Koridun panted for breath. Stones rattled on the roof. Her eyes darted from Sula to the others and back, and it was clear she realized acutely that she was the only person in the shed without a firearm. “I don’t know anyone by those names,” she said.
“Your brother’s behind this, isn’t he?” Sula said. “He’s spending an absurd amount on this ridiculous scheme.”
He was young, Sula knew, and the previous Lord Koridun had skipped two generations of his own descendants in order to bestow the title on his great-grandson. The generations he’d skipped had been renowned for debauchery, mental instability, and violence extreme even for Torminel—the hospital to which Koridun’s mother had been sent was for lunatics—and the late lord had probably hoped that his great-grandson would prove more sober and sensible than his parents.
He’d been overly optimistic. Koridun’s brother, masterminding this interplanetary revenge plot, was just as crazy as the others.
“We hate you!” Koridun’s fangs flared white in the dark room.
“Lady Tari,” Sula told Koridun, “your only chance is to cooperate. You’ve got to name everyone connected with this and—”
Koridun squalled, a nerve-splintering shriek designed to paralyze the carnivore Torminel’s prey, and then she charged. Her fur stood erect, making her seem like a giant gray-black demon, and her face was completely obscured save for her bared fangs and her furious blue eyes.
Sula had been half-prepared for something like this. The shed was too small to avoid Koridun entirely, but Sula stepped and pivoted out of the way, bracing against the impact. Koridun’s fangs flashed past Sula’s face, and her armored cuirass cracked against Sula’s. The two rebounded from one another, Sula taking another step back, Koridun going into a stack of barrels. She flung herself around and charged again, but by now, Sula’s pistol had had time to clear the holster, and she shot Koridun through the open faceplate of her helmet. Koridun flailed and fell, and Sula, with careful deliberation, shot her again.
There was a long moment when time seemed suspended, and Sula’s heart pounded louder than the report of her pistol, louder than the crash of volcanic debris on the roof. Macnamara and Spence had their pistols out, and they were staring at Koridun’s body in wild astonishment.
“Fuck,” Spence breathed. “Creeping fucking fuck!”
Sula tried to get her heart and breathing under control. Her arm was still outthrust, the pistol shaking to the tsunami of adrenaline that rocked her body. She engaged her pistol’s safety and returned it to the holster, and absently thought to herself she’d have to toss the gun somewhere it wouldn’t be found. She stepped to the body and bent over it. The tang of propellant flavored the air.
“We’ve got to get the breastplate off,” she said. “I’m going to need her jacket.”
“My lady?” Macnamara said.
“Then we toss the body into the ravine,” Sula said. Her hands unclamped the cuirass on the right side.
“I’m a constable,” Macnamara said in a reasonable tone. “Shawna and I can witness that she attacked you, and that it was self-defense.”
Sula straightened and looked at him. “If word gets to Lord Koridun that I’ve shot his sister, he’ll send a hundred more assassins after me. I’ve got to make it look as if his sister died in an accident.”
Which was plausible, she hoped, but not the real reason. If word of the Koridun conspiracy got out, the Legion of Diligence was almost certain to take charge of the investigation. And while those merciless enforcers of the Praxis could be counted on to put an end to Lord Koridun and any offending members of his family—plus the usual gang of innocents caught up in the investigation—they might also get it into their stubborn, inflexible heads to investigate the death of Lady Governor Trani Creel, and Sula couldn’t afford that.
No, she had other ways to deal with Lord Koridun and his clan.
Macnamara looked as if he was considering objecting to her argument, but decided against it. “Very well, my lady,” he said. His face was sulky.
If a subordinate’s bad mood was the worst thing that came out of this situation, Sula reckoned she could survive it. She and Macnamara stripped off the cuirass, then the uniform vest Koridun wore underneath it. As Sula’s uniform tunic held Sula’s communication gear and sleeve display, Koridun’s vest also contained hardware that kept her in touch with the world, and which also located her in space. If the vest wasn’t pulled off the corpse, the body could be located.
