The Court of a Thousand Suns

by Chris Bunch

  "Very dead Earth cabbage, garlic, and herbs. It helps if you don't smell it before you eat it."

  "Since you know about bombs," Sten asked, "did you figure out why no shrapnel?"

  Haines puzzled.

  Sten dug into his pocket and set a somewhat flattened ball bearing on the table. "The bomb's explosive was semidirectional. To make sure the bomb took care of anyone in the bar, the bomber also taped these on top of the explosive. Except the area facing that booth.

  "Prog, Lieutenant?"

  Haines knew enough military slang to understand the question. She pushed her plate aside, put her fingers together, and began theorizing.

  "The bomber wanted everybody in that bar dead—except whoever was in that booth."

  "If Alain and your man had been in that booth when the bomb went off, they would have been… concussed, possibly, or suffering blast breakage at the worst, right, Captain?"

  "Correct."

  "The bomber knew about that booth… and had to have known Alain would be in that booth on that particular night."

  Haines whistled tunelessly and drained her beer. "So for sure we have a political murder, don't we, Captain? Clot!"

  Sten nodded glumly, went to the counter, and brought back two more beers.

  "Not just a political murder, but one done by someone who knew exactly what Alain's movements were supposed to be, correct?"

  "You're right—but you aren't exactly making my day.

  "Drakh!" Lisa swore. "Clottin' stinkin' politics! Why couldn't I get stuck with a nice series of mass sex murders."

  Sten wasn't listening. He'd just taken the reasoning one step further. Impolitely, he grabbed the plate-projector from under Haines' arm and began flipping through it.

  "Assassination," Lisa continued, getting more depressed by the minute. "That'll mean a pro killer, and whoever hired it done will be untouchable. And I'll be running a precinct at one of the poles."

  "Maybe not," Sten said. "Look. Remember the bomb? It was just supposed to knock Alain cross-eyed, yes? Then what was supposed to happen?"

  "Who can tell? It never did."

  "Question, Lieutenant. Why did an ambulance not called by this tac sergeant show up within minutes of the blast? Don't you think that maybe—"

  Haines had already completed the thought. Beer unfinished, she was heading for Sten's combat car.

  Chapter Eleven

  Port Soward Hospital bore a strange resemblance to its oddly shaped cnidarian receiving clerk. It just grew from an emergency hospital intended to handle incoming ship disasters, industrial accidents, and whatever other catastrophe would come up within a ten-kilometer circle around Soward itself. But disasters and accidents have a way of growing wildly, so Soward Hospital sprawled a lot, adding ship-capable landing platforms here, radiation wards there, and nonhuman sections in still a third place.

  All of that made Admissions even more a nightmare than in most hospitals. In spite of high-speed computers, personal ID cards, and other improvements, the hospital's central area went far toward defining chaos.

  Sten and Haines waited beside a large central "desk," the outer ring of which was for files and such. The second ring contained a computer whose memory circuits rivaled an Imperial military computer. In the center swam the clerk(s), a colony of intelligent polyps-cnidarians, beings which began life as individuals and then, for protection, grew together—literally, like coral. But most cnidarians did not get along. The one in front of Sten—he mentally labeled it A—burbled in fury, snatched a moisture-resistant file from Polyp B, tossed it across the ring to Polyp R, Sten estimated, brushed Polyp C's tentacles off A's own terminal, and finally turned to the two people waiting. Its "voice" was just shrill enough to add to the surrounding madness as white-clad hospital types steered lift gurneys past, patients leaned, lay, or stood against the walls, and relatives wailed or wept.

  "You see what it's like? You see?" The polyp's feeder tentacles were bicycling wildly against the bottom of the tank.

  "Police," Lisa said dryly, holding out a card with one hand. She touched the card with an index finger, and the "badge" glowed briefly.

  "Another cop. This has been one of those days. Some wiper comes in, bleeding like—like a stuck human. Drunk, of course. He doesn't tell me that he's union, and so I send him to the Tombs. How was I know to he was union? Job-related and all that, and now I've got all this data. He'll probably die before I get the paperwork through. Now what do you want?"

