Throne of Stars (99 page)

“God, I’m glad to be out of
there
,” Despreaux said. “On the other hand, I really don’t want to burn to death, either.”

“Not a problem,” Krindi said. “Erkum, gimme.”

He hefted his towering sidekick’s weapon only with extreme difficulty, but this wasn’t something to be trusted to Erkum’s enthusiastic notions of marksmanship. Despite its weight, he managed to get it pointed at the side of the building which was least enveloped in flames. Then he triggered a single round.

The plasma bolt took out the walls on either side and blew a nine-meter hole in the back wall. It would have set the building behind Siminov’s on fire, if that hadn’t already been taken care of some time ago.

“Door,” Krindi observed as he pulled the power pack out of the plasma gun and tossed the weapon down into the flaming basement. “Now let’s get the polluted water out of here.”

They scrambled through the plasma-carved passage and into the alleyway between the blazing buildings, then turned and headed for the alley’s mouth. Erkum carried Trey and the well-trussed Siminov, and all of them stayed low, trying to avoid flaming debris until they stumbled out into the fresh morning air at last.

And found themselves looking into the gun muzzles of at least a dozen Imperial City Police.

“I don’t know who in the hell you people are,” the ICPD sergeant in charge of the squad said, covering them from behind his aircar. “And I don’t know what in the hell you’ve been doing,” he continued, looking at the team’s body armor and the Mardukans in their scorched environment suits, “but you’re all under arrest!”

Despreaux started to say something, then stopped and looked up at the armored assault shuttle sliding quietly down the sky. A large crowd had gathered to watch the buildings burn, since the municipal firemen had wisely decided to
let
them burn as long as plasma fire was being thrown around, and the shuttle had to maneuver a bit to find a spot to land. Despreaux saw a very familiar face at the controls as it settled on its countergravity, and Doc Dobrescu tossed her a salute as the shuttle’s plasma cannon trained around to cover the police holding them at gunpoint.

The rear hatch opened, and four Mardukans in battle armor unloaded. They took up a combat circle, two of them also sort of pointing their bead and plasma cannon nonchalantly in the general direction of the police.

And then a final figure stepped out of the shuttle. A slight figure, in a blue dress fetchingly topped off by an IBI SWAT jacket.

Buseh Subianto slid easily between the Mardukans and walked over to the ICPD sergeant . . . who was now ostentatiously pointing his own weapon skyward and trying to decide if placing it on the ground would be an even better bet.

“Good job, Sergeant,” Subianto said, patting him on the shoulder. “Thank you for your assistance in this little operation. We’ll just be picking up our team and going.”

“IBI?” the sergeant’s question came out more than half-strangled. “
IBI?
” he repeated in a shout, when he’d gotten his breath.

“Yes,” Subianto said lightly.

“You could have
told
us!”

“Sergeant, Sergeant, Sergeant . . .” the Deputy Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Director, Counterintelligence Division, of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation said. “You
know
ImpCity data security isn’t that good. Don’t you?”

“But . . .” The cop turned and looked at the group by the flaming building. “
You burned the building down!
Hell, you set the entire
block
on fire!”

“Mistakes happen.” Subianto shrugged.

“
Mistakes?!
” The sergeant threw his hands up. “They were using a
tank
cannon! A
plasma
tank cannon!”

Erkum ostentatiously interlaced his fingers in front of him and began twiddling all four thumbs. He also tried his best to whistle. It was not something Mardukan lips were designed for.

The sergeant looked at the Mardukans and the very old-fashioned combat shuttle.

“What in the hell
is
this?”

“Sergeant,” Subianto said politely, “have you ever heard the term ‘above your pay grade’?” The sergeant looked ready to implode on the spot, and she patted his shoulder again. “Look,” she said soothingly, “I’m from the IBI. I’m here to help you.”

Roger limped down the paneled corridor, using the bead cannon as a crutch and followed by Penalosa and the single remaining Mardukan. Dogzard, still in a deep funk, trailed along dead last. From time to time, Roger stopped and either broke down a door or had the Mardukan do it for him.

A guard in a standard combat suit stepped into the corridor and lifted a bead gun, firing a stream of projectiles that bounced screamingly off of Roger’s armor.

“Oh, get
real
,” the prince snarled, shifting to external speakers as he grabbed the guard by the collar and lifted him off the ground. “Where’s my mother?!”

The strangling guard dropped his weapon and kicked futilely at Roger’s armor, gurgling and making motions that he didn’t know. Roger snarled again, tossed him aside, and limped on down the corridor as fast as he could.

“Split up!” he said. “Find my mother.”

“Your Highness!” Penalosa protested. “We can’t leave you unpro—”

“Find her!”

“Pity to waste you,” Khalid said, flipping a knife in his hand as he approached the half-naked Empress on the huge bed. “On the other hand, you don’t get many chances at Imperial poontang,” he added, unsealing his trousers. “I suppose I might as well take one more. Don’t worry—I’ll be quick.”

“Get it over with,” Alexandra said angrily, pulling at the manacle on her left wrist. “But if you kill me, you’ll be hounded throughout the galaxy!”

“Not with Prince Jackson protecting me,” Khalid laughed.

He stepped forward, but before he reached the bed, the door burst suddenly open and an armored figure, missing part of one leg, leaned in through the broken panel.

“Mother?!” it shouted, and somehow the bead pistol holstered at its side had teleported into its right hand. It was the fastest draw Khalid had ever seen, and the mercenary’s belly muscles clenched as the pistol’s muzzle aligned squarely on the bridge of his nose. He started to open his mouth, and—

The bead pistol whined an “empty magazine” signal.