After the vest was removed, Sula and Macnamara wrestled the body up the drift of clinkers spilling through the door, then got it around the building and pitched it into the ravine just below the shed. Debris falling off the shed roof would bury it quickly, and if the ejecta kept coming down, Koridun would be buried under tons of rock that could stand for centuries. No one would have a reason to excavate that ravine, and perhaps they’d have every reason to build over it.
Sula threw Koridun’s cuirass after the body, and carrying the vest, she and the others returned to their vehicle, swept debris off the windscreen, and began the return journey. Macnamara drove in stony silence, a little muscle twitching his jaw. Spence said nothing and seemed to be in shock.
It had been a very full twenty-four hours, certainly.
They caught up to the slower-moving convoy and soon after that turned aside to bring the six-wheeler beneath the swooping portico of the great elevator building. Within minutes, Sula was back in her quarters, and she took out Koridun’s vest and turned off all its electronics. Any record of Koridun’s movements would show that she had returned to her own headquarters.
She’d chop up the vest later and dispose of what remained.
After a shower, Sula was back in the manager’s operations room, standing before the great clear window and looking out at the black storm that fell indifferently on the living and on the dead. She felt it was burying the Terra of her dreams, the magical place that had filled the fantasies of a young girl on Spannan.
That place, if it had existed at all, had died long before. A few monuments remained, as tortured and twisted by time as the Sphendone in Constantinople, but the civilizations that produced them had vanished, and the monuments survived only out of context, cenotaphs placed over the dust of the people that had built them. What remained was a sad, third-rate imitation of an imperial culture that was itself a patchwork jigsawed into place by half a dozen species surviving precariously under the despotic rule of vainglorious Shaa blockheads. The dreams of Terrans were no longer Terran but the dreams imposed by the Shaa and the culture of Zanshaa High City—and neither, she had learned, were worth anyone’s dreams.
Her dreams, it seemed, were mortal. Mortal as Byzantium, or the empire of the Persians, or the city that was even now being buried under millions of tons of debris.
Everything dies, she thought as she looked out at the falling stone. Nothing matters.
In her present mood, she found the thoughts comforting.
* * *
A little less than a month later, she was back in her quarters on the ring, preparing to receive Aram, Lord Tacorian in the paneled dining room of her suite. The president and founder of the Manado Company would be her guest for luncheon.
It would be the first time she’d served anyone off her new porcelain.
It hadn’t been difficult to get Lord Tacorian to meet her. All she had to do was hint that she was ready to sign the contract permitting Manado free use of the Fleet dockyard.
Back on Terra, the eruption of Karangetang had come to an end when the volcanic peak had collapsed into the empty magma chamber, and the waters of the Celebes Sea closed over the remains. The island had ceased to exist.
So had the city of Manado, which had been obliterated by a pyroclastic flow that had run across the surface of the strait, after which the ruins were entombed in ejecta deep enough to bury a three-story building. Because the city had been evacuated, only a few hundred lives were estimated to have been lost, far less than the eighty thousa
nd estimated to have been killed when a series of tsunamis struck the east coast of Borneo. There had been more warning in the Philippines, and only a few thousand had died there.
Most of Tambu had received enough ashfall to creep halfway up second-floor windows. Some of the lower parts of the city were completely buried. There was too much to remove; a new city would have to be built atop the old, with the old city becoming cellars and foundations.
The skyhook cables had suffered only minor damage during the eruption, easily repaired by robots, and were now carrying a substantial amount of traffic as vast amounts of food, other supplies, and relief workers were being carried down to Sulawesi.
Koridun, along with thousands of others, was safely buried under tons of debris. On the theory that she’d gone out to supervise some kind of rescue effort and been overcome by ejecta or crushed by a collapsing building, a search for her was under way through the improvised morgues that had been set up throughout Tambu, and Sula had to feign an interest in the results. She suspected that Koridun wouldn’t be found for millions of years, not until the volcanic deposit in which she was buried eroded away under the slow, steady drip of geologic time.
