In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “Use your purse to call up Prince Cyx,” Jak said to Waynong.

  Waynong told his purse to get Cyx. “He’s on maximum privacy.”

  “Tell your purse to use its override software. Then repeat after me,” Jak said.

  Waynong did and looked up expectantly. Faintly, Jak heard the slurred voice of Prince Cyx demanding to know what this was about. Jak nodded and said, “Oh, hello, Cyxy—”

  “ ‘Oh, hello, Cyxy—’ ”

  “Just wanted to call you up to say that I fucked her first, and now I’ve got a nasty dose of clap.”

  In a state of utter bewilderment, Waynong repeated.

  “Better wipe it down good. By the way, we’re taking that old lifelog thing with us, launching in two minutes,” Jak added.

  Waynong looked confused, but after he had repeated Jak’s words the slow spread of comprehension on Waynong’s face seemed to release Jak from any need for an explanation. Cyx’s voice was still shouting, faintly, through Waynong’s purse.

  “Now hang up.”

  Waynong did.

  Jak clicked back over to general communications and found Pikia shouting that she was trapped in the burning Splendor One surrounded by Greenworld beanies and couldn’t hold out much longer, and Sib calling the Royal Palace to demand to know whether or not the King was still alive, and if so, what they were going to do about it. On another channel, Princess Shyf was shouting that she had been insulted and that the sudden lowering of the cradle had spilled her bath all over her private quarters. He fought back the irrational desire to call her up and comfort her, and instead told her that a crew of men with mops and buckets would be coming in right away.

  “I’m not dressed yet,” she said. “Tell them to wait two minutes—”

  “It’s all right, they don’t care how fat you are,” Jak said, and clicked over to another channel, ordering Pikia to surrender the lifelog and evacuate Splendor One before it was blown up. Then he called the monitor tower and asked them what was wrong with them, putting water on Cradle Three when it was Fuel Tank Two that was burning.

  His purse said, “Endpoint One reached,” and Jak, motioning Waynong to follow, ran toward the monitor tower. Endpoint One meant that the first part of the operation was over: the Princess’s yacht was opening its doors.

  The monitor tower was only about two hundred meters high, much lower than the control tower; it had fire monitors all up its length, and a large sealed turret at the top studded with more monitors. Jak ran straight for its single entrance, the sling-bag of weapons clattering on his back. Not trying for any subtlety or deception—time was far too important— he used his laser pistol to cut a large circular hole in the door, and lunged through.

  The guard inside was unarmed; it had probably never occurred to anyone that anybody would ever want to seize a monitor tower. Jak stepped through, blocked the guard’s tentatively reaching right hand, turned his wrist in a monkey paw around the guard’s forearm, yanked him off balance, clapped his hand to the back of the man’s neck, and slammed his elbow forward into the startled man’s face. He swept the stunned guard’s feet from under him, stepped over him, and jumped into the elevator, telling his purse, “Hack this thing and get me to the top, now. And I want full control of all building functions by the time I get there.”

  Sadly, Clarbo Waynong at least had enough presence of mind to follow Jak into the elevator.

  “That wasn’t exactly … sportsmanlike, was it?”

  “That’s why it worked,” Jak said.

  “Oh.”

  “Not everything unsportsmanlike works,” Jak hastened to add, visions of what Clarbo might do (if he raised that to a general rule) suddenly alarming him. “But for example—”

  The elevator door popped open at the top. Jak had to give the technician some points for courage and presence of mind—he came through the door already jabbing with the broom handle. Jak’s Disciplines-trained reflexes took over; he thrust downward with crossed forearms, pushing the broom handle to the side. The tech whipped the handle downward and brought the broom end over toward Jak’s face; Jak caught the broom at the midpoint where the technician gripped it, yanked hard to the side, and leg-swept; the man staggered and lost his grip on the broom. Jak spun it to rap his opponent smartly on the forehead, let the tip slide down over the mouth and nose (that must have hurt), and poked the man hard in the solar plexus; he fell backward with a groan, into a sitting position, and Jak snap-kicked him in the forehead, thudding the back of his head against the wall. The tech lay crumpled as Jak turned to see two more techs, both clearly just waking from a doze in their chairs. Their eyes widened, and it took Jak half a second to realize that they were seeing a man carrying a personal arsenal on his back holding them at broom point.

