“Our lawyers are already calling us,” said Terise, opening a new screen on the nearest monitor. “Interesting,” she said.
“What?” said father and son at the same moment.
“The owners of Vaclav 18 are off the planet and unreachable. In their absence, the security firm monitoring the building refuses to divulge any camera or sensor logs unless we can get a court order tomorrow, er, this morning.”
“I’ll make them eat their cameras,” said Lyton.
“Michol Kott arranged an automatic death-benefit package for all his bonded and free employees, to be triggered upon his demise. The bequests were administered by the firm of Rowe Vermilion Singh. RVS just paid the benefit.”
In spite of common sense, Bill felt like snickering. “No wonder half of Kott’s crew vanished into the night with no forwarding address,” he said. He knew he should run from the train wreck beginning in front of him, but someone needed to be an eyewitness.
“I owned Kott and all his people,” began Lyton.
“No, you owned Kott’s bond. Which he paid faithfully, every year. Apparently while being bankrolled by another master. But he’d established his residency here on Cedar, and Cedar laws allow a bondsman to have his own separate business and bequests,” said Terise. “He was very clever about it. Too clever. What’s this? In the course of discharging their duty toward Kott’s estate, RVS has noted one rented group-bond was exempt from the buyout clause. They list it as being owned by a subsidiary of Rio Sardis. The bond was recently valued in the amount of five hundred million credits.”
“Let me guess,” said Bill, settling into a seat. “The Diamond’s bond.”
“You actually put a value on him? Through our company?” Terise confronted Lyton. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I pay taxes on it,” Lyton defended. “It’s not under his name, just Ventana Design Group. To the League, it’s listed as a collective bond of high-value research scientists and engineers. Terraformers. Genetics specialists. Starship designers.”
“Really,” said Terise. “Starship designers from a farm world?”
“The whole population and collected capital of Ventana wasn’t worth thirty million credits,” said Bill. “They were farmers. The moon had a few inches of constructed topsoil with nothing very useful underneath. It cost us more to mine it than we got out of it. I thought it was a deliberate tax loss.”
“It was. To outside accounting, Ventana Design Group was the best asset of the planet.” Lyton glared at his son. “I had to revalue the bond three years ago because Moro was making serious money for Kott. And paying everything he earned toward his bond. I didn’t want Moro buying himself free in front of new judges asking questions.”
“Yes,” Terise shouted, “but now people outside Rio Sardis are wondering why an aging pimp rented a bunch of planetary engineers!”
“There is no outside link between Moro and Ventana Design,” said Lyton, catching her wrist. He stood over her with his other fist raised.
A short, narrow hypodermic needle had appeared in Terise’s free hand.
Bill calculated the distance to the door.
“What happens when someone realizes a half-a-billion bond price is for one man?” Terise asked.
“They won’t,” said Lyton.
Unnoticed by his parents, Bill grinned wickedly.
A new window popped up on the monitor, flashing urgently with a high-level governmental crest. Bill tapped it to reveal the text. “Leave off, you lovebirds. The premier wants to talk to Lyton.”
Twenty-Four
WHENEVER THE WINDS lifted from a street-level garden, Moro smelled rain and autumn leaves. Five hundred feet up, the float-cycle zipped along the aerial artery’s highest reaches, leaving behind the slower trains and cargo barges below. The dark buildings soared into a foggy pink glow another thousand feet above, hiding their upper stories. The vehicle’s extended windscreen kept the worst of the chill away as Moro huddled behind Val.
Val was gloveless and unmasked, upper body wrapped in his ruined coat and a white cellulose fabric robe from the auto-room. His hair kissed Moro’s exposed face whenever Moro pulled away to look at the passing city.
Moro’s own tied-back hair was hidden once more by jacket and cap. He wore Val’s orange Camalian mask and gloves, his larger fingers cramping from the tight fit. Val had secured Moro’s boots to the passenger stirrups with cords of twisted gray silk from his ruined coat. The same material, padded with shreds of a pillow, held Moro’s forearms together in front of Val’s chest.
