Brother Death (20 page)

"Thanks, Chief. We know who our friends are."

"Good."

This was bad, Taz knew. To lose a witness with a matador and an Assistant Chief of Police looking right at her when it happened. But when they walked back into the main room of the pub, it got worse.

Ruul was gone.

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

TAZ FOUGHT A losing battle against panic. Her belly twisted, her bowels went cold, and she had trouble catching her breath. If somebody had come through the pub's door carrying a big stick, they could have walked up and swatted her with it, she'd have just stood there staring at them.

Saval took over.

"Taz, look in the fresher. Go and see if he is in there. Go."

Sudden hope lit up in her. The fresher. Of course, how stupid. She herself had to pee, and Ruul had never been able to drink and travel for more than a few minutes before he had to stop, she remembered that. The fresher-But, no. Nobody was in the fresher. The private stalls were all empty; she checked.

When she returned to the pub's main room, Saval wasn't in sight. Rugi waved her over. "He went out to check the street," Rugi said.

"Did anybody see Oro leave?"

Rugi shrugged.

Taz turned to the other patrons, the ones who hadn't run when the shooting started. "Did anybody see the man we came in with leave?" Her voice was loud enough to carry throughout the room.

A short but heavy man close to her sneered. "What, do we look like the lost and found?"

Ordinarily Taz was a good cool, able to keep her emotions controlled on the job after all the years on the streets. In any one of a hundred situations the big man could have mouthed off and she would have let it pass. Not now.

Taz took two steps, grabbed his shirt front, bunched it in her fists and lifted him. The material of his shirt was good, it held, and while his toes stayed in contact with the floor, there was very little weight on them.

"What did you say?"

From behind her Saval said, "Taz."

Her rage was hot enough so she considered seeing how far she could throw the guy. He tried to speak but nothing came.

"Taz."

Her vision cleared, the red haze faded. She put the man back onto his feet. His eyes were considerably wider than they had been, and if he had anything else clever to offer, he must have misplaced it while he was up in the air.

A smallish woman broke the tension. "Two guys in new coveralls walked him out," she said.

Taz turned away from the frightened man. "And nobody objected," she said.

The little woman shrugged. Wasn't her biz. People around here didn't poke at stuff that didn't concern them; that was a good way to get your face blown off.

Taz knew this, but the fear lying in her belly like some malevolent beast threatened to consume her from within and she had to do something

Saval said, "He wouldn't have wandered off on his own?"

"No."

"Okay. They've gotten clear. I figure he must have been a target of opportunity. The two were probably backup to the one who shot Ndizi. They saw us go after her, decided we were more than they could handle, took Ruul instead."

"I can't believe I left him there alone," she said.

"We left him alone, Taz."

"You could have handled the one guy. I should have stayed with Ruul."

"This doesn't help. Beat up on yourself later when you have the luxury of time. Now you can't afford it."

She gave him a choppy nod. He was right. Where were her brains? There was a procedure for kidnapping. She pulled her com to report it, to set the machine in motion. They had one of them, still alive, they might be able to keep him that way. They had a little information-Ndizi had told them her sib used the name "Sister Misery." The computer could scan religious groups for similar cult noms. She had the police resources of an entire planet at her disposal, plus she had Saval. They'd find him.

She turned back to the man she'd grabbed. "I was out of line, citizen. If you want to file a complaint-"

"N-No," he said quickly. "N-No problem."

Taz turned away, the man fading from her thoughts. Ruul. They'd find him.

And if somebody had hurt him, they would be sorry they'd ever been born. She would see to it personally.

Bork watched his sister, saw her settle down and begin to do her work, and felt a little better. Not much.

He had broken the first rule of a bodyguard by leaving his client unprotected. He had told Taz he would take care of her lover and he had failed to do it. That, coupled with his defeat by the assassin, rocked Bork pretty hard. The years of living easy after the revolution had dulled him, he had lost his edge, and it didn't feel good to know it. He was a half step slow here and if he didn't do something about it, he or Taz might wind up dead. It was not something he'd ever worried about before, but it worried him now. It was not so much the going that frightened him, but what he would leave behind. Little Saval would grow up not knowing his father. Veate would find another lover-being an Albino, she couldn't not-and somebody else might be hoisting her son onto his shoulder, doing all the things Bork should have done. If he died, it would be as if they had died, the effect would be the same, they would be lost to him.

