House of Shards

by Walter Jon Williams

  “I damn well hope you got the Shard,” she said. “Somebody ought to be rewarded for my spending an hour with the most repulsive individual I’ve ever met.”

  “Maijstral caught me.” Simply.

  Vanessa bared her teeth. “I could kill him.”

  Fu George raised a contemplative eyebrow. “You may not have to, my dear. I may do it for you.”

  ———

  Roberta found only Drexler in Fu George’s suite. The Khos-alikh agreed to have Fu George call her as soon as he returned, and Roberta began her return to her rooms. While waiting she could call the Marquess Kotani and agree upon a time to meet and arrange the encounter between Maijstral and Fu George. As she entered her corridor, she saw Paavo Kuusinen ahead of her, holding his walking stick meditatively behind him with both hands. Her pace increased.

  “Mr. Kuusinen!”

  He turned, saw her, and waited while she hastened to him. “I hope things have been arranged satisfactorily, your grace,” he said. With some difficulty he matched her long-legged stride.

  “Things are wretched. Maijstral lost the Shard and Fu George was caught red-handed in the room. Fu George denied stealing the Shard, and now he and Maijstral are going to fight a duel. I’m Maijstral’s second. I just tried to speak to Fu George privately to see if we could reach an arrangement about the Shard, but he’s not home.”

  Kuusinen stopped dead, his eyes opaque. Roberta, knowing him, paused. “Yes, Kuusinen? What is it?”

  “A moment, your grace.” Lost in thought, he paused, touched his chin with the head of his cane. He looked at her.

  “Where is Maijstral now? I need to give him some information.”

  “I believe he’s in a room on the Green Level. I don’t quite remember the number.”

  “Would you do me the kindness of showing me where it is?”

  “Certainly.” She began striding down the corridor again. Kuusinen, after a skip or two, matched her pace. Roberta looked at him. He was frowning at the carpet.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind, Mr. Kuusinen?”

  Kuusinen was startled. “I beg your pardon, your grace. I was… lost in thought.” He cleared his throat.”It’s rather complicated. Let me begin at the ball, that first night.”

  They arrived at the door of an elevator, and Roberta touched the service ideogram.

  Kuusinen spoke on.

  ———

  “What other ships are in dock?”

  Cap’n Bob called up the manifests. “Count Boston will arrive in three days. Other than that, there are only private yachts belonging to Miss Vanessa Runciter, Baron Silverside, and Pearl Woman.” She frowned. “The Baron’s yacht is down for maintenance.”

  “Runciter’s probably vanished along with Fu George,” Khamiss mused. She turned to the console. “Contact Pearl Woman’s suite.”

  ———

  Maijstral was not pleased to see Mr. Kuusinen, with or without the Duchess. He had just got a handle on his nerves, and the presence of his second reminded him of things he preferred to keep safely buried in the back of his mind. After Roman let the pair in, Maijstral remained prone on Dolfuss’s bed, asking rhetorical questions of the ceiling while Kuusinen prosed on.

  “The press is restricted here, you see. No one reporter is allowed to control more than eight media globes at any one time. So when I noticed that there were only six at the ball, and then six at your performance this afternoon, it became clear that they were being used elsewhere.”

  A flash of insight struck Maijstral. Quite suddenly he realized where this was going. He sat up abruptly. Hope floundered to the surface of his mind like an escaped convict pursuing daylight at the end of a long tunnel.

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  ———

  Bells of doom tolling in his mind, pistol firmly snugged in a harness built into his jacket, Zoot walked with a cold, sepulchral tread toward the docks. A series of practical decisions had brought him here. He had been intending to kill himself in the bath, where it would be easy to clean up; but then he realized that the charge might go through his head into the room adjacent and do someone damage. He’s decided therefore to kill himself in an isolated airlock, where the station crew would find it easier to clean up the mess and where no one else could get hurt.

  Lord Qlp boomed on. Lady Dosvidern’s expression alternated between despair and bafflement.

  Pearl Woman, smiling triumphantly, seemed a bit surprised when she saw that it was Khamiss who called her.

  “How may I help you, madam?” she asked.

