"I'd call that very reasonable of you," said the Bandit.
"I can see we understand each other," said Willowby with a smile. "How does 25 percent sound to you?"
The Bandit seemed to be considering the offer for a moment. Finally he shook his head. "No, that's not enough."
Willowby looked confused. "Not enough?" he repeated.
"I think a third makes more sense."
"You'd rather pay me a third than a quarter?"
"No," said the Bandit. "You're going to pay me a third."
"What are you talking about?"
"I want a third of your business. Give it to me and you can leave here alive."
"Are you crazy?" snapped Willowby. "I've got 25 men with me!"
"You mean these men?" asked the Bandit, waving an arm in their direction. As he pointed, a laser beam shot out of his finger and mowed them down before they knew what was happening. The last seven or eight had time to reach for their weapons, but the beam was replaced by an exploding energy ball, and an instant later Willowby was the only member of his party still standing.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"I told you: my name is Santiago. And you are a member of the Democracy. That's all I need to know."
The Bandit pointed a deadly finger at him, and an instant later Willowby fell to the ground, dead.
"That was stupid!" yelled Dante, rushing over to join the Bandit. "I told you—we needed his organization!"
"He worked for the Democracy," said the Bandit calmly. "The Democracy is our enemy."
"You were always going to kill him, weren't you?"
"That's what Santiago does to his enemies."
"Yeah, well Santiago could use his brain every now and then!" snapped Dante. "You've cost us billions. Billions!"
"I don't deal with the enemy."
"Then next time let me!"
The Bandit turned to him, and for just an instant Dante thought he was going to aim his lethal arm at him.
"You're a poet. Go write your poems. I'm Santiago. Let me handle my business in my own way—and don't ever stand between me and the enemy." He turned to one of the men who had run out of the house. "One of them is still alive. The fifth from the left."
"You want me to finish him off, Santiago?" asked the man.
"No," said the Bandit. "If I'd wanted him dead, I'd have killed him myself. Treat his wounds, drop him off on some colony world, and make sure he knows that it was Santiago who did this. Let him pass the word about what happens to anyone who stands against me." He turned to Dante. "Does that meet with your approval?"
"Hell, no!" said the poet bitterly. "What the fuck does he know about running an organization that spans a hundred worlds?" He tried to control his temper. "If you were going to let someone live, why not Willowby? He'd have been just as impressed as that poor bastard."
"Yes, he would have," agreed the Bandit. "And next time he'd have sent 200 men, or 500, or a thousand, and he'd have stayed away until it was over. He'd never give me another chance at him once he knew what I could do, and he couldn't let me live after I'd grabbed a third of his empire. If he'd shown any weakness of resolve, his own men would have been dividing the rest of his business."
"You could have negotiated," complained Dante. "Ten percent would still have been worth hundreds of millions."
"You don't negotiate with officers of the Democracy," said the Bandit coldly. "You kill them."
"But he was a corrupt officer, damn it! We could have reached an accommodation."
"They're all corrupt," said the Bandit, turning and heading back to the compound. "This conversation is over."
Dante watched him walk away.
Maybe you're right. Maybe you can't deal with representatives of the Democracy, even thoroughly corrupt ones. But damn it, you sounded a lot more reasonable when you were still just the One-Armed Bandit.
23.
Come inside the Blixtor Maze;
Spend your money, spend your days.
Nameless pleasures lie in wait—
Come along and meet your fate.
The Blixtor Maze was the brainchild of an alien architect named Blixtor. No one was quite sure what race he belonged to. Some said he was a Canphorite, but others said no, the Maze wasn't rational enough to have been created by a native of Canphor VI or VII, that he must be a native of Lodin XI. Still others said it was actually created by a human, but that his computer had crashed and he'd given up on the project, and other races built it based on what they could reconstruct from his shattered modules and memory crystals.
This much is known: no one ever succeeded in mapping the Blixtor Maze. It was said that parts of it went off into the fourth dimension, other parts were so complex that not even a theoretical mathematician could explain them. It was approximately one mile square. No one knew how many levels there were. The only thing that was certain is that no one had ever walked from one end to the other in less than a week, and even Homing Wolves, those remarkable domesticated creatures from Valos XI, were unable to retrace their steps.
It took four centuries to build the Maze on the isolated world of Nandi III. Legend has it that the original Maze was to be four miles on a side, but two crews got lost and starved to death. Nobody believed it—until they tried to find their way out of the Maze. There were some who felt the Maze was constantly moving, or rotating in and out of known dimensions, because you could wander into an antiquarian chart shop or a drug den, and when you walked out the same door nothing was where it had been. Further, if you had left something behind, you could turn and attempt to go back and retrieve it, only to find that the establishment you thought was two paces behind you was nowhere to be seen.
There were no warning signs as you approached the Maze, because the authorities operated on the reasonable assumption that you wouldn't be on Nandi II if you didn't have business there. Far from banning weapons, visitors were encouraged to enter the Maze heavily armed, since no lawman or bounty hunter was likely to respond to any entreaties coming from within the Maze. All laws were suspended the moment you took your first step inside the Maze. Murder was no longer a crime; neither were any of a hundred other actions that could get you executed or incarcerated in the Democracy, or the half-dozen that were still illegal across most of the Inner Frontier.
Dante was unsurprised to learn that Virgil was guilty of at least three of them. He was contacted by Blue Peter, who explained that Virgil was being held inside the Maze, that a group of permanent residents had him under what passed for house arrest, and that it was going to take a guide to find him and a lot of money to bail him out.
"How did you get out?" asked Dante over the subspace radio.
"The Maze spit me out," answered the alien. "It didn't want me."