The woman’s smile grew sly. “I believe you might be right.”
The man brought his lips close to hers, and, brushing the edge of her lower lip with his thumbnail, he removed the crystal from below her lips and held it to his own.
“Mr. Glascock!” he said to the micro-crystal, a lab-cultured Aurigan transmitter.
The pale card-player jerked in his seat. He began to look up.
“I strongly recommend that you keep your eyes on your cards, Mr. Glascock.”
The pale player went rigid. He lowered his head. His gaze fixed on his hand with an intentness not previously displayed.
“I’m assisting you now,” said the man on the balcony. “But the rules of the game have changed. You will ask your opponent only for cards he doesn’t hold, unless you’d like me to contact casino security. Would you like me to contact casino security?”
The pale player gave his head a quick shake.
“Very good,” said the man on the balcony. “You will start by asking for the queen—”
When the pale player found himself down two hundred twenty thousand AU, the man on the balcony said, “Game over, Mr. Glascock.”
Glascock flung down his cards.
On the balcony, the man holding the Aurigan crystal transmitter squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger. The crystal shattered.
The woman smiled at him, seductively. “Do you have a name?”
He held out his hand, and she placed her hand in his.
“Bhamu,” he answered, as he raised her to her feet. “Jangano Bhamu.”
“I’m Tai Msasi.”
She led him into her suite. He took her into his arms.
Enormous mirrors deflected sunlight through the glass inner rim of Bokassa’s Torus. The mirrors began slowly to turn. Night seeped into the space station. Electricity and neon flared across hotels and retail structures, amphitheatres and nightclubs, restoring artificial day.
Bhamu and Msasi sat up in her expansive bed. Light came faintly through a slit between the heavy curtains drawn over the glass balcony door. The light reached the bed and nightstand. The rest of the room was lost in shadow.
Msasi reached for the cigarette pack on the nightstand. The pack lay next to a miniature flechette pistol. Bhamu had removed it from his vest while disrobing.
As Bhamu lit Msasi’s cigarette, the glow revealed a man, broad and still and besuited, watching them.
The woman gasped. “Oddlot!”
Bhamu lunged for the flechette pistol.
The besuited man moved with equal alacrity. His arm flexed, snapping forward with the swiftness of a New Murri dandarabilla snake. The long, bent object he’d been holding flew from his hand.
The boomerang struck Bhamu’s temple. He sank down on the bed as if rendered boneless. He did not stir.
***
Bhamu was not unconscious long. But, when he woke, the man was gone. Every light in the room was ablaze. Tai Msasi’s nude form glittered.
***
“She wasn’t turned to crystal.”
The speaker, a whip-thin, blade-faced older woman known to her subordinates as Alif, extended a long arm across her desk. On her palm rested a small, elegant case of deep purple Alzubran burlwood. From the case, Jangano Bhamu selected a cigarette. He leaned back, placing it between his lips and touching an Alpha Cepheian crystal to the tip. Though the crystal was cool in his hand, the tip of his cigarette glowed red. Smoke rose in a thin line. Bhamu did not enjoy the taste of Novo Brasilian tobacco – he favored Yeniturkish – but it could have been worse. The Director of the Special Intelligence Service preferred Newmerican tobacco, which Bhamu despised.
Looking at Alif, he raised his brows. “Not crystal?”
Alif said, “She was turned to diamond, Agent Za.”
He drew on his cigarette and looked meditatively out the window of Alif’s office. He was no longer in Bokassa’s Torus. He was now on – or, more correctly, inside – his homeworld, a vast Dyson sphere known as New Zanzibar. To be more specific, Bhamu sat inside the tall, bland high-rise known to the public as the home of the Ministry of Agriculture and Wildlife. It was a plausible identity; immense swathes of New Zanzibar’s interior were given over to the cropland, rangeland, and carefully cultivated wilderness that sustained the sphere’s several hundred quintillion residents. However, much of the interior surface was occupied by the single, enormous city of New Trantor. The window behind Alif offered Bhamu a view of the district of Steel Town, the gleaming governmental soul of the ecumenopolis. Though seated in an office over one hundred stories above ground level, Bhamu couldn’t see the upcurve of the cityscape. Despite certain romantic images featured in New Zanzibarean tourism ministry advertisements on the InterPlanetNet, the beginning of the Dyson sphere curvature was millions of kilometers distant, and therefore out of sight.
