The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (24 page)

Chapter Forty-Nine

My mind cuts in many directions. The gyrodome makes the blades sharper.

—Zultan Abal Meshdi

It was difficult to imagine that anyone could be unhappy living in the magnificent Citadel of Paradij. As the Zultan of the Mutati Kingdom, Abal Meshdi possessed everything a shapeshifter could desire, including a harem of the most stunning and sensual Mutati women in all of creation, each of them rounded heaps of rolling fat. On a terraced hillside, his private baths offered a broad selection of mineral and spirit waters from all over the galaxy, for soothing his tired bones and renewing his energy, which had been sapped by endless affairs of state. Tens of thousands of Mutatis, robots, and the slaves of various races (other than allergy-producing Humans) worked for him in the Citadel, a virtual city within the capital city, attending to his every need, his every whim.

Originally, Paradij had not been a world that appealed to any galactic race for habitation, since it was covered with arid deserts and vast salt flats. But the planet featured deep aquifers, essentially subterranean seas. The Mutatis—driven there by Human attacks against their other planets—had set up a massive hydraulic engineering project to bring the water to the surface, which they then used to create rivers, lakes, and irrigation canals for crops and forests. The costs in money and the expenditure of time had been enormous, but the marvelous result had been a source of inspiration to all Mutatis. It showed what they could do in even the most difficult environments, and that the greedy, aggressive Humans could not take everything away from them.

He lived in such exquisite luxury that he didn’t really need to go to war against the merchant princes. But they had insulted him and his people, driving them from one world to the next, never letting up.

And Mutatis did not take insults lightly.

With many important matters weighing heavily on his mind, the big shapeshifter shuffled toward the clearglax bubble of his gyrodome, which he’d had moved to one of the highest rooms in the Citadel, where he could be closer to God-on-High. The platform inside the dome spun slowly now as it awaited him, making a faint, inviting hum. Pursuant to his instructions, the mind-enhancing unit was in its simplest, most basic configuration, without the customized compartments that could be fitted on the outside to contain aeromutatis and hydromutatis. Sometimes he did not want such distractions.

Just then an aide interrupted him and said, “Pardon me, Your Eminence, but there is a messenger to see you. He says it is important.”

Shaking his tiny head in dismay, since he really needed what he had come to call his “morning gyro treatment,” the Zultan said, “Very well, send him in.”

Moments later a uniformed aeromutati flew into the chamber, and hovered in the air. It was one of the small, speedy flyers who were best suited for such tasks. “There are two messages, Sire. I carry one”—he held a small communication pyramid in one hand—”and the other is outside.”

“Outside?” Abal Meshdi said.

“Look over there, My Zultan,” the messenger said. He pointed to a small window on the narrow north end of the chamber.

Hurrying to the window, Meshdi beheld a sight that surprised him, and filled him with patriotic pride. He counted ten outrider schooners flying in formation over the capital city, swooping this way and that.

“They are performing for you, Sire, in honor of the glory they will achieve when you send them into battle.”

“But I thought there was a delay in production,” the Zultan said. “I was told that the vessels would not be ready for another month.”

“Apparently they solved the problem,” the messenger said, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Look, Sire, the outriders have come to receive your blessing before departing on their holy missions and giving up their lives.”

Filled with pride, the Zultan watched the bomb-laden schooners, each a beautiful doomsday machine capable of annihilating an entire enemy planet. Such a magnificent, perfect design. Truly, his researchers were inspired by God-on-High when they developed this most perfect and deadly of all weapons!

The Zultan felt tremendously humbled by all of this. As the leader of trillions of Mutatis, he was still only a tool of the Almighty, put here on Paradij to further the hallowed Mutati mission. Today, his sacred duty was to dispatch these outriders.

Already two fringe planets under enemy control—Earth and Mars—had fallen victim to his deadly design. And one additional outrider had been sent as well, with orders to strike against a third planet in the future at a predetermined time, on a Mutati holy day. Now—glory of glories!—ten more magnificent weapons were ready to go, and only needed his blessing before surging off into space.

The opening salvos of the Demolio program were all according to a precise, sacred pattern of numerology, following mathematical formulas laid out in
The Holy Writ
of his people. Two, one, and ten were sacred numbers, referring to a sequence of events that occurred long ago in Mutati history, leading to the most celebrated of military victories.

Until now.

It was not necessary to wait for confirmation of the third kill—the outrider who was still out there—before sending more of his brethren into the fray. The excited Zultan knew nothing could go wrong with any of the attacks, and that the third one would go off without a hitch, scattering another merchant prince planet to the cosmic winds. Then there would be ten more.

And many more after that.

‘Everything is predetermined,’
he thought, quoting from the ancient sacred text of
The Holy Writ
.

The Zultan felt euphoria sweeping over him, and then noticed the aeromutati fluttering its short wings, still waiting to deliver the second message. “Oh yes,” Meshdi said, extending a hand, palm up.

