The Albino Knife (3 page)

Worse, this wasn't some random act. These four were set to attack him, and he was the target they'd been awaiting.

He didn't see any weapons, but that didn't mean anything. He was too close to turn back without exposing himself to a hidden gun.

Bork took a couple of deep breaths and moved to meet the four. That was a bad number; fewer could be danced around, and more only got in each other's way. The why of it could wait until later; now, it was time to deal with how.

Despite his size Bork was as much a matador as any. He would never be as graceful as Dirisha or as fast as Geneva or as cocky as Sleel, but he'd learned to walk the Ninety-seven Steps of sumito from start to finish without missing one or stumbling or losing his balance, and that made him one of only a few in the galaxy who could do so. Any man or woman who could dance the sumito pattern could also rank in the top players of the Musashi Flex, did he or she choose that path. None had, but the flexers were professional fighters who could hand-kill most men without much effort, and even the hardest of them respected the priests who had created sumito.

Bork smiled broadly and shook his head as he neared the four men. They turned to watch him openly now, and maybe the smile gave them a false sense of confidence.

The big man caught the first of the ersatz drunks unprepared. Bork snatched him up as a boy might pick up a pet cat. He twisted through the Magician's Hands, spun through Helicopter, threw the startled man into the face of an equally startled second would-be attacker, and danced into Laughing Stone at the third man.

The third man was good, he was fast, and he was ready. He ducked and sprang away to Bork's left, but made the mistake of going for a weapon instead of following up with a kick or punch. Bork altered his dance and skipped to the Braided Laser.

The assassin managed to clear his shotpistol from his hidden holster and had it halfway up when Bork's fist hammered down in the form of the Sword of the Sun.

Too hard, Bork realized, as the man's skull cracked under his blow. Well. That's why they had medics.

The fourth man was blinking away his surprise when Bork twirled toward him. Steel Circle and—

The man lifted his hand to the back of his neck and snapped his elbow and wrist down in a blur. The throwing steel spun toward the charging man. Bork tried to shift, but his forward momentum only allowed him a quarterstep to one side. It was enough so that the point of the steel hit him just above the belt, but outside the rectus abs proper, on the hard knot of lateral muscle. Another three centimeters and it would have missed entirely. The steel sank half its length and stopped, not doing any real damage.

Bork hoped the blade wasn't poisoned.

It worked out that when he reached the wide-eyed knifeman, who was going fora second steel, the best of the nineteen dances to use was the last one. Bork shifted his feet and slid the final half meter and brought the heels of his hands together in front of his chest in the first part of Mimosa Sleeps Softly.

Unfortunately for the knifeman, his temples were in the way of Bork's hands.

Too hard again, Bork.Emile would give you static for that.

Bork pulled the knife from his side and looked at it.Didn't look like it was coated with chem. That was good.

Now.He needed to find out who these people were and why they had come for him.

Prologue Six

When the motor of the aircar exploded, both Dirisha and Geneva bailed out. Fortunately the car was moving slowly and only a few centimeters above the road. It wasn't a bigblast, just enough to wreck the repellors and coil, but Dirisha knew it wasn't an accident. She hit the road rolling, tore the shoulder of her orthoskins, and came up with spetsdods extended.

There were six,no, seven of them, coming out of the brush on both sides of the outback road, and it couldn't be anything but a set-up.

" Geneva !Four on your side!"

The aircar was still skidding to a stop on the hard surface, shredding the plastic skirt before the safety wheels had a chance to kick out fully, when the first spring gun twanged and sent a needle her way.

Dirisha pointed her finger at the shooter and the spetsdod coughed twice. The two shocktox darts hit the woman in the face and she started to fall.

Dirisha rolled again, felt more spring needles thwip past her, and came up with her left spetsdod on full auto and her right tracking the sound of the spring gun.

She had only three on her side. The second caught the hail of full auto darts across the hands, twelve shots, and screamed before he fell. The third man ate a single dart from the right spetsdod; his mouth was open and dark against his white face, and that was where Dirisha aimed.

