The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 17

They found Yubere in his bathtub. His white-tiled bathroom was unostentatious — not large, and the silver and gold tub wasn’t the sort that could seat a party of three dozen close friends. But it was quite beautiful. Its comfortably slanted back was inlaid with precious stones — black opal butterflies flew among jade bamboo stems.

The target was alone, soaping his back with a long-handled brush, when they burst through the door.

He seemed not to be very startled by their sudden entrance. He looked from the weapons pointed at him to the faces above the barrels, and smiled wistfully.

“You’re from Publius, aren’t you?” he said. He gazed at the puppet, as if admiring the fine work Publius had done. “Clever monster,” he said, and sighed. “I should never have been so greedy as to deal with a thing like Publius.”

He looked at Ruiz, and a look of bittersweet astonishment slipped across his face and was gone. Ruiz had the uncomfortable and illogical sensation that Yubere recognized nun. No, no; that was impossible, he told himself.

“Kill him now,” said the puppet.

“What are you getting?” Ruiz asked Huxley.

The cyborg shrugged. “Nothing. Weird. No alarms, no sensors, no remote surveillance.”

The puppet smiled. “We’re a man of destiny, eh, Alonzo. What need have we of the protections lesser men crave?”

“As you say,” agreed the real Yubere. He gazed curiously at Ruiz. “What in the world could Publius have promised you to make you come here? You’re not Genched; I can tell that much.”

Ruiz ignored him; he was dead.

But Yubere spoke again. “I suppose I should take some comfort in the knowledge that you won’t long survive me.” He began to scrub at his back again, and shut his eyes, a smile of mild gratification lighting his face.

Ruiz triggered a burst that took off the top half of Yubere’s head, and spread a symmetrical splash of red across the butterflies and bamboo. He slung the weapon and turned away.

“Cut him up and put him down the recyclers,” said Ruiz to Albany. He clung to numb purpose, and resolutely refused to think about what he had just done. He heard the burble of Albany’s knife, and then the distinctive sounds that accompanied carving the body into pieces small enough to go down the bathroom recycler.

The puppet’s eyes glowed, and he turned to Ruiz as if to congratulate him, and started to extend his hand. Ruiz slapped the hand down on the rim of the tub, and chopped with his sonic knife, splitting the puppet’s forefinger and the mechanism of the one-shot pinbeam.

The false Yubere gasped and shuddered, and started to jerk his hand back, then became still, until Ruiz had withdrawn the knife and released his hand.

Blood welled from the puppet’s armored glove, dripped to the tiles. He clamped his hand around the injured finger and looked at Ruiz without accusation. “Publius said you were alert.” He sighed and took off the glove, examined his mangled finger. He went to a mirrored cabinet and found a self-tending dressing, which he slipped over the wound and activated.

“Well,” said the new Yubere. “I’d like to get out of this armor.” He opened a tall ebony wardrobe that stood against the far wall, selected an elegant unisuit of dove-gray silk. “Suitable?”

Albany looked up from his bloody work and laughed. “Whatever that means,” he said.

“Hurry,” said Ruiz.

“We have all the time in the world, now,” said Yubere lightly. He shucked off the armor and wiped his thin body with a scented towel, then dressed quickly.

“Wouldn’t you like to change too?” asked Yubere. “Aren’t you worried someone will wonder why men in armor are wandering around the stronghold?”

Albany laughed again. “He’s smarter than that, Yubere.” He put the last piece of the old Yubere down the recycler and began to wipe down the tub.

Ruiz nudged Yubere with the barrel of his splinter gun. “Let’s go find a comm and make sure the staff accepts you. Huxley, bring your gear. Albany, trail us a few feet, but no shooting unless there’s no other way. And, Yubere, no more funny stuff, or Publius’s investment will be wasted.”

“I’ll be careful,” said the puppet. “You be careful too.”

“A good thought,” said Ruiz. “Huxley, spike his bomb, in case we have to kill him.”

The new Yubere led the way to his comm center, moving with a convincing ease. Ruiz dared not aim a weapon at Yubere, for fear that one of Yubere’s people would see and react aggressively. He felt a distressing loss of control over the situation, but he needed to establish Yubere’s authority.

