Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  Brae reddened, obviously unnerved by the pair. "Well, yes. They will. But that's the whole point, don't you see?" He turned to direct his attention to the bearded man on his left. "They'll rise, but without leadership. They'll break themselves upon the Iconoclast ranks."

  The bearded man shrugged. He had spoken little on the trip so far. "Since when was war bad business for a maker of weapons?"

  Opposite him, a tall, languid man with a powdered face raised one hand in a dismissive gesture. "A short, hot war is worse for business than a long cold one," he opined.

  Brae nodded, jowls shaking. "Shantilli has it right," he said. "Once the Tenebrae are broken, Iconoclast orders from my manufactories will drop to a third of present levels. I can't afford that."

  "Not with lithium at Accord taxation rates," agreed Shantilli. He settled back into the arms of his two companions. "So, Het Brae, do you hope to stockpile before the Tenebrae rise?"

  "I do."

  "Curse the Tenebrae." The woman who had spoken was another mutant, slender and smooth faced, clad in a figure hugging leotard of fabric metal. "Their ridiculous crusade has brought us nothing but trouble."

  "It's unusual to hear a mutant speak in such a way," said Shantilli, sounding bored. He waved his hand again, loosely. "I'll admit my travels in the Accord have been limited, but most mutants I've met have been all too eager to side with the cultists."

  Beside him, the linked pair of twins opened their mouths as if to answer, but the smooth faced woman spoke too quickly. "That's because, Het Shantilli, most of my kind are whining fools. It's perfectly possible to live comfortably in peace with humans, as long as one makes the appropriate payments."

  The bearded man turned to her. "Your world can afford its tithe, then?"

  "We have that good fortune, yes."

  "Pity those that do not," said the twins. "However, we still have no proof that Durham Red was killed. There are only rumours."

  "Rumours have to come from somewhere," said Brae. "I say she has to be dead. Why else would the mutant worlds be in such a turmoil?"

  "I'm not so sure," said Shantilli. He closed his eyes and yawned. "Not that I'd shed any tears over her death, you understand, after what she did to my home world."

  "That is true, then?" The twins had fixed him with their double gaze. "Durham Red destroyed Magadan?"

  "Apparently." He blinked lazily at them. "I was away from home at the time."

  "But you believe she lives."

  "I do. Some diseases are just too tough to cure."

  The twins nodded, their faces blank of all expression. "Although we do not share your sentiment, Dominus, we share your opinion. We are sure Durham Red is alive."

  "Nonsense," crowed Brae. "My luck could never be so good."

  The twins stared at him for a moment, then turned to the hooded, veiled woman on their left. "And your opinion, lady? You have not spoken on this yet."

  Behind her veil, Durham Red couldn't help but grin. "Nah," she said finally. "The big guy's right. She's history."

  Not long after that, the tender ignited its grav-lifters and began to decelerate. Red could feel herself squashing down slightly into the leather couch, and was glad about it. The sooner she was off this bubble and away from her fellow passengers, the better.

  There had been space to avoid them on the clipper from Thaetia. Although the journey to Dedanas had taken nearly three days, Red had been able to spend most of that time away from the others, in her private cabin. Or, to be strictly accurate, in the cabin of the Lady Yalishanna Trier, buyer for the Trier-Hasnek corporation of Chios Secundus. The Lady Yalishanna herself was still on Thaetia, missing her clothes, her crypt-idents and about half a litre of blood. She would no doubt have woken up by now - the drug Red had slipped her was good for about two days of unconsciousness - but it would still be some time before she found her way out of the tavern room, after what Red had done to the locks.

  Perhaps, Red reflected, the event would teach Yalishanna to act more like a lady in the future, and less like a horny businesswoman going sex-crazy on a corporate freebie. A harsh education, but from what Red had learned about Her Ladyship in the days leading up to Thaetia, a long deserved one.

  Now though, it was Red herself who felt trapped and drained. The tender was built for comfort, not speed, and since leaving the clipper had progressed towards the surface with agonising sluggishness. After an hour of listening to her co-passengers bicker about whether she was dead or not, she was almost ready to rip open an airlock and jump.

