by Jo Zebedee
“Damn! We’ll never make it in time. Contact the Sikkerpoliti. Tell them to get a detachment to the Obduktor’s Office as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll have to go through channels, ma’am. Commissioner Opisina insists on it.”
Finesz scowled. She banged the heel of her palm down on the pommel of her sword. Time was slipping by. She set off towards the bureau reception at a smart pace. En route, she found Assaun leading a provost section of six troopers towards her office. All seven wheeled about smartly and followed her.
The section, Finesz and Assaun in the lead, quick-marched out of the Office of the Procurator Imperial bureau. The crowd of Opholdish thronging the corridor parted way before them. They reached the tube-station and waited for a train, Finesz impatient, the others imperturbable. She spoke to the air: “We’re going to be too late.”
A couple of nearby Opholdish glanced at her.
A train slid into the station. The doors hissed aside. They were standing in the first-class section. This was official business. Assaun and the troopers were permitted to use noble-designated areas on official business. If accompanied by an officer. Finesz bounded aboard the train and dropped into a seat. The troopers stepped aboard and remained standing. Finesz drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. Six miles. Six stops on this local branch-tube. Four minutes between stops. It would be thirty minutes since she’d shouted for Assaun before they set foot in the Obduktor’s Office. She was very much afraid that whoever was attacking would be long gone.
“The back-entrance to the Obduktor’s Office,” Finesz demanded of one of the troopers. “Where is it? Quickly, man!”
The trooper jerked in surprise at her evident impatience and then pointed along the corridor. “Turn right at the junction, ma’am,” he said.
“Lead the way,” Finesz ordered.
The trooper set off at a quick march.
“Faster!” snapped Finesz. “Run.”
As they ran, Finesz pulled her sword from scabbard. Behind her, she heard the snicks of truncheons being pulled from belt-fastenings. They rounded a corner. Halfway along this second passage was an open space to the right wherea wide three-lobed archway gave onto a square loading-bay. Finesz ran inside, Assaun and the troopers behind her. She saw two doors. One clearly led to the front-office: she could see part of the reception area at the end of a panelled corridor. The second corridor was tiled in white.
“Ma’am!” called Assaun.
She turned to the troop-sergeant. He indicated a body sitting slumped against one wall. She had not seen it. She crossed to it and squatted. A male prole, in dark red tunic and trousers, the quarter-moon and dagger of the death sciences prominent on one side of his chest. The other breast bore his escutcheon: a large black bird with a yellow beak, perched on a square tablet. Finesz could see no wound. She grasped his hair and lifted his head. Dead. Two sightless eyes stared up at her. She swore and scanned his upper torso for injury. The tunic hung oddly, heavily, beneath his right arm. She touched it with a finger. The cloth was clammy. Blood, invisible on the dark red fabric. It was why both the life and death sciences wore that particular colour.
Finesz rose to her feet. “He’s dead,” she said unnecessarily. She turned to the two doors. “Two troopers to the reception,” she ordered and pointed in that direction with her sword. “See if the receptionist is still alive.” She pushed open the door to the tiled passageway. “Assaun, the rest, with me.”
She ran along the corridor, the clatter of boots behind her echoing off the tiled walls. She passed an open door and saw bodies slumped across laboratory benches. Blood-red uniforms hid their wounds. They could be asleep—but for the red pooling beneath them, as if their clothing were deliquescing.
Whoever had broken into the Obduktor’s Office had not left any witnesses. She did not doubt the attackers were long gone. There was a stillness to the air, more than could be attributed to the lingering sense of death caused by cadavers being investigated or stored.
