The Emperor of Everything

Ruiz attempted to keep his attention focused on the moment, on the dimly illuminated metal that formed the walls and floor of the corridor, but after a while, as nothing dire occurred and Huxley detected no evidence of surveillance, his thoughts wandered. It seemed to him that he had been spending a great deal of his life lately walking down empty corridors, bound for events over which he had insufficient control.

He became self-indulgent, which led to philosophical musings of the least useful sort. He began to see himself and his people as maggots wandering through the mineralized veins of some dead steel colossus, frantically searching for some remaining bit of carrion to feed on.

Eventually he was forced to laugh out loud at these pretentious, egocentric fantasies. Huxley glanced back, as if wondering what Ruiz could possibly find amusing under these circumstances. Ruiz smiled at him, which did nothing to allay the cyborg’s puzzlement.

“How does it look, Huxley?” asked Ruiz, speaking softly into his helmet mike.

“Still no sign of the Clearlight system. You know, I’ve developed a theory. Would you care to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“Well… the target is running a secret operation here — so secret that he needs to keep it from his topside security forces — the SeedCorp shock troops you mentioned. Or, if they’re Genched, from his techs and service personnel. And of course, even Genched troops can’t be any smarter than they were before their processing; they’re as liable to say stupidly revealing things as any real person. Anyway, he fears attack only from above, it looks like, and so maybe we’ve got a clean conduit right into the heart of his levels.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ruiz said without much conviction.

They trudged on, and shortly Ruiz’s attention wavered again. He found himself reviewing pleasant memories of Nisa — her face in the sunlight, her face in the soft colored lights of the barge. When he realized what he was doing, he was frightened. Something deadly might come his way at any moment, and if it caught him mooning over the woman, he would never see her again.

He shook himself, and tried to firmly grasp his mortality and the probability of imminent destruction.

“Stop,” whispered Albany. “Come, Ruiz.”

Ruiz ran swiftly forward.

Albany knelt at the foot of a ramp that bridged a discontinuity in the tunnel. Apparently the stack had once fractured, displacing the corridors so that one floor was a meter higher than the other.

A high-ceilinged nexus opened on the far side of the break, and bright lights glared down the corridor.

“I think we’re just about there,” said Albany.

“I believe you’re right,” said Ruiz. “Let’s get Huxley up here — let him fish a little.”

Huxley examined the ramp carefully, then climbed it and eased closer to the nexus, extending probes on long monomol rods. Ruiz and Albany hid under the fracture, the puppet sitting next to them, face full of bland unconcern.

Five minutes passed.

Huxley returned, face pale and sweaty behind his visor. “The Clearlight system takes over just beyond the corridor junction. I think I can handle it, but not for very long.”

He extended a coiled datacable, plugged it into a receptacle at the hip of Ruiz’s armor. He tapped at his dataslate, frowned, tapped some more. “All right,” he said. “I can’t guarantee how long this ident sequence will fool the system.” As he spoke, he plugged into each of the others, fed the data to their armor. “Let’s get in quick, before it changes codes and leaves us naked.”

“What else did you see?” asked Ruiz.

“Ruptors over the security lock; and it looks well-hardened. I hope Albany’s good with explosives, if the puppet can’t get us through. Several other corridors feed into the nexus, but according to the nav bead, we have to go through the lock to get to the target.”

Ruiz took a deep breath and flexed his injured shoulder to be sure it still functioned adequately. Then he removed the leash from the false Yubere. “Now’s your moment,” said Ruiz. “Take us inside.”

The instant the leash was gone, the puppet seemed to change, to grow a little. “Of course,” he said regally. He strode up the ramp as though he owned it already, and the others trailed him in a rough triangular formation, Huxley and Albany immediately behind the puppet, Ruiz at the trailing point.

Ruiz felt terribly vulnerable under the glare of the nexus lights. He forced himself not to look at the ruptor turret that projected from the wall above the security lock, even when the twin barrels depressed to follow him across the floor.

The puppet ignored the turret, and swept up to the lock. Without hesitation, he applied his eye to the scanner, pressed his palm to the lockplate.

To Ruiz’s intense relief, the lock’s armored doors slid back. They crowded inside; the doors shut, and the far doors opened.

“Come along,” said the puppet.

He led the way out of the lock, and into Yubere’s living quarters.