The Crown Jewels

by Walter Jon Williams

  Kuusinen told his flier to circle and kept Amalia Jensen under observation. Presently two Gustafsons appeared over the horizon, Jensen floated into one of them, and darksuit screens appeared over each. Kuusinen swore. He tried to keep them on his detectors as they rose into the sky and sped off on two separate paths, but the disguise technology on each was too good, and they seemed to have special terrain-avoidance computers that kept them closer to the ground than Kuusinen dared fly.

  Police and firelighters would soon be coming. It was time for Kuusinen to leave.

  He decided to take up his surveillance again in the morning.

  *

  General Gerald snored gently in his battle armor, dreaming of glory. Maijstral had not come, would not be coming, but in his dreams the General fought a greater foe, the vast might of the Khosali Empire, the armada he had trained all his life to fight, now come at last.

  *

  “Next thing I knew,” Gregor said, “Pietro was carrying me out.”

  There was an ever-darkening lump on his temple, which Roman now approached with a semilife patch. Gregor flinched from Roman’s touch, took the patch himself, pulled his long hair out of the way, and gingerly applied the creature to his head. Happily released from suspended animation, the patch began to attach taproots to his skin and exchange healing drugs for nutrients.

  Gregor could not recall being knocked out. The last thing he remembered was floating in the room next to Amalia’s, admiring the Basil vase.

  The others were in a much more ebullient mood. They hadn’t ceased talking, laughing at their exploits, and exchanging stories since the fliers had parked at Maijstral’s house.

  Maijstral raised a glass of champagne. “Mr. Quijano,” he said, “you have been a glorious asset to our cause. You disposed of two enemies, including the ferocious Romper, and rescued Gregor from the hostiles. I salute you, sir.”

  Pietro blushed and looked at his feet. “Wasn’t much,” he said.

  “Quite the contrary,” said Amalia. “Beating that Romper creature was more than I could accomplish, and I’ve been studying pom boxing for years.” Pietro’s blush deepened. Amalia was still hovering in midair until such time as Roman could locate a tool capable of getting the manacles off her ankles,

  Roman refilled everyone’s glass, then bowed and went in search of the appropriate cutter. Now that the rescue was over he had reverted to the role of impassive servant, changing from the one-piece darksuit to more formal apparel. Maijstral had changed clothing as well, into a lace-edged shirt and dark, embroidered housejacket— meaning one he didn’t have to be laced into— which was tailored not to show the pistol he still wore in a hidden pocket.

  “By the way,” Maijstral said, “I believe our hero is still wearing our screens and weapons.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Pietro handed Maijstral a pistol, which vanished into another hidden pocket, and peeled himself out of the darksuit, which Maijstral dropped on a table. Gregor gave an unusually (for him) mellow smile as his healing patch fed him soothing chemicals.

  “Do you think any of them were hurt?” Amalia asked. “Aside from Romper, I mean.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Maijstral said. “Were there any you particularly wanted injured?”

  Amalia gnawed a lower lip. “No. Romper was the only one who went out of his way to be unpleasant. The rest were only doing their jobs. But you didn’t see a small Khosalikh in any of the fighting?”

  The others looked at each other. “I don’t believe so,” Maijstral said. “The only other Khosalikh I saw was the Baron.”

  To Maijstral’s surprise, Amalia seemed relieved. Maijstral decided not to offer comment.

  Roman returned with the cutter and a microvision hood, which would enable him to perform the delicate task of removing the skin-thin manacles from Amalia’s ankles. “Please come over to the sofa, miss,” Roman said, “and put your feet up on the table.” The others watched with bated breath, sipping champagne, as Roman pulled the hood over his head and carefully sliced the manacles away from her ankles and wrists.

  Amalia stretched her legs. “That’s much better. And not a scratch. Thank you, Roman.”

  “I’ll bring another bottle,” Roman said, and took his tools and the manacles away.

  “Say,” said Pietro, “why don’t we show Miss Jensen the reliquary?” He reached into the rotating Bartlett Head. The hand groped, encountering nothing.

