“The problem will be taken care of.” Mentally, she marked the Thane for a dead man, when she could find the time to dispose of him properly.

  “When?” asked Johan Zimmerman.

  “When I see fit,” she said, baring her ancient teeth just a fraction. Spinning around in a whirl of blue fabric, she left the chambers and mounted the steps to the flitter pad. She boarded her private flitter and directed the pilot to her home estate, which sprawled over thousands of square miles, half in New Manchuria and half in the aristocratic Slipape Counties. On the way she cursed the governor, cursed the Thane, and cursed Ari Steinbach.

  #

  Mai Lee had returned to her estate to meditate after the debacle in the Senate Chambers. She levitated near the ceiling, while a panorama of Old Earth played on the holo-plate.

  The communications module disguised as an arrangement of orchids chimed three times before she responded. “What is it? I am highly stressed this evening.”

  “There has been a crime in the estate village, Empress,” said a soft voice. “The people require your judgment.”

  “Ah,” said Mai Lee, rising into a sitting position. “Just the thing I need to relax.”

  The holo-plate images of Old Earth evaporated to be replaced by the wooded hills around her estate. The speaker hidden in the flowers narrated. “This very day a serious crime was committed by the second son of a power-cart driver. Instead of delivering his jaxes to the tax collectors at the gates of the marketplace for proper accounting, he drove his load of livestock off the road and into the forests.”

  Following along with the narration, the holo-plate played a computer simulation of the crime. The jaxes shrilled and stamped as the cart bumped through the trees.

  “There he staged a crude robbery, in which the power-cart was rammed into a tree and emptied of its valuable cargo. After killing the jaxes and stashing them for later illegal sale, he tore his own clothes in a conspicuous manner and rolled through a muddy thicket to appear as if he had been beaten. Staggering back to the village, he was horrified to find his story was not believed.”

  “How was the crime discovered?” asked Mai Lee. Her shoulders were relaxed and she even sported a grim smile. Passing judgment on criminals always agreed with her.

  “The village’s chief enforcer deserves considerable credit for discovering the critical flaw in the man’s story: he still retained the code-card for operating the power-cart, which although damaged, could have been driven away. Allowing the man to retain the code-card seemed an unlikely oversight on the part of these otherwise intelligent and ruthless thieves. Launching a full investigation, the enforcer soon learned the truth. Due to the flagrant nature of the crime, we recommend no leniency under estate law.”

  “Of course not,” snapped Mai Lee. “The man attempted to steal from me.”

  “What punishment shall be delivered, Empress?”

  Mai Lee sat back and floated for a minute or so, entertaining various ideas. “Have him drawn and quartered in the town square,” she said finally. “That always makes a good show. I need a good show right now.”

  “It shall be done,” said the orchids, then fell silent.

  Mai Lee meditated while the punishment was prepared. When it finally came, she was all but quivering in anticipation. Depicted in stark 3D perfection she watched as the four hydro-powered engines chugged into life in the town square.

  Soon the cables running to the man’s limbs drew tight and lifted his body from the ground. The engines, normally used to generate power for the village, coughed steam and revved up the scale. They were placed into their lowest gears and the throttles were opened. As a tug-of-war, the contest between man and machine was uneven. With a horrible ripping noise, first one arm gave, then the other. The two remaining contestant engines dragged their victim across the compound. Each held one leg and rapidly took up the slack in the cable. He flopped about in a frenzy of motion. This quickly subsided into a feeble quivering as the cables again went taunt and the left leg gave out with a distinct popping sound. The engines were stopped and the enforcer directed the tearful family members to clean up the mess.

