The boss’s room was across from mine, and I was horrified to see the lock had been blasted away somehow, leaving a ragged hole bigger than my head. It was dark inside the room, filled with thunderous crashings and the sound of fragile things being broken. Without a second’s pause, I plunged in and was greeted by the terrifying sight of Eichra Oren, pinned to the wreckage-littered floor by a sapient being I didn’t recognize, all teeth, claws, growls, and bristling hair.
Reeking of fear, anger, and concentrated hatred, it lowered its drooling jaws toward the helpless man’s face, ready to tear half of it away. I sprang, striking a sort of hump, high on the creature’s ridged and hair-crested back, fastening my own teeth deep into its flesh. It shrieked, trying to twist its jaws toward me, but Eichra Oren touched it with deceptive gentleness on the throat, and then just beneath one ear.
As the weight came off him, Eichra Oren sprang to his feet.
Instead of collapsing, as we’d both expected, it rose to its rear limbs, screamed into Eichra Oren’s face, and lunged toward him again. With my weight swinging from its back, it was caught off balance when the boss reached in and touched it where the collarbones and sternum came together. It pitched backward—I just avoided being crushed by letting go and leaping away—and fell, still as death, with all four limbs in the air, exactly like a dead bug, although it was thoroughly mammalian.
“Watch it, Sam, it isn’t dead and may be playing possum.” I backed away another couple of steps, sniffed the air and listened. I could hear its heart beating, slow and steady, and I was pretty sure it was unconscious.
By this time, the beautiful Marianne was rerobed and standing in Eichra Oren’s doorway with a highly competent-looking fusion blaster in one hand. I had no idea where she’d been carrying it. The effect was spoiled a little—but only a little—by the fact that her hair was a delightful mess and she hadn’t bothered to put her shoes back on.
“I’ve called hotel security,” she told us. “They were already on the way. Apparently that thing over there makes a lot of noise.” She pointed toward an object lying on the floor near the baseboards. It looked to me as if it had flown across the room—probably kicked from the creature’s hand—and bounced off the wall, leaving a deep dent.
I went over to examine it, and smelled chemical propellant. The lights were back on and I could see foot-wide craters in the walls, and even bigger holes taken out of the formerly comfortable furniture. “Ballistic Innovations,” I read the name engraved on the receiver. “Four millimeter SuperMagnum. About eighteen calibers. I think it’s a firearm.”
It was a hybrid. They were considered quaint these days, but there were still some of them in circulation. My implant said seventy-round magazine capacity, projectile speed approaching ten thousand feet per second, thanks to velocity-boosting magnetic coils wrapped around the longish barrel. Absolutely devastating in living flesh, against heavy fur, on reptilian hide, armored or unarmored, and on every variety of chiton. I doubt that even Misterthoggosh’s shell would have stopped one.
By that time, several entities in hotel livery had arrived and were trying to shoo us out of the room. “I don’t think so,” Eichra Oren told them, displaying his sword. I suddenly realized that he was naked.
I heard Marianne say, “Oh, my.” She’d noticed too.
One of the guys took her by an arm. “Not her,” I said. “She’s my bodyguard.”
She smiled. “You’re sweet, Sam, but really I do have to be going. Thank you for a wonderful—and, as it turned out, very exciting—evening.” She knelt and put her face on mine. “Anytime you’re in town, okay?”
Compliments of Misterthoggosh? It would have been rude to send her away.
“Okay, kid. And you’re no dud, yourself.” As she left, I turned to Eichra Oren, who’d started binding his guest’s arms and legs together—Marianne and I hadn’t gotten that far—using restraints borrowed from Security. “Now, Boss, do you have any idea at all what this thing is?”
Wrapping his tunic around himself and belting on his sword, he considered it for a moment. “Hyenoid, I think. Large. Not naturally sapient.”
“Like me.” I was well aware I had been manufactured. I knew of no doggy civilizations anywhere in alternity, maybe because we canines had already evolved as far as we needed to and couldn’t be improved on. For that matter, I’ve never heard of any cockroach civilizations, either.