  “Pick that heet up and carry him into the elevator,” Jak barked at them.

  They grabbed their unconscious comrade and went into the elevator. “Take ’em to the bottom,” Jak told his purse. There was a loud whoosh. “Highest safe speed.”

  “You should have told me that before I started,” the purse complained.

  “Are they hurt?”

  “No, but they are not happy.”

  Jak turned back to the control and observation panels; none of it made any sense to him, so he asked his purse, “Can you give me an enlarged display of the area around the Princess’s yacht?”

  “From two to five power. Up to one hundred power if you’re willing to lose some area.”

  “Five power, then.”

  One of the turret windows suddenly cleared and revealed an infrared display of the area. Jak watched for a long moment and then said, “There they go.”

  “There who go?” Waynong asked, still sounding as if he had only recently awakened from sleep.

  “Dujuv and Shadow. Running for the door of the Princess’s lander. Nothing else on feet moves as fast as those two and of course Shadow is seven feet tall and at a different body temperature.” The two figures climbed the access ladders on the side of the cradle, bounded over the edges, and slid down on their bottoms as if on a giant playground slide. “All right,” Jak said to his purse. “Do you have control of the monitors?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leave the two that are watering down the Fuel Tank One fire in place—we don’t want that to get out of control— but use every other monitor that will bear to wash out the space between Cradle Two and Splendor One. Including every side of the fuel tank you can see. Try to knock down as many running men as you can.”

  The thunder in the tower was about as loud as doom cracking at a motorcycle race, accompanied by an amplified million-piece brass band. The whole tower shook and the floor of the top turret glided perceptibly back and forth under their feet. Jak had to key into his purse—it could not hear him—and so it took some extra seconds to shut the water off. “How many monitors at full force was that?” Jak asked his purse.

  “Not counting the two fighting the fuel tank fire, one hundred eleven.”

  “If you leave the two on the fire, how many can you put on the command deck of the control tower and on the nose of the Princess’s yacht, combined? And how does that break out?”

  “We can have forty-one on the Princess’s yacht, one hundred six on the control tower, and another fifty-three that could hit either.”

  “All right, assemble a command to be called, um—‘Hose ’em down.’ On that command, allocate monitors as: Fifty on the Princess’s yacht with thirty right on the nose and the rest scattered evenly over whatever fuselage you can hit. Fifty on the command deck of the control tower. Five monitors on each control tower door that you can hit. The rest of the monitors to play up and down the control tower at random. All at full on. Once you activate it, put in antitampering in the software to make it difficult or impossible for anyone but me to turn it off.”

  “All set up,” the purse said, cheerfully.

  The elevator door opened, and Jak turned to cover it. Sib stepped in with a merry salute. “You must
have softened up that guard down there quite a bit. He was staggering around and tried to demand my identity, so I just gave him a quick kick and punch and he went down.”

  “I’m surprised he even got up. Duj and Shadow are inside the launch right now. I don’t see much other diverting we can do until we know how it’s going for them, so I’m just watching the launch with five-power magnification, since I also don’t know what door they’re going to come out of. Pikia’s due here in another few minutes but she’s such an overachiever I’m sure she’ll be early. And it’s just about half an hour till pickup.”

  “If you’re reporting,” the familiar patrician voice said, “I think I should be included in the report.”

  “Oh, yeah, Uncle Sib, I also accidentally rescued a prisoner.”

  Clarbo Waynong’s presence registered on Sibroillo for the first time. To his credit, the old diplomat barely blinked. “Well, glad we got you out.”

  “No one is telling me what’s going on,” Waynong said, sounding like a man who really hopes he isn’t whining.

