Juggernaut, p.55
Juggernaut, page 55
part #2 of Sten Omnibus Series
“The agents I have on Heath are button counters. Maybe. The clotting nets I have are low-level and, I suspect, doubled by the Tahn. That’s one problem. Your tubby cohort can shake them out, if he’s willing to go back.
“I need someone in place on Heath as my agent. We’ve reached, like the man said, if not the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning. I’m looking for somebody who can be a spy—and who can sit and talk like he’s a diplomat.
“I am not praising you, by the by. You’re at least a century too young and several assignments too gory to be my dream square peg. Mahoney, back when you first met him on Vulcan—don’t jump, I did a little refresher course—would be ideal. But he’s a little long in the tooth and too clottin’ good as a fleet marshal to waste on Heath.
“No offense.
“And I’ve wasted enough time jacking my jaws while you think about it. Decision time.”
Sten had already made it. Not only could he probably do more good on Heath than as a bucko destroyer leader, but there were certain things there he wanted to deal with personally. Such as the prisoners in Koldyeze.
“Thank you, Admiral,” the Emperor said without waiting for a verbalization. “My intelligence types will brief you and set up the insertion plan.”
Sten got up. “I think I’d rather use my own way to get in.”
“Your option. Like I said, the only boss you’ve got this time is me. All orders that you get will be mine. How you carry them out—and even if you do or not—is your option. You’re the man in place. Oh, yeah, before I forget. Mahoney had something that might be of help. He said there was a POW at Koldyeze. I think his name was Sorensen. Is that right?”
Sten nodded, remembering the big, smiling face of the farmbeing. He and Alex had debated for hours whether Sorensen was a Mantis battle computer.
“Fine,” the Emperor said. “Mahoney said to tell you that Sorensen’s code word is ‘Saider.’ Whatever that’s worth.”
If the drakh came down at Koldyeze, it would be worth a lot. Sten smiled to himself, but the Emperor was not through yet.
“One favor?”
Sten waited.
“If you decide to overthrow the clottin’ government, don’t appoint some anthropoid who likes stregg and can’t speak the same language I do. Or if you do, let me know first. ‘Kay?”
Sten found himself saluting a rapidly closing hatchway.
All he had to do was get the detailed briefing, listen to Kilgour tell him why it was a good idea to go back to Heath, and then track down Wild and let him know the time for fence-sitting neutral smugglers was over.
Chapter Thirty-five
VOLMER, PUBLISHING BARON and member of the Emperor’s privy council, was very proud of his complex mind.
He could sit, completely invisible, at the far end of a roaring Barbary hell, one of the rowdiest of the rowdy dock bars in Prime World’s port city of Soward, and do some serious thinking, undisturbed by the noise and unnoticed by the occupants.
On one level, he was contemplating what the evening might provide. Volmer had never heard the expression “polymorphously perverse” and would have been grandly irked if he had heard it applied—after, of course, he had looked up the meaning of “polymorphous.”
But that was one level of Volmer. Rich beyond comprehension and able to pay for safe, clean, comfortable sex of whatever category, he found it more interesting to look for it in the gutter. Volmer found it fully as satisfying to end up jackrolled in a gutter, Murphied, or badgered as it was to wake up next to an incredibly beautiful and insatiable sex object. That was his secret life, which only the top two percent of his reporters knew and laughed about. He had once heard a rumor that the Eternal Emperor did the same—and canned six journalists for being unable to verify it. But regardless, at least once a month Volmer gave his bodyguards and staff two days off and slipped away, in the appropriate disguise, through a hidden exit of his mansion to slink, disguised as “one of the people,” onto the wild side.
He thought that he was able to blend seamlessly into the sexual underworld and that he was accepted as nothing more than a mysterious man. Actually, he had been accepted as a sicko mark. But just recently another rumor had cropped up—a rumor that would be acted upon that very night.
