Ruler of Naught (12 page)

But Ng was not Douloi. Rom-Sanchez remembered Mdeino’s
comment in the wardroom about everyone getting a shot at alpha.
“Lot of
ships you can’t say that about.”
Rom-Sanchez had been lucky in his
assignment to
Grozniy
, lucky to avoid a ship where his Highdweller
origins might hold him back. Best not to screw it up with stupid fantasies
about a captain almost twice his age, not to mention one who’d been awarded the
Panarchy’s highest honor for her heroism at the Battle of Acheront that ended
the Dol’jharian War.

He forced his attention back to the conversation.

“... maybe the Local Justice Option, Captain?” Krajno was
saying, rubbing his hands with exaggerated pleasure.

That’s the real decision: what do we do with Eichelly
when we do catch him? I think she’s already decided.

“Look who’s being bloody-minded!” Ng laughed. “A tribunal
won’t need to make that decision. Can you imagine Schadenheimers in particular
not posting on Eichelly? Best we can hope for is a crack at interrogating the
survivors.”

She slapped the pane and it went dark. “That’s assuming our
ruptors even leave enough for the Schadenheimers. “

She tabbed the compad. “Bridge.”

“Yes, sir?” Mzinga’s voice responded.

“Plot a full-speed course to Schadenheim and stand by.”

“AyKay, sir, full-speed course to Schadenheim and stand by.”

She tapped the compad off and turned to Rom-Sanchez. “We
have a few minutes before the tacponder report is ready, which gives us time
for a different kind of tribunal.”

Despite the hint of smile betrayed at the corners of her
eyes, and the wink Krajno sent him, Rom-Sanchez’s stomach lurched.

“So, Lieutenant,” she continued. “Tell me what you did
wrong…”

The name on the door had been effaced by a low-power
jac-blast, but the title was still legible: Aegios, Node Charvann.

Hreem tapped his boswell for the override. As the door
whispered open, he could hear the occupant within snarling, “... so get a tech
and force it open, blunge-breath. I want my view back.”

Hreem motioned the two burly crewman ahead of him. Inside,
enfolded in an intricately stitched
griila
-leather chair, with his feet
up on the vast, polished paak-wood desk, Naigluf looked up lazily, his hand
hovering over the com control in one arm of the chair.

His expression widened into alarm when the two crewmen made
their way around the desk without a word and plucked him out of the chair. As
Hreem took his place behind the desk, the two slammed Naigluf down in an
elegant, armless chair in front of it.

Hreem leaned back and looked around at the luxurious office
that had once belonged to the manager of the Charvann Node. The exterior
viewport behind him was blanked, also on Hreem’s override—from the overheard
scrap of conversation, Naigluf hadn’t known that, not giving a hint of the
office’s location forty thousand kilometers above the surface of Charvann.

The Rifter captain swung his feet up onto the polished
surface of the desk and flexed his ankles rhythmically. The heel-claws in his
boots slid in and out with a subdued click.

Across the desk from him Naigluf hunched inward on himself,
his asymmetric mustache looking even more bedraggled than usual, and his
pockmarked face turned the color of old cheese. Hreem enjoyed the way the man’s
eyes fixed on the shiny heel-claws—in and out, in and out. The ring of white
around his dilated irises was even broader than the last time Hreem had seen
him.
Hopper eyes. Probably hasn’t touched ground since the attack.

As though in confirmation, Naigluf’s hand strayed toward one
of the pockets in his wrinkled, grimy jumpsuit, then jerked away.

Finally Naigluf couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “You
want me to take another office? I can move, I don’t need... ”

At a slight nod from Hreem one of the guards stepped forward
and slammed his cupped palm into the side of Naigluf’s head. The Rifter
screamed, and blood ran out of his ear from his shattered eardrum.

“Naigy, Naigy.” Hreem shook his head sadly. “You couldn’t be
satisfied with your twenty points, could you?”

The miserable Rifter’s eyes widened even more, something
Hreem hadn’t thought was possible. He opened his mouth to protest, then shrank away
as the crewman beside him raised his hand again.

“All the hopper you could pop, any prettyboy or girl you fancied,
a nice office,” Hreem continued. “Ran the entire Node. But it wasn’t enough.
What were you going to do with the rake-off?”

