Vortex (7 page)

Damn, he thought. Why me? Why this? I think I'd better walk very small when I bring this up to the Emperor. Then the thought leapt:

But if it works out—and I go in with some Gurkhas—the Emperor is sure going to get the flash he said he wanted. Plus, his backbrain chortled, I won't have any trouble keeping my back covered…

Cind had no idea what was going on.

First Sten had asked her out—socially. Then he had made that strange remark about sidearms being unobtrusive but color-coordinated.

She had chanced a fast call to Kilgour, a man she felt was on "her" side. Maybe. And whatever "her" side was anyway, which she was none too sure of.

Of course, the Scotsman had been less than no help.

"You remember, Mr. Kilgour, a conversation we had some time ago," Cind began. "When you said I was, uh, too young and striking to play spy?"

Alex thought back. Vaguely. "Ah do."

"Sten invited me to dinner this evening. I have the idea that… this is about half professional."

"Thae's a good startin't point, lass. Th' puir waif canna do naught thae's not work-related. 'Twill lead him t' an early grave, Ah'm fearit."

"Where are we going?"

"Y'mean morally, collectively, or historically?"

"I mean where is Sten taking me for dinner? And how should I dress?"

"Ah. I misunderstood. Th' place is secure, an' y'should dress cazz. Cazz dressy. Carry heat i' y' wish. Ah would. But y're safe."

"You'll not tell me any more."

"A course not, Cind. Dinnae Ah think—an' Ah'm tellin't th' truth—y' hae moves aboot y', giein' thae y'did some growin't since th' last we've seen y'? Dinnae Ah think, were y' noo so young, an' you an' Sten in love, Ah'd take y' home m'self to meet m' mum? So why sh'd Ah denigrate y' an' start tellin' y' wha's goin't on, when deep down, y' ken already?"

Without waiting for a response, Kilgour blanked the screen.

Clotting men, Cind thought.

Clotting… and then she deciphered Kilgour's brogue. Love? You an' Sten, emphasis Sten? Of course she probably was in love with him, assuming love was something that made you not sleep well at night, build entire castle complexes in the clouds and then move into them, and behave generally, if you didn't watch yourself, as if you had just injected an opiate.

But…

But Sten? Love?

Clot men, she decided, was a safer and more productive way to think.

At least now she knew how to dress.

Cind's outfit was a whisper of sensuality, a simple collarless garment with a deep V dip on the neckline, a close-fitting waist, and a slight flare just above the knees. There were no buttons, zips, or velk to suggest how it stayed together. The waist had a plain belt-tie. Of course, like all "plain, simple, well tailored" garments, it had cost Cind a quarter of her last proficiency bonus.

What made it special, besides the cutting, was the fabric itself. Mantis Section—the ultraelite operational section of Imperial Intelligence—wore the ultimate in camouflage uniforms. They were phototropic, changing colors to match the background the soldier was next to.

A civilian had bought marketing rights to this fabric and then modified it. The material remained phototropic—but it reflected the background of five minutes earlier. The color recorder and time delay were part of the garment—the belt, on Cind's dress. It also held a strip computer with a simpleminded color wheel that could override the phototropic commands so the wearer would not suddenly find herself wearing a pink dress against an orange background. The belt further contained sensors that muted or increased the color response to match the current light level. On a random factor, it sent strobe images to certain panels and, just to make sure the garment's audience stayed interested, occasional real-time flashes of what lay beneath, when panels would go transparent for eye-blink flashes. Those transparencies could be programmed to match the wearer's modesty. Or, in Cind's case, to never show the knife sheathed down her backbone or the mini-willygun in the small of her back.

Cind met Sten dressed to kill, in several ways.

And for once the male animal didn't screw up. Sten not only noticed and complimented her outfit, but asked intelligent questions—as if he were really interested—about how the cloth worked.

Still better, he brought a complementary flower.

Flower was not quite the right word. Aeons earlier, an Earth-orchid grower, exiled from his native tropics, had developed the ultimate
oncidium
orchid—many, many tiny little blossoms on a single stem, crossbred with a native chameleonlike and highly adaptable plant form. The result produced a living bouquet—a necklace—that exactly matched its wearer's garb.

