"One o'clock, then. I expect an interesting conversation." And with that, King Kamehameha V signed off.
I took off my shoe, threw it at the telecom keyboard, and the unit disconnected. It was another three minutes before I felt comfortable standing up.
* * *
Frag, I was boned. No, I was so far past boned that it would take light twenty years to get from here to there. I was playing with the government of a sovereign state. A fragging government. What kind of resources could a fragging government bring to bear at the whim of its ruler? Heavy-duty electronic interception and tracking, for one. A fragging sniper for another. What the hell else? I didn't know, and I didn't want to know.
Idly, I stuck my little finger through the bullet hole in the window—nicking myself, incidentally, on the sharp material. Clean-edged, perfectly circular—a little larger than nine millimeter, I judged. The round had been so fast that it had basically drilled through the window composite, too quickly for the brittle material to even crack, let alone shatter. The bullet hole in the opposite wall was a touch bigger, and so deep that I couldn't reach the bottom with my finger. It was a weight-bearing wall—good fragging thing, otherwise the round would have cored its way through my room and several others, before coming to rest in a wall or a hot plate or someone's headbone. (But of course the sniper had probably known it was a reinforced weight-bearing wall.)
Okay, I got the point. I wasn't dead, which meant I probably wouldn't become so on my appearance at the Iolani Palace. After my meeting with Gordon Ho, of course, all bets would be off. If he figured I wasn't telling him all I knew or wasn't giving him the answers he wanted to his questions, there wasn't much stopping him from sending me downstairs into a small, dark room—palaces had dungeons or something, didn't they?—where large men would ask the questions again under less agreeable conditions. Fragging swell.
Maybe I should just pull the quick fade. Maybe Kat and the rest—ALOHA or not—would help me disappear into the shadows. Maybe—and this was a big maybe—I'd be able to stay one jump ahead of the factions already out looking for me. Oh yes, and add to the playlist the Yamatetsu payback team that Barnard would send after me when he learned I hadn't delivered his message to the Ali'i. I was pretty good at keeping a low profile, I knew that ... but over the long haul, "pretty good" wouldn't cut no ice. I figured my odds at surviving a week at about fifty-fifty. A month—call it seventy-five-twenty-five. A year? Maybe a one-in-ten chance. Long enough to look back on all this and laugh? I'd rather bet on the survival of a snowball in a plasma furnace, chummer.
Looked like I'd be visiting the Iolani Palace in about an hour, didn't it?
The telecom—the one supposedly locked out to incoming calls—chirruped again. I glared at it. When it stubbornly refused to disassociate into its component atoms, I sighed. Gordon Ho calling back with some additional instructions? Whatever. I sat down at the keyboard, pressed the keys to accept the call.
It wasn't Gordon Ho's face that appeared on the screen. No, if I had to describe a face that was diametrically opposite from King Kam's in all facets, it wouldn't be too far from the man I saw before me. Smooth skin so pale it looked almost translucent. Silver hair, long and flowing. Eyes the color of arctic ice in Global Geographic trideo shows—maybe blue, maybe green, maybe gray, depending on the light and your mood. Hollow cheeks, small nose, small mouth. Ageless, too. If you'd asked me to peg his age, I'd have put it anywhere between twenty and a hundred. Instinctively, I looked at his ears—no points, he wasn't an elf.
There was something ... well, disturbing is the closest I can come to it ... about his appearance. Austere, he was, aloof, distant ... almost inhumanly so. I didn't really want to think about what those eyes might have seen.
"Mr. Montgomery," he said. His voice was ... strange ... too, thin, reedy, almost piping, but also strong, in the way that a stiletto is both delicate and lethal.
"Sorry," I said, trying to keep my bravado up, "someone's already won the prize for guessing that one. Who the hell are you?"
"A friend." No smile, no expression at all, accompanied the declaration.
"Could have fooled me. Are you sure you don't have the wrong number? Wrong Montgomery, for that matter."
"I don't think so." Again no smile, although there was a tinge of something in his voice that could be detached amusement. "I have a message for you, Mr. Montgomery. A warning, in fact."
"I don't want any—"
His voice didn't rise in volume, but it cut me off as effectively as a gag. "A friendly warning, Mr. Montgomery. I'd advise you listen."
