“I'm an interstellar traveler by the name of 'Dannie'. You might know of my kind by the title of 'tunnellers'.”
The man frowned. “And you came through that?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the former beacon.
“Ah, no, not exactly. You don't really come through them so much as -”
“You used it, then?”
“Yes, yes I did.
There was a brief exchange between the younger soldier and his superior. “Get into the truck, please. We must question you.”
“Certainly,” Dannie said, taking out his gun and handing it to the man butt-first. He raised an eyebrow. “I'm guessing that was going to be next, right?”
The interior of the truck was already cramped, with three other men squeezed into it, and Dannie found himself sitting on the floor between them. One of them began firing questions at him in fluent Standard: his name was Dannie (he didn't provide a second name, and none was asked for), he was 42, and he was a citizen of the Alliance. Why had he come to Selkgrand, the specific country he had landed in?
“I heard you have fantastic beaches,” he replied. His questioner frowned.
“Selkgrand is land-locked.”
“It was a joke. I ended up here by accident.” A light went off on his head, and he realized that his answers were being written down on something like an immigration form. “Are you connected to the Alliance's network?”
“No, no. This is only for our records.”
That's alright, then.
The truck took off with a roar, ploughing through a few dozen trees and upsetting an awful lot of birds. Dannie sighed and faked a yawn, then promptly went into something that might look like a coma to an inexperienced doctor.
When he tunnelled, Dannie was essentially a disembodied mind, and this was a similar feeling. The sensation of floating in an endless black void was somewhat disconcerting, even to someone as experienced as him.
Selkgrand, he thought, and the substantial amount of information he had downloaded into his brain the day before sprang into being around him. He spent the rest of the journey reading avidly.

#

When the truck finally emerged from the forest and began flattening small mammals on a wide road instead, Dannie came out of his self-induced coma. The soldiers were all staring at him fearfully, which meant they probably had some idea of what he was. Dannie wasn't sure if that was good or not, yet.
He could only see out of two small slits in the truck's thick metal sides, a view which gradually changed from open grassland to a run down, urban sprawl. In a surprisingly advanced innovation for a planet this far from the Alliance, the roads were all suspended in mid-air above the city. Given the scarcity of traffic, not many people had cars to drive on them, though.
“You're about to meet the Emperor,” the higher-ranking soldier told him. “When you see him-”
“Walk five paces towards him, bow, walk five paces, then bow again until he tells me to stand up straight.”
The man looked impressed. “You've studied our customs?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Then you shouldn't be in any danger of insulting the Emperor.”
God forbid, Dannie thought.
The 'palace', when they reached it, turned out to be a bizarre caricature of a fortress. There was an elegant building in there somewhere, but it was hidden behind a wall of armoured plating, turrets, and improbably large rail guns. It couldn't have been anything other than a show of force for the citizens to stare at; any attack that made it this far into the city probably wouldn't be turned away by a single building, no matter how many guns had been stuck onto it. Dannie knew from his reading that Selkgrand had been locked into a war for decades with Belequil the only other large country on the planet. There was an uneasy peace between them at the moment, but judging by the state of the palace, it didn't seem as if anyone expected it to last for too long.
The road actually ran straight into the palace, terminating in a very large garage. There was nobody else around, and the room had the feel of a place that was supposed to be bustling with activity. The soldiers led Dannie out of the truck and into a clanging metal elevator that descended swiftly into the lower levels of the palace.
Dannie eyed the soldiers carefully, keeping his face schooled into an expression of nonchalant blankness. There were all visibly nervous – perhaps because he had destroyed the beacon? It looked as if it was completely forgotten about, except for the single guard who had probably been stuck with the job because he was too incompetent to do anything else. He certainly hadn't been aiming his rifle right.
“Do not anger the Emperor in any
way, tunneller,” someone told him quietly. “Your fate is in his hands.”
“I'll keep that in mind.”
Dannie had been dragged in front of regional military officers, court marshal hearings, councils of elders, dukes, lords, ladies, kings, queens, dictators, and a particularly pompous man who had called himself 'The Second Messiah', but this was the first time he had been taken to see an honest-to-goodness Emperor.
It was quite exciting, he had to admit.