Hreem reached for a control in the chair arm. “No, I don’t
need this office, any more than you do now, or any more than she does.” He
jerked his head backward as the viewport dilated, revealing the vacuum-ravaged
body of a woman splayed across the monocrystal port, backlit by the bright,
cloud-dappled limb of Charvann behind her. Her pop-eyed expression of agony
contrasted violently with the elegance of her Douloi attire.

Naigluf gasped.

“Actually,” said Hreem as he got to his feet, “I don’t think
this office is a very healthy place—practically everybody who sits here lately
ends up dead.”

The two crewmen plucked Naigluf up out of the chair. Hreem
snorted as the skinny runt’s legs made abortive running movements.

“Telos, Hreem, we’ve been working together too long for
this.” Naigluf’s fear scaled his voice up to a near falsetto.

Laughing, Hreem directed the men toward the nearest airlock.

“Hreem, at least make it quick, use your jac, don’t just
shove me out there.”

The Rifter’s pleas grew in volume and vehemence as they
reached the lock. Naigluf flung out his arms and legs in a vain attempt to
prevent his escort from jamming him through the opening.

Hreem held up his hand. The two men released Naigluf so
suddenly that his frantic flailings propelled him backward against the opposite
bulkhead. As he slumped to the floor, looking up at Hreem, the Rifter captain
grinned at him.

“You’re right, Naigy, it’s been too long to end it this
way.” As the shivering Rifter relaxed and essayed a trembling smile, Hreem
continued, “This...” He jerked a thumb at the lock. “—is too good for you.”

“Hreeee-eeeeeeeem!” Naigluf howled.

‘Take him to Norio. He knows what to do.”

A shriek of terror accompanied by a waft of fetor from the trembling
huddle on the deck made Hreem bellow with laughter.

The crewmen dragged the blubbering Rifter roughly to his
feet and away, and Hreem strolled back to the office of the former Aegios,
looking around with proprietary satisfaction. The Node was his—the Syncs were
his. Almost a billion lives, all his. He’d let his crew pretty much do what
they wanted on the ground, but the Highdweller citizens were off limits: they
were Hreem’s.

Hreem dropped into the big chair and stretched his hands
over his head, fingers knit together, contemplating his next move.
Maybe
it’s time for my hostages to see one of my entertainments, so they understand
how things work now.
He’d separated out the upper echelon of the Node and
the temenarchs of the dominant Highdwellings, and had them incarcerated under
guard, as insurance for the behavior of the rest of the Syncs. He didn’t want
any trouble.

A tremor of uneasiness made him glance at the viewport, at
the dead Aegios.
Trouble. Who’d think the old bitch had that much fight in
her?
He could still remember the way she’d laughed as she crashed the
DataNet right in front of him, even as he held a jac pointed straight at her.

Hreem hated surprises.
What will scare all the fight out
of ‘em? I know. Let’s give ‘em Naigy’s farewell performance
.

He glanced at his boswell. It would take an hour or so for
Norio to finish what he called an “evocation,” in which he used various
stimuli, mostly visual, to identify his victim’s deepest fears. Hreem had never
actually seen the process; Norio claimed that an observer’s emotions blurred
the precision of his perceptions.

But once Naigluf’s evocation was finished, and Norio
understood just how to wring the most psychic anguish from the luckless Rifter,
Hreem knew what would come next.

It was strange, how ambivalent he was about Norio’s
preferred sex play until actually immersed in it. Inflicting pain and terror
was fun when you were angry, and useful when you needed to make an example of
someone, but Hreem himself got bored pretty quickly with it. Not Norio. He got
hotter and hotter, and his inventiveness got Hreem hot.

So Naigluf would end up putting on two shows: a private one
for Hreem and Norio, and a public one for the nicks. And Norio would record
vids of both of them: two more of the “treasures” that enabled him to relive
the emotions whenever he wanted to. And, inevitably, he and Hreem would bunny
again at some future date with one of those vids as background.

Hreem sighed. Sometimes being with Norio was like living in
a room full of mirrors.

