The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (91 page)

Adam Elvin leaned back against the purple cord cushions in the back of the gondola as it slid gracefully along the narrow canal. It was one of the little waterways that zigzagged around large blocks, connecting and crossing the larger canals. The side walls were high here, slimed with weed and dirt. Water slapped against the cracked brickwork, slowly eroding the mortar—there were entire sections that had been repaired with new bricks and hard cement, looking totally out of place. Bridges curved overhead like miniature tunnels. Each block had a row of near-identical blank wooden doors a meter above the tide line, fastened by heavy iron bolts. They passed several that were open, with little cargo boats tied up outside, their crew manhandling crates and boxes into the dark interiors.

Every delivery in Venice Coast was by boat, adding to the cost of living here. Adam hadn’t appreciated that before he came, that the only transport in each district was either walking or boat. The monorail took you between districts, but that was all.

They turned out onto the famous Rovigo canal, one of the major channels through the Cesena district. The venturi trees lined both sides; planted a century ago their trunks resembled gnarled copper pillars reaching over twenty-five meters high, with arched boughs that trailed long strands of yellow-gold leaves as thin as tissue. Each one had its own sieve well that had been drilled under the pavement into the boggy subsoil, allowing the roots to suck up fresh water. Adam was lucky enough to be visiting during the fortnight they were in bloom. Each branch ended in a triune of brilliant amethyst ruff flowers as big as footballs. Already, though, petals were beginning to fade and fall, snowing onto the heads of delighted gondola tourists like scented confetti.

Adam smiled appreciatively as the gondolier slowed down, allowing him to soak up the sight and smell of the wonderful native trees. The boutiques and galleries on either side of the Rovigo were among the more exclusive in Venice Coast, with dark glass windows illustrating single examples of their expensive prestige products. Not far away, the strange and wonderful twisted neo-Gothic spire of StPeter’s Cathedral towered above the city’s red tile roofs like a pre-Commonwealth silver space rocket.

The Rovigo ended at a junction with the Clade canal. They waited between the last of the venturi trees for a big glass-topped, air-conditioned tourist bus boat to chug past. The wash slapped at the gondola, much to the gondolier’s disgust; half of his conversation during the trip had been a diatribe against any boat that had an engine. Adam looked along the Clade, seeing the broad waterway slowly curving away from him, with the back of the Nystol Gallery just visible. There were only about ten other boats on this section, a couple of gondolas, some cargo boats, a taxi; the pavement along the side was equally empty, with a few tourists wandering along. Even the cafés were almost deserted—

“Stop!” Adam hissed at the gondolier.

The man looked back at him in surprise, the pole poised ready to push them out into the Clade now the water bus had passed. “Is clear now,” he complained.

“Go back. Do not go out onto the Clade. Understand? Do not take me out there. Take me back to the monorail station.” He produced a thick roll of notes from his pocket, and peeled off over a hundred Anacona dollars.

The gondolier’s face brightened at the sight of the money. “Sure. Okay. You’re the captain, I’m just the engine room.” He changed the angle of the pole, and slid it into the muddy water. The gondola’s prow slowly came around, and they began to head back down the Rovigo. A multitude of crispy dry violet petals continued to drift down over Adam’s clothes as they retreated at a speed that was barely above walking pace. He refused to look around. That would be a stupid weakness. He knew exactly who he’d seen sitting there outside the café. After all this time he could recognize Chief Investigator Myo’s profile from almost any angle and distance. She was wearing a blond wig, and large sunglasses, but that couldn’t disguise her from him. Her posture, her gestures. That suit! Who the hell else would wear a business suit in the middle of Venice Coast’s siesta?

His limbs were starting to shake as he realized how close he’d come to the end of … well, everything. He must have just used up every scrap of luck from the rest of his lifetime. If he’d been looking the other way … If Myo hadn’t been on duty at this time of day … He’d undergone cellular reprofiling, of course, giving himself a new image, a drawn face with dark skin. But he knew that wouldn’t have worked with the Chief Investigator. She would know him as easily as he knew her. They could never hide from each other.

....

He walked into the Nystol Gallery by the front door, knowing the Agency team would have his image on record. It didn’t bother him.