She gave Sten a moderate kiss and a hug in thanks. And, as she pulled away, she allowed her little fingernail to trail across his neck and down his chestline.

She did not want him to think, after all, that she was a
total
virgin…

The bar-restaurant was secreted in an industrial cul-de-sac not far from Prime World's Embassy Row. Sten missed the turnoff and had to bring his rented gravsled—he had politely rejected the garish official transport he'd been offered—back for another approach. The building sat by itself, isolated in gloom, almost impossible to see. But as the gravsled grounded, bright lights flared.

Cind blinked in the glare. The lights seemed less intended to illuminate the path than to allow those inside to see approaching visitors. There was a very small sign halfway up the curving walk:

The Western Eating Parlor. Number Two.

"Not a very exotic name," she observed. Sten grinned. "There are wheels within wheels here. Supposedly this joint started back on old Earth, way, way back. Like pre-Empire back. Outside a city called Langley. It catered to an exclusive clientele, the story goes. Which hasn't changed in all these centuries."

"Okay, I'll bite. Who're the customers?" She raised a hand before Sten could answer. "Don't tell me. But give me a hint."

"Okay. Take the first letter of each word in the name:
T-W-E-P. "

"Twep," Cind sounded.

"Long
E
," Sten said.

Oh. Like in the old archaic term "Terminate With Extreme Prejudice." Cind had heard the term used by elderly intelligence types. Officially sanctioned murder.

Inside, the restaurant was a hush of real leather, murmured conversation, and skillful service.

The maitre d' was a horror.

Half of his face was gone, replaced by a plas mask. Cind wondered how long he must have been without medhelp—it was very rare to see, at least in what passed for civilization, someone whom reconstructive surgery did not take on. He didn't notice Sten and Cind for a moment. He was supervising two busboys, who were covering a large blast hole in the paneling. Then he greeted the newcomers as if they were strangers. "May I help you, sir?"

"She's clean, Delaney."

Delaney grinned with the half that remained of his face. "Indeed she is. I have an upstairs snug, Cap'n. An' your friend's at the far bar. I'll bring her up."

"You've been here before?" Cind whispered as Delaney led them through quiet luxury.

"No. Delaney and I go back a ways."

Delaney's hearing was very sharp. He paused. "FYI, the captain lugged me off a mountain once. A real big mountain. During a bad time. When I wasn't computin' real well." His fingers touched where his face was.

"I had to," Sten said. "You owed me money." A bit embarrassed, he changed the subject. "What happened to the wall?"

"You ever operate with an octopots with a service name Quebec Niner Three Mike? Called herself Crazy Daisy? Kinda cute if you go for cephalopods."

Sten thought, then shook his head.

"She retired as OC, outa Mantis 365," Delaney added helpfully. "Mostly out of NGC 1300 Central?"

"Must've been before my time—wait a minute. Was three-six-five the guys who stole the sports arena?"

"That's them."

"Okay. Know the team. Never met her. But isn't she on some renegade list?"

"You must be thinking of somebody else," Delaney shrugged. "She's clean-up with anybody here."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt."

"Anyway, she was in this afternoon. Celebrating something. Kept climbing out of her tank and floppin' up and down the bar. Gettin' nasty. Pourin' down shots of jenevercut with dry ice. Anyway, she'd bought herself a toy. Old projectile weapon she'd had made up. Called it a goose gun. Anyway, she decided she wanted to show it around. I maybe shoulda said something, but—

"At any rate, she showed off how it loads—she'd had some special rounds built up for it—and then she says it'd put a hole in the wall you could throw a human through.

"Guy down at the end—ex-Mercury REMF Analysis, shoulda stayed quiet—says drakh. So Daisy blew a hole in the wall 'n started throwing the guy at the hole. He was right, and the hole wasn't big enough. But Daisy kept trying. I had to tell her to knock it off and go home after three, four tries."

Cind hid her giggle. Delaney led them into a small room and seated them.

"You'll have what, skipper? Scotch, or are you streggin' tonight?"

Sten decided to be reasonable. "Scotch. It's early."

