The Albino Knife (2 page)

Juete stepped inside and the door slid soundlessly shut on its cushion of magnetic flux behind her.

"Don't make any sudden moves,"came a deep male voice.

She was startled but she tried not to show it. The Exotic woman turned slowly.Two men. One stood in the doorway of her fresher, the other sat on the leather and spidersilk form-chair, enjoying the massage machinery built into the unit.

The one standing was tall, but not overly so, average-looking, medium skin color, pale brown buzzed-and-dubbed hair, the kind of face you'd forget a minute after you saw it, a zero.

The one in the chair was darker, almost swarthy, black hair spun into a conservative halo cut, harder features, with a long nose, big chin, and large muscles, to judge from the thickness of his neck and forearms where they protruded from his three-quarter sleeve, loose-weave tunic. Genuine cotton, if she was any judge of these things, stained with organic dyes in bright blue and green.A man of taste and money—or one who could fake it.

Muscles produced a small blue plastic airpistol from under his tunic, held it up so Juete could see it, raised his thick eyebrows for emphasis,then tucked the gun back out of sight. A threat, but more subtle than many she'd received. I have a gun, he said. See? No need to point it at you, is there?

How was it possible they had gotten in here? What did they want? What were they going to do to her?

The man in the chair interrupted her thoughts, as if he could read them, answering broadly the first of her unspoken questions. "The galaxy is full of miracles, isn't it?"

She blinked but did not speak.

"Shall we go?"

"Go? Go where?"

Hesmiled, a lazy, genuinely happy expression. "I could hardly say that in front of the room's recorder, now could I?"

"If you know that, you know I'll be missed."

"To be sure.Eventually."It didn't seem to worry him. He stood, moving smoothly, effortlessly, and nodded toward the door.

Juete sighed. These two were expert and dangerous and if they wanted to kill her, likely she would already be dead. To resist would be foolish. She had not lived as long as she had by being foolish.

Juete turned and walked to the door.

Prologue Three

In the small museum that served the Siblings of the Shroud in the main compound on Manus Island , Earth, the two most respected teachers of the order were being given a tour of the new exhibits. Pen and Moon were being led by Spiral, himself nearly as venerated as they. The trio were in their early eighties, late middle-age for a healthy terran. All three wore full shrouds, covering them everywhere save for their eyes and hands in the nearly-living one-way osmotic cloth called kawa . The material was produced in only one place, this compound, and used exclusively for the shrouds.

At one time, each of the three senior siblings had been the Elder Brother or Sister in charge of the order.

"There's the mock-up of Wall's private quarters," Spiral said.

It was a big room, even at quarter scale, with an indigo and scarlet rug covering the floor, waxed wooden walls, and a sheet of mother-of-pearl spider silk tenting down from the ceiling. A trio of custom orthopedia backed by a give-all drug and liquor dispenser and a computer console completed the main furnishings.

"Denying himself luxury wasn't one of his handicaps, I see," Moon said.

Spiral's eyes crinkled in a smile. "The late Factor did indulge himself at times."

"What is that carpet?Yinguala?" Pen asked.

"Bioengineeredtuch wool, from Rangi ya majani Mwezi."

"Green Moon fiber.I hear it's as comfortable askawa ," Pen said, "and costs ten times as much to make."

"I'm only a poor sibling," Spiral said. "I wouldn't know."

The three laughed.

Moon said, "How about the projections? Anything new we should know about?"

"That glitch is still there. The comp gives us a spike in the near future."

"How near?"

"What time is it now?"

"That soon?"Pen turned away from the exhibit and looked at his friend. They had been half-naked students together and he could hear the concern in Spiral's voice. Spiral had felt the Cosmic Lightning, theRelampago , more than a quarter century past, and few things had seriously disturbed hiswa since.

That this did bothered Pen.

"That soon.And close to home, too. We are fine-tuning the expectations."

"Take away the Confed and still there are problems," Moon said.

"The nature of life," Spiral countered. His voice was full of mock gravity.

They laughed again.

