The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 18

Gejas stood on the bridge of the destroyer, facing into the wind of their passage, a wide grin frozen on his mouth. He fingered the bandage on his neck, where the hetmen had attached their interrogation devices. He thought of Ruiz Aw and his grin grew wider.

Down below, protected by the destroyer’s heavy armor, were ten maniples of brain-chopped cyborg slayers, cocooned in stasis pods. Steel seeds… soon they would sprout into blood and pain.

As he had known they would, the hetmen had commanded him to go to SeaStack. Through a tongue who had stared at Gejas with a fascinated revulsion, the hetmen had said: “Gejas Tongue, you have allowed your god to be murdered. In only one way can you make amends. Bring us the treasure hidden in SeaStack.”

“I will,” he had said. But in his heart he kept a thought hidden, and it had to do with Ruiz Aw. What a pleasant, warming thought it was.

Ruiz donned his newly redecorated armor, cinching the straps tight with a kind of automatic intensity. But his thoughts were far away from Deepheart and the dangerous job he was about to undertake.

For some reason he kept thinking about Nisa in the canalside fountain on the day after they had escaped from Corean. Her pale perfect body, her smile, the way the water glistened on her skin — pretty memories, almost too pretty to be real.

He shrugged, to settle the gel pads that protected his shoulder. He smoothed the skinmask over his features and looked in the mirror to check its fit. He realigned the mask slightly and nodded at his unfamiliar reflection.

He picked up his helmet. Time to go, he thought.

The waterways were as deserted as before. Ruiz drove the squirtboat through the city and met no one at all until he was within a kilometer of the Spindinny’s stack.

Then he saw something that shocked him and made him dodge into the shadowed side of the channel.

A huge old starboat swooped down from the heights, spiraling around the stacks at high speed. Ruiz recognized its jaggedly baroque style, all spines and barbs. It resembled its owners, the Shards, the ancient race who owned Sook and enforced its eccentric rules.

He caught a glimpse of a hideous alien face as the boat sped by. A loudhailer squealed, and then a synthesized voice roared, “Attention, inferior species! Shard law must be observed in every detail, no matter how your enemies press you. All weapons must be line-of-sight and non-nuclear. No surface vehicles may exceed a speed of two hundred kilometers per hour. No air travel from local twilight to local sunrise. No more than three vessels of more than ten tons standard mass shall maneuver as a group. Violators will suffer instant and terminal correction!”

The starboat disappeared behind the nearest stacks and began to repeat its message. Ruiz was amazed. Never before, to his knowledge, had the Shards descended from their orbital platforms to instruct their tenants. How volatile had the situation become? It appeared the Shards had grown anxious about their property.

He went on, exercising even more caution, and finally arrived safely at the Spindinny’s lagoon.

The lagoon was under one of the largest stacks in the city and, remarkably, was full of boats. Under the purple glare of the lagoon’s lights, the vessels revealed the marks of hard use and battle.

There were no empty berths along the quay. Ruiz passed slowly along the line of boats, which were tied two and three deep to the dock. Why this unusual gathering?

As he passed a large whaleback torpedo boat, a man came from a hatch and stood swaying on its armored deck. The man wore a threadbare shipsuit, patched with the sigils of a dozen obscure campaigns. Ruiz identified him instantly as a mercenary — his face had the hollow intensity of a man who lived by violence. He wore an elbow punchgun, which he didn’t aim directly at Ruiz.

“Hoy!” the man said. “Are you here for the meeting? Of course you are… throw me your lines; I’ll tie you off.” His voice was slurred and too loud. Drunk, thought Ruiz.

Still, a berth was a berth, so he tossed his mooring cable to the man, who wobbled over to a midships bollard and dropped it over.

Ruiz reached up to the whaleback’s rail and heaved himself aboard. “Thanks,” he said. What meeting? He wondered how he could find out without revealing his ignorance: suppose this were an invitation-only affair? “So, why aren’t you at the meeting?”

The man spat overboard and produced a flask of some pungent liquor from his pocket. “Someone got to watch the boat. Besides, it’s all shit; I wouldn’t have gone anyway. What are they going to do about the war? Tell the Lords they don’t want to fight anymore? That too many of us are dying? Shit, that’s all it is. If we won’t fight for the Lords, they’ll kill us and carry on with their house troops. Shit.”

“I can’t say I disagree with you,” said Ruiz.

The man looked a bit confused, as if he found Ruiz’s position difficult to analyze, but after a moment of brow-furrowing concentration he apparently abandoned the effort and shrugged. “Well. We cast off an hour before midnight — better be back before then to move your boat.”