The black woman twisted toward her friend and lover, hearing Geneva's spetsdod fire.But only a single weapon.

Dirisha saw that three of the four attackers on Geneva's side were already down. The fourth fired a shotgun at the blonde, who was sprawled on her side on the road.

Dirisha screamed "No!" as Geneva's body rocked under the force of the hit. Dirisha leaped up, right hand pointed at the shotgunner. Her weapon rasped. Three small spots appeared in a short line on his neck. He fell.

She ran to Geneva .

"W-w-we get th-them all?"

"Yeah, hon. Hold still, let me see."

"I h-hit a bump on the r-road," Geneva said, the pain heavy in her voice."Sn-snapped the b-barrel on the left clean off."

Blood welled from the wound on the blonde's chest. The shotgun blast had hit her high and to the right.

Missed the heart, Dirisha hoped, but the splash of red bubbled.Got the lung for sure.

"I b-broke my left wrist, Dirisha.And t-took the shot in the—" She winced and ground her teeth as a spasm of pain hit her. Her pale skin seemed waxy and lighter than normal.

Dirisha slid her arms under the wounded woman. "Hang on, brat, they'll have transportation close. We'll go let you dance with the medics."

"You th-think?"

"Yeah.No problem. Looks like you might have to take it easy for a few days, though." Dirisha tried to sound offhand, as if she weren't worried in the least. It was a lie.

Green eyes narrowed in concern, the black woman stood and started for the place where she would have hidden her transport if she'd been mounting the assassination attempt. Halfway to the thick brush, she spotted the flitter. Good.

She put Geneva into the flitter, and sprinted back to their ruined aircar for the medkit she always carried.

The coags would slow or stop the bleeding, the stupecomp would pump whatever it thought the patient needed into her, and then it would be up to the medics to repair the damage.

The matadora hurried back as fast as she could move to Geneva, put the medkit over the chest wound and triggered the machine to life. It hummed and clicked, and Dirisha had already gotten the flitter online and into the air before the medkit finished its diagnosis and emergency treatment. The flitter's engine screamed as Dirisha jammed the forward speed control to maximum and headed back toward FlatTown .

Five minutes, she figured. Geneva had wanted to see where Dirisha grew up, and so they had come to the planet for which the black matadora had been named.

As she drove, fear making her mouth dry, Dirisha added things up. A bomb in the aircar'sengine, set off where seven attackers lay waiting. Probably a radio pulse rather than a timer. Somebody wanted the two of them dead? Who? Why?

Later.First thing was to get Geneva somewhere they could take care of her. After that, Dirisha would figure out the rest of it. And when that happened, somebody was going to be in a pile of shit a klick deep and as big around as MountZiwi .

Tape it, deuce. Somebody was going to pay big for this. You could spit on that and make it shine.

Part One

The Albino Knife

Chapter One

THINGS WERE QUIET in the Red Sister, which was not unusual. Winter had laid its cold hands across Muto Kato's single continent and a meter of fresh powder lay piled upon twice that much older packed snow. Those families who usually favored the pub with their patronage were slow in coming on this frigid evening. Half a dozen regulars sat drinking or smoking and the muted hum of conversation was mostly about the weather. Somewhere in the distance a snowmachine whined as it carried its passengers through the world made white.

Emile Antoon Khadaji, hero of the revolution,instigator of the war that brought low the repressive Confed, wiped the already-clean bar top with a rag. He was medium tall, still in good shape under his thermoskin coverall, though not muscular enough to draw stares. His dark hair had gray in it, mostly along the sides, and his face bore smile wrinkles and character lines. A first look might make him about forty T.S.,a more careful examination could up that closer to fifty. The blue eyes were still clear and alert.

Here, the patrons and workers he employed knew him under a pseudonym. It had been five years since anybody had called him by his true name, and none of the locals knew who he had been before. He was a man who had gone to ground, hiding who and what he had been.

The outer door slid open and then closed, the hard plastic squeaking a little as it moved along its track.

Have to get that fixed, Khadaji thought.

