Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (17 page)

The aging, black-and-white Hibbil seemed more agitated than usual, undoubtedly because of all the arrangements he had been coordinating. His red eyes flashed with intensity. “Despite a high standard of living on Timian One,” he said in a squeaky voice, “the event is likely to attract impoverished persons from the back country and a fair share of rowdies who will drink and party to excess.”

“Well, take care of it,” Lorenzo said, with a dismissive gesture. “Assign my entire special force to work the celebration.”

“
All
of your Red Berets? I don’t have the authority to do that.”

“Stop whining. Prepare the necessary document and I will sign it.”

“Yes. Mmmm, a large number of them should be plainclothesmen.”

“Attend to it.”

“I will, My Lord.” The Hibbil concealed a scowl on his furry, graying face. Unknown to the Doge, he would have preferred no festivities at all, since he considered the whole affair a lot of wasted effort when he had more important matters to handle … things the Doge didn’t know about. Though he concealed it well behind his innocent-looking, bearlike face, Pimyt did not like Humans at all, and he had taken certain steps to make them suffer.

When the Doge had no more orders to issue, the Royal Attaché took his leave.

That afternoon, crews began setting up temporary structures and hanging colorful banners from buildings. Curious crowds gathered in the streets of Elysoo to watch, and heard the scheduling announcement. By tomorrow the people would be jockeying for the best positions to camp, and street musicians, mimes, and jugglers would accelerate their practice sessions, putting the finishing touches on their routines.

And in only a few days, brightly-colored dirigibles would fill the sky, with their telebeam messages proclaiming the epic Human victory.

Chapter Twenty

Do you know what is exciting about the galaxy? The mystery of it, for this vast network of star systems, despite its great antiquity, continually shows us new and unpredictable faces.

—
Scienscroll,
Commentaries 1:29-30

In the bustling main kitchen of the Palazzo Magnifico, seven chefs in white smocks and gold caps hurried from counter to counter, inspecting the decorations on the mini-cakes, fruit biscuits, and other elegant desserts. The five men and two women moved from section to section like wine tasters, sampling the imaginatively-shaped confections and expectorating into buckets on the floor. It was mid-afternoon, a warm day in the city of Elysoo and even warmer in the kitchen, because of the ovens.

A teenage culinary worker, Dux Hannah. wiped perspiration from his brow with a long white sleeve. He noticed a roachrat poking its long black antennae out of a bucket at the exact moment that a female chef was about to spit food into it.

Startled, the chef sprayed her mouthful all over a tray of decorated cookies. “Double damn!” she exclaimed, and swept a thick arm across the contaminated tray, sending it crashing to the floor. Then she gave chase to the fat, beetle-bodied rodent as it ran across the kitchen.

Looking on, the stocky head chef, Verlan Ladoux, flew into a rage. “Get this kitchen clean!” he shouted. “We feed people, not roachrats!”

Moments later, a team of exterminators appeared with their equipment. Solemnly, they inspected sonic traps under the counters, cleaned dead roachrats out of sealed compartments, and reset the devices.

Dux Hannah and Acey Zelk were members of a Human slave crew. Sixteen-year-old boys, they were first cousins, with no formal education. Acquired on the auction market by Doge del Velli’s chief of staff, they had been enslaved because their people—the Barani tribe of Siriki’s wild back country—had been negligent in paying taxes to the Merchant Prince Alliance. The boys did not look alike at all. Acey had bristly black hair and a wide face, while Dux was taller and thinner, with long blond hair that tended to fall across his eyes.

Owing to his considerable artistic talents, Dux had been ordered to decorate royal cakes and other delicacies, using frosting and sprinkle guns to create swirls, animals, hieroglyphics, and geometric designs. In contrast, Acey had mechanical skills, so he worked with the maintenance staff to keep food-service robots operable.

As the exterminators worked under the counters, slowing the pace of kitchen operations, Chef Ladoux paced about nervously. He was especially agitated today, since food was being prepared for the Doge’s elaborate celebration, which had begun that morning. It was early afternoon now, and the kitchen—one of many servicing the festivities—had been operating at peak efficiency for more than a day. Until this interruption.