  Maijstral sighed. It was unfortunate that a celebration as nice as this one was going to end so soon. Good thing, he thought, he’d just disarmed Pietro. He seemed pleasant enough, but with these impetuous young men of action one never really knew.

  “Oh,” Maijstral said as if he’d just remembered, “I moved the Imperial Artifact to another location. Just in case our enemies followed us back, or managed to capture one of us and gain the location of this place.”

  Pietro looked at him blankly. “When?”

  “When we were flying toward the Countess’s. You were in the other flier. I made just a short detour.”

  Pietro frowned. “Should we go fetch it? Then we can conclude the purchase.”

  Amalia Jensen put a hand on Pietro’s arm. “Maijstral and I made other arrangements, Pietro,” she said.

  Pietro was bewildered. “When? You’ve been—”

  “This reminds me . . . ,” she said, standing and putting down her champagne. There was a growing coldness in her voice as she recalled facts which, in her joy at release, had been temporarily obscured. “We should leave, Pietro. We have many arrangements to make.”

  “We do? About what?”

  Maijstral straightened his shoulders and put down his own glass. “Roman will take you where you wish to go,” he said. High Custom smoothness had entered his voice.

  “I thought the party was just starting,” Pietro protested.

  Roman entered with another bottle and perceived the change in atmosphere. He looked at Maijstral. “Sir?” he said.

  “Please take our guests home.”

  Roman bowed. “Certainly, sir. Would you like a cloak, madam?”

  “No. Thank you, Roman. I think we should just leave.”

  “As you wish, madam.”

  Towing Pietro by the arm, Amalia Jensen left through a door that Roman held for her. Maijstral picked up his glass again and sipped. The champagne tasted a little flat.

  Gregor looked up at him in anesthetized joy. “Short party, boss,” he said.

  “Best we pack,” Maijstral said. “We’ll have to leave before Miss Jensen brings reinforcements.”

  “Say again, boss?”

  “It is possible, Gregor, our friends may come back with guns and kill us,” Maijstral explained,

  Gregor absorbed this with a certain glassy-eyed effort. “Short party,” he said again.

  Maijstral decided that the situation was best summed up by recourse to Gregor’s idiom. He put down his glass. “Only too, Gregor.”

  *

  It was still four hours before sunrise. The night wind was up, scudding leaves along the yellowgrass borders of Amalia Jensen’s lawn. She and Pietro watched from the roof as Roman’s Gustafson soared out of sight. Amalia was poorer by sixty novae; her rescue having put her in debt for the next twelve years. Pietro turned to her in bafflement. “What’s the problem. Miss Jensen?” he said.

  She idly kicked at a piece of the dismembered Howard. It scuttered across the roof. “Come downstairs with me. I want to start cleaning up the mess, and I can explain while I do it.”

  Cleaning house is good therapy for anger, and though Amalia Jensen wasn’t terribly good at it— Howard and his ilk normally handled this sort of thing— physical labor worked wonders for Amalia’s mood as she explained how Maijstral had added conditions to her release. Pietro, who wasn’t working as hard, found his anger growing as hers declined.

  “Damn the man! If I’d known, I would have whacked him!”

  “The point is, Pietro, I had no idea you were a member o
f the party,” she said. “If I’d known you were present, I would have been able to refuse him, and then he couldn’t just call off everything with you in his company— you would have known something was up.”

  “If he’d let me live,” Pietro said darkly.

  “I could have handled it, though, if I’d thought it through. Just now I realized that I should have pointed out that his honor had been insulted when I was kidnapped, and if he didn’t rescue me he’d have to start challenging people or else find another line of work.”

  “I’m tempted to challenge him.” Pietro pointed a finger at an imaginary Maijstral. “Bang. Send him off and take the artifact.”

  “If you challenged Maijstral you could be certain he wouldn’t bring the artifact with him,” Amalia said sensibly. “Besides, Pietro, you might lose.” She put her hand on his arm. “You’re going to be needed for other work, Pietro. We’re going to have to locate the artifact and steal it, or if not steal it, destroy it.”

