The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) (19 page)

Hastily compiled from various official and semi-official sources, the report didn't offer a full picture but at least it allowed an estimate of the shift of various multidirectional powers. Take the shopkeepers' alliance, deadly offended when a few public lashings had been followed by the collection of considerable tribute. Or the gatherers, forced to surrender 10% of the resources they farmed for access to Shui Fong-controlled locations. An impressive list of plundered castles, two subdued and integrated clans, successful raids into nearby clusters. The hyperactive bastards had left quite a trail.

Now this was interesting: Mao's Legacy alliance. Following the Great Helmsman's theses, they rejected expansion and directed their main efforts inward, leveling up and investing in production. Their combined call-up potential was nothing to sniff at which was quite understandable: if your average crafter or minedigger approaches level 200, he won't find it too hard to turn his plough shear into a sword which made him a combat opponent to be reckoned with.

At first, Shui Fong had mistaken them for an easy target and had a field day treading on their toes, wrestling a few top locations away from them, including a rich outcrop of silver and gold with a—wow!—a 0.5% chance of discovering mithril. The Mao's Legacy had recoiled like a taut spring, turned their respective plough shears to swords and wholeheartedly struck back. Currently the two clans were busy pummeling each other with variable success, burning an enormous wealth of resources much to their competitors and Admins' pleasure.

The conflict had now frozen in an uneasy balance of two wrestlers grappling with each other, throwing feints and testing the other's reactions. There were plenty of spectators but no one willing to stick their necks out. Or at least not until we came round. Like an uncontrollable teenager we'd rushed onto the tatami disrupting the tournament's course and giving one of the heavyweights an almighty kick in the balls: unexpected, unpleasant and very unfair. A perfect moment for the other wrestler to throw him out of the circle, breaking the opponent's elbow and rendering his greedy mitts inoperative for quite a while.

That was it, then. I jotted a quick letter to the Mao alliance's official channels, then used a few "gray" contacts to obtain the addresses of their clan leaders and heads of security and forwarded copies of the letter to them, too. I wasn't sure if it was a good thing to do but time was an issue, raising the hairs on my neck. As the saying goes, a cornered rat will bite the cat. In the body of the email I offered them a doctored version of our castle seizure story and made them an offer they had to find impossible to refuse. I suggested they buy the Shui Fong citadel off me for three million, thus hogging the blanket for themselves and achieving the numerical advantage in this lingering opposition: eleven castles against nine.

Slow thinkers don't survive in this line of work. It took the alliance seven minutes to come to a decision. I received an incoming inquiry,

Daxueshi Xiao Long on behalf of Mao's Legacy alliance is happy to welcome our Russian brother!

I shook my head skeptically, highlighting the first word in his name—a title? A new menu opened, offering a translation option. So!
A court official of fifth rank, advisor to the Emperor
. A big shot. While I was at it, I translated his name, too. Xiao Long:
a serpent
. Well, well, well. I'd better keep my eyes peeled with this one.

I confirmed chat activation and introduced myself as the commander of a Russian combined service raid. After more greetings and inscrutably syrupy compliments we finally got to the point.

In order to verify your information, we ask your permission to teleport our representative to the seized castle. We guarantee he will not use magic or activate any kind of artifacts.

So they didn't want to buy a pig in a poke. Fair enough. I sent a request through the staff channel to generate a single-use portal key, then forwarded it to the court official. He promised to arrive within five minutes. Excellent.

I closed all the windows and blinked them out of my eyes, refocusing as I tried to work out the cause of all the noise that had distracted me during the course of the negotiations.

Holy mama mia! Oksana, her tear-streaked face dusty and furious, was panting and wheezing as she struggled to drag a slave driver across the flagstones, his hands bound behind his back. Every ten paces she let her victim go, only to dig her heavy boots into his face. But even though the slave driver couldn't avoid the hail of blows, he didn't resemble a timid victim. Exposing his half-broken teeth in a defiant grin, he spat blood, talking out loud as he reminded the girl of all the instances of him raping her, relishing all the unsavory details.

Was he looking for an easy death? Was he trying to provoke the girl into killing him there and then before she dragged him to the knocked-down niche where we'd found the five irresponsive bricked-in bodies? Possible.

The slave driver made another attempt, "Shame you didn't hear that brat scream when I sharpened his fingers like pencils with my knife!"

"You lying piece of shit!" Oksana lost it completely, stomping the man into the ground with renewed force. My men didn't let him die though: one of the mercs healed the scumbag just in time.

