The Pillars of Eternity

The other end of the beam showed him Mace. At first he wondered why the ship had roused him just to show him one more of her erotic episodes. It was a good part of a minute before he realized that this time something else was happening.

Mace was bound to a chair by clasps. Nearby two men sat, wearing the loose flowing garments associated with the high-ranking and leisured classes. It was the apparel that had confused Boaz at first. The men did not look like policemen.

One leaned toward Mace, listening intently. And Mace was talking. It was evident she was drugged. Drugs that could get a person eagerly to tell all, on any subject, without inhibition or hint of falsehood, were legion.

‘What’s the range?’ he asked. The answer was what he expected: just over seven miles. ‘Show me where.’

The ship fed a route map to his brain, storing it in his adplant. Boaz wasted no time in getting ready. He pulled on his modsuit, and went to the storeroom. He selected a hand gun and a cutting beamer, both of which he tucked into two of the many recesses of the suit.

He went to a cupboard, opened a flask, and drank a long draught of glucose-rich nutrient syrup.

‘Get up onto the ground,’ he ordered the ship, ‘and be ready to take off when I return.’

The ship robots were busying themselves when he left. He made his way to the travel agency just outside the ship ground, and dialled a small ten-booth agency whose number he had to get from the directory after consulting the map in his mind.

He emerged on a nearly deserted walkway. At his back, the blank wall of a building seemed to extend forever. Before him, on the other side of the walkway, a tangled vista of rectilinear shafts gave the usual view of the three-dimensional urban jungle that was Kathundra, interspersed with lamp-suns that relieved the gloom of the lower city and created a glowing haze.

He paused with eyes closed, waiting for the wave of sickness that ran through his body to fade. Then he turned left and walked along the wall until coming to the entrance he knew would be there.

The huge blank-walled building was multifunctional. In it were several thousand dwellings, businesses, workshops, private clubs, dens and enterprises of all sorts, slotted into a mazelike inner structure. What they all had in common was a measure of secrecy. The building had no internal addresses, and all its force-transport numbers were unlisted. The only way to find any of the apartments was to be given a travel number or already to know the way there. For such privacy, the rentees paid highly.

But it was no protection against Joachim Boaz. He moved into the lobby, which was a long tunnel, square in cross-section, the wells roughened and grey and punctuated with elevator gates and the openings of flow-corridors. A tomblike quiet prevailed. The air was dead and oppressive.

Along the flowing floors of silent corridors, down in silently running elevators, Boaz came to a grey, numberless door. He took out the cutting beamer and began to trace out a rough square around the lock.

The tool’s nearly invisible radiation blade, carrying very little heat but maximum penetrating power, sliced into the metal. The main difficulty with a cutting beam was that the shear line was so thin that metals tended to bond themselves back together after the beam had passed. To prevent this Boaz placed a sucker pad against the section and jiggled it slightly until, the cutting complete, it came away altogether.

He knew that an alarm would go off as the door opened. Beyond it was an empty room. He crossed it at a run, and almost without losing momentum smashed into a second door with a booted foot and a fist.

The plastic panel shattered under the impact of his ship-enhanced strength. Kicking his way through the fragments, he emerged into the second room, putting away the cutting beam and taking out his hand gun.

During his long years of dependence on his ship Boaz had become used to foreknowledge. He already knew what he would find in the room. The interrogation was over. Mace, still held by clasps, lolled in the chair. The two robed men, who moments before had been sitting pensively, had risen at the sound of the alarm and now stared at Boaz with a lack of reaction that was curious until one realized that, after all, there was little they could do about what was happening. Boaz blocked the only exit. Neither man was armed. Usually, people in the addressless building saw little need for protection other than simply being there.

The taller of the two was a man with blue eyes that were clear and direct. With raised eyebrows, he coolly appraised the intruder.

‘Captain Joachim Boaz, I presume?’ he said after a moment’s hesitation.

‘How do you know me?’ Boaz asked gruffly.

‘You look the part, Captain. I admit, I had not anticipated that you would turn up here. You are even more resourceful than I had thought.’