He went by way of the equipment hold, just off the shop, where the racks swayed with armor, each squeezed in tightly to the next. He would have preferred to ship Bogie in his own trunk, but space here was a precious commodity and there had been no allowance for the extra weight and dimensions of the carrying trunk. Jack fought off a shiver. He felt as though he’d left the suit exposed and vulnerable to tampering, but the transparent cages showed no signs of entry since they’d been packed at the dock and loaded. He checked the lock, intuition pricking at the tiny hairs along the back of his neck, felt nothing, and turned away.
Wake up, damn you, wake up. Tell me who I am.
Perhaps it would never be as important again who he’d been, as who he was going to be. Or where. On Bythia, he might find the damning information he needed to shame Pepys into terraforming Claron. The Green Shirts had all but accused the emperor of the ignominious act. This time he wouldn’t be stopped. He looked forward to being melded with Bogie’s warrior spirit again, mowing down the enemy.
Like women, he thought. You can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. And thinking of that, he thought of Amber.
They woke Amber after reaching Bythia and settling into the new quarters set aside for the Walker prelates. She awoke in a bed chamber, too warm in the crèche blanket she was wrapped in, her dark honey-colored hair damp with sweat, as a cool, exotic smelling breeze wafted over her. She sat up, shedding the blanket.
There were no windows in this inner room, off a courtyard, and no walls, just graceful columns holding up the roof. Amber got up, felt a little wobbly, and leaned against one momentarily. The courtyard was tidy though covered with greenery and flowers planted in swirling patterns of color, which drew one naturally to the fountain in the center.
She knew she was on another world when she saw the rearing creature whose horned forehead formed the water spout. She’d never seen anything like it… saurian and ugly, yet graceful. Her head whirled. She tilted it back, and, looking up, saw the rolls of gauzy curtains that would be lowered for privacy in the evening. A flicker of gray-green across the curtain… she caught a glimpse of a darkened, winglike thing fluttering through the air, a pink tongue lashing out, and then a lizard scampering back to safety among the curtain’s folds, an insect wing still poking out from the corner of his mouth. Everything was so different from Malthen.
Bells tinkled. Turning, she saw another, heavier, curtain lifting to one side. The bells implanted in its hem jingled to herald the approach of another, and St. Colin’s smile met her gaze.
“Awake at last?”
“And hungry!”
“Hungry! Is that all you think about?”
Amber’s eyes lowered and she examined the floor contritely. “No.” But it was among the first. She’d learned hunger the hard way, in the gutters and back alleys of under-Malthen. She looked up. “When can I talk to Jack?”
“It’ll be another couple of days.”
“You mean we got here first?”
“Yes. A cold ship moves a little slower. We’ll be busy, don’t you worry… I have preliminary field surveys to set up, then reports to examine, plus I have to get these offices staffed.” Colin paused, “there’s a war going on here, but it’s a way from this city yet.” He took a deep breath, and Amber could tell his thoughts before he spoke them. “The air even smells different, doesn’t it?”
Amber nodded. She hugged her last swaddling blanket about herself, a little afraid at being so far from Jack.
“Better shower then. They use real water here, but the plumbing is a bit odd. You’ll figure it out for yourself. Oh, and there’re house lizards running about—”
“I know. I saw one.”
“Just so you know. They evidently keep the insect population down. We’ll have a vaccination schedule set up later this evening.” He turned to go and, framed by the softly tinkling curtain, stopped at her words.
“Colin… I want to thank you.”
His head turned to face her. “For what?”
“Believing I didn’t do it. For bringing me along, so I wouldn’t be too far from Jack.”
He smiled gently. “I don’t have to be thanked for believing something I know. I know you, Amber. Hard when you want to be, soft as honey when you don’t want to be. You weren’t the assassin that struck against me. And if you hadn’t been there, I’ve no doubt the neurological damage would have been massive. I thank you. As for Jack… I don’t think either of us wants him to get too far out of reach. There’s something about the man…” As she smiled, he ducked back and left, his words trailing along after him. “Shower and dress quickly. Follow your nose to the dining room!”
