The Centurion's Empire (47 page)

He dropped the gun. The doors of the blockhouse slid open and two security guards dashed out into the street. Both
carried Mossenberg slide-action combat shotguns. Urine suddenly stained dark at the crotch of the youth's citi-gray
slacks as one of the Mossbergs drifted over to take a bead on him. The two other surviving Ronin-Gs got to their feet,
dribbling blood and spitting teeth.

Lucel turned to the youth who had been holding a gun to her head. The tumble-shot was steady in her hand.

"You with the eyes," she said coldly. "If some scumbag holds a gun to my head I like to think that he's paying attention.
I don't think you were paying attention just then. Are you paying attention now?"

"Yes ma'am, 'deed I am ma'am, I'm sorry ma'am!"

"Well, I don't believe you, I think you need a reminder."

She fired into his left knee. He doubled over, howling, then toppled to the sidewalk. Lucel put a boot on his throat and
jammed the barrel into his open mouth.

"Are you paying attention?" His shrieks transmuted into whimpers. 'Wow you're going to pay attention with every step
you ever take. Say thank you, ma'am."

Lucel removed the gun from his mouth, but it took him some moments to articulate the words. She turned to the other
two.

"You may be thinking payback for your Ronin-G dead, but forget it kiddies. If I
ever
see
any
of your faces
anywhere
I'm
going to make sure you take a week to die. You just touched something so fucking big that you wouldn't believe it." She
played a burst about their feet and they jumped, then she turned to the guards. "You're late!" she snapped at the blank
blastmasks. "All this shit is your fault."

"Lady, we had orders—"

"Shut up and take me in there! Now!"

Lucel would not see Roarch before she was allowed to wash her face. He was scowling at an image on his wallscreen as
she entered his office.

"Did you have to mess up those kids so bad?" he asked as the scene replayed on the wall beside him.

"It was a lesson in manners. Good manners are the gateway to the upper classes."

"That's shit."

She shrugged. "The right to spit in my face and point a gun in my ear comes with a very high price tag. Besides, you
made it happen by leaving your fucking door shut so long. You wanted me taught what a mean fucker you are, but
you

went to school instead."

Roarch switched to realtime on the wallscreen. The living youths were gone, leaving smears of blood, piss, and vomit.
The dead still lay where they had fallen.

"You got a nerve and then some, lady," he said as he powered off the screen. "At least I'll talk to you—none of the Ward
Lords wanna hear any sound from you but splat after you torched their doctor."

"Not me. I do know who bought the pipes that hit Hall and Baker, though."

In spite of having a Shakespearean imprint, Roarch forgot himself and blinked in surprise. He recovered quickly.

"We already got all what we want on how Hall and Baker died, ungrateful bitch.
They
patched" you back together, then

you
pointed your Luministe iceheads straight at them."

"Not so. I have proof."

"That's shit, I done a lot of scans and filters. The tiltfan was hired through their LA temple. The Go-Bucks were ridin'

the contract, and right now they're in so much pain they wish their folks had never screwed."

"So why did I shoot out the tiltfan?"

Roarch hesitated. "Uh, coverin' I guess."

"Now who's talking shit, Roarch? I was trying to get the real hit squad before they locked on to the car. Get a fact! I
chased that damn car for two miles without firing a shot, didn't I? I was
trying
to protect
Halll"
Roarch snorted, then turned away from her and paced beside his desk. Lucel folded her arms and remained standing.

"The Go-Bucks were paid in clean, mixed bills," she said when it became clear that Roarch was not going to say any
more.' "I mean shit, the Pope himself could have handed over that stack of bills, but if he said he was a Luministe they
would have still believed him."

"How'd you know they were paid in bills?"

"The Yakuza were very helpful after I tipped them about a hit on their datavend, Seishi. They own the franchise that the
Go-Bucks work. They also want to taste blood from whoever dropped a half-pound of covalent into their Waugh Drive
embassy."

"I heard about that. Shredded the bodytats off a couple of grandsans by the pool. They're sore."

"I've got something else you might like to know about," she admitted, her eyes narrowing. "I can finger who did the
World Three Mall attack,
and
provide an audit trail."

Roarch swallowed. World Three Mall had been a showpiece market for gang commerce, cooperation, and responsibility,
and the attack by the unidentified crew of the stolen police tiltfan had annihilated more than the lives of 270 people.
Years of public relations work and millions of dollars in

potential business had been blasted out of existence, so whichever Ward Lord tracked down the culprits at the top of that
contract would gain a lot of status.

"Okay, okay, that's an offer too good to refuse," said Roarch, sitting on the edge of his desk and spreading his arms wide.

"Who then?"

"Durvas."

"Durvas? As in
the
Village? Now hold on. Durvas was picking up the bills for that Vitellan icehead."

"Durvas had no choice, he was under SkyPlaz security. Check the clinic's records: the contract was to keep Vitellan
isolated from everyone, Durvas included. I should know, I wrote it."

Roarch pressed his hands against his head, wanting to believe, yet still unwilling.

"This sounds like so much shit," he muttered, feeling the blood vessels pump against his palms, his mind devoid of a
better reply.

"Okay then, I didn't know you take lumps quietly."

"Hey now, I get one, I give ten," shouted Roarch, striding over and waving a ringer at her as if he could shoot it. "What's
for us to see?"

"I have a set of encrypted strings from the Luministe headquarters in Paris. They contain instructions to the LA
Luministe Temple of Pure Light to buy the contracts with old bills."

"You just said they didn't do it."

