‘Academician Stertour, its inventor, had a most complicated name for it … but we called it the Stopper,’ said Ahfred, very slowly. He was being forced to approach both a memory and a part of his mind that he did not want to recall or even acknowledge might still exist.
‘What was the nature and purpose of the Stopper?’ asked Ruane.
Ahfred’s lower lip trembled, and his hands began to shake.
‘The Stopper … the Stopper … was a development of Stertour’s sandgrain technology,’ he said. He could no longer look Ruane in the eyes but instead stared at the floor.
‘Continue.’
‘Stertour came to realize that clockwerk sandgrain artifices could be made to be inimical to other artifices, that it would only be a matter of time before someone … an anarchist or radical … designed and constructed sandgrain warriors that would act against beneficial clockwerk, particularly the clockwerk in augmented humanity …’
Ahfred stopped. Instead of the pale floorboards, he saw writhing bodies, contorted in agony, and smoke billowing from burning cities.
‘Go on.’
‘I cannot,’ whispered Ahfred. He felt his carefully constructed persona falling apart around himself, all the noises of the greater world coming back to thrust against his ears, as they sought to surge against his brain. His protective circle of silence, the quiet of the roses, all were gone.
‘You must,’ ordered Ruane. ‘Tell me about the Stopper.’
Ahfred looked up at her.
‘I don’t want … I don’t want to remember,’ he whispered.
‘Tell me,’ ordered Ruane. She raised the egg, and Ahfred remembered the pain in his ears.
‘The Stopper was a sandgrain artifice that would hunt and destroy other sandgrain artifices,’ he said. He did not talk to Ruane, but rather to his own shaking hands. ‘But it was not wound tightly, and would only tick on for minutes, so it could be deployed locally against inimical sandgrain artifices without danger of it … spreading.’
‘But clearly the Stopper did spread, across the world,’ said Ruane. ‘How did that happen?’
Ahfred sniffed. A clear fluid ran from one nostril and over his lip.
‘There were delivery mechanisms,’ he whispered. ‘Older weapons. Clockwerk aerial torpedoes, carded to fly over all significant cities and towns, depositing the Stopper like a fall of dust.’
‘But why were these torpedoes launched?’ asked Ruane. ‘That is—’
‘What?’ sniffled Ahfred.
‘One of the things that has puzzled us,’ said Ruane quietly. ‘Continue.’
‘What was the question?’ asked Ahfred. He couldn’t remember what they had been talking about, and there was work to be done in the garden. ‘My roses, and there is weeding—’
‘Why were the aerial torpedoes launched, and who ordered this action?’ asked Ruane.
‘What?’ whispered Ahfred.
Ruane looked at the old man, at his vacant eyes and drooping mouth, and changed her question.
‘Two keys were used to open the Ultimate Arsenal,’ said Ruane. ‘Whose keys?’
‘Oh, I took Mosiah’s key while she slept,’ said Ahfred. ‘And I had a capture cylinder of her voice, to play to the lock. It was much easier than I had thought.’
‘What did you do then?’ asked Ruane, as easily as asking for a glass of water from a friend.
Ahfred wiped his nose. He had forgotten the stricture to be still.
‘It took all night, but I did it,’ he said proudly. ‘I took the sample of the Stopper to the fabrication engine and redesigned it myself. I’m sure Stertour would have been amazed. Rewound, each artifice would last for months, not hours, and I gave it better cilia, so that it might travel so much more easily!’
Ahfred smiled at the thought of his technical triumph, utterly divorcing this pleasure from any other, more troubling, memories.
‘From there, the engine made the necessary ammunition to arm the torpedoes. One thousand and sixteen silver ellipsoids, containing millions of lovely sandgrain artifices, all of them sliding along the magnetic tubes, into the torpedoes, so quietly … Then it took but a moment to turn the keys … one … two … three … and off they went into the sky—’
‘Three keys?’ asked Ruane.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Ahfred testily. ‘Two keys to open the arsenal, three keys to use the weapons, as it has always been.’
‘So Distributor Kebediah was present?’