Amber showered warily. The feel of water raining upon her body brought back old memories of another world she’d shared with Jack, a world of much rain. She and Jack had nearly died there at Rolf’s hands. She thought now that she had been torn when she’d heard about Rolf’s death. Torn between despair and satisfaction. Despair because he was the only one who could have undone what had been done to her and satisfaction because there was no one she’d rather have seen dead, unless it was the ghostly Winton who haunted Jack’s past and future.
She toweled off. There was a sound in the outer room, a sound that was both unfamiliar and menacing. Amber darted through the door. She was not even aware of what she was doing until it had been done.
The tiny green lizard dropped from the curtain, limp and lifeless, its jaws open in agonized death, eyes popped from its skull and blood running in a river from the empty sockets. It fell at Amber’s feet.
She began to shake and recoiled from the carcass which had once been limber and graceful but was now twisted into rigid death. Amber forced herself to stand still. She eased a bare toe forward and nudged the carcass. Yes, it was dead. No doubt about it.
She wondered if it had been a house pet. Bending swiftly, she pinched it up by its tail and threw it out into the garden, unable to face questions about it if she left it in her room. With a corner of the discarded shroud from her cold sleep, she wiped up the blood which was not crimson but more of a pinkish orange. She returned to the bathroom, looking for the Disposall. There was nothing in the sink or pipes or drains remotely resembling one. “Oh, shit,” Amber said. Then she smiled grimly, tore off the bloody rag and threw it down the toilet. She flushed it, hoping that she wasn’t stopping up the primitive system for the whole household.
It wasn’t until she sat down on the low bed that she began to quiver all over. It wasn’t her fault she’d killed it—she’d heard the unfamiliar rustling form the curtains in the other room and she’d reacted before she even had a thought about it.
Amber raised her face from her hands. She looked up at the plastimirror across the room, small and oval, barely big enough to frame her head and shoulders. She scowled. “Right, bitch,” she told herself. “It scared you. But if it scared you so bad, why didn’t you just pick up a shoe and beat it to death? Why did you shoot it out of midair… with your brain?”
The enormity of the situation silenced her a moment. Then Amber got up and dressed swiftly, carelessly, stopping now and then to press the back of her hand to her mouth in horror.
The smallish man worked in the kitchen, washing unfamiliar vegetables and keeping an eye on the even more unfamiliar meat roasting on a spit. A series of well-angled mirrors on the roof were doing the roasting, beaming down a concentrated stream of light not unlike that of a laser. He’d been told Bythia was new, relatively uncivilized and unchallenged, but what he’d found here so far belied that. It was as though, having tried the more technical methods of doing something, the Bythians had retreated to the more natural. The roast being done, he shuttered the mirrors.
He chopped up a large orangish root and dropped it into a kettle of boiling water, wincing as the steam scalded his hand. He was not here to make judgments on the intelligence surveys of his employer. He was here for one purpose and one purpose only: a realistic assassination attempt on St. Colin
of the Blue Wheel. For what reasons, he had not asked. Nor did he intend to succeed beyond an attempt. The death of St. Colin would not put into motion the particular wheels of his own ideological plans. Therefore, a paycheck was just a paycheck.
And he was in the process of earning it when a willowy young lady stepped into the kitchen’s doorway.
He paused in midsprinkle, his hand filled with spices and herbs poised over a savory vegetable casserole in its individual dish. That she was beautiful, he noticed immediately, that she was human followed on its heels. He relaxed slightly though he was careful not to let her see the spice mixture he now had fisted in his hand. He recognized her as the secretary Colin had kept running for the past three days.
“What can I do for you, memsa?” he asked.
She smiled hesitantly. “Dinner smells good. Are you the cook?”