  There wasn't even much of a view to look at. Although the deck was ringed with viewports, they were set well above the spherical tender's widest point. All Red could see through them was the sky, changing all too gradually from black to blue. Occasionally there was a flash of horizon, but Dedanas had no landmasses, and so presented nothing more interesting than an uninterrupted stretch of ocean. Besides, to see through the viewports at all required either twisting around in her seat like a bored child, or staring across the deck past one or other of her fellow passengers. And that risked someone mistaking her gaze for an invitation to start talking to her.

  Which wasn't something she was interested in at all. Each one of them had started to bug her in the short time they had been forced together aboard al-Qirmiza. Brae, the weapons dealer from Fernal, had a way about him that made her fangs itch for his throat, if she could ever find it under all that flab. The mutant twins were quiet enough, but Red couldn't help but find them creepy. Something about their blankly identical faces and their flat, monotone voices speaking in perfect symmetry completely unnerved her. The quiet guy with the beard seemed tolerable, but he'd been looking at her oddly of late, and the woman with the smooth, noseless face was just plain annoying.

  The presence of a Magadani dominus wasn't making her feel exactly comfortable, either.

  All in all, hardly a fun party to crash. But Red wasn't here for fun. She had serious business on Dedanas, and it didn't involve buying cut-price lithium.

  A few seconds after the lifters ignited, a concealed sounder chimed softly, then spoke. "Honoured Hets," it said. "The Mercantile Caucus of Ulai welcomes you."

  "About bloody time," growled Brae.

  "Al-Qirmiza is about to enter final descent vector," the sounder continued. It might have been the vessel's pilot speaking; if it was, Red decided, he had a lovely voice. "The interior of the tender is gravity-damped. You will feel no ill effects. Please remain seated, and enjoy the final stages of our journey."

  With that, the voice fell silent, and the ocean beneath al-Qirmiza tipped up on its end.

  Red was suddenly looking at an expanse of wave-rippled blue racing towards her at an angle of about thirty degrees. It was like seeing the side of a mountain coming right at her, and an instinctive flutter of panic went off behind her ribs. She suppressed a gasp.

  None of the others seemed even to have noticed the effect.

  The sea wasn't tilting, of course. The tender itself had tipped, angling its rotund hull to let some of the energy from its grav-lifters slip aside, trading lift for forward thrust. Held in place by the deck's artificial gravity, Red was now sitting at the highest point of the couch, looking down past the bearded man at the endless blue seas below.

  At long last, Red could see something of interest among the waves. Far ahead, almost lost in the misty sea air, objects marred the unbroken expanse of ocean. Distance made them tiny, toy like, but they were growing as Red watched.

  Beside her, the twins were craning their necks to see what she saw, stretching their connecting tendril. "Ulai is in sight," they reported. "We can see the spaceport."

  That was the biggest object, a disc of white against the stark blue of the sea. As the tender got closer, Red started to make out imperfections in the disc's surface - pimples and bulges, dark spots and tiny points of light. Then she saw one of the dots begin to rise, recognised its shape, and realised with a start how big the spaceport was. That dot was a bulk hauler, kilometres lo
ng.

  "Is that where we'll set down?" Brae asked.

  The noseless mutant shook her head. "No, Het. That's only for cargo flights. The lithium you buy will lift off from there, but we'll go straight to the Ulai fin itself."

  They were close enough to see that the spaceport would pass by on the right of the tender. Red saw another structure over to the left, more angular but equally huge. That was the manufactory complex, or at least the part of it that protruded from the ocean's surface.

  Red knew the mining complex would be even further in that direction, but she couldn't see it. The air wasn't clear enough for her to pick out the transfer platform. She could, however, see dozens of white lines crossing the blue between the structures. There were cargo barges down there, each hauling kilotonnes of refined mineral, their mighty paddles churning up wakes dozens of kilometres long.

  "There," cried Brae abruptly. "The Ulai fin."

