The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 15

The submarine was approaching its design limit, creaking under the pressure of the black water, when they reached the ancient ingress. Ruiz watched the sonar image in the holotank intently, nudging the craft centimeter by centimeter closer to the stack’s vertical wall. The ingress showed as a circular depression, two meters in diameter, crudely blocked with fused metal girders, now shapeless with corrosion.

They touched the wall as gently as Ruiz could manage, but the submarine rang like a bell at the impact. The others watched with anxious faces as he extended the repair chamber, adjusted its mating surfaces to the wall’s irregularities, and activated its molecular hooks.

A pump came to life, sounding unnaturally loud. “It’ll be a few minutes before we can get into the chamber and start cutting,” Ruiz said.

Everyone looked down, a synchronized gesture that made Ruiz wonder if they had all heard the same tales he had — tales about huge voracious monsters that coiled through the uncharted deep grottoes of SeaStack, never rising to the surface. He laughed, prompting the others to glare at him suspiciously.

When the repair chamber was clear, he beckoned to Albany. “You’re good with a torch, Albany, so you’re elected; I’ll use the other one.” The two of them squeezed into the chamber, wearing respirators and protective masks, and started cutting away the dripping metal, along the circumference of the ingress. Thick white fumes filled the chamber, and Ruiz’s world narrowed down to the glare of the torch and the bright trickle of molten metal that ran from the cut, to be sucked up by the torch’s aspirator. He tried not to think of the coming action, the odds against his success. He succeeded in forcing away those thoughts — but he couldn’t entirely forget about Nisa, waiting for him in the pen, who would probably never learn the circumstances of his death, should he fail.

After ten minutes, the hiss of Albany’s torch changed, acquiring the fluttering note that indicated breakthrough into an airspace. “Stop,” said Ruiz, but Albany was already shutting down the torch.

Ruiz fed a finewire aural probe through the thin seam where Albany had broken through, turned up the gain on the amplifier. “Hold your breath,” he told Albany.

Nothing. Ruiz listened intently for thirty seconds. He heard only the most obdurate of silences; devoid even of the most basic sounds — the sigh of ventilators, the vibration of generators, the subtly distorted noises of life that usually filtered into even the most remote burrows of the stacks. “Maybe our employer was right,” he said, and put the probe away. “Maybe no one knows about this passage.”

Albany seemed briefly cheered. “You mean we might live through this?”

“I didn’t say that,” answered Ruiz — but he smiled and slapped Albany’s shoulder. “Let’s cut some more.”

An hour later they had freed the meter-thick plug that closed the ingress. They forced a thixotropic lubricant into the seam, then welded half a dozen automatic shear jacks to the outer edges and set them into motion.

Slowly, the plug slid inward, groaning. Ruiz donned his weapons.

“Make sure the others are ready — get them in their armor and check to see they’ve got all their gear,” he told Albany, who nodded and went back into the sub.

Ruiz tried to think what else he might do to increase his chances of survival, but nothing came to him. All now seemed to depend on how good Publius’s intelligence had been — and on how much good luck remained to Ruiz. He remembered Dolmaero’s dour pronouncements on the subject of luck, and smiled. He found that he missed the Guildmaster.

The plug cleared the opening, and the jacks pushed it inward half a meter, just far enough to permit a person to slip past. Air puffed into the repair chamber. Albany sampled it, bent over his meters, then spoke. “Clean enough.” He took off his breather, made a sour face. Ruiz took off his mask. The faint stink of Gencha stained the air. He wrinkled his nose, then put on his helmet and lowered the visor.

The rest of his team stood waiting, and Ruiz nodded at Durban the beaster.

“Go,” he said.

Durban shouldered eagerly past him. The personamatrix scarab he wore at the base of his skull gave him the reflexive cruelty and decisiveness of his totem. He glanced at Ruiz, bright-eyed and smiling. The wolverine that filled his brain looked out of Durban’s human eyes, happy to be going where it might fulfill its vicious impulses.

