Nonetheless, the mask remained a necessity.
Gerswin frowned as he moved down the corridor. While he had not had trouble with Saverin, the former assassin had been quick, either lucky or forewarned.
The next target, on the eleventh level, was not renowned for her reflexes. Margritta DiRenzo plotted out assassinations through carefully arranged accidents.
A pudgy man, belly boiling out over a too-wide golden waist sash, stepped on the lift as Gerswin stepped off. A lecherous smile crossed the heavy man’s lips as he took in the privacy mask and cloak, and he inclined his head in mock salute as he passed Gerswin.
The thinner man nodded in return as he turned to the left, away from the target suite, toward the service access. The corridor was clear as he used his equipment to enter the small closet and stepped inside. Once there, he cut aside the access panels with a cutter, then used two quick movements to sever the power leads. The corridor outside the closet turned pitch black before the emergency lamps returned a dim glow.
Gerswin retraced his steps past the lift and toward the proper portal. He tapped twice as he cut his way into the service box and used the manual controls to open the portal.
“Maintenance!” he called.
“What is the difficulty?”
The woman spoke, although accompanied by a slender man. Both held stunners pointed toward the portal. A small portable light in the room outlined their forms in a faint glow, leaving their faces dim smudges.
Gerswin remained in the shadow of the portal.
“Lost all power on this level—“
Thrumm! Thrumm!
Both man and woman dropped to the bolts from Gerswin’s stunner without triggering their own.
Gerswin closed the portal behind him and turned over the unconscious pair one by one. The man fit the description of a lover of Margritta’s, a sometime Guild agent.
He looked around the room for something to complete the job in the proper format. The scowl beneath the mask turned to a grim smile as he saw the ancient projectile gun on the bedside table.
Three shots later, the job was complete.
It would be reported, at least initially, as a murder-suicide, as an accident/tragedy.
The Guild would know better, but they were supposed to.
Gerswin closed the portal behind him as he left. No one along the corridor had even peered out. He suspected that those occupants who were in their suites intended to stay behind locked portals, at least until power was restored.
He took the stairs to the twelfth level, where the lights were on, unaffected by his actions below since the Tower was designed with power controls set on two level increments. Still swirling his cloak about him, he sauntered down to the technical access closet, where he casually cut his way in, then through three plate covers, and burned through the main conduits for both levels twelve and fourteen. There was no level thirteen.
Although it was theoretically possible to disable all power shunts for the Tower at one point, that one point was a junction center that would have required a full-sized laser and would have alerted not only the Tower security forces, but system security types as well. By disabling only the levels he needed out of the way, Gerswin avoided such alerts, and delayed even the entry of Tower security forces.
Gerswin did not intend to disable more than the two centers he had already put out.
The first suite he wanted was halfway down the hallway on the left, but Gerswin did not have to worry about opening the portal. It was wedged open.
He frowned. That meant quick action—extremely quick action—and that both Council members were probably in the Sendaris suite at the far end of the corridor.
He took the chance of darting into the empty suite and picked up a tumbler, half-filled with something, not that he intended to drink any of it. Then he ambled along the corridor, letting the glass slosh in his hand.
A light flashed from the corner suite of the Tower where he was headed, sweeping the corridor ahead of Gerswin.
So they had a guard.
The direct approach was still the best.
“Hallooo, there. You got power?”
“Who’s there?”
“Just old Modred. Looking for Welson’s suite, you know, on the corner.” Gerswin lisped the words, and let his gait appear unsteady.
In his left hand were sling leathers, looking like a set of ribbons dangling from unsteady fingers. The tumbler sloshed in his right.
The light centered in on him, and he strained for the sound of a stunner whispering from a holster as he put his left arm up across his face, as if to block the glare.
“Easy . . . just looking for Welson.”
“Hold it right there.”
The voice was that of a bored professional, expecting no trouble from an obviously drunken partier, but ready to drop him at the slightest excuse.
Gerswin wobbled to a halt, several steps taken toward the light, as if in an attempt to catch his balance and stop.
“You’re not Welson,” he accused the guard behind the light.
“Wrong suite, buddy. Better check downlift.”
Gerswin could see that there were two of them, both in dark brown uniforms, the second holding not a stunner but a powergun filled with explosive pellets, although it was not aimed directly at him.
“Sorry, sorry . . .” Gerswin made his voice whine with apologies as he turned and took one step, then another, back toward the direction from which he had come.
The light wavered as the guard flicked it to one side, then the other. While the aim was to see if Gerswin had been trying to misdirect them, to see if he had any accomplices, it was the wrong aim.
Gerswin dropped and turned.
Whhhrrr! Whhhrrr!