The reception hall had an arching roof of white-painted brick, and a flagstone floor. Before being converted into a gallery, the building had been a storage warehouse, which made it an ideal place to house EK pieces. The receptionist sat at a desk in front of a smoked-glass doorway that led into the gallery’s display chambers. She was staggeringly pretty, with a sylph body, Nordic white skin and red-gold hair that hung halfway down her back. Her flimsy brown and emerald dress belonged on a couture house’s runway. She smiled automatically at him, which deepened to mildly flirtatious as he walked over. “Hi, can I help you?”

“No.” He shot her through the temple with a microdart from his arm dispenser. Its n-pulse locked her muscles solid, an instant rigor mortis, holding her upright in her seat. Anyone peering in from the street would see her behind the desk as usual.

His e-butler opened a channel to the desk’s array. A brief software battle ensued as he took control of the building’s electronics network. As it progressed, the weapons and defense systems wetwired into his body powered up, bringing him to full combat status. He disconnected the gallery’s network from the planetary cybersphere, then deactivated all the internal alarms. The front door was locked. Where possible, fire doors were silently sealed, compartmentalizing the gallery. Sensors fed directly into his virtual vision, showing him the location of several people, although he knew there were at least three rooms without sensors.

The first chamber housed a three-meter-high EK gryphon, with a body made from thin sheets of jewel-encrusted brass that moved with fluid grace as they were manipulated from within by hundreds of small cogs and micro-pistons. It was as if Leonardo da Vinci had animated a sculpture with a difference engine. An old couple were walking around it, making admiring noises as they pointed out features to each other. He shot both of them with an ion bolt. The gryphon cooed loudly as he moved into the second chamber.

On the second floor, the fifth chamber had a single strip of machinery running its entire length, each component coming from the same aircraft, and broken in some way so instead of the smooth movement associated with the aerospace industry they jerked around like a damaged bird when power was applied. Ripples of motion ran up and down the strip, each one different to the last. A gallery guide was walking along the side of the piece, with a frown on his face as he came to investigate the strange sounds that had burst out of the fourth chamber.

The ion bolt vaporized the top of his skull. Blood-steam misted the workings of a wing flap electrohydraulic activator, slowing its motion. Loud rattling sounds began to issue up and down the whole length of the EK piece as its synchronization was thrown off and stresses built up.

He went up to the third floor. Valtare Rigin’s office was the second door along the hallway. Like the chambers below, it had a vaulting brickwork ceiling. At the far end, an arched window gave a splendid view out over the Cesena district, with StPeter’s mirror-chrome spire framed almost dead center. Rigin looked up in surprise from behind his desk, where he’d been struggling with his crashed network interface. “Who the hell are you?”

“You are Valtare Rigin?”

Rigin smiled thinly. “Roberto,” he called quietly.

A large black leather couch had been placed on the left side of the door, so it would remain unseen by anyone who entered the office until they were well inside the room. He had of course sensed the human male sitting on it. The man, presumably Roberto, who was now lifting his seven-foot-high frame onto his very large feet.

He brought his left arm up and fired an ion pulse straight through the door at the big human’s head.

Roberto, as a good bodyguard, was wearing a light armor frame below his expensive hand-tailored suit, which wrapped him in a deflector field. The ion bolt sizzled loudly as it bounced off into the brickwork. Carbonized clay puffed out of the strike point. Roberto slammed both hands into the door, which ripped off its hinges.

He barely noticed the impact as the door crashed against him. His arm sliced around hard, smashing three-inch-thick hardwood into splinter shrapnel.

Roberto grunted in surprise, and went for the weapon in his shoulder holster in a slick high-speed motion only available to those with a nervous system wetwired for accelerated response time. The bulky mag-a pistol that he pulled out fired two depleted-uranium rounds at the intruder, whose sparkling force field halted both of them. That was the only chance Roberto got.

He launched himself straight at the big man, right leg swinging up and around to kick the ribs. Roberto shrieked as the blow punched clean through the armor frame. Three ribs broke and pushed inward, puncturing his lungs.