“When we get there, set up my exit first,” he said. “Give us an escort back to the tram.”

Yubere looked back curiously. “Don’t you want to just go out the top? We’re in control here, now?”

Ruiz looked at him wordlessly, and Yubere shrugged easily. “As you wish.”

Huxley threw Ruiz a worried glance. He felt impelled to explain, for some reason. “Our employer will be hoping we’ll make it that easy for him to get rid of us. He’ll be sure to have people topside — but maybe he doesn’t have another sub. And on the sub, we’ll have the Gench to bargain with.”

Huxley looked even more worried. “What made you take employment with such a dire creature, Ruiz?”

“Necessity.”

Albany snorted. “Don’t let him kid you, Huxley. He likes this stuff — the more borderline the better, as far as Ruiz Aw is concerned. He’s always had that sort of bug up his ass.”

Ruiz wanted to deny it, to claim that he had changed, but Albany would only laugh at him.

The comm center was occupied by a tech wearing a black tunic and two Dirm guards — though these were unpithed and wore no armor. As they moved into the room, Ruiz began to calculate angles and priorities. The Dirm to the right seemed somewhat more alert than the other guard, and the tech paid no attention at all.

Yubere walked to the main dataslate, laid a languid hand on the black glass. He tapped it absently, then turned to the nearest Dirm and said, “Kill them.”

The Dirm was only starting to bring down its graser when Ruiz’s burst chopped across its torso, smashing it back against the wall. Ruiz spun, squeezed off another burst, missing the other Dirm just as it fired; then Albany’s graser hissed and cut the guard in half.

Ruiz turned, saw that Huxley was down, his legs twitching feebly, a wisp of steam rising from the hole in his chest. As he took this in, he saw Albany aim at Yubere, a look of murderous rage suffusing his lumpy features.

“No!” barked Ruiz. “We won’t kill him yet.”

For an instant he thought Albany would do it anyway, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to kill Albany before Yubere was dead — his weapon was still pointed at the first Dirm, who wasn’t quite dead yet.

But Albany snarled, flicked the graser aside, and vaporized the head of the black-shirted tech, who had finally reacted and was rising from his seat.

Relief shuddered through Ruiz.

Yubere leaned back against the panel. “Well, it was worth a try,” he said brightly.

Ruiz struggled to maintain a clear mind, though he felt an almost-irresistible impulse to destroy the puppet.

“How can I make the situation clear to you?” he asked Yubere. “If you keep fucking with us, your master’s scheme will come to nothing. Didn’t you see what I did back at the tram? My pack is full of toroidal explosive.” Ruiz looked at the watch embedded in the forearm of his armor. “If we don’t get back in twenty-eight minutes, it’s going to bring down the dome and choke off the hole.”

Yubere snapped upright. His face underwent an instantaneous transformation, from tolerant amusement to taut cold rage. “You’ll have to pay a terrible price for your obstructions when Publius catches you,” he said through his teeth. His eyes gleamed with an almost-human craziness for a moment, but then he regained control. “Of course, dead is dead, so I suppose I shouldn’t blame you for struggling.”

“Good for you,” said Ruiz. “Now make the arrangements.”

Yubere took a deep breath, then spoke terse instructions into the comm. When he was finished, he looked up at Ruiz, completely composed again. “Satisfied?”

“We’ll see how it goes,” said Ruiz.

Albany knelt beside Huxley, who had become still. “Dead,” Albany reported glumly. Ruiz felt a small poignant sadness. Huxley had seemed a fairly decent person, for a freelance slayer, and now he was gone as if he had never existed, his trust proven foolish.

He shook his head — he was indulging in pointless emotions. Each of the beings he had destroyed during this night’s work had been as alive as Huxley, and their lives had been just as important, in their own eyes.

As the puppet had said, dead was dead.

Ruiz helped Albany remove Huxley’s undamaged detectors, and slung most of the gear from his own armor. “I guess I’ll have to do Huxley’s job for a while,” he said.

Albany stood up wearily. “Yeah. Your army’s getting a little thin, Ruiz.”