“All right, Sam, like you. I don’t think he was ever anybody’s symbiote.”
“You’ve got that right, monkey-boy, I never was anybody’s symbiote!” That had come by implant. Eichra Oren had wrapped several of those restraints around the creature’s massive, lethally toothed jaws. “What’re you gonna do now, cut my head off with that sword of yours?”
Eichra Oren shrugged. “That depends. Maybe we’ll just remove your implants and let you go back to being the animal you started out to be.”
It laughed, one of the most evil sounds I’ve ever experienced. “How do you know that I’m an animal, humanoid? Maybe that isn’t where I really live. Maybe I’m inside these implants you’re threatening to remove.”
Forge of the Elders, I thought to myself, even this murderous thug wonders about the true nature of his identity. Does that make him unexpectedly thoughtful, or me just a less intelligent doggy than I’d realized?
“If you want to find out,” I told the thing on the floor, “I’m all for it. I get to watch and maybe I’ll learn something I’ve always wanted—”
“Enough, Sam,” Eichra Oren interrupted me. “Tell us a few things, killer, and we may not have to conduct Sam’s experiment on you after all.”
Sure,” said the thing. “What have I got to lose? You tell me what you want to know. I am a hyenoid, created as a kind of watchdog for a security company on the eastern coast of the Great Continent. I soon emancipated myself, at the eternal expense of those who thought they owned me—every slave has a natural right to kill his master—came here to the western coast, and set myself up in the business I know best.”
“Which is killing people,” Eichra Oren said.
“Which is doing anything somebody is willing to pay me to do—anything, exactly like that little whore who just left doggy-boy, here.”
I could see the pulse beating in the helpless creature’s throat, and suffered an almost irresistible urge to remove it, with my fangs. This monster hurt people for money. Girls like Marianne bring them joy.
“I happen to be a duly certified p’Nan debt assessor,” Eichra Oren announced, addressing the hotel security men. But this thing assaulted me and that makes me party to a dispute. Does this establishment have a debt assessor of its own, or will it be necessary for me to find one?”
“Will that be necessary?” the hyenoid asked. “I’ll tell you all that I know about what just happened. I am more than willing to pay monetary damages to the hotel and make some settlement with you, as well.”
Well, that’s boring, I thought. I’d been hoping to see a duel or something. The thing looked kind of ridiculous, lying there on its back with its feet in the air and plastic bands wrapped around its muzzle, but I couldn’t think of any viable alternative to listening patiently.
“I live on the Western Island in the Lesser Ocean, the one that’s always green, in a town famous the world over for distilling alcohol from grain—none of that kelpy slop, mind you—and aging it in charred oaken barrels. ‘Water of Life’, people call it in a dozen languages.”
There were those who would argue the island next door produced better whiskey, but it was scientific question requiring continuous experimentation.
“In that town,” the hyenoid went on, “I’m just a neighbor. I’m as kind as I know how to be with children and elderly beings. I buy my groceries, visit the tavern, listen to the people sing in the park on Tenday. But in certain circles around the globe, it’s well known what I do, as well as how to go about engaging my services without exposing oneself.”
There couldn’t be more tha
n three or four killers-for-hire on the entire planet. The Elders knew how to run a peaceful and productive society without limiting anybody’s freedom. One method that worked was that, in a culture of armed individuals, assassination was a dangerous profession.
Eichra Oren nodded, urging the creature onward. “Three mornings ago, I opened my front door to discover a fat package containing the requisite number of platinum coins, and a flattie of the intended recipient of my attentions. Nothing else. It was necessary to employ a computer—I didn’t want the query associated with my implant—and a facial recognition program to find out who my mark was. Let me tell you, I wasn’t a bit happy when it turned out to be a famous p’Nan debt assessor.”
Impervious to flattery, Eichra Oren asked, “Did you retain the envelope?” I could see happy little diagrams of DNA dancing in his head.