Acey and Dux exchanged glances, and nodded at each other. This was the moment the boys had long awaited, for they intended to use the confusion to activate their bold plan.

Acey slipped away first and entered a supply room. After shutting and locking the door he reprogrammed one of the robots. The brassex, semi-sentient machine was large and blocky, with a spacious interior where it carried food that it picked up and delivered—enough space for the two young men to hide, if the shelves were removed.

Still in the kitchen, Dux wrote a frosting message on a large ivory-chocolate cake: “I WOULDN’T EAT THIS IF I WERE YOU.” He then covered the cake with a silver lid and knocked on the door of the supply room, three taps followed by a pause and then two more taps.

Moments later, the robot marched outside and clanked toward the central market of the city. When out of sight of the palazzo, the machine changed course and took the boys instead to a crowded depot. There they caught a shuttle that took them up to an orbital pod station, high above the atmosphere of the planet. They brought money with them—merchant prince liras—stolen from the chefs’ locker room over a period of months.

Presently the boys stood at a broad glax window in a noisy, crowded waiting room, waiting for the next podship to arrive. The pod station was stark and utilitarian, made of unknown, impermeable materials and placed there by unknown methods … as others like it had been established in orbital positions around the galaxy.

Below the pod station, through patchy white clouds, Acey and Dux watched early evening shadows creeping across the surface of Timian One as the sun dropped beneath the horizon.

“When do you think the next podship will arrive?” Acey asked.

Looking up at an electronic sign hanging from the ceiling, Dux answered, “Anytime in the next twelve hours.”

“I’m not talking about what the podcasters say. Those guys are wrong all the time.”

As both teenagers knew, podcasters were expert prognosticators employed by the various galactic races, performing jobs that computers purportedly could not do nearly as well. Working at each pod station, the professionals spent long hours making calculations, figuring podship arrival probabilities based upon past results. The calculations were elaborate, owing to a number of variables and the sometimes unexpected behavior of the podships. The jobs were demanding and required a great deal of education to obtain, including rigid testing procedures. In merchant prince society the positions were considered prestigious for commoners to hold, causing people to compete for entrance into the finest schools.

“Wrong?” Dux said, brushing his long golden hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know about that.”

“Maybe I’ve had bad luck, but I’ve spent days waiting for podships that were supposed to show up and didn’t.” Acey’s chin jutted out stubbornly, as it often did when he debated a point.

“You mean on that cross-space trip you and Grandmamá took?”

“Uh huh, the contest she won.”

“I hear there was a big shakeup in the podcaster ranks a couple of years afterward, so hopefully it’s better now.”

For a long moment, Dux stared at another electronic sign hanging from the ceiling, a display panel that reported information transmitted by “glyphreader” robots from the zero-G docking bays. This one was blank, since there were no podships present at the moment. Had one been docked, the glyphreader would have translated the hieroglyphic destination board on the fuselage and transmitted the results to the various electronic signs around the station. (The alien hieroglyphs were one of the few things that anyone had figured out about the spaceships—a revelation that enabled travelers to know where they were going before boarding one of the vessels.)

When the right opportunity presented itself, Acey and Dux sneaked aboard a podship … without paying any attention to the destination.…

Back on Timian One, in the broad
plaza mayore
of the capital city, the citizens went into shock as rumors began to circulate about a catastrophic military loss suffered by the merchant princes at far-away Paradij. It seemed impossible for the Mutatis—who had lost most of the battles fought against the Humans—to have scored such a huge victory. People couldn’t believe it. Stunned and fearful, the crowds fell into murmurs. Were Mutati forces on the way here now?

In the throne room of the Palazzo Magnifico, Doge Lorenzo railed at General Sajak, who stood humbly before him in a wrinkled red-and-gold uniform, cap in hand. The furious ruler shouted so loudly that he could be heard all the way out in the corridors and public rooms. It was an embarrassment of epic proportions, the worst military defeat in the history of humanity.