"Do you pour Black Velvet?" Cind asked.

"We pour
anything
. Or if it doesn't pour, we'll get you the needle, the inhaler, or a suppository blank. And I'll tell Aretha—that's the name she prefers to use—to come on up." He left.

"This," Cind said, "is a spook bar? Correct?"

"It is. Mostly Mantis."

Every profession had its own watering holes, from politicians to pederasts. And each had its own requirements. The Western Eating Parlor was an almost perfect intelligence operative's bar. Situated in a capital—
the
capital, in fact—it was unobtrusive. It would serve its retired or active clients any of the exotics they had become fond of on a hundred hundred worlds. All of the help had some degree of intelligence background, from Delaney the maitre d' to the barman who was the son of a recently deceased planning type who was waiting his appointment to the appropriate university, to the busbeings who might just have done some contract wet work in the past. The Parlor was unbugged; it was kept that way with frequent, sophisticated sweeps. The press were discouraged, except for those journalists who needed deep background and would never blow a source.

The Parlor, like the dozens of other spook bars, gave its clients not only a chance to get radically unwound, but a chance to pick up on new information or what a new assignment
really
might bring down on the hapless operative whose control had been less than generous with the facts.

That was why Sten had asked Alex to book dinner at the Parlor. The Eternal Emperor was being entirely too generous with things for this to be anything other than a nightmare assignment.

Aretha sleeked into the room and curled onto an oversize ottoman, hooves tucked underneath her. She—question mark—might have been taken for a sextuple-legged herbivore, considering the swept-back, needle-sharp horns, the brown-white-striped fur coat, and the hooves on the first and rearmost set of legs. But when she put her head back and bayed amusement, the prominent canines and cutting premolars and molars said otherwise. She ordered mineral water to drink—Sten and Cind immediately put their drink intake at "nurse"—and a slab of animal tissue, pounded and raw. Sten had charbroiled Earth salmon, a relatively new addiction, with butter and dill sauce. Cind also sampled Earth salmon. Raw.

Aretha briefed them—as only a Mantis field operative could. Sten was grateful that she spoke through a synthbox after the initial, polite greetings. Translating someone else's speech, even when it was in one's own tongue, could get wearisome, especially if the speaker had a dual diaphragm and evidently was at home in a language with glottal stops and sibilants.

She knew of Sten and his reputation and said she would help as much as she could. She assumed this woman had a need to know. Helping, she went on, would best be done by her kicking Sten in the genitalia, ensuring that he could not take this posting.

Three years earlier, Aretha had been deputy military attaché at the Imperial Embassy on Jochi, she said. She was recovering from a minor case of zagging when zigging was indicated. Sten estimated her rank at lieutenant colonel.

"Nightmare," she went on. "A nightmare indeed.

"First let me tell you about the humans, my dear ambassador-to-be. Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Former miners, with all of the forethought and logic that means. Go to any length to prevent regulation, then howl like a spavined pup when the material being mined runs out.

"As a culture, the Torks have enough imagination to want everything, but not nearly enough brains to achieve it. So that means they will willingly deny anyone else possession of these same mostly imagined treasures. Because the Altaic Cluster can only be considered a treasure if you have a way to package and export hatred and ethnocentrism.

"Consider the Jochians. Perhaps you did not know they were once a self-named Society of Adventurers. Given a charter to plunder by our own Eternal Emperor, long may he wave."

"I know that." Sten did not feel it necessary to tell Aretha that the information had come from the Emperor himself.

"Adventurers—pirates at one time. Then their culture swash-buckled itself down into anarchy and city-world solar systems until the oncoming of the Khaqan. The first. There have only been two.

"The Khaqan was also a liar and a thief and a back-stabber. The thing was, he could do it faster and better than any other Jochians. So he rose to the top. Like scum on a pond.

"He either died or was murdered by his son, the present Khaqan. Who has all of his father's talents at chicanery, and a fondness for building monuments to himself to the exclusion of all logic, needed public works, or continuing the social umbrella. And the Empire did nothing about his excesses while I was there. Possibly the Emperor had larger problems. Certainly, he would have heard almost nothing about how severe the problems really were.