#

The 'throne room' was exactly as Dannie had predicted it would be: big, grandiose, and extremely poorly guarded.
A ship in orbit could fire right through those windows, he thought.
There were only five people in the room altogether: Dannie, his two guards, the Emperor, and a man who seemed to be the Emperor's adviser. He stood behind the Emperor's overblown throne and glared at Dannie from beneath the brim of a tall black hat. He looked far more capable than his boss; his type usually did, for some reason. It was a mainstay of totalitarian governments all over the galaxy.
Probably planning on stab the poor fellow in the back, too.
Without being prompted, Dannie strode forward five steps, bowed elaborately, sweeping his newly mended arm forward (and sending a jolt of pain up to his shoulder), then stepped forward five more paces and did the same with the other arm. The whole routine left him looking like a particularly clumsy gorilla trying to dance, which could well have been intentional.
“Very impressive, tunneller,” the Emperor said. He had beady eyes and a well-cultivated beard, and the hand he gestured to Dannie to straighten with was adorned with an impressive amount of rings. “I can see you've prepared well for your arrival.”
“That I have, your excellence,” Dannie replied, lowering his gaze an inch or two. “Your country has a fascinating history.”
“I believe it will probably grow more fascinating in the near future. Caleck? You may begin the interrogation.”
Caleck, the advisor, swept forward and raised an ornate glass and metal machine towards Dannie. He placed it over Dannie's head and let go of it carefully; it hovered where he had placed it.
“If you try to move in any direction, the machine will kill you. By the way.”
“Thank you, your Excellence. That's certainly worth knowing.”
Caleck produced a long length of paper from one of his sleeves and begin firing queries at Dannie in a clipped, precise tone of voice. They weren't really questions, so much as statements with a question mark stuck onto the end.
“The details you gave our immigration officer were correct?”
“Yep.”
“You are not an agent of the Alliance or any of its associated hegemonies?”
“No.”
“You are not an agent of Belequil?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You are not here to sabotage, assassinate, spread dissent, or otherwise impair the proper functioning of the glorious state of Selkgrand?”
“I can't say I was planning on it.”
“You are not a fugitive, outlaw, or escaped slave of any world?”
“Ah...well, that really depends on your definition of 'fugitive'-”
The hovering machine gave a warning beep, and Caleck narrowed his eyes further until they disappeared into his gaunt face. “You are lying tunneller. Explain yourself.”
Dannie took a leap of faith. “I'm being pursued by Alliance agents for stealing certain items of high technology from them.” This had the effect he was hoping for: the Emperor looked stunned, while Caleck's eyes immediately went to his clothing, as if hoping to spot a battle cruiser hidden up his sleeve.
“High technology?” the Emperor sputtered. “What is it? How much?”
Dannie suppressed a smirk. 'High technology' was the phrase used for anything really advanced that the Alliance had a monopoly on – almost ev everything to do with antimatter, shielding systems, planetary defence, and the clever bit of bio-engineering and nanotechnology that gave tunnellers their marvellous abilities. To a country in a system like this, it was the holy grail.
“What? What technology did you steal?” the Emperor demanded.
“Not much, your Majesty. A few small explosives, a personal shielding device, a tunnel mapper of course, and...oh yes, a container of blueprints.”
“Not much? My God, if my armies had technology like that-!”
Dannie decided that this would be a good time to butt in, before he was shot in the back and his corpse hastily looted. “Your excellence, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see that happen. However, I'm afraid I don't have the items I mentioned with me. Tunnelling is an imprecise art, and the container that carried them landed on another part of the planet.”
