The Dogs of God

by Chris Kennedy

  Still playing the role of the visiting dignitary, Syme bowed. “On behalf of the board and of our shareholders, Your Majesty, I thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

  Calen Harendotes arched an eyebrow beneath a cap of lank white hair. If he was palatine, then he was surely in the last years of his life. Imperial nobiles aged but slowly, preserving the years of vim and vigor across centuries until twilight came mere decades before the end. Even if he was not some renegade member of the nobility, he was certainly old, so old that there could be no escaping fate.

  The monarch of Latarra was dying.

  “Not what you expected?” the old king asked.

  He wasn’t. The holographs Syme had seen had been of a young man with long black hair and bronze skin, a man well-built and powerful. The Calen Harendotes of the holos seemed more akin to the heroes he’d watched in operas as a boy than to any of the graying and efficient military tribunes and strategoi of the Legions. On the holos, Calen Harendotes seemed a man larger-than-life, the sort of man you’d expect to be ten feet tall in the flesh.

  This man could not even stand.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and the trace of a smile played across those papery lips. “The centuries are long and less kind than men imagine.” He raised his hands as if for inspection, revealing translucent, mottled skin and blue veins.

  Clasping his hands together—twisting the venomed ring on his index finger—Syme said, “The holographs I’ve seen…”

  “Fabrications,” the monarch said. “I am less than inspiring as I am, but I have no wish to lie to the mighty Consortium. I wish for your board to invest in my little operation here, and before there can be any investment, there must be trust. So let us be honest with one another, Director.” He fixed Syme with bright blue eyes. “I need men. Human embryos. Three hundred thousand will do. Clones will suffice, but a diverse population is preferable.”

  Syme said nothing. It was true, then. This Harendotes was planning conquests in the outer regions, sweeping up the ashes of the Cielcin invasion. Clones…Clones were illegal, an abomination in the eyes of Earth’s Holy Chantry. Syme had long suspected the Consortium dealt in clones, and with this, Harendotes had all but confirmed that suspicion. There was only one reason why an Extrasolarian warlord would ask for three hundred thousand clone embryos.

  “We had heard that you intended to make yourself a tidy little empire out here,” Syme said, turning from the monarch as he spoke to study the koi. He watched an orange-gold shadow flicker and vanish into the depths, sending ripples across the mirror-dark surface. “It’s true, then?”

  “Do you see the Sollan Empire rushing to reclaim its lost territory?” Harendotes asked. “Once they held dominion over this entire arm of the galaxy. Now they scramble to hold any of it. And while they scramble, Director, people die.”

  “What are you offering?” Syme asked, apparently unruffled and still playing the role of Consortium director.

  “Opportunity,” Harendotes said, leaning forward in his chair.

  “We cannot bank on opportunity, Majesty,” Syme answered. “And you cannot spend it.”

  Acting as if he hadn’t heard the younger man’s words, King Calen gazed out across his pool and said, “Only the very foolish believe war is profitable. Winning wars is profitable—or can be. Every day this sector languishes in its shattered state is a day your corporation loses money.”

  Syme twisted his venomous ring again. “You’re building an army.”

  “I have an army,” Harendotes said. “But I need more. More soldiers. Soldiers your natalists can provide.”

  The younger man squeezed his hands behind his back. He wished he still had his cane. Three hundred thousand men was enough to topple legions, enough to secure a hold over more than a dozen worlds, provided…

  “You have the ships then?”

  Harendotes laughed and waved a hand. “Have you not seen my city?”

  Syme grunted. The man had a point. Every building beneath the monarch’s acropolis was truly some rocket or grounded freighter. Privately, Syme suspected many of the largest hulks would never fly again, but if even half the sunken vessels in the Maze rose once more, they would make quite the navy.

  “And you met Captain Zelaz, I understand,” the monarch added.

  “Captain?” Syme paced nearer the old man on his glass throne.