  "Last night, around 2100 hours, an ambulance responded to a call."

  "We have thousands of ambulances. For what?"

  "An explosion."

  "There are many kinds of explosions. Ship, atomsuit, housing, radiation. I can't help you if you don't help me!"

  Haines gave the polyp the file. The being submerged briefly, only the plate-projector, held in one tentacle, above the surface. Then another tentacle wove behind the being to a terminal and began tapping keys.

  "Yes. Ambulance GE145 it was. No input on who summoned it. You see what my trouble is? No one seems to care about proper files."

  Sten broke in. "Where would this ambulance have been routed to?"

  "Thank you, man. At least someone knows the proper question. Since it was sent to a… drinking establishment… unless other data was input, it would have gone to the Tombs."

  "The Tombs?"

  "Human emergency treatment, nonindustrial." The polyp pulled a square of plas from the counter and touched the edges of it. An outline of the sprawling hospital sprang into life on it. Further tentacling and a single red line wound its way through the corridors.

  "You Eire…here. You want to go there. They'll be able to help you. Maybe."

  Sten had one final question. "Why is it called the Tombs?"

  "Because this is where our—I believe the phrase is down and under—go. And if they weren't before, they are when they get to the Tombs."

  "GE145. Weird." The desk intern was puzzled. "No entry on who dispatched it—came from out-hospital. Three DOA's. They're… um, being held for autopsy results, Lieutenant."

  "Question, Doctor. Assuming this ambulance had arrived with live victims, what would have happened then?"

  "Depends on the injury."

  "Blast. Shock. Possible fractures," Sten said.

  "Um… that would have gone to—let me check last night's roster… Dr. Knox would have treated them."

  "Where is he?"

  "Let me see… not on shift today. Pity."

  "Would he be in the hospital?"

  "No, not at all. Dr. Knox was hardly one of us. He was a volunteer."

  "Do you have a contact number on him?" Lisa asked.

  "It should be right—no. No, we don't have anything on his sheet. That's unusual."

  "Two unusuals, Doctor. I'd like to see your files on this Knox."

  "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. But without a proper court order, not even the police—"

  Sten's own card was out. "On Imperial Service, Doctor."

  The intern's eyes widened. "Certainly… perhaps, back in my office. We'll use the terminal there. Genevieve? Would you take the floor for me?"

  Ten minutes later Sten knew they had something. Or rather, by having nothing, they had something.

  knox, dr. john, began the hospital's scanty info card. No such doctor was licensed on Prime World, as Sten quickly learned. Yet somehow a "Dr. Knox" had convinced someone at Soward Hospital—either a person or a computer—that he was legitimate. His listed home address was a recently demolished apartment building. His supposed private clinic was a restaurant, one which had been in existence at that address for almost ten years.

  "So this Knox," Sten mused, still staring at the fiche, "shows up from nowhere as a volunteer two weeks ago."

  "He was an excellent emergency surgeon, the intern said. "I prepped some patients for him."

  "What did he look like?"

  "Tall," the intern said hesitantly. "One eighty-five, one ninety centimeters. Slender build, alm
ost endomorphic. Seventy kilograms estimated weight. Eyes… I don't remember. He was very proud of his hair. Gray it was. Natural, he swore. Wore it mane-style."

  "Not bad," Haines said. "You ever think of being a cop?"

  "In this job I sometimes think I am one."

  "You said he was 'hardly one of you.' Did you mean just because he was a volunteer?" Sten asked.

  "No. Uh—you see, we don't exactly get Imperial-class medicos here. The pay. The conditions. The patients. So when we get a volunteer as good as Dr. Knox, well…" And the intern interrupted himself: "His room!"

  "Knox had a room?"

  "Of course. All of us do—our shifts are two-day marathons."

  "Where would it be?"

  "I'll get a floor chart."