Moro had nearly fought when he felt the cords tighten on his arms, but calmed himself without giving any outward sign of panic. Val didn’t need to know, and Moro’s emotional triggers meant nothing now. Nor did he need to know when new pains gathered in Moro’s gut, throat, and in his injected arm. After the burning, throbbing aches settled, a few minutes and many miles north, Moro discovered he could no longer close his hand. Val had been right to tie him. He pressed against Val’s warm back. Cedar-Saba swept by at almost two hundred miles an hour, its blaze of light scattered like crystal gems on shelves of black velvet.
HE’D BEEN SARDIS’S slave for four months, when Moro woke to the familiar texture of velvet on bare skin. A wide bed covered in black carbon-silk velvet. Crystal walls and roof arched overhead, atop another building in the center of another vast, brilliant city on another world. He never learned the planet’s name. Above the crystal, a black sky filled with gemmed lights: stars, satellites, aircraft crossing the sky, and ships lifting and descending from space.
No privacy, this open to the city and the sky.
No restraints.
Nothing imprisoned Moro but the locked door opening only for Sardis’s biocodes.
Sardis himself lounged, patient and nude, beside him on the soft black bed.
Dr. Volker had done something to Moro while he slept. The back of his neck hurt. He reached toward the ache, feeling the heavy bandage covering his skin. Shivers of familiar, despised pleasure trickled down Moro’s spine. More of those filthy drugs? Moro wondered if he could will himself to throw up on the velvet bed again.
“Not long now, Moro,” Sardis said, idly stroking his own erection.
Moro wanted to lock his unbound hands around Sardis’s neck. But between the intent and actual movement, Moro’s volition simply died. His hands fell to the velvet.
“Good,” Sardis whispered, picking up one of Moro’s limp hands and kissing the palm.
To Moro’s horror, he responded.
Sardis smiled, folding Moro’s hand around the kiss. “Terise’s new system is working now. I’ll never need to drug you or bind you again. You won’t be sick or bruised afterward. See? It begins.”
Neural conditioners newly woven into Moro’s nerves triggered a deep, sweet ache in his very core. Moro cried out, helpless against this new kind of rape.
Sardis praised him and kissed the tears away.
Moro’s own body betrayed him yet again, with a hunger only sated by Lyton’s whispering mouth and warm tongue, Lyton’s knowing hands and long cock burying itself in Moro’s already oiled and stretched sheath.
MORO BLINKED PARTIALLY awake, knowing it was nine years later, in Cedar-Saba, on a stolen cycle with a Camalian named Val. Moro had worn the gladiator persona for self-defense and sanity in Kott’s domain. The fights, injuries, hard-won victories, the public and private surrenders had happened to someone else. Someone already dead.
Sardis’s defiant, bewildered slave was dead too, on the promise he was beyond capture now.
Moro no longer felt sick or chilled, but warm and very relaxed. Sleepy. He could pretend this was a simple joyride, his arms clasped freely around Val’s waist. On their way back from one beautiful day and headed toward another. Beyond being handsome and clever, Val was important enough to think he could protect Moro.
Important people were rich and powerful. Important people commanded respect and took vengeance.
Moro examined the thoug
ht with distant interest. He’d worked out his furies in the arena. If he was beyond reach now, Sardis was certainly beyond Moro’s revenge. Someday the man would overstep, and someone else would destroy him.
Not me, Moro decided. This transient peace was too fragile to waste in dreaming of payback. He’d made a bargain with Val. Moro’s death for Val’s pleasure. And very nearly messed it up with his cruel misdirection of the boy’s silly fantasies. Val had shown him joy instead and hadn’t turned him away afterward. Moro allowed himself a wistful longing for Val’s offers. Love, protection, marriage, family. Such instant, foolish generosity! He’d said yes mostly to keep the light in Val’s eyes alive.
But a dying man could not let himself fall in love or grieve overmuch at the tiny pains his death must leave behind. Val was young, unscarred by the universe. He’d find someone more suited to his obvious station.
Before Moro had heard Val cry out on the roof of Vaclav 18, he’d already committed himself to his last step into the abyss.