  The Great Lady herself watched the entire enterprise on live holo. It seemed to be over with too soon. She sighed as the man expired. She needed more intense relief from the stresses represented by Lucas Droad and the bumbling General Steinbach. She needed relaxation, a diversion, and a release of tension. The execution had not quenched her thirst for sensation. She tapped her nails on the control console thoughtfully, watching as the dismembered corpse was dragged away leaving a pink trail in the sand. Her penciled-on eyebrows jerked up, and would have risen above her hairline had she not gone completely bald over a century ago. She smiled for the first time in a week as she thought of her battlesuit hidden beneath the castle. This scandal in the village might be just the thing for a little sport. She would have to clip all her nails down to the quick in order to drive the suit again, but it would be worth it. She believed, as her father had before her, that peasants were best dealt with in a heavy-handed fashion. Occasionally, a reminder of their status was in order.

  #

  Long after darkness had fallen over the village that huddled beneath the castle walls and the cookfires had died down for the night, a team of four barrel-chested brutes from the palace guard stalked through the narrow mud-splattered alleys. The gorilla-like men were unarmed, but as they weighed over three hundred pounds each and were exquisitely combat-trained, they needed no weapons. At the house of the criminal family, almost everyone slept except for a young boy that couldn’t so easily forget his big brother. He lay huddled at the foot of the family shrine, breathing the last of the incense.

  Because he was still awake, he caught sight of the men outside the hut and tried to climb out a window, shrieking in alarm. He surprised one of the small-brained brutes that struck him with a bit too much force, snapping the thin neck and killing him instantly. The boy’s body was tossed back through the window, landing on a mat with his three sisters. Then the giants forced the doors and immediately the beatings began in earnest.

  Mai Lee drove her battlesuit out from under the castle and up into the courtyard via a secret tunnel that slanted down into the deeps. The tunnel opened at the base of the fountain that dominated the mosaic gardens in front of the main keep. Anyone who might have witnessed her appearance would have seen a black monster in the shape of an ancient, terrestrial allosaurus materialize in the gardens. Standing over seven feet high and weighing several tons, the collapsium-armored battlesuit indeed resembled a reptile. It had huge rear legs, stubby gun barrels that thrust from the chest like foreclaws and a computer-controlled rear tail that moved incessantly to balance the machine. With a heavy stride that crushed vegetation and cracked flagstones, she set off down the hill toward the village.

  The battlesuit had been custom-made for her on the distant Nexus, back before such things had been rigorously recorded. She had ordered it partly for protection against assassination and partly for sport. The proud technicians that had brought it with them over so many light-years had trained her in its use and helped her set up special security codes so that no other could operate it. As a precaution, she had turned the chest-guns on them at the end of the final operator’s lesson. Since then, countless murders had been performed in the guise of the estate dragon, which had become something of a folk legend in the region over the years.

  Hearing the terror-stricken cries of pain coming from the hut of the criminal family, the villagers had reacted by extinguishing all fires and artificial lights and bolting their pathetically thin doors. When the first rasping, crashing footfalls of the dragon were heard and recognized, however, the mood changed to one of panic.

  “Gi!” they cried, voicing the local name for the legendary monster. Many of the villagers fled for their lives into the fields, others buried themselves in makeshift hiding places, trembling in fright. Only the bravest and the most foolhardy snuck to their darkened windows to catch a glimpse of Gi.

  The monster walked directly through the town square itself. The foreclaws thrust into the empty windows of the shops with vicious swipes, its tail whipped about, striking down tent poles and smashing trade goods. From the great head a blue glow was visible where the eyes and mouth should be, and a faint blue radiance could be seen outlining the major plates in its armored body.

  Purposefully and unerringly, it strode directly to the alleyway where the family of criminals lived and struck down the front door of the hut by simply walking through it. Inside the huts, the cries of woe took on an even more chilling note, the note of people faced with imminent death.

  Mai Lee was enjoying herself more than she had in years. For too long, she realized now, she had been willing to content herself with watching the video-feed of her bumbling minions artlessly executing her will. Tonight was different. Now the blood was on her hands directly, now the victims looked directly at her as they screamed in mortal terror. Inside the suit, her eyes were wide and staring, her heart pounded with true excitement, her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a death’s head grin.

