The Duke Of Uranium (28 page)

“As for your mission, an even slightly more experienced operative would have refused to deliver such a message, and rightly so. I hope you beat the hell out of Sibroillo for it when you get home—and you probably will be getting home, since at this point I see no reason to take more of it out on you than I already have. I’m assuming that you are a mere operative; if you meant anything to Sibroillo, if for example you were a blood relative, then I might be tempted to use you to send a further message.”

He spread his arms wide and brought his hands in with a resounding, excruciating clap on Jak’s cheeks.

“That was mostly to show you how free I feel with you. I suggest you avoid Sibroillo’s tone entirely.

Now, I’m going to go away for a while, and then a nice person will come in to take some of your blood, and then after that is all interpreted and decoded, I’ll be back for further discussion.” He tore the envelope open and pulled out the paper inside; when he glanced at it, he roared with laughter. “Oh, my. So you no doubt are a blood relative. How very like Sibroillo to think that I would be afraid to touch you because of that

he always had such an exaggerated notion of his reputation! No doubt he sent you for that very reason! Well, it’s possible that I won’t have any strong reason to do anything too dreadful to you, and I am in fact quite a reasonable man once you get to know me, which you should nevertheless be hoping you will not do. So I don’t think there’s anything more to worry about than you already had.

“Anyway, the next person will come along to take your blood, and then I’ll be back, and then depending on everything, perhaps I will take that gag off you and we’ll have further conversation. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, whether or not you ever talk to me—or talk—again, I’ll be talking to you later.”

Riveroma left, still chuckling merrily; just before the door closed, Jak heard him mutter “Sibroillo, Sibroillo, Sibroillo,” like a teacher thinking about a memorably dreadful pupil.

Jak ran through everything he knew for such a situation; it wasn’t much. There was no slack to work in his bonds—Riveroma was far too much of a pro for that. Unlike any villain in any intrigue novel, Riveroma had not left the keypad for the molecular lock attached to the bonds, so there was no hope of specking it, and anyway even if he had, the things had nine-digit combinations, so Jak would probably have had to work his way through some significant fraction of a billion possibilities before getting free. He’d be better off hoping to starve to the point where his wrists slipped free.

At least his jaw was going numb.

There was absolutely nothing in this slick-surfaced white room; after much squirming, he managed to spin all the way around in increments of ten degrees or so (at least he thought he had—he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t lost count of the number of corners he had passed) and thus confirm that he couldn’t even perceive where the doors were. He thought he remembered, but if he thought about that too much, the memory would disappear in a fog of doubt.

He could speck nothing else. When he was unsure or afraid, as long as he could remember, he’d always been able to rely upon a thing or two that Uncle Sib always said, but just now he really didn’t want to remember anything about Uncle Sib.

It had never occurred to Jak that his uncle might be anything other than the way he presented himself. The shock of discovering that the malphs thought of Sib with contempt, and that it was quite possible that Sib was not exactly the master of intrigue and adventure that he had presented himself to be, was in many ways far more severe than the shock of taking a bad wanging from a professional. Jak went from despair to disbelief to rage at Sib to rage at Riveroma over and over and over, stopping now and then along the way to berate himself, but it neither loosened his bonds nor helped him to accept it, so after a while he

began working the mental review part of the Disciplines, seeing whether he might get relaxed enough to gain some slack.

He had gained none by the time that a tall, older woman walked in, yanked his trousers down, and took a very unnecessarily large sample of blood from one of his buttocks; while doing this, several times she addressed him as “cutie” and accused him of getting excited. Jak knew that old tactic, at least—Uncle Sib had not given him a wholly erroneous impression of the world—and simply breathed deeper, concentrating more on relaxing. By the time the woman departed, with a final “Now be a good little bitch and maybe I’ll take more blood later, the way you like it,” he was merely mentally recording her voice, for later identification, if necessary.

He lay there and kept concentrating. There was no real slack in his bonds, but at least he was beginning to sweat more; he concentrated on making his hands and wrists feel warm, and finally he had budged things about a millimeter—but was no closer to getting free—when Riveroma returned and sat down beside him.

