The Court of a Thousand Suns

by Chris Bunch

  Ohlsn grunted happily. From his point of view, he was in the bargaining chair.

  "Fine, chien. We take care of her. But what's in it for us? Now? Here?"

  Alex lifted a roll of Tahn credits from his pocket.

  "Drakh," Keet said. "Should'a hit us at the beginning of the leave. That won't do us any good for the next three plan-years out there, now will it?"

  "Drop an offer."

  Keet lifted the ticket packet "This says we ship eight hours from now. Means if you're trying to buy us, you got to come up with something we can do 'tween now and then. And something that won't mess us. Which means don't even bother offerin' something in your own… organization?"

  "Man drinks quill, he starts thinking about other things," Ohlsn steered them.

  Sten widened his eyes. "Sorry, men. I guess I'm a bit slow. That's clottin' easy."

  "Bro," Kilgour added. "We could set 'em urn wi' any piece a' fluff. But these gens sound like they're willin' to treat us on the square. What about Din's sisters?"

  Keet licked his lips. "You've already got them?"

  "Clot yes," Sten said. "Folks don't care. They breed 'em like klarf. Wait till they hit ten, then sell 'em. We've had two for about a month. Breakin' 'em in right."

  "Then there's the deal," Keet said. "Plus you provide the rations and the drink—and make sure we hit the transport on time."

  The four beamed at each other, and Sten signaled for another pitcher to seal the arrangement.

  Outside, the salt air hit and instantly sobered Sten. He'd had just enough drink to seriously consider telling the two men in gray what was going to happen to them, and why. Instead, he fell back from Keet one half a pace and dropped his hand. His curled fingers freed the muscle holding the knife securely in his arm, and the blade dropped free into his hand. He gave the nod to Alex.

  Alex spun and swung, knotted three-gee muscles driving his fist straight into Ohlsn's rib cage. Ribs splintered, and the punch-shock impacted the man's heart.

  Ohlsn was dead, blood gouting from his mouth, before he could even realize.

  Keet's death was somewhat neater, but no less sudden, as Sten's knife slid into the base of the man's skull, severing the spinal cord.

  Old Mantis reflexes took over. They caught the corpses as they toppled and eased them to the boardwalk.

  The bodies were quickly stripped of weapons, uniforms, and ID packets. From a nearby piling, Alex grabbed weighted bodybags they'd stashed earlier; and they struggled the corpses into them.

  Minutes after they'd died, the two bodies splashed into the harbor to sink tracelessly and dissolve quickly. Ten hours, and nothing but a revolting slush would remain for forensics specialists.

  Alex bundled the uniforms together and tucked them under one arm. "Of a' the sins Ah hae on m'conscience," Alex mused. "Ah never consider't pollutin' th' ocean'd be one a them."

  "Alex, help," Sten said plaintively.

  "A min, lad. A min. Ah'm lockit up noo." Alex was indeed quite busy in the tiny slum flat they'd rented. Kilgour was feeding the ID cards, personal photos, and such from Keet and Ohlsn into one of the few Mantis tools they'd brought with them. The machine was copying the ID cards and personal data from the two originals then altering them so that Sten and Alex's pictures and physical characteristics were implanted on the documents.

  "Sergeant Major Kilgour, I still outrank you, damn it!"

  The final photo clicked out a shot of Keet arm in arm with some female-by-courtesy who must have been the love of his life. The new photo, however, showed Sten as the erring lover. Kilgour beamed and fingered a button. The machine began hissing—in less than a half a minute the original documents in the machine, and the guts of the machine itself, would be a nonanalyzable chunk of plas. He turned to see what Sten's problem was.

  "I am not," he said firmly, "a clottin' seamstress. I am a captain in the Imperial Guard. I do not know how to sew. I do not know how to alter uniforms to fit, even with sewing glue and this clottin' knife. All I know how to do is glue my fingers together."

  Kilgour tsked, poured himself a now off-duty drink, and sadly surveyed Sten.

  "How in hell did y'manage to glue both hands together? M'mum w'd nae have trouble wi' a simple task like that."

  Before Sten could find a way to hit him, Alex solved the problem by dumping his mug of alk over Sten's hands, dissolving the sewing glue, which Sten had rather ineptly been using to retailor Keet and Ohlsn's uniforms. The mug was swiftly refilled and handed to Sten, who knocked it back in one shot.