Crack! Crack!
Brrrrp-Crump!
Crack!
Gerswin came out of his dive with knives ready, ignoring the shrapnel cuts from the single burst of the powergun.
They were not necessary, and he resheathed them as he moved past the bodies.
The next step was anticlimactic.
Gerswin triggered the door overrides and tossed two circular objects through the portals, reversing the polarity and closing them before they had barely admitted the two grenades.
One was gas, the other antipersonnel.
Crump!
Crump!
The twin explosions reverberated satisfactorily, though muffled by the closed portal.
Gerswin jammed the filters into his nostrils, but forced himself to wait two full minutes before opening the door, surveying the corridor the entire time.
Then he used the regular controls to open the portal, standing well aside.
From the entrance he could see three bodies, but he waited, listening, as the gas filtered past him into the corridor.
Finally he moved into the suite, but his speed was unnecessary. There were four figures sprawled across the furniture, and all were dead—quite dead. Three he recognized as Council members, including Sendaris himself.
He left more quickly than he had entered, spurred, as he headed down the corridor to the emergency exit stairs, by the sound of a portal being forced open by someone who had obviously not read the emergency instructions. He slipped through the manual doors, designed for power and other failures, and began the descent.
He checked the time. Less than forty standard minutes since he had begun, but too long. Much longer than he had hoped. The time, combined with the obvious awareness of the Council that someone was after them, made up his mind, and he continued downward and away from the last target on the fourteenth level.
He who runs away lives to fight another day, reflected Gerswin as he reversed his cloak to the flip side, with the forest green shimmering outward. At the landing between the third and fourth levels, he buried his face under his arm. When he looked up and continued downward, he wore a green face shield matching the cloak.
Above him, he could hear footsteps, voices, then a scream as other Tower guests
began to abandon their suites for the emergency exits. The lifts would still be operating, but those on the affected levels were not apparently stopping to try them.
A Tower employee, apparently alerted by a monitoring system, stepped through the first floor entrance as Gerswin came down the last section of stairs.
“I beg your parden, ser, but these are for emergency use—“
“No power on my level! Istvenn take it! Last time I stay here! And you say that’s not an emergency? Just listen to all the others!”
Gerswin brushed past the man.
“No power?” stammered the young man.
“That’s right. Listen. Just listen. Think I’d take stairs for joy?”
Gerswin finished stepping around the man and around the security officer behind him and into the main lobby, strutting across it with every gram of outrage he could counterfeit. He reached the electrocab concourse without incident, and stepped inside the second one.
“Inverr House!” he snapped, loud enough for the Tower employee holding the door to step back, and for the surprised Tower patrons whom he had stepped in front of to back off.
His effrontery paid off. The shrieking and clanging of alarms began only as the electrocougar dropped away from the Tower concourse.
He changed the destination, but not the color of the privacy mask.
XLVIII
IN THE END, a decision either begins or concludes with two people. Either two men, two women, or a man and a woman.
In this case, the meeting happened to be between a man and a woman, but it could have been between two men. The head of the Guild could have been either a man or a woman, since throughout its history the senior assassins had picked both men and women as their chief. The modus operandi had varied little under either sex.
The man wore black, as he always did on such occasions, including a black face shield. The woman regarded his choice of apparel as an affront of sorts, particularly in view of his disregard for her profession.
Was the meeting in person?
Not for this pair.
Each sat before a screen, neither’s true countenance known to the other.
The man was who he said he was, although he called himself Merhlin, and his true name remained hidden.
The woman was of the occupation she professed, but not exactly the person she said she was. That deception the man suspected, but found immaterial, an attitude neither she nor the woman whose place she took would have appreciated had either known.
“You are the one calling himself Merhlin? The one with some slight ongoing interest in the Guild?”
“That is one way to put it, Honored Lady.”
“Assassin will do as well as any false honorific, Merhlin.”
“Very well, Assassin.”
“You wished the conversation, Merhlin, and paid for the privilege.”
“I did. Thought it only fair to give you advance notice of my intentions.”
“That you have already done. This was scarcely necessary, though we appreciate the additional income.”
“Should have been more clear. Wished to deliver a specific message.”
“Then do so.”
“In a few moments, I will. First, a few observations.” He held up a gloved hand to forestall any objections. “Observations more than relevant to the message.”
“Then state them.” The lady’s tone had gone from bored to sharp.
“First, the Guild prides itself on professionalism. Second, the Guild will not undertake any assassination for a fee, whether or not the victim is a total innocent or not. Third, the Guild has gone from being a tool that occasionally protected the oppressed to a tool for protecting the Imperial establishment in addition to and outside the law of the Empire.”
He paused.
