The Machiavelli Interface

by Steve Perry

  The right way for Massey to do it would be to examine each room on the ship physically; Dirisha didn't think he had enough people to do that before they reached the next port. That he wanted her alive was obvious; otherwise, she'd already be dead. She needed two days. And in two days, she had to figure a way off the ship.

  She found a public fresher, entered a stall, and lit the privacy diode. She sat on the bidet and began to read the passenger manifest.

  Eighteen

  WALL WAS IN HIS AIRCOACH traveling to Manchester. He had made his choice, and he wanted to speak to the parents personally, to assure them of how well their daughter would be treated. There would be no objections from them, he was certain. It was not every girl who had personal instruction from the most powerful man in the galaxy. Upper-middle-class parents would kill for the right to say as much to their friends: "Shelly? Why, she is in Australia at the Prep, didn't I mention that? Yes, Marcus Wall deemed her worthy of a full scholarship. Well, of course I call him Marcus. We're friends, after all. Yes, I spoke to him just the other day, and he is so pleased with Shelly's progress. So pleased."

  How easy it was to despise them, Wall thought.

  There was an admiring throng at the pad, and Wall smiled and waved to them from behind his densecris shield and moving wedge of bodyguards.

  Holocameras caught the carefully staged show of respect, to repeat it on newsfax casts. With the troubles on the out worlds, it paid to keep reminding everybody how normal things were where it really counted. Wall smiled and waved.

  Amidst the admiratory walls, there came a word that killed Wall's smile and caused him to stop as though he had hit a thick post.

  "Tavee! Hey, Tavee!"

  Wall spun, his robe flaring, and frantically searched for the source of the voice.

  Thirty meters away, standing near the entrance to the. underground tube, stood Artemis. The same youthful man Wall had seen in the holoproj of Hawaii.

  Before Wall could speak, the man turned and walked calmly into the tube's entrance, out of sight.

  "That man!" Wall yelled. "Get him!"

  "Where, my lord?" the nearest bodyguard said, drawing his weapon.

  "There, at the tube! He just went in!"

  Half a dozen guards sprinted for the tube's entrance. Wall stood as if transfixed, waiting.

  Five minutes later, the guards were back. Without the man Wall had seen.

  Wall turned and went back to his aircoach. "My visit here is cancelled," he said.

  Inside the coach, Wall kept shaking his head. It was no coincidence. There were only two explanations he could think of, and neither brought him any joy. Either he was mad, and being haunted by the shade of a man dead fifty years, or somebody was privy to knowledge to which they could not possibly have access. Not possibly. He could discount the first explanation, he was sure. And who could know about Artemis?

  That the first time he had seen the facsimile had been while viewing a recording of Khadaji's hideout on Hawaii was not lost on Wall. There was no way, and yet the man knew!

  Even protected by the thick walls of his coach, Wall suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable, as much so as when he had faced Khadaji personally in this same enclosure only a few weeks before.

  Marcus Jefferson Wall, the most powerful man in the galaxy, rode in the lap of luxury, dry-mouthed and afraid.

  * * *

  Khadaji moved through the dark, a part of the shadows. Aside from his spetsdöds, he was armed with his martial skills, not the least of which was a practiced ninj-ability to blend into almost any background. That alone would have shielded him from most human eyes; the class-one shiftsuit he wore, a miracle of viral electronics capable of focus matching the nearest background within a quarter second, hid him from any other organic notice. A confounder nestled against his belt shrouded him from electronic eyes and ears. It would take a very good guard indeed to spot Khadaji, and where he was going, the guards were apt to be no more than competent.

  Where he was going was the hangar in which Wall's personal aircoach was housed.

  The hangar would be guarded, of course, but not heavily. Wall was not in the vehicle, and it was routinely inspected before each use for possible sabotage, inspected very carefully, especially since the "assassination" attempt in Brisbane. No matter. Khadaji was not after Wall; he merely wanted to make a point.