  "Ah," Alex pointed out wisely after Sten had finished choking and wiping the tears from his eyes. "Y've provit th' adage."

  Sten just stared lethally at his partner.

  "Ah y'sew, tha's how y'weep."

  Kilgour, Sten decided, was definitely rising above his station.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  His muscles complaining as he automatically tensed his legs against the greasy tug of the water, Dynsman waded out through the receding tide. He was still way too new at the game yet, and hadn't learned to let the steady pull of the sea help him walk. It was the same at Conch time, when the day was officially ended by the shoreline horn. Then it was a matter of walking with the incoming tide and trying to keep one's balance. Dynsman still fought it. And the penalty was sleepless nights of agony as his legs knotted and cramped.

  Adding to his problems was the knife-sharp sea bottom, littered with gnarled rocks and razor-edge mollsk shells. He had only thin plas boots to protect his feet.

  "Clot!" A misstep, and a tiny slice of flesh was nipped off by a shell. He stopped, dragging himself back against the tide. His heart pounded wildly for an instant as he looked about him. He could almost feel the blood oozing from the tiny abrasion. Dynsman thought about all the things that sniffed for blood in the mollsk bed and shuddered.

  He fought back the panic and tried to regain his bearings. On each side of him, forty other prisoners of Dru eased out through the surf like slow-beating wings. They moved cautiously through the water, watching for the telltale bubbles of frightened mollsks.

  Dynsman had never worked so hard or been so frightened in his life. He would much rather disarm a sloppy bomb then pursue the wily mollsk. Dynsman really wasn't good with his hands even when working on the delicate mechanisms that make things go bang; his seven remaining fingers were mostly numb, blunt objects. He had lived at his trade as long as he had by being canny and what-the-hell-let's-go-for-it lucky.

  "Dynsman!" came the bellow from the shoreline. "Get your ass behind it or I'll put my boot in."

  The bellow hit him like an electric shock, and Dynsman stumbled clumsily forward, his mollsk-plunger held somewhat at the ready.

  Like most tasks on Dru, what Dynsman was about involved a product that was exceedingly exotic, expensive, and lethal. The tender mollsk was prized in many systems for its incredible taste and mythological aphrodisiac qualities. It was a mutant Old Earth bivalve creature, containing on average a kilo of delectable flesh, guarded by a razor-sharp shell about a half meter in diameter.

  It had been bred to its present delicious state over many centuries. The problem being, for the hunter, that the same genes that made it so large and tasty went along with a highly efficient system of mobility. The creature lived in the mud and preferred chill; krill-swarming seas.

  When it fed, it opened its huge top shell like a fan, guiding the microorganisms into its stomach-filter system. The mollsk could not see or feel, but judged the environment for mating or danger by a highly evolved system of smell. Which, in addition to convenience, is why mollsk hunters worked as the tide rushed out. In theory, the smells of the decaying shore life would mask the odor of an approaching mollsk hunter. But only until the last moment, when the hunter was a meter or so away. Then the mollsk would smell the hunter, take fright, and burrow deeper into the mud, leaving a trail of roiling bubbles. That's when the hunter captured it. Or if you were Dynsman, tried for it.

  Like the other hunters, Dynsma
n was provided with a mollsk-plunger. It consisted of two handles, a little more than a meter and a half long, that connected to a pair of very sharp shovel jaws that were spring-loaded and sieved. The plunger was held at the ready as the intrepid hunter waded out through the surf watching very carefully for the bubbles that marked panicked mollsks. Aiming at the point where the bubbles just disappeared, and making allowances for light refraction, the tool was plunged into the mud at just the right moment, triggering the spring. Then the mollsk-plunger was hauled to the surface spewing mud and water, and the creature was popped into the bubble raft towed behind the hunter.

  Dynsman was about as bad at the job as anyone could be. He could never time the bubbles correctly, and, about every other shift, he dumped his raft over as he was wading to shore. That meant he lived on very, very short rations because on Dru, a prisoner's food intake and the availability of luxuries depended upon performance. After only a month on Dru, Dynsman's ribs stood out from his hollow stomach at about a thirty-degree angle. To add injury to starvation, every time he fouled up, Chetwynd, the behemoth who was the boss villain, put his wrist to the nape of Dynsman's neck and made him do what Chetwynd called "the chicken."