“I will,” said Ruiz. “Thanks again.”

The man nodded and went below, closing the hatch with a clang.

Ruiz entered the Spindinny with an increasing level of apprehension. The war must be particularly bloody if the mercenaries were considering a strike.

Inside the Spindinny, killmechs manned an armored security cage, and their red-glowing optics locked on him as he passed. Otherwise the warren was silent, an eerie thing in that place of eternal debauchery.

Ruiz went down to the hiring hall, where the Spindinny maintained its computer facilities.

The hall was empty, except for one proctor, who gave Ruiz a suspicious glance. “What are you doing here? The meeting’s in the sub-basement auditorium.”

The proctor was a thin gray man with a grafted-on third arm protruding from his chest. At the moment, the central arm held a bowl of soup; his other two arms were crumbling crackers into it.

Ruiz took off his helmet and assumed an expression of innocent confusion. “I don’t know anything about a meeting. I just got to town this morning; what’s going on?”

The proctor snorted and started spooning up his soup. “‘Just got to town’? You can look forward to some surprises, then.”

“Really?”

“Really. SeaStack is a grave. Do you claim you didn’t notice?”

“No…. I saw the scars — and the stacks are silent. Is there no work, then?”

The proctor laughed, spraying a bit of soup from his mouth. “Oh, there’s plenty of work, but you might want to wait for a bit before you sign up for it.”

“Really?”

“Really. Really. Is that all you can say? Never mind. Go down to the sub-basement and listen to the fools at the meeting.” He went back to his soup, ignoring Ruiz pointedly.

“All right,” said Ruiz, striving for just the right note of uncertainty.

He put his helmet back on and scuttled out.

A RUSTY STEEL lift cage lowered Ruiz into the sub-basement, where plumbing and other conduits striated the damp meltstone walls and a smell of ancient garbage filled the stagnant air. Ruiz heard a deep murmur and followed it to the doors of the auditorium.

Inside, the lights were bright. Hundreds of mercenaries milled about, shouting and shoving. Ruiz sidled along the back wall, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and found a spot from which he could watch. The crowd was a sea of garish color, twinkling with the glitter of well-kept weapons. An odd stink — composed of unwashed bodies, gun oil, raw alcohol, and ozone — hung thick in the room.

On a platform at the far end of the hall a tiny woman in chromed servo-armor stood at a podium, waving her arms and screeching in a thin piping voice.

“Order!” she shrilled. “Order!” No one paid any attention to her.

A half-dozen other persons sat in a row of chairs behind her. When a scuffle broke out in front of the platform, a large man with a naked tattooed torso and several metal heatsinks protruding from his shaven skull, rose slowly and massively from his chair. He stood looking down at the two scufflers for a moment. When they fell and began to roll around on the floor, he drew a graser from a calf holster and cut them into four parts, which clutched at each other for a moment longer and then subsided into aimless twitching.

The hall fell silent, except for the rattle of drawn weapons and the snick of safety levers.

“Thank you, Sergeant-at-Arms Mondawber,” said the little woman in a tone of irritable satisfaction. “I hope no more such disciplinary acts will be necessary. The Lords wouldn’t really mind much if we chopped each other up.”

A mutter of agreement ran through the hall, accompanied by the sounds of weapons being returned to holsters.

“Now,” she continued. “We have speakers pro and con. Give them your attention, so you can convey their arguments to your constituents.”

A tall Dilvermoon herman in a flowing crimson robe approached the podium. It carried a thick sheaf of paper, and a groan rose from the crowd of mercenaries.

It smiled disarmingly. “No, no,” it said. “You mistake me. These aren’t notes, they’re handouts — so you won’t strain anything trying to remember what I’ve said.” It handed the papers down to the crowd, as low laughter ran around the room.

The herman waited until the handouts had circulated to the far corners of the hall. Ruiz took his in a gauntleted hand and read: “Why We Must Withdraw Our Forces From SeaStack.”

The herman cleared its throat. “This is the situation: Our units have all suffered losses far in excess of acceptable rates. Under these conditions, our contracts — most of them, anyway — specify that our pay must increase to a mutually acceptable level, in compensation for the increasingly hazardous working conditions. If our employers are unwilling or unable to raise our pay, we’re entitled to withdraw from our contractual commitments.”

“They’ve upped the pay,” shouted someone from the floor.

“No… they’ve promised higher pay — an important distinction,” said the herman. “They cannot deliver on these promises until the situation in the city stabilizes.”

It shook its handsome head. “They’ll never deliver; this is my opinion. Furthermore, I think the Lords have gone quite thoroughly mad and intend to fight over their obscure treasure until no one in SeaStack is left alive — except the victor. Dead persons cannot benefit from high pay.