Chapter Twenty-One

Nothing is entirely secure. No matter how many precautions are taken, no matter how much money and manpower are expended, a narrow crack of exposure always remains. Our mortal safety, then, depends upon the inability of an enemy to identify, or capitalize upon, each of his opportunities.

—Admiral Monmouth del Velli, ancestor of Lorenzo the Magnificent

A slideway took Master Noah from the docked shuttle into EcoStation, an orbital structure that looked like something a child had fitted together with toy parts, but on a very large scale. A round doorway dilated open and Noah stepped through into a vaulted entrance chamber that featured exotic climbing plants visible through glax-plate walls.

He waited while a security officer in a hooded black suit checked him with a scanner beam. The wash of white light felt cool on his skin. Even though Noah suffered this inconvenience every time he came here, it was the result of his own orders, to prevent anyone from pretending to be him. If a saboteur ever got aboard, the entire facility could be destroyed.

Guardian headquarters and this orbiter had state-of-the-art security systems and a private military force, which Noah had ordered on full alert. He’d had nothing to do with the assault on CorpOne, but feared that someone had impersonated his activists in order to make him look bad—thus paving the way for attacks against his operations.

For a while, he thought his father had laid a trap for him, but he was coming to believe that such a malicious deception was something altogether different from their earlier quarrels, and almost beyond comprehension. The more Noah thought about it, the more he suspected that Francella had masterminded the plan to ruin his reputation at the very least, and quite possibly to kill him. He wondered if his father had participated in such a scheme, perhaps after having been duped and manipulated by his wily daughter. And—plots within plots—had Francella planned to kill both her brother and father in the same incident?

A chill ran down Noah’s spine as possibilities curled around him like the tails of demons.

On the other side of a thick glax window, he saw the Adjutant of the Guardians, Subi Danvar, watching the security procedure. Loyal and efficient, he ran the entire Guardian organization whenever Noah was away on business.

Presently the hooded officer nodded stiffly, and on Noah’s right the door to a glax-walled booth opened, sliding upward. Stepping inside, Noah waited while an ion mist bathed him and his clothing in a waterless decontamination shower. It only lasted a few seconds, during which he felt a slight warmth, and a tingling sensation. Then an interior door opened.

As the Guardian leader marched into the adjacent room, Subi bowed slightly and said, “I trust you are doing well, Master Noah?”

“Passably, thank you.”

After the sound of a musical tone the adjutant said, “Excuse me for a moment, please.” From a pocket of his surcoat he removed a headset, and put it on. Telebeam images danced in front of his face, a live connection. He tuned the device so that the color projections grew larger, and filled the air between him and Noah. Two people were shown.

“An urgent transmission from a friend of yours,” Subi said. “He is at the entrance gate of the compound.” The adjutant was referring to the Ecological Demonstration Project, down on Canopa.

Noah recognized one of the pair, a blond, mustachioed young man standing just outside the guard station. It was Anton Glavine, accompanied by an attractive woman. She had long black hair and a good figure. “You’re looking fit, Anton,” Noah said, looking away from her.

“I must speak with you.”

“This is a busy time, but I can grant you three minutes. Proceed.”

“In person. Please.”

“I’ll return the day after tomorrow. You may await me in one of the guest houses. Make yourself comfortable.”

“I must see you now.
Please,
Noah. Allow me to come up there with you. I’d like to bring my girlfriend along, too. This is Tesh Kori.”

The woman bowed and smiled. She had emerald green eyes that Noah found striking. But he tried not to look at her, and focused instead on Anton. There were many reasons why Noah would do anything for this young man, reasons that had never been revealed to Anton.

“Very well,” Noah said after a long pause, “but I’m about to conduct a class. I will see you afterward.”

“All right. Thank you.”

Assuming that Anton wanted to express his sympathy over the life-threatening injury to Saito Watanabe, Noah told Subi to telebeam approval to the security people down at the compound, so that the young man and his companion could board a tram car and shuttle.

After Subi took care of this, he put away the headset and said, “Your class awaits you, Master.”