“One of them. The other is out tonight.” He felt uneasy. He had not wanted to be caught until the dish was presented to Colin. Otherwise, the implication, as Winton had explained it to him, would be lost. “I will be serving in a few minutes.”
“That’s all right. I came in to help. We’re working in the library and Colin said you wouldn’t know, and we didn’t want the food sitting around and getting cold. Is that for Colin?” And she reached for the poisoned casserole.
He froze.
She took a long inhalation, and then she stiffened, too. “What’s in this?” she asked casually, and he knew her tone of voice to be entirely too casual.
“Shit,” he said, as he reached for a carving knife.
Amber moved quickly, shifting across the room before he could take aim. He stumbled as he felt a blinding flash across his mind, through his thoughts, and wondered if he’d stumbled through the cooking beam. Then, realizing he’d shut it down and couldn’t have, and at almost the same instant that he’d not live to collect his last paycheck, he hit the floor.
She stood poised over him one last second before letting out a sharp cry of fear and agony.
She’d killed again.
Amber grasped the little cook by the ankles. She closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She couldn’t let Colin see this. And Jack’s ship was landing that night, he’d be here soon, just to check in. Amber’s hands snapped open as though sprung. She quickly went over the body for ID, money, jewelry, anything to identify him. All she could tell from his outward state was that he was not Bythian, and he was definitely dead.
She pulled a tiny scrap of microfiche from deep in the lint of a pocket. Without even taking it to the reader in the corner, where the cookbooks and household lists were stacked, she groaned. She knew what it was. An ID chip. Amber held it up to the skylight, afraid to take it to the reader which would read it, all right, and leave a record of what it had seen.
The infinitesimally small letters were barely perceptible. Amber frowned. She was not sure she’d seen what she thought she’d seen. She didn’t recognize the emblem. With a muffled noise of self-disgust, she threw the chip into a sack of leavings that passed for a Disposall. Then she grasped the ankles of the little cook.
She couldn’t leave him here. There was only one thing she could do with him. Wild beasts ranged the city gates at night, scavengers of the garbage dumped there. The garbage was already neatly sacked. All she had to do was arrange a small accident for this cook. Perhaps he’d fallen from the city walls when slopping the scavengers.
Or perhaps one of them had gotten bold enough and torn him down.
Amber shuddered at the idea. When she had enough momentum for the body to slide smoothly after her, she reached out with her right hand and snared the slop bag. She’d have to dispose of the poisoned casserole too. It wouldn’t do for the assassin to succeed posthumously. Colin wouldn’t notice her being gone for long minutes yet. The saint went into almost ecstatic meditations in the library over the field survey records. She had time, if she had the nerve.
And she had to have. She’d never survive another investigation. Never.
With another heave, Amber got the body over the kitchen sill and outside into the night.
She never noticed a man watching the Walker dormitories from across the grounds, his body shadowed in the corner.
Drefford smiled grimly to himself. He made a note on his keypad to contact Winton as soon as his watch was over. This was the break they’d been waiting for. Meantime, he aimed his pocket camcorder and filmed the entire sequence.
Chapter Eighteen
It was dark in the hold. Dark and cold. Bogie struggled with his growing awareness, trying to amuse himself by tracing the suit circuitry that was far more complete and intricate than his own circulatory and nervous system. He waited for Jack. Jack completed him. Jack gave him warmth and salt and water… life. Bogie worried a little then. He also wanted blood and other nutrients from Jack, but had kept himself from burrowing inward for it. He sensed he could harm Jack in that way. In a split second of amusement, he encountered another life. Bizzare and deadly. Growing rapidly. In a split second, Bogie found himself fighting for survival on a plane that was little more than microbiotic. He felt himself pulled down and rended. He fought absorption and death desperately and wondered where Jack was, and what would become of him if he lost.
Jeeze,” Sergeant Lassaday said, looking at the view screen. The three-sixty view of Bythia swooped about them as the ship came in on a decaying orbit, and the planet’s surface loomed closer and closer. They skimmed below the clouds, and the movement of the ship, buckling and vibrating against the atmosphere, shook them all.