“If we wish to survive, we must withdraw our forces from the pirates’ strongholds. If necessary, we must fight our way out of SeaStack — or we’ll all be dead in a week or two.

“This is my argument — and I think it irrefutable.”

The herman sat down, to a renewed babble of contention. The large tattooed man started to get up again, but the babble ceased and he settled back with a glower.

A woman with a tangled mane of white hair and a face like a nicked ax stepped to the podium. “My argument is even shorter. We must continue to fight for our employers, even if it means we must die. That is our function in the universe, and we must not deny it. If we die, we die — but if we slink off, our way of life will begin to die. Who will hire mercenaries if mercenaries cannot be depended upon to honor their contracts?” She sat down amid a chorus of hooting laughter and hisses of derision.

“Dupe!” someone shouted.

“Pirate’s dog,” shouted another anonymous voice. The white-haired woman stared stonily ahead.

Another woman stepped forward. She wore light armor of an opalescent lavender color, and when she raised her visor, Ruiz was startled to see the pale lined face of Diamond Bob, once the proprietor of a well-respected slave kennel.

“Well,” said Diamond Bob. “I can’t agree with that sentiment. Mercenaries are mercenaries. They fight for pay, but when no hope exists that they will live to spend that pay, intelligent mercenaries ‘slink off.’ Every time. Our employers are aware of that tradition, you can be sure.

“But another possibility exists. Why can’t we put our heads together and figure out what it is that the Lords want so bad? And then take it for ourselves?”

A rumble of confusion ran through the crowd, and then a tentative enthusiasm. But no one spoke.

“How else will we ever survive?” asked Diamond Bob. “How else will we ever get paid?”

“What if we can’t figure it out? And who would lead us?” someone asked from the floor.

“Whoever has the most experience,” answered Diamond Bob. “We’ll see who volunteers, and each candidate can make a pitch. And if we can’t figure it out, who can? The Lords aren’t cooperating with each other, and they’ve completely abandoned any attempt to keep SeaStack’s commerce functioning, so we can assume the prize is worth more than any of SeaStack’s other treasures.”

Shouting matches broke out here and there across the hall, and the sergeant-at-arms started to get up again. But the tiny woman laid a hand on his arm and shook her head. She stepped to the podium beside Diamond Bob and spoke quickly: “We’ll recess for an hour, to think over what our speakers have said. When we come back in, we’ll get down to making a decision.”

The mercenaries turned and started jostling their way from the hall. Ruiz stood against the wall, watching Diamond Bob.

After most of the fighters had left, she came down the hall toward him.

Ruiz let her pass and then fell into step just behind her.

At the row of lift cages, the remaining mercenaries were jostling for a place. Just as Ruiz and Diamond Bob reached the cage, the last man jammed himself in.

“Come on, old woman,” the mercenary said, and made a kissing sound. “Plenty of room.”

She stopped. “I’ll wait for the next lift,” she said, in a tone of fastidious reserve.

He shrugged and slammed the gate shut. The cage lifted away and they were alone.

Ruiz looked about. No one watched, as far as he could tell. He took Diamond Bob’s elbow and pulled her toward an open maintenance alcove at the end of the corridor. “I need a few moments of your time,” he said brightly. “We can help each other.”

She writhed in his grasp and struck up at his neckpiece with a sonic knife. He blocked her thrust with his armored forearm, barely — she was much quicker than he had expected. His forearm smoked and glowed, and the knife made a sound like a hundred grindstones.

He bulled her toward the wall, parrying two more slashes. He slammed her between the wall and his armored body, letting his momentum and mass do the work. Her armor flexed under the blow and she gasped. The knife fell from her hand and he twisted her arm behind her, levering it back and up, his gauntlet hooked into her armor’s neck ridge.

“Be calm,” he said as he hustled her through the door into the maintenance alcove. “I mean you no harm; I just have to talk to you.”

He kicked the door shut and jammed her into a tangle of monomol pipe while he looked around the alcove. A coil of thin cable caught his eye, and he used it to lash her securely to the pipework.

When he was done, he gingerly raised her visor. She glared at him with the eyes of a trapped beast, her teeth bared in a snarl.

He sighed and took off his helmet. Then he peeled up the skinmask.

Her eyes grew wide. “Ruiz Aw? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for information. Why are you here?”

She shrugged as expressively as her bonds permitted. “I’m out of the kennel business. My pens were burned and all my slaves killed or stolen. It ruined my rep and I couldn’t get insurance. Pretty soon I owed a lot of money. So here I am, trying to make a living.” She laughed, only a little bitterly. “This is a trade I’ve practiced before. It’s not so bad.”

