Endgame

by C. J. Cherryh

  Bang went the bow on the buffers and she found herself with a cut lip, lying belly down on the powder-barrels in the well, didn't even register that she'wasn't dead, just her body was trying to move, her hand still had a sweaty grip on the gun and she was scrambling off the barrels, got a grip on a low-hanging help-you rope to bring the drifting skip to the buffers again, planted a precarious bare foot on the cracked bow plank and kept her balance through it breaking under her. Second stride was on solid floating dockside and third was going for that doorway as hard as she could.

  Nobody shot her. She was halfway up the stairs before her breath ran out and she had to slow down and pull her way up by the banister, coughing in the smoke, tears running on her face. God, you couldn't breathe in here, you couldn't see. There wasn't anybody left. The Nev Hettekkers had taken out somewheres, maybe slipped up the northward direction, never gone to harbor at all, just—took him and got out, and everything was for nothing—

  She felt her way to a hallway of doors about the level of his window, she yelled out, "Mondragon!" at the top of her lungs, wiping her eyes and coughing. Wasn't an answer but the roar of fire. Smoke was pouring through the trim-boards, coming out every seam of the place. They took 'im, she told herself, and then had a more terrible thought, and went down that hall and started rattling doors, scared to death she was going to find him lying shot dead in some room. "Mondragon!"

  Female voice. Downstairs. "Jones, ye fool!"

  She went on looking. Her lungs ached from the smoke. She yelled and she opened doors, but she didn't panic or shoot when two murky figures came running up onto that floor and grabbed her and carried her out of there. By that time she'd figured she needed rescuing, she needed somebody to yank her around the waist and make her go, because she'd stopped thinking, she'd go searching till she died, because he was gone and it didn't matter any more.

  But they got her downstairs and got her air again, between coughing. They were trying to haul her into their fancyboat when Cal lifted his gun of a sudden and Rif cried, "Don't shoot! It's Raj! —Ye fool, what're ye doin' here?"

  "Trying to help Tom," a shaky answer came back. "Kat and I—Jones, Jones, did y' find him?"

  She shook her head. Struggled to see him and the Bolado kid in the electrics and the smoke of the dockside, but her eyes were running and it hurt too much to look long. "Gone," she managed to say.

  "We got eyes," Raj said, "hundreds of eyes. Somebody's got t' have seen where they went."

  It was a hope, damn, it was.

  "Get you out of here," Rif was saying, pulling her for the outside of the boat dock and clean air, and Raj was saying how he had something in Bolado's skip might help her lungs, but she shook her head and waved for silence.

  "Get in my skip," she said. "Got th' powder. Raj, ye help me—"

  "Kat," he said, "get the word out. I'm goin' with Jones."

  "Ye're fools! Rif said.

  "You help me," Jones yelled at her, struggling free. It came out a cracked, strange sound. "You get up on the North Flat, ye see if there's been any ship—"—Up there, she was trying to say, but coughing prevented it. "Got t' get clear," she managed to say, headed for her skip. " 'Splosives."

  ESCAPE FROM MEROVINGEN (ACT ONE REPRISED)

  by Janet & Chris Morris

  Kenner wanted to go lie down, if he couldn't report. But he'd done what he'd been told, out on canalside, he'd spread the rumors he'd been told, just as Magruder wanted them.

  Jacobs was dead, so he had to spread twice as many rumors, go to twice as many taverns.

  He drank a bit in each and he got drunk, on an empty stomach. So he enunciated very carefully, spreading his rumors:

  "Mikhail's been shot. Killed out on the Grand. One of Exeter's slinks. Just like that. No warning. Just shot in his boat."

  And elsewhere: "Yeah. I heard. They're arresting Nev Hettekkers, arresting anybody—sayin' some of us did it. I don't want t' end up in some Justiciary cell accused of what Exeter's thugs did. I give fair prices at my shop, I give fair service, I pay my taxes, what d' I get? Dragged in on this? The same folks'll be lookin' fer the killers as did the killin'. Is that justice?"

  He did that till he ran out of likely places, and he was too drunk to keep his tongue from tangling. He was getting the first rumors, riot uptown, people starting to move fast on the walkways. Then he set the first of his fires, down near the fish and chips stall on Ven-tani, where Jacobs and he had met the boat tonight.