  “Oneiros told you Zelaz is one of the Exalted, did he not?” Harendotes turned in his seat to fully face the approaching Syme, and for the first time, the younger man saw the spiderweb of wires, black beneath the flesh of the man’s neck like necrotic veins. A metallic nodule glowed beneath one ear where the implant shone, and a single fell light pulsed an evil blue to match the color of his eyes.

  Had Harendotes been listening to Syme’s every word since his arrival on this hideous planet?

  “Zelaz captains one of their Sojourners, the Hermetic Melancholia. Do you know what a Sojourner is, Director?”

  Syme nodded. The Sojourners were the greatest ships of the Extrasolarians, the ones belonging to the post-human Exalted, to men like Zelaz, who had mutated or abstracted their human forms almost beyond recognition. They were impossibly vast—some more than a hundred miles from end to end—and faster than any but the fastest ships in the Imperial fleet. If Zelaz really was a captain of the Exalted, then it wouldn’t matter if most of his ships were the crumbling relics in the city below. A Sojourner could deploy them across multiple star systems within a span of years…not decades.

  “It sounds as though you’re ready to move,” he said, stopping to admire another of the iron lamp posts that grew among the thick foliage. “May I ask a question, Majesty?” He held the king’s gaze.

  Harendotes did not answer at once. He did not move. Syme almost thought him another of his statues. Uncomfortable with the long silence, the would-be assassin asked, “Why?”

  “Why pick up the Imperium’s pieces, do you mean?” the old king asked, and there was no expression in the seamed face. “Because someone has to.”

  Syme nodded, turned from the space beside the pool to wander towards the trees and the flowerbeds behind the glass throne. “Do you have children, Majesty?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The would-be assassin paused, staring up into the boughs of a willow that hung low not ten paces from the monarch’s chair. “You’re old,” he said, abandoning political correctness. “What makes you think any of this world you want to build will endure when you are gone? Your little empire dies with you.”

  “Ah,” Calen Harendotes said. “There it is.” He almost laughed. “Answer a question for me, Director.” As he spoke, the black glass chair lifted silently into the air and turned to face Syme where he stood beneath the lamp post and the tree. “Are you planning to kill me with the poisoned ring on your left hand? Or the knife in your boot?”

  Syme tensed like a pulled bowstring and loosed himself. There was no time to waste, no time to wonder. Visions of Captain Zelaz and that inhuman majordomo bursting in through the airlock with the monarch’s statuesque guards filled his mind. He had to act quickly. How had Harendotes known? And why had he been permitted into the monarch’s presence so armed? There was no time to contemplate such questions, either—only time to act. If Harendotes knew about the ring, he must not fear its venom. Why then had he allowed the knife?

  Ducking around the willow’s branches, the assassin pressed the panic button on his wrist-terminal to signal his guards to open fire beyond the walls of the garden. He rushed straight at the old man’s throne. Calen Harendotes did not move, did not so much as widen his eyes. The monarch’s words resounded in Syme’s skull as he closed distance, and Ever-Fleeting Time seemed to slow as adrenaline kicked in and excited his artificially enhanced nervous system.

  The ring…he heard Harendotes say again, or the knife?

  “Neither.”

  He ran fingers through his hair and drew out the weapon hidden there, the one he had felt certain no
scanner would detect. A coil of monofilament wire; a single thread of nanocarbon. He pulled the garrote tight between gloved hands, felt the impossibly thin, sharp wire tight against the armor weave beneath the silk surface of his gloves. Syme expected resistance as he circled behind the aged king, expecting some hidden gun to fire or defense system in the man’s chair to engage. None did. He did not even hear the noise of distant gunfire as his men fought in the vestibule beyond the garden’s airlock.

  There was nothing but the splash of fountains and the music of birds, even as he looped the monofilament around the monarch’s neck and pulled. The nanocarbon cut without resistance, passed through flesh and bone and implanted circuitry with ease. And more than flesh: the garrote cut through black glass and steel, and severed the very headboard of the monarch’s throne as easily as wet clay.