A minute passed, then another brace of Dirm guards entered at a trot and slid to a stop, heads swiveling to take in the carnage. They started to snatch at the grasers they carried slung across their scaly chests, but Yubere spoke sharply. “Wait,” he said, raising a peremptory hand. “These are friends — they saved me from a treachery. You are to escort them to the downlevel security lock, then return here to clean up the mess. And see that the comm room is adequately restaffed. Guard the safety of our friends with your lives; we owe them much. And we intend to repay them.” A glitter of malevolence returned briefly to Yubere’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Ruiz said for effect. “Happy to help. By the way, did you know that life is a stiletto vine that blooms only once?”

When he spoke the code phrase that the Gench had tied into the puppet’s volitional network, Yubere slumped slightly, and a light went out of his eyes. He would be unable to make any decision, no matter how small, until Ruiz spoke the counterphrase. He would be unable even to decide to follow Publius’s orders. If for some reason Ruiz failed to speak it, Yubere would sit here until he starved, unless his people dared to carry him to a medunit to be fed intravenously.

“Well,” said Ruiz. “Good-bye, and good luck.”

The Dirm convoyed Ruiz and Albany to the lock, eyes rolling with suppressed panic. They seemed to have accepted the new Yubere’s identity without reservation — but they were a credulous species, another reason why they were popular cannon fodder. They bowed Ruiz and Albany into the lock and left at a quick trot.

When the inner door closed, Albany said, “So far so good. What did you do to the puppet?”

“Cut his strings, until we can get away. It gives us a deal point with our employer.”

“I wish you’d done it a little sooner.”

“I could only do it once. I’m sorry.”

Albany shrugged. “Well, it’s a tough business, and I know you’re sorry. What now?”

“Let’s run,” Ruiz said, and began to trot back down the long corridor.

The bits of the dismembered Moc were still twitching when they reached the tram platform ten minutes later. Ruiz looked at it and shivered. The face of Durban’s corpse had acquired a greasy bluish pallor; the dead eyes still glared, but without heat. Ruiz felt a pang of uncustomary squeamishness at the thought of riding down the tramway with the corpse, but there was no practical way to remove it from the tanglefoot.

Ruiz disarmed the satchel charge and then they stepped carefully aboard the tram. Ruiz sat in the driver’s chair. It took him only a moment to decipher the controls and start the tram sliding back down its rail.

To pass the time, he busied himself with Huxley’s detectors, getting them set up, ready to sniff out any activity below — just in case some of the alien tunnel dwellers decided to revenge themselves on the tram, or — an unpleasant notion — Publius had arranged some sort of trap for them on their return. It occurred to him that he hadn’t explicitly directed the Jahworld sisters to keep a watch down the tunnel, in case a surprise appeared from that direction. It was an uncomfortable feeling. He worried that if such an unfortunate event happened, the sisters would be too preoccupied with their horror of the pit’s depths to be paying much attention to what was going on behind them.

Perhaps, he thought, he was being excessively paranoid. On the other hand, Publius, a man with a vast talent for making enemies, was still alive after all these years — which argued for his thoroughness, and deviousness.

The danger was that Publius might kill him without giving Ruiz an opportunity to reveal his meddling with Publius’s puppet. Ruiz had to hope after he revealed this perfidy that Publius’s avarice would overtop his outrage.

“What’s wrong?” Albany asked.

“Probably nothing,” Ruiz answered.

“I don’t much like the sound of that,” said Albany.

Ruiz smiled at him. “I don’t blame you for that. I’m sorry to have involved you in such a mess, Albany.”

“No you’re not,” said Albany, but he smiled too.

The trip passed without incident, though Ruiz saw more furtive movement at the various openings, as if the dwellers within were curious about the unusual activity on the tramway. No one actually appeared, and Ruiz resisted the temptation to use his scope — he didn’t want to seem overly interested in things that weren’t any of his business.

When they were only a few hundred meters above the tunnel mouth, Ruiz brought out the scope and looked down and across the pit. He brought the dark opening into focus and saw Chou standing at the very lip, waving cheerfully, helmet visor carelessly open. The scope’s resolution was insufficient for Ruiz to make out her expression with exactitude.

Ruiz folded the scope and hung it from his armor. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“I think the sisters are dead — and that means Publius is waiting for us. But at least he didn’t kill us on sight. He likes to gloat — it’s one of his biggest weaknesses, and it’ll bring him to grief one of these days. I hope.”