Finesz reached a double-door and pushed it open. An autopsy theatre, a deep pit ringed with steeply-raked banks of wooden seats. And in the centre, a polished white slab liberally splattered with blood. Hooked and jointed silver utensils hung down on extensible arms from the ceiling above the slab. Two men in long red coats lay slumped over desks on one tier. A further two bodies sprawled across the floor of the pit. Finesz clattered down the stairs, and entered the pit. One of the bodies, a young woman, her escutcheon a white Ø on a black field, was a technician in blood-red tunic and long skirt. Finesz was bitterly amused to see that the technician’s boots and hose continued the colour scheme. The other corpse, a grey-haired and -moustachioed man, wore an ankle-length red coat over well-cut trousers and shirt in mustard and cream. A pool of blood spread across his lower torso. Finesz bent closer. The cream cloth had been sliced open on the side of his abdomen, as had the skin beneath. Viscera glistened wetly within the gaping wound. There was a corresponding cut in the red coat. A low slice across the body with a cut-and-thrust blade, Finesz surmised. The man, the Obduktor himself, was unarmed. His sword was no doubt in his office.
Straightening from her inspection, Finesz glanced across at the slab. She saw Assaun rising from a squat by the female technician. He shook his head sadly. The remaining troopers, shocked and horrified, peered about the theatre.
“There’s no body,” said Finesz. She crossed to the slab and wiped a finger through a puddle of dark red. It smeared. “There was, but it’s gone.” She shoved her sword back into her scabbard angrily. “He was in the middle of an autopsy. The receptionist said as much.” She snorted mordantly. “They stole the body off the damn slab.”
Spinning about, she gestured imperially at the four troopers. “Go and check the mortuary. Look in all the drawers. Find me two corpses. Male. Dressed in black coveralls. No distinguishing insignia. They’ll be unidentified.”
The troopers left, jogging up the steeply-raked stairs to the exit.
“The bodies won’t be there,” Finesz said over her shoulder to Assaun.
“Ma’am.”
“They came to retrieve them. They don’t want us to identify them.” She shook her head. “Damn!” She turned back to the troop-sergeant. “Who were they, Assaun? They break into Divine Providence— If it hadn’t been for our mysterious master swordsman, it would be Captain Plessant and her crew being cut open in here.”
She did not expect an answer and she didn’t get one. Assaun’s face, phlegmatic as ever, did not change expression. He attached his truncheon back to his belt.
A trooper appeared in the entrance to the autopsy theatre, back-lit by light reflected from the white-tiled corridor walls. “No corpses matching your description, ma’am,” he called out.
“You’ve checked the labs?” she called back, a hand to her brow. The trooper was a silhouette in his black uniform, a faint silver filigree on one shoulder the mailed fist of the OPI.
“Checking them now, ma’am,” the trooper replied.
“How many dead have you found?” Finesz grimaced sourly. “Let me rephrase that: how many did the body-snatchers kill?”
“An attendant in the mortuary. Six in the labs and offices so far.” He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Trooper Spadiggs reported back from the reception area. The receptionist and one administrative assistant. Both run through.”
“Dear Lords,” said Finesz quietly. “It’s a massacre. Thirteen bodies so far. Who would do this?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The ship’s pipe in Ormuz’s cabin let out a polysyllabic squawk. He jerked upright and then scrambled off his bunk. In two short strides, he was by the caster. He pressed a finger to the switch. “Yes?”
It was the captain. “Cas? You finished cleaning up the mess?”
“Over an hour ago, captain.”
“Good. Come up to the cupola. I need to talk to you.” She signed off.
Ormuz released the switch and frown
ed at the oval grille of the caster’s speaker/microphone. It had been a day for revelations and he had a feeling another one was coming. He cast about for his boots and found them tumbled together at the foot of the bunk. He prodded them with one foot until they sat upright, slid his feet into them, and bent to seal their fastenings. Drawing his hands back through his hair, he held it in one hand at the nape of his neck while he fumbled on a band. Boot-shod and pony-tailed once again, he left his cabin and headed for’ard.
Captain Plessant was sitting on the arm of the pilot’s chair, arms crossed. She saw him poke his head above the lip of the hatch from below and watched silently as his body followed and he stumbled from the airlock into the control cupola.
Seeing her expression, Ormuz winced. She was not angry, she was not upset, she was not even disappointed. He knew how to deal with the captain when she was in those moods. But now, puzzlingly, she seemed sad, and perhaps a little afraid. Slowly, Ormuz took a step forward.
