Punk six had a smartgun. She had old unit tattoos on her face, from some off-planet marine force. Her custom job had wires jacked into her arm.
Dom would have preferred the Confed marines.
“A fucking corp,” said Beret.
“Vent his ass,” said the woman.
“Hell you say, Trace. Corp exec, ransom—” said the one with the shoulder patch.
“Sell ‘im,” the guy with half a face agreed.
“Vent him,” said the woman as she began to power up her weapon.
“It’s your call, Bull,” said the man with video eyes.
The bald one looked down on him, shaking his head. “He looks like a corporate type. Could be worth something to someone—”
Patch and half-face gave satisfied nods to each other.
“—But I don’t want to deal with the upkeep, and the bastard shot a chair at me.” Baldy looked up at the woman. “Vent him, Trace.”
“Just the head,” said Beret, “We can harvest—”
Dom had been trying to think of a way he could either talk or fight his way out of this. He was about to say something, when Beret was interrupted by an impact that shook the ground. The punks all turned to face in the same direction.
“Shit, it’s a fucking paladin!” That was the last thing Beret ever said. A beam of energy shot through his torso, cutting him neatly in half.
The one with the shoulder patch fired his pulse carbine, cutting a left flank swath while the woman with the smartgun cut in from the right. They should have caught the attacker in the cross fire.
A shadow passed over them. Whoever it was jumped. There was another impact, and the ground shook again.
Trace and Patch were cut down from behind.
Half-face returned fire with his auto-shotgun. It sounded like a jackhammer and was about as accurate. A beam of energy erased the remainder of his face.
In the interim, Baldy and the video-eyed machete wielder had run off for parts unknown.
Dom got to his feet, holding his arms wide, and faced the paladin. The paladin’s body armor was spotless white, gold, and gleaming chrome. He had a narrow-aperture plasma weapon cabled into his backpack. The pack towered over the ovoid helmet, sign of a manpack contragrav unit. A gold cross was laminated on the paladin’s right shoulder.
The voice that addressed Dom passed through a electronic filter and had the bass turned way up. “Lower your hands, citizen. I do the Lord’s work.”
Religious fanatic. “I appreciate your help—” Dom read a small chromed nameplate on the breast of the body armor. “Brother Rourke.”
“Thanks are not required. It is our calling to combat the Devil’s influence on this poor lawless world—”
Dom ignored Rourke’s pitch. He spent the time looking over the four sinners that the nut had just erased. It wasn’t that he objected to the killing. If there were ever four people that needed the express route off-planet, it was these punks. It was doing it in the name of God that grated. It was almost as bad as killing someone in the name of some government.
“—is customary to transfer a small tithe to the Church.”
Dom looked up from Trace’s corpse. “What?”
“Proper thanks to the Church of Christ, Avenger for your deliverance is made by tithing to—”
“That’s what I thought you said.” Great racket, save any poor bastard that looks like he has two grams to rub together and make a sure profit. It was just too bad for Brother Rourke this time. “All my assets have been taken over. I don’t have any cash on me.”
“That is unfortunate.”
Rourke lifted another weapon before Dom could react. The paladin shot him, and the world blinked out of existence.
* * * *
CHAPTER SIX
Coup d’État
“Might might not make right, but it makes a damn good argument for its position.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.”
—Marcus Tullinus Cicero
(106-43 BC)
At exactly 2542 hours, Godwin Local, Colonel Klaus Dacham strode into Dominic Magnus’ office. Klaus was not in a pleasant mood. Ten years ago he’d convinced himself that it had been dealt with. Then came the discovery of Dominic Magnus’ identity, and then this mission—
And at the critical moment the murdering bastard escaped.
The feeling strung Klaus’ nerves tight, in an invisible tide, as if he were piloting his mental ship much too close to a point gravity source. It was a point he’d been orbiting for fifteen years.
Forget her, said a small heretic thought. She’s dead.
The thought angered him even more. The fact that she was dead, beyond reach, beyond any reconciliation—that was the dark hole his soul orbited. Killed by her favorite. The knowledge that the murderer had escaped justice this past decade tore all the wounds open.
The blood was still fresh.
And her murderer was still alive.
Sometimes Klaus wondered why he was obsessed with punishing the murderer of a woman he had hated. Hated and abandoned. Still hated. Every memory of her burned as badly as acid.
However, also burning in him was the sense that he was right. The necessity to punish the wrong was a scar on his soul deeper than even his duty to the TEC. A burning scar that, until recently, had been dormant.
Klaus should have been able to take Dominic, this time, without having to stretch the authority the TEC had given him.
And the murderer had still slipped through.
Klaus wondered if anyone at Executive Command— other than him—knew who Dominic really was. Did his superiors know why Klaus Dacham was so eager to command his first field mission since Paschal, at an age when most TEC agents were comfortably ensconced behind desks?
Klaus suspected that the old man Dimitri knew. If Dimitri Olmanov didn’t know, he was certainly capable of knowing. It was rumored that the head of the TEC could know anything that he put effort into finding out.
Klaus was skeptical of omniscience. However, Klaus did believe that if Dimitri knew about Dominic and still ordered this mission, then Klaus had implicit permission to act as he saw fit.
“Dominic Magnus—” Klaus frowned at that. It was a pretentious alias.
Klaus had only recently learned that his quarry had fled to Bakunin. Apparently, “Dominic” had appeared here within a year of Klaus’ last attempt to bring a belated end to the murderer’s life.
Coming to Bakunin had been like falling into a black hole. Bakunin was not part of the Confederacy, and even the TEC couldn’t penetrate beyond the scarred surface of its society. Klaus had been liaison between the TEC and the SEEC intelligence community, a dusty desk job, when he had learned of his quarry’s continued existence.
The file on “Dominic Magnus” had been buried in with a mass of reportage dealing with the arms industry on Bakunin. Klaus would never have seen it if the information packet hadn’t been mislabeled. The report had been requested by Klaus’ opposite number in the SEEC, and Klaus was only supposed to be a courier. Instead, someone had keyed the file “ATTN: Klaus Dacham.”
That file had been a minor part of Sirius’ and Centauri’s massive preparatory effort for Operation Rasputin. Seeing “Dominic Magnus” buried in those files had resurrected old phantoms Klaus had long thought exorcised.