The three of them strolled away from Factor Wall's exhibit and down the hallway through the rows of holo-projic dioramas. Many of the displays had been here for fifty years before Pen had first come to the compound as a new student, and he was as familiar with them as he was the bonsai and gardens outside in the tropical air.

"Here, have you seen this one?"

Spiral nodded at a full-scale display of a pair of spetsdods mounted inside a block of clear plastic. The weapons were small parallelograms, nearly diamond-shaped, each with a thin spun-fiber barrel. The magazine ejection button was the only visible control, since a spetsdod was fired by touching the barrel with the tip of the index finger. This rather tricky operation was made possible by the position of the weapon where it rode securely on the back of the operator's hand, held there by a thin slab of artificial flesh. A spetsdod operator learned care quickly.

Moon stepped close to the exhibit."Khadaji's?"

"Yes. That's his signature, authenticating them as one of the sets he used. The Smith has another set, and there's a pair in the Provincial Museum on Greaves. As far as we know, those are the only ones on public display."

"Nice of Emile to give them to us," Pen said.

The three started to move on.

Behind them, there was an explosion. The force of the blast knocked all three siblings sprawling. Debris sleeted past, spattering the walls and exhibits.

Penraised from his face-down position and shook his head, trying to clear the ringing in his ears. An alarm began to hoot, over and over, and he rolled onto his side from his belly, afraid, but not for himself.

"Moon—!?"

"Chang and Buddha on a goddamn stick!" she said.

Thank all the gods. They had been living together for so long that the idea of being without her was inconceivable.Ever since he had left Rim. Twenty years.

"Spiral."

"I'm okay."

"Pen.Your arm!"

As Moon sat up and pointed at him, Pen became aware of the pain in his left shoulder. He looked at it.

A shard of thincris had buried itself in his deltoid. The force of the explosion was such that the handsized sliver had pierced the rip-stop weave of thekawa shroud. He touched the clear crystal section with his right hand. It didn't move.Must be all the way to the bone, as solid as it felt. And now it really began to hurt. Blood oozed out through the torn cloth and dripped from the thincris onto the floor. Still, it was a small price.

He took a deep breath and tripped a mental kuji-kiri to stop the pain. The shoulder continued to throb and he was aware that it was injured, but the hurt diminished greatly.

Four siblings came running into the museum, all trying to talk at the same time.

Spiral looked at Pen and Moon. "I don't remember getting an exhibit that blows up," he said.

Prologue Four

On Thompson's Gazelle, first planet of the three-planet Delta System, the Civil and Criminal Complex in Evets City came to its last proceeding before the midday meal recess.

In Sentence Room A, the judge sat at his podium facing a single prisoner flanked by four planetary cools. The room was old; the air conditioning unit whistled somewhere in the low ceiling, sounding like some trapped beast unhappy at its fate. The room was empty, save for the six people who had to be there.

"Criminal Sleel—" began the sentence judge.

"I'm Sleel," Sleel said, interrupting. "Stuff the criminal part." He was a fair-sized man, well built but not extremely so, dressed in a prisoner-white coverall and neoprene slippers. He was held in place by a pressor field mounted beneath the floor. The field was keyed to movements involving more than a few kilos' effort. He could breathe or blink, but any real effort to move would activate the pressor and it would clamp him like a vise. The field was rated at a thousand kilos and there was no way a man or mue, no matter how string, could break its grip. But because he was Sleel, he kept trying.

"Can't" was not a word Sleel used very often.

The judge ignored the interruption. "You have been found guilty of tampering with protected artifacts—"

"This is all lizard shit and you know it."

"—and in addition, you have also been convicted of resisting arrest, assaulting planetary officers, third-degree mayhem, damaging property in excess of five thousand standards, and attempted escape. I am required to ask you if you have any final statement, which must be limited to one minute or less, before I pass the sentence."

"Yeah, I got a statement. You and everybody connected with this dick-twisting extrusion are gonna be sorry you were ever fucking born."

"Is that your statement?"

"You heard it."

"Then by the authority of the Galactic Republic and in accordance with the law of Thompson's Gazelle and the state of Bingington's Peninsula, I hereby order that you shall be removed to the General Power Complex on BantuIsland where you shall repay your debt to society by fifteen years at hard labor."

