The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 16

“Still seems clean,” said Huxley, sitting in the middle of the corpses, his detectors spread around him, heedless of the blood that stained his armor. “I was concerned we might find weight sensors, or something else out of the ordinary.”

The puppet got to his feet, apparently undisturbed by his near encounter with the razor rails. “In many ways I’m a conventional man,” he said calmly.

“Who cares?” asked Albany. “You care, Ruiz?”

“No. Get your gear and clear the rest of the traps, Albany.” Ruiz took the end of the leash, took the sealer from his pocket, and attached the end to a girder. “Durban, help me pitch the bodies off.”

The beaster looked up, eyes bright with pleasure. He licked a smear of blood from his glove and made an odd purring sound.

“And turn down your skein,” Ruiz said.

Durban snarled, and for a moment Ruiz thought he would attack. He felt an answering rage fill his body, and he leaned toward the beaster, knife ready, his mind completely clear, completely purposeful, for the first time in days. The chinks in the beaster’s armor seemed to take on a glow in the intensity of Ruiz’s regard; he could almost feel the sensation the knife would transmit to his hand when it penetrated Durban’s shell and sank into his flesh.

Durban started to rise, lips writhing back to show his teeth. Latent violence stained the ruddy light a darker crimson, and Ruiz felt his anger transmute into a kind of black joy.

The beaster stopped abruptly. Fear and blood lust appeared to struggle for control of his face. He shuddered and dropped his eyes. After a moment he reached up, touched the skein at the back of his neck. Though he didn’t look up, Ruiz could sense Durban’s returning rationality.

“Good decision,” said Albany, who holstered the splinter gun he had held aimed at Durban. “It’s generally a bad idea to fuck with Ruiz — even though he might seem like an easygoing fellow.”

Ruiz felt his own anger recede, to be replaced by an empty regret. But he switched off the knife and slipped it back into its wrist sheath. “If you max your skein again, I’ll cut it off you,” he said in a neutral voice.

He and Durban began to pitch the corpses off the tram. The beaster worked with a will, though he still wouldn’t meet Ruiz’s eyes. Ruiz felt no residue of irritation with him; he was too busy worrying about what they might find at the top of the pit.

They had moved around the pit, to a level just above the tunnel they had jumped from. Ruiz looked through his scope, to see Chou wave and retreat down the tunnel into darkness.

Albany moved about the tram, burning off the remaining proximity jects, tiny mantraps that fired an anesthetic charge at any protoplasm that touched their sensor fields. Albany was using one of the Dirm arms to spring the jects, after which he would apply a pinpoint of energy to fuse the mechanism.

He held the arm aloft. “When we’re done with this, I’m going to pitch it to the Gencha. Maybe one of them will eat enough of it to get sick.”

Ruiz wondered if any humans lived below, or any Gencha sufficiently worldly to report the sudden rain of food that had fallen from above. There had been nothing he could do about that. The tram would have ground to a stop under the weight of all of them: his slayers, the dead Dirms, and the former passengers. He tried to imagine what it might be like to exist at the bottom of the pit, what sort of person could survive among the great number of Gencha that must fill the caverns below. He couldn’t — they would have to be so strange as to no longer be recognizably human.

He went to sit beside Huxley, who had developed a worried frown. “What is it?” Ruiz asked.

“Not sure,” said the cyborg, tapping at his dataslate and checking the connections of his sensors. “I’m not getting any of what I should be getting. You’d figure a setup like this, there would be as much security at the top station as on the tram, but I’m not getting much. Actually, I’m not getting anything. Either our party is an overconfident man who expects no trouble from below, or he’s got stuff that’s too sophisticated for me.”

Ruiz looked at the puppet. “Which is it?” he asked.

The false Yubere shrugged. “Like all men, I have my moods and blind spots.”

“Whatever that means,” said Albany, who had finished his detrapping operations.

The puppet looked at him without expression. “Metaphor and allusion; these are the tools of the supple mind.”

“Whatever that means,” said Albany. “Ruiz, we’re fairly safe now. I don’t want to fiddle with the tanglefoot; it would take a lot of my remaining firepower to burn the stuff off. So if you don’t mind, we’ll all just be careful.”