Plessant unfolded an arm. “Have a seat.” She gestured at the captain’s station.
He glanced at her sharply. He had sat there before on numerous occasions… and whenever the captain had caught him in the chair, she had had sharp words. Lots of them. But now she was inviting him to sit there. Warily, he slid into the chair and pressed the button to power it snugly forward into the station. He kept his hands in his lap, afraid to push his luck by touching any part of the console before him.
“Casimir.”
He jerked his head round to look at her.
She cleared her throat. “Cas.” She stood and strolled behind him.
He twisted and saw that she had taken position at the chair’s back, both hands on its shoulders.
“Do you know why I arranged to buy your bond two years ago?”
“You needed another crew-member.”
“Did I? Think about it: has there been anything you’ve done since you joined Divine Providence we couldn’t have done ourselves?”
“Well… no, I suppose not. I guess you had to before me, anyway.” He frowned. “So why did you hire me?”
“To get you off Rasamra. There are some… people after you—”
“Like the Housecarl.”
Plessant blinked. “Yes, like the Housecarl.”
“Is it my real parents?”
There was a long moment of silence.
“It might be easier,” Plessant said in a strangled tone, “if you tell me what you do know. I’ll try and fill in the blanks.”
Ormuz turned back to face front and slouched back in the chair. Truth to tell, he knew little. It was all mostly guesswork—prompted by those peculiar, dimly-remembered glimpses of people and places in his dreams. “My parents on Rasamra weren’t my real parents,” he said. That was no supposition—they had told him as much. Although at some time, every child must feel a changeling, divorced in world-view, attitudes and personality from its parents, Ormuz at least had the advantage—if he could call it that—of possessing not the slightest resemblance to his parents and siblings. There had not been a single redhead in the Ormuz family. They tended to a thick-set build; he was slim and lithe.
“Who are my real parents?”
“That, I can’t tell you— Not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know. I… Sir Borodisz demar Lewy is a… front. I represent other interests. And they haven’t seen fit to tell me.”
Perversely, rather than the void opening beneath his feet he had been fearfully expecting, Ormuz felt himself to be more firmly grounded. His beginnings may have been a mystery but someone somewhere knew the truth of his birth.
“Who do you work for?” he asked.
“You’re taking this very calmly, Cas.”
Ormuz didn’t answer.
“I can’t tell you who I work for. I can only tell you that we’re on your side.”
A flicker of motion to his right drew Ormuz’s attention. It was Plessant. She returned to her seat on the arm of the pilot’s chair. Hands on knees, she leant forward:
“A long time ago,” she said, “we stumbled across a conspiracy. We weren’t entirely sure of its purpose and it was a while before we realised the conspirators were after the Imperial Throne.”
Ormuz let out a bark of surprised laughter. The Imperial Throne?
“Your… father is head of that conspiracy—”
“You stole me as a baby?”
Plessant grimaced. She looked extremely embarrassed. “Worse,” she said.
“What could be worse— You mean, you stole me before I was born? But how could you do that?”
“You’re a clone, Cas. My superiors stole a tissue culture and grew it.”
Ormuz blinked. A misty curtain descended across the glass panes before him. No. Across his vision. He wasn’t even a person. He was a clone, a genetic copy of someone else. Illegal. “I—” He bit back his words. “Why are you telling me this?” He felt a surge of rage.
“Because of what’s happened, Cas. Because of what will happen.”
“The Housecarl,” he said dully. “Those men last night.”
“Yes. They were after you. Your, um, father knows of you and wants you killed.”
He chopped the air savagely. “Don’t call him my father!” he said angrily.
“The Serpent, we call him the Serpent.”
Another bark of laughter, this time coloured with anger and hurt. “My ‘father’ is a snake.” He turned and gazed at Plessant hot-eyed. “Tell me more. Tell me everything.”
