Starhammer (17 page)

He headed for Kugs, the big department store. He needed a lot of stuff, starting with spacesuits and an invalid chair.

It was hard to concentrate. Old Meg had been ahead of him all along, as usual. Thinking of her brought a lump to his throat, tears to his eyes.

Now he had to get through; he must not fail her.

In fact, he had a responsibility to the whole human race.

Before entering the elevator running to the laowon level, Jon Iehard donned a new, crisp white uniform, a size too large. He carried a folding wheelchair and a small backpack. Beneath the whites he wore full body armor, more plates than usual. For the Taw Taw, he carried three twenty-shot clips.

When he emerged in laowon space, into the pseudolight of evening on ancient Laogolden, he blended perfectly into the crowd. White was the attire for servants there. The blues themselves wore military uniforms—harsh, simple, stark lines—or the more elaborate regalia of Seygfan.

Like most employees of the Hyperion Grandee police forces, Jon knew the legendary address he was heading toward, only too well.

He steered a path through the curving Massgiers Boulevard. The ceiling was fifty meters high; elegant white facades in the neoclassical laowon mode—flat planes, heavy bevels—occupied the walls. Discreet entrances, shrouded by potted shrubs, gave access to the apartments beyond. Massgiers Boulevard eventually opened onto Lanushka Avenue where one entrance was masked by six fat polpun trees, all in green flower and exuding the usual heavy, musky odor. The door itself was a modest real-wood affair, seven feet by five, an antique from some ancient fort on Laogolden or Ratan, inlaid with an intricate pattern of Early-Archaic lao hexagrams.

At the door stood two Superior Buro guards in black uniforms, handweapons strapped into holsters. Jon approached, set down the wheelchair and turned to them as if to offer his ID card. Instead he flicked an electric blade into the leading officer and produced the Taw Taw with the other.

"Open the door!" he hissed.

The stricken guard was already choking on a terrible amount of blood; the blade had chopped right through his neck and buried itself in the door behind him with a thunk. He quickly coughed up his life and lay still, but the blade was digging into the door, its charger whining shrilly.

He retrieved the blade, prodded the stunned guard through the Buro's front door, and then coldly shot him through the head. The big body tumbled heavily to the dark green rug in the Buro's outer lobby. A startled receptionist jumped up and opened her mouth, but his bullet took her the next moment, along with the officer in a black tunic who was leaping for the relative safety of the space behind her desk.

He emptied the clip into the rest of the laowon standing, bunched, in the doorway. Only one managed to get his own weapon out. The shot whanged off Jon's chest plate uselessly, staggering him for a moment, but too late. Then Jon was alone with a pile of laowon dead. Trembling fingers slid a new clip into the Taw Taw and then quickly unfolded the wheelchair and locked the legs in place. Parking it beside the door, he slipped into the next suite of offices.

He ran down a darkened spiral corridor, lined with doorless cubby holes, and as he ran, he shot laowon, wearing earphones, intent on tasks or monitor screens. None made effective resistance. The corridor curved back on itself past an empty conference room. No security provisions had been made against direct assault. Over the millennium, it had become unthinkable.

There was a guard at the door to the inner section. The fellow knew that something was up, he had his gun out when Jon came round the corner but his first shot was wild. He had no opportunity for a second. He still had no clear idea what was happening when he hit the wall behind him in death.

Inside that door he surprised a trio of laowon operatives. They responded with the lightning reflexes of their training. But Jon had the initiative. The Taw Taw took one in the face. Jon's foot hammered the second in the groin and he ducked to avoid the neck-breaker kick thrown by the third.

He spun, another kick rocked him into the wall, but the Taw Taw beat the third laowon's follow-up blow. Jon shot the knee, preventing the leg from rising, flipped the electric blade into the second officer's back, dropping him to the floor for good.

He was breathing hard by then, and the gunfire had produced a degree of alarm in the inner section. He heard someone shout. An overweight laowon appeared in a doorway, then ducked back with a fearful shriek. Jon caught him pulling a handweapon from a drawer in a lao-baroque desk. The Taw Taw finished its second clip.

