The Court of a Thousand Suns

by Chris Bunch

  Raschid's only specification was that one booth—Booth C, he'd told her to name it—was to be designed somewhat differently than the others. It was to be absolutely clean. State-of-the-art debugging and alarm devices were delivered and installed by anonymous coveralled men. The booth itself was soundproofed so that any conversation could not be overheard a meter away from the table. A security service swept the booth once a week.

  Raschid told Janiz that he wanted to use the booth for meetings. Nobody was permitted to sit there except him—or anyone who came in and used his name.

  Janiz, who had a pretty good idea how much money a ship's engineer made, and knew it was nowhere near enough to front an ex-joygirl in her hobby, figured Raschid had other things going. The man was probably a smuggler. Or… or she really didn't care.

  The Covenanter was quite successful, giving dockers and ship crewmen a quiet place to drink, a place where the riot squad never got called if evenings got interesting, and a place to meet colorful girls without colorful diseases. Raschid himself dropped by twice a Prime year or so, and then would vanish again. Janiz had tried to figure what ship he was on by following the outbound columns in the press, but she could never connect Raschid with any ship or even a shipping line. Nor could she figure who Raschid's "friends" were, since they ranged from well-dressed richies to obvious thugs.

  So when the two men, Alain and Craigwel, asked for Booth C, in an otherwise totally deserted bar, she had no reaction other than to ask what they were drinking.

  SEVENTY-TWO SECONDS:

  When Dynsman had broken into the Covenanter to plant the bomb a week earlier, he had also paced out the detonation time. His man would enter the bar. Ten seconds. Look around. Fifteen seconds. Walk to the bar. 7.5 seconds. Order a drink. One minute. Pick up the drink and walk across the room to Booth C. The bomber made allowances for possible crowding—which the Covenanter certainly was not that night—then gave his time-sequence another two minutes just to be sure.

  Alain eyed the vast array of liquors on display, then picked the safe bet. "Synthalk. With water. Tall and with ice, at your favor."

  Craigwel, the professional diplomat, ordered the same. His next statement would kill both men. It was intended only to lubricate the discussion that was to follow. "Have you ever tried Metaxa?"

  "No," Alain said.

  "Good stuff on a night like this."

  "Nonnarcotic?" Alain asked suspiciously.

  "Alcohol only. It's also a good hullpaint remover."

  Janiz poured the two shots, then busied herself making the synthalk drinks.

  Alain lifted his shot glass. "To peace."

  Craigwel nodded sincerely, and tossed his glass back.

  Time ran out. On timer cue, Dynsman touched the radio det button.

  The bomb exploded.

  High-grade explosive, covered with ball bearings, crashed.

  The three humans died very quickly but very messily. Dynsman had erred slightly in his calculations, since the bearings also slammed into the bar stock itself.

  Across the street, Dynsman dumped his equipment into a case, ran to the rear of the building, dropped the thread ladder down two levels, and quickly descended. When he hit the second level, he touched the disconnect button, and the ladder dropped down into his hands. That ladder also went into the case, and Dynsman faded into the shadows, headed for his own personal hideaway, deep inside one of Prime World's nonhumanoid conclaves.

  Ears still ringing from the explosion, he did not hear the clatter of boots on the catwalk above as they ran toward the shattered ruin that had been the Covenanter.

  Moments before the explosion, Sergeant Armus had been trying to soothe the injured feelings of the other member of his tac squad. The sector was so quiet and the duty so boring that it felt like a punishment tour. They were an elite, after all, a special unit that was supposed to be thrown into high-crime-potential areas to put the lid back on, and then turn the area over to normal patrols.

  Instead, they had been on nothing duty for nearly a month. Sergeant Armus listened to his corporal run over the complaints for the fiftieth time. Tac Chief Kreuger must really have it in for them. Nothing was going on in the sector that one lone Black Maria couldn't deal with. Armus didn't tell the man that he had been making the same complaint nightly! He had to admit there was a great deal of justification for his squad's complaints. Kreuger must be out of his clotting mind, assigning them to a dead sector, especially with the festival going on. Maybe the crime stat computer hiccupped. Maybe Krueger had a joygirl in the area who had complained about getting roughed up. Who could fathom what passed for the mind of a clotting captain?

