The Emperor of Everything

One lived long enough to get off a poorly aimed burst. A stream of hypersonic particles scythed through two of Remint’s flankers, whose upper bodies dissolved into flying tatters of armor and bone. Only their legs remained whole, geysering blood, held upright by the frozen servos in their armor.

When the gun fired, Ruiz felt his heart stutter for a moment, as though crushed by the pressure of his anxiety for Nisa. But she and the others were in a tight cluster in the center of the raider’s formation, and the burst missed them by a considerable margin.

One of the raiders held a neural whip, which he flicked at the prisoner’s heels whenever they slowed. Now he touched Nisa with it, and she stumbled, and looked up at the hidden camera, eyes full of shock and pain.

Ruiz froze the image and zoomed it in, until her face filled the screen. His gaze lingered on the clean planes of her cheekbones, the luminous dark eyes, the rich sweet mouth. Even in this extremity of fright and bewilderment, her features projected an admirable strength. Ruiz thought he could almost see the shape of her thoughts. She was thinking about escape, or — if that was impossible — about survival. Then, in a rush of sad realization, Ruiz knew that she was also thinking: Where is Ruiz Aw?

He touched the screen and the playback resumed. He watched with a frozen adamant concentration, as the raiders swept through the halls and out onto the quay, where a battered, heavily armed gunboat waited.

The raiders, herding their prisoners, boarded the gunboat. It sped away, powerful engines thundering, throwing up a high roostertail. Hot light lanced from its weapons, destroying the other craft in the lagoon, presumably to prevent pursuit.

The camera’s viewpoint flickered and then resumed, following the raiders’ craft as it snaked through the twisting waterways.

After a few moments, a weapons pod on the boat’s armored transom twinkled orange fire, and the screen went white. A tagline at the bottom read: TRACKING DEVICE DESTROYED.

Ruiz frowned. He wished he were not so afraid of the slayer Remint; that fear would undermine his effectiveness.

Something cold and hard whispered in the back of his mind — words he shut out at first, not wanting to hear them. The whisper grew louder, until he could no longer ignore it. Leave her; she’s probably already dead, it said. He’ll destroy you; can there be any doubt of this?

“Probably not,” he muttered. But behind his eyes Nisa’s face floated, as he had seen it in the playback: beautiful, tender, true. He couldn’t abandon her, no matter how sensible that course might be. She had taken firm root in his heart; if circumstances tore her away from him, he didn’t think there would be enough left of his heart to keep beating.

He forced his attention back to the matter at hand, and went through the rest of Diamond Bob’s material.

When he was finished, he was no less afraid of Remint y’Yubere, but he knew where to start looking for him.

Albany sat in the copilot’s chair as Ruiz guided the sub into one of the subsurface openings that led to the lagoon at the heart of the stack.

“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Albany was still pale and tense.

“No,” Ruiz said, as cheerfully as possible. “But at one time the man spent much of his time and money in the Celadon Wind; maybe I can cut his trail there.”

“What makes you think you’ll do any better than the lords? They’ve got good snoops, and snooping’s not your specialty.” Albany seemed dubious.

Ruiz shrugged. He had explained a bit about their quarry, leaving out the most frightening details. “We’re two of a kind,” he said. “I understand him better than the pirate snoops.”

“Seems thin,” said Albany dubiously.

It seemed thin to Ruiz too, but what else could he do?

The lagoon was a vast black emptiness beneath a high dome of slagged metal, a hollowed-out space a kilometer across.

Ruiz stood on the deck grating of the sub and looked up. Phosphorescent worms slithered across the dome, forming sinuous patterns of cold color; apparently an ancient work of bio-art gone feral.

Across the still water were scattered the riding lights of other vessels. Ruiz couldn’t see them well enough to tell if Publius’s gunboat was among them. He assumed that the gunboat Remint had used in the raid wasn’t here; surely the pirates would have found it, had Remint been so foolish as to come here.

They had picked up an automated mooring buoy. On securing their line, it had summoned one of the robotic bum-boats that waited at the quay that circled the lagoon.