He shook himself out of the mood. He could make good use of
the next hour. There were a lot of boring details involved in being master of a
planetary system, not to mention having Barrodagh nag him almost daily about
his progress tracking down every contact of that Omilov blit, still trying to
find some artifact that Eusabian was hot-nackered after.

Hreem tapped his boswell and called up Riolo’s code.
Time
to push the trog again.
He wasn’t about to end up like Tallis had. In fact,
he might even have a shot at succeeding where Tallis had failed, and maybe even
getting the upper hand on Barrodagh once and for all.

When the bozcode failed Hreem snarled and tabbed the console
in the desk. He’d forgotten that Riolo refused to wear a boswell when
noderunning. The Barcan’s face windowed up, dim in the reddish light of the
suite he’d converted to his use here on the Node.

Riolo spoke before Hreem. “Ah, Captain. I was just about to
call you.”

Sure you were.
The Barcan liked to hoard information,
releasing it at the last possible minute to extract the most personal benefit
from it. Hreem resolved again to break him of the habit, and then forgot about
it as Riolo continued.

“I have penetrated yet deeper into the Archonic system and
found confirmation that the L’Ranja gang does indeed have a base in this
system.”

Hreem’s heart thumped, and triumph suffused him.
It was
Telvarna!
He’d long suspected one of their bases was somewhere in this system, and the
news from Arthelion—the Aerenarch, last seen boosting towards Warlock, turning
up on a Columbiad manned by Rifters!—had made him even more certain.

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know that yet. I simply found a number of messages
from the Archon to Markham L’Ranja sent via in-system DataNet protocols. They
cover a period of years, indicating that this is probably their primary base,
but there is no mention of the location.” Riolo grinned. “The last message was
dated less than three months before you killed him.”

Hreem felt again the exquisite pleasure he’d had the year before,
firing a jac right into Markham’s laughing face. He needed no vid to relive
that! But ever since then, Markham’s ice-faced Dol’jharian tempath had been
after him, along with her pet psi-killers. And dressed in black, which he knew
meant a vengeance hunt. He’d been public in his scorn, but he’d been paying big
money to get their bases located so he could get her first.

“How long will it take you to find it?” demanded Hreem.

Riolo held up a hand. “Relax, Captain. We have plenty of
time. Assuming that the
Telvarna
is indeed headed back here after their raid—which
is likely, since rumor has their other base a mere way station—they cannot
arrive for at least another ten days. I will have the information well before
then, and you can be waiting for them. In the meantime—”

Hreem exulted, hardly listening as Riolo made excuses for
the slow progress in the search for Omilov’s contacts.

Markham’s gang had another ship, which might be at this
base. Maybe he should wait for
Telvarna
to return, and try to catch both
ships. Or first take care of the base and the other ship—if it was there—and
set an ambush. Maybe he could take
Telvarna
more or less intact. Were
the rewards for the Aerenarch and Omilov really worth the risk of running up
against Vi’ya and those little brain-boilers?

No one besides Riolo and me suspect that the
Telvarna
and Charvann are connected. That means that slug Barrodagh can’t know the
identity of the
Telvarna
, and
that
means he has no idea it might
return here.

So I am free to do what I want.

Hreem chuckled and rubbed his hands. Once he got hold of the
Maccabeus
, he could make his own fortune.

Hreem dismissed Riolo and lost himself in a reverie that was
half planning and half feral anticipation until his boswell pinged the inside
of his wrist with Norio’s code. Then the console lit up and Norio gazed out,
his pupils enormously dilated not from drugs, but from excited lust, his lips
parted as if he was panting. Hreem’s nacker stirred.

“Oh, Jala, such an entertainment we shall have,” Norio said.
“Oh, the fears... so exquisite, Naigluf’s fears, rare and delicious, and so
enhanced by his drug. I have never evoked a popper before.”

Hreem imagined Markham’s tempath strapped to the evocation
table—she would read his pleasure in her degradation even as Norio fed on her—then
he thought of himself on the bridge of a battlecruiser. He shivered as warmth
mounted in him. But it wouldn’t do to lose control, as had happened from time
to time in one of Norio’s private shows.

“Don’t get carried away,” said Hreem. “I want Naigluf alive.
I want an entertainment good enough to convince these Highdweller nicks that I
mean what I say.”