  Pietro felt a glorious confidence blazing in his soul. He had done rather well tonight, now that he thought about it, and he found himself longing for further action. His hands fairly ached to close around Maijstral’s neck. He patted Amalia’s hand.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. We know where they’re staying.”

  “We won’t have guns,” Amalia pointed out. “They do.”

  Pietro gave a bold smile. “We’ll use strategy instead,” he said.

  “Good. Have you got one in mind?”

  Beat. “No.” Another beat. “Have you?”

  “It’s almost time for first breakfast. Let’s have something to eat and give it a think, shall we?”

  “Yes, Miss Jensen.”

  Her arm still in his, she steered Pietro toward the kitchen. “I think,” she said, “in view of your rescuing me, you might call me Amalia.”

  “My pleasure.” Pietro smiled. “Amalia.” The name came to his lips like a lyric in a song.

  *

  A physician, assisted by numerous robots, was resetting Khotvinn’s bones. The giant Khosalikh’s howls echoed through the halls of the smoke-damaged manse.

  Baron Sinn flicked fire-retardant foam from his sleeve. Ash rose in puffs from the velvet. Sinn’s nose twitched. He smelled more tike smoke than ever.

  The firefighters and police had just left, puzzled by a wholly unconvincing tale of housebreaking and violence by persons unknown, and Sinn was going to have to brace the Countess for a session with the estate agents on the morrow. Chang and Bix had been sent home before the authorities arrived— Sinn distrusted their ability to remember any story that he and the Countess might concoct in order to explain their presence.

  Another of Khotvinn’s yells reverberated through the corridors. Sinn knocked on the door of the lower drawing room and heard the Countess’s voice bid him enter.

  “My lady.”

  The Countess was dressed in black silk lounging pajamas and a cheerful brocade dressing gown, the effect of which was somewhat marred by the addition of a pistol belt. She’d told the police that she was awakened from a sound sleep by the sudden flurry of shots, and she’d had to dress the part. Despite her clothes and the hour, the Countess didn’t look at all sleepy; she sniffed the Baron’s ears, lit a cigaret, and resumed her pacing, her shoulders square, her back unmoving.

  “Tvi has still not reported in,” the Baron said. “1 hope she’s following Maijstral.”

  “You’re assuming she wasn’t working for Maijstral,” the Countess said.

  “I don’t see how she could have been corrupted. She doesn’t know a soul on this planet— she came here with me when the consulate discovered the existence of the Imperial Relic.”

  Countess Anastasia turned toward him, pivoting her entire torso like a Khosalikh, her spine unbent. “Maijstral got to her somehow, I’m sure. Or that Jensen woman did.”

  “She might be a prisoner.”

  “She might be gathering mushrooms in the forest, my dear Baron. Or visiting an all-night boutique for some new apparel. We’re going to have to face realities.”

  Sinn seated himself in a chair and watched the Countess pace. He was at low ebb, the situation had run clean out of his control, and he didn’t like it. “Realities? Which realities do you mean, my lady?”

  The Countess pivoted toward him again, her posture alternately more and less strained as she remained facing him while she paced back and forth. “Your Secret Dragoons have failed you. Baron,” she said. “Tvi’s missing, and Khotvinn’s out of action for at least the next few days. We’re going to have to mobilize my people for this, my lord.”

  Sinn shifted uncomfortably.

  “Are you certain, my lady? Carrying out appropriate covert action, with its necessity of discretion, is an art form. The fewer people who know . . .”

  The Countess stabbed the air with her cigaret. “We don’t have to tell them anything. Just have everyone on the lookout for Maijstral, and have some here at the house, people like Chang and Bix, who can handle the rough stuff if— when— it’s necessary.”

  Sinn rose from his chair. There was no choice anymore; the situation was dictating events. “No one must know the reason for this. Not your people, not mine.”

  The Countess took this rightly, as assent. She bowed toward him. “No one shall know. We shall invent a story.” She walked to the service plate and touched the ideograph for “kitchen.” “Will you join me, my lord?”

  “With pleasure. Countess. But give me leave to wash first. I fear I’m a bit smoky.”