The huge man’s voice was oddly gentle. “Well. Your uncle is offering a truly wonderful, once-in-alifetime deal, and I dearly wish I could take it, Jak, because it would make my life so much better in so many ways. But as I was forced to explain to him, at the very moment that I removed several of those dangling swords from above my head, I would be—to mix a metaphor savagely—putting two hounds at my heels, to wit all of Uranium and all of Triangle One. This is because anything I do to help your Princess Shyf escape, or to let her go, is going to be absolutely transparent to everyone, for a variety of reasons. It therefore follows that I simply can’t take the offer, Jak, much as I would like to—and you have the word of one you can’t trust at all that I am telling the absolute truth in that regard.

“Now there is no good reason for me to murder you, or indeed to harm you any further, except that it’s possible that some earlier part of our conversations might have been heard and might have put some suspicion in my direction, because sad though it is to say, in this very distrustful world, both Triangle One and the Duchy of Uranium tend to watch me the way a rabbit watches a snake in its cage. Personally I don’t know why anyone pays good money for someone they’re afraid of, but there you have it.

“So I took the liberty of pumping a few good hard electromagnetic pulses through this room, and following up with a little hard gamma—oh, don’t worry, you won’t even lose any hair, they’ll barely be able to detect it in your blood chemistry in a few weeks—and setting up a watch-and-scramble that I’m wearing at the moment, and for just now we can talk freely, you see? Or rather I can. You’re still gagged.

“Anyway, a couple of quite technically proficient fellows are now going to take you over to a guardhouse for a quite mild beating, which I hope you will understand is in the nature of a cover and not intended at all to cause you much distress—it won’t be nearly as bad as what I already did to you. I’ve already given the orders, and I— oh, here they are.”

Riveroma stood, and Jak could see his shiny black boots on one side of his peripheral vision, and the boots of the guards on the other. “I was expecting Rab Beversen,” he said. ‘That’s the one I use for things

like this. This can’t be done by unskilled hands—there’s a real precise level I want you to hit. Along with some real precise parts of young Jak Jinnaka here.”

“Beversen got called over to Station Four,” one guard said. “Just a second before we came over. We could take the prisoner over there.”

“I’d appreciate that, if it’s not too much trouble,” Riveroma said. “And make sure Beversen has this”—he handed them a sheet of paper—”I already sent it, but everything is being screwed up today, you know, so let’s just see if maybe we can get this right. Make sure that Beversen knows that under no circumstances is he to administer anything more than the level I tell him to.”

“I believe he already got the order, sir,” the guard said, “but I’ll make sure he gets this copy, and I’ll have him call you if he has any questions, before he starts.”

“Good,” Riveroma said. “Adieu, dear Jak, and I surely hope not to see you again—you must be feeling much the same about me, masen?” He left through a door that appeared suddenly in the wall; another door appeared, and the guards dragged him through it. Toktru, Jak wished he could faint.

Ihey threw Jak into a ground car, not gently but with no more roughness than was incidental to the process, and took off at great speed; probably the Duke’s guards didn’t have to worry about whatever traffic regulations there were in Fermi, if any. “Station Four,” the guard said. “Can you believe he still makes us say ‘Station Four’?”

“Shut up. There’s a hostile present.”

“Right, and six of the biggest media outlets, and a dozen viv programs, all have run and rerun that big story by Mreek Sinda, the one called ‘Secrets of Station Four.’ And there’s a chain of flashclubs in ten cities at least—including this one!—called ‘Station Four, Fit for a Princess!’ So nobody knows that Station Four is really—”

“You heard me. Shut up. I’m not getting punished for you being a blabbermouth. Not for the third time this year, not ever again, nunh-unh. So shut up.”

Jak had specked it already, of course; well, he was getting closer to Sesh, probably into the outer guard areas of Psim’s palace. He saw no way that this could be help-fill, but it was something to know about. He pushed himself into deeper concentration, hoping to be mostly self-hypnotized by the time his beating began.