“I see,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry you’ve had reverses.”

“Oh?” She looked down at the cable that bound her to the pipes.

“I must take precautions, Diamond Bob.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Do you know what you’re worth, these days? I kept hoping you’d bring me Remint’s head and give me a chance to catch you. Then I’d have gone far away. Far away.” Her face showed a childlike wistfulness, for just an instant.

“Remint’s dead, I think,” Ruiz said.

She smiled poisonously. “You didn’t kill him, I take it?”

“Only indirectly,” he said. “If he’s really dead. But never mind that; will you talk to me? I won’t try to force you to help me… but if you’ll tell me what you know, it might help me to put an end to the fighting.”

“Why should you care how long the fighting lasts?”

“I don’t,” answered Ruiz honestly. “If the pirates kill each other completely off, I won’t mind at all. But you will, I guess, and if I achieve my goal, the fighting will end.”

Her brows drew together. “What do you want to know? From the Lords’ urgent desire to meet you, I’d have judged that you know more about what’s going on than anyone else.”

“You’d be wrong,” he lied. He could see no point in telling her anything, since he intended to spare her life, if at all possible. She had, after all, dealt as fairly with him as anyone else on Sook had. “I need to know about the fighting: where it’s heaviest, where it’s quiet. The patterns of the fighting. The forces involved. Anything you can tell me about this mysterious treasure… everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve seen.”

She chuckled dryly. “When I made my pitch to the mercs, I didn’t think anyone would take me up on it so soon. Why don’t you volunteer to command us? Most of them have heard of Ruiz Aw by now — they’ll believe you know what the treasure is, even if you don’t. I won’t tell.”

He sat down and put his back against a comfortable patch of wall. “Tempting. But I know them. They’d throw a sack over me and haul me in for the reward; they’d go for the sure thing.”

“You’re probably right, Ruiz Aw. Well, how shall I begin?”

In the half hour that followed, she gave Ruiz a summary of SeaStack’s recent disintegration.

In the week following Ruiz’s departure, several prominent Lords had suddenly turned into vegetables.

Their heirs had discovered them to be impostors — gene-carved to resemble the real Lords, then Genched into near-perfect counterfeits.

The survivors had lost their composure completely, lashing out at rival Lords under the assumption that old hatreds had been revived. But gradually this first outbreak of hostilities had waned, to be replaced by a period of watchful paranoia and frenzied espionage. The violence grew sporadic: assassinations, ambushes, killmech skirmishes.

“That’s when we started hearing the rumors,” Diamond Bob said. “About a treasure, hidden somewhere under SeaStack. But no one knew what it was.”

“And now?” Ruiz asked. “Does anyone know?”

“Not that I’ve heard… unless you know. Though maybe the Lords know. Or some of them, anyway — but I really don’t think so.”

“What have you heard?”

She dropped her eyes for a moment. “Everyone has a different theory. The least imaginative fantasize about great heaps of rare isotopes, or cisterns full of valuable drugs, or chests of soulstones. That sort of thing. The superstitious believe a god is hiding under the stacks. The romantic think it’s a woman or a man of such inhuman beauty as to drive the beholder mad — and the Lords certainly seem maddened.”

“So which seems most plausible to you?”

“The smarter ones visualize some sort of universe-shaking new tech. I think that’s the most likely possibility.” Diamond Bob shifted, as though attempting to find a more comfortable position.

Ruiz resisted the temptation to loosen her bonds. “That’s what I think, too,” he said. “And then what happened?”

She went on with her story. After a period of relative calm, the battles had begun in earnest, and in the first three days, almost thirty percent of SeaStack’s combatants had died, by the estimates of her unit’s strategists. The weaker Lords had been destroyed, their stacks broken open and sterilized like so many termite mounds.

Then the violence had waned. Since then, the fighting had been periodic and intense, and another large portion of the city’s population had gone to feed the margars.

“But there’s no resolution, no matter how many die, which is why most of the merc units in the city sent representatives to this meeting. When you grabbed me, I was sure you were a Lord’s man, come to shut my mouth.” She grinned. “Are you sure you’re not?”

“I’m not,” Ruiz said. “Why do they want me so bad?”

She developed an incongruously coy expression. “I have a theory. Which was one reason I suggested my plan at the meeting.”

“Tell me.”

She hesitated. “Will you kill me if I guess true?”

“No… I just won’t tell you if you’re right.” Ruiz smoothed all expression from his face.

“A good gambler mask you have, Ruiz Aw,” Diamond Bob said, and then she smiled an oddly guileless smile. “All right. This is what I think: Because they associate you with this great treasure.”