  He saw a dirty chip squashed by somebody's heel near a barrel, and closed his eyes. Jacobs was dead. Here, where he'd been so alive only hours before. It was hard to believe that he'd never see the fat kid again.

  Jacobs would come walking out of the shadows and the fog any minute, with another dirty paper full of fish and chips.

  But Jacobs didn't, and setting the fire felt good, because Jacobs was dead. It was like setting a funeral pyre, for Jacobs and this fogbound excuse for a city.

  It felt good to raise a little hell here. This place, as much as Mondragon, had killed Jacobs. All Kenner could do for Jacobs now was make sure his friend hadn't died in vain. Do a perfect job. On schedule. Make Magruder proud of them both.

  He was on his way now to the second of the arson sites on his list, his own machine shop. Second time it had burned. Mondragon again.

  Damn him.

  The shop was an easy place to torch—and he had to burn it. Jacobs' ghost was most alive here. Confused, it was sitting around on an oil drum wondering where its body had gone.

  Scat, ghost, you're dead. Go find Jacobs a resting place. Not here. Here's for the devil. Here's for the Retribution.

  The fire burned hot as hell. The ghost looked at him reproachfully from the midst of it and finally turned its back and walked away, into the flames.

  When it disappeared, Kenner found himself sober enough to find the doorway. To scatter the cans and the rags outside. Magruder wanted it to seem like the Bloody Cardinal's people had come down here and hit the shop—come after the innocent Nev Hettek-kers, who helped the canalers and gave good fair service to the poor. Magruder wanted clear arson.

  Arson was a good pretext for any response Magruder wanted to make. Kenner made damned sure that this fire looked real suspicious.

  But for some crazy reason he got all choked up when he was leaving, wishing he had Jacobs' body so he could chuck it into the flames and give it a decent burial. Adventist burial. Sword burial. Not have it for fish food, like Merovingen did with its dead. Fire. The way the spacefarers had done with theirs—tossed them into the burning hearts of suns.

  But he didn't have it, he couldn't. He'd sent Jacobs' ghost packing, hadn't he? He had to get on with his tasks. He must be running about an hour late. He had to hope that an hour late was going to be all right with Magruder.

  Otherwise he'd end up right beside Jacobs, floating around in the embassy watergate.

  What in hell?

  Big glow on the water. Fog lit up. Shots rattling. Kenner knew that sound. It was coming from uptown.

  Steps running for him, down the boards. Kenner blinked, reaching for a gun he'd lost somewhere. He caught himself against the corner of the building. Heard shouting from the walkway overhead, people yelling about Cassie Boregy, about Exeter's assassinating Mikhail, about Cassie Boregy's prophecy coming true, the fire was coming—

  He ran for the steps, he staggered up to middle tier, saw the sky glowing uptown.

  Damn, it was really working. Chance's scheme was off and running. Now if Kenner could just connect with his own people—

  Except he'd lost Jacobs.

  He started walking, kept looking for somebody to take his report. The harder that was, the more he learned as he moved through the crowds that bumped him, the more determined he became.

  Now there was, according to the crowd, a full-fledged move by an Exeter conspiracy against the Kalugin power structure. Willa Exeter had betrayed Iosef Kalugin. Killed Mikhail and set the fires.

  Common folk, who'
d never cursed the Church, cursed the priests, cursed the governor too, for a fool, cursed the Ancestors, who'd forsaken the stars and stranded them in hell—

  If Kenner wasn't scared to death of crowds and mob psychology, he'd have been giggling at the swiftness and completeness of the plan's success. His, and Jacobs'. Hey, Jacobs, check this out!

  Hey, Jacobs, we did great! Magruder's going to be friggin' thrilled.

  Hey, Jacobs, rest in peace.

  At least Jacobs didn't have a body to risk being trampled by the mob.

  Kenner knew a lot about mobs. More than he wanted to, learned the hard way, back in the north. He knew enough to stay the hell away from them, to never get caught up in one, and to respect them like a force of nature.

  Hand grabbed his arm. "Kenner!" He nearly killed the guy before he heard his name. He leaned against the railing of some mid-air bridge and blinked at the guy, one of the embassy staffers. Accident, the meeting, a piece of luck. Or the manipulation of Jacobs' ghost, trying to run interference for Kenner from beyond the grave. "Kenner, where the hell you been?" the man yelled, as a mob surged past them. As he leaned there over the dark and the water.

  "Doin' my job," he shouted back. "Where's Chance?"