The tanglefoot was a mat that ran around the perimeter of the tram, just outside the razor rails. An incautious foot descending on the mat caused the tanglefoot to fire barbed wires into the foot. Even armor wasn’t entirely proof against a mat; some wires would penetrate, enough to discourage lifting the foot. Ruiz had once stepped on tanglefoot, even now he could remember the awful sensations of pulling loose — the barbs ripping through flesh and tendon, the little wet pops as they came through the skin.

“We’ll be careful,” he said.

The tram rode steadily up the rail, and Ruiz stationed himself at the control panel, ready to press the Dirm’s elbow into the scanner cup, should a request come through the short-range communit built into the panel. But the comm’s activity light remained dark, and nothing disturbed their progress.

After a while Ruiz relaxed enough to look out at the walls of the pit, which at this height were even more wormy with interrupted tunnels. From the mouths of some of these openings came signs of life within, soft noises, an occasional flicker of movement, the nose-tingling smells of unfamiliar alien cookery. Ruiz wondered what sort of creatures made their home here so far below the human levels of the stack. According to the data Publius had provided, they were still a long way beneath the lowest levels of Yubere’s dungeons.

When humans had arrived on Sook, the planet was populated by a diversity of alien races. Some, reduced to devolved remnants, had been there for eons; others had been more recently marooned.

When the humans had succeeded to domination on Sook, some of those aliens had retreated into the roots of SeaStack.

In any case, none of the pit’s inhabitants came to the tunnel mouths to look at them, and Ruiz surmised that the Dirms had entertained themselves by potshotting at the dwellers, a theory that gained credibility when he noticed the recent scars of energy weapons across several of the openings.

The dark roof of the pit drew closer, until Ruiz could see that it was a rough dome, built of scrap alloy beams, chinked with unpolished meltstone. Apparently some titanic weapon had punched a vast hole through the stack in some long-forgotten battle — and then someone had hurriedly repaired the damage. How long ago had that been?

Now he could see the terminus of the tram rail — it passed behind a curved monomol barricade just below the dome’s foundation buttresses. The barricade, like the tram, seemed shiny and new compared to its surroundings.

“Let’s get set,” said Ruiz. “I’ll sit one chair, Huxley the other. Albany and Durban on the pallets with Yubere between them. We don’t know what to expect, but whatever we find, be quick, get off the tram as fast as you can — and then get behind something hard. Make sure your armor is tight, check your weapons, loosen your muscles.”

“Yes, Momma,” said Albany.

Ruiz ignored him. “We want to create as little fuss as possible; Huxley, you keep your eye on your sensors, unless you absolutely have to stop to do someone. We need to know right away, the instant word goes up to the target that weasels are in his chickenhouse.”

“I’m getting something now,” said Huxley. “Not much; looks like it might be the spill-off radiation from a Konda class graser. If so, someone up there is carrying a big gun.”

Albany looked at Ruiz and shivered elaborately. “Oooh,” he whispered. “Getting interesting now, boss. Who do we know can tote a Konda?”

Ruiz shook his head, but suddenly he was assailed by a memory of Corean’s big Moc, bounding gracefully through the air, firing its ice gun.

“Have any of you ever danced with a Mocrassar?” he asked.

Albany’s eyes widened theatrically. He patted his chest-plate tentatively. “No… no. I seem to be alive, so I guess not.”

Huxley looked thoughtful. “That might be it, though I don’t want to believe it. A Moc, with one big well-shielded graser — hard to beat something like that, if your enemy can afford it. Let’s hope it’s just a killmech, with sensory pickups too cute for me to detect.”

“Four well-prepared humans can sometimes kill a Moc, given a similar tech level,” said Ruiz. “We’ll probably take casualties, but there’s hope.”

“Thank you for that inspirational speech, Ruiz Aw,” said Albany, still smiling, but looking somewhat pale behind his visor.

The terminal barricade approached rapidly, and Ruiz checked over his weapons one last time. The tram slowed, just as it passed through an automatic blast door that folded shut behind them.

The tram ground to a stop at a platform, empty except for a corridor-car, apparently waiting to take the passengers back to Yubere’s stronghold. A long peaceful moment passed, as they started to rise from their various positions. Nothing happened, and Ruiz was starting to hope that they had, miraculously, penetrated Yubere’s stronghold without further conflict.