  In the interest of maintaining proper decorum, Armus kept all that to himself. Instead he ran the overtime bit past his squad members again—which was another thing that was odd. Because of the pressures of the festival, there were very few tac soldiers to spare, and the entire unit had been on overtime from almost the beginning. Now, how the clot was the chief going to explain that?

  And then came the shock wave of the explosion. Almost before the sound stopped, the squad was thundering down the rampway and turning the comer—sprinting for the ruin that had been the Covenanter. Armus took one look at the shattered building and three thoughts flashed across his brain: fire, survivors, and ambulance. And, as he thought, he acted. Although no flames were visible in the ruins of the bar, he smashed an armored fist into an industrial extinguisher button and a ton or more of suds dumped into the building. He shouted orders to his men to grab any tool in sight, and thumbed his mike to call for an ambulance. Then he stopped as an ambulance lifted over the catwalk and hissed toward the bar. What was that doing here? He hadn't even called yet! But he had no time to waste; he unhooked his belt pry bar and plunged into the ruins after his men.

  Book Two

  Lunette

  Chapter Seven

  Dear Sten:

  Hi ya, mate. Guess you're surprised to hear from the likes of me. Well, yours truly has finally landed some much-deserved soft duty. This is duty, I might add, befitting a clansman of such high rank. Sergeant Major Alex Kilgour! Hah, Captain't Bet you never thought you'd live to see the day!

  Sten pulled back to give the letter a disbelieving glance. Kilgour! He didn't recognize him without the thick Scots accent. But then, of course even Alex wouldn't write with a burr. He laughed, and dove back into the letter.

  Of course, a sergeant major still can't drink at the fancy officer clubs with an exalted captain, but an honest pint of bitter is an honest pint of bitter, and it drinks much smoother when it's never your shout. I've never seen such a brown-nosing clan of lowly noncoms as I've got here. Although I do not dissuade them of this practice. I'm sure that buying a pint for the sergeant major is a ceremony of ancient and holy tradition in these parts.

  To be honest with you, this tour is beginning to wear thinner than a slice of haggis at a Campbell christening. The powers that be have posted me as curator of the clotting Mantis Museum. Now, as you well know, it requires a Q clearance to even see the lobby of this godforsaken place, so we don't get a lot of visitors. Just blooming security committee politicians getting their clotting expense tickets punched on the way to some gambling hell. Although there was one lass… Ah, never mind. A Kilgour doesn't kiss and tell, especially when the bonny one outranks him.

  Anyhow, here I am, performing the safest duty in my wicked career as one of the Emperor's blackguards. I'm going out of my clotting mind, I tell you. And the only thing that keeps me sane is that you can't be doing much better in that fancy-dan job of yours on Prime World. No, I'm afeared it will never be the same since they broke up our team—Old Mantis 13. They better well retire the number, I tell you, or there'll be some explaining to do to a Kilgour.

  Have you heard from the others? In case your news is wearier than mine, I'll fill you in on what I know. Bet has been promoted to lieutenant and is running her own team now, although I'm not too sure what nasty business she's about at the mome
nt.

  As for Doc, well, that little furry bundle of sharp edges managed himself a sabbatical leave. Do you recall the Stralbo? You know, The People Of The Lake? Those horrendous tall blokes who supped on blood and milk? Sure, I thought you would and wasn't Doc more than a giggle the way he got blotto on all that blood? So, what Doc is doing is getting drunk and staying that way all in the name of Mother Science.

  The only one I haven't picked up any particulars on is Ida. When her hitch was over, she refused to reup and did a bloody Rom disappearing act. Although I imagine she must have gnashed her teeth over all that filthy lucre they were waving at her. One thing I have to say for her, though, she did come through on my share of the loot she was investing for us. It was a clotting big heap of money that took almost all of one leave for me to go through. If you haven't got yours yet, I suspicion that it's probably winging its way to you. Truly, it's a nice bundle of credits. If by chance she's holding out on you, howsomever, check the futures market columns. Any big jump or dip in the exotics, and you'll find the plump little beggar.

