Almost against his will, he glanced again to his right, and again experienced the uncanny sensation that someone on the fringe of the crowd down there had just turned his head away. But he could not pinpoint the individual. He had a feeling it could be one of the people near the wall… male, female, he couldn't say.
Shrugging uncomfortably, he faced forward again and set his right eye into the sight, swiveled ever so slightly… there! Metep's face – fixed smile, earnest expression – trapped in the crosshairs. As he lifted his head from the sight for an instant's perspective, he felt a stinging impact on the right side of his throat. Everything was suddenly red… his arms, his hands, the weapon… all bright red. Vision dimmed as he tried to raise himself from the now slippery ledge, then it brightened into blazing white light, followed by total, eternal darkness.
A woman in the crowd below felt something wet on her left cheek and put a hand up to see what it was. Her index and middle fingers came away sticky and scarlet. Another large drop splattered on her left shoulder, then a steady crimson stream poured over her. The ensuing screams of the woman and others around her brought the ceremony to a halt and sent Metep VII scurrying from the dais.
A telescoping platform was brought in from the maintenance area and raised to the ledge. To the accompaniment of horrified gasps from the onlookers, the exsanguinated corpse of the would-be assassin and his unused weapon were lowered to the floor. The cause of death was obvious to all within view: a hand-sized star-shaped disk edged with five curved blades had whirled into the man's throat and severed the right carotid artery.
As the body was being trucked away, an amplified voice announced that the remainder of the evening's program was canceled. Please clear the hall. Imperial guards, skilled at crowd control, began to herd the onlookers toward the exits.
Broohnin stood fast in the current, his eyes fixed on his fallen fellow guerrilla as the crowd eddied past.
“Who did this?” he muttered softly under his breath. Then louder. “Who did this!”
A voice directly to his right startled him. “We don't know who's behind these assassination attempts, sir. But we'll find them, have no fear of that. For now, though, please keep moving.”
It was one of the Imperial Guard, a young one, who had overheard and misunderstood him, and was now edging him into the outward flow. Broohnin nodded and averted his face. His underground organization was unnamed and unknown. The Imperium was not at all sure that a unified revolutionary force even existed. The incidents – the bombings, the assassination attempts on Metep – had a certain random quality about them that led the experts to believe that they were the work of unconnected malcontents. The sudden rash of incidents was explained as me-tooism: one terrorist act often engendered others.
Still, he kept his face averted. Never too careful. Breaking from the crowd as soon as he reached the cool dark outside, Broohnin headed for Imperium Park at a brisk pace. He spat at the sign that indicated the name of the preserve.
Imperium! he thought. Everything has “Imperium” or “Imperial” before it! Why wasn't everyone else on the planet as sick of those words as he was?
He found his brooding tree and seated himself under it, back against the bole, legs stretched out before him. He had to sit here and control himself. If he stayed on his feet, he would do something foolish like throwing himself into the lake down at the bottom of the hill. Holding his head back against the firmness of the keerni tree behind him, Den Broohnin closed his eyes and fought the despair that was never very far away. His life had been one long desperate fight against that despair and he felt he would lose the battle tonight. The blackness crept in around the edges of his mind as he sat and tried to find some reason to wait around for tomorrow.
He wanted to cry. There was a huge sob trapped in his chest and he could not find a way to release it.
The revolution was finished. Aborted. Dead. His organization was bankrupt. The tools for hollowing out the column had drained their financial reserves; the weapon, purchased through underground channels, had dried them up completely. But every mark would have been well spent were Metep VII dead now.
Footsteps on the path up from the lake caused Broohnin to push back the blackness and part his eyelids just enough for a look. A lone figure strolled aimlessly along, apparently killing time. Broohnin closed his eyes briefly, then snapped them open again when he heard the footsteps stop. The stroller had halted in front of him, waiting to be noticed.
“Den Broohnin, I believe?” the stranger said once he was sure he had Broohnin's attention. His tone was relaxed, assured, the words pronounced with an odd nasal lilt that was familiar yet not readily identifiable. The man was tall – perhaps five or six centimeters taller than Broohnin – slight, with curly, almost kinky blond hair. He had positioned himself in such a manner that the light from the nearest glo-globe shone over his right shoulder, completely obscuring his facial features. A knee-length cloak further blunted his outline.
“How do you know my name?” Broohnin asked, trying to find something familiar about the stranger, something that would identify him. He drew his legs under him and crouched, ready to spring. There was no good reason for this man to accost him in Imperium Park at this hour. Something was very wrong.
“Your name is the very least of my knowledge.” Again, that tantalizing accent. “I know you're from Nolevatol. I know you came to Throne twelve standard years ago and have, in the past two, directed a number of assassination attempts against the life of the current Metep. I know the number of men in your little guerrilla band, know their names and where they live. I even know the name of the man who was killed tonight.”
“You know who killed him, then?” Broohnin's right hand had slipped toward his ankle as the stranger spoke, and now firmly grasped the handle of his vibe-knife.
The silhouette of the stranger's head nodded. “One of my associates. And the reason for this little meet is to inform you that there will be no more assassination attempts on Metep VII.”