Ahfred looked out the doorway, past Ruane. There were many tasks in the garden, all of them requiring long hours of quiet, contemplative work. It would be best if he finished with this visitor quickly, so he could get back to work.
‘Not at first,’ he said. ‘I had arranged for her to come. A state secret, I said, we must meet in the arsenal, and she came as we had arranged. Old comrades, old friends, she suspected nothing. I had a capture cylinder of her voice, too. I was completely prepared. I just needed her key.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘The Stopper!’ cackled Ahfred. He clapped his hands on his knees twice in great satisfaction. ‘Steam skeleton, sandgrain enhancement, she had it all. I had put the Stopper on her chair …’
Ahfred’s face fell and he folded his hands in his lap.
‘It was horribly loud,’ he whispered. ‘The sound of the artifices fighting inside her, like animals, clawing and chewing, and her screaming, the boiler when the safety valve blew … it was unbearable, save that I had my helmet …’
He looked around and added, ‘Where is my helmet? It is loud here, now, all this talking, and your breath, it is like a bellows, all a-huffing and a-puffing …’
Ruane’s face had set, hard and cold. When she spoke, her words came out with slow deliberation.
‘How was it you were not affected by the Stopper?’
‘Me?’ asked Ahfred. ‘Everyone knows I have no clockwerk enhancement. Oh, no, I couldn’t stand it, all that ticking inside me, that constant tick… tick… tick… It was bad enough around me, oh, yes, much too awful to have it inside.’
‘Why did you fire the torpedoes?’ asked Ruane.
‘Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you,’ said Ahfred. ‘Then you may leave my presence, madam, and I shall return to my work … and my quiet.’
‘I am an investigator of what you termed the Rival Nation,’ said Ruane.
‘But there is no Rival Nation,’ said Ahfred. ‘I remember that. We destroyed you all in the War of Accretion!’
‘All here on Earth,’ said Ruane. The lines on her neck, which Ahfred had thought tattoos, opened to reveal a delicate layering of blue flukes that shivered in contact with the air before the slits closed again. ‘You killed my grandparents, my great-uncles and great-aunts, and all my terrestrial kin. But not our future. Not my parents, not those of us in the far beyond, in the living ships. Long we prepared, myself since birth, readying ourselves to come back, to fight, to regain our ancestral lands and seas, to pit the creations of our minds against your clockwerk. But we found not an enemy, but a puzzle, the ruins of a once great, if misguided, civilization. And in seeking the answer to that puzzle, we have at last found you. I have found you.’
‘Bah!’ said Ahfred. His voice grew softer as he went on. ‘I have no time for puzzles. I shall call my guards, assassin, and you will be … you will be …’
‘Why did you fire the torpedoes?’ asked Ruane. ‘Why did you use the Stopper? Why did you destroy your world?’
‘The Stopper,’ said Ahfred. He shook his head, small sideways shakes, hardly moving his neck. ‘I had to do it. Nothing else would work, and it just kept getting worse and worse, every day—’
‘What got worse?’
Ahfred stopped shaking his head and stood bolt upright, eyes starting, his back rigid, hands clapped to his ears. Froth spewed from between his clenched teeth and cascaded from his chin in pink bubbles, stained with blood from his bitten tongue.
‘The noise!’ he screamed. ‘The noise! A world of cloc
kwerk, everybody and everything ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking—’
Suddenly the old man’s eyes rolled back. His hands fell, but he remained upright for a moment, as if suspended by hidden wires, then fell forward and stretched out headlong on the floor. A gush of bright blood came from his ears, before slowing to a trickle.
It was quiet after the Grand Technomancer fell. Ruane could hear her own breathing, and the swift pumping of her hearts.
It was a welcome sound, but not enough, not now. She went outside and took a message swift from her pocket, licking the bird to wake it, before she sent it aloft. It would bring her companions soon.
In the meantime, she began to whistle an old, old song.
Master Haddad’s Holiday
THE WORLD WAS A BLEAK one. It was unable to support human life and didn’t do very well with homegrown life-forms either. It had not been tek-shaped to improve its temperature, which was too hot, nor its atmosphere, which was thin and somewhat poisonous.