“Interesting,” Bhamu said, at length. “I’d not been aware that a process existed to turn flesh to diamond.”
“It was a secret of the New Zanzibarean defense ministry,” Alif replied. “It is no longer.”
“I see.” Bhamu did not comment on the obvious danger such a leak posed to New Zanzibar and its allies. “This process would be a threat to Glascock and other diamond traders, I suppose.”
“Perhaps,” Alif said. “Perhaps not. Diamond manufactured by human or alien processes has never previously threatened the market for naturally occurring diamonds of the first water.”
She reached into the burlwood case, which now rested on the authentic Fomolhautean hardwood of her desk, and selected a cigarette. Bhamu knew very little about the head of SIS—New Zanzibar’s Special Intelligence Service—but he knew better than to offer her a light. She deployed her own Alpha Cepheian crystal, then smoked for a moment, studying him.
“Our concern is not for the state of the natural diamond market,” she said finally, “although of course we wouldn’t care to test the theory that creating diamonds from flesh wouldn’t affect the interstellar economy.”
“Then there’s a concern beyond the obvious.”
“Of course there’s a concern beyond the obvious, Agent Za. You wouldn’t be sitting in my office if there wasn’t. The threat is immediate, and grave.”
“I’m afraid I fail to grasp the nature of this threat.”
“Part of our concern is that the process also works in reverse.”
“Ah,” Bhamu said. “I can see where that would be a threat to the interstellar diamond market, and therefore to economic stability.”
“Would that this was the full extent of the threat,” Alif said. “But this reverse process doesn’t only convert diamond to flesh. It also works, with equal swiftness, on certain metals.”
“Gold and other precious metals?”
“When applied directly, as with an aerosol dispenser, or an explosion, it dissolves most metals, Agent Za.”
Involuntarily, Bhamu glanced out the window at Steel Town.
“You comprehend, I see,” ‘Alif said. “Glascock has come into possession of a secret more threatening to us than fusion was to Old Earth.”
“Glascock possesses,” Bhamu said, “the means to dissolve our graviton generators and our great world-city, and most every other urb in Human Space.”
“Which would be catastrophic enough,” ‘Alif said. “But that’s not all. He can dissolve the transsteel of which our sphere-world itself is constructed, and leave every one of New Zanzibar’s several hundred quintillion inhabitants to die in the vacuum of space.”
***
In the darkness of a planetary night from which both moons had fled, Bhamu crouched on a forested hillside. He was clad in a full-body coverall provided by Qāf, the research and development division of SIS. The coverall’s smartcloth showed a shifting camouflage pattern, which harmonized with the deciduous forests of the planet New New England. Qāf Division wasn’t responsible for the video-camo, but it had created the app that gave Bhamu the heat signature of a local deer species.
Bhamu wor
e an earpiece and a pair of dataspex. Both were far superior to any on the interstellar market. Data flickered in Bhamu’s peripheral vision as he watched a small, sporty starship descend noisily to the spacefield of a palatial estate. The ship came to rest on retro-style fins and cut its roaring rocket. The rocket and fins were aesthetic. Starships circumvented the vastness of interstellar space with near-instantaneous warp drives, and landed and launched by generating anti-gravitons.
An aesthetically old-school airlock opened in the starship’s sleek side. From the lock, a ramp emerged, settling on the plascrete. Soon thereafter, the airlock disgorged several individuals into the bright artificial lighting of the spacefield, and into range of Bhamu’s Qāf-designed spex.
Emerging first were a pair of watchful male bodyguards. Their uniforms matched those of the private security guards Bhamu had spotted patrolling the grounds of the estate, and they bore the same weapons: 905 nm laser-rifles of New Palestinian design. The bodyguards were followed by a dozen men of varying degrees of attentiveness and attractiveness. These were clad in unflattering one-piece lavender jumpsuits of the sort favored by henchpersons, or, rather, their employers. The jumpsuit of each henchman was belted with a white sash, which held a semi-automatic flechette pistol of Neudeutchlander design.