Durban went through with a supple twist of his body, and Ruiz held his breath, waiting for the sound of ambush, or automated anti-intruder weaponry. But nothing came, and after a moment Durban whispered, “Come.”

“Huxley,” Ruiz said to the cyborg with the antisurveillance gear. “Get in, set up.” Next, Ruiz sent in the scar-faced ex-gladiator and one of the flankers, then gestured at the puppet. The false Yubere smiled his empty smile and went.

Ruiz went back into the sub, checked to see that the controls were adequately locked against tampering, and that the sub’s security systems were set to self-destruct should anyone attempt to enter before Ruiz returned. The Gench crouched in the darkest corner, and Ruiz dialed the lights to a softer level. “We’ll be back as soon as possible,” he told it, and it made a hissing sound of assent.

“If Publius attempts to contact you, you will be much safer if you do not respond,” he said.

“I will remember,” it said. “At present, you seem more trustworthy than Publius. So far you have been truthful; I detect the scent-signatures of many members of the Real Race.”

A shudder of apprehension wavered through Ruiz. “How many?”

“More than I could separate — more than I knew still existed anywhere. I am very young and my knowledge is small, but… very many. Perhaps when you return, you will allow me to go to them.”

“If conditions permit,” Ruiz said.

“I understand.”

The tunnel was three meters in height. In the helmet lamps his team wore, its rough alloy walls seemed to curve slightly to the left. Ruiz consulted with Albany, who monitored a tiny scattershot radarscreen on his forearm. “What do you see?” asked Ruiz.

“No activity in my range,” said Albany, brow furrowed in concentration. “I get dropouts every thirty-three meters — must be adits of some sort, without doors.”

Ruiz set his people in motion — the beaster in front, the flankers drifting back and forth in a reciprocating pattern, the nameless gladiator trailing well back. He held the false Yubere’s leash; just ahead of him walked Huxley the cyborg with his antisurveillance gear. Just behind Ruiz, Albany trudged along under his load of detectors.

“Helmet mikes only, minimum range,” said Ruiz. “Be stealthy, everyone.”

Seven pairs of eyes gleamed at him from the dark; each pair but one carried some unique message: anticipation, curiosity, fear.

The puppet seemed impossibly placid.

Ruiz looked back at Albany. “You’re the navigator,” he said.

“Let’s trot,” said Albany. “I’ll let you know when we’re lost.”

They followed the empty tunnel for several kilometers, and Albany confirmed Ruiz’s impression that they were rising slightly. “That’s the right way, boss,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“I guess,” Ruiz said. They were following a navigation bead provided by Publius; its telltales blinked green in Albany’s dataslate.

At regular intervals they passed open doorways, edged by ovals of some silvery alloy. At the first of these, Durban had paused for a moment, then dropped to his belly and risked a peek over the threshold. “Empty storeroom,” he said, and went on. So far all the doorways had proven similarly innocuous.

At the three-and-a-half-kilometer mark, Albany froze in midstep. “Activity,” he whispered, and the rest of the team stopped abruptly. “I’m getting just a taste of electromagnetics… some sort of ranging pulse, maybe.”

Huxley tapped at his dataslate. “Not enough to go on,” the cyborg said in a grating bass. “I need to get closer.”

Ruiz considered, then called in one of the pinbeamers. “Chou, you and Durban convoy Huxley and Albany forward, till they get a better shape of what’s coming up. Be quiet — don’t use the helmet comms outside the fifty-meter range.”

She nodded, and the four of them slid into the gloom. In a few moments they disappeared around the curve of the tunnel. For a dozen heartbeats longer Ruiz could make out the reflection of their helmet lamps, and then there was nothing but darkness ahead.

Ruiz waited, the puppet’s leash in one hand, a plasma projector in the other. The remaining pinbeamer crouched against the tunnel wall fifteen meters ahead, the gladiator waited even farther behind them, just inside a storeroom doorway.