  "Down at the docks, where we should be. I've been hiking all up and down here looking for you! You're late!" The man wasn't happy. His face was soot-smudged and his eyes were wild, and not just from the lamplight reflected in them.

  A warm feeling of belonging flooded Kenner from head to foot, almost enough to banish the shivers racking him. At the same time he was shivering he was sweating. He wiped his stinging eyes with a forearm. "Docks, is it?"

  "We're to report there! The embassy's burning. We can leave as soon as we find Jacobs!" The man gave him a shake. "Hear?"

  "Take your hand off me!"

  Even Kenner was surprised at the deadliness in his tone. Mob violence. It was as contagious as the worst plague. Or maybe he was reacting to the man who wanted to wait for Jacobs. Wait until hell and Merovingen froze over. "Take your friggin' hands off me!"

  The man did, hands up, clear of his body.

  "Good." Kenner stood clear from the rail. "We can't wait for Jacobs, unless you want to wait till Retribution comes." He couldn't say it. Then he had to. "Jacobs is dead. Killed by Mondragon in the line o' duty. Let's go. I'll explain to Magruder when we get there."

  He had no intention of reporting in depth to the staffer, but he got the man moving. They'd left this guy behind to make sure the whole team got out clean. Down at the docks. The embassy afire. Maybe things weren't going right.

  But they were. Maximum disorder. Ships must be coming in. There was a new day, after this one.

  But salvation was canals away. He and Chance's staffer had to get through the fires and the mobs and the looters they began to see as they trotted along the middle tier.

  Kenner had the queasy, satisfied feeling he always had when he'd run death squads against the tide in the old regime—you'd find yourself moving through crowded streets, sometimes the opposite way to what folk were going, and if you were alert and careful and good at your job, you never got caught up in the fights at the barricades or the looting at the doorways or the police actions failing to restore order. You were moving against the tide, but it was your tide.

  You kept your head down and you stayed in the shadows and you moved along. And since what you wanted wasn't at odds with what the crowd wanted, you usually did okay.

  They kept within arm's length of each other, and they moved across the spindly bridges and through the crowds as if they were moving through a herd of animals—carefully, respectfully, but with a different purpose: Kenner had seen his boys die because they stopped to help a fallen child or grab a bit of loot— or because they saw one more opportunity to do some extraneous bit of violence, because violence is such a contagious high that you can find it hard to resist.

  Kenner had no trouble at all resisting the urge to pitch in and destroy anything Merovingian. He just wanted to save his own life. He'd lost a friend tonight, he didn't realize how good a friend until Jacobs was dead. He didn't dare ask himself for what—

  He knew for what. So had Jacobs. They'd had a job to do. They'd had to kill a fool tonight, so they'd killed one. Usually, to kick off a revolution, there was some fool who had to die.

  He wasn't angry at Merovingen. He wasn't even angry at Mondragon. He was angry at himself, for not having found some way to keep Jacobs alive. Jacobs had known he was going to die tonight—had felt it. Had tried to tell Kenner so, back there on Ventani Pier. But Kenner hadn't been listening hard enough.

  And now the mission was all there was left. Doing the job they'd come here to do, was all he could do for Jacobs. He didn't have to do it with hate.

  In his way, he was doing it with love.

  Whatever was left of Merovingen when this night was done wasn't his concern. Now that he knew the whole embassy was being pulled out, he figured not even Chance was going to try to make some stable transition out of this free-for-all. Nev Hettek was pulling out, pulling back, leaving behind a legend of fellowship with the poor, an example of industry and progress. And Jacobs' ghost.

  When the smoke cleared, maybe Karl Fon would send down a second contingent, offer aid, offer help rebuilding Merovingen, deal with whoever was in charge.

  But right now, you couldn't tell who that might be. All you could do was your best to get out alive.

  FAMILY TIES (REPRISED)

  by Nancy Asire

  They'd gotten a table in the common room, near the door. Their single bag was under it. Justice and Sonja sat scanning the crowd that milled in and out the doors. "They'll be here," he swore, and clenched her cold fist in his. "They'll make it." Sonja looked like hell, white as a Dead Marsh ghost, smudges under her eyes that spoke of worry for her parents. He had no problems. He would be leaving Merovingen with his father and mother. He had packed all he could carry, but now the talk was gunfire uptown, and at the College—a student had come in all bloody and said he'd climbed down off the Justiciary walkway, that Anas-tasi's regulars and Tatiana's blacklegs were shooting at each other; and Justice had quickly revised his packing—he was down to the books, the paintings, rolled in sketches, thank God his best were small ones. He had his sketchbook for ideas, he'd a precious few jars of reds and blues he wasn't sure he could replace in the south—necessity finally came down to that one bag, and Sonja's jewels, and the hope Rhajmurti and Stella were going to come through that dark doorway any moment. "God," he said suddenly, "I haven't paid Hilda."