The second layer of Volmer’s mind was pondering the recent meeting on Earth with Sullamora and the others. He had reacted, he thought, perhaps a little too quickly. Possibly Sullamora and the others had considered their future problems more carefully than he had. Maybe he should have been silent, or perhaps expressed more interest—if, he suddenly realized, he had even heard them correctly. What if he had jumped to some incorrect conclusions? Volmer rewarded himself for considering all possibilities, even one that might not be the most ego-gratifying.
That kind of thinking was what had made him as successful and respected a media baron as he was.
He never knew that his staff referred to him as “Old Ademony-Kademony,” a term lost in journalism’s prehistory meaning a waffler who can never make up his mind on anything.
But if he was correct in his understanding, he went on, would he be better off informing the Emperor of his suspicions? Well, not suspicions. Actually there was not that much to report to the Emperor. Suppose he had misunderstood what Sullamora and the others were saying. Would he not appear as a prize ass, some kind of hysteroid, if he did trouble his Emperor with what had gone on?
Perhaps, he concluded, he should do nothing. Perhaps he should reapproach Tanz and let the situation develop.
Yes. That was the way to behave.
Satisfied that once again he had reached the decision to juggle, he turned his primary focus to the pleasures of the evening.
He listened with interest to the handsome young man who appeared at the bar beside him, discussing some dizzying possibilities as to sex partners, not the least of which was the young man himself. Volmer thought that a possibility—but he was more intrigued with what the young man told him about certain most unusual events that were occurring among the staff of a certain hospital, centering on that hospital’s cold room.
The handsome young man was available, indeed. But not as a whore. The young man’s services were available, in fact, at a much higher price, specifically to take care of annoyances.
The rumor that had spread recently about the sicko mark was that he was more than what he appeared. He was, in fact, a deep-cover copper. Why else had some of Soward’s more eminent sex hustlers been arrested, charged, and convicted sans deal in the last month?
The rumor—no one knew where it came from—made perfect sense.
And for that reason it was logical for the underworld bosses, each of whom thought he was much more lethal and in charge than he in fact was, to put out an open contract on the mark. The handsome young man proposed to fill that contract.
Two hours later, as Volmer listened drunkenly and fascinatedly to the young man’s descriptions of necro-pleasures, he was skillfully sandbagged below his left ear, his pockets ransacked, his jewels and half boots stolen; then the unconscious body was tipped over the railing to thud soddenly down four levels to the concrete below.
When the body was discovered and reported two days later, Tanz Sullamora expressed appropriate shock. He announced that he would, out of pocket, have his shipping security patrols widen their assignments beyond the yards themselves. That terrible incident had no doubt occurred because Volmer, a respected hands-on newsperson, was conducting his own investigation of the corruption sapping the war effort.
Sullamora even posted a reward for the apprehension of the lethal muggers who had killed his old and revered friend.
Chapter Thirty-six
THE FOUR TAHN officers glowered at St. Clair. Even in the glitter of their full-dress uniforms they were looming, ominous. Without checking rank tabs, she knew from the cut of their tunics and the gleaming custom willyguns strapped to their waists that they were higher-ups. They almost filled the small anteroom with their presence, and St. Clair had to wrestle with the urge to bolt. Their faces were set in the automatic brutish threat mode that high Tahn officials wore to get their way.
Instead of running, St. Clair greeted them with her priciest smile.
“Gentlebeings,” she said. “Check your guns and credit at the door.” And with that, she waved them into the main lounge of the K’ton Klub, the most exclusive and successful gambling hell in the Chaboya District of Heath.
And it’s mine, all mine, St. Clair gloated as she watched the smooth, muscular hunk she had hired as her head host go into his little bowing and scraping act that eliminated all the sting from what the Tahn officers would have to go through to enter her members-only club. In a matter of seconds their rank would be verified, ability to pay checked, and weapons and cloaks tagged and locked away. Then they would be putting their fingerprints to a membership contract that would put the K’ton Klub first in line of debtors if there was any hint of financial difficulties. All that was accomplished with smiles and jokes guaranteed to crack even the thick varnish of gloom that the Tahn seemed to prefer in public.