The messenger placed the gleaming communication pyramid on his palm. Afterward, the aeromutati tried to leave, but Abal Meshdi shouted after him, “Wait! I might send a response.”

* * * * *

The Zultan didn’t want to believe the message.

Angrily, he hurled the communication pyramid at the aeromutati and hit him square in the head, dropping him out of the air, where he had been hovering. The flying Mutati thudded heavily to the floor, didn’t even twitch. He was dead, but this didn’t make the Zultan feel any better.

“It’s not possible!” he bellowed.

According to the missive, his son Hari’Adab had barely escaped with his life when enemy commandos destroyed the Demolio manufacturing plant, along with the adjacent outrider training facility. The ten planet-busting schooners now at Paradij had been dispatched shortly before the disaster, and—for reasons of military security—had flown across the solar system by conventional hydion propulsion.

Two attendants ran into the chamber. “Your Eminence?” one of them said. “is everything all right?”

Reaching into the pockets of his robe with his two outer hands, Meshdi brought out a pair of long knives. Thunk. Thunk. The motions were smooth as he hurled the blades expertly at the terramutatis, hitting each of them in their torsos. The attendants dropped into piles of pulpy, bleeding flesh, beside the messenger.

For months, the Zultan had been practicing with his knives, throwing them at target boards. Fortunately for his aim, the attendants had been wide, easy targets. But he still didn’t feel any better.

I need to kill Humans, not my own people
.

Extremely agitated, he entered the gyrodome and stood on the whirling floor. Closing his eyes, he felt the mechanism probing his overburdened mind, trying to purge it of the weight of vital duties and decisions. But it only made him feel worse.

When he finally stepped out of the gyrodome, the Zultan felt confused and uncertain. Now he would need to wait for instructions from God-on-High before proceeding. Clearly, it was not enough to only destroy ten merchant prince planets, since the enemy had hundreds, with military industrial facilities on many of them. With only a limited number of doomsday weapons and no manufacturing facility to replace them, Abal Meshdi needed to rework his war plan.

As he watched the gyrodome stop spinning and shut down, he made a new vow. The destruction of his Demolio facility would slow the Zultan down, but he would resume operations as quickly as possible at another location, diverting all possible resources to the project.

And next time there would be no security breach.

Chapter Fifty

There are so many ways to kill a prisoner, and so many ways to make it entertaining.

—Supreme General Mah Sajak

Princess Meghina sat beside her husband in the royal box, with immense red-and-gold banners fluttering overhead, each emblazoned with the golden tigerhorse crest of the House of del Velli. They gazed down on the broad central square of the capital city, thronged with people who came to see the public executions. It was a cloudy afternoon, and she shivered as a breeze picked up from the west.

At the near end of the square, a platform had been constructed with a simple-looking chair mounted atop it … a device that her husband had said was actually a newly-designed execution machine. Perhaps a meter away, and around the same height as the empty chair, stood an alloy framework with a black tube on top of it. Wishing to spare herself some of the horror of whatever they had in mind for the prisoner, she had not asked him for details, and had silenced him when he tried to tell her. But in her high station, she still had to attend the event.

Now she gasped as a blue flame surged straight in the air from the top of the alloy stand, coming from the tube. The crowd roared its mindless approval, and then grew even louder when four guards escorted the condemned man toward the platform. Sajak wore a red hood over his head, and a simple red smock; without his uniform he looked very small and thin. Onlookers moved aside as the guards pressed their way through.

Meghina, the most famous noblewoman in the Merchant Prince Alliance, loathed these macabre spectacles that Lorenzo staged too frequently, and disliked the way he made her observe them whenever they were together. She and the Doge could not be any different, but eighteen years ago she had consented to marry him for the sake of her own House of Siriki, to give her people enhanced military protection and commercial benefits.

Over the time that they had been married—living much of the time on different worlds—she had tried to see good things in him, and on occasion his small kindnesses surfaced. But she felt no passion for the nobleman, no spark, not the way she had cherished Prince Saito. Such a distinguished old gentleman the industrialist had been, and what a terrible loss when he didn’t come out of his coma. She wondered if the rumors were true, that his own son had attacked CorpOne, leading to his death. If so, she hoped he got what he deserved.

In front of the Doge and his lady, entertainers wandered through the crowd, playing music, singing songs, and juggling, throwing glimmerballs high in the air. Hawkers worked the perimeter, selling gourmet foods to the excited people who had come to see fifteen traitors die.

How ironic this whole scenario was, Meghina thought, as she watched two black-robed men take custody of the hooded prisoner and lead him up the steps of the platform. General Mah Sajak had been a renowned torturer of Mutatis, and now Lorenzo promised he was going to die as horribly as he always gave it out himself. Fittingly, according to her husband, today’s means of execution was a device of Sajak’s own invention, a machine that he had been developing, and which no one had ever put to use. Until now.