My bravado was wearing kind of thin at the moment, so I just shrugged.
"Through no fault of your own, you've become involved in matters much too weighty for you," the austere face told me. (No drek, Sherlock, I managed not to say.) "A longstanding conflict is coming to a head in Hawai'i. Forces are marshaling."
"ALOHA and the corps. No drek."
"Yes, those too," Mr. Parchment-Face paused. "Even when one fully understands the dynamics of a conflict, it's often difficult to keep from getting overwhelmed by it ... overwhelmed and crushed. When one is unaware of what the conflict is truly about, it's usually impossible."
"So tell me."
This time the amusement—cold, distant, but unmistakable—was clear in his voice. "I think not, not at this time. I merely suggest you take my words to heart. Terminate your involvement in matters beyond your control and comprehension. In more familiar terms . . . stay out of it, Mr. Montgomery. Right out."
"I would if I had the opportunity," I told him honestly.
"Then make the opportunity."
"Who the frag are you anyway?"
"As I said, a friend," the man repeated softly.
"And you're telling me you know what's going down?" He nodded. "Yeah, right," I snorted. "Prove it if you want me to pay any attention to you." It was only after the words were out of my mouth that I remembered the last "proof' anyone had provided me. Out of reflex, I glanced at the bullet hole in the window.
And so I missed the first instants of the change. By the time my eyes were back on the screen, the man's outlines were flowing, shifting—morphing. Nothing I saw on that screen was beyond the capabilities of a hot-shot kid with a Cray-Amiga submicro running FX Oven ... but, deep down, I knew what I was watching wasn't any kind of special effect. The man's skull expanded, elongated. Those icy eyes swelled, shifting apart, migrating toward the sides of the skull. His mouth opened, showing dagger teeth. Beyond the serried rows of teeth, something moved—a black tongue, forked like a snake's.
"Is this sufficient proof?" asked the dragon.
14
The big worm. The fragging bakeware.
That's who it had to be, didn't it? Ryumyo the fragging Great Dragon. Great fragging Christ on a crutch. Whatever happened to a low fragging profile?
My hands were shaking, making it harder to hot-wire the car I was boosting—a nice, nondescript Volkswagen Elektro, rusted out here and there. I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the back of my hand and tried not to drek myself.
A nice, relaxing sojourn in the islands. Just deliver a message, soak up a few rays, get wasted on mai-tais, then it's all over. That's how Barnard had pitched it to me.
Yeah, right. Ryumyo, the fragging dragon, had it chipped, didn't he? "You've become involved in matters much too weighty for you," that's what he'd told me. No drek. Corps and yaks and terrorists, oh my. And now kings and fragging dragons ... Oh yes, and we can't forget the insect spirits, can we? My dance card was already full, and more guests kept showing up at the cotillion. Frag it to hell and back. I must have been something real nasty in a past life—nun-rapist, maybe, mass murderer, or perhaps tax collector—to warrant this kind of drekky karma.
I finally managed to get the Elektro to admit that I did have the right keycode, and the little flywheel deep in the car's guts spun up to speed. I tried to burn rubber, but the mobile coffin just whined at me accusingly and pulled away from th
e curb at a slow walk. (According to some Volkswagen propaganda I'd scanned a while back, the Electro is supposed to have a top end of 75 klicks. Sure, chummer. The Volkswagen engineers must have dropped the fragging thing off a bridge to get that figure.) I pointed the Elektro east, and cruised through the noontime traffic.
Spirits ... I would purely loooove to take the nice dragon's friendly advice and just butt the hell out of all this. It hadn't been my choice to stick my nose into anyone's biz. Now, if I made one wrong step, my nose was probably the largest fragment of my anatomy anyone would find left in one piece. Maybe after I'd talked to King Kamehameha V. Yeah, right.
I was ten minutes early for my appointment—audience?—when I pulled into the public parking facility a block from the lolani Palace. I bid a less-than-fond farewell to the Elektro—Volkswagen's ergonomic gurus must have left it up to a band of munchkins to spec out the headroom—and took the elevator up to street level.