Ruiz chewed at his lip, then set his helmet mike for long-range comm. “Publius? Are you listening? If you kill me now, you’ve lost. I don’t buy Chou’s act; she and her sister were extreme acrophobes.”

A few moments passed; then Chou stepped back and folded up like a doll. “What do you mean, I’ve lost?” Publius spoke in a taut whisper. “You’re mine now, Ruiz. You can’t get away. If you go back up, I’ll just call my new Yubere and have him intercept you. Or maybe I’ll just fire a seeker at you and be done with it — though I’d hate to have my tram damaged.”

Ruiz sighed. He’d hoped that the worst was over, but nothing was easy, with Publius — the monster-maker was a match for him in guile, maybe more than a match. He took a deep breath and took out his boot gun, a little pepperbox that fired armor-piercing explosive pellets. He held it to the side of his head, aimed so that if he triggered it, his brain would be reduced to such dissociated pulp that Publius would never be able to sift any memories from it.

Publius’s voice filled his helmet. “What a silly person you are. Do you imagine I care whether or not I actually get to carve on you? Or that my little Gench goes pop when you do? I have much bigger fish to fry; I’ll just scrape up a few bits and clone you for later amusement.”

“That’ll be nice,” said Ruiz. “But you still don’t understand. Have you tried to contact Yubere yet?”

“No,” said Publius, his voice betraying just the tiniest degree of uncertainty. “Why? Were you unsuccessful? And if so, why shouldn’t I kill you. And by the way, where is my Gench?”

Ruiz noted with some satisfaction that Publius had apparently not broken into the sub. “I left it on the sub.”

“Oh? Wasn’t that incautious of you?”

“Not really. In the first place, how could you think me so stupid as to not understand that one Gench more or less was a matter of indifference to you? In the second place, I’m not wearing your madcollar. In the third place, I used the Gench to gimmick your puppet. Kill me and you’ll never get a bit of use out of him, even though he’s sitting in his control room, as we speak, in command of the stronghold.”

A terribly ominous silence ensued, broken only by the sound of heavy breathing.

Finally Publius spoke, and his voice was full of a cold controlled fury that frightened Ruiz more than all his flamboyant threats had. “Why should I believe you?”

“Call Yubere.”

“And if you failed? The real Yubere will learn who acted against him, and even I don’t care to face Yubere in open war.”

“That’s a problem, isn’t it?” Ruiz struggled to maintain a cool indifferent tone.

More time passed, and the tram slid onward, closer and closer to the tunnel. “What should I do?” asked Albany.

Ruiz cut back the comm to close range, so that he could speak to Albany without Publius hearing. “Nothing. Either he wants whatever he’s got cooked up more than he wants to get even — or we’re dead. Or worse. You might want to jump, or take off your head with the graser, rather than let Publius take you in restorable condition.”

“He’s that bad?”

“Worse.”

They approached the tunnel, and Ruiz cut the speed, keeping the pepperbox pressed to his head. They glided to a stop directly under the tunnel mouth and waited.

A horrid sound came from the tunnel. It didn’t sound like the sort of noise a human being could make; it sounded more like some great predator, a lion, or perhaps some mad monstrous bear. At first Ruiz couldn’t identify it, but then he understood that Publius had gotten confirmation and was roaring with rage.

It ceased abruptly. A big killmech with a scarred carapace came to the edge and lowered a cable equipped with magnetic shackles. Ruiz lifted his arm and guided a shackle to his chestplate.

Albany looked at him, his face pale. “Is this a good idea, Ruiz?” His voice was shaky; he seemed to have lost his cheerful bravado in the face of Publius’s crazy rage.

“I don’t know what choice we have, Albany. Down is the Gencha, up is Yubere’s people, who are probably starting to wonder what’s wrong with their master. They’ll be nervous, and looking for answers we don’t have.”

“I guess you’re right,” Albany said dubiously.

“I don’t know about that, but I’ve got a little leverage with Publius, who has his heart set on this scheme of his. I don’t think he’ll kill us as long as he has hope that it will still work.”

Albany looked up at the killmech. “I sure hope this turns out to be worth it.” He shackled the cable to his armor, and the killmech began to reel them up.