Moments later, the door leading to the ground-floor casino hushed open and the four laughing Tahn officers were plunging into the boisterous throng of marks anxious to eat, drink, and gamble their souls away to St. Clair, because the next day they might find themselves volunteered as targets for an Imperial cruiser.
There was a tinkling of old-fashioned mechanical bells, announcing more customers. St. Clair motioned for her host to take over. From that time of night on, the customers would mostly consist of regulars that St. Clair would not have to sus out.
St. Clair followed the Tahn into the casino. It was time to check out the action. Not that she had to go too far to check—the joint was jumping. By the time the night was over, St. Clair figured, she would have another record take in the till.
The K’ton Klub was one of many multistoried casinos that made up the Chaboya District’s gambling strip. But there were two, no, three, big differences between her club and the others: (1) The percentages were honest. (2) The percentages were honest. (3) The percentages were honest. From long experience, St. Clair knew that the rake-in from the house’s built-in edge was more than enough profit for any fool. Every time her competitors skinned a mark, they lost that same mark permanently to St. Clair.
It was dishonesty in fact that had brought the K’ton Klub into her hands. The previous owner, like most of the other casino operators in the district, had been unable to swim against the new economic tide created by the war. As shortages tightened the supply and power screws, the casinos, instead of finding new ways to keep the customers happy, racked up the gambling machines’ percentages until it was nearly impossible to win, then pulled in their heads, cutting back hours until many of them finally just shut their doors and walked away.
If St. Clair had been looking at the situation purely from a business point of view, instead of trying to find a nice comfortable way of hiding out in plain view until she and L’n were rescued, she still would have sized up the situation the same.
War brought shortages, true. But looked at another way, the shortages meant that the price of things simply went up. More importantly, the sin business always boomed during war. That was an economic curve on a chart that St. Clair had memorized before she had any curves of her own.
St. Clair had plucked the club off the tree within weeks after she and L’n had made their escape.
They had spent very little time in the actual escape itself. St. Clair had abandoned her plan to be a rich-bitch tuber hunter as soon as she had decided that L’n’s only chance of survival was as her escape partner. She would have to trust to luck and play the situation by ear. There was no forged ID card that might fit the number of situations St. Clair and L’n might meet—So she did not carry any.
Bluff would be her calling card.
As soon as they had exited the tunnel, she headed for the nearest gravtrain station. Acting imperious as all hell, she had browbeaten the ticket clerk into selling her an unauthorized first-class seat on a train heading directly into the center of town.
“Travel permit? Ration card? My good man, I explained to you that I lost them, didn’t I? I suppose you expect me to grovel in my carelessness, now, don’t you? Very well, then. If that gives you satisfaction, I am now groveling! See me grovel?” She put her hands together as if in prayer and gave him a slight bow. “There! I hope that makes you happy! Now sell me the damned tickets!”
Her nongroveling grovel act scared the holy bejesus out of the clerk. From her clothes, she was obviously richer than hell. Either that or joygirl to a Tahn officer whose rank he did not even want to guess at. He sold her the tickets, not even asking why she needed two of them. He supposed it had something to do with the strange pink little furry creature accompanying her. Maybe rich types always bought seats for their pets.
St. Clair and L’n were just taking deep, shuddering breaths of relief as the gravtrain’s generators wound up to a high keen, when they heard the station speakers crackle into life. There was a series of sharp, barked orders. The keen died down to a low hum. Then they heard heavy footsteps. St. Clair swore she would not look up as she heard someone in obvious authority grilling the passenger just in front of her. She felt L’n quiver in fear. Absently she ran her fingers through L’n’s smooth fur, trying to calm her, but it was hopeless.
Authority Figure shouted. Passenger wailed. L’n choked back a low moan. And St. Clair found herself looking up against her will—straight into the eyes of a black-uniformed Tahn thug.