  First, she killed the oldest male by shoving one of the chest-mounted gun barrels into his belly and ramming him against the wall of the hut. The gun barrel ran through him like a spear. He was already dying but she loosed a burst of forty rounds into his chest cavity anyway, blowing a hole through the back wall of the hut.

  She turned the machine around and reached with one foot to crush the life from a boy that lay supine on the floor, but halted. From the impossible angle of the boy’s neck, it was clear that he was already dead. A rush of wild rage swept over her.

  “My instructions were quite clear,” her amplified voice boomed inside the hut. “I was to perform all the actual executions myself. Who is responsible for this?”

  “Oh great Gi, forgive him, but Jin killed the boy,” one of the brutes ratted quickly, gesturing toward a giant who held aloft a young woman by her hair. The other giants, a worried look in their eyes, quickly agreed, pointing to the slack-jawed Jin.

  “They lie—” he began.

  He got no further as the dragon’s mouth opened and the blue glow inside grew in intensity. With a sudden gush of burning superheated gas, Jin, the girl, and two other peasants were engulfed in searing blue vapor. The surviving palace guards vaulted out of the windows and through the ruined door, running through the mud toward the castle.

  Mai Lee, enjoying herself thoroughly again, continued her work in the hut until it was leveled. The sound of the chest guns ripped the air; the flares of livid blue ignited the horizon. Before she marched Gi back up the flagstones to reenter the garden, three huts had been burned and twelve people lay dead.

  Five

  The hot little water-world with its swampy sister planet had grown from a speck to a fat blue-white disk over the last two days. Less than a million kilometers out and coming in fast, the Parent began a hard three-gee braking to bring it into a safe descent pattern. Landfall was only hours away. The larvae had been hatched and birthed and now crowded the tiny ship with their humping, glistening bodies. They ate liberally of the protoplasm supplies, and the Parent estimated that soon the tanks would be sucked dry. At that point they would enter the pupae stage. They would transform and awaken as adult offspring less than an hour before the invasion began.

  The Parent herself ate sparingly, taking in only enough to keep her ovaries working. Her external egg sacs were already distended with the seeds for more offspring, and every hour they swelled further.

  The Parent heard a rustling back in the cryogenics chamber. Extending a pseudopod to investigate, she found two of the larvae had climbed through the hatch and had gotten into a death struggle inside. One of them had killed and half eaten the other, to her chagrin. She could not, of course, blame the surviving youngster. It was quite possible that the dead larvae had been defective genetically in some way. It shouldn’t have been so easily bested. Yet it was vexing to have to birth another so soon.

  Reaching out with her tentacles, she herded the surviving youngster out of the chamber and sealed it. The others romped about in the control room and chased one another up to the ceiling on their sticky-padded feet. One of the larvae had bitten a chunk of sticky flesh from the other, causing it to run a little faster.

  The Parent sucked up the carcass of the dead larvae with her foodtube and ruffled her tentacles in amusement at the antics of her offspring. Then she turned back to the ship’s data-interface. She shifted the ship’s approach path to bring it in directly behind the smaller planet, interposing the satellite between the planet and her ship. Orbiting the moon were many of the small ships that seemed to sneak down to the planet’s surface so easily. She targeted one that was just picking up speed and falling out of orbit toward the planet. Her dark, silent ship locked onto the target and rapidly closed the distance between them.

  Once this was done, there wasn’t much left to do other than to enjoy the last frolicking of the larvae before they settled down and spun their fleshy, egg-shaped cocoons.

  #

  “Come on, come on, you poor wretches,” muttered Sarah Engstrom under her breath, sitting in the cockpit of her flitter.

  Sarah’s flitter sat in the middle of the vast swamps of Gopus on an illegal saber-reed farm. Daddy and his son Mudface lived on the huge triangular-shaped island, a lump of mush called Sharkstooth. Their huge moldy stockade was visible through the trees, built out of tough mangrove-like timber. At each of the seven guard towers that lined the walls of the stockade bearded thugs slumped over their rattler turrets. Sarah eyed the walls with trepidation, although it looked primitive, she knew the electronics and weaponry employed by the drug kingpins were unsurpassed. They maintained a facade of simple-mindedness because they liked it that way. Several hundred swamp-folk lived with them in and around the stockade, doing all the work and getting off-handedly abused for it whenever Daddy had a little too much reed-whiskey.