The bodyguard ignored the pain and countered with a left twist, his right arm coming around flat, aimed for the intruder’s neck, armor frame’s e-dump function on and eager to wreck the other’s force field. Energy flared from the impact like a fusion bloom, the blinding discharge flinging off slivers of static that clawed at both figures as they grounded out. But the e-dump never got anywhere near overloading the force field. A fist like the front end of an express train crashed into Roberto’s side, sending him flying backward through the air to smack into the curving brickwork. Trailers of blood smeared the white paint as he slithered down limply to the polished wooden floorboards.

He leaped gracefully across the intervening distance, one heel coming down on Roberto’s leg. The knee joint snapped with a sickening crunch under his heel. Roberto threw up as hands grasped the lapels on his ruined suit, hauling him to his feet. It was difficult for Roberto to focus through the daze of pain, but he just managed to squint at the intruder’s frighteningly emotionless features. Then the head butt caved in the front of Roberto’s face, pushing several splintered fragments of bone from the fractured skull directly into his brain.

He dropped the dead bodyguard, and turned to face the terrified man behind the desk. “You are Valtare Rigin?”

“Yes.” Rigin crossed himself, his eyes watering as he waited to die.

“I do not have time to torture information from you. If you do not cooperate, I will destroy your memorycell insert when I kill your body; then we will infiltrate your re-life clinic and erase your secure store. You will be genuinely dead. We do have the capability to do this. Do you believe me?” Rigin nodded frantically. “Holy Mother of God, who are you?” His eyes flicked to the broken corpse of his bodyguard. “How did you …?”

“The location of the equipment you are buying for Adam Elvin?”

“I … That wasn’t the name he gave me, but everything for the deal I’m putting together right now is in the second storeroom at the end of the hallway. All of it, I swear.”

“Give me the file containing the list of components and the methods of payment to your encrypted bank accounts. I also want the export route.” He ordered his e-butler to open a channel to the terrified arms merchant. Information flowed into his cache. The ion bolt blew a wide hole through Rigin’s chest. He hurried over to the corpse and bent down. A single slender harmonic blade slid out from underneath his right index finger, and he quickly cut through the neck to pull out a bloody glob of flesh and bone that contained all of Rigin’s inserts.

With the arms merchant’s memorycell safe in his pocket, he walked down the hallway to the second storeroom. A single kick shattered the reinforced polytanium door. There were three crates in the windowless room, all unsealed, with packaging foam scattered around them. He went over to the first, checked to see that it did contain high-technology items, then dropped a superthermal demolition charge in.

To exit the gallery he went back to Rigin’s office. He stood in front of the window and activated a focused disrupter field. The entire window of toughened carbonglass shattered before him, its cascade of shards twinkling in the brilliant sunlight as they flew outward. He followed them, sailing through the warm outside air in a perfect swan dive to land cleanly in the Clade canal with a small splash. Underwater, he put his feet together and kept his arms by his side. A ripple of motion swept down his body, and he powered forward with the ease of a dolphin through the muddy water, his enhanced senses showing him the canal walls on either side and the boats above.

The superthermal charge exploded behind him.

....

His training had been hard. Not just physically, Kazimir had expected that, but mentally, too. The things he’d had to learn! The Commonwealth’s history, its current affairs, the multitude of planets and their accompanying cultures, technology, programs, endless programs, and how they managed his new inserts. There had been so many times over the last two years when he just wanted to shout: “I quit!” at Stig and his other tormentor-tutors. But the thought of Bruce stayed with him through all those months spent moving between the secret clan villages of the Dessault Mountains; he competed against the memory, thinking how Bruce would never quit, never turn tail.

Now, finally, Kazimir stood on Santa Monica’s sandy beach facing the water as the morning sun rose slowly behind Los Angeles, and admitted it had all been worthwhile. A pleasant wind blew in off the Pacific Ocean, ruffling the waves, while the first limousines and coupes of the morning’s commuter traffic slid silently and cleanly along the Pacific Coast Highway. To his left was the Santa Monica pier, extending a kilometer out into the ocean; its ancient original structure, a platform of wood and metal and concrete, gradually blended into the first of the three extensions that had been grafted onto it during its four centuries’ lifetime. Out to sea, the newer components of sicarbon and glass and hyperfilament girders had been arranged in mockorganic forms, sometimes discreet, sometimes deliberately garish, especially where the funfair rides were stationed along the east side.