“
Son of a BITCH!
” Roger shouted, and threw the empty pistol at the man standing over his lingerie-clad mother with a knife. The other man dodged, and the pistol flew by his head and smashed into the wall as Roger stomped forward as quickly as he could on his improvised crutch.

Khalid made an instant evaluation of the relative value of obeying Adoula or saving his own life. Evaluation completed, he dropped the knife and pulled out a one-shot.

The contact-range anti-armor device was about the size of a large, prespace flashlight and operated on the principle of an ancient “squash head” antitank round. It couldn’t
penetrate battle armor’s ChromSten, so it attacked the less impenetrable plasteel liner which supported the ChromSten matrix by transmitting the shockwave of a contact detonated hundred-gram charge of plasticized cataclysmite
through
the ChromSten to blast a “scab” of the liner right through the body of who ever happened to be wearing the armor. Its user had to come literally within arm’s reach of his target, but if he could survive to get that close, the device was perfectly capable of killing someone through any battle armor ever made.

Roger had faced one-shots twice before. One, in the hand of a Krath raider, had badly injured—indeed, almost killed—him, despite armor almost identical to that which he was currently wearing. The second, in the much more skilled hands of a Saint commando, had killed his mentor, his father-in-truth, Armand Pahner. And with one leg, and out of ammunition, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do but take the shot and hope like hell he managed to survive again.

Dogzard was still badly depressed, but she was beginning to feel more cheerful. Her God had gone missing, replaced by a stranger, but there was something about the rooms around her now—a smell, an almost psychic sense—which told her that her God might come back. These rooms didn’t smell the
same
as her God, but the scents which filled them were elusively similar. There were hints all about her that whispered of her God, and she snuffled at the wood paneling and the furniture as they passed it. She’d never been in this place before, but somehow, incredible as it seemed, she might actually be coming home.

In the meantime, she continued to follow the stranger who said he was God. He hadn’t seemed very much like God up until the past little bit. Just recently, however, he’d started acting much more as God had always acted before. The smells of cooking flesh and burning buildings were those she associated with the passage of her God, and she’d stopped and sniffed a couple of corpses along the way. She’d been shouted at, as usual, and she’d obeyed the might-be-God voice, albeit reluctantly. It didn’t seem right to let all that perfectly good meat and sweet, sweet blood go to waste, but it was a dog-lizard’s life, no question.

Now she was excited. She smelled, not her God, but someone who smelled much the same. Someone who might know her God, and if she was a good dog-lizard, might bring her back to her God.

She pushed up beside the one-legged stranger in the doorway. The smell was coming from the bed in the room beyond. It wasn’t her God, but it was close, and the female on the bed smelled of anger, just like her God often did. Yet there was fear, too, and Dogzard knew the fear was directed at the man beside the bed. The man holding a Bad Thing.

Suddenly, Dogzard had more important things to worry about than impostors who claimed they were God.

Roger bounced off the wall as six hundred kilos of raging Dogzard brushed him aside with a blood-chilling snarl and charged into the room. He managed to catch himself without quite falling, and his head whipped around just in time to see the results.

“Holy Allah!” Khalid gasped as a red-and-black
thing
knocked the armored man out of its way and charged. He tried to hit it with the one-shot, but it was too close, moving too fast. His arm swung, stabbing the weapon at the creature’s side, but a charging shoulder hit his forearm, sending the weapon flying out of his grasp. And then there was no time, no time at all.

Roger pushed himself off the wall as Dogzard lifted her stained muzzle. Her powerful jaws had literally decapitated the other man, and the dog-lizard gave Roger a half-shamed glance, then grabbed the body and pulled it behind the couch. There was a crunch, and a ripping sound.

Roger limped toward the bed, hobbling on his bead cannon and pulling off his helmet.

“Mother,” he said, eyes blurred with tears. “Mother?”

Alexandra stared up at him, and his heart twisted as the combat fugue release him and the Empress’ condition truly registered.

His memories of his mother included all too few personal, informal moments. For him, she had always been a distant, almost god-like figure. An authoritarian deity whose approval he hungered for above all things . . . and had known he would never win. Cool, reserved, always immaculate and in command of herself. That was how he remembered his mother.

But this woman was none of those things, and raw, red-fanged fury rose suddenly within him as he took in the scanty lingerie, the chains permanently affixed to her bed, and the bruises—the many, many bruises and welts—her clothing would have hidden . . . if she’d had any clothing on. He remembered what Catrone had said about the day they told him how Adoula had controlled her. Adoula . . . and his father.

He looked into her eyes, and what he saw there shocked him almost more than her physical condition. There was anger in them, fury and defiance. But there was more than that. There was fear. And there was confusion. It was as if her stare was flickering in and out of focus. One breath he saw the furious anger, the sense of who she was and her hatred for the ones who had done this to her. And in the next breath, she was simply . . . gone. Someone else looked out of those same eyes at him. Someone quivering with terror. Someone uncertain of who she was, or why she was there. They wavered back and forth, those two people, and somewhere deep inside, behind the flickering, blurred interface, she
knew
. Knew that she was broken, helpless, reduced from the distant figure, the avatar of strength and authority who had always been the mother he knew now he had helplessly adored even as he tried futilely to somehow win her love in return.

“Oh, Mother,” he whispered, his expression as clenched as his heart, and reached the bed towards her. “Oh, Mother.”

“W-who are you?” the Empress demanded in a harsh, wavering whisper, and his jaw tightened. Of course. She couldn’t possibly recognize him behind the disguising body-mod of Augustus Chung.

“It’s me, Mother,” he said. “It’s Roger.”

“Who?” She blinked at him, as if she were fighting to focus on his face, not to find some sort of internal focus in the swirling chaos of her own mind.

“Roger, Mother,” he said softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder at last. “I know I look different, but I’m Roger.”