#

  Governor Droad wasn’t pleased with what he learned from the files he had purchased from the Captain of the Gladius. Nexus Cluster Command’s worst fears concerning the progress of Garm toward corruption and decay had apparently been surpassed since he had left Neu Schweitz three years before. Graft, smuggling and factionalism amongst the ruling elite had the colony teetering close to anarchy.

  Equally disturbing, the previous governor had lasted only a few weeks into his term before experiencing a deadly accident over the red hork jungles in New Amazonia. The new governor was of the worst sort. Hans Zimmerman was a self-serving inbred crony of the ruling families. Spineless and unconcerned, he apparently left the job of rulership completely up to the aristocratic Senate, coming out of his permanent vacation only long enough to perform the most perfunctory duties of state.

  As he climbed out of the cab, Lucas Droad saw the car coming up the drive out of the corner of his eye. The car was coming a bit too fast, but he wasn’t really ready for an attack yet, so he didn’t respond. He paid the driver and mounted the steps into the hotel lobby. The car pulled up behind the cab and the doors slammed shut behind the three men who piled out. Droad looked back and noticed that the car had the windows dimmed even though the sky was entirely overcast. Then he saw the shape of a sleek black weapon and threw himself at the glass hotel doors.

  Tossing the confused bellhop out of his way, he plowed into the lobby, drawing a slim-barreled pulse-laser. Bullets shattered the glass behind him and the bellhop was cut down, blood welling up from a dozen holes in his blue vest and staining his silver epaulets. Surprised to find himself still breathing, Droad sprinted into the marble-walled lobby.

  Tapio Kuosa, one of his giant bodyguards, sat in the lobby reading a newsfax and sipping hot caf. He looked up as Governor Droad came running in. With one moment of eye contact the giant was up and drawing his weapon, but it was already too late. The Manchurian janitor behind him fired thirty rounds into the back of his huge head. The Mendelian giant toppled forward. His body destroyed a rich horkwood table while the red ruin of his head crashed between two shouting guests on a silk divan.

  Another assassin came out of the restroom with his weapon raised. Droad dove over the front desk, flattening a clerk. The clerk’s hairpiece skittered across the floor. Bullets streamed over the desk and a woman screamed.

  From outside there was a heavy crump of a high-powered weapon. The car the assassins had come in exploded into melting fragments. Droad darted up over the counter and burnt away the throat of the man who had come out of the restroom while he hesitated, looking at the burning get-away car.

  Then a big Anglo man pushed through the glass doors, holding a hand-cannon in each of his beefy fists. Droad threw himself to one side behind the desk, taking a spray of plastic splinters in the face and arms as the hand-cannons barked in unison.

  The assassin approached the desk, blasting head-sized holes in it as he came. Then the glass doors behind him simply disintegrated. His hand-cannons barked once more before he was seared by a direct hit of plasma from behind. As soon as the echoes of the plasma blast had died down, the sounds of the street outside could be heard through the opening. Charging into the breach came Jarmo Niska carrying a recoilless plasma rifle big enough to mount on an armored personal carrier. Two more black and silver dressed giants backed him up. More giants sprinted from the elevators and gunned down the last of the assassins in the hotel.

  The remainder of the governor’s bodyguards thundered down the stairs and into the smoke-filled lobby. Jarmo made a quick inspection, then whistled and gave a quick hand-signal. Droad still crouched behind the front desk with his pistol in his hands while the terrified clerk eyed him with dread.

  “Do you think they’ve gone?” asked the clerk.

  “Only until the next time,” said Droad, giving the man a grim smile. He tried to get up and found that his leg had been injured.

  “Are you hurt, sir?” asked the huge, moon-like face of Jarmo Niska as he loomed over the desk.

  “Yes, my leg caught a few splinters, I think. Pull me up, will you?” While the hotel clerk gaped, Jarmo bent over the desk and gently lifted Lucas Droad into the air.

  “I think that our location and identities have been compromised, sir,” said Jarmo stiffly. His yellow-blond brow furrowed deeply as he examined Droad’s injuries.

