Man Who Used the Universe (7 page)

"Find out, hell! I want to know wh . . ."

She broke off. Loo-Macklin turned and gave her a particularly sharp look. "Khrys . . . ."

She'd heard that tone before—harsh and devoid of compassion. The pretense of familiarity that had existed between them prior to Basright's entrance vanished. She was now merely another employee, nothing more.

Slowly she took a seat, the folds of her dress collapsing beneath her, while above her body the chiffonlike material continued to drift gently in the air.

Loo-Macklin returned his attention to the now sweating Basright.

"They said they'd kill me," he remonstrated with his boss, "if I didn't go along with them. I didn't know what to do . . . ."

"Why didn't you come to me?"

"They were on me all the time, clockabout, sir. I'm not into violence. I've always been interested in the ledger side of syndicate operations. You know Nubra, what he was like. Always ready for a fight. He never liked me, that wipsipper. He would've killed me right there if Amoleen hadn't intervened. Said they couldn't do anything until after they'd . . . taken care of you.

"So . . . I told them I'd cooperate, but passively. Nubra wanted more than that, damn him, but he wasn't sure what. They hadn't finalized their plans yet. I didn't want to go in with them . . . I didn't want to see you replaced. You've done everything with the syndicate you said you would. You've been fair with me. And I'm neither jealous nor power-hungry, like Nubra and Amoleen are . . . were."

"That's always been one of your greatest qualities, Basright," said Loo-Macklin approvingly. "You're not terribly smart, but you're smart enough to recognize when someone's smarter than yourself. You're a plodder, not an innovator. Talents in themselves."

The man's shaking stopped. For the first time since the announcement of his colleagues' deaths he started to relax. But only a little. He wasn't sure he was safe yet.

"Well, anyways, sir, that's why you haven't been able to reach me for the past two weeks. I made myself lost. Vanalatan Islands in the southern ocean, actually. I hoped that if I didn't help them or hinder them, they'd ignore me until I came back. I could always plead bad nerves. Amoleen would've accepted that, I think. She needed my financial skills to run the syndicate's business end."

"And conversely, if they failed, you could simply have told me you badly needed a vacation. So you covered yourself with both sides, right?"

"It wasn't like that at all, sir!" Basright protested.

Loo-Macklin waved him down. "I'm not mad at you for looking out for yourself, Bas. Survival's nothing to be ashamed of. But lying isn't one of your talents. I think you know that, too."

Basright hesitated, then let out a nervous little half-chuckle. "No, sir. But I did the only thing I could think of. And I sure as hell needed the vacation, though the last couple of days before I came home weren't very relaxing." He managed to meet the younger man's gaze.

"I'm not in your class, Loo-Macklin, and I know it. Nubra and Amoleen couldn't see how well off they were. They wanted control more than they wanted success."

Loo-Macklin nodded, rose and approached the old programmer. Basright cringed, then relaxed and positively beamed when Loo-Macklin patted him on the shoulder. Save for the fact that his tongue wasn't lolling out, Basright looked for all the world like a gratified dog.

Hard to think that he presided over, among other things, a squad of twelve professional collectors whose methods were less than courteous. Highly efficient, was Basright, but absolutely devoid of imagination. Dutiful and unchanging as the programs he entered into the syndicate's computers. A born administrator.

"That's why you and Khrys are still here," he told the older man, "and the other two are not." His gaze traveled across the room to Khryswhy. "Basright here is smart enough to know how stupid he is, whereas you, Khrys, are smart enough to know how smart I am."

She fiddled with the airborne folds of her dress, uncertain what to say. "You certainly have a low opinion of yourself, Kees vaan Loo-Macklin."

"Have you ever known me to suffer from false modesty?"

"No."

"It's not a question of opinion but of fact. I'm here. Other people who were careless are not."

"I'd be redundant then," she continued, lighting up a blue dopestick of legal manufacture but laced with highly illegal hallucinogens, which the Ninth Syndicate imported to Evenwaith, "in saying that Amoleen and Nubra's passing was accidental."