And that's where I stopped and listened for a minute or two to my pulse beating a wild tattoo in my ears. Logic fought with instinct. It was instinct that told me to use all the tradecraft I knew, to look for shadows and tails, to watch my hoop, to approach my target without being spotted. Logic told me that was a load of bollocks. I was going to be jandering into a fragging palace. Lot of good tradecraft was going to do me there. And anyway, I recalled, looking down at the nicks the window composite had left in my finger, Gordon Ho's sniper had given me convincing evidence that the Ali'i didn't want me dead yet. Still, it took a good two minutes for logic to suppress the whimperings of reflex. Finally. I strode across the road—almost getting greased by a courier on a pedal-bike, despite the fact that I had the light—and toward the lolani Palace.
The building itself sat in the middle of more than half a hectare of grassy turf, almost indecently green and vibrant. It didn't look big enough to be the capitol of a sovereign nation. Frag, you couldn't fit more than a hundred bureaucrats and datapushers into the place. But then I glanced across the road at the Haleaka-something, the big, ferrocrete Government House. I supposed it made sense; separate the day-today biz of the government from the symbolic, ritualistic drek. The wrought iron gate leading onto the grounds was open, flanked by four guards—all big boys, trolls or orks dressed in white uniforms that were almost blinding in the brilliant sun. (Stupid, I thought at first, but then I realized these guys were just symbolic. If you're going to stand at attention out in the beating tropical sun, white gear makes a lot more sense than dark camo. The real hard-men would be out of sight, somewhere in the shade, but able to respond to trouble in an instant.) I jandered on through. One of the trolls gave me my daily dose of stink-eye, and I saw his big, horny knuckles whiten on the forestock of his H&K assault rifle. Chummer, I just smiled. At the moment trolls with assault rifles were low on my priority list of things to drek myself over.
Up the driveway I jandered, up the low steps, in the front door. And into the blissful cool of a lobby/reception area. Scott had told me the Iolani Palace was about a hundred and fifty years old, and now I could really feel it. Not that the place looked rundown. Far from it, it was perfectly maintained. But the very feel of the air hinted at the history that had passed through its doors, up its stairways, across its dark wood floors.
There were four more white-clad ceremonial guards—trolls, again—one in each corner of the room. More stink-eye. In front of me was a huge reception desk made from the same dark wood as the floor. Behind it sat a young Polynesian woman, her attractiveness undiminished by the fact that she was an ork. No stink-eye here. She was watching me with a welcoming smile that, under other circumstances, might have had me running around in circles, dragging a wing and whimpering. I walked up to the desk. "My name's Dirk Montgomery," I told her.
"Yes?" Then she blinked and looked down at a 'puter flatscreen set into the desktop. "Oh, yes," she said brightly, "I'm sorry, Mr. Montgomery, you are expected, of course. If you'll just wait a moment ..." Her eyes rolled up in her head, and for the first time I noticed that a fiber-optic line connected her to the desktop system. In a couple of heartbeats her dark eyes were smiling up into mine again. "Mr. Ortega will be with you momentarily," she told me.
When she said, "momentarily," she meant it. I'd barely finished thanking her when a door in the wall behind her opened and a suit emerged.
Not "suit" as in "corp." No, "suit" as in Zoe or one of the other upper-tier designers. When Mr. Ortega came through the door, it was the suit I noticed first, and only as an afterthought the man who was wearing it. A pasty-faced little guy, pale skin, salt-and-pepper hair. He looked kind of dusty, like a librarian who hadn't been let out of the stacks for a couple of years. But the suit and the eyes—flinty-hard, rather like the Ali'i's, I thought suddenly—were enough to tell me this was a honcho with real juice.
Those eyes gave me the top-to-toe scan, sizing me up ... and narrowing as though he didn't particularly like the conclusions he'd reached. "Mr. Montgomery," he said politely, but with no human warmth. He extended a thin hand. "Your weapon, please."
Out the corner of my eye, I saw the white-suits stiffen as I reached—very slowly, with my left hand—under my shirt-tails and pulled out my Manhunter. I safed the weapon, going so far as to pop out the clip before I handed it over to Ortega. Distastefully, as though I'd offered him a dead fish, he took it and passed it in turn to the receptionist, who made it disappear into a drawer. "You will, of course, receive it back once your business is concluded," Ortega told me. Then he turned his back and strode toward the door, the lines of his narrow shoulders indicating he fully expected me to follow.