  "Very private sort, this Knox," Lisa said. "His room card specifies no mechanical or personal cleaning wanted. Maybe we'll get something."

  Sten suspected they would get nothing, and if they got as thorough a nothing as he feared…

  "Four thirteen."

  Lisa took the passcard from the back of the room file.

  "Hang on. And stay back from the door."

  Millimeter by millimeter, Sten checked the jamb around the slide-door's edges. He found it just above the floor—a barely visible gray hair stretched across the doorjamb.

  "We need an evidence team," Sten said. "Your best. But there won't be a bomb inside. I want this room sealed until the evidence team goes through it."

  Lisa started to get angry, then snapped a salute.

  "Yes, sir. Captain, sir. Anything else?"

  "Aw drakh," Sten swore. "Sorry. Didn't mean to sound like, like—"

  "A cop?"

  "A cop." Sten grinned.

  The room was ballooned, then gently opened. Finally, the tech team went in.

  The three spindars—one adult and two adolescents—were not what Sten had thought expert forensic specialists would look like. As soon as the room was unsealed and the adult lumbered into the bedroom, the two adolescents rolled out of its pouch and began scurrying about with doll-size instruments and meters taken from the pack strapped to the adult's pouch.

  The adult spindar was about two meters in any direction and scaled like a pangolin. It surveyed the scuttlings of its two offspring with what might have been mild approval, rebuttoned the instrument pack with a prehensile subarm, scratched its belly thoughtfully, and sat down on its rear legs in the center of the room. The being chuffed three times experimentally, then introduced itself as Technician Bernard Spilsbury. Spindars having names unpronounceable to any being without both primary and secondary voice boxes, they found human names a useful conceit—names selected from within whatever field the spindar worked in.

  "Highly unusual," it chuffed. "Very highly unusual. Recollect only one case like that. My esteemed colleague Halperin handled that one. Most interesting. Would you be interested in hearing about it while my young proteges continue?"

  Sten looked at Haines. She shrugged, and Sten got the idea that once a spindar started, nothing short of high explosives could shut him up.

  "Out on one of the pioneer worlds it was. Disremember at the moment which one. Pair of miners it was. Got into some unseemly squabble about claims or stakegrubs or whatever miners bicker about.

  "First miner waited until his mate got into a suit, then shot him in the face. Stuffed the corpus into the drive, suit and all."

  One young spindar held up a minidisplay to his parent. Columns of figures, unintelligible to Sten, reeled past.

  The young one chittered, and the older one rumbled.

  "Even more so," the spindar said. "If you'll excuse me?" His forearm dug larger instruments from the pack, then he waddled to the bed, half stood, and began running a pickup across it. "Curiouser and curiouser."

  "Speaking of curious," Haines said quietly to Sten. "You wondered about that tac squad? I think I'll check on just why they were assigned to that area.

  "I owe you a beer, Captain."

  They smiled at each other.

  Before Sten could say anything, the spindar was back beside him. "That took care of one sort of evidence, of course."

  "You found something?"

  "No, no. I meant the miner. To continue, he then dumped the ship's atmosphere and disposed of all of his mate's belongings and went peaceably on his way.

  "Questioned some months later, said miner maintained that he had shipped solo. Contrary to the ship's lading, no one had been with him. Claimed the other party had never showed at lift-off, and he himself had been too lazy to change the manifest. There was, indeed, no sign that anyone had ever been on the ship besides this individual.

  "But Halperin produced evidence that it was physically impossible for one human to have consumed the amount of rations missing from the ship. The miner contradicted him. Swore that he was a hearty eater. Pity."

  Evidently that was the end of the spindar's story. By then, Sten knew better, but asked what happened anyway.

  "The planetary patrols in the frontier worlds are somewhat pragmatic. Not to say ruthless. They purchased an equivalent amount of rations and sat the suspect down in front of them. Gave him thirty days to prove his innocence. Trial by glut, I suppose you would refer to it. A definite pity."

  Again the spindar dug out instruments and, attaching extensions to them, swept the ceiling area. "The man died of overeating on the third day. Odd system of justice you humans have.

