The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  Dujuv shrugged. "I noticed a long time ago that things go a lot better when you make the plans and I just supply the muscle and motivation, tove."

  Piaro nodded. "Your mission—your call."

  "Boys are so passive," Myx said.

  Phrysaba giggled. "Let's give Jak a chance, though. Did you have anything in mind, or were you just asking because you were fresh out of ideas?"

  "Almost both," Jak said. He really wished that he could explain the djeste, and lay out the plan that he still intended to carry out, but he had a feeling that what would happen was that they would veto it, since it involved his being taken prisoner and held for months, not to mention personally delivering a blackmail message to an extremely dangerous criminal. But he had to try it— as far as he could see, getting back on the original plan was still the best hope for getting Sesh released.

  While he had been thinking, they had been looking at Jak, waiting for him to explain. They might begin to suspect that something was up, so he temporized. "I kind of have an idea but I don't seem to know whether it's a good one or not."

  Myxenna chuckled. "Well, then, you've found the right friends. Don't worry, if it's not a good idea, toktru, we'll make sure that you know it's not."

  Phrysaba leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. "It's not exactly like we're painfully shy or anything, masen?"

  Jak nodded and said, "Well, all right, here's what I was thinking. My Uncle Sib always say, that when you don't know how to get into a place, you should at least speck knocking on the front door. Now, as I see it, we know nothing about Psim Cofinalez's palace, where Sesh is being held. None of us is really an experienced fighter, so chances are that we aren't a match for the guards, not even you, Dujuv."

  "I'd like to find out, though."

  "Well, let's just say that I don't want to be there while you're finding out, because you might not find out what you're expecting to find out, masen? Anyway, so I think that any attempt to penetrate that palace, either by sneaking in or by breaking in, is apt to be a disaster."

  "And it wasn't a disaster that they tried to kill you by shooting down the launch?" Phrysaba asked.

  "Or that they were going to hold you in prison forever?" Myxenna added.

  "Well, first of all, we don't know that I was the target of the attack on the launch. There were some other pretty good targets, just among the survivors, and Nakasen knows how many others among the dead might have been the target. So let's set that aside for the moment, eh? Now, they could have just shot me out in the desert, after they took the others away, or they could have given me a good shaking and destroyed my message and then put me right on a launch back up to orbit. Or they could have even just flown me to Fermi and had me present the message. So it looks to me like, whatever's in the message I'm carrying, it's not as important as the fact that there is a message, or the fact that the message gets presented. I think those two facts are what actually change anything. Therefore, what I plan to do is just walk right up to the address I've been given, in view of as many petty officials as possible, and present the message.

  "I think once the message is formally, publicly presented, they don't have very many options. Once they're forced to admit that they've received it, they pretty much have to start negotiating publicly with Greenworld, don't they?"

  Myxenna nodded. "That sounds right. Why don't you give me some time to look that up? I might be able to find something about it in the rules of international diplomacy, or find some precedents in history, or something like that. But so far so good."

  "Well, then, there's a heet I'm supposed to contact and talk to, and what I'd say is, as soon as we're in Fermi, we all go get a place in a hotel; then I go to someplace that isn't the room, because if anything goes wrong—no arguing, masen?—I want you all out of it. If everything goes right, I go see the heet and present the message, and then we see where it goes from there."

  "Well, the djeste makes complete sense," Myxenna said, "assuming that having delivered the message will be enough to protect you, and that the message will get Sesh freed eventually. Which are two huge assumptions, but I don't know that I see any alternative to making them. So let's try it."

  Phrysaba nodded. "I agree, and I'll run it by Pabrino."

  Piaro sighed. "I probably consume too many intrigue-and-adventure stories, but somehow it doesn't seem tok-tru singing-on that this plan involves nothing but telling the truth and dealing directly."

  Dujuv nodded. "It's probably a good idea but it yellow-lines my creepometer for just that reason."