  Dynsman moved slowly forward again, his feet feeling for the uncluttered spaces along the bottom. A streak of bubbles suddenly shot for the surface and Dynsman almost panicked. Blindly, he slammed the mollsk-plunger downward and triggered the release. A myriad of bubbles exploded upward and then Dynsman was laughing almost hysterically as he tugged up on the plunger, a large mollsk snared in its jaws. He pressed the release lever and hurled the creature into the raft. There, he thought to himself. You're finally getting it. With a great deal more confidence, he strode forward. But then the old doubts and fears came crowding back. All the stories he had listened to in the village about the things that wait for a guy and are most likely to attack during rookie false confidence.

  Dynsman had yet to witness one of the attacks, but he had seen the bodies dragged up on shore by Chetwynd and his cronies. There were many, many beings to fear in those waters, it was said, but two creatures in particular were the source of constant conversation and mid-sleep perspiration. The second most deadly being that also preyed on the mollsk was the morae. It was shaped a bit like a serpent and powered its three-meter length through the seas by constantly moving ribs—the tail streaming out behind for a rudder, or more awfully, as a brace in attacking.

  The morae had an enormous head with jaws that could unhinge, allowing it to rip into morsels much larger than the circumference of its tubular body. And, like most animals of the deep, its flesh was very dense, giving its enormous strength, even for its size. Eyewitness accounts had one morae going for a leg dangling out of a boat and dragging leg, boat, and all under water. Fortunately, Dynsman reassured himself, the morae rarely fed during an outgoing tide. It was during the return home, with the seas pounding back at the shore, that the hunters worried.

  Most dreaded of all, however, was the gurion. This was a thing that was always hungry and hunted at all times. Dynsman noticed that he was about waist-deep, a depth most favored by the gurion when it was on the stalk. He had never seen a gurion, and sure as hell wanted to keep it that way. Apparently they looked a bit like an Earth starfish but enormously larger—perhaps two meters across. On their many legs they could rise up out of the water over a three-meter tide. A gurion could run through the water as fast as a human being could on land. It was impossible to escape them. They were an almost obscene white, covered with a thick bumpy skin. The huge sucking discs on their legs could rip a mollsk apart then evert its stomach, which was lined with rows of needle-teeth, over its prey, grasp the soft flesh, and pull it back into its body, ripping and digesting the living organism at the same time.

  Dynsman never wanted to meet a living gurion.

  All in all, after being condemned to Dru, Dynsman wasn't sure if he wouldn't have been better off facing Prime World justice. He felt that he had always been an unappreciated man, but on Dru his talents were going completely without use. He thought of himself as the kind of a fellow who could get along in any society. He had not a prejudice in him. He just wanted to be allowed to do what he did best—blow things up—and then enjoy the companionship of his fellow professionals in a bar after the bloody task was done.

  Chetwynd had changed all that. Dynsman did not blame the Tahn system for his present state. He had made a misstep and then been caught. Dynsman blamed it on evil companions. What happened later was only to be expected.

  Chetwynd was only one of many prisoner bosses who ruled the isolated villages sprinkled across Dru. The Tahn, fascists that they were, created the prison colony of Dru for only one purpose: to imprison criminals, both political and societal. Rob a bank or hoist a picket sign, it was all the same to the Tahn. But, fascists or not, they were also eminently practical. If they had to have a prison world, it should pay for itself. Better yet, it should make a profit.

  In Dynsman's area, the Tahn had seeded a vast mollsk bed. Twenty grams of mollsk flesh went for a small fortune in Tahn high society. Deeper inland, musk-bearing plants rolled like tumbleweeds across an enormous desert landscape. Since they also sprayed a highly caustic acid all about them when they were halted, it cost many prisoner lives to harvest them. And across the face of Dru, ranches, farms, and mines produced items worth a warlord's dowry at the cost of many "worthless" lives.

  Dynsman had figured out the system even before he was transported to Chetwynd's village, and was determined to keep himself alive. With Chetwynd, it was a plan that almost could have worked.