  Syme staggered back as the head and headboard fell. Glass shattered on tile work, and the monarch’s head tumbled into the grass.

  The fountains still played. Birds sang. But all else was quiet.

  There was no alarm. No sound of fighting. No assassins or secret guards hiding in the trees. Still clutching the garrote tight between his hands, Syme backed away, unable to shake the sense of dread and growing horror deep in him. It was all too easy. Harendotes had all but let himself be killed.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  He keyed a sequence into his terminal, then spoke into the bracelet. “This is Syme. Target has been eliminated. Repeat: target has been eliminated. Calen Harendotes is dead.” He began moving back along the path towards the statue of the naked woman and the way towards the door. His heart was pounding in his ears, and the adrenal tightness in his chest twinged as if shards of glass from the broken throne were lodged there. He hurried on towards the airlock, overclocked nervous system spurring him on faster than any ordinary man. He hadn’t far to go.

  “Leaving so soon, Director?” came a deep voice, issuing from speakers bracketed to the lamp posts that dotted the misty garden.

  Syme froze.

  It was Calen’s voice…but not quite. The intonation and the cadence were all there, but the timbre was different. Deeper. Darker. As if the man spoke through a diaphragm larger than any human chest.

  “I must admit,” the voice said, “the garrote surprised me. My servants did not detect it with the rest of your weapons.”

  Drawing the line taut between his fingers, Syme shouted, “Harendotes?”

  “Tell me, which of the other players sent you? Was it her?”

  “Who?” Syme inched back along the path as he listened. The monarch was Extrasolarian, that much was certain. The machines in his body must be working to keep his brain alive in his severed head. Syme grit his teeth. Horror or no, he still had a job to do.

  “Or was it the Empire, perhaps? You’ve an Imperial stink about you.”

  Unable to help himself, Syme hurried back along the path, back past the bent lamp post strangled by the tree, past the statue of the naked woman, towards the mirrored pool. The monarch’s voice followed Syme up the path. “Afraid someone will pick up all their lost territory, are they? And so they send an assassin.”

  He saw the head lying where he’d left it amid stained grass; the body, slumped and blood-soaked, still in its chair. Syme crossed to it, hounded by Harendotes’ voice as he went. “Being unable to cause force to obey justice, men have made it just to obey force. Unable to strengthen justice, they have justified force.” The severed head’s lips moved, though no sound issued from them, and the dark voice came only over the loudspeakers in the garden. The monarch’s blue eyes shone.

  Syme said nothing. There was nothing to say. He slammed his heel into the king’s face. Bone crunched beneath his heel as the assassin went smoothly to one knee and drew forth the ceramic blade he’s been permitted to keep in his boot. With the monofilament line still binding his hands together, he crouched and plunge the tip of the blade down through the side of the man’s skull.

  Blue eyes guttered, flickered, and died. Syme wondered if they, too, had been mechanical. Blood ran from the twice-murdered tyrant’s temple, and the brain within was utterly destroyed. Once more, the only noise in the glass gardens of Calen Harendotes was the music of bird and fountain.

  * * *

  The airlock cycled when Syme pulled the lever. That surprised him. He’d expected to be trapped in the garden, to be forced to await his end beside the body of his victim. That Calen Harendotes was truly dead was certain, and just as certain was the fact his own death could not be far away. He’d signaled the pilot officer and his people in orbit above, relaying what audio and rough holography of the incident his terminal could report to Legion Intelligence and the War Ministry on Forum.

  The vestibule was empty.

  Oneiros and Zelaz and the guards—both the monarch’s guards and Syme’s own—were gone. The assassin’s sense of unease only deepened. Something was very wrong here. He checked his shield-belt’s power pack. It was green. Moving carefully, he edged forward into the room, keeping his hands up like a boxer, the monofilament garrote clenched in his fists.