  “We have an emergency situation on the station,” Khamiss said. “Lives are at stake. I wonder if we might meet you at the docks and perhaps ask for the codes to your yacht.”

  Pearl Woman tilted her head, permitting a view of the trademark that dangled from her ear. “Of course,” she said. Her powerful shoulder muscles flexed. “I can be there in a few minutes.” Her expression turned puzzled. “By the way,” she added, “what’s that noise?”

  Khamiss hesitated. “Could I possibly explain later? It’s part of our problem.”

  “Very well.” She looked out of the camera’s range. “Fetch the cutlasses, Advert. And some of our media globes.”

  Her hologram vanished. Lord’Qlp’s voice continued to roar from its speaker.

  “Oh, no.” Khamiss looked up sharply at Lady Dosvidern’s tone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Lady Dosvidern’s expression was stricken.

  “Its lordship just imposed a deadline. We have one hour before it transmits its final message to Zynzlyp and blows up the station.”

  Khamiss rose from her chair, her hand resting on her holster. “Then I’ll have to hurry,” she said.

  Once out the door she began to run.

  Though she ran as fast as she could, she was possessed the while by a certain sense of futility. Once she got to the docks, she had no clear idea what she was going to do.

  ———

  “Drake Maijstral’s on the phone.” Vanessa Runciter’s eyes glittered coldly. “Trying to wriggle out of the encounter, | no doubt.”

  Mild surprise overtook Fu George’s features. “Odd. I wonder what he intends?” He and Vanessa had, just that moment, returned to their suite to find emergency lights blinking all over the telephone equipment—Drexler, crouched behind the sofa with detectors strapped over his eyes and a pistol in his hand, had steadfastly been refusing all communication. Vanessa had reached for the phone to check |for messages just as a holographic Maijstral popped into view.

  Fu George stepped to before the telephone. “Maijstral,” he said, “are you certain this is quite regular?”

  Maijstral’s lazy green eyes, despite the bruising around the left, glowed with silent delight. “I’ll confess to irregularity,” he said, “but I think we find ourselves in an irregular situation.”

  Fu George raised an eyebrow. “We?” he asked. He’d take this gratuitous plural from Vanessa, but hardly from the man he expected to blast out of his boots in a day or two.

  “I know this is an extremely odd request, Fu George,” Maijstral said, “but would you do me the irregular favor of meeting me down on Mauve Level, outside room sixteen?”

  Ignoring Vanessa’s mime of outrage, Fu George gazed deliberately at Maijstral and assumed a look of gravity. “This had better be good,” he said.

  ———

  Pearl Woman was dashingly dressed in boots, pantaloons, a short-sleeved, quilted Quivira jacket, and her matched cutlasses. The butt of a Fantod Exquisite mapper protruded discreetly from the open jacket. Her private media globes, technically illegal onstation, orbited silently overhead. She listened to Khamiss’s hasty story, then nodded.

  “So you want to use my yacht to get some of your people across to the liner?”

  “Right. Or, if necessary, ram the Cheng and disable it.”

  “Qlp will see you coming. He can’t miss something the size of a yacht heading for him.”

/>   Khamiss’s nostrils fluttered hopelessly. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Pearl Woman considered the question. “Maybe we could cross unobserved from an airlock to the liner.”

  ‘Khamiss was in no mood to question the sudden gratuitous we in Pearl Woman’s conversation, nor for that matter the illegal media globes that recorded the debate.

  “Cheng’s got exterior cameras as well as detectors. If they’re in use, its lordship will see us.” Khamiss’s diaphragm pulsed. “I may as well use the yacht. It will give me more options.”

  Pearl Woman frowned. “Do you by any chance have access to darksuits?”

  Khamiss looked at her in slow surprise. “We confiscated darksuits from Maijstral and Fu George when they came on station.”

  “Excellent. They’ll have antidetection mechanisms built in.”

  “The suits are in impoundment. Just over there.”

  Pearl Woman smiled. She drew her Fantod and spun it in her hand.