Follow I did, through the door—through a sophisticated suite of metal detectors and chemsniffers, I had no doubt—and into a kind of anteroom with three doors. Ortega turned around again, and again he gave me the top-to-bottom scan. "Yes, well," he said at last, "you must, of course, wear a jacket and tie for an audience with the Ali'i." I almost chuckled aloud—the last time I'd heard words to that effect I'd been trying to sleaze my way into a restaurant called La Maison d'Indochine back in Seattle—but suppressed my amusement. Aide de camp, maitre d'—I guess there wasn't that much difference, when you thought about it. I watched the laser-eyed little man, surprised that he didn't look even slightly Polynesian, as he opened a closet set into the richly paneled walls and pulled out some clothes. "A one-oh-five regular should fit." (This seemed to be my week for meeting people with a haberdasher's eye.) He handed over a double-breasted jacket—deep blue with a conservative emerald pinstripe—and a white-and-navy paisley tie. And then he waited.
The collar of my tropical shirt wasn't made for a tie, and if the jacket actually was a one-oh-five regular, I'd put on some weight. But I made do the best I could, and did a model's turn for Ortega. "Yes," he said dryly—I suppose a sense of humor wasn't de rigueur this season—and turned his back on me once more.
I followed him through another door and down a short hallway. We stopped at yet another door—some dark, dynamically grained wood this time—and paused. He turned back to me, gave me one last once-over—his frown telling me he didn't like what he saw any better this time—and started in on a protocol lecture. "The Ali'i will acknowledge you," he said. "Until that point you will stand with your eyes averted. You will not speak unless addressed, and then you will limit yourself to answers to the Ali'i's questions. You will not—"
Mr. Manners was cut off by a click as the door opened behind him. He shot me a scowl—didn't appreciate pedantus interruptus, apparently—but turned to whisper something to the white-suit who'd opened the door. After a quiet exchange Ortega stepped aside and gestured for me to go ahead. I did, but not before wishing I had a small-denomination coin handy to tip him (and really slot him off). I walked through the door .. .
. . . And into a throne room. I mean a real throne room, complete with throne, up on a low dais at the far end. Like a magnet the figure on the throne drew my gaze. A bronzeskinned warrior god—that was my first impression. Tall, muscular,
in the prime of his vibrant, vigorous life. He wore pretty much the same getup as the statue of Kamehameha the Great that Scott had shown me: loincloth, a cape of brilliant yellow feathers hung over his shoulders, and a big forward-curving headdress also covered with feathers. His chest was bare, well-muscled, and decorated here and there with tattoos of a geometrical design. If he'd held a spear or a war club in his big hands, it would have looked totally appropriate. In fact, however, what he held was a sophisticated pocket 'puter on which he was taking notes. He looked up as the door clicked shut behind me, and those flinty eyes seemed to pierce me to the core.
It was Gordon Ho—it had taken me this long, a couple of seconds, to recognize him in his glory. Gordon Ho, King Kamehameha V, Ali'i of the Kingdom of Hawai'i. When I'd seen him on the telecom screen, my mental impression had been of a young, up-and-coming corporate exec. The telecom hadn't conveyed the size of him—just shy of two meters tall, I guessed; not up to Kamehameha the Great's standard, but still one big boy—and it certainly hadn't done justice to his ... his aura. (I hate the word, but it's the only one that fits.) I could feel his personality, his strength of will, like radiant heat penetrating to my core. I'd never met a king before, and for the first time I realized there might be something more to this monarchy drek than a title and—maybe—congenital defects from inbreeding.
He glanced back to his computer, and the removal of his gaze seemed to free me from a spell. For the first time since I'd stepped through the door, I was able to look around at the rest of the room.
It wasn't big, this throne room, about the size of a major corporate boardroom. The floor was hardwood, the walls paneled in the same rich-grained wood as the door I'd passed through. On the wall behind the Ali'i was a large coat of arms or seal or something—circular, with words around its circumference. Ua mau ke ea a ka aina i ka pono, I managed to pick out . . . whatever the frag that was supposed to mean. In the center of the seal was some kind of emblem incorporating a hibiscuslike flower, a tree that looked like a banyan, and—I drek you not—a fragging goose. Framing it were drapes of rich maroon velvet.
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