Now his face filled with pure hatred. "You bastard Russians! How I hate you! You burned my grandfather alive with Grad missiles on Damansky island! My father was a gold digger in the Amur basin and he never came back from the taiga! I lost both legs in the Far East conflict! We'll kill you all, each and every one of you!"

I frowned and turned to Widowmaker. "Who's that?"

"The head of interior guards. The slaves only mention his name in whispers. They're still scared shitless of him. You can't even imagine the kind of things he did here. He was the one who bricked Alexis in. The kid is away with the fairies now, just drooling and staring into space. They broke something in him. So Oksana flipped out, as you can see..."

I ground my teeth and squinted at the slave driver. This was an enemy, pure and simple.

He burst into insane laughter. "Don't cringe! Scared, are we? Or is it that you want to kill me? Well, you can't! I'm immortal! You think you can brick me in or bury me alive? Never mind, I can wait. Hatred will help me stay sane, even if it's a thousand years. The wind and water will turn these stones to dust, but one day I'll be free to come back and kill you all who speak a dog's tongue!"

Now I freaked out, too. I jumped off my throne and strode toward the spattering slave driver. "You can wait, can you?" I croaked into his enraged face. "Very well. Time to find out what real hatred is like!"

A portal popped open behind me but I couldn't stop. Without looking, I felt in my inventory for Lloth's black dagger and thrust it into the slave driver's heart.

"Give my love to the Spider Queen!"

Chapter Twelve

M
oscow, Chronos Life Extension Center.

"Olga, here's more flowers from your boyfriend! Does that mean it's a champagne day again today?"

Olga switched the monitor to transparency mode. Without removing the mental control headband, she looked up at Alina the receptionist scurrying toward her desk. Alina's strongest points were her long slender legs and two miracles of plastic surgery bouncing in her deep cleavage, the cause of the male office staff suffering acute cases of wandering eye.

Now her voluptuous curves were shielded by a colorful riot of flowers. The girl's groomed fingers greedily felt for a small gift box wrapped in expensive "living design" paper.

Olga couldn't suppress a blush. It had to be Max again. Most men wouldn't bother to give you flowers on your first date but this one had remembered his promise, having sent her some direct from the heart of the virtual world.

She felt flattered by the handsome young man's attentions but he had to understand that most of their staff were female, only too eager to indulge in some quality gossip. The last time, even the bottle of Veuve Clicot she'd sacrificed as a friendly bribe for an office party hadn't saved her from two weeks' worth of pseudo friendly teasing and jealous whispering behind her back. Which was only understandable: after the introduction of the obligatory genome vaccinations, male births had dropped a third compared to girls. Apparently, Russian men had lost the incentive to reincarnate in the country where blood had lost its vodka-absorbing properties.

Olga accepted the flowers from the office bombshell and prized the gift box free from the girl's greedy fingers. She stuffed it into a desk drawer, much to her colleagues' disappointment. Who was that idiot who'd invented open plan offices and transparent furniture? It was like sitting in a shop window in a brand-name mini skirt, trying to squeeze exposed legs shut, transparent desk drawers revealing a standard workaholic manager's tool kit. She was forced to store more personal items in her overloaded handbag.

She needed a vase. Olga rose and headed for the bookkeeping department. She walked across the room, clattering the heels of her emo shoes she'd splurged the whole of last year's bonus on. The bookkeepers were mainly in their forties, frumpy and farsighted, happy to oblige whenever one needed a bottle opener or a needle with a bit of thread in an emergency.

The co-workers she met on her way promptly swallowed the unasked question and excused themselves under the pretext of some urgent business. The expensive shoes were paying for themselves, adding an infrasound deterrent note to her pace. Perfectly legal, no need to cringe like that. Not all heels were made to please your subconscious ear with an erotic ultrasound mantra.

Olga returned to her work station, strategically placing the vase between herself and any curious stares. She then opened the virtual monitor to its full 50-inch potential and activated the polaroid screen, leaving the jealous office trolls to stare at their own reflection. God knows she tried really hard not to scream with joy, pressing her face to the beautiful flowers and ripping the gift paper to bits, wriggling with excitement. As a matter of fact, she was terribly lonely. Male attention?—lecherous stares definitely didn't count as such and neither did her miscellaneous dates' attempts to be invited in for a "nightcap" after having gone to the trouble of taking her out. Her wretched bookworm upbringing!

