Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

“But another possibility exists. Why can’t we put our heads together and figure out what it is that the Lords want so bad? And then take it for ourselves?”

A rumble of confusion ran through the crowd, and then a tentative enthusiasm. But no one spoke.

“How else will we ever survive?” asked Diamond Bob. “How else will we ever get paid?”

“What if we can’t figure it out? And who would lead us?” someone asked from the floor.

“Whoever has the most experience,” answered Diamond Bob. “We’ll see who volunteers, and each candidate can make a pitch. And if we can’t figure it out, who can? The Lords aren’t cooperating with each other, and they’ve completely abandoned any attempt to keep SeaStack’s commerce functioning, so we can assume the prize is worth more than any of SeaStack’s other treasures.”

Shouting matches broke out here and there across the hall, and the sergeant-at-arms started to get up again. But the tiny woman laid a hand on his arm and shook her head. She stepped to the podium beside Diamond Bob and spoke quickly: “We’ll recess for an hour, to think over what our speakers have said. When we come back in, we’ll get down to making a decision.”

The mercenaries turned and started jostling their way from the hall. Ruiz stood against the wall, watching Diamond Bob.

After most of the fighters had left, she came down the hall toward him.

Ruiz let her pass and then fell into step just behind her.

At the row of lift cages, the remaining mercenaries were jostling for a place. Just as Ruiz and Diamond Bob reached the cage, the last man jammed himself in.

“Come on, old woman,” the mercenary said, and made a kissing sound. “Plenty of room.”

She stopped. “I’ll wait for the next lift,” she said, in a tone of fastidious reserve.

He shrugged and slammed the gate shut. The cage lifted away and they were alone.

Ruiz looked about. No one watched, as far as he could tell. He took Diamond Bob’s elbow and pulled her toward an open maintenance alcove at the end of the corridor. “I need a few moments of your time,” he said brightly. “We can help each other.”

She writhed in his grasp and struck up at his neckpiece with a sonic knife. He blocked her thrust with his armored forearm, barely — she was much quicker than he had expected. His forearm smoked and glowed, and the knife made a sound like a hundred grindstones.

He bulled her toward the wall, parrying two more slashes. He slammed her between the wall and his armored body, letting his momentum and mass do the work. Her armor flexed under the blow and she gasped. The knife fell from her hand and he twisted her arm behind her, levering it back and up, his gauntlet hooked into her armor’s neck ridge.

“Be calm,” he said as he hustled her through the door into the maintenance alcove. “I mean you no harm; I just have to talk to you.”

He kicked the door shut and jammed her into a tangle of monomol pipe while he looked around the alcove. A coil of thin cable caught his eye, and he used it to lash her securely to the pipework.

When he was done, he gingerly raised her visor. She glared at him with the eyes of a trapped beast, her teeth bared in a snarl.

He sighed and took off his helmet. Then he peeled up the skinmask.

Her eyes grew wide. “Ruiz Aw? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for information. Why are you here?”

She shrugged as expressively as her bonds permitted. “I’m out of the kennel business. My pens were burned and all my slaves killed or stolen. It ruined my rep and I couldn’t get insurance. Pretty soon I owed a lot of money. So here I am, trying to make a living.” She laughed, only a little bitterly. “This is a trade I’ve practiced before. It’s not so bad.”

“I see,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry you’ve had reverses.”

“Oh?” She looked down at the cable that bound her to the pipes.

“I must take precautions, Diamond Bob.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Do you know what you’re worth, these days? I kept hoping you’d bring me Remint’s head and give me a chance to catch you. Then I’d have gone far away. Far away.” Her face showed a childlike wistfulness, for just an instant.

“Remint’s dead, I think,” Ruiz said.

She smiled poisonously. “You didn’t kill him, I take it?”

“Only indirectly,” he said. “If he’s really dead. But never mind that; will you talk to me? I won’t try to force you to help me… but if you’ll tell me what you know, it might help me to put an end to the fighting.”

“Why should you care how long the fighting lasts?”

“I don’t,” answered Ruiz honestly. “If the pirates kill each other completely off, I won’t mind at all. But you will, I guess, and if I achieve my goal, the fighting will end.”

Her brows drew together. “What do you want to know? From the Lords’ urgent desire to meet you, I’d have judged that you know more about what’s going on than anyone else.”

“You’d be wrong,” he lied. He could see no point in telling her anything, since he intended to spare her life, if at all possible. She had, after all, dealt as fairly with him as anyone else on Sook had. “I need to know about the fighting: where it’s heaviest, where it’s quiet. The patterns of the fighting. The forces involved. Anything you can tell me about this mysterious treasure… everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve seen.”

She chuckled dryly. “When I made my pitch to the mercs, I didn’t think anyone would take me up on it so soon. Why don’t you volunteer to command us? Most of them have heard of Ruiz Aw by now — they’ll believe you know what the treasure is, even if you don’t. I won’t tell.”

He sat down and put his back against a comfortable patch of wall. “Tempting. But I know them. They’d throw a sack over me and haul me in for the reward; they’d go for the sure thing.”

“You’re probably right, Ruiz Aw. Well, how shall I begin?”

In the half hour that followed, she gave Ruiz a summary of SeaStack’s recent disintegration.

In the week following Ruiz’s departure, several prominent Lords had suddenly turned into vegetables.

Their heirs had discovered them to be impostors — gene-carved to resemble the real Lords, then Genched into near-perfect counterfeits.

The survivors had lost their composure completely, lashing out at rival Lords under the assumption that old hatreds had been revived. But gradually this first outbreak of hostilities had waned, to be replaced by a period of watchful paranoia and frenzied espionage. The violence grew sporadic: assassinations, ambushes, killmech skirmishes.

“That’s when we started hearing the rumors,” Diamond Bob said. “About a treasure, hidden somewhere under SeaStack. But no one knew what it was.”

“And now?” Ruiz asked. “Does anyone know?”

“Not that I’ve heard… unless you know. Though maybe the Lords know. Or some of them, anyway — but I really don’t think so.”

“What have you heard?”

She dropped her eyes for a moment. “Everyone has a different theory. The least imaginative fantasize about great heaps of rare isotopes, or cisterns full of valuable drugs, or chests of soulstones. That sort of thing. The superstitious believe a god is hiding under the stacks. The romantic think it’s a woman or a man of such inhuman beauty as to drive the beholder mad — and the Lords certainly seem maddened.”

“So which seems most plausible to you?”

“The smarter ones visualize some sort of universe-shaking new tech. I think that’s the most likely possibility.” Diamond Bob shifted, as though attempting to find a more comfortable position.

Ruiz resisted the temptation to loosen her bonds. “That’s what I think, too,” he said. “And then what happened?”