A step delayed and now due.
As Sardis’s pet, sleep had been a risk because Moro never knew where or how he’d be awakened.
In Kott’s stable, sleep had meant being locked up for his own protection, in a cage to which only Kott had the biometric key.
This last, painless, gentle escape was another unearned miracle. Moro closed his eyes again and fell asleep.
Twenty-Five
“YOU’RE NOT AFRAID,” said Johani when Phillipe sagged limply against Hegen’s chest.
“Of what?” Hegen asked, easing the sleeping child to a more comfortable position for both of them.
“Cama’s Touch. My son could infect you.”
“From a little drool? There are worse things in this universe,” said Hegen, musing on Cedar-Saba’s efficient corruption. With enough money, nearly every problem went away. The big automatic taxi was dim, quiet, and luxurious enough to sport a thousand-credit shutoff option for its internal surveillance systems. Nothing recorded them or their destination. They’d be at the embassy in less than two hours. From there, he planned on jumping aboard the nearest ship going in the farthest possible direction from Lyton Sardis.
“He’s just a boy,” said Hegen. “I was a frontier doctor, Sera Richeson. I thought I’d seen all manner of sickness and injury, until I came to the older, long-settled planets, where folk pay to watch death and evil. If I’m to die from this, so be it. I’ve outlived my world and my family.”
“My sympathies,” she said softly. “I know how it feels. My husband, Nico, was an engineer on the cargo ship Austin Salazar.”
“Ah,” murmured Hegen, not wanting to wake the boy. “I remember the news, last year. Hull breach, was it? I’m sorry.”
“Other wives and husbands at least got bodies to bury or burn,” said Johani. “I have nothing but his last whisper, transmitted to me by Cama. I can’t pretend he’ll meet me again after I die. So I still catch myself listening for his voice.”
“I’ll smell a certain food we liked to cook,” said Hegen. “Or I’ll see a pretty dress and think, ‘She’d like that, Demetra would.’”
“Demetra. A good name. Your wife?”
“My wife? Sophia would never have worn a dress unless she lost a bet.” Hegen surprised himself by laughing a little. “Sophia was a terraformer. Slept upright in her coveralls half the time.” To his surprise, the old pain barely touched him now, and he felt it another betrayal of Ventana. “She died decades ago. An ice shelf broke under some equipment. No, Demetra was our daughter, over eight years dead now. She’s the one I can’t let go.”
“Ah,” said Johani, touching his shoulder briefly. They passed through a darker part of the city now, so he could not see her face.
Twenty-Six
THE PRIVATE BALCONY in the Premier’s Palace was screened on the front by dwarf maple trees flaming autumn red. Curtains of water cascaded over its glass side windows. Cunning sonic nullifiers isolated the enclosed space from audio surveillance.
As an aide shut the door behind them, two men walked to a glass table laid with steaming coffees and a tray of delicate pastries. Beside the tray, a single monitor screen displayed scenes of ancient Terran-Chinese paintings of mountains and more autumn forests.
“I appreciate your availability this early in the morning, Sero Sardis,” said the premier, still wearing his full evening garb from the earlier state dinner. “The hour and timing are uncivilized, especially in light of your revelations about the Dalgleish youth. May I offer my condolences and the resources of Cedar-Saba to speed your search?”
Sardis slumped his shoulders again, since it had worked well with the journalists. Up until Deljou Shannon. “Thank you, Premier Chu. I admit it. I’m shaken and angry. To come so close to finding someone I’d thought was dead, and to lose him again,” Lyton dropped his voice in genuine emotion. “It’s almost too much to bear. It took me years to track him this far. I’m trying to work with the police, but getting the various court orders has proved difficult.”
“Lyton,” said the old premier, “I have no time for your verbal games. Either find your young man quickly or abandon him forever.”
Sardis looked up at the uncharacteristic abruptness. “Premier Chu?”
“As you are one of my most generous campaign donors, I feel I owe you a warning.”
“I apologize for the mess my associate Michol Kott left behind earlier.”