  What had worked for entering a not-too-secure warehouse on Greaves should also work on Earth. The essential ingredient was rain, which was due to start falling in a few minutes. Soldiers hated rain and usually avoided standing in it, if they could. That would buy him access to the building's roof.

  On Greaves, he had deliberately tripped inside alarms of a warehouse several times until the system had been shut down by angry troopers. Once that was done, the inside of the building was easy. Through the roof, in and out, and he was gone.

  Earth soldiers were no less cooperative than those on Greaves. It took an hour, but after six false alarms, the inside system bioelectrics were turned off.

  Khadaji used a wire ladder to reach the floor. He attached the shaped-charge to the aircoach, used a buzzpoint to etch a message onto the hatch of Wall's salon, and left.

  A kilometer away, Khadaji stopped, part of the night. He thumbed the transmitter into life. The roof of the hangar blew out in a bright flash, followed a couple of seconds later by the sound of the explosion. The charge would have blown the coach in two, leaving the message on the hatch intact for Wall's inspection.

  Khadaji laughed softly, flattened himself against a corrugated green plastic wall as four quads of troopers went running past, toward the noise. When the soldiers were gone, he had a brief moment of nostalgia for the days of guerrilla activity on Greaves, when it had been one against all.

  The Shamba Scum had struck again....

  * * *

  Dirisha had found the room she needed. It was occupied by two women and a man, listed as a group marriage from the wheelworld of Malgranda Luno, circling Farbis, in the Bruna System. One of the women was dark-skinned and fairly large, so that if she were seen entering the room, Dirisha might not be wondered about by a casual viewer. It was the best choice, under the circumstances. If Massey did start a room search, he was likely to concentrate on those rooms with single occupants first. Controlling three people for any amount of time would be difficult at best. At least she hoped Massey would see it that way.

  She stopped briefly at a pub and obtained two weeks' supply of a high-range soporific; her last public appearance for a while, she hoped. Then she went to cabin 2322.

  A thin, spindly man answered the door. He was a Farbisian, to judge from his upswept hair style and Dirisha's first thought was to wonder how he managed to handle two women. Old pattern of thinking, she corrected herself mentally. Maybe they handled each other and he watched. Or maybe he had a wart....

  "Yes?"

  "Maintenance sent me," Dirisha said. 'To fix the drink dispense."

  "I wasn't aware it was malfunctioning."

  "That's why I'm the tech and you're not," Dirisha said.

  "How droll. Paliva, Orsal, there's a technical person here. Try and conduct yourselves accordingly."

  The two women were playing some kind of card game on the room's single, large bed. The larger woman—Paliva, Dirisha knew—wore a thin silk wrap; Orsal was nude. Both glanced up at Dirisha, then went back to their game. In a moment, the man, Ledo, joined them.

  Dirisha went to the dispense and began fiddling with it. She removed the cover, then hid the unit from the three with her body. She took five of the high-range sops, each a single crystal the size of a pinhead, and dropped them into one of the plastic glasses next to the dispense. She coded the unit to produce a thin stream of vintage red wine and watched the crystals fizz and dissolve as the wine washed over them. She then divided the wine into three portions, each in a separate glass.

  "Excuse me," Dirisha said to the trio on the bed. "I need your assistance. If you would please taste this
wine, to see if the problem with the dispense has been corrected?" She extended the glasses.

  "Tastes fine to me," Ledo said. "A bit on the tart side, but ship wine is always lacking something."

  Paliva shrugged as she downed the wine. "I'm a beer fan myself. It all tastes sour to me."

  Orsal said, "It needs more aging, but I don't suppose the dispense can help that."

  Dirisha smiled, and thanked them. She covered the perfectly fine dispense unit and left.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was back. She had the entry code to the door, so getting in was no problem. The triad lay peacefully sleeping on the bed, the cards scattered where they had fallen.

  Well. She had a place to hide. The four of them could live on liquids easily enough for two days; some of the ship's selections were quite nourishing. The group marriagees would sleep most of the time, or be so out of it they wouldn't know what was going on.

  Dirisha sat on the stuffed chair close to the bed and thought about her next move. This was all going to be wasted effort if she couldn't come up with a way to leave the ship when it stopped.