  “Obviously. So much for posing as a bank inspector, eh? Could you hand me a med-kit?” asked Droad, tearing apart his left pantsleg and exposing a bleeding wound. He sighed, they had no time to pick out the red horkwood splinters and buckshot now. He simply sprayed on a double layer of pink nu-skin and tossed the empty canister. Meanwhile, Jarmo marshaled his team and placed them about the lobby in a defensive arrangement. Sirens sounded out on Black Beak Avenue as police cars and an ambulance rushed toward the hotel.

  “What’s our situation?” he asked Jarmo.

  “One of our men dead, plus seven civilians. We put down all of the assassins. We’re running an ID check on them with the police computers now. Several more of the civilians were badly injured. I took the liberty of calling the emergency services on my phone.”

  “You did excellently, Jarmo, as usual. Once again, I owe you my life. I hope we all live long enough for me to repay the debt,” said Droad, struggling to stand. The anesthetic in the nu-skin was taking hold, easing the pain and stiffness temporarily. He looked over toward the fallen giant, his ruined head still face down on the silk divan. “That’s Tapio Kuosa, isn’t it? Damn.”

  “Yes sir, a good man,” replied Jarmo. His eyes never stopped roaming over the lobby and the street outside. His phone beeped and he touched the device embedded in his huge ear. After listening for a few seconds, his expression changed to one of alarm. He shouted curt orders to his men who jumped to obey. Outside, the police vehicles and the ambulance had pulled up. The police were forming up behind their cars, readying their weapons.

  “Sir!” boomed Jarmo, his voice deafening at close quarters. “The Caucasian was a police sergeant, off-duty!”

  Droad’s head jerked up at this, looking out the blown out doors toward the gathering police forces. He nodded. “So that’s how it’s going to be.” He turned back to Jarmo. “Emergency exit. Let’s move it.”

  Without bothering to acknowledge the command, Jarmo shouted again to his men. They withdrew instantly from their posts, retreating from the policemen outside. Droad hobbled painfully after them into the corridor, and then suddenly he was swept up in a pair of massive arms. He was carried off at a sprinter’s pace into the hotel. Feeling slightly embarrassed, he looked up into the blue eyes of Jun, a man with a nose the size of Droad’s fist. All around him the other Finns clustered, ducking down as they ran so as not to ram their heads into the ornate overhead lighting fixtures. Behind them, the police cautiously approached the smoldering hotel lobby.

  “Everyone in the hotel is under arrest,” said a sergeant with a bullhorn from the safety of his vehicle. “Lay down your weapons and come out.”

  They ignored the corrupt police and carried Droad swiftly to a location they had scouted out immediately after checking into the hotel. Jun turned to shield the Governor with his body as two other giants unlimbered their plasma rifles and simultaneously fired at the back wall of the hotel. Masonry vaporized and fragmented, blasting a hole out into the open air. Moving as a smooth team, the men rushed through the breach and climbed into the rented hover-limos that waited in the parking lot beside a row of trash consumers.

  “We have a safe hiding spot nearby, sir,” Jarmo said as they climbed into the car. “We’ve lost our pursuers for now, but we should take cover until things cool down.”

  “Right, we’ll duck low for tonight,” Droad sat on the floor of the limo, surrounded by the huge hunched-over forms of his bodyguards.

  “And tomorrow?”

  “We’ll head back to the spaceport,” said Droad grimly. He noted Jarmo’s upraised eyebrows. “They aren’t going to let us just walk in and take their power from them, that much is clear, but I’m not going to just hide, either. Grunstein Interplanetary is owned by the Cluster Nexus itself. We’ll make our stand there.”

  Jarmo dipped his head slightly: a nod. He gave a small shrug and then went back to the business of keeping the Governor alive.

  Four

  “Imbecile!” hissed Mai Lee into the video unit. The luxurious hanging tapestries of the Planetary Senate Chambers lined the walls behind her. She was wearing the blue velvet robes of her office, and held a portable video unit in the palm of her hand. Her tense, harsh face was a wild network of lines that no surgery could completely erase. “Everyone is outraged! How could you fail at so simple a task?”