“We have a little privacy,” said the false Yubere. “Perhaps you’ll tell me what the Gench did to me. Publius said nothing to me about any additional modifications.”

“Publius doesn’t tell you everything, apparently.”

“No, of course not. Still it seems strange. Are you sure it wasn’t your idea?”

“If it was, would I tell you?”

The puppet’s face twisted, just for an instant. “Dangerous even to tease me about such things,” the false Yubere said, in a voice that was suddenly dark and wild, as if another person spoke from his body.

Ruiz gave the puppet a speculative stare. What was this? Was the puppet — and thus Yubere — not so bland a creature as Publius had led him to believe?

“Sorry,” said Ruiz. “Of course I acted on Publius’s instructions. Would I dare to defy such a potent monster? Who is that brave, or foolish?”

The puppet’s face resumed its mask of disengaged cheerfulness. “As you say. Well, another matter, then. Why must you keep me on this leash? Surely you know I wouldn’t defy Publius’s instructions.”

“It makes me feel better,” said Ruiz. “Besides, it’s clear already that he gave different orders to me than he gave to you.”

Half an hour later, Ruiz heard Albany’s whisper through the comm. “Come.”

Albany was alone when they reached him a few minutes later. “I left the others to keep an eye on developments,” Albany said. There was a jagged undertone to his voice. “Do we have to do this, boss?”

Ruiz nodded. “What did you find?”

“Weird stuff. Weird. What is it with you and the Gencha? You seem to be going out of your way to rub up against them.”

In fact Ruiz had noticed the slow strengthening of the Gencha stink, as they walked.

“Never mind that, Albany,” he snapped. “What did you find?”

Albany sighed. “So don’t pay any attention to me; see if I care. Well, we found a great big hole in the stack. This tunnel ends there, like the big hole ate right through it when whatever made the big hole happened. The hole is about a hundred fifty meters across, roughly cylindrical, with lots of other tunnels above and below this one. A spiral tramway goes around the walls, avoiding the tunnels — it looks to be pretty recent construction. The hole goes up almost half a kilometer, according to my radar, but it goes down a lot farther — three kilometers. But I can tell you this: It stinks like the whole Gencha race lives at the bottom of it.”

“What was the activity you detected?”

Albany shook his head. “Don’t know — it dropped off when we got a little closer. My guess is that it was the tram — a car going up or down.”

“Surveillance activity?”

“Huxley says not. Is he any good?”

Ruiz ignored the question. The pit hadn’t figured in Publius’s briefing; apparently Publius’s data on Yubere’s stronghold was imperfect. He hoped that the navigation bead wasn’t useless.

He turned to the puppet. “What is it?”

The puppet shook his head amiably. “I seem to have forgotten about this. How odd, to be surprised by such a major feature in my own house.” He looked genuinely bemused, though only for an instant.

“Can we get to the tram track?” asked Ruiz.

“Passes twenty meters under our tunnel, spirals around the pit wall and passes sixty meters above the tunnel,” said Albany. “But you can see for yourself; we’re almost there. There’s a useful level of ambient light in the pit, if you want to switch off your helmet light.”

As soon as Ruiz killed his light, he noticed a soft red light at the end of the tunnel. His stomach jumped, and he felt a sweat break on his forehead.

“Oh yeah,” said Albany.

The red glow was the hue preferred by the Gencha who had installed his death net and mission-imperative. He felt a phantom shift in his mind, as if ghosts of those constructs still existed somewhere in him. An odd lassitude welled up in him; he fought it down, bludgeoned it with his purpose.

They reached the end of the tunnel, where the others lay on their bellies. The cyborg had extended several probes into the pit; he appeared to be fishing with invisible line. Chou the pinbeamer was well back from the edge, her face pressed to the tunnel floor. Durban seemed a compressed spring of destruction, waiting to uncoil. He gave Ruiz a feral glance as Ruiz crawled up beside him.

“Cut back your personaskein,” ordered Ruiz. Durban gave him a wordless snarl, an inhuman expression… but then he reached up to his neck and adjusted the skein.