After the henchmen, three dark-skinned young women emerged from the ship. They were so beautiful, the agent covertly watching them caught his breath. All three were clad in far more upmarket uniforms than the men. The shortest wore the sort of dress uniform associated with starship engineers, though hers came from no official space force. The other two women – one tall, the other downright stunning – wore the sort of blazer, tie, and slacks favored for over a millennium by civilian starcraft pilots. Each carried the traditional pilot’s cap under one arm. The stunning woman had a voluptuous figure and a gorgeous Hausa Sáabóo face and a civilian captain’s insignia. Her right hand rested on an accessory less commonly associated with private aviators: a flechette pistol.
Bhamu tore his gaze from the lead pilot and forced himself to study the man who followed her out of the starship. This man was dark and powerfully built, of average height, with black, wavy hair that fell to his shoulders. His features were pure New Murri, though he wore an elegant cream lace agbada and deep red fila in the latest New Yoruban style. In his left hand he held a large boomerang. He was the man Tai Msasi had identified as Oddlot before she died.
The New Murrian was followed by two men. One was a beautiful, willowy young man, dripping with diamonds and dressed in the height of New Mumbai fashion. He had one bejeweled brown hand draped negligently over the elbow of the other man. This man appeared some years older. He was tall and thin, with the pale, straight hair and bony, pallid face of a New New Englander. He was Richard Glascock, and he was retro-stylishly attired in a revival of TwenCen Western men’s fashion, complete with analog watch, diamond cufflinks, diamond-accented tie clip, and an absence of further ornamentation.
Behind Richard Glascock and his arm-candy, a fourth woman stepped from the craft. She had the straight black hair and round tan face of Xin Zhongguo. She wore the silk slacks and long jacquard jacket of a wealthy Xin Zhongguo businesswoman without an air of comfort. Hastening to the unoccupied side of the diamond merchant, she leaned close and began speaking intently into his ear.
Bhamu began to hear a woman’s voice in his left ear. When the airlock had opened, he’d released a nano-drone. It featured an Aurigan cultured-crystal transmitter and the freshest in Qāf Division anti-detection measures. It followed Glascock’s party, sending Bhamu’s earpiece the clearest conversation possible.
“We’re prepared to pay very well—” the black-haired woman was speaking the Běifānghuà Mandarin of Xin Zhongguo “—for use of the formula—”
“Of course you are,” Glascock replied in the same language, its tones tinged with the nasal accent of New Boston. “Only the New Zanzibarean government and I have the formula. And New Zanzibar wouldn’t sell it to you at any price.”
Bhamu began to move stealthily down the wooded slope.
On the spacefield, Glascock smiled at the Xin Zhongguo woman. “You’re in luck, Madame Zhang. I’m willing to fulfill your government’s fondest desire at a bargain rate. I will charge your government only slightly less than everything.”
Zhang ignored his witticism. “We should like to begin Operation Slam Dunk in one Galactic Standard week—”
Zhang’s voice cut off as she, Glascock, and Glascock’s arm-candy rounded the corner of a large warehouse.
No building should have been able to block the nano-drone’s transmission. It was possible the nano-drone had failed. It was also possible the Glascock estate’s datanet had a counter-surveillance measure unknown to Qāf Division.
If the latter was true, the datanet might have detected the nano-drone—and reported it to Glascock.
Abandoning caution, Bhamu sprinted down the dangerously rough hillside. He could only hope the sounds he made would be drowned by the henchmen’s tramping footsteps, or mistaken for a deer running through the woods.
Emerging from the forest, Bhamu sped like a gazelle across the spacefield. He appreciated its modest dimensions, but not its bright lights. He was grateful to reach the shadow of a hangar for planetary aircraft.
Glascock’s party had disappeared around a corner of the warehouse. Bhamu followed, advancing quietly on large squares of plascrete pavement. Peering around a second corner, he saw Glascock’s group some distance ahead, rounding the corner of a greenhouse. Glascock was calmly discussing payment with Madame Zhang, and no one in his entourage glanced around. None demonstrated awareness of a security breach.