Her male peers were utterly spoiled by the skewed demographics and desperate female competition to land a man of their own, however humble. No one bothered these days to properly date an old-fashioned girl, no matter how beautiful. So any potential boyfriends disappeared with a shrug and an encouraging smile to a more eager workmate. And if you disregarded all the junkies, jail birds and just plain idiots, it looked as if life was pushing her toward the assisted reproduction clinic and further down the aisle in one of those reformed churches to tie a same-sex knot that today's media was really shoving down your throat.

Well, tough! She had her own prince on a white charger! Olga shuddered when thinking about the rather tomboyish Lara who'd been wooing her lately. With a mental finger to her workmates, she jerked the desk drawer open, pulling out the little gift box, and gingerly rustled the paper, admiring the kaleidoscope of living pictures.

Their office probably resembled a giraffe cage in the zoo at meal time: everyone was sticking their suddenly elongated necks out from behind their monitors as the existing world view was crumbling, promising a jackpot to the office Cinderella. Come on now, open it, we can't wait any longer! What had he given you this time, your mysterious suitor?

Finally she pulled the wrapper off—and gasped, taking out the so recognizable and so widely advertised top-level iCom9 communicator. She remembered the bogus buyers' stage whisper on every street corner as they "discussed" the product properties from the company's fact sheet: "It's a millimeter thinner! And six grams lighter!" Then the hired actors would sneak a glance around them, as if saying to the curious crowd, "Did you hear that? If you hurry you might still get an easy term loan with negative interest!"

Honestly, she couldn't have cared less about the crowds being manipulated into changing their gadgets every three months, but her current comm was already four generations old, making it a bit awkward for her to answer a call as the consumerists around her cringed, stigmatizing her as an old-fashioned klutz.

She forced her wrist into the everlasting gel bracelet waiting for the morphplastic to adjust to her anatomy, then held her breath as she slid her finger across the sensor, activating the device. Expensive toy: a hundred and forty gold rubles, her wages for three months. But unfortunately, you couldn't buy foreign goods for traditional paper banknotes as the Russian government was trying hard to encourage production.

As she admired the perfect holographic image on the comm's internal surface, a tiny swab of custom-made polish was softening in the warmth of her skin, releasing a tiny spring-like needle.

Thinner than a bee's sting, just thick enough to pierce her skin, the miniscule hollow injector contained exactly one milligram of synthetic batrachotoxin: twenty times the lethal dose for an adult.

The poison had no effective antidote, identical to the one produced by poison dart frogs with their warningly bright coloration. More importantly, it was perfect to imitate an accident as the hired killer wouldn't wish to alarm the other victims or expose himself to the police.

A sharp pain pierced her hand. Her muscles twitched. Olga gasped trying to catch her breath, her heart missing a beat, then restarting double time in a desperately ragged rhythm. The toxin had stopped the neural impulses in her cells, leading to a paralysis and causing immediate arrhythmia, fibrillation and irreversible cardiac arrest.

Her strong young body convulsed, knocking over the vase and the flowers. Her workmates looked up again, this time in alarm. The sight of Olga wheezing and clutching her heart paralyzed some of them while encouraging others to act.

An anxious senior manager arrived to their screams of panic from his cubicle of one-way glass. As his title suggested, he was the first to take control, mumbling something into his own communicator as he summoned the resuscitation team—which was always on call in their office conveniently located in the very heart of Moscow.

The team arrived in no time. These guys were used to emergencies and countdowns. Their hefty bonuses were calculated by a complex formula that covered everything: the time the brain remained deprived of oxygen, the degree of medication administered to the patient and the amount of general resuscitation provided.

A paramedic shoved aside a clumsy volunteer who was kneading the girl's breasts imagining he was administering CPR. Other team members began bustling about, activating and connecting their diagnostics equipment. One of them yanked the girl's shoes off as they kept whining, empathizing with their departing owner.

The oxygen mask, the unsettlingly frequent clicks of the jet injector, the familiar discharges of the defibrillator so familiar to all of us from the movies—ten exhausting minutes of struggle for life. Then the team leader rose from the girl's body, shaking his head.

"Pointless. Irreversible cardiac arrest."

He looked around, searching for the senior manager who couldn't but cast glances at the girl's slim bare legs and the front of her torn blouse. The paramedic frowned and stepped in front of her, his burly figure obscuring the man's view. "Request your permission to commence procedure Protocol A2/1."