  Chetwynd had been a labor organizer on the docks at the Tahn's main spaceport. In his somewhat colorful past there had been more than a modicum of murder and robbery and mayhem. But when he led his fellow workers out on strike over some now obscure benefit-parity issue involving in-flight feelies for deep-space workers, it was just the final straw for the Tahn. He was put in manacles and told there were many many many mollsks in his future.

  By the time Dynsman came on the scene, the enormous being that was Chetwynd had staked out the village for himself. He dressed in the best of clothes, confiscated all the luxuries for himself and his cronies, and had gathered a little harem of prisoner lovelies. The ladies were there, it would be noted, more for his charm and prowess than his relative riches as boss thug.

  Dynsman himself had fallen under the giant's spell when he was dumped from the flitter and assigned to Chetwynd's work party. The big man had already pored over a stolen copy of his rap sheet. "Bomber, huh?" he had mused. "You gotta be the clot I was always lookin' for back on Heath."

  Chetwynd had immediately put Dynsman to work building bombs. The materials were far from right, but Dynsman did his damnedest to produce, bragging all the while about the sophisticated things he could do if given the right tools and materials.

  He never asked Chetwynd what the bombs were for because the obvious targets—the guards—would bring thousandfold retaliations if any of them were even scratched. Eventually Dynsman managed to produce a double-throw-down explosive device, triggered by the narcobeer breath that always seemed to exude from Dru guards. The test was unfortunate. The problem was, Dynsman had made a minor error involving the pheromone trigger, and when Chetwynd threw a party for the first blast, the musk favored by Chetwynd's latest passion set the bomb off well before schedule.

  Dynsman expected to be killed on the spot. Instead, Chetwynd merely smashed him about for a while and then, after a long conference with his bullyboys, assigned him to the main mollsk work party. As he waded through the surf, waiting for the first crunch of the morae, or the gurion, Dynsman had mixed feelings about his reprieve.

  There was a shout from his left. Dynsman whirled to see that entire side of the work force flailing at the water, desperately struggling to reach shore. Another shout rose to his right, and Dysnman knew that somehow it was too late. The others were already heading back, and he had been daydreaming about his problems, ignoring
everything about him.

  He tried to get his feet to move, but instead stared in awful fascination at the black shapes that were whipping through the sea toward them. Morae! By clotting hell, morae! Somehow he turned and started plunging his knees up and down, but made almost no headway against the outgoing tide. His heart was hammering, his muscles straining, and still it wasn't enough; he could almost feel the gaping jaws moving in on his legs. The legs felt so thin and brittle. Then he was on the shore, and people were pulling him onto the beach and he was gasping and laughing and messing himself in fear. They dumped him and ran back. Dynsman heard a scream and rolled over to look.

  Chetwynd was standing in the surf, his huge body braced against some terrible pulling weight as he tugged at one of the mollsk hunters. Chetwynd had the man beneath both arms, and the hunter's body was wracked back and forth in fast, terribly agonizing motions. The man screamed and screamed and screamed. But Chetwynd kept his hold. He kept pulling, and finally whatever had the man let go. Chetwynd staggered back with him and collapsed on the sand to a ragged cheer from the others. Dynsman himself almost yelled out in relief until he saw the thing that was in Chetwynd's arms. The morae had won. Nothing existed below the waist. The worker grinned at Chetwynd, and then his eyes rolled up in his head and blood burst out of his mouth. Dynsman turned aside to vomit.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "One to you, Mr. Ohlsn!"

  "Acknowledged, Mr. Keet!"

  Prodded by Sten's club, the prisoner double-timed from the white line chalked on the ground across the compound Coward Alex. Kilgour saluted, in the flat-hand outstretched salute of the Tahn, then motioned the prisoner out the gate, onto the world of Dru itself. He slammed and triple-print-locked the gate, then doubled, knees high, toward his partner. Again they exchanged salutes, then started toward their quarters.

  "Ah ha' been a lot of things f'r the Emperor, young Sten," Kilgour said heavily, "but y've forced me into roles Ah dinna ken a' all. I wasna bad bein't a cashiered soldier when we were dealin't wi' those mad Taliemaners. But this time y'hae me ae first a pimp, an' noo a screw.