“The Guild does not concern itself with popular opinion.
“It should. Because it does not, and has not, and will not acknowledge either restraint or morality, it is doomed. Should those who survive, and there may be a few, continue the tradition of serving the highest bidder and slaughtering men, women, and children whose sole fault is that their existence stands in the way of the powerful and the unscrupulous, the Guild will not survive.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, Assassin. That you should already know. I am Merhlin. Call me Merhlin of Avalon, and tremble when you call upon my name. You have been warned, and your days are numbered.”
The screen blanked.
The chief assassin who was not the head assassin stared at the screen. Then she tapped a code.
“Did you get that?”
“Outspace transmission. Either has his own ship or went to trouble of routing indirect through the geosynch station. No way to trace him. No way even to figure out who he is.”
“We know that. He’s the one who’s been picking off top assassins, using their own weapons.”
“Is he?”
“Why else would he go to the trouble, and the expense? This has been going on for more than five years, if I recall right.”
“What about his threat? Why did he even bother?”
“That’s the troubling part. That implies an even bigger effort against the Guild.”
“What else can he do? We’re recruiting as fast as he strikes.”
“Are our recruits learning as fast as those they replace?”
“Now . . . you sound like her.” The man paused. “But what really can he do?”
“I don’t know. The annual conference is coming up. That strikes me as more than coincidence.”
“So . . . ? Maybe he wanted the word spread.”
“That means he knows it’s taking place.”
“What could he do? Destroy the entire quarter?”
XLIX
“RECOMPUTE WITHOUT SUBSET two.”
The small control room was silent except for the breathing of the man at the control couch and the muted hiss of the ship’s ventilation system.
“Probability approaches unity. The accuracy of the data cannot be verified.”
“Stet. Recompute with subset two and without subset three.”
The man gazed at the exterior screens while he waited, studying the view of Iredesium in the distance. The moon, less than a thousand kays in diameter, housed some of the largest resort and pleasure centers outside of the home Imperial systems, each a domed oasis on airless stone, built at enormous costs for the wealthy and those who played at being wealthy. Of either, there seemed to be no shortage.
The view he watched showed the moon clearly, half white, half dark.
“Probability in excess of point nine. Exact figures cannot be determined within standard parameters of error without the information contained in subset three.”
The pilot shook his head. No matter how the information was juggled, the answer came out the same.
How good was the information?
Some of it had come from Infonet. Despite the fact that he had founded Infonet and trusted the management, Infonet Class A information had a proven accuracy pattern of greater than ninety-five per-cent. Given the volume of the corroborating information, and the independent analyses from the foundation, which confirmed the conclusion, the chance for the final recommendation to be wrong was infinitesimal.
That the AI supported the conclusion with whole sets missing was another supporting, though certainly not conclusive, test.
Still . . . he didn’t like it. When everything agreed, there was a chance that everything was wrong.
Or was it that he didn’t want to pay the price to finish off what he had started? Or that he hated to solve problems impersonally?
He looked up at the screen, touching the distance control and letting the view enlarge as Iredesium seemed to swim closer in the large screen before him.
He checked the time again, for perhaps the tenth time in the last standard hour.
Less than a standard hour before the meeting below came to order, and that meant less than two stans before it was over, on
e way or another. Time to act, or to fail to act.
“The same old question, isn’t it?”
“Inquiry imprecise. Please reformulate.”
He ignored the AI’s precise statement as he pondered the implications stretching out before him. Certainly his opponents had shown no mercy, nor would they even understand his mercy should he grant it. No . . . business as usual, and Istvenn protect the innocent. He sighed, and stood.
“Passive detection. Report if any targets within screen range.”
“Understood. Will report standard targets.”
Though there was no carpet on the deck of the small ship, his steps did not click or echo as he made his way to the locker that held the space armor.
He said nothing as he donned it, nor did the AI break the silence. Finally he stepped through the small inner lock, leaving it open as he began his checks.
“Comm check.”
“Circuits clear.”
After the inner lock sealed, he touched the plate that would open the exterior lock, and waited. Hand over hand, he exited, clipping his safety line to the recessed anchor beside the lock plate. He moved with a minimum of excess motion to the exterior lock to the aft hold.
From a distance, any distance, an observer using optical methods would have seen nothing, for the full-fade black of the hull and matching finish of his armor created an effect of invisibility.
Once the lock opened, he maneuvered the long shape through the narrow aperture. Next came the checks of the drive ring unit he had added below the missile’s normal drives.
Slowly, he edged the massive but slender shape around the hull until it pointed at the midpoint of the terminator line of the moon that the ship, the man, and the missile all orbited.
The man took a long breath, then another.
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