The Emperor of Everything

SEVERAL THREAD BARS appeared on the analyzer’s screen, and Ruiz touched the first one, labeled SURVEILLANCE RECORDS. The thread expanded into its nested subjects, and he followed the one that contained the recording of the assault on the pens.

The screen cleared for an instant, and then filled with a slightly grainy image, harshly lit, of a large person in bulky black mirror-armor, who walked quickly through the entrance portal of the pens, accompanied by two smaller figures, also armored. The tagline at the screen’s lower right corner said: REMINT Y’YUBERE AND TWO UNKNOWNS.

Ruiz studied this new enemy. He began to feel a little sick. He had never met Remint, but he knew him, with a knowledge born of the countless bloody encounters that had forged Ruiz into what he was.

Ruiz was abruptly and completely sure that Remint was the kind of killer he most feared, the purest and most deadly species of slayer, a man who lived wholly in the moment, untroubled by regret or foreboding. The man moved as lightly as a recent heavyworld immigrant — he gave an impression of irresistible strength, tightly leashed. Behind the mirrored visor, his eyes would be flickering, seeing everything, weighing it on the scales of his purpose. He would destroy without thought whatever obstructed that purpose, instantly and with instinctive efficiency.

Ruiz touched the screen, and the lower left quadrant displayed a still image of Remint’s face, as he had appeared on his first visit to the pen. He could see a little of Alonzo Yubere in those features, but the resemblance was obscured by cloned muscle and reengineered bone, so that the expressionless eyes gleamed out of slits cut through a mask of inhumanly dense flesh. If anything, the slayer was more frightening without his armor — he seemed even more truly an engine of destruction.

This was, in fact, himself as he had been, and it was like looking into a smoky mirror and seeing a grinning skull. Ruiz shuddered. Could such a man be defeated? He had never really thought it possible, when he had been such a man himself.

The screen split and began to display another group of armored persons, four in number, tagged: CONFEDERATES OF REMINT Y’YUBERE, IDENTITIES UNKNOWN.

Ruiz touched the forward speed dot on the display, and held it down to cycle past the initial penetration. The two groups of armored raiders converged at a locked ingress to the common area. He saw Flomel, who had evidently been given a ceramic blast pencil during Remint’s previous visit, attach the pencil to a security mechanism at the ingress. He watched Flomel trigger a flare of energies that had melted the device, allowing Remint and his people to gain access to the common room.

There was the glare and percussion of weapons, torn bodies, running and screaming. The raiders moved efficiently through the hysteria, cutting down anyone who blocked their path.

They set rip charges at the inner doors of the other Pharaohans’ cells, detonated them, swept through. In what seemed an obvious afterthought, the last raiders to leave seized several of the nearest slaves and herded them along.

Ruiz paused the recording, frowned. He was still very tired, but something about the sequence of events bothered him. Why had the attempt to cover their true purpose been so transparently clumsy? In all the other aspects of the operation, Remint had been coldly brilliant, directing the raid with inhuman precision.

An idea bubbled up from some deep layer of paranoia, and Ruiz couldn’t help speculating: Was all this an elaborate charade, designed to draw Ruiz Aw into the open?

He shook his head. Even if it was the opening gambit in a clever trap, he would still have to respond. He filed the suspicion away for later examination and allowed the recording to play on.

The pen’s security forces had finally begun to react to the raid, and they brought up monomol barricades and heavy flutter guns, trying to prevent the raiders from escaping.

Remint seemed to go into another temporal frame of reference, moving so quickly that he became a blur the camera could not resolve into clarity, no matter how much Ruiz slowed the recording.

Remint flashed forward, ahead of his troops, rolling under the barricades before the guards could react and bring their flutter guns to bear.

Ruiz watched the slow-motion carnage, fascinated and horrified. There was a dreadful beauty in the slayer’s movements, as he spun from one guard to the next, slashing with a sonic knife and firing a pinbeam with his other hand. In an instant six guards were down.