  Sonja squeezed his hand, said, "Go do that. I'll watch."

  He got up, felt for his wallet and walked to the bar, attempting to look as if nothing more was on his mind than another beer. "Hilda. I need a word."

  "Eh?" She looked at him, her eyes momentarily unfocused, looked at the coin he pressed into her hand. Tried to shove it back at him. Hilda didn't handle gold.

  He closed her hand on it. "I'm paying out, Hilda. Going to be leaving town." "Not comin' back?"

  "I don't know. Hilda, you take care of yourself. Keep your head down. Maybe lock up the next couple days."

  She stared at him. "Me? Lock up? Ain't never locked. What'd you students do, go to John's place?" Her expression changed from confusion to concern. "What've ye heard that I ain't?"

  "Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing more than you know?"

  "Where ye goin'?"

  He hesitated to tell her the truth. Someone might care to ask. Someone of Keisel's enemies. God knew. "Where I'll be safe. Where I'll paint."

  Hilda's eyes shifted beyond him, toward Sonja. "Yer young m'sera?"

  "My young m'sera."

  "She's a fine 'un," Hilda said, God, her chin was trembling. She darted a fierce, moist look his direction. "Figger then ye can afford th' coin."

  "I can afford it."

  "Ye been th' best of my boarders ... an' that Raj boy— Aint' seen him t'night. ..."

  "He's all right. So am I. I w
anted to let you know, so you won't think I'm at the bottom of a canal somewhere. And thanks for all you've done for me. I might come back, you know. Might get homesick for your sillybit and greens."

  Hilda laughed, short and sharp, wiped a glass and set it down. Justice returned to his table, sat down beside Sonja, and watched the doorway, along with everyone else in the room—Krishna Malenkov had just come in. Krishna bullied his way through the crowd to the bar and swore they were fools out there, shooting at random—"They knocked down the gates at the College," he said, and the room got quieter. Krishna found himself with an audience, picked up the beer he'd ordered, and turned to the room at large. "Blacklegs atop the Signeury, shooting at anything that moves, Kamat's shut its gates—"

  A murmur of panic that had to do with people's routes home. Kamat was a key isle for anybody going Eastside. Shut up, somebody said, so we can hear! and Krishna waved his mug and said, "Mikhail was definitely shot—blew half his head off."

  "Aw, then he ain't even wounded," somebody quipped. There was a grim mutter of laughter.

  "What about the governor?" somebody asked Krishna. Krishna was hightown, the Rimmon Isle elite. Krishna had contacts to have the real facts of what was going on and Justice was all attention.

  Krishna said, "Governor's shut his doors and waiting for his heirs to sort it out. Tatiana's holed up in the Justiciary, Anastasi's on his yacht on Archangel, not doing damn much, but he's got one hell of a gun on that boat. Figuring is, he's moving his militia in toward the Justiciary, just waiting to back that big boat up along Kass-side and blow that door down—" Sonja's hand jerked. Sonja's parents were in that building. God. And the battle was shaping up on the Archangel side of the very Isle they were on. "I'm getting out of here," someone said, and no few left.

  The walkways were clogged with people. The boards thundered and Rhajmurti forged ahead, one arm linked through Stella's, elbowing his way through the men and women who blocked his path—no care now for the saffron showing: it was dark, it was shoulder to shoulder through the spots of lantern-light along shop and warehouse frontages and everybody was in a hurry. There was the faint pop of weapons-fire from somewhere, echoing crazily off the walls so there was no telling where it was coming from. They were on Deems and headed breathlessly for Mansur and North, hoping Mansur and North were open canalside to Spellbridge and then Kass, where Hilda's sat on canalside—there wasn't a boat to be had, you couldn't see one from Deems, and they were lucky to be this far: Vance had shut all its gates, was closing off its bridges, and people were panicking, taking convolute routes as rumor proliferated of night-gates shut, shots fired—