“The casino incident? Not far from a normal Saturday night in Vaclav, from what I hear. You should complete your search for your bed toy by noon today, at the latest,” said the premier. “Gather your assets. Get off Cedar and out of the system as quickly as you may. You will find many among my cabinet doing the same, with as little publicity as possible. I will not be among them.”
Sardis stared at him. Chu and he were not friends. On occasion, they could be allies. “Why?”
“The Sonta are coming to Cedar with one of their half-tame elementals.”
Sardis laughed.
“I’m not joking.” The premier tapped his monitor. “This is a recording taken several hours ago, above Manchester.”
Sardis leaned over to watch as the exquisite paintings became a black star field. The reddish curve of a planet filled the lower screen. A grayish plume rose from one area, lifting into the upper atmosphere before trailing away across the dimly seen continent below.
“Manchester’s had malfunctions with some of their oldest reactors,” said the premier. “Nuclear waste dumps and industrial tailing ponds were cracked in a recent earthquake near a major population center. A reactor array caught fire. We’ve been trying to clean it up, but it’s slow and dangerous work. Their planetary governor just called me. To thank me for convincing the Sonta to come help. I didn’t dare tell him I hadn’t.”
As Sardis watched, several vast black ships appeared right above the planet. They held their huge orange-edged portal open around them, stretched to a rounded triangle. Through its center undulated a long black horizontal spindle, flexible and graceful as a tropical sea animal gliding over a reef. The creature was striped in dozens of luminous orange, longitudinal fins. Dwarfing the fifty-mile-long black ships, its shadow eclipsed half the planet. One of the orange-and-black fins extended down toward the trailing white plume.
“Ksala,” Sardis began, giving its Sonta name. “A star-eater.”
“One the Sonta call ‘Aksenna,’” said the premier, looking sharply at Sardis. “As near as we can figure out, it’s an energy life-form sharing some bizarre characteristics with black holes. But sentient, mobile, and very deft. Watch.”
The screen image shifted again, to a ground-based camera. Sardis felt a moment’s admiration for the camera wielder’s bravery, for the screen didn’t shake much as it focused on the gray toxic plume boiling up from the destroyed reactors. Greasy midafternoon sunlight was swallowed by a shadow spanning the sky. A deeper darkness pierced downward; a long black tendril extended from one of the rippling fins.
Thinner
and thinner, the black appendage narrowed itself to perhaps a hundred feet wide. Dots of flaring pink-orange lights shimmered in long lines up both sides, all the way up into the murky atmosphere. The dull-orange tip sank into the nest of burning reactors. The lights flared, painfully bright. When the tip pulled back, it left a quarter-mile-wide shallow crater of black glass. Then the appendage flexed and widened, its edges coruscating orange like flaring embers. It became a filmy black-and-orange sheet swirling along the ground like smoke. It crept closer to the camera. Separated around it, pouring smoothly as water.
Another holo, from a higher angle, showed an industrial landscape drowned in twenty feet of black, orange-sparkling fog, coalescing again into a single sheet as it rose once more into the air.
“It became one thin layer stretching over the whole planet,” said the premier. “It caused a lot of panic at first, but it harmed no living thing. It parted around air traffic. Even the firefighters nearest the reactors were simply lifted away and set down a mile or two off. In three hours, it had swept around the planet and was gone. Its Sonta minders sent a terse message in Terran Standard. They said the folk of Manchester were lucky to have a planet at all, given the way they’d treated theirs for a thousand years. And to please do something about restocking their oceans. This is what dawn looked like on Manchester, just now.”
Sardis stared at blue crystalline skies.
“Sonta,” he whispered, unable to contain the longing in his voice.
“They’re a hundred thousand years ahead of us in technology,” said the premier. “We’ve been lucky they stay out of our part of the galaxy. The news feeds are already digging up every old myth known about them. Manchester notwithstanding, there are a lot of nervous people in the League right now. I’m concerned that the Sonta have obviously become very fluent in Terran Standard. Who taught them? The Camalians? The next planet on the itinerary is a mined-out moon called RS14. Then the poison world of Kashmir.”
Moro's Price Page 13