  Ari Steinbach made a wry face, raising his eyebrows until they disappeared beneath his hanging blonde bangs. Out of sight of the video pick-up, he silently drummed his horkwood desk with his fingers.

  “My operatives—”

  “Your operatives are cheap, ineffective thugs,” she said from between her clenched teeth, trying to keep other nearby Senators from hearing. She poked her pen-shaped note-recorder at the video pick-up so that it seemed to lunge out of the screen at his end. “All you did was put him on his guard and get the damned Senate stirred up with headlines. The media is playing shots of the wrecked lobby and the bodies at every commercial break! The crazy Zimmermans have mobilized their estate armies in Grunstein and Slipape County.”

  Ari nodded his head gloomily. After the failed assassination attempt, he had spent all night at militia headquarters, trying to cover his involvement and fend off the newsmen. Sergeant Borshe’s bloody corpse had done nothing to help matters, as his close relationship with Ari was known to the media. After a night of being run ragged by hungry newshounds, he had spent the day trying to calm the excitable aristocracy of the colony. All day reports of the powerful elite families pulling together their ‘security forces’, some of which had air assault and light grav-armor units, had flooded his desk.

  He sighed and glanced out his window briefly, eyeing the heavy cobalt waves of the polar sea. So near to the pole the days were only four hours long during the winter and darkness was closing in fast. The skies were dark and pregnant; it looked as if they were in for a storm tonight. It might even snow if it lasted until morning.

  “General!” she snapped, rapping her note-recorder on the audio pick-up so that a loud clacking noise sounded at the other end. Ari jumped and grimaced.

  “Sorry, your Excellency,” said Ari distractedly. He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then rubbed his eyes and sipped his hot caf. “I’ve been here all night trying to clean up this mess. I might point out that you suggested this course of action.”

  “And I might point out that you are on the edge of losing your lucrative office, General,” said Mai Lee with a flash of her merciless eyes. They were the eyes of a reptile, cold and devoid of compassion. “Listen, you just find where Droad is hiding this time. You just find him and call me. I will have my personal assets take care of matters after that.”

  Ari heard his own involuntary sharp intake of breath. The old battleaxe was talking about committing her personal guard. Known as the Reavers, they were also giants, monstrous Korean men that normally guarded her hilltop palace in the Counties. Ari had seen them often on her estate, and he feared them. With under-sized heads, long gorilla-like arms and incredibly wide barrel chests they seemed only marginally human. As a group, they were mysterious, legendary for their cruelty and brutal professionalism. He was surprised that she would allow them to stray from her stronghold. It was obvious that Mai Lee was under terrific pressure from the Zimmermans and probably the Manchurians in the Senate as well.

  “Recall that you are my creature, General. You can be destroyed as easily as you were created.”

  Ari narrowed his eyes, feeling deep hate surging through him for this evil wraith-like woman. “Recall, Senator, that we’re in this together, and that you need me. In fact, I seem to be one of the few friends you have at the moment.”

  Mai Lee seemed overcome with fury and Ari worried that he had overstepped himself. Her face was a rictus of hard-lined hatred. Then her eyes seemed to bulge less. Her face softened and sagged back into its normal shape.

  “So,” she said, her voice becoming soft and silky, the way it must have been centuries before in the flower of her youth and beauty. “The puppet has teeth.”

  The screen went blank, and Ari was left with a feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Unlike Zimmerman, he had no powerful family of his own to turn to in times of need. The Steinbachs owned a successful software publishing company in town, but they controlled no land or vast amounts of capital.

  He decided it was time to put into action his emergency plans for the worst. Things were going poorly, he needed to move quickly before events took an even darker course.

  Ari rose and drew an anti-snooper device from his desk. He turned the jammer on and set his windows to a metallic opaque setting. After securing the inside lock on his office door, he dragged a heavy pseudo-marble reproduction of a skald sculpture to one side. Using a knife from his desk, he cut a squarish hole in the thick carpet. Underneath was revealed a locked safe. He proceeded to disarm six security systems and type in the lock’s ten-digit hexadecimal code. The safe opened and he withdrew a satchel, identical to the one he used at the office. Switching the two satchels, he resealed the safe and reset the devices. Working with nervous speed, he replaced the carpet and the sculpture, eyeing it from many angles to make sure that the placement was identical. Satisfied, he rubbed his hands together as he donned his thick fur-lined coat and left the office.

