1
ASSASSINS
Hans Bettelhine may have been an infamous merchant of death, whose munitions empire was even now fueling slaughter on a hundred human worlds, but I had to be fair: it was for precisely that reason that I wouldn’t blame him for today’s attempt on my life.
Bettelhine would not have invited me all the way to his home system just to have a couple of incompetent assassins ambush me in his spaceport. Had he wanted me dead all that badly he knew my address, and could have nuked it on a whim or, given the preference for a more surgical strike, sent semi-intelligent flechette drones into New London to hunt me down and vivisect me in my sleep. Juje alone knew that he was supposed to have done stuff like that before.
Still, there was no denying that his headquarters world, Xana, set an entirely new record for the shortest interval between my arrival at a place I’ve never been and the very first attempt on my life there.
I’m talking about minutes. Minutes.
It happened before I took my first step onto its planetary soil, even before Bettelhine should have known that my transport had arrived at its main orbital terminal, Layabout.
The Porrinyards and I were walking through the concourse off Layabout’s main docking facilities, an array of liquor stores, restaurants, boutiques, gift shops, and even brothel booths where bored execs waiting for their passages offworld could spend a few minutes being brought to multiple orgasms by pulsed sonics. Strolling to the elevator dock, where we’d been assured a berth on the private car normally reserved for Bettelhine use, I counted four sentient species, not counting human beings, among the travelers waiting for their ride to the planetary surface or for their transports to other systems. There was at least one I didn’t recognize, who to my eyes looked a little like a terrestrial donkey—after that donkey had been burned with a blowtorch and then explosively decompressed. All of this would have provided more than enough distraction, after all those weeks in Intersleep, were I not also arguing politics with the Porrinyards, an exercise that amounts to being outnumbered even when only one of them is talking.
A pair of striking physical paragons, one male and one female, each with wise eyes, kind smiles, and stubbly silvery hair, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard have one supersized composite mind between them and often champion ridiculous points just to twist me into rhetorical knots.
The first of the assassins stood up the second that Oscin and I came into view at the far end of the concourse, but there was still no reason to believe that his aimless stroll away from the seats and into the area of greatest foot traffic was intended to end with me bleeding my life out onto the cold permaplastic of the terminal floor. He was even easy to mistake as human. Bocaians made many of the same evolutionary choices as human beings. You wouldn’t ever mistake a member of one race for the other on close examination, but their basic outlines are almost identical, the most prominent difference when clothed being the bumpy Bocaian ear and the oversized Bocaian eyes. Any Bocaian dedicated to killing me, as most Bocaians are, can therefore get well within striking distance before being recognized for what he is.
This one began to pick up speed as Oscin and I passed by, still lost in our ridiculous argument. His path paralleled ours, but there was still no obvious reason to think that suspicious in a bustling place like Layabout.
Even as he stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and retrieved a featureless disk backed with a metallic loop designed to bind it to the palm of his hand, there was no reason to suspect him of murderous intent.
Not even as he came up from behind and reached for the back of my neck.
Traveling by myself, I would have been dead.
But that’s why I always have one Porrinyard walk ten paces behind me in public.
Oscin said, “Oh, dear.”
By the time I turned to question him he had already pivoted on his heels and seized the Bocaian by the forearm.
Oscin wasn’t the one who’d seen the Bocaian’s approach. Skye had. But he was privy to everything she was privy to, and so he was ready the instant she was.
She caught up a second later, her smaller hands seizing the Bocaian farther down his arm. Her grip and Oscin’s was enough to halt the Bocaian’s lunge before the disk came anywhere near my skin.
All of this happened before I completed my turn.
Next to the Porrinyards I’m a turtle on neural dampeners.
The first I actually saw of the fight, when my pivot was completed, was Oscin and Skye using the Bocaian’s own struggles to force him to his knees.
Then I heard a familiar cold voice in my head. Counselor: Five o’ clock.
I whirled again and caught a glimpse of another hate-filled Bocaian face, as its owner charged me from the opposite side of the walkway.
This one was older and taller than the first: a full head taller than I, with a reach that put me at a disadvantage. He must have been watching his friend’s attempt from cover before using the confusion caused by the first charge to initiate his own.
I didn’t see a weapon. But I didn’t have a weapon, either. My satchel had several interesting items that only somebody with Diplomatic credentials can get through customs, but I didn’t have the time or the space to access anything that could possibly be of use now.
That was all right.
There was a bulkhead some ten paces behind me.
I grabbed the second Bocaian by his shoulders and spun, adding my own momentum to his. We ran the last meter or so together. I tripped him at the point of no return. There was a very satisfying crunch as he hit the bulkhead face-first. Before he could fall, and possibly rise again, I drove my knee into the small of his back, a place every bit as vulnerable on a Bocaian as it is on a human being.
He managed to turn and wrap his arms around my legs, as much to support himself as to maintain hold of his hated enemy. A keening moan, halfway to a howl, exploded from him, carrying with it a level of pain he might have borne his entire life. I shoved him away. He fell back and curled into a ball, his low moan continuing. Bocaians do not have tear ducts and do not cry as human beings do, but that sound transcended species. I knew. I’d made sounds very much like it myself, on the world that had given me both life and reputation. On Bocai.
I asked him, “What’s your name?”
He coughed out a word, along with a pair of tooth fragments.
It was not one I knew. “Are you alone?”
He gasped, and then something happened to his eyes: they strobed, bright enough to leave purple afterimages on my retinas. By the time I blinked away the blindness, his expression had gone blank.
Crap.
There were microteemers behind his eyelids. The flash, triggered by him or some confederate I couldn’t see, was a packed visual impulse capable of overloading his brain with a single preprogrammed image, intense enough to occupy every neural function but the autonomic. Yelling at him, or shaking him, or trying to wake him up in any way would do no good. He’d be catatonic for days.
I’d been teemed a few times myself, most recently as one of dozens put down by New London police, when I’d chosen the wrong moment to try to get to the other side of a political demonstration turned riot. The next thing I knew it was five days later and my head was cottony from clearing away the fractals.
I looked for the Porrinyards and was not surprised to see that the Bocaian they’d disarmed and cuffed had also gone limp. I didn’t bother asking if they were all right. Of course they were all right. They were the Porrinyards. “Did that bastard just teem himself?”
“Yes,” they said in perfect unison. “And wet himself too. I’m going to need a washroom.”