The waiter was a brainchopped woman of great apparent age, who showed him a menu and accepted his order silently, then shuffled back to the little black tent that held the cafe’s machinery. She returned with his meal almost instantly; it consisted of a platter of gray textured protein and vatted fungi in various fluorescent hues, sliced into bite-size pieces and covered with a thick bluish sauce. It tasted marginally better than it looked, and he ate it while he examined his map.
The map, installed in a disposable dataslate, allowed him to scroll crudely through the stack, level by level. The major features were represented by wireframe diagrams and touch-dot labels. When he located the Sweetshimmer, three levels below the Celadon Wind, he was immediately struck by its suitability for an ambush. There were only two entries into the joypalace, according to the map, and one watcher could cover both of them. The corridor that led to Suite B-448 served only a half-dozen other suites, and was accessible from a single elevator bank.
He finished his meal and looked out at the people passing through the market. He watched for a few minutes; none of the shoppers resembled the woman with the steel slippers.
He slipped out of the cafe and found a shop specializing in full bodymasks. The shop was housed in an inflatable structure covered with anodized alloy scales, so that it looked like a giant lavender artichoke. The clerk, another elderly brainchopped woman, served him without detectable interest, and a few minutes later Ruiz left the shop disguised as a fat merchant. He wore a poisonous-green puffsuit, gold-mirrored ankle boots, and a stylish pink visor. He’d also purchased a somatic inductance overlay, which lay against the nape of his neck and changed his gait into a mincing waddle, made his arms flip about in a disarmingly frivolous manner, and raised his voice an octave.
He was confident no one would recognize him, though he feared that if he ran into one of the muggergangs which infested the city, he would be attacked. The bodymask restricted his movements and prevented access to most of his weapons, and the face-covering restricted his vision. Worse, he had been forced to leave his armor behind, in a public locker that would surely be broken open and emptied as soon as he was out of sight. He felt naked and vulnerable, protected only by a layer of spongy synthetic flesh.
But he could think of no better plan, so he went to the public lifts and dropped down to the level of the Sweetshimmer.
At the moment Remint lay back on the couch, eyes closed. Corean was reminded of a mech recharging its batteries — the slayer’s face seemed even less human in repose, the grotesquely muscled features even more like some murderous alien mask. She wondered how he could sleep with Ruiz Aw so close to his trap. Probably, she thought, he wasn’t asleep, but only resting, husbanding his energies in a wholly logical manner. She wondered what would happen if she were to go to his couch and touch him. Would she survive the experiment?
She returned her attention to the spyscreen, which now displayed a view of the corridor outside the suite. In the last few moments the traffic in the corridor had picked up. A fat man in a ridiculous green puffsuit simpered and clung to the arm of a rather homely albino joyboy in a leather whipping jumper. A few paces behind the fat man, a tall cadaverous man in the dull black shipsuit of a Dead God acolyte trudged along, face solemn; he was trailed by a brightly dressed covey of preadolescent girls, all of whom wore identical looks of unchildlike resignation.
The lights in the corridor went out.
Corean sat in bemusement for an instant, before she realized that something was wrong. She opened her mouth to shout for Remint, when the red emergency lights strobed on, then off. In that blink of time, she saw the fat man moving with astonishing speed up the corridor, a look of wooden calm on his doughy face. The albino sprawled on his back, legs kicking, and the tall acolyte was soaring over the fallen joyboy in a tigerish bound.
She turned and shrieked a warning at Remint, who was already rising from his couch, when the suite’s door shattered and the fat man burst through, a splinter gun in his hand.
In that transparent slice of time, she saw that Remint — for all his inhuman speed — would be too slow, that the fat man would kill or disable Remint before the slayer could reach his weapons or get his feet sufficiently under him to take evasive action.
But then a slender hand reached through the shattered door and sank a stun needle into the fat man’s neck. The fat man spasmed and flung his arms wide… then toppled over, helpless.
Ruiz regained consciousness as two of Remint’s hired slayers were cutting him out of the bodymask. He couldn’t completely stifle a groan as his injured nervous system reacted to the rough handling.
Corean’s face floated above him, transfigured with vengeful joy. “Oh, how I’ve waited for this moment,” she said, in tones vibrant with pleasure.
He knew better than to attempt speech until he had further recovered from the stun; his muscles were still useless. He looked around, and saw the tall naked woman with the steel slippers removing the last piece of her acolyte bodymask. She favored him with a nod and a cool smile. “Not a bad try,” she said. Apparently she was not in the employ of the pirates, as the mythagogue had told him. Other things were also apparent: principally, that Ruiz Aw was an idiot who richly deserved his fate. He sighed.
Remint y’Yubere sat on the couch, hands folded, looking remarkably placid. Ruiz could observe none of the intensity he had expected to see in the slayer’s face. The man seemed unaffected by the recent violent events. Genched, Ruiz thought, and shuddered. He would be just as placid in a little while.
“That’s right,” burbled Corean, as if she had added mind-reading to her skills. “You’re all mine now.” She reached out and touched the madcollar Ruiz wore. “Whose is this? No matter.” She clamped a decoupler module to the collar’s control linkage, and adjusted the damping field until it resonated with the linkage. The collar clicked open and dropped away. “There,” she said brightly. “Remint!”
The slayer looked up incuriously.
“Take us back to your brother’s stronghold,” she ordered.
Remint nodded. “As you say.” He rose from the couch and glanced around the suite. The joyboys, who were still huddled on the bed, both shrieked thinly when his gaze rested on them; he killed them with two brief touches of his pinbeam.
A look of uncertainty flickered across the face of the tall woman; immediately she suppressed it. The other two slayers laughed and brought out a control harness, which they began strapping to Ruiz. It was a device somewhat like the corpse-walker Publius had used; when it was activated Ruiz would be unable to make any movement except those specifically directed by the controller of the harness.
When they had finished fastening the control harness to Ruiz, they rolled him over and sat him up.
“Give me the controller,” said Remint.
“Sure,” said one slayer, and passed it over. Remint touched the controller’s finger pad, and Ruiz’s leg and arm muscles locked tight. The intensity of the pain astonished him; his abused nervous system was protesting vigorously. He clamped his jaws shut. For some reason he didn’t want to admit how much it hurt.
Remint took one last slow look around the suite, and then he cut down the rest of his people. The two male slayers fell before they could react; the tall woman, who was very quick, had time only to jerk aside slightly as Remint’s pinbeam cooked through her breastbone.
Ruiz took a sort of hopeless satisfaction in the terror that filled Corean’s face as she waited to find out if she were scheduled to die too. But Remint turned toward the door and said, “Come. Alonzo is waiting for us.”