  Well, I've about run out of time to get this into the next post. Hope all is well with you, mate.

  Yours, Aye

  Alex Kilgour

  Sten chuckled to himself as he blanked out the letter. Same old Alex, grousing when the tour is too hot, and grousing when it's too soft. He did, however, have a point about Prime World. It looked soft, and felt soft—dangerously so. Sten had pored over the records his predecessors had left. For the last few centuries, they were almost depressing in their lack of action. However, the few times things did happen, he noticed, the situation tended to get very bloody and very political. After his years in Mantis Section, blood didn't bother Sten much. But politics—politics could make your skin crawl.

  Forgetting how small his quarters were, Sten leaned back in his chair, bumping his head against a wall. He groaned as the thump reminded him of the royal hangover he was suffering from. The only effect the Angelo stew had was to mask the alcohol and allow him to stay up even later with the Emperor. Somehow, he had stumbled through his job the next day, leaving him no other cure the following night than to try to drink the residual pain and agony away. Sten had sworn to himself last night that today he would be pristine pure. Not a drop of the evil Stregg would wet his lips. That was the only way out of it. The trouble was, just then, it wasn't Stregg he wanted, but a nice cold beer.

  He scraped the thought out of his mind, drank a saintly gulp of water, and looked around his room. The homely-looking woman on the wall stared back at him. Sten gave another mental groan and searched for another place to rest his grating eyes—only to find the same woman giving him the same stare. In fact, wherever he looked, there she was again, the skinny-faced homely woman with the loving eyes.

  The walls of the room were covered with her portrait, a legacy, Sten had learned, from the man who had proceeded him. Naik Rai, Sten's batman, had assured him that the previous CO had been an excellent Captain of the Guard. Maybe so, but he sure was a lousy painter—almost as lousy as his taste in women. At least, that's what Sten had thought at first, when he had stared at the murals crowding his walls. After the first week living with the lady, he had ordered her image removed—blasted off, if necessary. But then she began to haunt him, and he had countermanded the order—he wasn't sure why. And then it came to him: The man must have really loved the woman, no matter how homely.

  The records proved it: The captain had been every bit as hardworking, dedicated, and professional as any being before him. Although older than Sten, he had been assured of a long and promising career. Instead, he had pulled every string possible to win a lateral transfer into a deadend job on some frontier post. And, just before he left, he had married the woman in the picture. The emperor had given the bride away. In his gut, Sten knew what had happened. In the few months he had been there, Sten had realized that his particular post was for a bachelor, or someone who cared very little about spouse and family. There just weren't enough hours in the day to do the job properly. And the good captain had realized that enough to throw it all away for the homely lady in the pictures.

  Sten thought he had been a very wise man.

  Once you got past the murals, the rest of Sten's room dissolved into a bachelor officer's dilemma: a jungle of items both personal and work-related. It wasn't that Sten didn't know where everything was; his was a carefully ordered mind that heaped things into their proper mounds. The trouble was, mounds kept sliding into one another, a bit like his current interests. His professional studies, for example, blended into a gnawing hunger for history—anyone's history, it didn't matter. And, along with that, the obvious technical tracts a fortieth-century military being might need, as well as Sten's Vulcan-born tech-related curiosity. Also, since leaving Vulcan, he had become an avid reader of almost everything in general.

  Two particular things in the room illustrated the personal and professional crush: Filling up one corner was a many-layered map of the castle, the surrounding buildings, and the castle grounds. Each hinged section was at least two meters high, and showed a two-dimensional view of every alley and cranny and drawing room of the entire structure. Sten had traced the sectional map down in a dusty archive after his first month on the job, when he realized that the sheer size of the castle and its grounds made it impossible for him to ever see it all on foot. And without personal, detailed knowledge of every Imperial centimeter of the area, he would not be able to perform his primary function—which was to keep the Emperor safe.