  Jak smiled. "Suppose I promise that as soon as there's the least reason to, I'll lie and cheat…"

  "Might help quite a bit," Dujuv said, and Piaro nodded agreement.

  An hour later, Pabrino had seen nothing wrong with the plan and absolutely no way that it might be made better, and Myx's research had turned up half a dozen rules and cases that seemed to indicate it might really be the best thing to do. With that settled, they all sat back in the comfortable chairs in the observation bubble, talking idly, sipping juice, enjoying the respite from danger and effort, while the central African landscape slid away behind them in the late afternoon sun, grassland alternating with scrub and brush, then yielding to farmland, and at last the farmland shading into tall, dark, cool forests.

  It was sunset by the time they were crossing the causeway that ran across the gigantic Lake Ralph Smith; somewhere on its bottom lay the bed of the much smaller Lake Victoria, but in one of the freaks of the Bombardment, this area had been hit heavily and the crater rings had overlapped in such a way as to provide a gigantic dam, just before the worldwide rise in rainfall had hit; by the time the Bombardment had ended, the vast new lake had been well established, and was now thought of as one of the things not to be missed on a tour of Africa. Fermi sat on its eastern shore, a great glowing city, with the sun behind them and the city lights just beginning to shine in the deep twilight shadows.

  "Bex Riveroma will see you now," the voice said, and Jak got up from the bench where he had been sitting by himself for over two hours, according to his new purse.

  Jak was trying to be nicer to this one, and so far it was at least giving him information in a nonsarcastic way. A door appeared in the white wall in front of him, and he walked through it.

  Bex Riveroma was an exceptionally tall man with very broad shoulders, and if there was any surplus fat on him, it must have been in his earlobes or the tips of his little fingers. He was completely hairless, lacking even eyebrows; his jaw was large and square, his eyes were a deep vivid green, and his full red lips stood out like a gash in his light tan skin.

  "Now," he said, "to begin with, I hope you'll be willing to repeat what you said to me over the communications link; I have been in touch with Sibroillo Jinnaka, so I'm somewhat better equipped to receive the message."

  "Sure," Jak said. " 'I am carrying information from Sibroillo Jinnaka, and I am authorized to exchange it for a service from you. The information concerns the location of all the extant, court-admissible evidence regarding the Fat Man, the Dagger and Daisy, the business about the burning armchair, the disappearance of Titan's Dancer, and KX-126, including all such evidence regarding your involvement. The public key has already been sent to you. The private key, along with the way to retrieve the encoded information, has been coded onto an antigen group in my bloodstream. Here are the specifications for the isolation and decoding of the antigen group, and I will cooperate when you draw a blood sample.'" Jak pulled the envelope from his pocket; Riveroma tucked it into his own pocket, zipping it closed as Jak continued. " 'We will proceed no further than that until you agree to—'"

  Riveroma whipped a full-force kick at Jak's head. Jak blocked and ducked, but Riveroma's boot heel scraped across his forehead as he was thrown backward. An instant later Riveroma drew Jak's foot with a neat inside sweep, so that Jak hit the floor hard, and then Riveroma was around him, kicking him hard in the face and the belly, the toe of the black boot snapping
into the bridge of Jak's nose, slamming his fist into Jak's belly, blows coming too fast for Jak even to know everywhere that he was hit.

  He covered up and tried to roll out, but he wasn't thinking clearly in the blur of pain. Riveroma grabbed his collar, then his wrist, and in a moment had him trussed up completely. He turned Jak over, and before Jak could speak, Riveroma held a ball gag in front of his face and said, "Now, will you open up for this or—"

  "What are you—?"

  Riveroma's fist plunged deep into Jak's solar plexus, and Jak gasped in pain and shock; the ball gag went deep into his mouth, and Riveroma touched the ends together and set them to autotighten, so that they clamped the ball deeper and deeper into Jak's sore, swelling mouth. When it was thoroughly painful, and Jak was wondering whether he would be able to breathe in another instant, or whether the increasing force of the tightening gag might dislocate his jaw, Riveroma touched it again, leaving it agonizing but not damaging.