  Red offered up a silent prayer of thanks as she followed the fat man's gaze. Sure enough, just coming into view was a titanic wing of gleaming white, rising from the waves like part of a downed starship. It was immensely tall, dwarfing the breakers that battered its flanks, and so slender that it seemed as if a storm or an especially violent sea swell might shear it right off its moorings. To Red, who had never seen such a thing poking up from the sea before, it looked dangerously delicate.

  She wasn't the only one who thought so. Shantilli was shaking his head in wonder. "This world must boast an eternally calm sea," he murmured. "I've seen storms that would bend that thing over."

  "On the contrary, Dominus," the twins replied. "The winds here can reach five hundred kilometres an hour, and the waves eighty metres high - there is no landmass to moderate such conditions."

  "Really?" Red's eyebrows went up. "Bloody hell. Must be built strong, then."

  "It is. In addition, the entire structure rotates on its axis."

  Red gaped. "You're kidding."

  "Not at all." That was the bearded man. "There's an axle running down from the top deck, right through into the sea bed. If the wind gets too high, or the current too strong, the whole arcology swivels to reduce its profile."

  "Sneck." Red whistled softly. The tender was levelling out, and the fin filled her view. She was close enough to see its windows, thousands of them, arranged in lines down the glossy white sides of it. If each line of windows was a deck, the fin must have been two, maybe three kilometres high, not counting the section that lay below sea level.

  Flat vanes set along its sloping front edge had grown into vast decks peppered with holes. Some of the holes were filled with golden spheres, tenders like al-Qirmiza, and Red could see one hole in particular expanding in front of her. The little ship was coming in on final approach.

  There was a chime, and the sounder spoke again. "In a few moments," it said, "al-Qirmiza will reach the upper dock of Ulai. Once we are socketed, there will be a short delay while the umbilicals are fixed and the atmospheres equalised. This may take a few minutes, so please remain seated and continue to enjoy the hospitality of the Caucus."

  So she'd have to endure these people for even longer. "Bugger," Red muttered, sitting back and folding her arms.

  The twins snapped a double glance at her. "Excuse us?"

  "What? Oh, it's, ah, an expression of joy. Back on Chios Secundus, I mean." Red felt herself cringing back under the linked mutants' piercing stare. "Like, 'Ooh, we get to stay in this lovely tender for even longer, oh bugger.'"

  Four eyes blinked at her in perfect unison. "We see."

  I'll bet you do, thought Red, glaring at the holo. The sooner she could drop her charade and get away from this crowd, the better.

  There was a slight vibration as the grav-lifters throttled up, and Red heard the distant whine of servos as the landing claws engaged, and then the walls of the socket rose above the viewports, obscuring her view. A moment later, the tender settled and the lifters shut down.

  There was a chime, and the deck's internal lighting changed from white to a very gentle shade of blue. "Welcome to Dedanas," said the sounder.

  Next to Red, the twins stood up carefully. "Bugger," they intoned.

  Red smiled. "Couldn't have put it better myself."

  After being cooped up in the tender for so long, Red would have welcomed a decent walk in the sea air to stretch her legs and clear the shipboard claustrophobia from her head, but she had forgotten how privileged she was now supposed to be. There was no question of being allowed to walk more than a few steps in succession, a rule that seemed to favour Marentus Brae in particular. Perhaps, Red surmised sourly as she was led towards a monorail car, Ulai's rulers expected their visitors to be corpulent. Maybe allowing one's appetites to run wild was a corporate objective out here among the Periphery.

  The car was a blunt-nosed cylinder as long as a ground bus, constructed entirely from thick glass facets in a cage of brass frame. A uniformed servant showed them inside, gesturing each over the threshold in turn. Red glared at him as she went past, considering herself perfectly capable of getting into a monorail without help, but if the man noticed her expression he paid it no heed. Yalishanna's hood and veil was a passable disguise, she had learned, but it was no aid to expression. Most of the time, no one seemed to even look at the face behind the silk.