“Why so?” asked Ruiz.

“Because of your connection with Publius the monster maker. They know you hired fighters for Publius — and Publius is connected to the changeling Lords, the puppets whose discovery began the war. He made them, or so it seems.” She shrugged. “And whatever job you did for Publius appears to have precipitated the first outbreak of fighting. Some unknown force destroyed his laboratories, and Publius disappeared. No one knows where he went, but his puppets were apparently equipped with some sort of deadman switch, so they lost any semblance of volition after he was gone — when he could no longer contact them with instructions. But none of this came out in the first days of the fighting.”

She stopped and gave Ruiz a shrewd look. “Any of this useful to you?”

“Maybe,” he answered.

“Well. So, Publius had some sort of vast scheme going, which may or may not have had anything to do with the Lords’ treasure. I think it did. He apparently had an ally — hence the deadman switches in his puppets. Insurance against treachery.”

Ruiz shook his head. “But why would they think I would know anything about Publius’s scheme?”

“Mostly, I suppose, because you’re the only loose end they can see in the fabric of the scheme. You might be this unknown ally.”

“Oh,” said Ruiz. “I take it you don’t think so.”

“No. I’m sorry to say, you just don’t have the air of a kingpin, Ruiz Aw. You’re more the cornered animal type. I think all you want to do is get away from Sook in one piece. I’m astonished to see you again, in fact.”

Ruiz wanted to tell her that she was absolutely correct, but he didn’t dare. “I was astonished to see you,” he said.

“So you say. Anyway… remember when you came to me and asked about Remint y’Yubere? And you spoke of a woman, a slaver called Corean? Of the connection between Corean and Alonzo Yubere? Yes?”

“Yes,” Ruiz said. He attempted to prevent any reaction from reaching his face.

“Well. No one but me knows of the connection between you and Yubere — and this is probably the reason no one has mounted a heavy assault on the Yubere stronghold. So I believe. If the Lords had found out what you told me, they’d have scoured the Yubere stack down to the magma. Right after they’d fought each other into extinction for the right to do so.” She shook her head wearily. “They really have gone mad. But anyway, you should be grateful to me for my silence… even if I was only waiting for the most opportune moment to make use of my speculations.”

“Why do you say that?” He had found out the crucial piece of information — Yubere’s stronghold remained intact — but he was curious.

She looked at him, wearing a crooked half-smile. “You’re no longer interested in Corean? In her whereabouts? In anything connected with Yubere’s stronghold?”

He shook his head. “I long ago removed what I valued from Yubere’s custody.” He told this half-truth easily.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I had a bit of information about Corean… but I guess you wouldn’t be interested.”

“I might,” he said cautiously.

She laughed. “You might? I work for Battalion LeFebvre; you know it? Good intelligence arm, right? Three days ago one of our agents, monitoring a long-range spybead, saw a woman return to the Yubere stronghold with several prisoners. The woman matched your description of the slaver Corean. She unloaded three prisoners and went in.”

“So?” Ruiz strove for an air of casual curiosity.

“Our agent described the prisoners. The descriptions exactly matched those of three slaves you left with me, the ones Remint took.” She shook her head, her eyes full of some odd amusement. “Have you noticed how full of coincidence life seems to be?”

“Not really,” he answered. “In fact, I’m not sure I believe in coincidence anymore. Well, that’s interesting, but irrelevant to my current purposes.”

And then, for the next half-hour, Ruiz quizzed Diamond Bob on the military situation in SeaStack — troop strengths, dispositions, fortifications — all the things an ambitious warlord would need to know. As they spoke, he heard the shuffle and clatter of the returning mercenaries.

By the time he had drained her of all the news he could think to ask for, she had become uncertain again.

“Perhaps I underestimated you, Ruiz Aw,” she said, biting her lip and shifting within her bonds. “Are you raising an army? I’d enlist, if so. The situation here is volatile, but exploitable, for a properly ruthless person.”

Ruiz looked at her, expressionless. Perhaps he could make use of her suspicions. “I won’t say. But when I’m gone, talk to the other delegates. Don’t use my name, unless you’d trust that person with your life.”

Diamond Bob nodded somberly. “All right. Will you release me?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’ll leave the access open and someone will hear you.”

Her thin mouth trembled. “I must rely on a kindly mercenary?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He smoothed the skinmask back into place, donned his helmet, and left. He didn’t look back.

When he was halfway to the lift cages, he heard fighting break out in the resumed meeting — the sound of weapons and the screams of the wounded. He ran the rest of the way and was well above the sub-basement when the first survivors came from the hall.