Glascock’s party had progressed along the pavement without incident. But as Bhamu followed, one of the squares of plascrete gave way beneath his feet.
He stifled the impulse to curse the darkness as he plunged through it.
A sudden but not unexpected impact stole his senses.
***
Jangano Bhamu woke to bright light, and to powerful aches in head and body. He didn’t change expression. He kept his eyes narrow, letting his vision adjust.
He lay on his back. He wondered if he’d been moved. He couldn’t recall the moment of impact. He doubted he’d landed with his weight evenly distributed, his arms against his sides, and his legs stretched out straight.
Through barely parted lids, Bhamu looked around.
His body was aligned with the length of a rectangular tabletop. Its sides were equidistant from his arms. He couldn’t see the head or foot of the tabletop unless he moved his head. He kept still.
He could see a wall to either side. The walls were pink as the interior of a Nueva Cuba conch. The left wall had a metal door, a motion detector light-switch, and a square red button. Each wall was over six Standard Meters from the table.
Bhamu assessed himself. His aches suggested serious bruises, but no broken bones. His dataspex, earpiece, concealed firearms and knives, video-camouflage coverall, and boots had been removed, leaving him in the tight-fitting black pants and long-sleeved shirt he’d worn underneath the coverall.
Bhamu felt a discernable interruption in the surface beneath his torso and head. The interruption might mean the tabletop could be separated for addition of an extender. The separation felt wider than necessary. Bhamu didn’t like it.
He also didn’t like the broad metal bands binding his torso and limbs to the table. Those passing over his chest and stomach also confined his arms. However, each of his legs was secured in place by a separate series of bands. These kept his legs separated by several centimeters.
A faint click drew Bhamu’s attention to the door. It swung open, admitting the diamond smuggler and his diamond-dripping arm-candy. The two were followed into the room by Oddlot, still bearing his boomerang. Oddlot was followed by a dozen henchmen to be named later, if at all.
“Rise and shine, Mr. Bhamu!” called the diamond smuggler.
Bhamu raised his head and
looked around.
The tabletop was pale wood. The separation divided the tabletop from head to foot. The surface was patched with large, dark stains. They bore a distinct resemblance to dried blood.
Bhamu’s gaze fixed on the table’s most unusual detail.
This appeared to be a diamond blade, visible between and beyond his parted feet. The blade rose a Standard meter above the tabletop. The glittering edge faced Bhamu from the edge of the separation in the table. To be more precise, the blade-edge faced Bhamu’s groin.
Observing the focus of Bhamu’s attention, Richard Glascock laughed. “Mr. Bhamu, it’s a pleasure to see you again!” he said in Galactic Standard KiSwahili. “I regret that our last acquaintance was so unsatisfying. But you were unconscious in my lady companion’s hotel room. Furthermore, my earpiece was transmitting the news that your counterpart in the Newmerican Central Intelligence Agency was rushing to your side. I found it necessary to leave Bokassa’s Torus before you could wake.”
Bhamu looked at him. “Pleased to meet you, I suppose.”
“I suppose you believe you pleased Ms. Tsasi,” Glascock returned with a smile. “But I was quite displeased that I hadn’t time to reward you as I rewarded her. However, I’m a diamond merchant, so I always look on the bright side of life. And I rejoice that you’ve gratified me with the opportunity to introduce you to—” he gestured at the foot of the table “—a singular gem.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Bhamu replied coolly. “Now, if I might have a spot of assistance in rising from this table—”
“I’m afraid I must disappoint your hope, Mr. Bhamu.”
Glascock gestured. Oddlot turned and retraced his steps. Instead of exiting, he depressed the red button beside the door.
A faint motor noise began, drawing Bhamu’s attention to the foot of the table.
The diamond blade began to move rapidly up and down. Simultaneously, it began to proceed up the channel in the table. Its advance was less frantic than its up-and-down motions, but still distressingly rapid.
Bhamu’s efforts to escape the metal bonds pinning him in the blade’s implacable path met with no success.
Black Power- The Superhero Anthology Page 18