  The obvious ways were the most dangerous, for they would be just as obvious to Massey and his troops. Walking to the shuttle would be foolhardy; trying to steal an escape pod or lighter was out, since she was certain they'd be guarded, and probably rigged to new start codes. Hiding in cargo or luggage was possible, but likely there was some procedure for inspection, and probably not all that much leaving the ship at the next juncture. Disguise was a possibility. Hiding in the solid waste might be another. Nothing seemed particularly appealing.

  What would Khadaji do in this situation? In his teachings while disguised as Pen, he had always stressed looking at all parts of a problem, of sometimes picking the obvious, but sometimes finding a section of the circle no one would suspect. Come on, Dirisha, think. You've got to get off the ship—

  Wait. There was something there.... Dirisha grinned. Maybe she didn't have to get off the ship, not if she could somehow convince Massey and his thugs that she had gotten off! If they thought she was gone, they'd go after her.

  Maybe not all of them, but if she could throw enough of them off her track, she could leave at the next stop, another two days beyond. It would certainly be a lot easier then. Yeah. That'd do it. She might be able to pull it off. There was a computer console in the room, and she had the codes for ship-to-port communication. A local Confed agent could spot her scuttling for safety at the port and give Massey a call. He'd have to go after her, especially if there was a positive identification. Yeah. The timing would have to be close, just as the ship was ready to leave, but she had the schedules for that, too.

  Thanks, Emile, wherever you are.

  Nineteen

  AT DUSK on a balmy September evening the Kookaburra Beacon finally died.

  Wall regarded the news with a feeling just to the left of panic. He sat in his organomechanical chair and listened to the vapid newsfaxer's voiceover as the unblinking eye of the camera focused on the dead beacon. Darkness had fallen, and for the first time in seventy-seven years, the night was unhindered by the Miracle of Birdsville.

  Wall knew the story well enough. It had been the subject of reports for at least sixty years, long since leaving the party chatter of Earth to make the rounds of bored gatherings around the civilized galaxy.

  The Kookaburra Beacon was nothing more than a small sign lamp that had been wired into place over a poster board on the back wall of a pub in central Australia, the old state of Queensland. It was a small bulb, twenty-five watts, tungsten-alloy element in vacuum, surrounded by clear glass. The owner of the Kookaburra Public House had set the bulb in a cheap socket and tied it directly to a DC line running to the pub's main battery. It was easier just to let the porky thing run, don'tcha know, than to wire in a bleedin' switch. He could, he thought at the time, just unscrew the bulb when it burned out and toss it a damnsight easier than fiddlin' alia time with a control.

  He, lived long enough to see his grandsons still waiting for the bulb to go nova. .

  There might have been some doubt that the bulb was the same, but during the same afternoon he'd installed the bulletin board, the owner and operator of Birdsville's largest rec-chem facility had been doing some touch-up painting on the wall above it. He'd spilled a long dribble of Sher-man's Everlast Exterior—guaranteed for a hundred years exposure to desert sunlight—and the pale blue paint had landed on the bulb and its socket.

  Three quarters of a century later, the paint had faded some, but it was still there in an unbroken line across the socket and bulb.

  After ten years, the beacon was local curiosity.

  After twenty years, tourists would drop by to see the technological wonder.

  After fifty years, legends had been thickly formed about the beacon. Some were quite fanciful and had religious overtones. A densecris cover had been put up, to keep some fanatic from tossing a rock at the beacon. Armed guards stood watch round the clock. Over a hundred thousand tourists a year came to gawk at the little lamp. Expert scientists had examined the bulb, wire, battery, and paint, and pronounced them authentic. For a device rated at perhaps a thousand hours, the Kookaburra Beacon had long outlived the company that had produced it. It had become a symbol of many different things: some said it represented man's struggle against the forces of darkness; some said it showed that technology was salvation; some said the beacon represented the Confederation, and that as long as it burned, the Confed would rule.