  "This case," the spindar continued, reseating himself, "is even stranger. You do, just as you warned me, Lieutenant, appear to have a great quantity of nothing."

  For Sten, that was the first positive lead toward finding the disappeared Dr. Knox.

  Chapter Twelve

  "And what, captain, does nothing give you?" the Eternal Emperor asked.

  The Emperor might appear less angry, but Sten was determined to keep the briefing as short as possible. As long as he stuck to business, he probably couldn't get in much trouble.

  "This Knox did not want the room cleaned. My theory is that he was afraid some personal evidence might still be in the room's automatic cleaning filters.

  "We found no fingerprints. No traces of dead skin, no urine traces in the bed, no sweat or oil stains in the pillow. Also, there was no IR residue in the bed coverings."

  "Thank you, Captain. I will now assume you and the techs produced every sort of zero-trace science can look for. Explain."

  Sten did. Knox not only cleaned the room minutely, but also used sophisticated electronics to remove all traces of his occupancy.

  "So. Your, uh, Knox character's more than just a professional doctor."

  "That's the assumption," Sten said carefully. "Haines—she's the police OIC on the case—is tracing doctors who might have learned another set of skills."

  "If your Knox is as good as you say, Captain, I'd assume he was an offworlder."

  "Haines is checking all Prime World arrivals within the last E-year, sir."

  "Good luck. Prediction, Captain: You're going to draw a big fat blank."

  "Probably. Which is why we're working angle B—the bomber."

  The Emperor shrugged. "If you've got one pro, why couldn't the bomber be just as faceless?"

  "Because the bomber—" Sten caught himself before he could say "blew it."—"made a mistake."

  The Emperor considered. "All right. Work that angle. Is there anything else?"

  Sten shook his head—there was no point in mentioning the tacsquad's mysterious presence until Haines had more information.

  "One more thing, Captain. For your information only. The Tahn Embassy's Principal Secretary has requested an interview with me. I think we may both assume what it will be regarding.

  "And I really would like to be able to tell him more than 'I got plenty of nothing.'

  "That's all, Captain. You may go."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sten fingered the pore-pattern key on his mailbox and absentmindedly fished out its contents. It was the usual junk—Th
e Imperial Guard Times, Forces Journal, the palace's daily house organ, the latest promotion list, an ad from a military jeweler—all of which went into the disposal. Sten tucked one fiche—reminder of his somewhat past-due bill from a uniform tailor—into his belt pouch and started to close the little door. Then he saw something else and fished it out curiously.

  It was a real paper envelope, addressed by hand to "Captain Sten, Imperial Household." Sten fumbled the envelope open. Three other pieces of paper dropped into his hand. The first was a blank envelope. The second was a thick engraved paper card:

  MARR & SENN Request the Honor of

  Your Attendance At a Dinner Reception for

  KAI HAKONE RSVP Guest

  Perplexed, Sten stared at the invitation. Of course he knew Marr and Senn as the Imperial caterers and unofficial social arbiters at Court. The brief meetings he'd had with them had been purely official, even though he was personally intrigued by their bitchy humor and warmth. He wondered why they'd invite a lowly captain, regardless of position, to what must be a Major Social Event.

  The third piece of paper, also hand-written, explained it. The card said simply, "It's time for old friends to meet again," and was signed Sofia.

  Umm. Sten knew that the woman he'd had a brief but very passionate affair with during a previous assignment was on Prime World—he'd been responsible for getting Sofia off Nebta before the shooting started—but had semideliberately not looked her up, having no idea any longer what he felt toward her.

  Sten decided he needed some advice. In the Imperial Household, unofficial advice for officers was the province of the Grand Chamberlain. His offices were only a few hundred meters from the Emperor's own business suite.

  The Grand Chamberlain, Fleet Admiral Mik Ledoh (Ret.), looked like everyone's favorite grandsire. Sten, however, had looked up the admiral's record as part of his routine security check while settling into the job.