Sleel stared at the judge as if his eyes were charged particle spitters and he could cut the man to shreds with his gaze.

"That's it. Take him out."

Sleel gathered himself for the moment that the pressor field would let go. Hell, there were just four of them, and armed with only hand wands. Any matador worth a damn ought to be able to take these balloos without working up a good sweat. He grinned at the thought.

"Should I shut the field off?" one of the guards asked.

The head guard, one who had been knocked silly by Sleel during an earlier escape attempt, smiled to match the trapped matador's expression. "Just a second," he said. He pulled his hand wand, a standard issue straight tube, but one that had been customized with pearl inlays and a Pachmayr one-piece stikgrip. He pointed the weapon at Sleel. "Have a nice nap, elbow sucker," the guard said.

Sleel had time to realize what was happening before the guard flashed him. Dammit, they were gonna blast him before they let the pressor down.

Shit—

Prologue Five

Saval Bork was of homomue stock, born of a heavy gravity world, and big by any man or mue standard. On a one-gee planet like Fox, he weighed nearly a hundred and twenty-five kilos, and he stood not quite two meters tall. Between the high-gravity upbringing and his subsequent work with lifting weights, Bork had built his body to impressive proportions, with power to match his looks. He knew his own strength, after a fashion, but he sometimes did things without thinking that other men could not do with all-out effort. What he considered hard made most strong men quail.

As he walked along the quiet street in Zor, the main city on the Little Island, Bork was once again lost in memory. It had been five years and more since Mayli had died, cut down by the guns of the Confederation. The wound to Bork's heart seemed as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. He had loved only one woman in his life, a woman who had been many things, doctor, whore, teacher, matadora. She had called from his depths an emotion he had not known he'd had, and his life had truly begun on that day; now, she was dead, and not a waking hour passed without Bork's regret.

This town, this planet, this system, they were backrocket places where even a man who had been one of the heroes of the revolution could mostly stay lost. Not unnoticed, because someone who looked like Bork always drew stares, but at least he wasn't bothered very often. Last year, when one of the entcom channels ran a lurid vid about the last days of the Confed, they'd gotten some giant actor to play his part.

A few people had asked him about it then, but Bork had simply stared at them until they shut up and went away. He rarely lost his temper and, looking as hedid, most people didn't want that to happen. He'd shucked his spetsdods and orthoskins for anonymous gray coveralls and he'd gone back to his old line of work, security in a local pub. After he warned a couple of overchemmed and drunk patrons to quiet down, once by lifting a big man clear of the floor by his shirt front, word got around the neighborhood that it was probably better not to get in Bork's way.

He was on his way to his cube from work, the corpse-stealer's shift, and Fox's sun had yet to come up, though it was trying. The narrow street was quiet, only a few electric carts humming along,no other pedestrians up at this hour.

Ahead four men came out of a pub, laughing too loudly and making broad gestures in the dimness of false dawn. They looked like an all-night party winding down, but as Bork walked toward them, he saw that they were watching him and pretending otherwise.

He was used to being the object of awed stares, but this was different. Alarms tripped in his head.

He no longer wore the uniform, nor did he mount the standard weaponry, but the training he'd gotten as a matador did not disappear so easily. A man could not graduate from the elite bodyguard school without learning how to recognize a potentially dangerous situation. After all the years of instruction and practice, it was nearly a reflex.

Bork altered his path and started to cross the street. He had no client to protect and the simplest way of avoiding trouble was to be elsewhere when it came down. After Mayli and Red died, Bork decided he did not want to be involved with death again. He carried no weapons, save his own skills and strength, and he would avoid using these if possible.

The four men pretended to ignore him as two of them stumbled out into the street and began a showy, fake argument. The other two played at encouraging the first pair to fight.

None of the four were drunk or stoned, Bork realized. They all moved too well. You could hide a lot, you were a good actor, but body control and balance were hard to disguise. Little moves gave it away; a stumble uncontrolled made the hands and arms go out reflexively, and the motion was different if you faked it. Bork had been taught by the best. These four were fairly big, if not as big as he was, and they moved like men who knew how to fight.