Bruen placed bone-thin fingers to his temples, pressing slightly and rotating his hands. "I just do." He raised a hand in protest. "No, my friend, I know that is no answer. The only other thing I can tell you is that I have faith. What? Heresy from a Seddi Magister? Perhaps. I think, however, that you of all people can understand."
"Why me, Magister?"
Bruen's smile was a wispy thing. "You, Magister Assassin, carry the burden of death constantly within your fingertips. What if your poison reaches the wrong person, kills the innocent? What if the man we remove was just about to betray his cause? God built the universe on uncertainty. The quanta are God's joke on reality; they affect everything. You share my burden — the power of life and death based on future probabilities of human action."
"The chance for error." Ret rumbled in a deep bass. "But Magister, for me, I must judge the value of each life one by one. You, most venerable teacher, must judge the future of all humanity."
"I throw a Seddi paradox back at you, Butla Ret. If the God mind is one, and if the God mind is infinitely divisible into awareness, which reality phase do you judge, and which do I? According to the quanta, it's all the same — and all different."
"You are very good, Magister, you have shifted attention away from my question. Soon you will have us steered into the solipsistic perspective of existence. I repeat, however, how do you bear responsibility for the probability of your own failure?" Ret cocked his head, black eyes gleaming as he laced his fingers together.
Bruen sniffed wearily and sighed. "I do so because no one else can. Does that surprise you?" He smiled, seeing disbelief in Butla's eyes. "It does? Very well, are you ready to sit down before the machine and attempt to deflect it while it's within your mind, sharing your thoughts?"
"No, Magister." A shudder shook Ret's massive shoulders.
Bruen nodded. "You see, Butla. tike Arta, I, too, was condemned from birth. My parallels are very like hers. No one else can fill her role. She is unique in that, just as I myself am unique in dealing with the Mag Comm. Our lives consist of nothing more than individual phase realities which happened to fit a probabilistic niche some thing happened to observe. That's a frightening thought — be it true or not."
Butla Ret's lips twitched. "And God has built uncertainty into the very underpinnings of the universe."
"Now you see the true nightmare of existence, my friend."
Staffa kar Therma lay on cold stone, unaware of the world around him and the mildly curious stares of his companions. Instead, he fought the dream that wound through his aching head. and succumbed to defeat.
He twisted and ran, bolts of energy seeking his vulnerable body. The corridor down which his bare feet pelted had been bent by explosions that had wrenched blasted steel into jagged edges. Here and there an overhead panel provided just enough light to show him the way through eerie shadows.
Behind him, the faceless pursuers howled, shrieked, and cursed as they shot at his fleeing back.
Fiery air ripped in and out of Staffa's searing lungs. Ahead of him, a bulkhead exploded in fire and destruction. The concussion smashed him onto his back, impaling his shivering flesh on one of the torn petal edges of metal that thrust up from the floor.
Staffa's throat tore in violent screams as he felt the cold metal slipping through his back and slicing neatly through peritoneum and spinal column. At first his intestines slid away from the edge, squirming to avoid the invasion that finally severed them, spilling hot brown digestive juices into his body to bu and begin eating away at the very flesh they served.
Staffa whimpered as he looked down, seeing the bulge beneath hard belly muscles, feeling steel cutting inside, pok-
ing the white skin of his stomach up in a steeple while the widening edge filled him, foreign, hard, cold.
In slow motion, the point formed under his stretching skin, lifting his naval, turning it inside out.
His choking lungs exploded again as the keen gray point broke through the
strained skin that slipped rubberlike and clinging along the lifting edge. It stopped, protruding — a gleaming peak of death over the snowy-white of his skin.
His brain terror-locked. He choked on fear and disbelief. A wretched sob shook his lungs while cold from the steel slowly spread through his gut, seeking his vitality, drawing i his life into the impersonal metal.
He became aware of the shuffling of millions of feet. Unable to tear his straining eyes from the spear of geaming gray lancing from his tortured gut, he heard the mutter of their voices, thick with hatred: watching. watching him 1 die.:
He screamed again, refusing to look up, refusing to see the damnation in their haunted dead eyes.
A slow murmur stirred them. "You are one of us now, Star Butcher! One of us!" It rustled in his mind, chilling, cursing.
They shuffled aside and Chrysla stepped out to stare at him with haunted yelow eyes. With one slim white hand, i she reached down and pressed a firing stud to blast him.:
"NO!" Staffa screamed, knowing it was all a dream — one from which he could not force himself to awaken. A dream he must live forever.
Chapter 10
Tybalt the Imperial Seventh reclined in his plush gravity chair, surrounded by his opulent sandwood desk. The airconditioning stirred the jasmine-scented air above his head and the Regan sun shimmered down through the crystal skylight. Gentle strains of an obscure Maikan symphony soothed him. He absently began to chew his thumb as he watched the message fax. The holo of Ily Takka paused after her ritual greeting. Tybalt smiled.
How I've missed you, my hot fox. Haven't had a decent romp since you left. Enjoying the taste of power, my precious? Beware, it's poisonous. He laughed. Also true to her prediction, he had grown tired of having no one to talk to. The others simply agreed or refused to express their true feelings on matters out of fear of his power.
How lonely, this business of being Emperor.
Her next words brought him upright. "My Lord Emperor, it seems we have miscalculated. We thought Staffa might bargain beyond our means. We accepted that we might have to eliminate him from the service of the Sassans. To my surprise and astonishment he has turned down both the Sassan offer of contract — and ours. Lord Emperor, he wasn't even present. We had to deal face-to-face with his Wing Commander — and in the presence of the Sassan Legate to boot. The exact transcript of my actions and offers is enclosed with this report. Suffice it to say, the Companions don't care to listen to offers at this time, nor will the Lord Commander fight for either side. Enclosed is the packet his people prepared. I trust you will find it to be most interesting."
Impossible! Staffa turned down the largest contract ever offered? He wouldn't even listen to an offer from Rega? Or Sassa? A sudden shiver ran down Tybalt's spine. What did
it mean? What was Staffa's angle? Was he preparing to go rogue? Perhaps turn to piracy? Or worse, could it be some deep conspiracy he and the Sassans had concocted during Staffa's last contract?
Tybalt picked up the brief from the ceramic table before him. He frowned at the broken seal and looked back at the screen as Ily continued, "Not the least of the revelations to come out of the Itreatic Asteroids is that Staffa himself is on leave. He has disappeared." Her lips curled with triumph. "But, Lord Emperor, he is vacationing within Rega and I believe I have the ability to find him. I will keep you informed concerning the results of my search."
Tybalt realized dumbly that his mouth gaped open. The Lord Commander had gone totally daft! The single most important man in the politics of Free Space — disappeared! Vacationing, by the Bloody Gods!
Ily bent her head in deep thought. "Which brings us to the Companions. I couldn't interest them in any of the offers I tried to make. One possible exception might be the Targan affair. Wing Commander Lyma hinted that Staffa might contract to fight for the Empire in that 'domestic' matter. As a result, I propose we allow that stew to boil for a whie longer."