The beaster might turn out to be a liability, Ruiz thought, just before he looked out over the pit.

The walls seemed to be the source of that disturbing bloody light, and he wondered at the extravagance of Alonzo Yubere, to so illuminate this vast hole. Judging the man from his puppet, he’d never have expected such a flair for the dramatic.

The tramway was a single rail, held away from the slagged-over surface of the pit by webwork brackets; its metal showed the brightness of frequent use. It spiraled endlessly down into the pit, its delicate glimmer finally lost against the glow.

Ruiz edged forward, so that he could look far down into the pit. A thin mist obscured the depths, catching and concentrating the light so that it seemed a great gloomy red eye looked up at Ruiz from the bottom of the world.

“Something’s falling fast,” said the cyborg, who hastily retracted his probes.

Ruiz looked up. A dot resolved into the tiny figure of a person, falling in a boneless tumble. An instant later Ruiz saw that it was a woman, her face obscured by long dark hair, streaming in the wind of her descent.

Then she dropped past, somewhat closer to the far side of the pit than to Ruiz, so that he never got a clear look at her. She disappeared soundlessly into the red depths.

He was shaken by a sudden illogical conviction that he had just seen Nisa falling to her death. No, no…. She was safe, back in the pen. He cursed himself for his foolishness. The universe was full of slender black-haired women; it was supreme arrogance to believe that this one was in any way connected to Ruiz Aw.

“Feeding the Gencha,” said Albany.

“I guess so,” said Ruiz in a somewhat shaky voice. The Gencha were carrion feeders, able to assimilate the decay products of almost any hydrocarbon-based life. He didn’t want to think what it must be like at the bottom of the pit. This is just like a goblin tale, Nisa, he thought, and then somehow he was able to put aside his horror and apprehension. The hero always rescues the princess, he told himself.

The cyborg extended his probes and lowered a sensor to the track. He studied the output, then proffered a datacable to Albany, who plugged it into his own array of detectors.

“Hey,” said Albany. “I think someone’s coming down the slow way.”

Huxley reeled in his probes again, and the others dispersed back down the tunnel, so as not to project too obvious an infrared profile.

Ruiz had handed the puppet’s leash to one of the pinbeamers. Now he, Huxley, and Albany were the only ones remaining at the lip of the tunnel.

A thin singing reached Ruiz’s ears. He looked up and saw the tram far above, descending swiftly, circulating around the wall of the pit at a speed that stressed the rail enough to produce the sound.

When the tram had descended to a point just above them on the opposite wall, Ruiz peered at it through the tiny photomultiplier telescope that Albany handed him. He saw a bare framework of girders cantilevered out from the rail, sliding on frictionless impellor bushings. Between the ends lay six pallets, to which a half-dozen persons were secured. The passengers’ heads lolled with every jolt of the tram; apparently they were anesthetized. A Dirm of gigantic proportions sat at each end of the contrivance, each staring in opposite directions, grasers held ready. Before one of them was a control panel, from which projected various levers and switches. Their alien skulls displayed prominent scars, of a pattern Ruiz recognized.

Albany grunted. “Pithed Dirms,” he said. “Your man got the big money, eh?”

Ruiz shrugged. “They wouldn’t hire us expensive cutthroats just to snuff a pauper.”

“True. Well, we can snip them right off their seats; the real trick will come after we grease them — catching the tram before it gets away. It’s moving pretty fast.”

“Let’s wait until they come back,” said Ruiz.

“Well of course.” Albany looked mildly insulted. “Do I look like a tourist who’s just dying to visit Gencha Wonderland?”

Ruiz smiled. “No. How do you think we should do it?”

Albany rubbed his jaw speculatively. “We got a small problem. The Jahworld sisters are acrophobic — I guess you didn’t think that would matter when you probed them. I don’t know how much good they’re going to do us out there.”