“Where?”
“Belequil.”
“Invade! Give the order to attack their borders immediately! If those pigs get their hands on that equipment...”
Dannie almost rolled his eyes. The Emperor didn't seem stupid, but neither did he come across as the greatest tactician in the world. Caleck was trying to calm him down.
“Your excellence! Your excellence, please! Think this through for a moment. We still have to deal with...that problem we discussed last month.”
The Emperor went rigid and stared into space for several seconds. Dannie wondered what visions of victory and destruction were playing out in front of his eyes. Finally, he slumped back into his chair and nodded. “Yes, of course. Thank you, Caleck. Tunneller, I request your help. Go to Belequil and get me the items you dropped there.”
“Just out of curiosity, what would happen if-”
“I'll kill you.”
“Fair enough. Then I agree completely to helping you.”
“Oh?” Caleck said, raising one pencil-thin eyebrow. “And what is there to stop you from selling the technology to Belequil?”
Damn.
Dannie took a deep breath and spread his hands out imploringly. “Your excellence, would a man who walks the righteous path deceive his king in a matter such as this?”
The Emperor leaned forward and furrowed his brows. “You're a believer? Impossible, unless you've been to Selkgrand before.”
“Ah, but didn't the Second Prophet say that 'all knowledge of the stars leads to knowledge of God'? And I'm a person who has sought knowledge of the stars for a very long time, your excellence.” Dannie motioned to Caleck, who glanced over to the Emperor, who nodded. The hovering glass and metal device was reluctantly removed.
“Thank you. As I was saying; should you be surprised that I've been born again in the spirit? After all, I've travelled to the distant edges of the galaxy, to the galactic core itself, and to every point in between.” He started to walk back and forth slowly in front of the Emperor. A panicked giddiness started to well up in his chest, the feeling he always got when he was talking out of his nether regions with his life hanging in the balance. The feeling was like an old friend at this point.
“Is it so surprising that I should be a believer? As a young man, eager to see more of the Universe, I travelled to a certain star in the Orion constellation, and all at once was reborn. Ever since then I have sought true knowledge of God, and only recently have I discovered the religion of the prophets. The moment I read the Books, I knew they must be true.”
“And which star was this?” the Emperor asked quietly.
Dannie had to force down the hysterical laughter. He couldn't believe what he was about to try, but his regard for caution had long since abandoned him as a lost cause. “It was near Betelgeuse, your excellence.”
The Emperor's stared at him in shock, while Caleck stared at him in open incredulity. “Betelgeuse? Are you certain, tunneller?”
“Of course. I could never forget where it happened.” He stretched his acting abilities to their limits by adopting a look of innocent naivete. “Why, your excellence? Have you been there?”
“No, of course not...have you not read the book of the End Times?”
“Unfortunately not, your excellence. A copy is not easy to come by in the Alliance.” That was a lie: you could download one from any library in the galaxy, along with every other tome from every other crackpot religion that humans had come up with.
“Yes, I see...I'll have to think this through. Until then, you will of course be provided with a room to stay in.” The Emperor was lost in thought and waved him away gently. One of his guards gestured back towards the day.
“This way, please.”
Dannie smiled at his tone. It was nice how the merest hint that you might be a harbinger of the apocalypse earned you a good deal of respect.

