“Right, we’ll duck low for tonight,” Lucas sat on the floor of the limo, surrounded by the huge hunched-over forms of his bodyguards.
“And tomorrow?”
“We’ll head back to the spaceport,” said Lucas grimly. He noted Jarmo’s upraised eyebrows. “They aren’t going to let us just walk in and take their power from them, that much is clear, but I’m not going to just hide, either. Grunstein Interplanetary is owned by the Cluster Nexus itself. We’ll make our stand there.”
Jarmo dipped his head slightly: a nod. He gave a small shrug and then went back to the business of keeping the Governor alive.
Four
“Imbecile!” hissed Mai Lee into the video unit. The luxurious hanging tapestries of the Planetary Senate Chambers lined the walls behind her. She was wearing the blue velvet robes of her office, and held a portable video unit in the palm of her hand. Her tense, harsh face was a wild network of lines that no surgery could completely erase. “Everyone is outraged! How could you fail at so simple a task?”
Ari Steinbach made a wry face, raising his eyebrows until they disappeared beneath his hanging blonde bangs. Out of sight of the video pick-up, he silently drummed his horkwood desk with his fingers.
“My operatives-”
“Your operatives are cheap, ineffective thugs,” she said from between her clenched teeth, trying to keep other nearby Senators from hearing. She poked her pen-shaped note-recorder at the video pick-up so that it seemed to lunge out of the screen at his end. “All you did was put him on his guard and get the damned Senate stirred up with headlines. The media is playing shots of the wrecked lobby and the bodies at every commercial break! The crazy Zimmermans have mobilized their estate armies in Grunstein and Slipape County.”
Ari nodded his head gloomily. After the failed assassination attempt, he had spent all night at militia headquarters, trying to cover his involvement and fend off the newsmen. Sergeant Borshe’s bloody corpse had done nothing to help matters, as his close relationship with Ari was known to the media. After a night of being run ragged by hungry newshounds, he had spent the day trying to calm the excitable aristocracy of the colony. All day reports of the powerful elite families pulling together their ‘security forces’, some of which had air assault and light grav-armor units, had flooded his desk.
He sighed and glanced out his window briefly, eyeing the heavy cobalt waves of the polar sea. So near to the pole the days were only four hours long during the winter and darkness was closing in fast. The skies were dark and pregnant; it looked as if they were in for a storm tonight. It might even snow if it lasted until morning.
“General!” she snapped, rapping her note-recorder on the audio pick-up so that a loud clacking noise sounded at the other end. Ari jumped and grimaced.
“Sorry, your Excellency,” said Ari distractedly. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then rubbed his eyes and sipped his hot caf. “I’ve been here all night trying to clean up this mess. I might point out that you suggested this course of action.”
“And I might point out that you are on the edge of losing your lucrative office, General,” said Mai Lee with a flash of her merciless eyes. They were the eyes of a reptile, cold and devoid of compassion. “Listen, you just find where Droad is hiding this time. You just find him and call me. I will have my personal assets take care of matters after that.”
Ari heard his own involuntary sharp intake of breath. The old battleaxe was talking about committing her personal guard. Known as the Reavers, they were also giants, monstrous Korean men that normally guarded her hilltop palace in the Counties. Ari had seen them often on her estate, and he feared them. With under-sized heads, long gorilla-like arms and incredibly wide barrel chests they seemed only marginally human. As a group, they were mysterious, legendary for their cruelty and brutal professionalism. He was surprised that she would allow them to stray from her stronghold. It was obvious that Mai Lee was under terrific pressure from the Zimmermans and probably the Manchurians in the Senate as well.
“Recall that you are my creature, General. You can be destroyed as easily as you were created.”
Ari narrowed his eyes, feeling deep hate surging through him for this evil wraith-like woman. “Recall, Senator, that we’re in this together, and that you need me. In fact, I seem to be one of the few friends you have at the moment.”
Mai Lee seemed overcome with fury and Ari worried that he had overstepped himself. Her face was a rictus of hard-lined hatred. Then her eyes seemed to bulge less. Her face softened and sagged back into its normal shape.
“So,” she said, her voice becoming soft and silky, the way it must have been centuries before in the flower of her youth and beauty. “The puppet has teeth.”
The screen went blank, and Ari was left with a feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Unlike Zimmerman, he had no powerful family of his own to turn to in times of need. The Steinbachs owned a successful software publishing company in town, but they controlled no land or vast amounts of capital.
He decided it was time to put into action his emergency plans for the worst. Things were going poorly, he needed to move quickly before events took an even darker course.
Ari rose and drew an anti-snooper device from his desk. He turned the jammer on and set his windows to a metallic opaque setting. After securing the inside lock on his office door, he dragged a heavy pseudo-marble reproduction of a skald sculpture to one side. Using a knife from his desk, he cut a squarish hole in the thick carpet. Underneath was revealed a locked safe. He proceeded to disarm six security systems and type in the lock’s ten-digit hexadecimal code. The safe opened and he withdrew a satchel, identical to the one he used at the office. Switching the two satchels, he resealed the safe and reset the devices. Working with nervous speed, he replaced the carpet and the sculpture, eyeing it from many angles to make sure that the placement was identical. Satisfied, he rubbed his hands together as he donned his thick fur-lined coat and left the office.
Striding briskly, but not quite trotting, he took the elevator to the underground garage and climbed into his waiting limo. He directed the driver to head for the cross-colony autobahn, rather than toward his home in the hills overlooking the old colony domes. He settled into the backseat, holding his satchel on his lap like a sleeping child.
It was dark outside now and the wind was a growing, low-pitched howl. The first heavy raindrops splattered the limo’s windows as it reached the gates of the spaceport.
When Mai Lee returned to the main conference chambers located on the floor directly below the Senate floor, most of the faces that meant anything in the power structure of Garm were waiting there for her. They were like a panicked herd of jaxes, she thought. Then she amended the thought, seeing the dangerous look in many of their eyes. No, they were more like a panicked lynch-mob, and they smelled their witch.
Most knew that something big had hit, many of them knew that the new governor had arrived, and a few even knew that the militia had made a stab at assassination and cut their own fingers. What everyone knew was that it was all Mai Lee’s fault.
“You told us you had planned for this eventuality,” said the formidable figure of Johan Zimmerman, gripping his robes at his chest and giving her a look of utter contempt.
“You said they wouldn’t come for years yet,” whined a thin-faced Senator from New Manchuria with six-inch long rat-tail mustaches. He dropped his eyes as her glare swept over him.
“The Cluster Nexus will drop troops when they hear of it!” shouted the Thane of the Slipape Territories, the bright florescent lights reflecting from his shiny bald scalp. He was one of the few individuals in the group who truly owed no fealty to either the Zimmermans or the Manchurians. He valued nothing more than his political independence, and thus had only enough power to prove annoying to the others. “You crazy southern bastards have tried to kill the legitimate governor twice in a row and this time you missed!”
“Shut your hole, you old fool!” shouted back Mertrude Evans, a staunch supporter of the powerful Zimmermans. Mertrude was an immensely fat woman with protruding eyes. She was at least as colorful in personality as was the Thane himself. She was an environmentalist, he an exploiter, both were fanatical in their