He nodded once.

"How come no one in my section reported any of this to me?" She glanced over at Basright. "What about you?"

He shook his head violently. "None of my people knew about it or had anything to do with it. At least, none that I know of, sir." He frowned at a sudden thought. "They've all been busy with their regular work, and Nubra was responsible for any stronger 'coercive measures' business required. Who did you get to vape him and Amoleen? If something major like that was afoot I should have heard rumors of it, at least."

"Five years," Khryswhy was murmuring. "They worked for you for five years."

"They got tired of me," he said bluntly, folding his hands across his enormous chest. His eyes dropped to study his interlocked fingers.

"I knew they were plotting against me as early as two years back, but they were valuable people. Within their own sections they performed with great efficiency."

"If you knew all this time that they were out to get you," she asked him curiously, "why didn't you ever let them know that you knew? Maybe none of this would have happened."

Loo-Macklin shook his head. "That's not how people's minds work, Khrys. I know a little about human nature. I've been forced to learn. If I'd confronted them with what I'd learned they would have denied everything. Then they would have bided their time and hatched some new plot, which I might have been lax in uncovering.

"Five years ago I told them, as I told you, that within a year I would triple the syndicate's earnings. Well, we're now the largest, most prosperous illegal enterprise on Evenwaith. We've absorbed four of the original twelve syndicates. With some more hard work and perseverance, I think that within another year we will control more than two thirds of the underworld commerce on this planet. That will put us in a dominant fiscal position vis-à-vis any possible competitors." Basright nodded agreement.

"I've also initiated expansion operations on Helhedrin and Vlox. Quietly, of course, and in such a way that the small local syndicates there are as yet unaware of our intentions."

Khryswhy gaped at him, half-rising from her chair. "But otherworld expansion by syndicates is . . ."

"Illegal?" He laughed, as he rarely did, a high-pitched sound almost like barking.

"Sometimes I wonder at the way our galactic society is structured, let alone how it manages to muddle along so effectively. Crime syndicates are illegal by definition and are supposed to restrict themselves to a single world. To prevent them from attaining a dangerous amount of power, I presume.

"Meanwhile, legal corporations and syndicates, which destroy the surfaces of whole worlds with their operations, are permitted to expand wherever they're able. I see little enough difference in our activities." There was unusual passion in his voice, and Basright and Khryswhy watched in fascination as he paced the room.

"We will expand. It's vital to our continued security. I see no reason why we can't."

"You'll find out why when word of what you're trying to do reaches the Board of Operators on Terra and Restavon," Khryswhy told him. "But you didn't answer my question or Basright's." She gestured at the older man, who'd finally regained his composure now that he was reasonably sure Loo-Macklin didn't intend to have him join Amoleen and Nubra. Actually he was quite pleased at the way things had turned out. He couldn't have been comfortable in his dotage with Nubra as syndicate chief.

"What did you do," she asked Loo-Macklin, "borrow killers from another syndicate?"

"No," he told her softly. "That would have been dangerous. Outsiders can be talkative, especially where things of importance and great worth are involved. I prefer keeping such matters as private as possible.

"So I killed Amoleen and Nubra myself. I think that's more honest than hiring someone, don't you? I've never forgotten my early training, nor have five years relaxed my basic instincts."

His associates were speechless. Their reaction was a mystery to him.

"What's the matter with you two?" He made a face. "Have you both forgotten what I was trained to do? I'm quite capable of calling in my own debts."

"But what about your position," Khryswhy pointed out. "If this becomes widely known, it will lower your status."

"Ah, status," he murmured. "If I recall last year's determinations, I've been accorded twenty-fourth class. Perhaps now I'll fall above thirty. So what? Status means nothing to me."

Khryswhy stared straight at him and said something, which made Basright shudder for her.

"You're lying."

Loo-Macklin resumed his seat and, since this was to be a day full of unexpected revelations, it seemed, smiled at her. It was a genuine smile, an expression as rare as the honest laughter they'd heard from him minutes earlier.