  “Let’s get them,” she said, and her smile broadened. “You know, Miss Khamiss, I was planning on being bored today. It’s nice to know I’ll be disappointed.”

  Gregor and Roman, hopping and clashing elbows in their haste, were changing into their darksuits in the bathroom. Maijstral had adopted a more leisurely pace; he was letting the closet robot unlace his jacket and the sideseams of his trousers.

  “Mr. Kuusinen, I thank you,” he said. “I don’t think you need be present at the finale unless you wish to be.”

  “I prefer to remain in the background, sir.” Kuusinen bowed. “I wish you success.”

  Maijstral tore off his jacket, falling bands, and holster. “Your grace,” he said as he unstrapped his knife from his forearm, “I thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

  “Pleased to be of help, Maijstral. Do you still want me to see Kotani?”

  “Not until this business is resolved.”

  Roberta drew back her ears. “You wouldn’t have a spare darksuit, would you?”

  “Not here. My spares are impounded at customs.”

  “Too bad, Maijstral. I’d like to be in on the finish, but I’m afraid I can’t be seen in your company—I can’t afford the appearance of colluding with you in the theft of my own treasure.”

  “I’ll give you first view of the recordings, your grace.”

  “It’s not the same as being there.”

  “Alas, not.”

  The door opened. Roman and Gregor stepped out, dark suit hoods drawn over their heads.

  “We’re ready, boss,” Gregor said.

  “If you’ll excuse me, your grace.”

  “Maijstral.” She stepped toward him and gently sniffed his ears. “Good luck.” Surprise stirred in Maijstral. In the part ing handclasp, the Duchess had offered him three fingers.

  Vanessa Runciter, fashionably ornate detector goggles over her eyes, reached into the closet for her Nana-Coulville rifle. “Nana-Coulville,” as the advertisements read, “gunmaker by appointment to His Imperial Majesty Nnis CVI,” never mentioning that the Emperor had been frozen stiff for two generations and that even when he was alive he preferred stalking insects with nets to shooting live animals for sport. Vanessa’s lightweight mapper was not precisely a sporting weapon, being intended for driving large-caliber slugs through force fields and into the bodies of sentient beings, whence the victims’ nervous systems would be mapped within seconds and permanently short-circuited by the single-minded, homicidal, miniature intelligence concealed in the hard casing of the bullet.

  Vanessa, pleased at the heft of the weapon in her hands, formed in her mind the happy image of little jagged lightning bolts running along the network of Drake Maijstral’s nerves, turning them black as charcoal. Cheered by the graphic quality of the picture, Vanessa paused and smiled. It was a pity that Maijstral was going to get his comeuppance at Fu George’s hands, not her own.

  But maybe not. Perhaps Maijstral had lured Fu George and Drexler off to Mauve Level in order to loot his suite; in which case he would find Vanessa, Chalice, and a magazine full of nasty homicidal bullets waiting for him.

  Dwelling on this cheerful thought, Vanessa glanced up, her detector goggles showing her the pulses of energy from the alarms set in the false closet ceiling atop which Fu George had stowed his loot. Vanessa’s smile vanished. There was something wrong here.

  She leaned the gun against the wall, reached up on tiptoe, and disengaged the false ceiling. Alarms failed to clang. The ceiling was suspiciously light.

  The loot had gone. Vanessa flung the false ceiling across the room and sent crystal glasses hopping from the portable bar to the floor. Unsatisfactorily, none broke.

  Maijstral! she thought.

  “Chalice!” she shouted, and reached again for her gun. “To arms!”

  ———

  “Boss,” said Gregor. “I think I should tell you something.”

  “Later, Gregor.”

  “It’s sort of important.”

  Maijstral looked at him in irritation. “Later,” he said more firmly.

  Gregor shrugged and gave up. “Right,” he said. “Like you say.”

  Maijstral, Roman, and Gregor stepped from Dolfuss’s room, then rose on a-grav harnesses and sped down the corridor. Camouflage holograms blossomed around them. Dodging the occasional startled pedestrian, they soared straight to a communications main, entered, dropped three storeys to the Mauve Level, then raced onward. Mauve Level was devoted largely to storage of food, water, furniture, and other bulky items: the party encountered no employees or guests as they flew to their destination.