In a single swift motion, Broohnin pulled the weapon from its sheath, activated it, and leaped to his feet. The blade, two centimeters wide and six angstroms thick, was a linear haze as it vibrated at 6,000 cycles per second. It had its limitations as a cutting tool, but certainly nothing organic could resist it.
“I wonder what your ‘associates’ will think,” Broohnin said through clenched teeth as he approached the stranger in a half-crouch, waving the weapon before him, “when they find your head at one end of Imperium Park and your body at the other?”
The man shrugged. “I'll let them tell you themselves.”
Broohnin suddenly felt himself grabbed by both arms from behind. The vibe-knife was deftly removed from his grasp as he was slammed back against the tree and held there, stunned, shaken, and utterly helpless. He glanced right and left to see two figures, a male and a female, robed in black. The hair of each was knotted at the back and a red circle was painted in the center of each forehead. All sorts of things hung from the belts that circled their waists and crossed their chests. He felt a sudden urge to retch. He knew what they were… he'd seen holos countless times.
Flinters!
II
There used to be high priests to explain the ways of the king – who was the state – to the masses. Religion is gone, and so are kings. But the state remains, as do the high priests in the guise of Advisers, Secretaries of Whatever Bureau, public relations people, and sundry apologists. Nothing changes.
from THE SECOND BOOK OF KYFHO
Metep VII slumped in his high-back chair at the head of the long conference table. Four other silent men sat in similar but smaller chairs here and there along the length of the table, waiting for the fifth and final member of the council of advisers to arrive. The prim, crisp executive image had fallen away from the “Lord of the Out-worlds.” His white brocade coat was fastened only halfway up, and his dark brown hair, tinged with careful amounts of silver, was sloppily pushed off his forehead. The sharply
chiseled facial features sagged now with fatigue as he rubbed the reddened, irritated whites of his blue eyes. He was one very frightened man.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were paneled with keerni wood; the conference table, too, was constructed of that grainy ubiquitous hardwood. Metep II, designer of this particular room, had wanted it that way. To alter it would be to alter history. And so it remained.
Forcing himself to relax, he leaned back and let his gaze drift toward the ceiling where holographic portraits of his six predecessors were suspended in mid-air. It came to rest on Metep I.
Anyone ever try to kill you? he mentally asked the rugged, lifelike face.
Metep I's real name had been Fritz Renders. A farmer by birth, revolutionary by choice, he had led his ragtag forces in a seemingly hopeless assault against the Earth governorship headquartered here on Throne – then called Caelum – and had succeeded. Fritz Renders had then declared the out-worlds independent of Earth, and himself “Lord of the Out-worlds.” That was 206 years ago today, the first Insurrection Day. The rest of the colonials on other planets rose up then and threw out their own overseers. Earth's day of absentee landlordship over her star colonies was over. The Out-world Imperium was born.
It was an empire in no sense of the word, however. The colonials would not stand for such a thing. But the trappings of a monarchy were felt to be of psychological importance when dealing with Earth and the vast economic forces based there. The very name, Out-world Imperium, engendered a sense of permanence and monolithic solidarity. Nominally at least, it was not to be trifled with.
In actuality, however, the Imperium was a simple democratic republic which elected its leader to a lifelong term – with recall option, of course. Each leader took the title of Metep and affixed the proper sequential number, thereby reinforcing the image of power and immutability.
How things had changed, though. The first council meeting such as this had taken place in the immediate post-revolutionary period and had been attended by a crew of hard-bitten, hard-drinking revolutionaries and the radical thinkers who had gravitated to them. And that was the entire government.
Now look at it: in two short centuries the Out-world Imperium had grown from a handful of angry, victorious interstellar colonials into a… business. Yes, that's what it was: A business. But one that produced nothing. True, it employed more people than any other business in the out-worlds; and its gross income was certainly much larger, though income was not received in free exchange for goods or services, but rather through taxation. A business… one that never showed a profit, was always in the red, continually borrowing to make up deficits.
A rueful smile briefly lit Metep VII's handsome middle-aged face as he followed the train of thought to its end: lucky for this business that it controlled the currency machinery or it would have been bankrupt long ago!
His gaze remained fixed on the portrait of Metep I, who in his day had known everyone in the entire government by face and by name. Now… the current Metep was lucky if he knew who was in the executive branch alone. It was a big job, being Metep. A high-pressure job, but one with enough power and glory to suit any man. Some said the position had come to hold more power than a good man would want and an evil man would need. But those were the words of the doom-and-gloomers who dogged every great man's heels. He had power, yes, but he didn't make all the decisions. All the civilized out worlds, except for a few oddball societies, sent representatives to the legislature. They had nominal power… nuisance value, really. The real power of the out-worlds lay with Metep and his advisers on the Council of Five. When Haworth arrived, the true decision-makers of the Imperium would all be in this one room.
All in all, it was a great life, being Metep. At least until recently… until the assassination attempts had started. There had been one previous attempt on a Metep – back when the legal tender laws were being enforced by Metep IV – but that had been a freak incident; a clerk in the agriculture bureau had been passed over at promotion time and laid all blame on the presiding Metep.