Atop the platform, one of the robed men removed Sajak’s hood with a flourish, which seemed odd to Meghina. Normally it was the other way around; they put a hood on a victim just before executing him, a gesture of compassion at the end. But there was nothing normal about today’s event. General Sajak had been the most trusted military officer in the entire Merchant Prince Alliance, and had committed the ultimate betrayal.

Seeing the chair and the blue flame beside it, Sajak began to scream in terror, and tried unsuccessfully to free himself. The crowd grew quiet, except for the call of a food hawker, an odd sound drowned out by the General’s panicked shrieks.

“No, no!” he pleaded. “Not this! Please, not this! I’ll give you more names, people who conspire against the Doge!” Even from her distance of perhaps thirty meters away, Meghina saw the terror on the disgraced officer’s gaunt face, the way his eyes seemed twice their normal size.

Doge Lorenzo waved one hand, and a holo-image appeared in the air over the execution machine, a three-dimensional schematic drawing of the device.

“General Mah Sajak invented this machine himself!” a mechanical voice proclaimed over the loudspeaker system. “These are his own drawings!”

The image spun slowly, so that all could see it.

The elegant Princess didn’t want to watch this terrible event, but knew she had no choice. Her husband and the crowd would expect it, and she could not lose face by disappointing them.

“No!” Sajak screamed. He tried to kick one of the robed men in the groin, but a thick garment prevented this. In response, the man backhanded the prisoner, sending him sprawling. Forcefully, the ominously-attired pair then dragged Sajak to the chair and strapped him to it, while he continued to scream and shout his promises to reveal new information.

It did him no good, for his fate had been sealed. A black, rather dented robot climbed the platform, and removed the tube that was shooting the blue flame, so that it was now a mobile torch.

Pointing it toward the sky, the robot turned the flame up, to double its previous size. The crowd thundered its approval.

Even over that noise, Meghina heard Sajak’s screams.

“Louder,” Doge Lorenzo said, to an aide.

Moments later, someone turned up the volume on a fireproof microphone that Sajak wore on his person. His shuddering screams reverberated across the square, sending the crowd into a frenzy of pleasure.

* * * * *

Holding the torch, the sentient robot activated a laser eye on it, and directed a bright red light at the prisoner’s booted left foot. Jimu moved closer, and a metallic strap shot out of the device in his hand, wrapping itself around Sajak’s lower left leg, just above his ankle.

“No!” he screamed. “Don’t do this to me!”

The blue flame darted forward hungrily, and consumed the boot and the General’s foot. His screams intensified, but the robot paid no attention. This evil man had tried to assassinate the Doge, the greatest Human in the galaxy.

Where there had been a foot only moments before, nothing but a charred, cauterized stump remained now.

Moments later, Jimu burned the right foot off. The robot expected Sajak to pass out from the pain, but he didn’t, and kept wailing and crying for mercy. An expert at torture himself, the General was suffering indignity on top of indignity at the hands of the robot. The lower legs followed, then the thighs. Piece by piece, Jimu melted the body from the feet up. When he got to the lower torso, Sajak finally grew quiet and motionless.

The crowd cheered and clapped. Children giggled and played. Musicians struck up joyous tunes, and acrobats performed.

In a cruel spectacle, other robots under Jimu’s command then executed General Sajak’s co-conspirators the same way, one by one and piece by piece. Princess Meghina nearly gagged at the odor of charred flesh. Admittedly, these were all bad people, but she couldn’t avoid her feelings of intense sadness. Faking a little sneeze, she leaned forward and wiped tears from her eyes, not wanting anyone to see.

Through it all, she sat silently beside Lorenzo, showing the Doge and the public one face, while concealing another one.

* * * * *

Following the executions, Doge Lorenzo appointed the famed inventor Jacopo Nehr to a new position, surprising many people. Nehr—previously only a reserve colonel—became Supreme General of the Merchant Prince Armed Forces, taking control away from the noble-born princes, whose champion had been Sajak. The new military commander owned several machine manufacturing plants on Hibbil worlds, and preferred the uniformity of those new machines to Jimu and his motley bunch. Still, Nehr could not deny their loyalty or accomplishments, so he rewarded them by commissioning all of them Red Beret officers.

In the process, Jimu was initiated into the rituals and secrets of the elite paramilitary organization, whose primary mission was to protect the Doge. This pleased the robot immensely, but he found himself troubled by the memory of the terrible defeat suffered by the Grand Fleet at Paradij … the biggest military loss in merchant prince history. Sadness and guilt permeated his mechanical brain, but his logical circuitry told him that he had not been at fault, and that he had done his best possible job as Captain of the sentient machines.

Even so, he felt an inexplicable need to make up for the loss, in some manner. The loyal robot vowed to work even harder on behalf of Doge Lorenzo.