  Geoff Fu George, his countenance displaying suspicion, waited with Drexler. Chalice and Vanessa, Maijstral assumed, were guarding Fu George’s suite.

  As Maijstral settled to the floor, Fu George folded his arms and gave him a cool look. “I hope you have an explanation for this, Maijstral.”

  “Yes. One moment.” He gestured to his two assistants. They deployed media globes, stepped to one of the false walls, inserted passkeys, and swung the false wall up on its hinges.

  A startled Kyoko Asperson hung in a hammock stretched inside the utility corridor. Media globes circled over her head. Loot was piled high around her. There was clearly no room left for the impact diamond. The Eltdown Shard glowed at her throat. She raised a hand.

  “Hi there.” Tentatively.

  “Boss,” Gregor said. “This was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  The airlock door closed silently behind him, a gateway from the world Zoot had known to the world awaiting him.

  He glanced over the empty airlock and gave a long sigh as he ran over a mental checklist, assuring himself that there was nothing left to do with his life but finish himself off. Apparently, he concluded, there wasn’t. His diaphragm pulsed reflectively.

  His farewell text, sealed in an envelope, made a crinkling noise in his breast pocket as drew his disrupter and set the selector to “lethal.” He licked his nose and pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple just below the left ear. His heart beat a slow dirge in his chest.

  His eyes shut tight, he commended himself ritually to the Sixteen Active and Twelve Passive Virtues, then conjured in his mind’s eye the image of Lady Dosvidern, in whose name he committed this act. The image, he discovered, was maddeningly indistinct. The situation was too distracting for proper meditation. Zoot growled and concentrated harder. The image hardened. Better.

  Goodbye, cruel world, he thought, and prepared to squeeze the trigger.

  The door behind him opened.

  Zoot yowled in surprise and jumped three feet, his pulse hammering harder than it had when he was about to kill himself. He whirled and saw Khamiss and Pearl Woman standing in the airlock door, pistols in their hands.

  Pearl Woman grinned at him. “Thought you were going to get away with it, eh?”

  Zoot stared. “Your pardon?” he asked.

  Pearl Woman stepped into the airlock. “You’re not doing this alone, yo
u know.”

  “I’m not?” He wondered briefly if he should ask them why they were doing away with themselves; then decided the question was in bad taste.

  Pearl Woman laughed. “Thought you’d get sole credit, didn’t you?”

  Through his fog of bewilderment, Zoot became aware that his features were, once again, running through a long repertoire of ticks and palpitations. He drew himself up and summoned indignation.

  “Ladies,” he demanded, “what in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

  Pearl Woman touched the ideograms that controlled the airlock. “We’re here for the same reason as you,” she said. “Don’t be naive.”

  Zoot looked at her as the door cycled shut. There must be some perspective on this, he thought desperately, in which all will make sense.

  Khamiss stepped close to him. She put her hand on his arm and softly sniffed his ear. “Thank you, Zoot,” she said. “I’m glad you’re with us.”

  Zoot looked at her. His diaphragm gave a final, resigned spasm. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  Hello, cruel world.

  “Air’s getting ready to cycle out,” Pearl Woman said. “Turn on your fields.”

  For the first time Zoot noticed that the Pearl and Khamiss were both dressed in one-piece garments, Pearl Woman with her swords belted on over her clothes. The two intruders blurred slightly as they turned on the force fields that would capture and preserve the air around them.

  Zoot had built a similar field into his jacket, mainly to aid in river crossings or diving into predator-filled waters. With a push of his mind, he turned it on.

  He was long past the point of trying to figure things out. He’d follow the others and hope, eventually, everything made sense.

  He was too confused to feel relief.

  ———

  “Good work, Kuusinen. I am in your debt.”

  “All in a day’s work, your grace.” The door to Roberta’s suite swung open. She stepped in and glanced in surprise at her telephone. “Look at all the emergency lights,” she said. “I wonder what’s going on now?”

  ———

  “A common thief,” Fu George said. “I’m surprised at you, Miss Asperson.”