  A black shape lurched out from behind one squat pillar. It was one of the monarch’s guards, black-armored and white-crested. It swung its energy lance down in a blow that would have flattened Syme’s skull. The assassin raised his hands, pulling the line taut between them. The wire sliced clean through the haft of the weapon. Syme lurched to one side as the lance’s bladed head tumbled past. He tugged the line down as he went, monofilament passing clean through both wrists as he lurched sideways. Heedless of the blood flowing from the fellow’s mutilated limbs, Syme slammed his shoulder against the man, knocking him back against the column.

  Something struck his shield, and turning, he saw a second guard standing with his own lance aimed square at Syme’s chest. The weapons had a projectile launcher, not the beam weapon common on such lances.

  The adrenaline came rushing back, and once more the assassin felt the strange slowing of time as his nervous system ratcheted up and pushed his body past its normal human responses. He ducked as the other man fired and heard the bullet strike the pillar behind him. Keeping low, he lunged towards the other man, forgetting the mutilated guard at his back. Syme dodged the out-thrust bayonet. With one wire-wrapped hand, he seized the haft of the lance and punched it up into the guardsman’s visored face. Stunned, the man staggered long enough for Syme to wrap his monofilament line around his neck and pull. The cord came free, and the head with it.

  The elevator lay open ahead. Inviting. Expectant.

  Syme was certain it was some of kind of trap.

  He moved towards it all the same, also certain that he was a dead man.

  He stopped, surprised by what he saw on the counter between the pillars to the side of the little vestibule.

  His cane.

  His cane was still there. How? Why?

  Unraveling the wire from his gloved hands, Syme took up the sword-stick. His pistol was gone, moved perhaps in whatever struggle had disappeared his guards along with Oneiros and Zelaz. Why had the cane been left behind?

  There were too many questions.

  He twisted the cane in his fists, detached the shaft from the sword hilt, and squeezed the trigger. The highmatter blade flowed like water, like quicksilver. It rippled in the close air of the vestibule, casting shadows on the walls where it glowed like pale moonlight.

  A groan sounded from behind him, and turning back, he saw the man whose hands he’d removed sitting slumped against the base of one pillar. Syme stumped back over to him, peering down into his black-visored face. The man looked up at him, trying to cradle his ruined stumps. The Imperial soldier wasted no time. He slashed the man across the chest, the exotic matter of his blade passing through armor and flesh as easily as the garrote had.

  Blood-soaked, chest heaving from the exertion and the adrenaline, Syme stepped onto the lift.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Three

  I For I

&n
bsp; The iron grill rattled open, and light spilled in from the gallery. Syme had not taken the lift back to the ground floor lobby. The main doors were sure to be guarded. He was running blind, desperate for a window, a way out. A way around to where the shuttle waited on its landing pad. He’d tried to signal the pilot officer from the relative safety of the lift, but had met only with silence. He said a silent prayer to Earth and Emperor that it was only signal trouble, that the woman was alive.

  Disruptor fire cracked against the door frame and against the curtain of his shield, and ahead Syme saw the figures of three men closing in, moving in the tight-knit arrowhead formation common to Imperial legionnaires. The gallery ahead wrapped around in what Syme guessed must be a big circle, enclosing conference rooms and offices, mirroring the curve of the huge lobby below. He wished he’d managed to take one of the energy lances from the men upstairs and snarled. There was nothing for it. He had his shield, his sword. He’d have to run for it.

  Syme bolted from the dubious cover of the lift and pounded up the hall towards the onrushing guards. Disruptor bolts flashed off the energy curtain of his shield, and he moved faster, pushing his body to its enhanced limits. Seeing their target was shielded, the trio of men staggered back, their leader moving to draw his own ceramic short sword from the scabbard on his hip.

  He never stood a chance. The Imperial assassin leaped, rebounding off the outer wall of the gallery with one, two, three steps and a leap that carried him over the head of the first man and through the second with a vicious swipe of the highmatter sword that cleaved the man into ragged halves. Even as he landed, Syme turned, dragging his sword with him to strike one leg out from under the third man. He buckled like a house of cards and upended a plinth decorated with some antique vase of blue porcelain. Syme came about before the first man had even finished drawing his sword.