Mazes, Masks & Murderers
Minister Keeto hurried Jack and Klik out of their booth in the Ministerium as soon as he finished testifying. The bellowing of a couple hundred thousand representatives was lost as soon as the door to the main lobby hissed shut behind them.
Jack did a double take. The lobby suddenly looked so tiny and quiet compared to the council chamber. If it weren’t for the same pair of weird-looking aliens working on the reception desk, Jack would have scarcely believed it to be the same lobby at all.
He glanced over his shoulder at the plain, unassuming door to the Ministerium and shook his head. There was no way the chamber occupied the same physical space as the rest of the headquarters. Not a chance.
They followed Keeto down the wide, stone steps and into a maze of corridors disappearing off to one side of the lobby. They were built from the same grey, Brutalist cubes – some sections were sheer and polished, others jutted out in abstract shapes like a giant’s climbing wall. Sometimes Jack would spot ministers crossing walkways formed from blocks above. Sometimes their own corridor would open up and he’d see delegates passing through corridors far below. A few looked up from their data pads in surprise as Jack passed. He wondered if the council’s emergency meeting had been broadcast out to the whole organisation.
Eventually Keeto stopped at a door set into one of the anonymous grey blocks. Glancing each way down the corridor to make sure nobody was watching, she took out her own data pad and tapped the door to unlock it. Jack and Klik hurried inside without needing to be asked.
The room was a stark contrast to the cold, featureless labyrinth that surrounded it. Three of the four walls were a deep, expensive crimson – the fourth was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Various chairs were dotted around the room, designed to suit the hindquarters of all manner of different guests. The air smelled old and forgotten like an attic. Unappealing grub-like snacks were laid out on a small table beside the mirror. A flat monitor on one of the other walls showed a live feed from the inside of the Ministerium.
“Well, I think that was a little more than any of us bargained for,” said Minister Keeto, locking the door behind them. Her previously pale-blue face had turned a darker grey colour, as if a storm cloud was passing through it.
“What happens now?” asked Jack.
“The Grand Ministers retire to a private chamber and vote on how to proceed,” she explained. “Usually everybody in the council gets to cast a vote, but not with topics as urgent as this. There isn’t time, as I’m sure you can appreciate. Situations like these are why we elect the Grand Ministers in the first place.”
“Surely there’s nothing to discuss?” Jack paced back and forth. “They know Everett harvested the star and what he plans to do with it. They have to do something about it now.”
Klik picked up one of the dry grubs from the snack bowl beside the mirror, raised it to her engineering mask, gave it a sniff, and promptly dropped it back into the bowl with a grimace.
“We shall see.” Keeto’s mind seemed elsewhere. “There are a lot of stubborn minds shared between those Grand Ministers. Nothing gets decided until it goes through proper deliberation, and you gave them a lot to talk about.”
“Well, how long does that take?” asked Klik.
“Usually?” The sound of Klik’s voice seemed to get Keeto’s attention. “A couple of hours. Longer, sometimes. But you never know – they might be a little bit quicker today, all things considered.”
She checked her data pad, nodded, and stuffed it back into the pocket of her robe.
“Okay. Stay here, do you understand? Somebody will come along if the council needs to hear from you. If not, you’ll be able to watch them announce their decision from here.”
She pointed at the monitor. Jack looked from her to the screen and back again.
“You’re leaving? Now?”
“I’m on the clock, Jack.” She shrugged. “I wish I wasn’t, but there are a hundred other jobs that need doing… not to mention a whole star system’s population that needs urgent rescuing and relocating, in case you forgot.”
“But the Mansa—”
Minister Keeto took Jack’s hands in her own.
“You’ve gone through a lot, Jack. I think you’ll survive being left in a room on your own for a little while. And besides,” she added with a laugh, “you’ve still got your bodyguard.”
Jack looked across at Klik, who was staring at herself in the mirror. He sighed and nodded.
“You’ll be fine,” Keeto repeated as she unlocked the door. “And thank you for speaking today. It was the right thing to do. You should be proud of yourself, whatever the Grand Ministers decide.”
“Thanks. Will we see you again?”
Keeto flashed him that friendly smile of hers.
“Oh, I should think so.” She gestured to the building as a whole. “After all, you know where to find me!”
She left. Jack slumped into the nearest chair, exhausted.
“In this place? Fat chance of that happening.”
Despite being only a millimetre thick, the fidelity of the monitor’s screen looked higher resolution than real life. Not that there was anything interesting to watch on it. It only showed a real-time feed of the Ministerium, which even now was still being emptied of its previous delegates. They looked like ants streaming out of a nest.
Jack closed his eyes and decided to get some rest.
“Can I take the mask off now?”
He groggily lifted one eyelid in Klik’s direction. She was stood above his chair with her hands on her hips, looking like a raider about to stab him in his sleep.
“Is that a good idea?” He closed his eye again. “You never know who might be watching.”
He heard Klik’s cloak rustle and imagined she was gesturing around at the room is disbelief.
“Do you see any cameras? Come on. I’ve been wearing this thing for, like, fourteen hours now. It stinks.”
Jack sighed but kept his eyes closed.