  Pikia had had time to grab a sling of slug throwers (since beam weapons were prohibited in the Harmless Zone, that was what there was to grab), a few thousand rounds of ammunition (it was good that ammo was about the size of a grain of rice), a fresh chocolate shake, and most of a large cup of coffee, when she decided that the sortie from the Princess’s yacht was definitely coming this way. “Activate plan ‘Bugger all’ as soon as we leave the ship,” she told her purse as she trotted toward the emergency hatch on the fuel tank side near the nose. “Open emergency hatch Front Right Four now.”

  “It’s locked manually,” the purse reported. “So are all other emergency ports.”

  “Nakasen’s bleeding bung,” she muttered, “I could’ve checked that, couldn’t I?”

  “You had about nine minutes in which to do so,” her purse said, helpfully.

  “Take your helpfulness level down by about—no, forget it, keep helpfulness where it is.” She sighed. It was hardly her purse’s fault that she had assumed an emergency exit would not be locked. “How close are they?”

  “Forty meters from the gangplank—”

  “Activate ‘Bugger all,’ now. And find me a door you can open on this side of the ship.”

  She turned and ran down the passage; faintly, she could hear the outside loudspeakers demanding that the Green-world guards throw down their weapons, telling them that they were covered by the combined arms of the Hive and the Splendor. The riot-protection guns opened up, not hurting anyone since all the guards were in armor, but undoubtedly making their helmets ring like gongs. Sure enough, there was the hiss and crackle of fighting lasers lashing into the old warshuttle’s skin, and now the control room was anxiously calling for help from the Splendor’s forces, identifying its attackers as being from Greenworld.

  Each of the emergency hatches she passed was manually locked, and she didn’t know the combination—a thought struck her. “Hey, purse, find out who’s authorized to open each hatch, right now.”

  “Right now no one is on duty, so no one is.”

  “Sorry, modify command.” She rounded a corner and found herself face-to-face with Kawib Presgano, who stared at her for a second, then leveled his slug thrower at her, laughing uproariously.

  “Oh, Nakasen’s hairy bag,” he said, “now it all makes sense.” He raised his purse to his face, keeping the pistol leveled at her. “All units. Everything connected with Splendor One is a diversion. Return to the Princess’s yacht at once. Repeat, emphasized: break off all action and return to the Princess’s yacht at once.” He lowered his left hand and shook his head, seemingly in admiration. “I have to admit, that was a pretty good try, but it didn’t work out, so come on along. We’re very civilized about POWs and we might as well get you over to the launch early, so you can get one of the nicer brig cells. And really, don’t worry, we’ll have you released and on your way home in a couple of days.” He waited a moment for her to comply. “Now, come on, set down that arsenal and come along.”

  “Kawib,” she said, “(I hope it’s all right to call you Kawib, even in the present circumstances) um … would you actually shoot me if I tried to get away, considering how little is at stake? I mean, would you blow a big hole in me when my getting away would make no difference?”

  “Well,” Kawib said, “of course not.” He holstered his pistol.

  “Good.” She ducked and ran, made more awkward by the sling-bag she still wore and her purse clapped to her ear. “Find me a way out of this ship now,” she whispered.

  “I was able to construct your probable intent from your last question and from the correction you began to make at that point,” the purse said quietly into her ear, with a certain smugness that she would normally have reprimanded it for. “Turn left.”

  She did; a slug rang off the ceiling behind her, so either Kawib had been lying or he had some nonlethal rounds with him and had reloaded. Since nonlethals had effects like being whacked with a long-handled rubber mallet wielded by a large man, she kept running.

  “Up the ladder in front of you.”

  She was leaving the safety of the lower deck, but she really had no choice but to follow her purse’s instructions. In the light gravity, she jumped more than climbed to the next level. “One more level,” her left hand said faintly.

