Authors: Walter Jon Williams
“Yes.” She hesitated. “May Mr. Kuusinen accompany us?”
“With respect, I'd rather he didn’t. My apologies, Mr. Kuusinen, but this is private business.”
Kuusinen bowed stiffly. “No offence taken, sir.”
“Your grace?”
“Yes.” Roberta moved at once for the exit. “Let's hurry, if we may.”
*
“Yes,” Lady Dosvidern said. “That's its lordship's voice. You’ve found Lord Qlp, then?”
“In a manner of speaking, my lady,” Khamiss said. “It appears that its lordship has stolen the
Viscount Cheng.”
Lady Dosvidern’s muzzle gaped in surprise.
“My lady,” Khamiss went on, “could you come to our communications room? I think we may need a translator.”
*
“Excuse me, Vanessa,” Dolfuss said. He looked at his cards with a puzzled expression. “Could you remind me of the sequence from secundus onward?”
Vanessa looked at him from over her cards and smiled. “Of course, Mr. Dolfuss. Secundus, response, octet, and cheeseup.”
“Ah.” Dolfuss frowned over his cards for another moment, his brows knit, then he put his hand on the table.
“That's octet,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Congratulations, Mr. Dolfuss.” She folded her hand and dropped her cards atop the discard pile.
“And with the Emperor in Elevation, isn’t that something else?”
“Camembert.” Stonily.
Dolfuss grinned. “So that gives me forty-one, right? My luck is in this afternoon.”
“It seems so.”
Dolfuss's laugh boomed across the Casino. Heads turned. “I
thought
that's what it was!” he roared.
“Camembert!”
Heads turned away.
Vanessa reached for the cards and began to shuffle. “I hope you will consent to another game, Mr. Dolfuss,” she said.
“For you, lady,” Dolfuss said, “anything. Anything at all.”
*
Zoot gazed at the contents of his closet in bleak despair. How to dress for one's suicide? he wondered. Did this count as a formal event, or was he allowed to dress casually?
Formal, he decided. Go with dignity.
He reached for his evening clothes, then hesitated. The jacket he’d invented might be more appropriate: it was his trademark, after all. If the back of his head was blown off he thought morbidly, at least he’d be recognizable.
He stood away from the closet. Perhaps he should just write the note first. Traditionally this was done in High Khosali, in which the parsing of each sentence commented on the sentence before, the whole unrolling, ideally anyway, in as precise and rigorous terms as a mathematical statement. Zoot spoke High Khosali fairly well, but minor mistakes were easy to make; and he had to be careful as possible. Nobody wanted to be known for bungling his last words, and Zoot would need to produce two sets of them. A public apology, suitably phrased, to be found in his breast pocket, along with a private note to Lady Dosvidern to be hand delivered by a discreet member of the Very Private Letter service, apologizing for destroying her reputation. There were certain delicacies to be observed as well: in the public statement, he had to make his reasons for killing himself clear, publicly exonerate the lady of all suspicion, and yet in so doing never mention her by name.
It was ironic, Zoot thought, that the cause of all this was just the sort of thing that members of the Diadem were
supposed
to do. He was
expected
to have affaires and scrapes and then have them broadcast throughout the Constellation and Empire by the Diadem's own exclusive news service. But Diadem members weren’t supposed to botch things, weren’t supposed to babble and stare when subjected to pointed interviews, to blurt out obvious untruths and cause potential Colonial Service incidents between opaque aliens and their wives.
There was only one way for a gentleman to behave once he’d wrecked things to
that
degree.
Zoot stepped to the closet again, hesitated once more.It was a practical issue that finally decided him. After he'd blown his brains out, the famous jacket would be a lot easier to clean than would formal evening clothes.
He still had to write his note.
Suicides, he realized in growing despair, were much more complicated than they seemed.
*
Maijstral hastened down the corridor with her grace of Benn at his side. Roman and Gregor followed behind, hovering at the edge of Maijstral’s awareness, their detectors deployed. Roberta had a stylus and one of the credit chips from the Casino: carefully she rearranged molecules as she walked, wrote an amount, signed and thumbprinted it. She handed it to Maijstral.
“There. Your losses at tiles multiplied by a large factor.”
Maijstral came to Dolfuss’s door. He reached for the lock, hesitated, drew his hand back. Electricity crackled through his nerves.