Then the Moc stepped from the mouth of the dark opening at the back of the platform.

In the frozen instant that passed before the Moc understood that it faced enemies, and before his slayers could react to the creature’s presence, Ruiz’s eyes recorded a number of irrelevant details.

This Moc was somewhat shorter than Corean’s, and the paint that decorated it formed less complex patterns, indicating its inferior lineage. It wore no clothing, and its six-limbed body gleamed with fresh healthy chitin. Ruiz noticed no cyborged weapons, such as the energy tubes built into the midlimbs of Corean’s Moc — but Yubere’s Moc didn’t need any such enhancements. This one’s midlimbs were fully occupied with a huge graser; ready lights burned green on the weapon’s receiver.

The scene erupted into violent movement. The Moc leaped sideways and whipped the graser up.

Ruiz was ready for the Moc’s evasive leap, and from the manner in which the Moc held its weapon had guessed correctly at the direction… and so he had a chance at survival. He was bounding from his tram chair as he fired his splinter gun, and the shuddering recoil of the weapon spun him onto his back. He managed to maintain his aim through that impromptu tumble, and the hail of spinning wire sleeted against the creature’s insectoid head. Most of the wire bounced harmlessly from chitin, but the Moc’s great faceted eyes were ruined, reduced to yellow-slimed holes.

It opened its maw and shrieked, a high penetrating sound that carried over the crash of the others’ weapons. Ruiz landed awkwardly on the platform and felt something pop in his right shoulder. He ignored the injury and continued to fire, hoping a splinter might ricochet through the Moc’s maw into some other sensory channel — even blinded, the thing could fight on effectively, using smell and sound. He rolled, in case the creature decided to fire at the thump he’d made when he landed, and just as he vacated the spot, the big graser turned it into a puddle of molten alloy.

All this took less than a second, and then Albany’s graser found the Moc’s head and took it off in a puff of evil-smelling smoke. The Moc danced back, its movements almost too quick to follow, the graser firing in a continuous stream, burning holes through the barricade, melting streams of metal from the doorway from which it had emerged.

Finally Albany hit the Moc’s graser, and it fell apart in a shower of pink sparks. The Moc flung the smoking pieces aside and continued to whirl about the platform in a random pattern, stamping with its huge lower limbs, slashing with its midlimbs, feeling delicately with its tiny forelimbs at its neck hole, as if looking for its missing head.

“Knees,” Ruiz shouted, and concentrated his fire on the Moc’s lower limbs.

After what seemed an eternity, but was actually no more than three or four seconds, the Moc lay in a puddle of yellow fluid, still twitching, its limbs lopped off, its thorax chopped into several pieces.

Ruiz got painfully to his feet. His shoulder ached fiercely; soon he might have difficulty in moving it. He wiggled his arm experimentally; it felt like someone had driven a nail between his shoulder blade and his arm. He directed his in-armor medunit to apply a ject of local anesthetic and an anti-inflammatory to the joint. After the tiny sting, the shoulder began immediately to feel better.

Albany was already at the door, peering down the dark corridor. “No reaction yet,” he said.

Huxley stood at the edge of the platform, apparently unhurt, peering at his detectors. “Nothing here either,” he said.

Ruiz looked at the tram, where the false Yubere still lay, belly down, propped on his elbows, watching the scene with no great interest. He seemed uninjured, and Ruiz sighed with relief.

Unfortunately, Durban the beaster had either stumbled attempting to leave the tram, or had fallen backward from the platform in trying to avoid the sweep of the Moc’s graser. He lay on the tanglefoot mat, staring up, eyes blank, jerking as the wires extended their barbs into his torso.

Albany looked at Ruiz. “What now?”

Ruiz stepped over Durban, onto the tram. The beaster looked at him, and it was plain that he was a dying wolverine, cranked all the way down into his hindbrain, what small humanity he once possessed lost forever.

Durban started to lift the splinter gun he still held, but Ruiz kicked it away. Durban snarled and writhed against the grip of the tanglefoot, but he couldn’t move his body, and the attempt caused the tanglefoot to fire more wire into his skull. He shuddered and screamed, but only for a second, until Ruiz bent down and triggered a merciful burst into the center of his forehead.