Ruiz considered. “If our employer’s given us accurate data — aside from the existence of this hole, which he didn’t know existed — then we may be able to slip in the target’s back door, and we may not need everyone. We’ll leave the sisters here in the tunnel to keep our bolthole open.”

“Lot of ifs, Ruiz,” said Albany.

The tram swept around the side of the pit. Ruiz turned to Huxley. “Get everything you can, scan the contraption for deadman switches, uplinks, antiboarding devices — you know what to look for. I don’t know how long a round-trip takes, but when they get back, we’ll have to be ready for them.”

They waited silently while Huxley worked with his probes. The tram passed beneath them and Ruiz half expected the Dirm to lift their alien heads and see him — but they stared stolidly at nothing.

When they were gone with their cargo of sleeping victims, Ruiz turned to Huxley. “What did you get?”

“I can’t be sure I got everything, but… there are deadman switches, inductively monitoring the first Dirm’s vital signs. No problem there, if Moh or Chou can still shoot. The switches seem inadequately armored — a pinbeam through the central solenoids ought to fuse them open. Stupid design, really — the main uplink transponder seemed to be housed in an impenetrable block of monomol armor, but the remotes are vulnerable.”

“What else?”

“There’s a random ident uplink, I think. If it works as I assume it does, someone upstairs occasionally calls, and one of them responds. Puts some part of its anatomy in a topological scanner. What do Dirms use for that?”

“Elbow whorls,” said Ruiz.

“Ah. Well then, no problem — we’ll just keep an elbow handy and hope we recognize the calldown. Then there’s an anti-intrusion field — sets off a silent alarm if any unauthorized person tries to board the tram between stops. Fortunately our employer didn’t skimp on our gear, and I think I can tune our armor into an invisible resonance with the field — its pattern shift isn’t terribly sophisticated.”

Albany laughed softly. “Yeah, great, Huxley, what a relief. Otherwise we might have had to give up and go back to our nice little sub. Wouldn’t that’ve been a tragedy?”

Huxley gave Albany a chilly glance, but didn’t bother to reply. “Then,” he continued, “there seem to be several purely mechanical devices: proximity jects, tanglefoot decking, razor rails. Those are more properly your department, Albany, but they seem to be electronically linked to a central activity monitor — another job for the pinbeamers.

“Then there’s some sort of feedback uplink on the tram itself, hooked to a lowtech inertial guidance unit, which probably is designed to report any sudden change in the tram’s speed.”

“What about the pit itself?” asked Ruiz.

“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” said the cyborg, shrugging his metal shoulders. “If we had a week and the right gear, we might be able to scale the wall, if no one came along and noticed us. The rail is hot with detector filaments, though, so we can’t just climb the webbing.”

“So,” said Albany. “Let’s see if I can sum up. Our freaked-out sisters got to get steady enough to punch the solenoids, we got to pop the Dirms without losing any elbows, and then we got to get on the thing without slowing it, even though it’s moving fast enough to break our legs if we land wrong. Then we got to miss the jects and the razor rails, keep from stepping in the tanglefoot. Then when we get to the top, we’ll probably have a reception waiting for us because we missed some detail, or stuck the wrong elbow in the scanner. Stop me anytime, someone.”

“I guess I’ll go talk to Moh and Chou,” said Ruiz. “Meanwhile, figure out how to get on the tram.”

Ruiz went back along the tunnel, to where the two Jahworld women huddled in the angle between wall and floor, each clutching her pinbeam, as if deriving some comfort from its heavy glass and metal barrel.

“I’m sorry you’re frightened,” he said. “But we’ll need you when the tram comes back.”

“Too deep,” said Moh in a voice trembling with strain. “Way too deep. You told us this was going to be a cavecrawl.” Her tone was only slightly accusing; her terror seemed to be occupying all her attention.

“I thought it was,” said Ruiz. “But it’s not; and that’s too bad. I’m going to put you two up at the tunnel mouth — you’ll have to burn out some gear for us. Can you do it?”

Chou sat up and disengaged herself from the other woman’s grip. “We’ll give it a shot. But if you think we’re going out into that hole, you’re wrong.”