"Sometimes you have rare insights, Khryswhy. Occasionally, real perception. It's one of the reasons I value you and your opinions so highly.

"Yes, perhaps I am lying. Perhaps." He touched a control on the armchair computer console. Matching units came to life on other chairs, though two of them were not occupied.

"Now then, we've a great deal of work to do today." Basright bent gratefully over the glowing screen, Khryswhy more slowly. "There's a new drug being manufactured on Restavon, which hasn't been seen here on Evenwaith yet. It's called Endorphin twenty-nine red. I'm told it possesses some interesting side effects and ought to sell fast and at a hell of a profit.

"The Osos and Ti-chin syndicates also know about the stuff and are trying to line up the usual exclusive import rights from the Restavon lab. Whoever gets there first with the best offer stands to make a great deal, not only here but on other worlds as well. You both know the novelty value of a new drug."

"'Other worlds,'" murmured Khryswhy. "Like Helhedrin and Vlox?"

"Among others," agreed Loo-Macklin.

Basright scratched behind an ear, grinned at his console. "I wondered what we were funneling all the credit to those two dumps for."

"Those 'dumps' are rapidly growing, well-managed colony worlds," Loo-Macklin informed him. "As to the credit, now you know. You have objections, perhaps?"

That was always a rhetorical question with Loo-Macklin.

"Good. This is how I recommend we proceed. I've had some checking done into the personal background of the chief chemist at the Restavon lab. He's a legal, twenty-fifth status, clean. More important, he has a married daughter who's wed to a twenty-first class operator who works for the planetary government. Economics programming, but that's not what matters.

"What matters is that the husband's been involved in some shady dealings on the side. Nothing extreme, but enough to disgrace him if ever revealed. They have two children of their own.

"We can make a straight offer, of course, as Osos and the Ti-chins will, but I'd also like to begin action against the son-in-law. If not him, the father will want to protect his grandchildren from the damage a scandal could cause. Beyond that we also have the possibility of . . ."

Khryswhy listened to him drone on, one part of her methodically soaking up every pertinent fact while the other tried to fathom the man she worked for.

She was eight centimeters taller than he was but never felt taller in his presence. It was an effect he had on many people. He was relentlessly, eternally demanding, driving himself toward some unknown, unimaginable personal goal.

He drove his employees equally hard, from Basright and herself down to the lowliest courier.

Because of that drive she'd become wealthy and powerful beyond her wildest dreams. True, she was older, but not that much older. And he was not yet thirty. At times she felt protective toward him, at other times openly affectionate. He never reciprocated, was never more than formally cordial toward her.

Sometimes she had the feeling that . . . she forced the thought aside and fought to pay more attention to what he was saying. It would be dangerous to think she had any kind of claim on him, as dangerous as believing she understood what kind of man he was. She didn't. No one did.

The real Kees vaan Loo-Macklin was buried somewhere beneath a hundred carefully constructed layers of deception and camouflage. There were times when she thought she'd caught a glimpse of the real man, only to discover later on that they were false impressions, deliberately manufactured by him. On other occasions she allowed herself to respond to his leads on a personal level, to find out that he was just toying with her.

Back off, she told herself in warning. Do your job and follow orders and stay clear of this creature. Bide your time. Bide it better than poor old Amoleen. She'd known and worked with her for many years. Nubra, for nearly as long. All three of them had worked their way up through Lal's organization together.

And now Lal was long gone and this strange, powerful enigma of a man was in his place. Amoleen and Nubra were gone too, victims of their own greed and impatience. They'd been outanticipated, outthought.

She wasn't going to let that happen to her, no, not to her, not to Khryswhy. Loo-Macklin was right when he said that she knew which of them was the smarter. She'd keep that in mind.

For now, at least, she would be content with prosperity and power . . . .

It was a beautiful, functional thing. The spherical extrusion jutted from the flank of the massive space station like a silver flower doomed never to bloom.

The station orbited a particular blue-green world which was instantly recognizable by people who'd spent their entire lives elsewhere. Ships and shuttles hovered about the vast construction like bees around a hive.