For a moment Albany didn’t react, then he seemed to relax from some tautness that Ruiz hadn’t noticed until he had moved. “Yeah, yeah. I guess I’ll do that.” He began to strip off his own armor, and Ruiz saw that Albany’s hands were trembling.
“What’s been happening?” Ruiz asked.
Albany shrugged, and settled into the pilot’s chair. “Not much. We’re in a west-running current, drifting at a half knot. There was something going on right after you went to sleep, some fuss on the surface, with a lot of active sonar and detector drogues being dropped — someone looking for something. Probably wasn’t us, hey?”
“Maybe not,” said Ruiz. “Anything else?”
Albany shifted uneasily. “Our former employer… he’s a firecracker, isn’t he? He’s been telling me about his art, trying to throw a scare into me. He’s succeeded, I have to tell you. I see now why you’d rather be dead than his.” He sighed and looked at Ruiz with weary eyes. “Me too. I hope you can control him, Ruiz.”
“I think I can,” said Ruiz, summoning a confident tone. “If anyone can.”
“I guess so.” Albany sighed and shut his eyes. A moment later his breathing deepened and he began to snore.
Ruiz stretched, then went to the comm panel and slipped Diamond Bob’s wafer into the analyzer slot.
Remint called again, shortly after dawn, and woke Corean from an uneasy slumber, in which she had dreamed of ruin and flight. The dreams had been colored by dreadful images from the raving corridors of Dobravit — seepage from her locked-away childhood memories.
Marmo took the call, but Remint insisted he could speak only to Corean. By that time, Corean stood in the doorway, scratching at her sleep-tousled head. When she saw whose face filled the vidscreen, she moved to the comm panel.
“What is it?”
“Another sighting.”
“Where?” She was completely awake now, her bad dreams forgotten in the heat of her hatred.
“At the pens. He arrived in a small submersible, went inside for a few minutes, then emerged, reboarded the sub, and left.” Remint’s expressionless face told her nothing.
“You took him?” She was filled with elation.
“No. We expected him to arrive in a surface vessel — the gunboat — and arranged our subterfuges and devices accordingly. We had no way to strike at him within the pen’s lagoon; we had great difficulty in even getting a spymote inside. The pirate lords are incandescent with outrage; they’ve staffed the pens with numerous killmechs, they search for me everywhere. I fear my usefulness to my brother is permanently diminished.” At this digression, something kindled deep behind the slayer’s eyes.
“But you’re following him? Surely?”
“No. Outside the entrance, the sub dove, before we could get a transponder on it. It descended to a great depth, then went silent, and our detectors were unable to maintain contact.”
“You idiot!” Her elation had mutated into sizzling rage. “I ought to cut your throat and feed you to the margars.”
Remint seemed unaffected by her outburst. He leaned back and brought a sonic knife into the camera’s field of view. He activated the knife and touched the roil of displaced air delicately to his throat. “Do you so order?” As he spoke, the blade bit, just a little, and a flutter of blood ran along the edge of the knife’s envelope and spattered the camera’s lens with tiny red specks.
“No! No, don’t be foolish.” She watched him switch the knife off and put it away, apparently unconcerned with the red rivulet that trickled over the corded muscle of his throat. He was, she thought, a creature completely outside her experience, even though she had possessed a number of Genched slaves. None had displayed such frozen intensity; Remint must have been a remarkable man before his deconstruction.
He looked up, his eyes empty of emotion. “Shall I continue?”
“Yes.”
“Then: Ruiz Aw is considering what he learned in the pens. My belief is that he will seek me in my once-favorite place, a fabularium in a stack near my brother’s stronghold. Already the pirate lords have visited the Celadon Wind, as the place is called; their agents still infest every room and rathole. He will know this, but my assessment of the man is that he will believe that he can discover some vital information that the lords were too stupid to find. He is an egomaniac, as I once was. We were very much alike, in many ways.” His detachment seemed impossible, even for the robot of flesh and bone she knew him to be.
Corean considered. “You’re waiting for him there?”
“I hide myself and several slayers in an adjacent joypalace.”
She made a decision. “Send me a guide, and I’ll join you.”
His gaze was cool and full of evaluation. “Your passion may be a liability to my success.”
She snarled and said, “Just do it.” Then she cut the connection.
She sat back and thought about Ruiz Aw and his inexplicable luck. From somewhere a memory rose to torment her. She remembered that she had wondered aloud about Ruiz Aw, about whether his confidence arose from a foolish ignorance of the dangers of his situation, or whether it came from a strength so overpowering that he truly didn’t need to fear her.
A chill came over her, and she shivered involuntarily. No, no, that was ridiculous. Several times she had held his life in her hand, several times she could have snuffed him out effortlessly, and he couldn’t have resisted at all.
But still, a tiny voice whispered, deep inside her heart, but still, Ruiz Aw lives and thwarts you. And ignores you as he goes about his business.
SEVERAL THREAD BARS appeared on the analyzer’s screen, and Ruiz touched the first one, labeled SURVEILLANCE RECORDS. The thread expanded into its nested subjects, and he followed the one that contained the recording of the assault on the pens.
The screen cleared for an instant, and then filled with a slightly grainy image, harshly lit, of a large person in bulky black mirror-armor, who walked quickly through the entrance portal of the pens, accompanied by two smaller figures, also armored. The tagline at the screen’s lower right corner said: REMINT Y’YUBERE AND TWO UNKNOWNS.
Ruiz studied this new enemy. He began to feel a little sick. He had never met Remint, but he knew him, with a knowledge born of the countless bloody encounters that had forged Ruiz into what he was.
Ruiz was abruptly and completely sure that Remint was the kind of killer he most feared, the purest and most deadly species of slayer, a man who lived wholly in the moment, untroubled by regret or foreboding. The man moved as lightly as a recent heavyworld immigrant — he gave an impression of irresistible strength, tightly leashed. Behind the mirrored visor, his eyes would be flickering, seeing everything, weighing it on the scales of his purpose. He would destroy without thought whatever obstructed that purpose, instantly and with instinctive efficiency.
Ruiz touched the screen, and the lower left quadrant displayed a still image of Remint’s face, as he had appeared on his first visit to the pen. He could see a little of Alonzo Yubere in those features, but the resemblance was obscured by cloned muscle and reengineered bone, so that the expressionless eyes gleamed out of slits cut through a mask of inhumanly dense flesh. If anything, the slayer was more frightening without his armor — he seemed even more truly an engine of destruction.
This was, in fact, himself as he had been, and it was like looking into a smoky mirror and seeing a grinning skull. Ruiz shuddered. Could such a man be defeated? He had never really thought it possible, when he had been such a man himself.
The screen split and began to display another group of armored persons, four in number, tagged: CONFEDERATES OF REMINT Y’YUBERE, IDENTITIES UNKNOWN.