He turned to adjust the nozzle on the liquor dispenser as the inner door opened, so that he caught only a peripheral flash as the single customer entered the pub. He noticed nothing unusual about the figure from his quick glimpse. He—she?—wore a heavy, gloved and hooded parka over thermoskins and extrusion boots. The whine of the snow-shoes as they retracted over the second dump grate just inside the door was a sound he heard frequently. There was nothing to set the customer apart from any other, and yet—

Khadaji turned and looked at the woman. He was sure it was a woman, and something about her movement as she reached up to untab her parka and face shield seemed familiar, even though he felt certain he had never seen her before. What would bring a stranger here? The last person he hadn't known personally who'd come to the Red Sister had been a miner from Delton City, and he'd stopped in only because his flitter had broken down on the way home.

When the woman removed the parka, Khadaji thought his heart was going to stop.

Juete!

It couldn't be, and yet, there she was.

Khadaji stared, unable to get his mind working. It had been more than twenty years since he had seen her, and she looked exactly the same. There was the white skin, the white hair, the pink eyes—she wasn't wearing colored droptacs—and the beauty that hit you like a fist to the solar plexus, stealing your breath and your soul at the same time.

Even as he saw her, he knew it could not be. Juete had never told him how old she was, but surely twenty years had to show somehow? If anything, she looked younger than she had when he'd seen her last.

She walked toward the bar. Every customer in the place stopped and turned to watch, caught by the genetic magic that was the Albino Exotic's birthright. Those closest to her would have felt the call most, for her ancestors' pheromones had been tailored to attract virtually any man or woman of human or human mue stock.

As she drew closer, Khadaji saw that he had been mistaken. This was not Juete. There were small differences in her face, the shape of her nose, her lips, her jaw. She was close, very close, but not Juete.

A relative.

The woman reached the bar and looked at Khadaji with a gaze that seemed to penetrate to his essence.

"Hello, Emile," she finally said. Her voice was honey on denscris, smooth and clear. "My name is Veate."

That she used his name, one he hadn't heard directed at him for five years, was not lost on him. And in that instant, he knew who she was.

"You're Juete's daughter," he said, his voice full of wonder and a certain kind of joy. Juete had a daughter.Amazing.

She gave him a brief nod. "And yours," she said.

Veate had played this scene a hundred times in the theater of her mind and in none of those rehearsals had he reacted quite the way it turned out now, finally, on opening night. She was watching carefully, very carefully when she announced her news, and save for a slight tightening around the eyes, he had shown no reaction. He hadn't suspected, she was pretty sure of that; it was a true surprise, but he'd handled it well, better than she'd expected. She wasn't sure exactlywhat she thought he might do: he could have denied it, maybe; or maybe his mouth might have gaped in shock; yes, and maybe he could have fallen down and frothed at the nose, too. But she could see that he didn't doubt it for a second, that he knew the truth when he heard it.

There was a way in which she hated him, but she was also curious. One did not meet one's father every day, and she had been nervous about it, frightened in some nonspecific way. Not every young woman was the daughter of a certified hero, a man who'd taken his lever and found a place to stand and then moved the whole damned galaxy.

Not that he looked it. He was ordinary enough, handsome in a rough way, but nobody she'd cross the street to view better. She had seen the holoprojic representations her mother had, some of them full size, and even so, she'd expected him to be taller, to be larger than life,to be arrogant.

He turned to a young man stacking bottles near the opposite end of the bar. "Shel, watch things here for me, would you?" Then he turned back toward her. "I have an office in the back; we can talk there."

Damn. He sounded so fucking calm! She'd wanted to rattle him, offbalance him, at least a little, and he was taking this in stride as if she'd offered him nothing more than the weather.

He grinned, and Veate tried to read it. Was he laughing at her? Could he somehow tell she'd wanted to rock him? Or was he smirking for some other reason?

Maybe he's glad to see you, hey?

No. Discount that. She didn't want him to be glad to see her. She didn't want him to have any redeeming virtues, save his much-vaunted abilities with guns and intrigue. She needed his help; that was the only reason she'd come to him.The only reason.