Someone had killed the lights, but Jon sensed laowon fear and he set the electric blade to boomerang, then flipped it around a wall partition to gut the wily section leader who waited there with a loaded handweapon.

He ran on, but found himself running out of opponents. One senior officer got off a shot from his office door but the slug glanced off Jon's chest armor and barely broke his stride.

In the laowon view the only thing human beings understood was force. This view was a natural outgrowth of the imperial system that had evolved on Laogolden. In addition there was a natural tendency to see humans as dangerous, irresponsible inferiors who were only kept from wholesale murder of their blue-skin betters by fear of a painful death.

Most human systems that supported laowon populations also had Superior Buro stations. Where there were such stations, there was always the dreaded "Brutality Room." There, the Superior Buro brought human criminals seized on charges laid against them by laowon victims. The Buro screened complaints; only a few were actually proceeded upon, and the Buro was careful not to overuse the Room. In fact, they usually did not kill the people brought in. This increased the legendary stature of the place among the subject human peoples, since it produced still voluble, if often permanently inarticulate, survivors.

Based on laowon punishment principles, as encoded in the
Imperiomix Lao
, the Room was actually a small hospital. There were white walled interrogation clinics and padded cells. Even rooms for surgery, but the main room was given over to the practices of physical punishment.

On the occasion of the tri-mode punishment of Docket No. 813, the gallery above the punishment room itself was graced by the aristocratic presence of the Lady Blasilab of Chashleesh and the young Morgooze of Blue Seygfan. Behind them sat a pair of officers from
Illustrious
, wearing the black and gold tunics of the space navy. The four laowon watched impassively as the Superior Buro operatives applied their instruments to the naked woman strapped on the frame.

Again and again the instruments sparked and crackled and Meg Vance's body jumped and wobbled. She had long since ceased screaming. There was no point. It was better to be far beyond speech, in a trance state, somewhere approaching death. Meg had reached the tertiary punishment mode.

The first mode, applied to humans of either sex, involved a horribly humiliating hour of sexual abuse by two or three special bred brutalitors; pinhead males who became sexually uncontrollable in the presence of almost anything mammalian. Of low intelligence and ferocious drives, they quickly reduced prisoners to the necessary state of low self-esteem that was prized by the operatives in the secondary and tertiary modes.

Only after the brutalitors had exhausted themselves did the Buro's skilled operatives begin their work. Electrodes were attached for induced pseudosmothering, followed by pseudodrowning and then an extreme claustrophobic anxiety.

As Meg's personality profile had revealed, those deaths were the worst imaginable to her. While in a state of complete disorientation she'd received injections of tenderniche to sensitize her nervous system, and then the operatives in shining white tunics had begun their work with the pain wands—the tertiary mode.

The nerve fire had wrung every tear from her body, her throat was a dried husk, she could protest no longer.

Still the punishment continued.

Lady Blasilab affected a yawn. The Morgooze ignored it, intent on the chastisement of the willful human. The Morgooze was determined to exact revenge from the humans at every opportunity. He had made a request to the Central Fleet Command for the blood rights to Jon Iehard, the incompetent operative who had lost their one trace on the Elchite murderer.
"The Bey was gone, flown to the stars..."
Somehow those mocking words refused to leave his mind. Already he dreaded his return to Laogolden. What would the Heir say? What would the old Widow Maker say?

Of course, he would blame it on the Superior Buro. The fool Petrie could be taken for evidence. The Morgooze decided to take the initiative. Instant, furious assault, that was the way of Blue Seygfan! And just possibly, if he could steamroller the court, they would throw him Padzn Birthamb, for an expiation. The Morgooze would have Birthamb up on the rack right after Jon Iehard's extravagant expiation beneath the camera lights.

The laowon became aware of a disturbance in the outer corridor. The Morgooze looked up in annoyance. There should be no interruptions. This was an expiation before a full Morgooze!

The door to the Brutality Room opened and a figure in a white uniform slipped in. The Morgooze watched in surprise as a human, unescorted by laowon operatives approached the rack.

Aghast, the Morgooze heard the solid "thuck" sounds of Jon Iehard's Taw Taw as the human shot the three laowon who were torturing Meg Vance. Shocking red blood spattered the white tunics.

