Colorless laughter.
Marmigus Deified? It had been a long time. He'd just become OpsAvocat last time they were out. "Must have been slow times."
"Bet it's a routine cleanup, Sarge. Ain't nobody in a hurry."
"Ship is Red One, Hake."
"Ain't breaking out nobody but infantry. Somebody dropped a condiment tray."
Jo paused at the theater hatchway. "Can it, troops."
They entered a space where thirty thousand could be seated. They nodded to soldiers they knew, found seats, stared at their officers, waited. Above the stage, in large but unpretentious letters, was the motto, "I Am A Soldier." It was posted over every exit from WarCrew country. It emblazoned a patch worn by WarCrew, encircling a numeral VII superimposed upon a caricature of the tutelary, a naked woman running that did not seem warlike to Jo.
How about a wide, muscular thug like her, short, ratty hair and a bloody ax in hand? Be more like the truth.
People did not shy away when Jo Klass walked past, but she could not be convinced that she was not unattractive.
The lander grounded. Jo trudged out into P. Jaksonica 3's reddish daylight. Hake had it right. They were cleaning up a spill. A krekelen shapechanger, for Tawn's sake!
She glared at Cholot Varagona. It looked like every outport city on every House-dominated world in Canon. The houses were so damned conservative they would not stray from one standard prefab design. If you wanted something different, you had to hunt up a non-House world.
The High City floated a thousand meters up, connected to UpTown by a flexible tube containing passenger and freight lifts. The proconsuls of the House, the very rich and their hangers-on, remained safely isolated there.
The legs of UpTown lifted it, too, above the perils of a world poorly tamed and, especially, above the taint of the tamers. Administrators and functionaries; Canon garrison if there was one; House dependent, cadet, and allied merchants; contract operators; these lived UpTown.
DownTown was the base of the social pyramid. Its own gradient declined toward the deepest shadow beneath the belly of UpTown.
Some were big, some were small, but that basic structure formed the capital on ten thousand worlds.
Jo activated her suit and bounced to her right. Her squad followed. Sensors systems came up, displaying in color on the sensitized inner surface of her face plate, defining her surroundings. She could breathe the air. It was not too cold out there. But the info she cared about was that there were no unfriendly weapons nearby.
Data from VII Gemina, relayed from the lander, interrupted once a minute for five seconds, mapping the city as Probe saw it. The krekelen remained stationary near the heart of DownTown.
City work. Jo hated it. Cities were treacherous. You never knew who would hit you with what from where. The system was not great at detecting non-energy weapons.
Linkup. Circle complete. Nothing would get out. Came the order to advance.
Jo glanced up at the High City, at the flaming star of VII Gemina, which seemed tangled among fairy spires. How frightened they must be, those Cholot lordlings, wondering if the landing party had come to end the Ban by toppling UpTown and killing the High City's gravs.
There was no resistance. The few beings Jo saw stood rigidly immobile, staring with terrified eyes. Seldom had she seen so many sports, discards, and bizarre aliens. And this world had been allowed no outside contact for centuries. The creepy-crawlies were taking over.
The target did not move till the circle was under a kilometer in diameter. Jo's faceplate began displaying Gemina track in five second alternates with suit local. Up on battalion net, for all officers and NCOs: "A reminder from up top, people. We will take it alive." No commentary, of course. That was there only in tone.
I Am A Soldier.
Corollary: I Obey.
On platoon net: "It's headed our way, people."
Jo matched Gemina-feed with a suit-local heat trace a hundred meters out. She outlocked Gemina, fixed the track, switched on squad tac. "Coming right down our throats, guys."
"Why can't we see it? You see it, Sarge? Anybody see it?"
No one did. But it ought to be visible. It was on top of them.
Top! She looked up, adjusted to max enhancement. There. Something scuttling along a beam.
Her bolt edged it perfectly. It went into nerve lock, clung to a stress lattice branching from a pylon, slowly changed into what looked like a black plastic film. Jo switched to platoon tac. "Platoon, Second Squad. We got it."
— 6 —
The chamber was a perfect globe a thousand meters across. A great mass floated near its heart, slightly upward as gravity was oriented. Lightning leaped from the curved walls to the mass. Tin-sheet thunder beat its chest and howled around the cavity. Gouts of red, gaseous flame exploded across the darkness. Self-congratulatory devil's laughter pranced between the valleys of the thunder.
A woman stood in the mouth of a corridor ending at the wall of the chamber. "He's in a dramatic mood today." Her companion was a youth who looked seventeen. She looked twenty-one. He was. She was not. She was much older and more cruel. The sorrow of the torturer looked out through her pale blue eyes.
"When will we kill him?" The boy's dark eyes were not those of an adolescent. The rest of him looked naive and young and innocent, but his eyes were those of a predator.
She slapped him. "Don't say that! Don't even think it this close to him." She laughed. "Not soon. After he succeeds. If he succeeds." Though not as loud her laughter was as wicked as that racketing around the globular cavity. "Who wants to inherit a disaster?"
The boy shivered. It was cold there, and gloomy, and something in the air reminded him of graveyards before dawn. "Why did he summon us?"
"Probably because he needs to proclaim his genius, and Lupo Provik doesn't feed his ego because Lupo refuses to be impressed." She palmed a bright plate on the corridor wall. "Father! We're here."
The show doubled in intensity. Lightning arrows thumped the wall near the corridor's end. Hologramatic monsters slithered the air, snapping and clawing, breathing fire and spitting venom. A black gondola manned by a skeletal gondolier approached imperturbed through the fury. Backlighting betrayed the hologram. The thing was a grav-sled and humanoid robot tricked up by the imagination of Simon Tregesser.
The sled nudged the wall. The woman stepped aboard. The youth hesitated, followed. The wing of fear cast one brief shadow upon his face.
His features hardened into naive inscrutability. He was learning.
One learned if one intended to survive amongst House Tregesser's ruling family.
The sled glided toward the heart of the cavity. A closed, transparent bell filled with dark smoke hung from the machinery there, which supported the thing inside and made of its will realities. The sled stopped ten meters away. Search probes tickled its passengers.
A grotesque face pressed against the inner surface of the bell. The smoke faded, revealed the wreckage of a body, one arm withered, the rest gnawed by fire, blind, all the handiwork of an assassin who had been almost lucky enough.
"Ah. My loving child Valerena. And her plaything."
"My son, Father."
A shrill cackle surrounded her. "I have eyes that see farther and deeper than these blind scars. But who or what you bed is your own affair." A moment. "Are you Valerena indeed? Or her Other?"
"I'm Valerena Prime."
"That's a comfort. Sometimes I think you send your Other when your conscience bothers you."
Guilty, Valerena tried to change the subject. "Why did you summon us?"
"The most pessimistic projections suggest that the beast is down on P. Jaksonica 3 and has been recognized. That entire Presidency will be crawling with Travelers carrying the alarm. We count the game begun. Soon they'll come sniffing up the trail. And we'll seize a Guardship for House Tregesser."