  Sarah pushed her dark hair back from her face and wiped sweat on her jumpsuit. She wanted to move fast because Mudface was showing signs of getting amorous again, and worse, Daddy would be back any minute.

  “You sure are pretty today, Sarah. You sure you don’t want another hit off the reed-juice?” asked Mudface, leering at her.

  Sarah was used to men who leered, it usually didn’t bother her. But Mudface was different, because he was a mech. He’d died some years ago and his brain had been revived by Daddy, who was rich enough to afford the expensive procedure to save his son. Sarah privately believed Daddy had killed Mudface personally, and felt bad about it afterward. Unlike most mechs, Mudface hadn’t had his personality scrubbed during the process. His brain was still human and now stewed inside a bubbling tank in the center of the artificial body. His body had been rebuilt with artificial nano-tube muscles and titanium bones. Unlike most mechs, he was built to look like a normal human, or at least to look as Mudface had in life. He didn’t resemble a robot, he looked more like a store manikin—the kind that modeled the clothes in an automated loop. He was rail-thin, with a permanent, stupid-looking grin built onto his plastic face that belied the malevolent cunning behind it.

  “No time for it, but thanks,” Sarah said, managing to smile back at the mech. She knew that it was best to keep on the good side of Mudface and Daddy, especially when visiting their island. “Your people have gotten almost all the cargo aboard now.”

  Mudface nodded, watching the swamp-folk load Sarah’s flitter with bales of dried, bluish saber-reeds. “Ground up into blur dust, this load will make a lot of people happy down there,” Mudface said, his impossible grin seeming to widen a fraction. “We grow the best here on Sharkstooth, you know.”

  “No rot-eye, right?”

  “This is the good stuff. Our customers rarely go blind,” said Mudface proudly.

  Sarah wasn’t so sure it was ‘the good stuff’. Her stomach twisted at the thought. Blur dust induced euphoria with the usual vicious side effects such drugs had on the chronic user. The drug was named for the side effect of temporary blindness, which sometimes became permanent. She told herself that every spacer in the system did it. Smuggling was almost required to keep afloat as independent these days. The graft alone to keep flying inflated every year.

  Mudface turned a sharp eye back to the swamp-folk, who were carrying heavy wicker cases to the flitter on their permanently crooked backs. One man, even thinner and less healthy-looking than the rest, stumbled and sagged down beneath the weight of his burden. He struggled desperately to get up, his feet slipping in the loose mud. Despite the generously low gravity on Gopus, he couldn’t stand. There was a wild look in his black-circled eyes. An old woman and a boy came forward to help him up, but Mudface waved them back.

  “Leave him,” said Mudface.

  The old woman reached out a hand. Mudface pulled his short-barreled shotgun out of his belt and hit her with it. It was a Wu hand-cannon semi-automatic, loaded with high-velocity shells. She staggered away with blood running out of her bedraggled hair.

  “I said leave him be! You people never listen!” shouted Mudface. Then he bent down beside the fallen man, prodding him with the barrel of his hand-cannon. The man struggled harder, and got one corner of the wicker case off the ground. “You sick or something, boy? You got the fever, don’t you?”

  Sarah squirmed in her cockpit, biting her lip.

  “Can’t have you spreading no fevers,” said Mudface, cocking his hand-cannon.

  “I’ve changed my mind about that drink, Mudface,” Sarah called from the cockpit of the flitter. “It’s quite hot out here.”

  Mudface turned away from the man struggling in the mud and beamed his idiot’s grin at her. “Now, you’ve got that right, girl,” he said and sent the bleeding old woman into the stockade to fetch a fresh bottle of chilled reed-whiskey. As soon as his attention had shifted, the other swamp-folk helped the sick man to his feet and finished loading the flitter.