Lassaday had been Jack’s D.I. for the emperor’s revival of the armored bodyguard. He was bald as an egg, tanned deep space brown, with heavy bags under skeptical black eyes. Built like a squat, granite mountainside, the sergeant stood with his feet slightly apart, braced against the transport’s movement. He peered avidly at the view screen, then swore again.
“What is it?” Jack asked.
“They’ve lied to us again, bucko. That’s tracking what.” He turned to one side and took a heavy drag off a drugstick, blue-gray smoke trickling out of his nostrils.
Jack looked back to the screen. Coming in at this speed, he couldn’t see much of the landscape. Brown and green and blue flashed by him, around and past him. “Tell me.”
The sergeant measured him with a look. “Th’ hills,” he said, “Bucko. Look at the hills. Even the high mountains.”
Jack frowned. “I don’t—”
“Rounded,” Lassaday said. “Not a sharp peak among them. Th’ wind and th’ rain’s been at ‘em too long. Snow and ice, too, likely. This is an old world, an old, old world… and I’ll give you my nuts if that warring civilization down there is much younger.”
Jack closed his eyes a moment. Then he opened them and straightened. “Form an opinion after we land, sergeant. It might be more accurate.” He left the man’s side, but a low, humorless laugh followed him.
“Yes, sar,” the sergeant said.
The scent of blue-gray smoke touched Jack mockingly as he left the viewing hold. He made his way to the equipment hold. It had become a nervous obsession for him to check it several times a waking period, sometimes more. He couldn’t tell himself why he did, except that it had become nearly impossible for him to function if he didn’t. Frowning, he entered the hold, unhappy at being at the mercy of his compulsion. He leaned over the lock.
A faint red light blinked, showing the integrity seal of the lock had been broken. Jack backed up a step and swore.
Someone had opened the lock.
He forced himself forward again and looked keenly through at the equipment. Nothing appeared damaged or tampered with. No suits were missing, although Jack would not have been surprised at that, considering the black market on battle armor. Nothing seemed amiss.
Perhaps it was that which bothered him the most. Sabotage, to be successful, had to be undiscoverable. If anything had been sabotaged, it was successful at this point and there was little he could do about i
t.
Thinking this, Jack turned away. If he were considering sabotage, then he had to consider that someone among them was the culprit. Who would he pick? Who could he suspect? No one, as yet. His fist balled, then opened. He would tell Kavin. The Purple should be aware of it even if nothing else could be done. When they rigged for the first time, he’d have his men look for damage.
He came up sharply in the corridor as he ran into another knight. The young man looked up, his white-blond hair cut short in front and long in the back, thick, spiked white-blond hair and eyes the deep water blue of a bottomless pool. This was the man who’d made the desperate, last-ditch attempt to stop him at the demonstration.
“Captain, sir,” he said and came to a stiff halt.
“At ease,” Storm murmured. The man’s name came to him. “Rawlins, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Commander Kavin,” and the younger one stumbled a little over Purple’s newly found name, “is looking for you.”
“Good. Where is he?”
“In the Officers’ Lounge, sir.”
Storm’s mouth twitched at that. The lounge was a closet someone had cleaned out, thrown a few chairs and a table in, and dubbed that. Its only advantage was its proximity to the liquor storage area and the galley. Cold beer made a short run to the lounge. The only way to get it quicker would be to sleep next to the storage kegs. He nodded. “Thank you, Rawlins. I’m on my way.”
There was a light that flickered deep in those endlessly blue eyes. “Sir!”
Storm brushed past him, then paused. “What is it?”
“I know it’s early yet. Purple—ah, Commander Kavin—told me you’d be picking your team when we landed and found our quarters but, ah, well, sir, I’d like to be your second lieutenant, sir.” The young man’s face fairly shone as he said what was on his mind.
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