#

“The Emperor wishes to inform you that you're not considered a prisoner,” Dannie was told once inside his room, which he knew would hold true right up until the moment he tried to leave. The messenger was a young woman who was staring at a sheet of paper with her eyebrows scrunched together furiously as she read, obviously for the first time and in a  language she barely understood, his 'official rights'. This went on for an excruciatingly long time, but at last she finished and left.
Dannie collapsed into an ornate black chair. The entire room was quite stylishly furnished and had a view of the hovering roads and what he assumed was the more affluent section of the city, but all he had eyes for was the bed. It was big, with a pair of downy looking pillows, the type that feel as if they're going to swallow your head whole when you lie down on them.
Later, he told himself, knowing full well that pillows weren't going to be a feature in his immediate future. For the moment, he had to figure out if he was in a good situation or a very bad one. He mentally tallied up what he had going for him.
For a start, the Emperor seemed stupid enough to believe that he was 'the Hand of Justice', a saviour figure from his country's religion. Dannie had given himself a little crash course on the subject, enough to talk his way through basic questions about it.The Selkgrandians belief that their holy books were unknown to the rest of the galaxy gave a handy cover for any ignorance that might come to the fore (and there was a lot of it waiting to be discovered), but he was still walking a fine line.
Secondly, he could technically tunnel away if he really needed to. It would be risky without the beacon, but it was an option.
And finally, they hadn't taken away his gun. This was a rather novel occurrence in these kinds of scenarios, and he could only assume that the soldiers who had arrested him had some idea of how important a tunneller was to the Alliance. For all of the Emperor's posturing, he wasn't about to risk bringing an Inspection to his country.
Those were what Dannie had working in his favour. They didn't quite outweigh the fact that he had no money, no connections within several hundred light years, no real destination in mind, and was probably still being pursued by some of the most tenacious bounty hunters the Alliance had on its payroll. And on that note...
Not everything he had said to the Emperor had been a lie. He did have several pieces of high technology at his disposal, and among his collection was a tunnel mapper. He took off his coat and laid it out flat on the floor. It had a beguiling number of pockets and compartments, none of which had anything useful in them. Dannie knelt down and stripped away a flap of material along the back of the coat, which was held in place through similar means to the gel pack he had put on his broken arm. Underneath this was a fine grey mesh.
Dannie took a small device out of his pocket and spoke into it briefly. The mesh did something complicated that made it hard to look at, a particularly bizarre optical illusion that gave people the impression of falling a very long distance without actually moving. When it stopped, the mesh had disappeared, and in its place was a neat hole, about a foot wide. Dannie reached into this and produced the tunnel mapper.
The mesh reformed the moment his hand was out of the hole. It was a handy little piece of high technology, although all it did was create a tunnel between two miniature beacons - one in the coat, and the other in a private, rented vault on a pleasure station in orbit around Mars.
The tunnel mapper was simply a small screen linked to a disc of metal a few inches across. This went onto Dannie's forehead. The word 'READY' appeared on the screen, and he relaxed into a sitting position on the floor. The many augmentations to his brain came to life and his vision blacked out for a few seconds as the mapper took over. Blinking furiously, he held up the screen.
A perfect map of every active tunnel nearby was displayed, courtesy of Dannie's quasi-mystic ability to propel himself through the more shady levels of reality. He was not overly surprised to find five tunnels narrowing in on the planet (which was, helpfully, known by a different name depending on which country you lived in; Dannie hadn't bothered to learn either of them). What was strange, though, was that they were all set to land in completely different places; assuming their creators managed to travel steadily without the aid of a beacon, three of the five would come out in one of the planet's many uninhabitable areas. That wasn't very clever of them; they had to know where the beacon had been, and that Dannie would have come out almost on top of it.
Disturbed, he felt along the tunnels with his mind, letting the computer make sense of what his brain was telling him. They were coming from nearby, most likely from a ship, and...yes, they were taking their time, moving through the system carefully. He couldn't follow all of them at once, so he chose one and traced it carefully.
It would curve around one of the gas giants - that was good, they were skimming along its gravity; these people had some skill - slingshot around a moon or two, flowing through the system in a ribbon-like manner rather than the neat curves that Dannie preferred, but to each his own, and now there was something moving through it...
A cold shock raced down his spine as he encountered something that certainly wasn't human. His eyes flew open just as the computer told him what it was: the words 'ANTIMATTER BOMB' flashed in red. Dannie stared at them, willing the computer to have made a mistake, but the little warning winked at him incessantly.
With a sense of urgency that rode ahead of a wave of terror, he checked the rest of the tunnels. Each of them contained the same deadly payload, and now he had an explanation for their trajectories. Someone wanted him dead so badly that they were willing to sterilize an entire planet. When a fifth tunnel appeared, this time bearing a ship, he was not at all surprised to find that it would arrive a minute or two after the bombs did.
The cleanup crew, because he had escaped against impossible odds before.
Dannie shut off the computer and removed the metal disc from his temple. He stowed them away again mechanically, with stiff, slow movements. When he was done he sat down on the ground in front of his coat, thinking hard, and when he was done with that he dived back into his mental repository, searching, searching frantically for a way out. He found one, eventually, and when he knocked on the door of his room his expression was one of complete calm.
"Excuse me, but I need to speak with the Emperor again," he told his guard.
"Is it...urgent?" He pronounced 'urgent' like 'oorgent'.
"Yes, I think so."