Anna Spendlove had gone missing as well. The jail in Tinombala where she was being held had partially collapsed, and during the evacuation, she’d managed to slip away into the darkness and the stony rain. Sula presumed that if Spendlove had survived, she was trying as hard as possible not to look like Sula anymore. There was still a planetwide search for her, and there was every hope that she’d be spotted if she ever took the elevator to the ring in an attempt to flee Terra.
Sula hoped for Spendlove’s sake that she wouldn’t attempt to contact any of the people who had sponsored her visit to Terra. They had far more reason to kill than to help her.
Sula had done her part in the charade and written the late Lieutenant-Captain Koridun a commendation, and put her in for a medal for her work during the eruption. She’d also written to her brother, Lord Koridun, complimenting her actions and assuring him that she was leaving no stone unturned in her search for her missing officer. Unspoken was the truth that there were far too many stones to turn them all.
In the meantime, she had sent a message to a friend, Julian Bakshi. Julian was a leader of the hard core of fighters who had spearheaded Sula’s army during the rebellion, a murderous elite that had been drawn mainly from the ranks of the underworld. Julian had been one of those who had arranged for Trani Creel to meet her end, and no doubt he would be very interested in Lord Koridun’s attempts to avenge her.
In fact, Sula now supposed that the Koridun clan would suffer more tragedies in the coming year, Lord Koridun’s death chief among them.
Sula’s message would be hand-delivered by Spence, who was now en route to the capital. Sula had considered Macnamara for the job, but Macnamara had never approved of Sula’s making use of gangsters, and he hadn’t known Sula’s part in the Lady Governor’s death. Sula thought she really didn’t want any more of Macnamara’s disapproval and had sent Spence instead. Spence might or might not approve, but she wouldn’t sulk about it.
And now Sula was back on the ring, surrounded by her own personnel and her own guards. And about to serve her guest on her own porcelain, the tulip-and-pomegranate pattern she’d bought in Cappadocia. While she waited, she filled the teapot and poured herself a cup that she sweetened with cane sugar syrup. The black lychee tea had a pleasant vanilla undertone that soothed her. She had finished half the cup before Macnamara announced her guest.
Lord Tacorian was relatively young, a vigorous man still under forty Earth years, with wiry, wavy dark hair, large brown eyes, and a slightly off-center nose with a bump on the bridge. He wore a chocolate-brown suit of soft, lightweight wool over immaculate white ruffles. His walk, she thought, might best be described as a saunter.
A confident man, Sula thought. Despite the title that had given him his start, he and his company were largely self-made. When he spoke, it was with one of Terra’s more obscure accents.
“Lady Sula.”
“My lord. Will you take a seat?”
“Delighted. Thank you.”
“May I offer wine? Some other beverage?”
Tacorian smiled. “If that’s tea you’re drinking, I’ll have some.”
Macnamara, acting as a server, poured tea, then collected the wine glasses and carried them away. Sula offered cheese huffers and smiled. “I hope the Manado Company will survive the destruction of Manado itself.”
“We’re fairly decentralized, so yes. We were able to evacuate our personnel and their dependents to the ring before the explosion, and now most of them are back on Earth, employed in our other offices.”
“And your interstellar ships will be in a position to take advantage of all the food aid shipments coming to Earth.”
He offered an easy smile. “That’s true. It’s a shame to profit from such a tragedy, but we’re in a good position, with so many other companies’ ships destroyed in the war.”
Macnamara appeared with a trolley and the luncheon prepared by Sula’s Cree chef Turney: a salad, crepes stuffed with walnuts and the celebrated lamb jerky of Ereğli, and an artistic swirl of creamed krek-tuber. Complex odors wafted through the air. Macnamara refilled the teacups and bowed his way out.
Sula had told him not to interrupt the meal unless she called for him. The conversation was bound to upset someone of Macnamara’s temperament, and Sula preferred not to provoke any more sulks.