Thrukhaz Three did have a starport of sorts, built for a Prince who, on the basis of a single holographic image, had thought that the huge, carapaced beetles that were at the top of the local food chain might offer good hunting. When it turned out that they were easily frightened, basically herbivorous, and left luminous trails that made them ludicrously easy to track, the hunting was canceled. The infrastructure built for the hunting parties remained.
As Thrukhaz had once been claimed by a Prince, it technically remained within the Empire – but in practice it was part of the Fringe. Blessed with numerous wormholes to and from long-established Imperial worlds, shadowy traders and smugglers found that it was a useful place to meet, in order to buy, sell, and get away in quick time if it proved necessary.
Haddad, an assassin of the Empire, came to Thrukhaz Three, but his primary purpose was not to buy and sell. Though Haddad was only twenty-one old-Earth years, he was already a senior apprentice, and was soon to be made a Master of Assassins.
That is, if he survived this final mission for his current Prince, which was doubtful. The Prince’s probability calculator, Uncle Yukhul, had worked out that the chances of the overall plan succeeding were quite good, about 0.42. Haddad’s chance of remaining alive was a much more disturbing 0.04.
But even the priests of the Temple of the Aspect of the Cold Calculator could not include all possible variables, particularly for missions outside the Empire. And no assassin expected to live a long time. They were expendable, particularly apprentice assassins. Perfect to use up in long-shot missions, like the one Haddad was engaged in right now.
It was unusual for an apprentice to be sent alone out of Imperial space, disguised as a Fringe-dwelling dealer in antique weapons. The transparent panels in Haddad’s head were hidden, under Bitek simuflesh that had spread and merged into his own skin. A living wig had been implanted into his scalp, giving him a dark red mane that stretched halfway down his back. A programmed Bitek scathe had burrowed red trails across his cheeks, creating in five minutes the effects of years of ritual scarification.
This was the fashion of a clan of independent traders, the Pralganians, who turned up from time to time in odd corners of the galaxy. There were no real Pralganians in the sector at the moment, or at least there should not be, according to Haddad’s information.
To reinforce his disguise, Haddad wore a Pralganian trader’s flax-gold shipsuit, with paler yellow boots and a belt of woven wires that supported twin sting-guns: handguns that fired low-velocity Bitek projectiles, suitable for use on a ship or in zero gravity. One gun had a red grip and was for crystalline darts charged with a lethal nerve poison. The other had a blue grip and was loaded with a mere knockout/ paralysis combo. Or so the traders liked people to believe. It made their enemies watch the red-handled gun too closely.
A Bitek portable safe followed Haddad. Portable safes, with their ultratough armored hide, strong reptilian legs, and cacophonous hooting alarm snout, were very popular for transporting valuables in the Fringe, though some customers didn’t like the idea of goods being stored inside the utility stomach of a living creature, even though it was designed for the purpose, and was both dry and disconnected from the alimentary system of the beast.
‘Hup,’ said Haddad. He checked his breath mask and weapons and went out through the ion curtain that separated the breathable air of the starport arrival ‘hall’ from the miasmic mist of the planet. The safe waddled after him, its sentience limited to obeying simple commands, knowing who its master was, and shrieking if anyone tried to cut it open or prize its massive, interlocking jaws apart.
Haddad had memorized a map of the Thrukhaz Three startown, but it was based on the interrogation of a trader who had been there several months previously. He noted the differences as he walked between buildings toward the caravansary that was his chosen destination. He had selected it from the data available in the Empire, and confirmed the choice with some judicious questioning of the other travelers who had descended with him from the tramp starship that ran a semiregular route between Thrukhaz and Sazekh Seven, the nearest Imperial system.