  When the last of them was in, the servant moved to stand in the doorway. "This is but a short journey, Hets," he assured them. "The transit tunnel will take you directly to the arrivals lounge, where you may rest and take refreshment while your luggage and entourages are being offloaded."

  "Lounge? Refreshment? For Christ's sake..." Red grimaced. All this was taking far too long, and her left forearm was beginning to itch. She resisted the urge to scratch it. "I thought we were going to do some business here."

  "In good time, my lady." And with that the servant stepped back, allowing the glass door of the car to roll down and seal them in.

  "Sneck it," Red snapped, and thumped angrily back into her seat. The monorail was already beginning to pick up speed. The tunnel entrance gaped at her, then swallowed the car whole.

  There was a light touch on her hand. It was Shantilli, leaning over from the opposite seat, his sylphs sitting wordlessly to either side of him. When she looked up, he smiled. "In a hurry, my dear?"

  "You could say that." Red tried to keep the edge out of her voice. Shantilli was as annoying as anyone else on the flight - a rich, powdered idiot trailing his lobotomised sex slaves around like trophies, his clothes worth a year's food to any hungry family, but Red couldn't bring herself to treat him badly.

  It was guilt, she knew, pure and simple. She had been indirectly responsible for the destruction of his homeland, and the deaths of untold thousands of his people. Even though she had managed to drive a few Magadani out of the ruins to safety, they were trapped on their encoded world, the gateway between them and the rest of the universe sealed forever. Shantilli could never return home.

  If she couldn't feel guilty about that, what would shame her?

  "I'm just not used to all this poncing about," she went on. "Go in, get the job done, and get out again; that's how I do things. All this?" She waved her hands about. "This is just wasting my bloody time."

  "The Dedani mean no harm, my lady. They simply need to unload the tender. You have an entourage, yes?"

  She shook her head. "Nope. Well, there's a couple of guys who help me out now and then, but they're not here right now." She glanced out of the nearest pane as the car began to slow. "They might be along later, though."

  "So a few minutes won't make any difference."

  "Don't bet on it."

  He put up his hands in defeat, the smile still playing about his painted lips. "Ah, I see I will be drinking alone. Forgive my intrusion, Lady Yalishanna."

  "No problem," she said, not unkindly. "I'm just on a tight schedule."

  "Another time, then. After this tiresome trading is over and done with."

  In spite of herself, she winked
at him. "You never know."

  The arrivals lounge was large, open and airy, the floor strewn with silken cushions, the tables heaving with delicacies. Holographic globes drifted in the air like vast soap bubbles, filled with turning diagrams and schematics of the wares Ulai had to offer. Lithium for power cores, molybdenum for starship hulls, deuterium and tritium refined as pure fusion fuel, even purified seawater by the tanker - their atomic structures spiralled overhead, along with their shipping costs and taxation rates, while recorded voices from hidden sounders followed the bubbles around in a continuous, synchronised sales pitch.

  A small army of traders had already occupied the place. Some had paired off and were talking animatedly in a mix of spoken words and complex, arcane gestures, while many more were sprawled around in loose, open groups, relaxing before the hard bargaining began.

  Pale skinned young women in uniform robes paced slowly between the traders, moving with an easy, practised grace. They carried trays laden with glasses of wine or mint tea. One came close to Red with a strange assemblage of brass pipes and globes hooked over her left shoulder, a rack of tiny cups in her right. As she passed, Red smelled coffee, sweet and strong, and her mouth watered.

  The lounge looked a lot more inviting than she had expected, and it was an effort to deny herself even the least of its pleasures. Her forearm was hurting again, though, and that spurred her on. She grabbed the next servant girl to pass by.

  "Excuse me? Look, I don't want to sound rude, but is there any chance I could get on with some business? My boss is going to freak out if I don't start dealing soon..."

  The girl nodded and disappeared through a doorway concealed between two wall hangings. Red watched her go, and then saw Shantilli out of the corner of her eye, already languishing amidst a group of buyers. Largely female ones, she noticed with a slight smile. He'd be okay here for a good while, which could save him considerable trouble later on, if things went badly.