  She went on up and planted her feet on the deck. “Straight down this corridor, turn left at the tee,” her purse said. She could hear shouting below, but her pursuers did not seem to know exactly where she was; perhaps her hacking of Splendor One’s information systems was still holding. Her feet threw her down the short corridor, and she had to kick out against the wall to keep her footing as she made the turn.

  “Exit to your right,” the purse said. She turned and found an emergency crash-evac door—not usually a feature on a warship, but then Splendor One hadn’t been shot at, before now, since retiring from the Hive Spatial centuries before, and it had rather often hauled passengers. “Code follows,” the purse said. “Push the red button. Now push four, seven, six, nine. Now the green button. Now two, seven. Now the red button—”

  With a deafening kerfoom! the emergency hatch blew off, revealing the warm Martian desert night and the light of the still-burning Fuel Tank One. A moment later the evacuation slide deployed, rolling out like an old-fashioned carpet, stiffening and reshaping until it was simply a large version of a playground slide. Pikia leapt up, grabbed the overhead bar, pulled her feet up, and swung out into the night, dropping onto the slide and whooshing down it like any otter or small child. The slide took her all the way down the side of the embankment that supported the linducer track.

  She came up in a neat roll at the end of the slide and ran toward the blazing Fuel Tank One. “I set off all the internal fire alarms when the exit deployed,” her purse said, more smugly than ever. “And about half of the sprinklers. And two of the foam-smother systems. They’ll be busy for a little while.”

  Pikia dashed toward the blazing tank, as tall as a seven-story building. She specked that getting a fire that big, even a relatively cool and controlled one, behind her would be a pretty good way to shake off any pursuers, and anyway, it was only a slightly longer way to the monitor tower.

  She was running more slowly than usual, with her hands clasped in front of her, holding down the reward spot on her purse, so hard and for so long that its happy cheebles blurred into a trill. She could do something about the smugness some other time.

  Jak and Sib had begun to reassure each other frequently (in a way that meant, to anyone who knew them, they were both nervous) when they saw the abnormally tall, oddly jointed figure break from one side of the Princess’s yacht, followed by the smaller, more muscular one; both leapt over the end of the lowered cradle in one long bound, and raced for the monitor tower. Jak specked that pursuit had to be white-hot. He raised his purse to his mouth to give an order—

  “Let ’em get clear,” Sibroillo said, “but if there’s any s
ign of pursuit—”

  A nose gun on the Princess’s yacht fired, but it didn’t depress quite enough; the hypersonic round left a bright streak of artificial lightning in the thick air, and Dujuv and Shadow went sprawling from its sonic boom, but a moment later they had rolled back up to their feet and they were running again.

  Jak couldn’t let that gun fire again—especially because as Dujuv and Shadow got farther away from it, it would be able to bear on them—so he just had to hope that Dujuv and Shadow on the Frost were far enough away. “Hose ’em down,” he said to his purse.

  The monitor tower thundered and boomed like the end of the world, but the Princess’s yacht vanished in a great swirl of rolling and curling white water that flooded the cradle and piled in mountains of foam over the edges. If they’d left any doors open, they were probably regretting (and trying to correct) it, right now. Jak hoped to Nakasen that no one was trapped between the yacht and the cradle wall—anyone in that situation had surely been battered unconscious and then drowned.

  “Weehu,” Uncle Sib hollered into Jak’s ear, “that did more than you planned on. I’m glad I forced everyone out of the tower before I left.”

  Jak turned to see the control tower bending, dancing, wobbling, like a drunken dancer who is trying to get the engineer’s attention in a slec space (the kind of drunken dancer no slec engineer will ever point a camera at). “Long lever arm,” he said, cupping his hands around Sib’s ear. “The command deck is at the top, and it’s wide, and the whole tower is almost a kilometer tall. It’s like a man trying to hold up a snow shovel against a fire hose. Where did you send the tower crew?”

  “Over to the main hangar. If they didn’t turn back—and these were technicians, not soldiers, they wouldn’t turn back, I don’t speck they would—well, anyway, they should have gotten there before now.”