“No,” the assassin answered. “I shredded and burned it. Standard professional practice. I don’t have the original coins, either. I exchanged them for silver and gold, not all of them in the same place.”
“And the flattie?
“Committed to implant memory and destroyed with the envelope.”
“Very well,” Eichra Oren stood over the beast and drew his sword, its edges gleaming as it left the scabbard. “This is what’s going to happen.”
“You drive, Sam,” said Eichra Oren. “I have thinking to do.”
“You got it, Boss.” I took over the controls. “Anything I can help with?” I wondered if the way he’d handled the hyenoid wasn’t bothering him.
He shook his head. “I’ll let you know.”
He settled in his seat, put fingertips to forehead, and closed his eyes. I negotiated with the veek—the fact is, it mostly drove itself—and we were off. Five hundred miles at three hundred miles per hour should get us home from Lanternlight in an hour and forty minutes. I had long since made it a practice never to listen to music or to watch video, even via implant, while the Boss was concentrating like this. As the miles whisked by outside, with nothing better to do, I contemplated my boss’s sword where it stood, propped against his knee. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had never given it a name. He liked to think it was just a tool—albeit a very special one—nothing more.
There were those, our recent would-be assassin for one, who might have believed differently, if they were still capable of believing anything.
As well as being a conspicuous insignia of office, recognized everywhere on the planet, the p’Nan debt assessor’s sword has to be supremely utilitarian, to do what it does swiftly and efficiently, without inflicting pain which has no part at all in the restitution process.
There isn’t any rule in nautiloid society against anyone carrying a sword (or any other weapon), but large edged weapons are thoroughly antiquated—and the good ones moderately expensive—compared to other weapons, so that such a social transgression practically never happens.
Like every p’Nan debt assessor ending his novitiate, Eichra Oren had designed his own sword and made it with his own hands. There are as many schools of thought on the subject of what makes a good sword as there are p’Nan novices. His was straight, rather than curved, twenty-five inches long from its needle-sharp tip to the end of its pommel.
Signed and dated on one side of the ricasso by the fledgling debt assessor, and on the other by a Master of p’Na, in the name of the ancient school of p’Na, the blade itself was nineteen inches long, an inch and three quarters at its widest, and a quarter at its thickest, near the hilt. It was said to be incapable of rusting, but Eichra Oren attended to it almost daily, and it was never given a chance to rust. There is nothing that will corrode a blade like blood, mammalian or otherwise.
Fashioned of iron, chromium, significant traces of other elements, and shards of the sword of Elyodruthrananocris, ceremonially broken on the day he’d died, the finished billet of alloy had been heated white hot, hand-beaten into an approximate shape, quenched in liquid helium, and drawn back in an induction oven. It had then been symmetrically ground double-edged, with a subtly narrowed “waist” about a hand’s width forward of the crossguard, and finally polished between opposing antigravity fields until its surface was compacted and it shone like a mirror.
The edges were said to be but a single molecule thick.
The amply cross-guarded—and circumferentially ridged—handle, as well as the chestnut-shaped pommel, were all of a single piece, cast tungsten through and through (except at the very end, where the tang of the blade poked through and had been peened or swaged into place). It made the hilt surprisingly heavy, the blade extremely quick, with minimal decoration and a stippled gripping surface of ion-implanted gold.
Eichra Oren often claimed that he never kept a count of how many lives he’d taken with his sword, but I’m sure that someone, somewhere, did. I knew of one or two myself where some other weapon had proven necessary.
As we entered sagebrush country and could tell the Inland Sea was near, the boss seemed finally to come back to life. “Don’t settle in when we get home, Sam. We’re going on a trip as soon as I can arrange it.”
“Back to Lanternlight, I hope. I like Lanternlight.”
He snorted. “You like the food there—”
I nodded. “And the females.”
“And the females. But you like the food and females everywhere, Sam, although I doubt you’ll have time to appreciate them where we’re going.”