“No, no, I don’t expect that. What good would you be to me there? I’ll leave you here to guard our back door, after we get the tram. You wait for us.”

Chou’s flat broad face cleared. “We’ll camp down the tunnel, where we can’t see the light or feel the deep.”

Ruiz nodded and went back to the lip.

“Go set up the sisters’ fire pattern and priorities,” he told the cyborg.

More than an hour passed before Ruiz heard the rail begin to sing again.

They had used the time to formulate and refine a plan. It depended too much on perfection of execution, Ruiz thought pessimistically, but it was the best he could do. He didn’t really believe that he would be able to come up with a better plan if they waited for the tram to make another trip; besides, who knew when that might occur — it might not go down to the Gencha again for a week. And he’d always been luckiest when he improvised quickly.

Ruiz had sent the gladiator, the puppet, and Durban the beaster out along a horizontal crack in the wall that widened sufficiently to hide them, a few meters closer to the rail and perhaps fifty meters farther up — a point from which boarding the tram would be somewhat easier. Ruiz had sealed the puppet’s leash to the gladiator’s wrist — and told the nameless man that getting the puppet safely on the tram was the most important job.

Ruiz, Albany, Huxley, and the sisters lay on their bellies at the tunnel mouth, rehearsing each other in their roles in the impending attack. The sisters would burn out the deadman solenoids, so those mechanisms would stay locked in the live positions. Albany would try to burn off as many of the physical antiboarding devices as he could. Huxley wasn’t notably skilled with long-range weapons, so his job was to get his and Albany’s gear aboard undamaged.

Ruiz had taken one of the most difficult tasks for himself — killing the Dirms. Dirms possessed vestigial remote brains distributed through their bodies in a number of locations, a legacy from their overgrown sauroid ancestors. Through an expensive and uncertain process, these vestigial brains could be enhanced with tissue from the Dirm’s primary brain, until the alien possessed a form of distributed intelligence that made it almost impossible to instantly disable the creature. Ruiz would have to burn through enough of the Dirm’s brains to disable the creature before it could report the attack.

Then, supposing all went well, and Huxley detected no alarms on the tram’s uplink, they would all fling themselves into space, tethered by programmable monolastic descenders — special lines that would stretch to absorb the shock of hitting the end of the tether, but not rebound. If Albany’s calculations were correct, they would end up dangling two meters over the rail as the tram passed.

They’d have to drop, avoid any of the mantraps Albany might have missed, avoid injury, and not fall off. Then they’d have to catch the puppet, and the other two slayers.

After that they could start wondering what they might find at the top of the pit.

“This ought to be easy,” said Albany, grinning ferociously.

Ruiz wasn’t very amused. All his life he had thrown himself into situations of uncertain violence, confident that he would survive them, as he always had. It no longer seemed possible for him to enter conflict with the same impersonal monomaniacal intensity that had guarded him for so long, and he wasn’t sure what had changed. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he was no longer as indifferent to the possibility of death; now he wanted very badly to live, with a fervor that grew stronger every day.

He wondered how it was he had lived for so many years without noticing that he hadn’t cared very much whether he lived or died.

“Wake up, Ruiz,” whispered Albany, who nudged him and pointed. The tram was coming up the incline toward them, moving upward somewhat more slowly than it had descended — a heartening development. It carried six passengers, though these weren’t anesthetized. They lay on their pallets, looking up empty-eyed. A chill passed through Ruiz — these were obviously deconstructed persons, returning from the Gencha.

Ruiz squinted through the scope of the long-barreled spitter he had carried strapped to his packframe for just such an occasion. The Dirm’s scaly face swam into focus, the pithing scar prominent just below the creature’s skulltop nostrils. Its moonstone eyes stared dully, as if the redistribution of its intelligence had taken something essential from it.

Ruiz dropped the crosshairs to the Dirm’s left shoulder joint; it held the tram’s speed yoke in its left hand.