The caravansary was much as Haddad expected. He took a small room at the back, a bolted-on unit that had a ceiling hatch as well as a door, and reserved a rectangular patch of ground in the courtyard, where he would set up his booth. Leaving the traveling safe surrounded by a number of tiny telltales, Haddad wandered the startown, buying a few odds and ends for his booth and examining the wares of those who would be his competitors, selling antique or interesting weapons. None had anything of particular interest. He made a point of introducing himself, and invited the other dealers to come and see his wares.
Returning to the caravansary, Haddad found that, as he had expected, his room had been searched and surveillance established, and the traveling safe had been inspected, though not actually opened. Unless it had been opened with Psitek by either a Master of Assassins or a Prince, and he thought it was too early for either one to be here.
Haddad took out one of the items he’d bought, an obsolete Mektek Jhezhan spytracker, and set it going on his table. It unfolded its jointed legs and search tendrils and started looking for spy-specks.
After the spytracker had wandered for a few minutes without success, Haddad smiled, as if he were content he was not under observation. He already knew from a Psitek scan that it would take the spytracker a few hours to find and destroy the spy-specks, which were of a newer and superior make.
‘Open.’
The safe yawned wide, revealing the shelved space within. Haddad reached inside and gently ran his fingers over the items on each shelf. No one could see it, under false flesh and hair, but his temples were roiling with the blue fluid that indicated Psitek activity.
As far as he could tell, nothing had been interfered with, and nothing new had been introduced. For the benefit of those watching and listening via the almost invisible spy-specks up in the corners of the ceiling, he took out the most important item.
This was a small reddish box of real wood, not Bitek extrusion, at least five centuries old. Haddad flicked the bronze catch and opened it. Lined with velvet, it held a simple steel dagger, the bright blade rippled with tiny wave marks, the hilt and guard a darker, more ominous metal.
The weapon was at least three thousand years old, and came from ancient Earth. To a discerning collector, it was worth more than the entire Thrukhaz startown. In fact, it was so valuable, only one of the richest plutocrats in the Fringe could afford it – or a Prince of the Empire.
Not that Princes typically bought things. They just took them, unless they were already claimed by another Prince or a temple, or made inviolate by an order of the Imperial Mind.
But here, essentially outside the Empire, a Prince might find it easier to buy. Though there would probably be an attempt or attempts to steal it first. Not that such attempts would solely be the action of Princes. Many people would want that ancient dagger.
Haddad closed the box and returned it to the saf
e, taking out several other packages, which he laid out on his table.
‘Shut and lock.’
Interlocking teeth ground to closure. The safe hunkered down on its haunches.
Haddad sorted through the lesser wares he had taken from the safe, while he waited for the spytracker to finish. He had nothing else that was anywhere near as valuable as the dagger, but compared to what he had seen from the other weapon sellers, his basic stock was good. All old Imperial tek, proven in countless battles across the galaxy.
Like the blast projector he was examining, a lighter and shorter version of the basic mekbi trooper weapon.
Haddad heard faint footsteps in the corridor, and his
Psitek senses picked up hostile intentions. Earlier than he had expected, but the indications were very clear. He lifted the blast projector and sighted at the door. It was locked, but whoever was outside had another key.
As the door slid open, the blindingly bright energy pulse from Haddad’s weapon essentially vaporized the two thugs who were about to charge in, and badly wounded their boss, who was several paces behind.
Haddad moved, faster than a human should be able to move. Leaping over the remains of the two attackers, he ripped off a Bitek medaid patch that had been disguised as a button on his shipsuit and slapped it on the scorched face of the boss who had been lurking behind. The patch rippled, manipulating blood chemistry, injecting drugs, arresting shock, and arranging mental compliance – at least for the minute or two the man had left.
‘Who sent you?’ demanded Haddad.
‘Contract,’ whispered the dying man. ‘Lerrue the Shubian.’
‘Kill and steal?’
‘Yes … the safe …’
The man died. The medaid patch shriveled and fell off.
The next person in the corridor was the manager of the caravansary, suspiciously close and quick. She approached cautiously, her hands up and open.
‘An attempted robbery,’ said Haddad. He didn’t mention the fact that the intruders had a key, doubtless obtained from the woman. ‘I will require a different room. Number 125 will be suitable.’