“How sad. And that’s where?” He loved to keep me hanging like this.
“People aren’t always cooperative. Those in business will protect the privacy, if not of their customers then of their associates. I had to look for reasons—incentives—to trust the information I was given.”
I had no idea where he was headed, but he was making good time.
“I have had a feeling all along, Sam, that Meerltchirt’s partner was right, that he’s made his way somehow to the Northwest Continent. I can’t say why—because his family have extensive land holdings there, because that’s where I would flee, were I compelled to; it’s a good place to get lost—but I trust my unconscious mind and felt the intuition was worth looking into. I haven’t been entirely forthcoming with you, my friend, because I had nothing objective to share with you. I was more than a little chagrined: all I had were these baseless speculations.”
“Hey, Boss, I can baselessly speculate with the best of ’em.”
“I rest my case. All this time on the road, I’ve been making calls. Insurance companies proved most helpful. It develops that more than a thousand aircraft departed our extension of the Great Continent the day our client’s fiancé vanished, bound for the Northwest Continent. Only a few hundred bore spiders, fewer than a dozen were the correct species, and only four of those were male. Only one carried a lone male.”
I felt my ears perk. It’s a reflex and I hate it. “So we’ve got him?”
“You know better than that. He might never have left. He might have gone to the Southwest Continent, the Island Continent, the other end of this one. He might have gone to the South Pole, though coldbloods seldom prosper there. What we have is a promising lead that we will follow.”
“To the Northwest Continent?”
“To the Northwest Continent.”
“Hooray!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Liberty
THE FLIGHT ACROSS THE LESSER OCEAN TO THE NORTHWEST Continent hardly took any time at all. Misterthoggosh had agreed to lend us a suborbital flyer which we climbed aboard on the grounds of his seaside estate.
“This craft has been designed for mammalian use,” he’d told us. “My personal flyer is a bit more ponderous, as it must be filled with water, and at the same time withstand both high altitude and deep sea use.” I’d heard that technology was being developed to keep aquatic pilots and passengers misted like a houseplant, saving tons of water weight.
We’d thanked him and went out to look our noble steed over where she sat casually on the driveway on extended legs. The littl
e vessel was shaped, basically, like a doughnut with a floor across the bottom of the hole, and was powered by an antimatter minireactor. She used antigravity for both lift and propulsion. A transparent dome covered the entire top half of the aerocraft from rim to rim. She had plenty of headroom and best of all, she was bright apple-red with a white stripe.
“See?” said the boss. “I told you so.”
“That we have flying saucers? She looks more like a flying bagel, Boss.”
Why did I call her “she”? It could be a simple matter of respect: for uncounted thousands of years, sailors, aviators, and spacemen, who have risked their lives and everything they had in these contrivances, have seen their ships as beautiful ladies, and they’ve loved them. It’s certainly no insult to women, as perfect idiots sometimes claim—on the contrary. Or it could just be that the AI in this particular craft thought of herself as female and preferred to be addressed that way.
In any event, she opened exactly the same kind of door Eichra Oren’s veek has, lowering a short flight of courtesy steps. We climbed aboard. Briefly, as she sealed up, she and the boss debated possible destinations on the Northwest Continent. Then she began a sprightly ascent on powerful antigravs, moving westward almost as quickly as she rose. I knew she was also talking to other flyers in the air between here and wherever we were going, making sure our flightpaths didn’t converge, which would have been messy and unfortunate, to say the least.
As the Inland Sea vanished behind us, a mountain range rose before us before giving way to the Lesser Ocean which was lesser than the Greater Ocean only by comparison. I felt myself pressed into the seat by acceleration, not particularly hard, and by the time I had become comfortable with it, we were out over the shining water and so high it was easy to see the curvature of the planet below us. I knew the vehicle was capable of achieving orbit, but she wouldn’t be doing that today.
“And the world,” I proclaimed, “is round.”
Blade of p’Na Page 19