  As the early evening shadows stretched into night that balmy and fateful day, however, the little bulb winked out. The dozen or so who happened to be watching drew in simultaneous breaths and held them, as the last orange glow faded from the heroic wire.

  The Kookaburra Beacon had finally been overcome by the forces of entropy.

  Wall was not one to believe in portents or prophesies, but as he watched the final seconds of the newsfax cast, he felt the now-familiar cold hand of fear massage the back of his neck a bit harder than usual. That little light was a symbol, burning since before he had been born.

  For a wild moment, he knew that Khadaji was somehow responsible for this, too. Stop it, Wall—that way lay madness!

  Wall shut the holoproj down with a terse command. Things were not going well. Khadaji was still at large, as were all his matadors. Revolution held sway over the populations of nine of the Fifty-Six Worlds and seven of the Eighty-Seven Wheel worlds. Unrest stirred on a dozen other planets and twice that number of artificial satellites. Damn, it was all happening so fast—

  Wall's com circuit chirped. Only a dozen people had clearance to use his code, all of them important.

  "Yes?"

  "My Lord Factor." It was the acting Chief of the Guard.

  "Yes? What is it?"

  "There has been an... incident, my lord."

  "Incident? What kind of incident?"

  "Your personal aircoach has been bombed."

  "Bombed? How?"

  "We have yet to determine that, my lord. It happened a few hours ago. We have been investigating—"

  "Is the area secured?" Wall cut in.

  "Yes, my lord—"

  "I'll be there shortly. I want to see for myself."

  "I don't think that would be a good—"

  "If you thought. Chief, my aircoach would be intact."

  * * *

  The destruction of his prized coach was total. Wall picked up a twisted and blast-darkened section of his motif, then let it drop. A moment later, the message graven into the hatch was found. Some quirk allowed a thin beam of sunlight through a crack in the destroyed roof, so that the hatch was illuminated as if by a focused light:

  The People Have Long Memories, was all it said.

  * * *

  Emile Antoon Khadaji felt his palms grow damp and his heart begin to speed up, despite his attempts to maintain his calm. He sat in the anteroom of a religious commune on Manus Island, in the Bismarck Sea, three hundred kilometers northeast of Wewak, New
Guinea. For the last hundred years, the island had belonged to the religious order, which had made the place virtually self-sufficient. As a basically pacifistic organization, the order had been tolerated by the Confed. They paid their taxes, stayed out of politics, and obeyed—ostensibly, at least—the law.

  The order was known as the Siblings of the Shroud.

  Khadaji knew this, for he had become much of what he was due to the teachings of the Shroud, in the person of Pen. Pen, who found him in a daze after the Slaughter at Maro, and who had taught him the Ninety-seven Steps of Sumito; Pen, who had taught him how to tend pub; Pen, who had given real direction to the boy who had touched the face of the Cosmic. Khadaji hadn't seen the old man in years and had seen his face only once, was now about to meet his teacher again.

  The figure standing near the entrance was wrapped in the voluminous folds of his robe, which covered all of him, save his hands and eyes. The two additional figures who came walking down the hall in that smooth, flowing gait were similarly dressed. To a casual eye, there was no way to determine the identity of the Siblings, but Khadaji's gaze was more than casual. He recognized Pen instantly from his walk. Khadaji stood, and smiled.

  "Ah, Emile," Pen said. "It has been too long."

  Khadaji caught the old man's hand—it was wrinkled a bit more, but still firm and powerful—and brought it to his lips. They stood that way for a moment, then Pen gently pulled his hand back. "So, you don't look like a legend."

  "I can't say as I feel much like one, either," Khadaji said.

  "We will talk."

  At this, the other two Siblings glided quietly away, leaving Khadaji with his mentor. "Allow me to show you the grounds of the courtyard."

  Khadaji nodded, and followed Pen.

  "I saw your best students," Pen said, as they exited the building into the courtyard. The place was thick with flowering bushes, bright color splashed against the green. A path of what looked like marble wound through the carefully tended plantings. "You are to be complimented. They were going to bend to Renault to free you. Your escape must have been frustrating."