“Fine. But keep your hood up and the mask within grabbing distance, just in case.”
Klik let out a whoop. He heard the click-clacking of her mandibles flexing a second later.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Good. I’m going to try and get some shut-eye. Wake me up when the Grand Ministers come out to deliver their statement, will you?”
Despite his anxiety regarding both the council’s verdict and the Mansa’s inevitable response to his rather public spilling of secrets, Jack quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Jack was woken by a thunderous knock on the door.
“Keeto?” He staggered up from his chair and winced at the pounding sensation in his temples. “Minister Keeto, is that you?”
There came no answer. He wondered if the room was soundproofed from the inside. Aside from the knocking, he sure couldn’t hear much outside of it.
“Klik!” She was lying curled up on the floor in the corner of the room, her mask propped up on a chair beside her. “Get up and for God’s sake, get yourself ready!”
Klik jerked awake, looking this way and that like a cat caught from behind. She snatched up her mask and hurriedly reattached it as Jack made his way towards the door.
There was no handle. There was, however, a touchpad beside the door, and whilst Jack didn’t have the access-all-areas data pad Minister Keeto possessed, he did have a pair of big, green arrows on the screen symbolising OPEN. He gave it a groggy tap and the door slid aside.
A boulder of a creature stood in the doorway. It wasn’t human, of course – the various horns and tusks around its skull made that perfectly clear – but its eyes were familiar enough that Jack knew which part of the alien’s face he was supposed to be addressing. The entirety of its bald head was covered in pock-marks like asteroid craters. It was dressed in the same formal Ministry robe as pretty much everyone else in the building.
“Jack Bishop, yes?”
&nb
sp; “Erm… yep.”
“Good.” The troll-creature pushed past Jack and entered the room. “Got sent to collect you. Ministry folk want a word. Who’s this?”
“Klak,” said Klik, backing into the corner.
“Huh.” The minister shrugged its mountainous shoulders. “Nobody said there was anyone else. Don’t matter.”
Apparently the bar for entry into the Ministerium of Cultured Planets wasn’t very high – this minister seemed to be playing with a few cards short of a full deck. Jack supposed that’s why they’d been chosen for such a simple errand in the first place.
“Okay,” said Jack, cautiously. He crossed the room to where Klik stood. It suddenly seemed a lot smaller with their new guest in it. “Where are we going?”
“No we – just you. Friend stays here. Them’s the orders.”
Jack looked at Klik, whose expressionless mask looked back at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking… until she shrugged.
“Go on,” she said. “They probably just want to clarify a few points before they make their announcement. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine watching it all from here.”
Jack didn’t like the idea of the two of them being split up, not least because he didn’t trust himself – or this ogre – to find his way back to this room again. But he was under the Ministry’s roof, so he guessed he had to do as they asked. They were the law, after all.
“Let’s go, then. Do you know what they want to talk to me about?”
His escort shook its head and ushered Jack back towards the door. It didn’t need to push Jack – the brutish alien’s sheer physical presence was ample encouragement in itself.
“Come on… you must have heard something.” Jack knotted his fingers together. His stomach developed a fresh cramp. “Did the Mansa Grand Minister mention anything about punishing me? Or did they only discuss Proxima Delta?”
“Proxima Delta?” The minister barked a low laugh. “Sounds like one of them girls over at Skimpy’s joint. What they want her for?”
Jack may have let that comment go. His escort was hardly the sharpest tool in the shed, and it wasn’t as if strip joints were illegal on Kapamentis. After all, even Minister Keeto hid a mild gambling addiction.
But it was that comment which made Jack cast a more scrutinising glance in the minister’s direction and notice a charred spot hidden in the folds of its robe. This seemed odd, given how immaculate everybody else’s uniform seemed to be. But as the alien walked and the robe under its arm shifted, Jack realised it wasn’t a spot but a hole… a burned hole caused, he suspected from personal experience, by a plasma bolt.
The folds of its robe flapped again, and this time Jack got a quick glimpse of Kevlar-style body armour underneath. He was pretty sure that wasn’t standard Ministry issue.
Jack stopped dead a foot from the door. A sub-zero shiver ran down his spine.
“You’re not from the Ministry, are you?”
The mountainous creature half-sighed, half-grunted.
“Sorry, kid. It’s nothin’ personal. Just doin’ what I’ve been paid for.”
The troll swung a fist like a battering ram and punched Jack clean off his feet. Jack flew across the room and plunged into the mirror-wall. He collapsed to the floor in a shower of broken glass.
“Wanted to do this somewhere else,” the walking boulder grumbled to itself. “Somewhere obvious. Now I’ll have to cause a ruckus so they find your body.”
“Find my body?” Jack tried to scramble to his feet but slipped on the carpet of glass. Even with Tuner’s shock-absorbant suit, the wind had been knocked out of him. Possibly a couple of ribs, too. “Jesus!”
Klik ran to the door to get help. Unfortunately, the assassin still occupied most of the room. It caught her on the backhand as it swung its fist back in the opposite direction. Klik crashed into one of the chairs with an audible crack and didn’t get back up.