“Now,” he said, and fired.

His weapon launched a supersonic needle of frozen gas, which struck the Dirm and thawed explosively.

Before Ruiz could see the damage he had done, he was firing again, at the right shoulder brain, the abdominal brain, the left hip, the left calf. He switched his fire to the other Dirm, who was reacting to the destruction of its partner, its right hand rising toward an alarm button. Ruiz hit the right shoulder brain, then before the Dirm could switch hands, the left shoulder, and on to the other centers.

He was vaguely aware of the spurts of white sparks as the pinbeamers killed the solenoids, of the darker flash of Albany’s graser as he burned away the mechanical devices on the near side of the tram.

The shooting was over in two seconds.

“Clean so far,” Huxley barked. The three of them slung their weapons and rolled over the lip of the tunnel into the void.

The fall lasted a timeless instant, until the deceleration jerked Ruiz upright. He waited until the tram was almost under him, then slapped the release and dropped the last two meters. He landed on one of the passengers; it was like falling into soft sand, it cushioned the impact. He managed to keep his balance, and jumped toward the first Dirm he had shot, which was floundering weakly. The spitter had pulped its joints along with its brains, and it showed no sign of surviving intelligence.

Ruiz swung the little sonic blade and lopped off the creature’s left arm just below its shattered shoulder. He jerked the arm loose, slashed the Dirm’s safety harness, and kicked the alien over the side.

He turned, to see Albany struggling with the other Dirm, whom he had apparently not done such a good job with. Some strength remained in one arm, and it was resisting Albany’s efforts to pry it out of its seat, hissing and swinging the arm like a club at Albany’s head.

Ruiz bounded across the tram and took off the arm with a slice of the sonic knife. This Dirm retained some of its sapience, and it stared in bewilderment at the stump of its arm, as Albany and Ruiz pulled it out of its seat and toppled it into the pit.

The passengers had begun to react to the attack, had started to rise from their pallets, faces slowly shifting toward hostility, as they realized that these ambushers were almost certainly not allied to their owners.

But their impulse toward attack was cut short by Huxley, who stitched his splinter gun across them. They fell back silently, blood welling from the arc described by Huxley’s gun, dead or dying.

“Still clean,” said Huxley, consulting the tiny dataslate strapped to his wrist.

An instant later Durban landed on the corpses and rolled, covering his armor in red splashes. Then the gladiator and the puppet hit… and matters started to deteriorate.

The gladiator, a heavy man apparently no longer as agile as he must have been during his years in the bloodstadia, stumbled and fell against the razor rail that rimmed the far edge of the tram. He gasped and folded over the rail, which came to life with a high-pitched whine. In an instant its vibrating blades had sliced through his armor and deep into his belly. He struggled to escape the rail’s terrible keenness, his legs scrabbling weakly. The rail must have penetrated almost to his spine when he made a last spasmodic effort and slipped over the side.

Ruiz lunged at the puppet, who was still leashed to the gladiator’s wrist. The gladiator hit the end of the leash and the puppet slid toward the rail, just before Ruiz landed on the spot he had been. But Albany saw what was happening and grabbed the puppet before he hit the rail, though Albany was twisted awkwardly across the pallets of corpses, his foot hooked precariously under a girder.

“Do something,” said Albany hoarsely. “Can’t hold them for long.”

Ruiz leaped to the rail, stopping just short of the red-dripping blades. The gladiator hung from the leash, while he tried with his other hand to retrieve the intestines that were slipping in gory loops from his belly.

Suddenly he looked up from his task, at Ruiz. His eyes were glazing with shock, but he spoke. “Too slippery, Ruiz.”

He wasn’t too far gone to react when Ruiz began to saw at the leash with his sonic knife. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Don’t want to be Gench food. Don’t. No, no, no.”

The tough filaments parted reluctantly. The gladiator pleaded. Ruiz kept his eyes fixed on the knife.

He didn’t look down, not even when the leash finally parted and the man fell wailing into the pit.