The Emperor of Everything

The puppet’s face twisted, just for an instant. “Dangerous even to tease me about such things,” the false Yubere said, in a voice that was suddenly dark and wild, as if another person spoke from his body.

Ruiz gave the puppet a speculative stare. What was this? Was the puppet — and thus Yubere — not so bland a creature as Publius had led him to believe?

“Sorry,” said Ruiz. “Of course I acted on Publius’s instructions. Would I dare to defy such a potent monster? Who is that brave, or foolish?”

The puppet’s face resumed its mask of disengaged cheerfulness. “As you say. Well, another matter, then. Why must you keep me on this leash? Surely you know I wouldn’t defy Publius’s instructions.”

“It makes me feel better,” said Ruiz. “Besides, it’s clear already that he gave different orders to me than he gave to you.”

Half an hour later, Ruiz heard Albany’s whisper through the comm. “Come.”

Albany was alone when they reached him a few minutes later. “I left the others to keep an eye on developments,” Albany said. There was a jagged undertone to his voice. “Do we have to do this, boss?”

Ruiz nodded. “What did you find?”

“Weird stuff. Weird. What is it with you and the Gencha? You seem to be going out of your way to rub up against them.”

In fact Ruiz had noticed the slow strengthening of the Gencha stink, as they walked.

“Never mind that, Albany,” he snapped. “What did you find?”

Albany sighed. “So don’t pay any attention to me; see if I care. Well, we found a great big hole in the stack. This tunnel ends there, like the big hole ate right through it when whatever made the big hole happened. The hole is about a hundred fifty meters across, roughly cylindrical, with lots of other tunnels above and below this one. A spiral tramway goes around the walls, avoiding the tunnels — it looks to be pretty recent construction. The hole goes up almost half a kilometer, according to my radar, but it goes down a lot farther — three kilometers. But I can tell you this: It stinks like the whole Gencha race lives at the bottom of it.”

“What was the activity you detected?”

Albany shook his head. “Don’t know — it dropped off when we got a little closer. My guess is that it was the tram — a car going up or down.”

“Surveillance activity?”

“Huxley says not. Is he any good?”

Ruiz ignored the question. The pit hadn’t figured in Publius’s briefing; apparently Publius’s data on Yubere’s stronghold was imperfect. He hoped that the navigation bead wasn’t useless.

He turned to the puppet. “What is it?”

The puppet shook his head amiably. “I seem to have forgotten about this. How odd, to be surprised by such a major feature in my own house.” He looked genuinely bemused, though only for an instant.

“Can we get to the tram track?” asked Ruiz.

“Passes twenty meters under our tunnel, spirals around the pit wall and passes sixty meters above the tunnel,” said Albany. “But you can see for yourself; we’re almost there. There’s a useful level of ambient light in the pit, if you want to switch off your helmet light.”

As soon as Ruiz killed his light, he noticed a soft red light at the end of the tunnel. His stomach jumped, and he felt a sweat break on his forehead.

“Oh yeah,” said Albany.

The red glow was the hue preferred by the Gencha who had installed his death net and mission-imperative. He felt a phantom shift in his mind, as if ghosts of those constructs still existed somewhere in him. An odd lassitude welled up in him; he fought it down, bludgeoned it with his purpose.

They reached the end of the tunnel, where the others lay on their bellies. The cyborg had extended several probes into the pit; he appeared to be fishing with invisible line. Chou the pinbeamer was well back from the edge, her face pressed to the tunnel floor. Durban seemed a compressed spring of destruction, waiting to uncoil. He gave Ruiz a feral glance as Ruiz crawled up beside him.

“Cut back your personaskein,” ordered Ruiz. Durban gave him a wordless snarl, an inhuman expression… but then he reached up to his neck and adjusted the skein.

The beaster might turn out to be a liability, Ruiz thought, just before he looked out over the pit.

The walls seemed to be the source of that disturbing bloody light, and he wondered at the extravagance of Alonzo Yubere, to so illuminate this vast hole. Judging the man from his puppet, he’d never have expected such a flair for the dramatic.

The tramway was a single rail, held away from the slagged-over surface of the pit by webwork brackets; its metal showed the brightness of frequent use. It spiraled endlessly down into the pit, its delicate glimmer finally lost against the glow.

Ruiz edged forward, so that he could look far down into the pit. A thin mist obscured the depths, catching and concentrating the light so that it seemed a great gloomy red eye looked up at Ruiz from the bottom of the world.

“Something’s falling fast,” said the cyborg, who hastily retracted his probes.