She would never forget those eyes. They were the color of a bottom-feeding fish. They took her in. Then L’n. Then her again. Fish Eyes dropped the papers into the passenger’s lap and walked straight back toward her. St. Clair forced out what she hoped was an in-character haughty smile. She prepared to reach into her jumper suit pockets and fumble for nonexistent papers.
The man stopped in front of her. He leaned forward. Then, surprise of all surprises, he grinned, exposing a horrible row of black and yellow stumps.
“Chook-um, chook-um,” he said. “Chook-um, chook-um.” And he began stroking and tickling L’n!
“I say! What a great pet! What is it? Some kind of cat? I love cats! The wife and I must own thirty or forty of the little buggers. Ha! I should say they own us.”
And all the while he kept stroking and tickling L’n. St. Clair burbled something between a laugh and a sob, thinking all the while, Purr, clot, you purr, to L’n.
“Yes,” she said. “A cat. A type of one, anyway. Very rare breed…”
At that moment L’n started purring, saving her life and St. Clair’s in what was probably the only actual case of interspecies telepathy ever to occur in the Empire’s history.
And once she started purring, she never stopped. She purred through the entire conversation. St. Clair lied. Fish Eyes bought. And a little while later, he waved her down when she tried to look for the papers that were not there and exited a happy Tahn with a great story to tell his nice Tahn wife.
“You can stop purring now,” St. Clair finally whispered to L’n.
“Not on your life,” L’n whispered back. “The kid plans to keep purring for at least the next fifty-sixty years. And you will, too, if you know what’s good for you.”
And St. Clair realized that L’n did not understand that she had been mistaken for a pet. Oh, well. She would wait awhile before she let her furry friend in on it. But, oh, God, was there going to be an explosion when she found out.
Later, after St. Clair had explained and then scraped her friend off the ceiling of the compartment, she just had to ask it. “Did you know how to purr before?”
“No,” L’n had said. “I’ve never even heard of a cat, either!”
“Then how…”
L’n gave a shrug of a furry pink shoulder. “I don’t know. I just reached down inside and… purred, dammit! Now, will you shut up about it, before I show you what I can do with teeth?”
It was the turning point in the life of the once-shy being called L’n. And there would be no going back.
As soon as they reached the center of the city, St. Clair instinctively gravitated toward Chaboya. In any area where sin was largely ignored and corruption was waist deep, cops tended to blank out most of the evildoers and their victims. The crackdowns usually came against well-known types who had not coughed up enough to stay in business. Credits changed hands, and then it was back to business as usual.
St. Clair found a dive for them to hole up in and then hit the streets. For the first day or two she fooled around with a few penny-ante shell games just to get warmed up and increase her stash of credits. Then she hit the casinos. Unnoticed, she filtered through them one by one, dropping a little here, picking up a little there, always keeping a low profile. She found what she was looking for at the K’ton Klub. From the thin crowds and the peeling plas walls, she knew it was close to folding. She played small-time dice machines for a while, watching the crowds.
She identified the owner right off. He was an older, handsome man who tended to dress a bit too flashily. She noticed that he spent little time on the floor, appearing only when another obviously high-stakes flash gambler occasionally showed up.
He would personally greet him, then they would disappear upstairs to what St. Clair just knew was a big-time game. It was time to strike. She invested a healthy chunk of her stake for the flashiest, sexiest outfit she could find, then reentered the club, looking for all the world like a bored professional anxious to find some action.
The owner spotted her right off. A little flirting followed, and teasing remarks were exchanged. Mild sexual innuendo was used on each side to check out the gambler in the other. An invitation was offered.
A little later she found herself being ushered into the owner’s office. As soon as she entered the room, she knew she was home. In the center of the table was the pot. And it did not consist of the funny money the Tahn laughingly called credits. Instead, there were rare gems and exotic heavy mineral baubles. And there were also stacks of parchment-like papers that could only be Imperial bonds and real estate deeds.