“What’s wrong?” asked Roberta.
Maijstral did not quite trust himself to speak; instead his hand went to the small of his back and drew out a pistol. His other hand took Roberta’s shoulder; he gently guided her away from the line of fire. Turning toward Roman and Gregor, he gestured significantly with the pistol. Weapons drawn, detectors screening their eyes, the pair moved silently down the corridor. Roman reached into a pocket and handed Maijstral a pair of detector goggles: he drew them on with his free hand. A pair of media globes rose out of Roman’s pocket and hovered in the air.
Maijstral paused for a moment of consideration. Roman and Gregor waited.
Roberta, violet eyes alight, bent and drew a small, elegant Nana-Coulville Elite spitfire from an ankle holster. Roman and Gregor observed this with a certain amount of admiration.
Maijstral, with careful consideration for the state of his nerves, concluded that he was not going to be the first person into the room. With gestures, Maijstral told Roman to dive through the door: he and Gregor would provide cover fire and support.
Roman bowed; he flexed his muscles, set his pistol to “lethal,” opened the door lock with a touch of his hand and charged.
Through the haze of his fear, Maijstral experienced a moment of admiration for the absolute grace of Roman’s movement, for the elegance of Roman’s execution, his total silence.
Roman entered low and dove to his right out of the line of fire. A media globe swooped over his head. Maijstral and Gregor followed, guns thrust forward.
The giant impact diamond was propped in a corner. No person was visible. The bed was unmade—Maijstral hadn’t permitted maid service since he'd begun stowing his loot in the room.
Roman, Gregor, and Maijstral fanned over the room. Maijstral’s heart thundered in his breast. He dropped by the bed—into convenient cover—and kept his arms locked rigid in a firing position, thereby feigning an inspection of anything beneath the mattress. There was, he discovered, nothing—none of the rolled paintings or compact sculptures that had once belonged to the Baroness Silverside and that, as of midnight, had become his personal property. Anger growled in his nerves. He stood, flipped over his pillow. The box with the Eltdown Shard was gone.
Roberta glided into the room, pistol ready in her hand, her eyes questioning.
Maijstral stepped to the closet and pointed his pistol at the closed door. “Fu George,” he said, “come out,
please.”
There was a moment's pause, then the closet door came open. Geoff Fu George, elegantly attired in an evening jacket that made an unfortunate contrast to the bruising around his eyes, smiled ruefully. A pair of media globes orbited his head as he stepped into the room. Apparently, with his equipment, he’d managed to overcome the closet's reluctance to close.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and bowed. “Your grace.”
Fu George, Maijstral realized, had four pistols pointed at him. Maijstral’s nervousness eased; he seemed to be in control of the situation.
“The Shard, if you please,” Maijstral said.
Fu George spread in hands in a helpless gesture.
“Sorry, Maijstral,” he said. “I'd be perfectly happy to oblige you, but as it happens I don’t have it.”
*
“Its lordship is threatening the station?” Khamiss stared at Lady Dosvidern in surprise.
Lord Qlp’s voice boomed from the speakers. “It says,” Lady Dosvidern said, her voice trembling, “that if it doesn’t get the Perfected Tear, It’s going to ram the
Viscount Cheng
into the antimatter bottle in the surface power plant and blow everything up.”
Khamiss ignored strangling sounds from the Tanquer and considered the situation, wondering primarily if it was still possible to throw up her hands and turn the situation over to Mr. Sun.
Mr. Sun's choked, purple face rose in her mind. Probably not, she decided.
“Can its lordship
do
that?” Lady Dosvidern said. “Is there really antimatter onstation?” Her eyes were hopeless. “Isn’t that old-fashioned? I thought everyone used sidestep systems these days.”
“Silverside Station’s in an unstable orbit around an unstable star system,” Khamiss said. “There’s tremendous gravitational stress, and we need to adjust our position and gravity from one second to the next. Energy expenditure is enormous, and a matter-antimatter reaction was the most efficient way to provide it. The power plant got put on the surface so that if there was a problem with the magnetic containment bottle, the antimatter would boil off into space instead of blowing up Silverside.” Her ears flickered uncertainly. “That was the hope, at any rate.”
“There's nothing protecting the bottle?”