She couldn’t meet his gaze. “We had what we wanted from you, so we left you with the Ormuz family to live a normal life. And so it was, for eighteen years. Then we learned that the Serpent had learnt of your existence and was close to finding you. So we brought you aboard Divine Providence, where we could keep an eye on you. That worked for two years. I was called to Darrus for a meeting. I was told to take you to Kapuluan. It seems we’ve decided to use you and there will be people there to look after you.”
“Use me for what?”
“I don’t know, Cas. I don’t get told these things.”
“Your superiors are very secretive,” he said bitterly.
“Very. They’ve survived since the Empire’s founding by keeping their affairs a secret.” She turned to face him and reached out a tentative hand to touch his shoulder. “I have to ask you something, Cas.”
He nodded brusquely.
“We were taking about your dreams the other night… The fat man: do you know who he is?”
“No.”
“The description fits a man called Gyome mar Norioko. He’s a lieutenant-without-portfolio for the Office of the Procurator Imperial. If I had a picture—” She grimaced— “which I don’t—I’d show it to you to see if you recognise him.”
“That’s why the Oppies are interested in us?”
“Ah. No. They were interested in the Housecarl.” She frowned. “How the Serpent knew we’d be on Darrus, I don’t know.”
“Where does Riz fit into this?”
“Riz.” Now the captain was angry. Her mouth tightened. “Riz—” She all but spat the name— “is an agent of the Serpent—”
“She’s not,” said Ormuz. It was bizarre how these threads of knowledge, these unconnected and seemingly meaningless snippets floating around in his head—the residue of dreams, observations, overheard remarks—wove their own skein of meaningful significance when the right cue was presented. “She’s not the enemy.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Ormuz nodded. Exactly who Riz was, he didn’t know. Nor did he know for whom she worked. But it wasn’t this Serpent, his own… clone-father.
“That’s everything you know?” he asked.
Plessant nodded sadly.
“I’m a clone of the Serpent and you’re going to use me to defeat him. How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“The people we’re going to m
eet on Kapuluan.”
“They’ll answer all my questions?”
“I don’t know.”
Ormuz pushed the button to power back the chair. He scrambled from it once it had jerked into place. “I have to think about this,” he said. He regarded Plessant with detachment. He had liked her immensely. He remembered liking her. But that was before she had told him he was no more than the product of life science—and a tool to be used. He turned his back on her and stepped across to the airlock. One hand to the jamb, he spoke, gazing at the bulkhead abaft the ladder. “You weren’t supposed to tell me this, were you?”
Plessant’s voice came tonelessly from behind him: “No, I wasn’t.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I don’t want to see you used. No one should forfeit control over their own destiny.”
He jerked his head round to look at her. “You’re a yeoman,” he accused. “You’re not a prole like the rest of us.” Plessant’s sentiment had not been a proletarian sentiment: proles had no control over their own destiny.
Plessant lifted her gaze from her lap. Ormuz was shocked to see the sorrow which bled from her expression. “Neither are you. The Serpent is after the Imperial Throne, Cas. How can he be a prole?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Rinharte smiled as Lotsman delivered the punch-line to his anecdote, and lifted her fork to her mouth. Her gaze flicked to the left, over the pilot’s shoulder. She saw Kordelasz, dining alone at a table in the corner. He was frowning down at his plate, as if unsure of its contents. Her smile widened and she turned her attention back to Lotsman.
The pilot had chosen the restaurant, so naturally its clientele was almost exclusively ship-crew and its menu incorporated dishes from over one hundred worlds. The restaurant occupied the area between four pillars. Ceiling-high sound-proofed walls stretched between each pillar. Each wall had been painted and textured to seem as if made from crumbling ancient plaster, and decorated with large stylised murals of landscapes. Climbing plants spidered across the faux plaster, and explosions of greenery drooped from clay pots hanging from wall-sconces. In the centre of the square, water trickled from a vase held by a figure so weathered it was little beyond a collection of curves in stone. Rinharte thought it might once have been a woman, perhaps clad in some flowing robe.