What was going on here and now was different. Tonight was the third attempt in the past year. The first two had been bombs – one in his private flitter, and then another hidden in the main entrance from the roof pad of the palatial estate occupied by every Metep since III. Both had been found in time, thank the Core. But this third attack, the one tonight… this one had unnerved him. The realization that a man had been able to smuggle an energy weapon into Freedom Hall and had actually been in position to fire was bad enough. But add to that the manner in which he was stopped – his throat sliced open by some grotesquely primitive weapon – and the result was one terrified head of state.
Not only was some unknown, unheralded group trying to bring his life to an end, but another person or group, equally unknown and unheralded, was trying to preserve it. He did not know which terrified him more.
Daro Haworth, head of the Council of Five, entered then, bringing the low hum of conversation around the table and Metep VII's reverie to an abrupt halt. Born on Derby, educated on Earth, he was rumored in some quarters to wield as much power on Throne and in the Imperium as the Metep himself. That sort of talk irked Metep VII, whose ego was unsteady of late. But he had to admit that Haworth possessed a deviously brilliant mind. Given any set of rules or regulations, the man could find a loophole of sufficient size to slip through any program the Metep and his council desired. Moved by neither the spirit nor the letter of any constitutional checks and balances, he could find ways to make almost anything legal – or at least give it a patina of legality. And in those rare instances when his efforts were thwarted, he found the legislature more than willing to modify the troublesome law to specification. A remarkable man.
His appearance, too, was remarkable: deeply tanned skin set against hair bleached stark white, a decadent affectation he had picked up during his years on Earth and never lost. It made him instantly identifiable.
“Afraid I don't have anything new to tell you on that dead assassin, Jek,” Haworth said, sliding into the chair directly to the Metep's right. Like all members of the Council of Five, he called Metep VII by the name his parents had given him forty-seven standard years ago: Jek Milian. Other cronies who had known him way back when and had helped him reach his present position used it, too. But only in private. In public he was Metep VII – to everyone.
“Don't call him an ‘assassin.’ He didn't succeed so he's not an assassin.” Metep straightened in his chair. “And there's nothing new on him?”
Haworth shook his head. “We know his name, we know where he lived, we know he was a dolee. Beyond that, it's as if he lived in a vacuum. We have no line on his acquaintances, or how he spent his time.”
“Damn dolees!” was muttered somewhere down the table.
“Don't damn them,” Haworth said in his cool, cultured tones. “They're a big vote block – keep a little money in their pockets, give them Food Vouchers to fill their bellies, and there'll be no recall… ever. But getting back to this would-be assassin. We will get a line on him; and when we do, it will be the end of the group behind these assassination attempts.”
“What about that thing that killed him?” Metep asked. “Any idea where it came from? I've never seen anything like it.”
“Neither have I,” Haworth replied. “But we've found out what it is and it's nothing new. Couple of thousand years old, in fact.” He hesitated.
“Well?” The entire table was listening intently.
“It's a shuriken, used on old Earth before the days of atmospheric flight.” A murmur arose among the other four councilors. “A relic of some sort?” Metep said.
“No. It's new… manufactured only a few years ago.” Again the hesitation, then: “And it was manufactured on Flint.”
Silence, as deep and complete as that of interstellar space, enveloped the table. Krager, a short, crusty, portly old politico, broke it.
“A Flinter? Here?”
“Apparently so,” Haworth said, hi
s delicate fingers forming a steeple in front of him on the table. “Or somebody trying to make us think there's a Flinter here. However, judging by the accuracy with which that thing was thrown, I'd say we were dealing with the real thing.”
Metep VII was ashen, his face nearly matching the color of his jacket. “Why me? What could a Flinter possibly have against me?”
“No, Jek,” Haworth said in soothing tones. “You don't understand. Whoever threw the shuriken saved your life. Don't you see that?”
What Metep saw was a colossal reversal of roles. The man who thought himself the gamemaster had suddenly become a pawn on a board between two opposing forces, neither identified and both totally beyond his control. This was what was most disturbing: he had no control over recent events. And that, after all, was why he was Metep – to control events.
He slammed his palm down on the table. “Never mind what I see! There's a concerted effort on out there to kill me! I've been lucky so far, but I'm not supposed to be relying on luck… I'm supposed to be relying on skilled security personnel. Yet two bombs were planted–”
“They were found,” Haworth reminded him in a low voice.
“Yes, found.” Metep VII lowered his voice to match the level of his chief adviser's. “But they shouldn't have been planted in the first place! And tonight tops everything!” His voice began to rise. “There should have been no way for anyone to get an energy weapon into Freedom Hall tonight – but someone did. There should have been no way for him to set up that weapon and sight in on me – but he did. And who stopped him before he could kill me?” His eyes ranged the table. “Not one of my security people, but someone, I'm now told, from Flint! From Flint! And there shouldn't even be a Flinter on Throne without my knowing about it! My entire security setup has become a farce and I want to know why!”
His voice had risen to a scream by the time he finished and the Council of Five demonstrated concerned respect for his tantrum by pausing briefly in absolute silence.