The Emperor of Everything

Albany moved about the tram, burning off the remaining proximity jects, tiny mantraps that fired an anesthetic charge at any protoplasm that touched their sensor fields. Albany was using one of the Dirm arms to spring the jects, after which he would apply a pinpoint of energy to fuse the mechanism.

He held the arm aloft. “When we’re done with this, I’m going to pitch it to the Gencha. Maybe one of them will eat enough of it to get sick.”

Ruiz wondered if any humans lived below, or any Gencha sufficiently worldly to report the sudden rain of food that had fallen from above. There had been nothing he could do about that. The tram would have ground to a stop under the weight of all of them: his slayers, the dead Dirms, and the former passengers. He tried to imagine what it might be like to exist at the bottom of the pit, what sort of person could survive among the great number of Gencha that must fill the caverns below. He couldn’t — they would have to be so strange as to no longer be recognizably human.

He went to sit beside Huxley, who had developed a worried frown. “What is it?” Ruiz asked.

“Not sure,” said the cyborg, tapping at his dataslate and checking the connections of his sensors. “I’m not getting any of what I should be getting. You’d figure a setup like this, there would be as much security at the top station as on the tram, but I’m not getting much. Actually, I’m not getting anything. Either our party is an overconfident man who expects no trouble from below, or he’s got stuff that’s too sophisticated for me.”

Ruiz looked at the puppet. “Which is it?” he asked.

The false Yubere shrugged. “Like all men, I have my moods and blind spots.”

“Whatever that means,” said Albany, who had finished his detrapping operations.

The puppet looked at him without expression. “Metaphor and allusion; these are the tools of the supple mind.”

“Whatever that means,” said Albany. “Ruiz, we’re fairly safe now. I don’t want to fiddle with the tanglefoot; it would take a lot of my remaining firepower to burn the stuff off. So if you don’t mind, we’ll all just be careful.”

The tanglefoot was a mat that ran around the perimeter of the tram, just outside the razor rails. An incautious foot descending on the mat caused the tanglefoot to fire barbed wires into the foot. Even armor wasn’t entirely proof against a mat; some wires would penetrate, enough to discourage lifting the foot. Ruiz had once stepped on tanglefoot, even now he could remember the awful sensations of pulling loose — the barbs ripping through flesh and tendon, the little wet pops as they came through the skin.

“We’ll be careful,” he said.

The tram rode steadily up the rail, and Ruiz stationed himself at the control panel, ready to press the Dirm’s elbow into the scanner cup, should a request come through the short-range communit built into the panel. But the comm’s activity light remained dark, and nothing disturbed their progress.

After a while Ruiz relaxed enough to look out at the walls of the pit, which at this height were even more wormy with interrupted tunnels. From the mouths of some of these openings came signs of life within, soft noises, an occasional flicker of movement, the nose-tingling smells of unfamiliar alien cookery. Ruiz wondered what sort of creatures made their home here so far below the human levels of the stack. According to the data Publius had provided, they were still a long way beneath the lowest levels of Yubere’s dungeons.

When humans had arrived on Sook, the planet was populated by a diversity of alien races. Some, reduced to devolved remnants, had been there for eons; others had been more recently marooned.

When the humans had succeeded to domination on Sook, some of those aliens had retreated into the roots of SeaStack.

In any case, none of the pit’s inhabitants came to the tunnel mouths to look at them, and Ruiz surmised that the Dirms had entertained themselves by potshotting at the dwellers, a theory that gained credibility when he noticed the recent scars of energy weapons across several of the openings.

The dark roof of the pit drew closer, until Ruiz could see that it was a rough dome, built of scrap alloy beams, chinked with unpolished meltstone. Apparently some titanic weapon had punched a vast hole through the stack in some long-forgotten battle — and then someone had hurriedly repaired the damage. How long ago had that been?

Now he could see the terminus of the tram rail — it passed behind a curved monomol barricade just below the dome’s foundation buttresses. The barricade, like the tram, seemed shiny and new compared to its surroundings.

“Let’s get set,” said Ruiz. “I’ll sit one chair, Huxley the other. Albany and Durban on the pallets with Yubere between them. We don’t know what to expect, but whatever we find, be quick, get off the tram as fast as you can — and then get behind something hard. Make sure your armor is tight, check your weapons, loosen your muscles.”

“Yes, Momma,” said Albany.