Everybody went over. It wasn't something Bork had ever thought much about. With drugs and diet and exercise, a careful man or mue could extend his lifespan to a hundred and fifty or sixty years. If what Sleel had told him about the plants they were growing in The Brambles was true, that span might be extended to eight or nine hundred years. It would be tragic to die when that kind of breakthrough was just around the corner. Eight hundred years with Veate wouldn't be too long. To live to see your great-times-a-dozen grandchildren; there was a miracle men had dreamed about ever since they first learned what death was. To lose that would be a bigger loss than what your own great-grandfather had stood to lose in his time. Dying of a fatal disease when the cure was almost ready was worse than if no cure were possible.

No, death hadn't seemed real to him before; he was too vital, too strong. He had walked through a revolution, a big target, and death had missed him every time. Not even a serious injury had ever slowed him down; a few strains, that was it. His genetically improved constitution kept him from falling sick with most of the common illnesses they hadn't yet found preventions for, and when he was cut or bruised, he healed faster than did ordinary men. He had been designed for planets with heavy gravity, his body made to withstand more than basic stockers and until he had clinched with the assassin, his body had never really failed him. But it only takes one loss to make you realize you can lose, Bork had learned. And that knowledge is a fertile breeding ground for fear and doubt, both of which could grow up to kill you. Excessive caution can slap you just as dead; he'd learned that at the Villa. Hesitate at the wrong second, and you will be lost just as surely as if you leap too quickly.

Bork had never really appreciated how thin a line you had to walk to survive in the galaxy. And that appreciation, he found, didn't help things at all; it only made them worse.

Kifo looked upon the two brothers with a certain kind of wonder. Perhaps stupidity was contagious?

Perhaps one of them had infected the other?

He knew the man they had collected. He was some kind of actor, aside from being loosely associated with the policewoman.

"Your assignment was to back up Brother Agony, was it not? While he slew the whore?"

"Yes, my Unique," they said in perfect chorus.

"Then why this?" He waved at the actor.

The two brothers glanced at each other. The shorter one said, "Well, when Brother Agony was attacked, we thought this one would be a good hostage. To . . . uh, to uh, frighten the woman cool."

Kifo shook his head.

"I see. And did you recognize the big man with the policewoman? The matador?"

The two glanced at each other again. The taller one was slightly quicker with his reply: "Yes, my Unique."

"You know this was the man who fought Brother Hand to a draw." This was not a question and both men knew it.

"Y-Y-Yes."

"And you thought that if he could do that to Brother Mkono then you would certainly be defeated did you face him, did you not?"

The faces of both men were filled with shame. There was no need for them to speak.

Kifo shook his head. "Take him out and kill him," he said. He nodded at the actor.

The three started to leave. "No, wait. As long as we have him, we might as well keep him. If by chance the authorities try to molest us, perhaps he will serve some purpose. Put him in the punishment chamber."

"Nice to meet you, too," the actor said.

Kifo shook his head.

When the trio had departed, Kifo sat and stared at the wall. The gods had given him what seemed a plump and ripe fruit, beautiful to the eyes and pleasing to the nose-and after allowing him one delicious bite, had made it go bitter in his mouth. The Unique of the Few felt sour all over. A simple precaution, to remove a link tenuous at best, had met with unexpected resistance. A small seed that might well have been dismissed as trivial even had it been uncovered had suddenly blossomed into an exceedingly ugly weed in his garden. The brain-death command implanted in the Few who were at risk could be circumvented by a clever and quick enough neuromedic. Once the block was thus short-circuited, then any whack with a cheap electropophy machine or encephaloscanner could dig out whatever the simadam wanted. The chance that such a thing might happen had existed all along; Kifo had hoped to put it off for a longer time. The unbelievers had collected yet another of his people, and he must assume that they would be expecting the mental shutdown. Whether they had learned anything from the whore whose sister had been one of the Few was pretty much moot.

Kifo looked around at the inside of the meditation chamber. It was only a building, true enough, but he had spent much of his life living and learning within the walls of it. It would be hard to leave without a certain regret.