With yowls of rage the Morgooze and Lady Blasilab called for guards to slay the impious human intruder. An invasion of the Brutality Room! Such a thing had never been dared! It was unthinkable!

Jon looked up, saw them, and fired in a single fluid movement. The Morgooze spilled over the rail and landed on the matted floor with a thud. Lady Blasilab's head burst the next instant and pieces flew back over the seats of the gallery.

The two officers from
Illustrious
were standing in their seats, stunned. Where were the Guards? How did the impious human dare to do this? Then the exploding slugs hit them, and they toppled into the row behind them.

Jon broke Meg free from the rack and drew a black coat around her body, then buttoned it up to the neck.

Her soft, middle aged body was slick with sweat and mucus. The pain wands left no visible marks, but there were many bruises, scratches, and cuts from her battle with the pinhead rapists.

She moaned. He whispered fiercely in her ear. She shut up. Somehow he managed to convince her to hang onto him, piggyback style, as he went back out through the offices of the Buro. He had to step over a number of dead laowon before he reached the door.

Outside he got her into the wheelchair he had waiting. It was equipped with straps, which he fastened with fingers that were barely shaking. Something that he noticed with considerable surprise. Here he'd surely provided his own sentence of death yet his deeds seemed remote, impossible. He couldn't fail now!

Then Jon was pushing Meg briskly down the laowon corridor to the elevator bank. In the artificial eternal sunset of Laogolden, laowon he passed in the corridor assumed he was a servant taking an elderly patron for a stroll above the park. The elevator bore them to the transit station far below, and a car was along within moments. His luck held good.

In fact, his crazed audacity had worked far better than he had ever imagined. The Superior Buro had been struck a hammer blow. So devastating an attack, that, until the surviving Buro operatives on the off shift woke up and came into the office, nobody would know it had taken place. For the moment there was no Superior Buro on Hyperion Grandee.

Jon and Meg rode the transit cars to Octagon One. Then Jon loaded her onto a low gravity manhandler pod, and they climbed on the escalator to the docking parks for small craft, on the outermost dorsal extension.

Melissa Baltitude was waiting inside the Dove model B, a high expression of the boat builder's art. An aerodynamically smooth exterior gave onto a luxurious interior of inlaid stone panels and sleek white acceleration couches for four people. Polished brass accoutrements decorated the purple glass control screens. A smaller cabin at the rear concealed a tiny galley and bathroom facilities.

He pushed Meg on board, and loaded her into an acceleration couch, thankful for low gravity. The piggyback ride had been a nightmare experience for his bruised back and chest.

Melissa was staring at him openmouthed. "Jon, what's happened." She noticed the green medipack on the back of his head, plus the purpling bruises.

"There's been some trouble." He took a look at the clock. "Let's go, time is short."

"Who?" She began.

But he cut her off. "I'll explain when we're out of Hyperion Grandee."

Twenty-eight minutes had passed since he'd left the Superior Buro. He strapped in and Melissa gave the computer the go-ahead. The Dove rose and flew away down the exit funnel.

Outside Grandee a moderate amount of traffic was moving in the inner lanes, but they soon emptied out, permitting the Traxon engines to cut in full for a primary burn that pressed the Dove's passengers deep into their seats. When the burn ended, forty-five minutes after the slaughter, the first screams of public outrage were hitting the airwaves. Jon first detected heavy bursts of activity on the laowon channels. Then it suddenly erupted on the human news channels. Jon covered all the major ones, and found interesting nuances in the coverage. Channel 99, the biggest news net, was very noncomittal. Someone, it didn't mention who, had committed a mass murder upon laowon. The big rival, 109, insisted that the identity of the chief suspect in the case was an operative of the Hyperion Grandee Mass Murder Squad.

While he was listening to the first rounds of instant analysis, Meg came awake. Jon was ready with painkillers and a cup of nutrisoup. She groaned, opened her eyes, and blinked in astonishment. Then she screamed, again and again, and writhed, cowering in the acceleration couch. It was unnerving, the sounds were so animal, so desperate. Mucus streamed from her eyes, her mouth, her nose. Her sobs had a deep, tearing quality that made them hard to listen to.