Ruiz helped the puppet up. “Let’s go,” he said, unsealing the leash. “Mind the tanglefoot.”

The puppet jumped nimbly to the platform.

“Where are we?” Ruiz asked.

The puppet shrugged. “I think I’m at the top of my pipeline; don’t you think so?”

“So it seems. Tell me, why do you have so few people here? Two Dirm guards, a Moc? That doesn’t seem much to guard such a valuable secret.”

”Secret is the operative term here. The fewer that know a valuable secret, the better — and better yet if they’re aliens who have no way of understanding the secret’s value.”

Ruiz considered the false Yubere. Was there more guile in the puppet’s voice, now that they were approaching their goal? That made sense, since the instant the false Yubere took control of the real Yubere’s operation, Ruiz would become a liability. Presumably Publius had issued dire orders to his puppet regarding that moment.

He guided the puppet across the platform and gave the leash to Albany. “Sit on him for a minute,” he said.

Albany nodded and wrapped the leash around his fist, though his attention remained on the corridor leading away from the platform.

Ruiz went to Huxley, who was wandering about, his detectors extended. “Nothing,” Huxley said in wondering tones. “I can’t find any sort of surveillance. It’s miraculous.” Indeed, Huxley’s face glowed with a sort of superstitious awe.

“Don’t get carried away,” said Ruiz. “Remember the Clearlight security network; we know Yubere has it installed throughout the stronghold.”

“Then why haven’t we come across it yet?”

It was a good question, and Ruiz resolved to consider it. But first he lowered his voice and said to Huxley, “Without being obvious, check the puppet for built-in weapons or comm devices.”

“You don’t trust our employer?” asked Huxley.

“That’s a foolish question,” said Ruiz wearily. “Do you trust me?”

“Well… yes, in fact.” Huxley seemed taken aback by his question. “Albany speaks well of you — and also I’m usually perceptive about such things. We don’t expect you to die for us, or anything so melodramatic, but I think you’re probably as honorable as anyone in this business can afford to be.”

Ruiz sighed.

A minute later Huxley wandered back. “He’s got a one-shot pinbeam in his right index finger and a small bomb in his belly.”

“‘Small’?”

Huxley shrugged. “Relatively small… but I wouldn’t want to be within a hundred meters if it pops.”

Ruiz considered. He stepped back aboard the tram, and slipped off his packframe. He strapped it to one of the main cross-girders, and tapped at the faceplate of a tamperproof timer. Then he stood and divested himself of the heaviest of his weapons — the sniper gas gun, a midrange graser and its powerpack.

He retained only his knives, his splinter gun, and a rack of light concussion grenades.

Albany raised his eyebrows, giving Ruiz a questioning look.

“Got to be quick,” Ruiz explained. “We’ve got a slippery devil here.”

They trotted along the corridor, Albany fifty paces in the lead, Huxley with the puppet’s leash sealed to a harness ring on his armor, Ruiz trailing a hundred paces behind.

Ruiz attempted to keep his attention focused on the moment, on the dimly illuminated metal that formed the walls and floor of the corridor, but after a while, as nothing dire occurred and Huxley detected no evidence of surveillance, his thoughts wandered. It seemed to him that he had been spending a great deal of his life lately walking down empty corridors, bound for events over which he had insufficient control.

He became self-indulgent, which led to philosophical musings of the least useful sort. He began to see himself and his people as maggots wandering through the mineralized veins of some dead steel colossus, frantically searching for some remaining bit of carrion to feed on.

Eventually he was forced to laugh out loud at these pretentious, egocentric fantasies. Huxley glanced back, as if wondering what Ruiz could possibly find amusing under these circumstances. Ruiz smiled at him, which did nothing to allay the cyborg’s puzzlement.

“How does it look, Huxley?” asked Ruiz, speaking softly into his helmet mike.

“Still no sign of the Clearlight system. You know, I’ve developed a theory. Would you care to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“Well… the target is running a secret operation here — so secret that he needs to keep it from his topside security forces — the SeedCorp shock troops you mentioned. Or, if they’re Genched, from his techs and service personnel. And of course, even Genched troops can’t be any smarter than they were before their processing; they’re as liable to say stupidly revealing things as any real person. Anyway, he fears attack only from above, it looks like, and so maybe we’ve got a clean conduit right into the heart of his levels.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ruiz said without much conviction.

