The Emperor of Everything

Ruiz had taken one of the most difficult tasks for himself — killing the Dirms. Dirms possessed vestigial remote brains distributed through their bodies in a number of locations, a legacy from their overgrown sauroid ancestors. Through an expensive and uncertain process, these vestigial brains could be enhanced with tissue from the Dirm’s primary brain, until the alien possessed a form of distributed intelligence that made it almost impossible to instantly disable the creature. Ruiz would have to burn through enough of the Dirm’s brains to disable the creature before it could report the attack.

Then, supposing all went well, and Huxley detected no alarms on the tram’s uplink, they would all fling themselves into space, tethered by programmable monolastic descenders — special lines that would stretch to absorb the shock of hitting the end of the tether, but not rebound. If Albany’s calculations were correct, they would end up dangling two meters over the rail as the tram passed.

They’d have to drop, avoid any of the mantraps Albany might have missed, avoid injury, and not fall off. Then they’d have to catch the puppet, and the other two slayers.

After that they could start wondering what they might find at the top of the pit.

“This ought to be easy,” said Albany, grinning ferociously.

Ruiz wasn’t very amused. All his life he had thrown himself into situations of uncertain violence, confident that he would survive them, as he always had. It no longer seemed possible for him to enter conflict with the same impersonal monomaniacal intensity that had guarded him for so long, and he wasn’t sure what had changed. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he was no longer as indifferent to the possibility of death; now he wanted very badly to live, with a fervor that grew stronger every day.

He wondered how it was he had lived for so many years without noticing that he hadn’t cared very much whether he lived or died.

“Wake up, Ruiz,” whispered Albany, who nudged him and pointed. The tram was coming up the incline toward them, moving upward somewhat more slowly than it had descended — a heartening development. It carried six passengers, though these weren’t anesthetized. They lay on their pallets, looking up empty-eyed. A chill passed through Ruiz — these were obviously deconstructed persons, returning from the Gencha.

Ruiz squinted through the scope of the long-barreled spitter he had carried strapped to his packframe for just such an occasion. The Dirm’s scaly face swam into focus, the pithing scar prominent just below the creature’s skulltop nostrils. Its moonstone eyes stared dully, as if the redistribution of its intelligence had taken something essential from it.

Ruiz dropped the crosshairs to the Dirm’s left shoulder joint; it held the tram’s speed yoke in its left hand.

“Now,” he said, and fired.

His weapon launched a supersonic needle of frozen gas, which struck the Dirm and thawed explosively.

Before Ruiz could see the damage he had done, he was firing again, at the right shoulder brain, the abdominal brain, the left hip, the left calf. He switched his fire to the other Dirm, who was reacting to the destruction of its partner, its right hand rising toward an alarm button. Ruiz hit the right shoulder brain, then before the Dirm could switch hands, the left shoulder, and on to the other centers.

He was vaguely aware of the spurts of white sparks as the pinbeamers killed the solenoids, of the darker flash of Albany’s graser as he burned away the mechanical devices on the near side of the tram.

The shooting was over in two seconds.

“Clean so far,” Huxley barked. The three of them slung their weapons and rolled over the lip of the tunnel into the void.

The fall lasted a timeless instant, until the deceleration jerked Ruiz upright. He waited until the tram was almost under him, then slapped the release and dropped the last two meters. He landed on one of the passengers; it was like falling into soft sand, it cushioned the impact. He managed to keep his balance, and jumped toward the first Dirm he had shot, which was floundering weakly. The spitter had pulped its joints along with its brains, and it showed no sign of surviving intelligence.

Ruiz swung the little sonic blade and lopped off the creature’s left arm just below its shattered shoulder. He jerked the arm loose, slashed the Dirm’s safety harness, and kicked the alien over the side.

He turned, to see Albany struggling with the other Dirm, whom he had apparently not done such a good job with. Some strength remained in one arm, and it was resisting Albany’s efforts to pry it out of its seat, hissing and swinging the arm like a club at Albany’s head.

Ruiz bounded across the tram and took off the arm with a slice of the sonic knife. This Dirm retained some of its sapience, and it stared in bewilderment at the stump of its arm, as Albany and Ruiz pulled it out of its seat and toppled it into the pit.