Then again, a building was as nothing to one who was on the way to becoming a god. He would create finer places with a backhand wave, once he joined the ranks of the Zonn. And were he to join them, it was best that the unbelievers not catch him or his people before it happened.

Kifo keyed into the temple's broadcast system.

"This is your Unique," Kifo said. "The Few are about to depart for Paradise. Ready yourselves."

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

BACK IN HER office, the practiced motions of her job mostly carried Taz through her worry. After more than half her life as a cool, she had learned that inertia was a potent force. If you picked a direction and just kept moving, sometimes that would be enough. Inertia. She tried not to think about Ruul. Of how she had let him down . . .

"Chief, here's the read on that name," came a voice from one of the computer operators.

Taz punched the code up on her monitor.

"Saval," she called as she read.

He looked up from his work using her flatscreen.

"We have an ID on the group. 'Sister Misery' is crosslinked to something called the Temple of Despair.

The Chosen Few. They have a place here in the city."

Saval moved to stand next to her, reading the holoproj over her shoulder.

"Sketchy," he said. "Doesn't say anything about what they believe, just bare bones. Look at the names: Despair, Misery, Angst, Grief, head guy is named 'Death.' Cheery bunch of folks."

Taz glanced at the list. "Says the leader is called The Unique. Damn."

"What?"

"Remember the guy whose brain fried back on Kato? The one thing he said before he checked out?"

Saval nodded, appeared to be scanning his memory. " 'Moja.' "

"Yeah. Well, in Tembonese 'moja' means 'lone' or 'one.' It might also be taken to mean 'unique.' "

"Whoops," Saval said.

"Yeah. It's enough to fan on," she said. Taz tapped in a call code. "This is Assistant Chief Bork," she said. "I want a Tactical Insertion Team ready at the front entrance in five minutes and I want half a dozen tans in riot suits waiting for them when they get there."

"Caught it clear, Chief. On it."

She looked up at her brother. "Let's go talk to these Chosen Few," she said.

The insertion team's van idled outside the building as Taz and Saval exited. Taz spoke to the Team Leader, gave him the address and what information she had. The van fanned away, a blast of warm and gritty wind washing over Taz and Saval. Smelled like lube. Six traffic units followed the van as the siblings moved toward Taz's flitter.

"Tactical Insertion Team?" Saval said.

"An unfortunate choice of names," Taz said. "Somebody wasn't thinking about the acroynm. Want to guess how long it took before somebody started calling them TIT-suckers?"

Saval shook his head.

The team would secure the perimeter of the temple and keep Taz informed via com. If anybody came out with Ruul in tow, Taz could have his captors taken out. A large-caliber metal projectile zipping along at a thousand meters a second would stop a bad guy instantly if it hit him in the head. The TIT snipers had state-of-the-art water-plasma rifles with shock-armored full-holoproj pinprick scopes. The stocks were sculpted carbonex and wedded to the actions by sixty precise and very strong welds. You could drop one of the weapons off a building and it would probably still shoot true, and the men and women doing the shooting were good enough to drill a target through the eye at a hundred meters-and you get to pick which eye.

Even so, Taz hoped it wouldn't come to that. She didn't want to risk Ruul's life.

They were halfway to the temple when the call came back: "We've got the building lugged down, Chief, but it's real quiet in there. The wolf ears can't hear anything, motion detectors and doppler come up clean."

"Shit," Taz said. "Hold your positions."

She glanced over at Saval. "Sounds like they're gone," she said.

"Yeah, it does. We'll see."

The Nine were in the first coach to arrive at the ruins. Kifo would take seven of the Very Few with him, leaving Brother Mkono behind to sow a few dragon's teeth among their enemies. It was heady, the feeling he had, knowing what he knew. Fifty others would also make the crossing. Some of the lesser brothers and sisters would have to be left behind; they were even now scattering themselves from the city, some going into the highlands, others downcountry, a few offworld. Too bad he couldn't take them all, but one could not request too much hospitality from the gods. Among the Few, only three still alive had communed directly with the Zonn and none more than once save himself. It would be an adventure, to take so many into the Realm. He had gone four times before, and he had studied closely the old records, the Book of Rules about what to expect and how to deal with it, compiled by the Uniques before him. Even so, there were dangers waiting to trap those whose faith was less than complete, whose attention wandered in the slightest. Ah, yes. An adventure, indeed.