  Crammed a few meters away from the map was the other major feature in Sten's current life. Sitting on a fold-up field table was a very expensive miniholoprocessor. It was the biggest expense in Sten's life, not even counting the thousands of hours of time invested in the tiny box lying next to it.

  The little box contained Sten's hobby—Model building: not ordinary glue-gun models set into paste-metal dioramas but complete, working and living holographic displays ranging from simple ancient engines to tiny factories manned by their workers. Each was contained on a tiny card, jammed with complex computer equations.

  Sten was then building a replica of a logging mill. He had imprinted, byte by byte, everything that theoretically made the mill work, including the workers, their job functions, their tools, and the spare parts. Also programmed were other details, such as the wear-factor on a belt drive, the drunken behavior of the head mechanic, etc. When the card slid into the holoprocessor it projected a full-color holographic display of the mill at work. Occasionally, if Sten didn't have his voila moves down, a worker would stumble, or a log would jam, and the whole edifice would tumble apart into a blaze of colored dots.

  Sten glanced at the model box guiltily. He hadn't worked on it more than a few hours since he started the job. And, no, there wasn't time now—he had to get to work.

  He palmed the video display and the news menu crawled across the screen, terrorist dies in spaceport bar

  EXPLOSION.

  Sten thumbed up the story and quickly scanned the details of the Covenanter tragedy. There wasn't much to it at the moment, except for the fact that Godfrey Alain, a high-ranking Fringe World revolutionary, had died in an accident at some seedy bar near the spaceport. It was believed that a few others had also died, but their names had not yet been released. Mostly the article talked about what was not known—like what Alain was doing on Prime World, especially in a bar like the Covenanter.

  Sten yawned at the story. He had little or no interest in the fate of terrorists. In fact, he had marked paid to many terrorist careers in his time. Clot Godfrey Alain, as far as he was concerned. He noticed, however, that there were as yet no official statements on Alain's presence.

  The only thing he was sure of was that the press had it wrong about the explosion being an "accident." Terrorists do not die accidentally. Sten idly wondered if someone in Mantis Section had sent Alain on to meet his revolutionary maker.

  Sten yawned again and began to scroll on just as he got the
call. The Eternal Emperor wanted him. Immediately, if not sooner.

  Chapter Eight

  The Eternal Emperor was an entirely different person from the man Sten had drunk with. He looked many years older, the flesh on his face was sagging, and pouches had appeared beneath his eyes. His complexion was gray underneath the perfect tan. More importantly, the man Sten was observing was stern and grim, with hatred burning just beneath the surface. Sten stirred uneasily in his seat, goose-bumps on the back of his neck. Something was frightening there, and although Sten hadn't the faintest idea what was going on, he hoped to hell it didn't involve a transgression on his part. Sten would not have liked to be the being the Emperor was fixing his attention on at the moment.

  "You've read this," the Emperor said coldly, sliding a printout across his desk.

  Sten glanced at the fax. It was an update on the death of Godfrey Alain. Puzzled, Sten scanned it, noting that although there were a few more details, they involved mostly color, with few hard facts. "Yes, sir," he said after a moment.

  "Are you familiar with this man's background?"

  "Not really, sir. Just that he's a terrorist and that he's been a thorn in our side for some time."

  The Emperor snorted. "You'll need to know a lot more than that. But no matter. I've given you clearance for his files. You can go over them after we've talked.

  "I want the people responsible," the Emperor snapped. "And I want every single swinging Richard of them standing before me, not tomorrow or the next day, but yesterday. And I want them delivered in a nice neat package. And no loose ends. Do you understand me, Captain? No loose ends."

  Sten started to nod automatically. Then he stopped himself—no, he didn't understand. And his survival instinct told him he'd better not pretend otherwise. "Excuse me, sir," he finally said, "but I do not understand. Perhaps I'm missing something, but what does Godfrey Alain have to do with the captain of your guard?"