They used a power dolly to move him inside the big building at the other end of the trip; Jak couldn’t look around, so he had no way of confirming that he was in the palace, just yet, but he tried to make sure he stayed fully as alert as if he were.

“Rab, we brought your guy here. Riveroma’s orders. Here’s a copy in case you tossed the ones you already got.”

“Thanks—I had. Weehu, what a day. One contradictory order after another. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t. All right

hey, how long has he been bound?”

“I don’t know. Riveroma didn’t say—”

Jak felt rather than saw Rab Beversen bending over him and probing—”Weehu, and weehu again. Lots of areas on his skin that are cold as a lizard. I can’t work on that. The pain monitors will read all wrong and there’s a risk of doing way too much tissue damage, bruising him way more than the orders—and these orders are the strictest I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to untie him and let him recover for at least an hour, so he can get his circulation back and his joints can get back to normal. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another!”

Jak felt absurdly grateful—it’s absurd to be so happy at being untied entirely for the purpose of being beaten, and yet to be released from those bonds was still, somehow, the best feeling in the world. He lay on his side, gasping, working his jaw, stretching his legs and arms, trying to control the unbearable tingling on the side of him pressed against the floor. The sensations rushing through his body were overwhelming, and for a long time he concentrated entirely on those, trying to get his motor control and sensation back at least a little before they would realize he had it.

Gradually the sensations of being rubbed with sandpaper, pricked with a thousand cold needles, and dropped into a saltwater bath with a live electrode all diminished to the level of mere discomfort; he could have moved, but he was careful not to, waiting to see what chance he might be able to find in the next few seconds.

The places where Riveroma had kicked and hit him hurt terribly, but none of them was vital, and toktru it was no worse than losing a dozen rough rounds of catch-as-can. He might very well have taken a worse thumping than this at gen school championships a couple of years ago. Though he was having all sorts of doubts about his other training, he was grateful to Uncle Sib for having made sure he trained enough to really dak pain; that was critical right now, the knowledge that things hurt badly, but that he wasn’t hurt badly.

As he was able to return his focus to the room around him, he realized that there were only two people left in it; Rab had switched into his dress uniform “because her princessy-ness is always coming up with more annoying things for us to do, I think she just wants to make sure she doesn’t make any friends here!”

Apparently if you were really a specialist at beating people up, there was a special beatingpeople-up

uniform you had to wear to do it just exactly singingon right, and Rab had already taken his beatingpeople-up uniform off, so while Jak was recovering, a surly private, who was quite sure it was not part of his job description, had to be bullied into going to Beversen’s quarters, getting that specialty uniform, running it through a quick fresh-up, and bringing it back here. “And hurry—I don’t have much time but I have to do this one absolutely singingon right!”

“I’ll be back in four minutes, Sarge, you can place a bet on it that I will. And with it all cleaned and freshened. Really!”

“All right. You’re on. Beer tonight on me if you get it here in four minutes. Ready, go—”

The door closed. Rab Beversen paced around impatiently; after a moment, he grabbed a chair and took off his coat, hanging it neatly over the back. He draped his belt and sidearm across the coat. Then he removed his tunic, which he laid across the seat and smoothed flat. His boots came off next, and he placed them carefully under the chair, presumably so that no one would trip and scuff them.

His trousers were just at his calves when Jak shot from the bed in one smooth motion, driving a shoulder into the sergeant’s buttocks, smashing headfirst into the wall before he could reach forward to catch himself. It didn’t make much of a sound; the wall seemed to be solid stone. Jak slipped the butterfly strangle on him, squeezing the man’s carotid fiercely, and in a moment felt the body go limp. He grasped Rab’s jaw, turning the unconscious body to face him, and slammed the man’s head against the wall as hard as he could, hoping to give him a concussion or perhaps a fractured skull. “After all,” Jak muttered, tugging the pants off the unconscious body, “you’d have done the same for me.” He specked he had no more than two minutes left before the other guard returned—after all, beer was riding on this. Jak had no idea how to lock the doors in this place, so he just finished dressing in Rab’s uniform, noting with mild distress that the sleeves and legs were about a centimeter long, enough for a smart person to notice.