“I wanted to talk to you personally, Lord Tacorian,” Sula said. “About the contract to berth Manado in the Fleet dockyard. I spoke about it to Lord Peltrot, and I think we got off on the wrong foot somehow.”
Tacorian tented his thick eyebrows. “Lord Peltrot can be brusque.”
“He was brusque enough when I met him,” Sula said. “And then, of course, he hired an assassin to kill me.”
Tacorian halted a fork en route to his mouth, then lowered it. “You have evidence of this?” he asked.
“Let’s say only that evidence exists,” Sula said. This was a lie, but she thought it a convincing one, particularly to anyone burdened with a guilty conscience. “Now the question in my mind,” she continued, “is whether as operations officer, Lord Peltrot needed the permission of the president or the board of directors to hire an assassin, or whether he did it on his own.”
Tacorian dabbed his mouth with his napkin while he considered his answer. “I think you must already know the answer,” he said, “otherwise you’d be talking to me through the bars of a cell.”
“Lord Peltrot’s hiring a murderer seems to be only one of his many bad decisions,” Sula said. “He’s a Daimong, and Daimongs can’t change their expression—and as a result they don’t pay a lot of attention to the fine details of the expression of others. It turns out he couldn’t tell one blond Terran female from another—he gave his bribe to the wrong person, and then he tried to kill me for not following through.”
Tacorian’s brows formed a crease between them. “He bribed the . . . the celebrated impersonator?”
Anna Spendlove’s activities had become public when Lady Commissioner Bjorge had begun investigations of the companies that had bribed her. The material was sensational and would have created a media firestorm if the eruption of Karangetang hadn’t displaced it in the world’s attention.
“He gave her four percent of your company,” Sula said. “No cash changed hands, so nothing ended up in Spendlove’s phony bank account, and the police never found out about it. And since the stock is in my name, I suppose it’s actually mine.”
Tacorian seemed amused. “Some compensation for all you’ve been through, I suppose. Keep it with my compliments.”
Sula took a deliberate sip of tea. “I’m willing to sign the Manado agreement, but only under certain conditions.”
Tacorian spread his hands. “Lady Sula, you have the floor.”
“First,” Sula said, “Lord Peltrot has to go. He’s created a cu
lture of violence within the company, and sooner or later, his bad judgment may wreck everything. He could land you all in jail.”
Lord Tacorian didn’t seem deeply troubled by the idea.
“You can’t just sack him, of course,” Sula added. “You’ll need to leave him enough of an incentive not to wreck everything on his way out. He should probably retire with a pension and with stock options—but I’d be very disappointed if he ended up spectacularly rich.”
“I think what you ask is possible,” Tacorian said carefully.
“You could, of course, kill him. I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”
Tacorian chose to affect amusement. “I’m shocked at the suggestion.”
“The second thing I’d like,” Sula said, “is that I’d like my investment in your company doubled.”
Tacorian narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure a berth in the Fleet dockyard is worth all of that.”
“Consider what’s at stake.” Sula leaned back in her chair and smiled. “How many habitable planets have you found, Lord Tacorian?”
Because Sula was looking for them, she saw a series of small tremors cross Lord Tacorian’s face all in the space of less than a second, a reaction far more candid than the measured reply that followed.
“I can’t imagine what you’re thinking, Lady Sula.”
“Manado’s been on a series of mysterious missions to the Kuiper Belt,” Sula said. “Continuing a series of trips made by other craft since before the war, originally carried out by your partner Captain Patel. Your patron, Lord Mogna, has vastly increased his investment in your company and arranged for a warship badly needed in the Fleet to be diverted to your use—I don’t have the precise figures, but your company’s material wealth has increased by something like ten thousand percent.
“Manado’s taking shuttles out, and those shuttles have to fly somewhere. You’re bringing back samples for analysis. On the last trip, Manado took an ecologist and a mining engineer, which makes sense if you’ve found a habitable world that you intend to exploit.”
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