The balding manager jumped, the sickly dreamy expression leaving his face, replaced by the scowl of a cornered rat. Chronos affairs had been going south lately as potential clients refused to be turned into deep-frozen drumsticks and kept pulling their money out, opting for going perma instead. The staff's wages had plummeted and so had the prospectives, prompting the smartest workers to quit. Then an idea had struck him. The senior manager had checked staff medical records and came forward with an initiative aimed at keeping the remaining workers. He suggested offering every worker a personal corporate insurance that included the cryogenic immortality program. He'd bent over backwards at the board meeting as he displayed charts and schemes proving that even if they'd introduced the program ten years ago, they still wouldn't have had to pay for a single instance of hibernation procedure.

No good deed goes unpunished! Barely a week had passed since they'd had a special meeting handing each office worker his or her insurance certificate—and they already had their first claim! He sensed the atmosphere thicken. All eyes were on him, growing grimmer by the minute.

The manager chewed his lip. "Permission granted," he dropped. "Take her to the refrigerator."

He swung round and slogged back to his office, struggling to remember if there was still some brandy left in the bottle he'd stashed away during the last office party.

Behind his back, the well-oiled cryogenics machine was already gaining momentum. The gurney's wheels whirred, the resuscitation team's leader snapped orders as the Chronos in-house lawyer was mumbling something into his comm bracelet.

The fickle finger of Chance touched the girl's shoulder as she walked down an endless corridor toward a blinding light.

* * *

"Give my love to the Spider Queen!" I croaked into the enemy's face watching his pupils contract in terror, his mouth dropping in a silent scream.

The dagger in his body shook like a hungry dog on seeing a steak. Then it dug into the victim's flesh, slicing and viscerating its way through, devouring the unfortunate perma's soul. I recoiled in horror, trying to let go of the dagger. As if! The priest, the victim and the weapon—the ritual only worked if all three were connected in blood-curdling unity. On their own they weren't worth much. The vicious artifact sent a quick discharge through my arm paralyzing it, the spasm locking my fingers around the dagger's black handle. Six of the spider's legs had until now been folded up forming a single blade. They now clicked open like the fingers of an opening hand, piercing the victim's ribs. Slowly they left the body, revealing the wriggling bloodied claws.

And now it was my turn to shake uncontrollably as I began soaking in everything that had only a moment ago been my enemy—all of his memories, his knowledge and his emotions, compressing them into a tight wad that gained energy and shot into space, beamlike, toward what I supposed were Lloth's domains.

The unfortunate perma's body crumbled in a heap of black sand that immediately turned into thousands of spiders scattering in all directions. The satiated dagger clicked its legs closed, returning sensitivity to my arm. I staggered, trying hard not to collapse onto the swarming carpet of millions of tiny feet. I could barely register the mercs' hearty swearing as they danced on the spot trying to get out of Lloth's servants' way without squashing a single one of her favorites.

In the meantime, I was trying to puzzle my mind back together, recoiling from the remaining shreds of somebody else's thoughts, feelings and memories. No idea who I was supposed to have been in this ritual sacrifice—the hand of vengeance or a brainless retrodirective antenna, but he'd turned my mind into a right pile of shit. I wasn't a 100% sure but I had a funny feeling I wouldn't need a Chinese translator any near time in the future. Besides, thanks to a tip from the ever-watchful greedy pig I'd managed to glean just one mental image from my enemy's compressed thought flow. A top combo from the repertoire of the rogue who'd chosen the path of a Dark assassin and somehow managed to reach level 260 on his way.

The Wings of an Angel combo is dealt to your opponent's back by slicing his spine with one or both blades, removing the ribs from the spine and turning them inside out like a pair of sickening red and white wings. How gross. And still I couldn't deny I was dying to check out what it was I'd just gotten: mere information or an executable skill.

I was only worried everyone would sink into a coma watching a blood-curdling combo like that performed by a low-level knight with a heavy two-handed sword.

My unscrupulous inner pig studied the remaining prisoners with a greedy eye, then began whispering his plans into my ear, promising such a heady solution to all my problems that potentially could make the sun weep with envy. Even though I managed to suppress his voice in my head, I could now better understand the ways of those Dark Overlords corrupting their disciples. They simply played on their avarice and lust for power. So you think you're a useless waste of space, cringing with envy at the sight of a powerful warrior? No problem, bring him to the sacrificial altar! This was exactly the kind of field day the inquisition had had all those centuries ago with their genetic purges. Really, if you'd spent hundreds of years accusing every pretty girl of being a witch, no wonder the current gene pool was what it was...