"Uh, uh. The Luministes did the legwork, but the orders came from Durvas. I had a pattern filter on the Durvas research
node, and an algorithm which compares that with outgoing traffic from the Luministe headquarters in Paris—even with
encryption. I got a match dating back before Hall was torched, but it took a lot of time and CPU credit to break the
message. By then it was late—too late, as it happened. I can tell you about an old man and a dead man, both a long way
underground. Security, layouts, equipment, all that sort of thing. Send a payback team, I'll be project leader if you
like—"

"Hold it, just hold it!" shouted Roarch, holding his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut. "What do
you
get
out of this?"

"The same as you: payback. I'm a mean bitch and I'm into revenge. Play back the monitor of what just happened on your
doorstep if you don't believe me."

Roarch was beginning to feel comfortable with Lucel, and he suspected that she would let him have all the credit for the
payback as long as he provided the resources. He sat down and put his feet on his desk, pressing his fingertips together.

"You're incommin' on a deal, mean bitch," he said . smoothly, "but I'm curious to know what Durvas did to get
your

gripes so sharp."

"Uh, uh. That's on a need-to-know basis, and there's only one man alive who needs to know."
D u r v a s , B r i t a i n : 2 5 J a n u a r y 2 0 2 9 , A n n o D o m i n i

Anderson stumbled, then seized a railing to steady himself as he cut through the gardens of Durvas University on the
way to the shafthead of the Deep Frigidarium. What are the warning signs of a hidden imprint? Blank spots, vertigo,
atypical memories. He walked on, thinking carefully about his morning routine. He remembered breakfast in his
bathrobe, showering under needles of hot water and being shaved by his new GE grooming unit. After that... nothing was
missing. He arrived at the shafthead building after what should have been a nine-minute walk. He glanced at his watch.
Eight minutes, ten seconds. No unaccounted time in his routine. Perhaps he really was working too hard.
At the shafthead he had the security crew check him with particular care. He stripped completely, then thought the
better of his morning routine and had a voluntary enema and stomach pump. Half an hour later Lord Wallace called him
as he sat eating a second breakfast of thoroughly scanned food and wearing a security uniform from stores.

"The duty officer says you are putting yourself through Core A-plus-plus security, old boy," said a hologram of Lord
Wallace's head hovering just above his plate. "Anything I should know about?"

"I had a dizzy spell on the way over," Anderson replied defensively. He was the Durvas marshal, the head of the se-
curity system. The idea of admitting that he might be a security risk did not come easily.
The hologram bent forward and peered at him carefully. "Anything else? Time unaccounted for, lightheadedness,
unfamiliar clothing, odd smells on your breath?"

"Nothing, and the scans are all clear. No implants, no overlay, no obvious imprints, although the microimprint of a
trigger would take hours to find."

"What about VCA?"

"Viral Culture Analysis shows nothing out of the catalogue."

"And nanoware?"

"That needs a full blood exchange to do properly, especially if we're looking for a multiphase biological mimic on a
random switch cycle. I'd be two hours in the unit, and another to get the results. Still, I could do it."
The little hologram of Lord Wallace brought his fingertips together at the point of his chin. His eyebrows converged
slightly with the hint of a frown.

"I need to speak to you soon."

"So? You're doing it now."

"It must be off-comm," the holographic Lord Wallace insisted.

"We've got encryption." "Encryption's not good enough."

"That serious? All right then, three hours more, that's when I get the all-clear."

"And if they find some harmless anomaly? We might wait days, and I don't have days.
We
don't have days."

"I'd prefer the screening to be finished," said Anderson reluctantly. "It's the proper procedure."

"I
wrote
the procedure, and this can't wait. Look, meet me in the screen room of the Deep Frigidarium. That has total
privacy and is as secure as anywhere on earth."

Anderson pushed his plate away and sat back, arms folded and defiant. "Lord Wallace, the last time we bent our own
rules some screwy Luministe faction blasted their way in and—"

"I know what they did, better than anyone. You will be behind an armored, blast-proof partition, it will be quite safe."

"You hope. What could be so damn important that we have to take risks again?" "It is time for Black Prince."
Anderson sat up and put both hands on the table, staring intently at the hologram.

"Black Prince? Are you absolutely sure?"

"There's no other way, Bonhomme's timer is already counting."

The quarter-mile drop to the chamber where Vitellan's body was being kept took less than a minute. Lord Wallace had a
suite of offices and living space down there, far beyond the reach of any macro-attack from terrorists. The screen room
was nothing more than a narrow cubicle with two chairs separated by a laminate film partition—a deeply inset partition
that would not blow out should there be an explosion on one side. Anderson was still wearing the spare security uniform
as he entered and sat down. Again he was scanned, but this time it was only ultrasonic resonance, a newly developed
check for covalent lattice explosive disguised as bone or muscles. Lord Wallace entered the other side of the cubicle,
carrying a holoboard. His face was tight with fury. The gaslift chair depressed slightly as he sat down, Anderson noted.
He was no hologram.

"This
is all that we have to show the world in 2054," Lord Wallace said, coming straight to the point as he thumbed the
hologram board into life.

Vitellan's body materialized in the space between them, bisected down the middle by the laminate partition. It was not
healthy looking, even to the casual glance. The skin was a murky, soiled white with a chaotic tracery of red hairline
scars. His head was hairless, even his eyebrows and lashes were gone.

"Yes, that's how his realware looks," said Anderson. "Not a pretty bear, is he?"

"He's all that we have now," replied Lord Wallace. "I want a complete cosmetic job on him, electrostim workouts on his
muscles, and enough sunlamp to get his skin back to the way it was when he came out of the ice."

"But he's a vegetable."

"As I said, he's all we have, and Black Prince
must
be put