#

The Emperor stared at Dannie as he paced back and forth in front of his throne, explaining the situation as a University professor might explain a particularly difficult topic to his class, with many tangents and pauses for his single student (not including the ever-present Caleck) to ask questions.
When he was done, the Emperor turned to Caleck and smiled triumphantly; the 'Hand of Justice' was supposed to fight in a great battle against impossible odds before the end of the Universe. Dannie found it hard to take any pride in his ruse now.
"Can you do anything about this, tunneller?" the Emperor asked when the explanation was finished. He seemed calm for a man who had just learned that his entire planet was about to be obliterated, but Dannie could detect the faint notes of desperation in his voice. They were likely there all along, but now he was looking for them; he had read some very interesting things about Belequil.
"I can't, your excellence. Once a tunnel is formed, there's nothing I can do to change its course. But, as you're probably aware, Belequil possesses artillery turrets capable of firing into orbit..." This was what Caleck had no doubt meant by 'that problem we discussed last month'. Those same turrets were also more than capable of firing straight at an incoming army, and there were enough of them to turn any attack into a spectacular and costly disaster.
"If you're suggesting that we ask for help..."
That's exactly what I'm suggesting, you jackass, Dannie thought. He often wondered if men with power took special classes in being obtuse, or if it was just something they developed as their careers developed and the body count rose.
"We wouldn't need to 'ask for help', your excellence. I need to go to Belequil anyway to retrieve my...ah, that is, your high technology. While I'm there, it would be easy to take control of one of their guns in time to destroy the bombs as they emerge."
Caleck raised an eyebrow again. Dannie watched it go up, fascinated; it seemed to take twice as many muscles as it would for anyone else. It was practically choreographed.
"You can single handedly capture on of these artillery pieces?" he said, his eyebrow a-quiver.
"Yes."
The Emperor shot Caleck 'A Look'. "How long do we have?"
"Two hours...no, one hour and fifty minutes. Your time, that is."
"Do it, then."
Dannie performed his ape-dance bowing routine again and left, this time without an armed escourt.

#

Tunnelling from one part of a planet to another was easy for someone of Dannie's experience, but he spent a long time standing on the roof of the palace anyway, ostensibly to prepare himself to tunnel but in reality to prepare himself for what might happen afterwards.
It was night, and the stars were bright overhead; there was a blackout in effect in the city. The streets were also empty except for roving pairs of armoured soldiers, a depressingly familiar sight to Dannie.
The stars tempted him. He could take a chance and try to escape, and leave this planet and its people to their fate. It would be so easy, he thought. He could just keep going, right out to some uncharted system with life-supporting planets. Nobody would ever find him.
If the bombs hadn't been intended for him, he might have done it.
We make decisions in one of two ways. Either an epiphany comes over us and we decide, all at once, to take a certain action, or we deliberate for  along time, weighing up the pros and cons in a rational way, balancing the scales before coming to a final (but not unalterable) conclusion. Although we always think we decide the second way, very often we don't. There was no real chance of Dannie leaving the planet to be destroyed; he made up his mind the moment he saw the bombs on his tunnel mapper, had crossed a line that he couldn't walk back over again, no matter how many times he told himself it was a possibility.
A long time ago he had come to a similar decision, that he could not let the captain of his ship continue to commit certain crimes, and when reporting him did no good...
Dannie roused himself from memory. In hindsight he had doomed himself to be a fugitive for the rest of his life - a life that he had spent opposing the Alliance whenever he could. There had been more deaths after the first, of course.
Okay...here we go, he thought, and reached out with his mind. His normal senses dropped away, to be replaced by the complex intuition and mental sensations that were a tunneller's second sight.
Watching from nearby, where they thought Dannie wouldn't see them, the Emperor's soldiers witnessed the air around Dannie warp strangely for the briefest moment before he simply vanished. Half of them looked disappointed, while the others stared at the empty rooftop in astonishment. They had all heard the stories of the Alliance's mighty Tunnellers, but they hadn't really believed in them.


