Ruiz touched the forward speed dot on the display, and held it down to cycle past the initial penetration. The two groups of armored raiders converged at a locked ingress to the common area. He saw Flomel, who had evidently been given a ceramic blast pencil during Remint’s previous visit, attach the pencil to a security mechanism at the ingress. He watched Flomel trigger a flare of energies that had melted the device, allowing Remint and his people to gain access to the common room.
There was the glare and percussion of weapons, torn bodies, running and screaming. The raiders moved efficiently through the hysteria, cutting down anyone who blocked their path.
They set rip charges at the inner doors of the other Pharaohans’ cells, detonated them, swept through. In what seemed an obvious afterthought, the last raiders to leave seized several of the nearest slaves and herded them along.
Ruiz paused the recording, frowned. He was still very tired, but something about the sequence of events bothered him. Why had the attempt to cover their true purpose been so transparently clumsy? In all the other aspects of the operation, Remint had been coldly brilliant, directing the raid with inhuman precision.
An idea bubbled up from some deep layer of paranoia, and Ruiz couldn’t help speculating: Was all this an elaborate charade, designed to draw Ruiz Aw into the open?
He shook his head. Even if it was the opening gambit in a clever trap, he would still have to respond. He filed the suspicion away for later examination and allowed the recording to play on.
The pen’s security forces had finally begun to react to the raid, and they brought up monomol barricades and heavy flutter guns, trying to prevent the raiders from escaping.
Remint seemed to go into another temporal frame of reference, moving so quickly that he became a blur the camera could not resolve into clarity, no matter how much Ruiz slowed the recording.
Remint flashed forward, ahead of his troops, rolling under the barricades before the guards could react and bring their flutter guns to bear.
Ruiz watched the slow-motion carnage, fascinated and horrified. There was a dreadful beauty in the slayer’s movements, as he spun from one guard to the next, slashing with a sonic knife and firing a pinbeam with his other hand. In an instant six guards were down.
One lived long enough to get off a poorly aimed burst. A stream of hypersonic particles scythed through two of Remint’s flankers, whose upper bodies dissolved into flying tatters of armor and bone. Only their legs remained whole, geysering blood, held upright by the frozen servos in their armor.
When the gun fired, Ruiz felt his heart stutter for a moment, as though crushed by the pressure of his anxiety for Nisa. But she and the others were in a tight cluster in the center of the raider’s formation, and the burst missed them by a considerable margin.
One of the raiders held a neural whip, which he flicked at the prisoner’s heels whenever they slowed. Now he touched Nisa with it, and she stumbled, and looked up at the hidden camera, eyes full of shock and pain.
Ruiz froze the image and zoomed it in, until her face filled the screen. His gaze lingered on the clean planes of her cheekbones, the luminous dark eyes, the rich sweet mouth. Even in this extremity of fright and bewilderment, her features projected an admirable strength. Ruiz thought he could almost see the shape of her thoughts. She was thinking about escape, or — if that was impossible — about survival. Then, in a rush of sad realization, Ruiz knew that she was also thinking: Where is Ruiz Aw?
He touched the screen and the playback resumed. He watched with a frozen adamant concentration, as the raiders swept through the halls and out onto the quay, where a battered, heavily armed gunboat waited.
The raiders, herding their prisoners, boarded the gunboat. It sped away, powerful engines thundering, throwing up a high roostertail. Hot light lanced from its weapons, destroying the other craft in the lagoon, presumably to prevent pursuit.
The camera’s viewpoint flickered and then resumed, following the raiders’ craft as it snaked through the twisting waterways.
After a few moments, a weapons pod on the boat’s armored transom twinkled orange fire, and the screen went white. A tagline at the bottom read: TRACKING DEVICE DESTROYED.
Ruiz frowned. He wished he were not so afraid of the slayer Remint; that fear would undermine his effectiveness.
Something cold and hard whispered in the back of his mind — words he shut out at first, not wanting to hear them. The whisper grew louder, until he could no longer ignore it. Leave her; she’s probably already dead, it said. He’ll destroy you; can there be any doubt of this?
“Probably not,” he muttered. But behind his eyes Nisa’s face floated, as he had seen it in the playback: beautiful, tender, true. He couldn’t abandon her, no matter how sensible that course might be. She had taken firm root in his heart; if circumstances tore her away from him, he didn’t think there would be enough left of his heart to keep beating.
He forced his attention back to the matter at hand, and went through the rest of Diamond Bob’s material.
When he was finished, he was no less afraid of Remint y’Yubere, but he knew where to start looking for him.
Albany sat in the copilot’s chair as Ruiz guided the sub into one of the subsurface openings that led to the lagoon at the heart of the stack.
“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Albany was still pale and tense.
“No,” Ruiz said, as cheerfully as possible. “But at one time the man spent much of his time and money in the Celadon Wind; maybe I can cut his trail there.”
“What makes you think you’ll do any better than the lords? They’ve got good snoops, and snooping’s not your specialty.” Albany seemed dubious.
Ruiz shrugged. He had explained a bit about their quarry, leaving out the most frightening details. “We’re two of a kind,” he said. “I understand him better than the pirate snoops.”
“Seems thin,” said Albany dubiously.
It seemed thin to Ruiz too, but what else could he do?
The lagoon was a vast black emptiness beneath a high dome of slagged metal, a hollowed-out space a kilometer across.
Ruiz stood on the deck grating of the sub and looked up. Phosphorescent worms slithered across the dome, forming sinuous patterns of cold color; apparently an ancient work of bio-art gone feral.
Across the still water were scattered the riding lights of other vessels. Ruiz couldn’t see them well enough to tell if Publius’s gunboat was among them. He assumed that the gunboat Remint had used in the raid wasn’t here; surely the pirates would have found it, had Remint been so foolish as to come here.
They had picked up an automated mooring buoy. On securing their line, it had summoned one of the robotic bumboats that waited at the quay that circled the lagoon.
It arrived and Ruiz descended the narrow steps set into the sub’s bulging topsides. Albany leaned on the sub’s conning tower, looking down at Ruiz, his face obscured by the darkness. “I still think we ought to go to ground until this excitement blows over. I know places where we’d keep fat and happy.” He spoke in an oddly dispassionate tone. It suddenly seemed to Ruiz that perhaps some vital mechanism had broken down in Albany. He wondered what it might be, and how it had happened — and why it hadn’t happened to him, yet.
“You’re probably right,” Ruiz said. “But I don’t think I have any choice. If you want, I’ll put you ashore here, no hard feelings.”
Albany sighed. “No. I’ll stick. You still have your luck, Ruiz Aw. I need something; maybe that’s it. Besides, who’d keep an eye on our benevolent employer?”