  *

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Only too, boss.” Gregor raised his cash counter to his mouth and bit it for luck. The gold ideograph for “money” gleamed against an eyetooth. The semilife patch on his temple looked like a strawberry birthmark.

  Maijstral put his own cash counter in a pocket. He had just transferred to his henchmen their share of Amalia Jensen’s sixty novae. The household robot finished clearing the breakfast plates from the table.

  He had moved into a rented safe house in Peleng City after deciding that the city was where he was least likely to be looked for. The country house, in the meantime, had been programmed to look lively, keep window shades moving up and down, lights switching on and off.

  The new town place was about forty years old and had been built during the period of architectural adventurism that followed the success of the Rebellion, when all the old boundaries were down and human horizons seemed unlimited. The house looked rather like a blue matte flying saucer crashed at a forty-degree angle into the corn-colored sward of a small ridge. At night its rim coruscated to alternating strobe lights and colored beams of coherent light. Gravity stabilizers kept everyone comfortably vertical with regard to the floors, though looking out the window and seeing the horizon tilted on edge could be unsettling until one got used to it.

  The style seemed a bit quaint now, particularly the household fixtures, which were designed to look too much like what they actually were. Sinks and toilets featured gleaming pipes and spigots that wove in intricate, elaborate patterns above the taps. Service plates had metal studs, buttons, and flashing lights rather than simple ideographs. The household robots were designed to actually look mechanical— their arms and legs were driven by gears and hydraulic pistons and small electric motors, and they made rattling, clattering, and hissing noises when they were in action, as if they were somehow powered by steam. Their voices were obviously artificial and their cogitation was accompanied by blinking lights. Maijstral, who hated the very idea of cute robots, realized early on that if he stayed here very long he was going to have to take a heavy wrench to everything mechanical before the clattering and buzzing drove him mad.

  Maijstral stood up from the breakfast table, stretched, and yawned. “Later today,” he said, “we’ll contact Miss Jensen and the Countess.” He patted the pocket where his cash-piece rested. “A bidding war between them will serve us well, I think.”

  Gregor, Mai
jstral noticed, seemed not to be as cheered by the thought of money as was his usual wont. Maijstral wondered if the semilife patch had exhausted its resources of painkillers so quickly, then remembered Gregor’s professed concern for the Fate of the Constellation. He nodded toward Gregor.

  “Don’t despair,” he said. “I believe the result wilt be to your satisfaction.” Gregor seemed to take cheer immediately. The robot, still clearing dishes, rattled the silverware in a calculated, programmed way. It did this every few seconds.

  “Wake me by thirteen if I’m not up. And have second breakfast ready by then.”

  Roman rose from the table. “Sir. A word.”

  “Of course, Roman. Come with me.”

  The dishes rattled again. Maijstral clenched his teeth.

  He led Roman toward the saucer’s living quarters. He put his gun on his bedside table and tossed his jacket over a chair. He looked up and noticed that Roman had one ear cocked toward the door, as if concerned about being overheard.

  “Close the door if you like, Roman.”

  Roman’s ear flickered, but stayed trained toward the door. “No need, sir,” he said. His voice was low. Maijstral sat on the bed and began unlacing his cuffs. Roman moved toward him and automatically assumed the task. “I wonder if I may inquire,” Roman said, “what you plan as the ultimate fate of the Imperial Artifact?”

  Maijstral didn’t even look up. “Sell it, of course,” he said. “As soon as possible. It will only bring us trouble if we keep it.”

  Roman’s shoulder fur rose under his clothes, a few strands escaping his collar. Silently he put Maijstral’s cuffs in a drawer. “I think we may safely say,” he said, “that honor was satisfied by Miss Jensen’s rescue.”

  Maijstral tossed his shirt on top of his jacket and rotated his arm in its socket, wincing at a slight pain. He must have strained his shoulder at some point during the night’s adventure. He spoke offhandedly. “Truly. I thank you, both for the observation and for your participation on my behalf.”

  “It would be a shame,” Roman said, “to penalize the Imperial line in order to punish the rudeness of some of their adherents. But I suppose the Empire can command greater financial resources than Miss Jensen and her friends.”