#

Tunnelling was an experience like no other for Dannie, even after so many years. As his body disappeared, so too did his thoughts and the ever-present fear of capture by the Alliance. There was only time for the mental reflexes that would keep him on the right course or send him to his death. The planet he travelled over became a deep curve in space-time, and he skimmed across it expertly. 'Speed' didn't apply here, but there was a way to measure how far he went and how much time it took him to get there. In that sense, he was going quite slowly. Dannie's speciality had always been the long trips, the tunnels that stretched across the stars and linked nebulas together. There were others who could tunnel from one end of a small room to the other, but Dannie had been a prodigy when it came to long distances. He had set several records in his time as well, usually while fleeing the Alliance.
All too soon, he began to fade himself back into normal space. This was a gradual process, and his senses returned to him one at a time: first he became aware of the physical space around him (although his mind was still travelling through that shadowy other dimension), then he could feel a warm breeze on his skin. Hearing came next, arriving with the clang and clamour of some heavy machinery in the distance, then smell (the sharp tang of oil greeted him), taste, and finally sight. It took about three seconds total, but he knew of tunnellers who had been killed in that amount of time.
He was standing knee-deep in unhealthy looking grass, behind the control center for the largest set of turrets. He could have tunnelled right inside, of course, coming out in a building was never a good idea unless you knew it very well. His lecturers at the military academy had illustrated this point with all sorts of anecdotes about unfortunate men and woman appearing inside fusion reactors or in mid-air over scrap metal reprocessors. Dannie still didn't know how many of those stories were true, but the lecturer had made his point sufficiently well all the same.
The two guards at the main entrance collapsed with a single shot of Dannie's concussion gun. He dragged the unconscious men into the scrubby grass and tied their feet together, then tossed an EMP grenade through the door they had been guarding. Every security system in the building immediately went haywire.
Inside, the building was impressively modern, with a few computer systems that made Dannie think the Bellequil military was buying Alliance technology from pirates. There was an alarm sounding somewhere, but he met relatively few guards. Those that he did come across were too slow with their weapons to avoid forceful unconsciousness.
The main control room was at the bottom of a maze of concrete corridors and fortified blast doors. Dannie checked his map often (he had printed a hard copy; diving into his mental repository every few minutes would not have been a clever move in a place like this) and avoided as many of these doors as he could, but he was still forced to shoot his way through a few of them.
Three doors and a dozen unconscious guards later, he got the surprise of his life; an AI in a robotic shell came sprinting around the corner towards him. It was a brand new model, built for combat and lethally fast. With inhuman speed it raised its rifle and fired. The charge went straight through Dannie's arm, breaking it again and giving it an interesting new hole that hadn't been there before, and blew a sizeable chunk out of the wall behind him. Dannie dived to the side to avoid another shot and simultaneously tossed his second EMP grenade. It went off with a bang and the AI collapsed.
Dannie slapped another gel back on his arm, but the damage was too severe for instant healing. He'd have to do a more thorough job later.
The AI's shell really was pristine. He examined it carefully, trying to find the tattoo-like markings that a pirate cartel would have etched onto the near-indestructible metal, but there were none. An Alliance serial number was printed in the small of its back and along both of its spindly (but extremely powerful) arms.
This certainly changed things. An AI in an advanced shell was the last thing he had expected to find here, and if the Alliance were supplying Bellequil with technology, he had to assume that the antimatter bombs had been set in such a way as to leave some parts of the planet untouched. Risking a peek at some of his stored information, he found that Bellequil's society had modernized rapidly along with their technological prowess. His files suggested that they were biding their time until they could crush Selkgrand with impunity. Apparently, the Alliance had decided to kill two birds with one stone and do that for them.
Would a war break out between the two countries as soon as he was gone? Probably, but that was none of Dannie's business. The bombs were still at least partially intended to kill him, so his plan hadn't changed much. He amended it as he hurried to the heart of the subterranean complex.
The final set of blast door yielded easily to the more powerful of his two guns. He stepped aside quickly as it melted away, neatly avoiding a hail of rifle fire, and then tossed a concussion grenade into the room. It made a satisfying thump sound as it went off.
Inside he found a few unconscious men and women in blue military uniforms, what looked like a scientist, and two soldiers. He made a quick check for guns and ended up with a small pile, which he promptly melted.
The computers didn't give him nearly as much trouble as he thought they would; they were standard Alliance models, after all. The terminal he picked accepted his little virus without complaint and initiated a secure connection to the Emperor. A holographic projection appeared on the wall beside him, filled with an image of the Emperor smiling smugly. Dannie didn't like the look in his eyes.
"You're in? You have control of the turret?" he asked. Caleck was hovering behind him.
"Yes, the program worked fine. I can fire any time."
"Good."