  "You can tell Sibroillo from me," Riveroma said, very calmly and pleasantly, as if the two of them were just having a friendly discussion, "that although I may very well want to take whatever deal he is offering me, or I may be forced to bow to whatever threat he is making— whichever it should turn out to be—that I do not accept orders from him and in particular I resent the tone of that nasty little note, and you may remind him that I have told him about this before. His whole way of communicating is extremely rude and unprofessional and he shows no respect for the moral equivalence that is key to everyone's getting along. Do you think you can repeat that to him?"

  Jak nodded eagerly.

  "Good. Let me add, young man, that whether by choice or accident, you are working for one of the rudest, most obnoxious, and most egotistical bastards in the business, known to one and all as an arrogant ninny, and you really must try not to pick up any of his bad habits, because not everyone would make the allowances I am making for your youth and inexperience, and of course for your bad training.

  "As for your mission, an even slightly more experienced operative would have refused to deliver such a message, and rightly so. I hope you beat the hell out of Sibroillo for it when you get home—and you probably will be getting home, since at this point I see no reason to take more of it out on you than I already have. I'm assuming that you are a mere operative; if you meant anything to Sibroillo, if for example you were a blood relative, then I might be tempted to use you to send a further message."

  He spread his arms wide and brought his hands in with a resounding, excruciating clap on Jak's cheeks. "That was mostly to show you how free I feel with you. I suggest you avoid Sibroillo's tone entirely. Now, I'm going to go away for a while, and then a nice person will come in to take some of your blood, and then after that is all interpreted and decoded, I'll be back for further discussion." He tore the envelope open and pulled out the paper inside; when he glanced at it, he roared with laughter. "Oh, my. So you no doubt are a blood relative. How very like Sibroillo to think that I would be afraid to touch you because of that… he always had such an exaggerated notion of his reputation! No doubt he sent you for that very reason! Well, it's possible that I won't have any strong reason to do anything too dreadful to you, and I am in fact quite a reasonable man once you get to know me, which you should nevertheless be hoping you will not do. So I don't think there's anything more to worry about than you already had.

  "Anyway, the next person will come along to take your blood, and then I'll be back, and then depending on everything, perhaps I will take that gag off you and we'll have further conversation. Or perhaps not. Anyway, whether or not you ever talk to me—or talk—again, I'll be talking to you later."

  Riveroma left, still chuckling merrily; just before the door closed, Jak heard him mutter "Sibroillo, Sibroillo, Sibroillo," like a teacher thinking about a memorably dreadful pupil.

  Jak ran through everything he knew for such a situation; it wasn't much. There was no slack to work in his bonds—Riveroma was far too much of a pro for that. Unlike any villain in any intrigue novel, Riveroma had not left the keypad for the molecular lock attached to the bonds, so there was no hope of specking it, and anyway even if he had, the things had nine-digit combinations, so Jak would probably have had to work his way through some significant fraction of a billion possibilities before getting free. He'd be better off hoping to starve to the point where his wrists slipped free.

  At least his jaw was going numb.

  There was absolutely nothing in this slick-surfaced white room; after much squirming, he managed to spin all the way around in increments of ten degrees or so (at least he thought he had—he wasn't sure that he hadn't lost count of the number of corners he had passed) and thus confirm that he couldn't even perceive where the doors were. He thought he remembered, but if he thought about that too much, the memory would disappear in a fog of doubt.

  He could speck nothing else. When he was unsure or afraid, as long as he could remember, he'd always been able to rely upon a thing or two that Uncle Sib always said, but just now he really didn't want to remember anything about Uncle Sib.