They trudged on, and shortly Ruiz’s attention wavered again. He found himself reviewing pleasant memories of Nisa — her face in the sunlight, her face in the soft colored lights of the barge. When he realized what he was doing, he was frightened. Something deadly might come his way at any moment, and if it caught him mooning over the woman, he would never see her again.

He shook himself, and tried to firmly grasp his mortality and the probability of imminent destruction.

“Stop,” whispered Albany. “Come, Ruiz.”

Ruiz ran swiftly forward.

Albany knelt at the foot of a ramp that bridged a discontinuity in the tunnel. Apparently the stack had once fractured, displacing the corridors so that one floor was a meter higher than the other.

A high-ceilinged nexus opened on the far side of the break, and bright lights glared down the corridor.

“I think we’re just about there,” said Albany.

“I believe you’re right,” said Ruiz. “Let’s get Huxley up here — let him fish a little.”

Huxley examined the ramp carefully, then climbed it and eased closer to the nexus, extending probes on long monomol rods. Ruiz and Albany hid under the fracture, the puppet sitting next to them, face full of bland unconcern.

Five minutes passed.

Huxley returned, face pale and sweaty behind his visor. “The Clearlight system takes over just beyond the corridor junction. I think I can handle it, but not for very long.”

He extended a coiled datacable, plugged it into a receptacle at the hip of Ruiz’s armor. He tapped at his dataslate, frowned, tapped some more. “All right,” he said. “I can’t guarantee how long this ident sequence will fool the system.” As he spoke, he plugged into each of the others, fed the data to their armor. “Let’s get in quick, before it changes codes and leaves us naked.”

“What else did you see?” asked Ruiz.

“Ruptors over the security lock; and it looks well-hardened. I hope Albany’s good with explosives, if the puppet can’t get us through. Several other corridors feed into the nexus, but according to the nav bead, we have to go through the lock to get to the target.”

Ruiz took a deep breath and flexed his injured shoulder to be sure it still functioned adequately. Then he removed the leash from the false Yubere. “Now’s your moment,” said Ruiz. “Take us inside.”

The instant the leash was gone, the puppet seemed to change, to grow a little. “Of course,” he said regally. He strode up the ramp as though he owned it already, and the others trailed him in a rough triangular formation, Huxley and Albany immediately behind the puppet, Ruiz at the trailing point.

Ruiz felt terribly vulnerable under the glare of the nexus lights. He forced himself not to look at the ruptor turret that projected from the wall above the security lock, even when the twin barrels depressed to follow him across the floor.

The puppet ignored the turret, and swept up to the lock. Without hesitation, he applied his eye to the scanner, pressed his palm to the lockplate.

To Ruiz’s intense relief, the lock’s armored doors slid back. They crowded inside; the doors shut, and the far doors opened.

“Come along,” said the puppet.

He led the way out of the lock, and into Yubere’s living quarters.

Just inside a Dirm bondguard lounged against the wall. It was just turning toward them, when Ruiz’s knife slid into its throat. It died with no more than a small gurgle, and Albany helped Ruiz lower the heavy corpse quietly to the floor.

Ruiz looked at Huxley inquiringly. The cyborg studied his detectors, then shook his head and smiled.

They moved through a large public room, decorated in a rather austere style, with pristine white walls and carpet, sparely furnished with openwork couches carved of some shiny black wood. The effect was curiously unreal, as if they had stepped into some ancient colorless photograph.

A hall full of outre paintings led into the private sectors of the suite. Ruiz passed them without looking, but even from the corners of his eyes, the paintings were disturbing — harsh clashing colors and distorted figures — a madman’s vision.

At the end of the hall, a maid came from a linen room, looked up to see them bearing down on her. She gasped and dropped the bundle of towels she carried, and turned as if to flee. But then she seemed to notice that one of the armored men running down the hall was Yubere, and her face filled with confusion.

Ruiz reached her and rapped his fist against her temple, then eased her to the floor.

“Sentimentalist,” whispered Albany. “She’s probably Genched, she’ll rise up and cut your heart out when we leave.”

Albany was probably right, Ruiz thought glumly. He resolved to be more decisive with the next servant they met, but they saw no one else before they reached their goal.