A klaxon began to screech loudly, and the computer flashed a warning: an ominously orange-tinted map of the complex appeared, with each turret marked out in red. They had all been deactivated.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"You thought you were clever, did you? Eh?" the Emperor said, manically. His eyes were bulging from his head. He's snapped, Dannie thought, feeling his stomach plunging. "How stupid do you think I am? Did you actually think you could fool me with that blasphemous act?" He laughed for a good thirty seconds, ignoring Caleck's weak entreaties behind him.
"Listen to me, if these turrets don't fire-"
"The bombs will come?" the Emperor finished for him. "What bombs? My astronomers have searched the skies and found nothing. You're an Alliance spy, aren't you? I know all about how people are siding with Bellequil."
Dannie groaned and shut off the sound. The Emperor ranted on, waving his arms animatedly in a way that might have been funny in any other situation. The program he had been given had locked him out of the turret controls completely; evidently, the Selkgrandians knew more about computers than he thought. Trying to reactivate the turrets was a lost cause, but he could still use the communications systems...
The sound of people rushing towards the room echoed down the corridor outside, and Dannie tossed his final grenade at the door absent mindedly. A shield sprang up where it landed, blocking it completely. There was no way in now short of tunnelling through the walls.
Ten minutes until the bombs get here, he thought, tapping on the computer's controls nervously. Someone started firing at the shield and got a nasty surprise when his charge bounced off it and hit him in the leg. Five minutes later, the Alliance ship finally appeared in orbit.
Dannie opened a communication line to it, and a man in a captain's uniform appeared on another projection. He looked only faintly surprised to see Dannie.
"It's you. Do you ever go somewhere without causing trouble?"
"I could ask you the same question. Close the tunnels with the bombs in them," Dannie snarled, leaning in close to the projection. "You won't get me anyway. I'm in Belequil."
"This wasn't about you. We want Belequil to win this war, and bombing everyone else was the quickest way to make sure that happened. You just happened to land here, so we...accelerated the plan somewhat. Besides, you can't escape. We've shielded the entire city you're in."
Dannie swore silently. He could still tunnel within the shield, but not through it. That would make things a bit more tricky, but he had a trump card ready. His hands flew over the computer's controls, and a small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth as he saw that the bomb tunnels extended right down to the planet's surface.
"Captain, I strongly advise that you call off the attack."
"Why's that?"
"Because I've been recording everything you said for the last few minutes, and I just broadcast it through your tunnels. You've got...let me see, one minute and ten seconds before a certain very vocal dissident media company gets hold of this."
The captain stared at him. "You couldn't have, we shielded-"
"These people still use hardlines. The broadcast tower is actually right next to one of your bombs. Lucky for me, I guess. Fifty seconds!"
The captain turned and barked an order at someone behind him. They apparently confirmed what Dannie had said, because the captain's face turned an interesting shade of purple.
"You goddamned psycho, you'll start riots in-"
"Good.  I hope they burn down the citadel. Twenty seconds, captain. You'll probably lose your job over this."
Two things happened at once: the captain of the Alliance ship gave the order to close the bomb tunnels, essentially destroying anything inside them, and something on the other screen caught Dannie's eye. He turned towards in time to see Caleck shoot the Emperor in the head.
There was a brief spray of blood and bone before his body dropped away from view. Caleck took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead with a shaky hand.
Whoops. Probably should have been keeping an eye on that, Dannie thought. He turned the audio stream back on.
"I've just killed the Emperor," Caleck said, in a dazed tone of voice. "He had ordered a full scale attack on Belequil...it would have been suicide. I'll call it off."
"Please do. Will you be in trouble over this?"
"No...no, not really. I had, ah, certain events planned anyway. Friends in the right places, so to speak," Caleck visibly regained his composure, although he was still even more pale than usual. "The bombs?"
"Taken care of. It's about time I got out of here."
"Thank you. And good luck."
Dannie turned off the projection and smiled at the glowering captain. "Well, that was fun."
"Belequil will still win this war. You haven't changed anything."
"That's not entirely true. I'm not going to die."
"Ha! That room you're in is about to be filled with my soldiers. There's no way out."
Dannie chuckled. He had that giddy feeling again, the one that meant his hindbrain felt death approaching at speed. But he still had one way out....
The soldiers tunnelled into the room at the precise moment Dannie tunnelled out. He felt the shield all around him, as constricting as a fine meshed net would have been to his physical body, but it was pierced by the rapidly decaying tunnel that the Alliance soldiers had used - a tunnel that was tuned specifically to breach it. He caught the ragged edges of it and pushed himself through, following it straight to its source.
As it turned out, the captain had his back to him when he appeared on the bridge. Dannie drew his gun and, still half blind from the after-effects of tunnelling, shot him in the back. There was a lot of yelling and guns being drawn all around him, but Dannie was an oasis of calm amidst all of this. He turned around and gave a cheery little wave to a woman who was about to shoot him, and then vanished.


#

The trip out of the system was as rough as he had expected. He came perilously close to falling into several large gravity wells and barely made it out without his tunnel collapsing altogether; he was exhausted, and tunnelling required effort. But he made it out and left the crowded little system behind.
He travelled aimlessly through the depths of space, joyful of his freedom. The stars were calling to him again.