  It had never occurred to Jak that his uncle might be anything other than the way he presented himself. The shock of discovering that the malphs thought of Sib with contempt, and that it was quite possible that Sib was not exactly the master of intrigue and adventure that he had presented himself to be, was in many ways far more severe than the shock of taking a bad wanging from a professional. Jak went from despair to disbelief to rage at Sib to rage at Riveroma over and over and over, stopping now and then along the way to berate himself, but it neither loosened his bonds nor helped him to accept it, so after a while he began working the mental review part of the Disciplines, seeing whether he might get relaxed enough to gain some slack.

  He had gained none by the time that a tall, older woman walked in, yanked his trousers down, and took a very unnecessarily large sample of blood from one of his buttocks; while doing this, several times she addressed him as "cutie" and accused him of getting excited. Jak knew that old tactic, at least—Uncle Sib had not given him a wholly erroneous impression of the world—and simply breathed deeper, concentrating more on relaxing. By the time the woman departed, with a final "Now be a good little bitch and maybe I'll take more blood later, the way you like it," he was merely mentally recording her voice, for later identification, if necessary.

  He lay there and kept concentrating. There was no real slack in his bonds, but at least he was beginning to sweat more; he concentrated on making his hands and wrists feel warm, and finally he had budged things about a millimeter—but was no closer to getting free—when Riveroma returned and sat down beside him.

  The huge man's voice was oddly gentle. "Well. Your uncle is offering a truly wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime deal, and I dearly wish I could take it, Jak, because it would make my life so much better in so many ways. But as I was forced to explain to him, at the very moment that I removed several of those dangling swords from above my head, I would be—to mix a metaphor savagely—putting two hounds at my heels, to wit all of Uranium and all of Triangle One. This is because anything I do to help your Princess Shyf escape, or to let her go, is going to be absolutely transparent to everyone, for a variety of reasons. It therefore follows that I simply can't take the offer, Jak, much as I would like to—and you have the word of one you can't trust at all that I am telling the absolute truth in that regard.

  "Now there is no good reason for me to murder you, or indeed to harm you any further, except that it's possible that some earlier part of our conversations might have been heard and might have put some suspicion in my direction, because sad though it is to say, in this very distrustful world, both Triangle One and the Duchy of Uranium tend to watch me the way a rabbit watches a snake in its cage. Personally I don't know why anyone pays good money for someone they're afraid of, but there you have it.

  "So I took the liberty of pumping a few good hard electromagnetic pulses through this room, and following up with a little h
ard gamma—oh, don't worry, you won't even lose any hair, they'll barely be able to detect it in your blood chemistry in a few weeks—and setting up a watch-and-scramble that I'm wearing at the moment, and for just now we can talk freely, you see? Or rather I can. You're still gagged.

  "Anyway, a couple of quite technically proficient fellows are now going to take you over to a guardhouse for a quite mild beating, which I hope you will understand is in the nature of a cover and not intended at all to cause you much distress—it won't be nearly as bad as what I already did to you. I've already given the orders, and I— oh, here they are."

  Riveroma stood, and Jak could see his shiny black boots on one side of his peripheral vision, and the boots of the guards on the other. "I was expecting Rab Bev-ersen," he said. 'That's the one I use for things like this. This can't be done by unskilled hands—there's a real precise level I want you to hit. Along with some real precise parts of young Jak Jinnaka here."

  "Beversen got called over to Station Four," one guard said. "Just a second before we came over. We could take the prisoner over there."

  "I'd appreciate that, if it's not too much trouble," Riveroma said. "And make sure Beversen has this"—he handed them a sheet of paper—"I already sent it, but everything is being screwed up today, you know, so let's just see if maybe we can get this right. Make sure that Beversen knows that under no circumstances is he to administer anything more than the level I tell him to."

  "I believe he already got the order, sir," the guard said, "but I'll make sure he gets this copy, and I'll have him call you if he has any questions, before he starts."

  "Good," Riveroma said. "Adieu, dear Jak, and I surely hope not to see you again—you must be feeling much the same about me, masen?" He left through a door that appeared suddenly in the wall; another door appeared, and the guards dragged him through it. Toktru, Jak wished he could faint.

  Chapter 11