Ray Aldridge - The Emperor of Everything

While he considered the indications, he consumed the farmer’s lunch, which consisted of a piece of blue-veined cheese, a sweet onion, half a loaf of bread, and a plastic bowl of green-gold spiceplums. It was, Ruiz decided, the best meal he’d had in weeks. He had found an insulated flask of cold water in the bilge, and he took a long swallow, looking up at the green forested ledges of the stack above him. The tide drifted his boat out into the midmorning sunlight for a moment, and the heat soaked into his sore shoulders comfortingly, until he shortened up his lines and returned to the shade. It occurred to him that it was a fine thing to be alive.

The novelty of this notion struck him forcibly — when had he last thought such a thing? On the barge? Perhaps. That joyfully uncertain journey now seemed impossibly distant in time….

He shrugged and gave his attention to the readout slate. Perhaps he was missing something, but he just couldn’t find any unambiguous evidence that Publius’s security systems still functioned. Either his own gear was faulty — or Remint had gotten here first.

Eventually he finished his lunch and cast off his lines. He lifted the sampan’s sculling oar into its fork and propelled the boat across the channel toward the entrance of Publius’s mooring lagoon.

Inside, he saw that Remint, or some other hostile force, had indeed been there. The air was still thick with the stink of discharged energy weapons and vaporized metal. Publius’s big gunboat was awash in the center of the lagoon, and another gunboat was canted onto the quay near the entrance to the maze.

The place was utterly silent, except for a faint sound of frying electronics, which emanated from the sinking gunboat. Ruiz coasted along, watching his readouts for any sign that he was not alone, but everything indicated that he was. The sampan bumped the quay gently; at the same moment his slate indicated that one close-range detector field remained active at the gate. As far as Ruiz could tell, the field was only able to register the passage through the gate of metal, plastics, or other synthetic materials.

Ruiz sighed. He’d expected worse. He divested himself of all his weapons, which he hid under the vegetables. Perhaps the recent fighting had frightened away any scavengers unambitious enough to be interested in a boat full of turnips and cabbages. He cut the decorative alloy buckles off his canvas shoes. He looked at the buttons that kept his shorts closed; they seemed to be carved from thick fish scales. He picked up the farmer’s cudgel, an arm-long piece of dense black wood, capped with a crudely carved margar head. The grip was smooth with use and fit his hand well.

He stepped to the sampan’s bow and hitched its line to a mooring ring, then stepped down to the quay.

“You’re an idiot, Ruiz Aw,” he said to himself. “You’re going after the hardest man in the human universe. With a stick.” He laughed ruefully.

A smell of recent death came from the mouth of the maze, and Ruiz Aw suddenly wanted very badly not to enter that darkness.

But he went in anyway, and found that the maze was now populated only by corpses. He found another one around every corner of the dim passageways — sometimes one of Publius’s failed monsters in a pathetic heap of fur and scales, more often one of the monster-maker’s Dirm bond-guards. The killing, it seemed to Ruiz, had been done with the offhand efficiency that characterized Remint’s approach to his trade. Each burn seemed perfectly placed, each dismembering slash seemed perfectly aimed to destroy some vital function. Ruiz examined each Dirm guard for usable weapons, but in each case Remint, in his thorough fashion, had taken the time to put a pinbeam through each weapon’s mechanism.

Ruiz found it almost inconceivable that Remint had managed to penetrate Publius’s stronghold alone, but the evidence was compelling. He didn’t want to think about what it must have been like during the night, when Publius had sent his people into the maze.

Ruiz moved more cautiously as he neared the center of the maze, pausing frequently to listen for any sign that any of Publius’s defenses remained active. He detected nothing to alarm him, a condition he found intrinsically alarming.

The devastation at the security ingress was even more impressive. Apparently Remint had fought his way through the maze carrying racks of searbombs and ladder-charges. The ingress was split open, its armor ripped up into long splinters around a hole where the elevator had been.

Ruiz crept to the edge of the hole and peered over. The alloy of the shaft bore the indentations of scaling hooks, which evidently Remint had used to climb down to Publius’s labs. Ruiz took a deep breath. He had no hooks; his only way down appeared to be a slender maintenance ladder, severely damaged by the blasts that had opened the shaft. In places it hung loose, twisted and broken. In other places it had half-melted and sagged against the wall.

He wanted to give up, to go back out to the sunlight and the crates of turnips, to forget everything that had gone before, to change his name and become another person, someone who wouldn’t have to go down to whatever waited at the bottom of the shaft.

But the way to Nisa led down; Publius was still his prime ticket into Yubere’s stronghold. He wondered if she still lived, and if she did, what she thought of Ruiz Aw. Did she hate him, as seemed most likely?

He shook his head, thrust the cudgel through his belt, and started down.

Ruiz could scarcely believe that he had survived the descent when he finally reached the bottom of the shaft. Twice he had slipped and caught himself after a short fall. Once a section of ladder had broken away from its supports and smashed him against the shaft wall, almost shaking him loose. But none of his scrapes seemed serious, though his injured shoulder was throbbing again.

The shaft wall was ripped open at three levels, as if Remint had set his charges to distract Publius’s remaining people and divide their attention. From the perfect stillness of Publius’s formerly busy laboratories, Ruiz deduced that Remint’s ploy had succeeded.

He began to worry that Remint had already killed Publius, or tormented him into uselessness. “Now you think of this?” he whispered to himself.

Pointless, he thought wryly, to start relying on logic at this late date.

So he entered the dead laboratories.

The silence was intimidating. Ruiz moved stealthily through the level, slipping from one place of concealment to the next, pausing frequently to strain his senses for any indication that Publius’s security forces were still functioning. He heard nothing.

Here and there he saw the bodies of technicians, who had evidently been armed with makeshift weapons — knives and clubs — and sent against Remint. From one of these he retrieved a knife with a long thin blade, which he bound to his forearm with a rag, so that the hilt lay above his wrist. None of the clubs seemed as suitable as the farmer’s cudgel, so he kept it ready in his hand.

A few of these latest victims had lived long enough to drag themselves under lab benches, or behind concealing machinery. Had Remint lost some fraction of his efficiency… was he beginning to tire? Might he have taken wounds? This seemed a cheerful conjecture, and Ruiz’s spirits rose slightly.

When he heard the ring of steel on steel, he became even more cautious, but he soon discovered that the sound came from the sunken amphitheater that Publius had pointed out on his first visit. The little ursine warriors still slashed at each other with dazzling speed; evidently the events in the laboratory had not distracted them from their inbred ferocity. There were still quite a lot of them; perhaps this was a later generation of the elimination trials.