“Cold fields to keep out the odd meteor strike. But I doubt they're strong enough to keep out anything with the size and mass of the
Viscount Cheng.”
There was a thud. Khamiss glanced over her shoulder and observed that the Tanquer had passed out from lack of oxygen.
“Good,” she said. “She was making me nervous.”
*
Advert smiled as she entered Pearl Woman's suite. “I’m so glad you changed your mind,” she said. “I really think It’s for the best.”
Pearl Woman looked at her without joy. “I really wish you'd tell me,” she said.
“Pearl! You know I promised.”
“I’m not entirely happy about the way the price went up.”
“I’m sorry, Pearl, but you really shouldn’t have delayed.”
Pearl Woman handed Advert a credit chip. “Here,” she said. “A hundred.”
Advert looked at the chip and smiled. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.” She paused in the doorway. “You're doing the right thing. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m afraid the place was gutted before I arrived,” Geoff Fu George said. “The only thing of value remaining was the big diamond—I suppose it was too awkward to transport.” His ears fluttered in an offhand way. “Sorry, Maijstral. Say, can I lower my hands?”
Maijstral stared at Fu George over the sights of his pistol. Anger tugged at his nerves, his mind, his trigger finger.
“I can’t accept that, Fu George,” he said. “My swag's stolen, and you're in my closet. These are facts difficult to ignore.”
“About my hands, Maijstral.”
“I need the Eltdown Shard. I need it
now.”
“The boss is telling the truth.”
Startled, Maijstral swung his pistol to cover the new voice, his heart hammering anew. Chalice had appeared in the doorway—also, strangely, in evening dress. Observing that Roberta and Gregor had Chalice covered, Maijstral swung back to Fu George.
“Shut the door, Roman,” he said. “Let’s keep this gathering private, shall we?”
“It took us a long time to get through your traps and alarms.” Chalice stepped into the room while Roman stepped behind him to close the door. “Once we got through, Mr. Fu George entered and found your room plundered. I was running black boxes outside. I heard you coming and hid around the comer. It was too late for the boss to get away.”
Maijstral kept his pistol aimed four inches below Fu George’s famous hairline. Probably Fu George’s evening jacket/darksuit contained defenses; but since his encounters with the Ronnie Romper creature on Peleng, Maijstral had been carrying the most powerful Trilby 8 spitfire available and he was reasonably certain of blasting through Fu George’s shields. This certainty served to elevate his confidence.
“I might point out,” he said, “that we've caught you red-handed in an act of burglary. We've got
recordings.
I
don’t know what Baron Silverside intends for anyone caught stealing on his station, but he’s a sovereign lord here and he's got a very simple and very medieval court system in which he plays both judge and advocate; and I assume that there would be little problem for him in sentencing you to ten or twelve years of breaking rocks on Gosat. I suggest therefore that returning my property would seem by far the most convenient alternative.”
“Love to oblige, old man,” Fu George said. “Unfortunately, it ain’t in the cards. Look, can I put my hands down?”
“You may
not,”
Maijstral snarled at him, happy to vent his anger. “I
like
you with your hands in the air. I think it suits you. Perhaps you'll be
buried
that way.”
“I prefer cremation, old man. Incidentally, I wouldn’t put too much trust in those recordings. They also record the presence of this big diamond, which I suspect is not yet your legal property.”
Maijstral hesitated, then smiled. “This isn’t my room. The diamond has nothing to do with me.”
“If this isn’t your room, then what are you doing in it?”
“Making an arrest, looks like.”
“Mr. Fu George,” Roberta said.' “There are lives at stake here.”
Fu George offered her a graceful inclination of his head “No one regrets that more than I, your grace. Except possibly for Chalice.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” Quickly, her pistol trained unerringly on Chalice’s right ear, Roberta explained Lord Qlp’s behavior and its threat of planetary discontinuation.
“Very strange, your grace,” Fu George said. “Were the Shard in my possession, I'd be happy to arrange its ransom. However, as I have no idea where the Shard might be—”
Maijstral’s exasperation boiled over. “Oh, shut up,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”
Fu George raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling me a liar, Maijstral?”
“Damn right I am,” Maijstral snarled.
“Old man.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the Duchess. “I’m going to have Roman and Gregor hold Fu George here while I take a look in his suite. The Shard may be there.”