  Striding briskly, but not quite trotting, he took the elevator to the underground garage and climbed into his waiting limo. He directed the driver to head for the cross-colony autobahn, rather than toward his home in the hills overlooking the old colony domes. He settled into the backseat, holding his satchel on his lap like a sleeping child.

  It was dark outside now and the wind was a growing, low-pitched howl. The first heavy raindrops splattered the limo’s windows as it reached the gates of the spaceport.

  #

  When Mai Lee returned to the main conference chambers located on the floor directly below the Senate floor, most of the faces that meant anything in the power structure of Garm were waiting there for her. They were like a panicked herd of jaxes, she thought. Then she amended the thought, seeing the dangerous look in many of their eyes. No, they were more like a panicked lynch-mob, and they smelled their witch.

  Most knew that something big had hit, many of them knew that the new governor had arrived, and a few even knew that the militia had made a stab at assassination and cut their own fingers. What everyone knew was that it was all Mai Lee’s fault.

  “You told us you had planned for this eventuality,” said the formidable figure of Johan Zimmerman, gripping his robes at his chest and giving her a look of utter contempt.

  “You said they wouldn’t come for years yet,” whined a thin-faced Senator from New Manchuria with six-inch long rat-tail mustaches. He dropped his eyes as her glare swept over him.

  “The Cluster Nexus will drop troops when they hear of it!” shouted the Thane of the Slipape Territories, the bright florescent lights reflecting from his shiny bald scalp. He was one of the few individuals in the group who truly owed no fealty to either the Zimmermans or the Manchurians. He valued nothing more than his political independence, and thus had only enough power to prove annoying to the others. “You crazy southern bastards have tried to kill the legitimate governor twice in a row and this time you missed!”

  “Shut your hole, you old fool!” shouted back Mertrude Evans, a staunch supporter of the powerful Zimmermans. Mertrude was an immensely fat woman with protruding eyes. She was at least as colorful in personality as was the Thane himself. She was an environmentalist, he an exploiter, both were fanatical in their cause. Their long-standing mutual hatred was well known and generally tiresome for the others.

  Johan Zimmerman raised his hands overhead in a dramatic gesture for calm. Due to his political clout, he soon got it. With a sweeping motion of his arms, he gestured toward Mai Lee, who still stood in the entryway, reviewing them all coldly. “Let’s hear what the Lady has to say.”

  Acknowledging her greatest competitor with a curt nod, Mai Lee addressed the assembly. “Senators, we are all on the same side. Let’s not forget where our profits come from, regardless of our political differences concerning the management of our planet. Nexus influence constitutes the removal of power from this body, and is to be avoided at all costs. On this I hope we all agree.”

  There were several heads nodding and a general murmur of agreement rose from the Senators. The Thane, however, saw fit to interrupt her. “Of course we all want the Nexus to keep their noses away from our arse. That’s not the point, woman!”

  “What is the point, you old goat?” demanded Mertrude, unable to restrain herself, so great was her dislike for the Thane. Johan Zimmerman quieted her with a blunt stare of disapproval.

  “The point is,” boomed the Thane, ignoring Mertrude. “That you could do all this in a much more subtle fashion, rather than trying to kill the man and his retinue on his first day planetside! A hand-cannon to the head, that’s all you Manchurians understand, isn’t it? Your political objectives for personal power have caused you to put us all in jeopardy. I vote that we remove you as our protectorate and find a new man to run the militia. Ari Steinbach is a coward and a cretin!”

  For a moment, Mai Lee marveled at the man’s bravery. Perhaps he was unaware of the danger he was placing himself in. As an unaligned member of the Senate, he had no faction sworn to avenge any sudden accidents that might befall him. Indeed, the stunned silence and furtive glances that followed his speech seemed to unnerve him just a bit. He looked flustered for a moment, then raised up his eyes and locked them with Mai Lee’s.