“Wait!” Jack scrambled backwards, wincing as a shard of glass cut into the palm of his hand. “Who paid you to do this?”
“What’s it matter?” The troll creature cracked its considerable knuckles. “Makes less difference to you than anyone else. You’ll be the one who’s dead.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” said Jack, grabbing the biggest piece of glass he could find and brandishing it in front of him like a dagger.
The assassin laughed and reached down the back of its robe. It pulled out a rifle and clicked off the safety catch.
“Don’t worry,” it grunted rather innocently, “I’ll make it quick.”
The assassin was just readying its rifle’s sights when Klik screamed and leapt onto its back. It let out a groan of surprise and tried to reach up and grab her, but she was too small and nimble for its sluggish hands. In spite of her lightweight frame, the fabric of its robe began to tear.
The assassin roared in frustration and tried to fire at Jack regardless. Klik punched it on the back of the head just as it went to pull the trigger. This did little except give Jack a moment to roll out of the way. The plasma bolt left a smoking black patch on the stone floor exactly where he’d been sat a second earlier.
He tried to rush forwards and stab the assassin with the shard of glass in his hand – which was cutting through the skin of his own, but Jack was far too numb from adrenaline to notice – but the colossal alien simply booted him back against the shattered wall and took aim again.
Klik raised her left forearm, extended the bony blade hidden within, and plunged it through the assassin’s back. The creature was much too large for the blade to pierce through the other side of its chest, but it looked as if she’d aimed for where its heart should be.
Yet instead of dying, it let out an agonised scream and reverted to flailing behind its back to get the insect off.
Jack climbed back to his feet again. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe. He didn’t know if he had it in him to roll out the way of another gunshot, but he staggered towards their assailant all the same.
Noticing Jack’s slow advance, the assassin raised the butt of its rifle threateningly… and then charged backwards into the wall instead, pinning Klik between itself and the crimson paintwork. She let out an anguished shriek.
The sound of her pain gave Jack a new surge of energy. He lunged forward and stabbed the shard of glass into the hitman’s knee. The monster’s leathery skin was even more hardened than he expected, and its sharpest tip snapped off before the rest of the makeshift blade could cut through.
The assassin howled in pain and rage. It instinctively bent forwards to pull the shard out, giving Klik a moment to gasp for breath. She took the opportunity to drive her other forearm blade deep into the right side of the troll’s back.
This time she got something. The monster jolted upright, an expression of paralysed surprise across its bestial face… and then collapsed forward like a mighty felled oak.
Jack booted the rifle away, then gave the assassin’s body the same treatment. It certainly seemed dead. Blood was bubbling up from the two punctures in its back.
The creature’s robe had risen as it hit the floor to reveal a belt of knives and ammunition around its waist. One item in particular caught Jack’s eye – a metal fob hanging from a silver chain.
It was a bounty chip… and definitely not the poker kind. Jack quietly pocketed it.
“Do you remember what I said back on the Adeona when we were in orbit above Krett?” Klik took off her mask again and spat out a string of phlegmy blue blood. “There’s nowhere in the galaxy the Mansa won’t find you.”
Jack winced and clutched at his side as he limped over to the door.
“Yeah. I can’t wait for this to become a regular occurrence.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, wiping her mouth clear.
“To tell someone we have a dead hitman in our room,” he replied as the door hissed open. “And to ask the council a few questions of my own.”
10
Everybody Lies
Half a dozen people crowded around the body, and twice as many more tried to peer in through the open door. One of the ministers’ assistants was doing his best to block their view.
“This is beyond reprehensible,” muttered the Oortilian Grand Minister, whose name Jack now knew to be Heram. “And to dare conduct such business on Ministerium grounds…”
Jack and Klik looked worse for wear on the other side of the corpse. Jack had collapsed into one of the chairs as soon as he managed to flag a minister down. He was afraid of standing again in case one of his ribs didn’t get up with him. Klik, on the other hand, had barely moved since killing the assassin. She stood beside Jack, her head bowed and face hidden, her tatty cloak drenched in their assailant’s blood, not looking the slightest bit comfortable – physically or socially.
The woman with the black-tubed breathing apparatus – Grand Minister Zsal, apparently – raised one of her four metal arms to where her ear should have been, then solemnly nodded.
“They found Minister Kyre dead in his apartment. Poor guy. The assassin must have killed him for his uniform.” She shook her head. There was a hiss as more gas flowed into her mask. “To have known Kyre would be the right size, either the killer had been planning this for weeks…”
“Or somebody on the inside told the killer what to do,” groaned Jack. “Given that I’ve barely been here five minutes and even I didn’t know I was coming until yesterday, I rather think it was the latter.”
“Who in the Ministry would ever do that?” asked a small, bug-like alien scribbling notes and taking pictures of the body.
Jack raised his eyebrows and glared at the only other person in the room.
“Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
Everybody turned to look at Grand Minister Philo Na Ji, the minister for Paryx and the Mansa Empire. His fleshy mouth-tendrils quivered with indignation.
“You can’t be serious,” he blustered. “Why in the galaxy would you think I would do such a thing?”
A Dark Horizon (Final Dawn, Book 3) Page 7
