The Castle in Cassiopeia Read online

  He checked the weapons, found they were in good repair, and concluded that they were there just in case an invading enemy reached the chamber where he had left Proto and the two women.

  He walked a little farther and came to a closed door. He drew his burner, then approached the door. Unlike the others, this one didn’t slide back, which meant either that it was locked, or that it was only programmed to allow Kaboris to pass through, and probably only Kaboris it recognized.

  He reached out, touching the door lightly, hoping to find some small or hidden latch. There was none, but suddenly the door began to glow, which could mean anything from a “Keep Out” message to an intruder warning.

  A few seconds later it opened, and he found himself facing a Kabori who took one look at him, growled something he couldn’t understand, and launched himself at him. Pretorius fired his burner at point-blank range, an expression of absolute surprise crossed the Kabori’s face, and a second later he had fallen to the floor, twitching slightly.

  Pretorius entered the room, pulled the Kabori out of the way, and looked around to determine what was so special about it that it had been kept shut and locked. It was when he saw the untidy sleeping mat in a corner that he had to conclude the door was closed solely because its occupant had been sleeping.

  He spent another minute rummaging through the room, hoping to find something, anything, of value, came up negative, and left the room. The door did not close automatically behind him, so he tried a few words and gestures to get it to move. When nothing happened, he took another minute to hide the Kabori under his bedding.

  He then stepped out into the hall again, walked by the room in both directions, decided that there was nothing to attract the curious other than the open door, about which he could do nothing, and continued on his way.

  He proceeded to the end of the corridor, turned back, came to a fork, went off in a new direction, and spent the next half hour following forks and finding nothing of use.

  Finally he decided to go back to the point where they had started to see if any of the others had experienced anything more useful, and found Snake waiting for him.

  “Apollo?” he asked softly.

  She shrugged. “Not a word.”

  “Let’s hope he’s found something.”

  “Well, if he hasn’t, I have,” said Snake.

  “Oh?”

  She nodded her head and smiled. “If it’s not his private quarters, then it belongs to the most decorated Kabori in history. If you had to choose knowing only that, which would you pick?”

  “Got a lot of medals and decorations around it?”

  “Let me put it this way,” said Snake. “If they weren’t using some alien hardwood for the door frame, it would have collapsed a long time ago. Or if it is Michkag’s, a couple of months ago.”

  “Okay,” said Pretorius. “You wait here for Apollo.”

  “Where are you going?” she demanded.

  “To get Proto, Irish, and Pandora,” he answered. “I hope you’re right, but even if you’re not, they’ve been standing out there long enough. See you in a couple of minutes.”

  Pretorius made his way back, opened the door, silently caught Irish’s attention, and waved them over. Once they began walking, he pressed a forefinger to his lips, and they remained silent.

  He led them to where Snake awaited them. A moment later, Apollo came back down his corridor and rejoined them.

  “You’ve found him!” he said, when he saw that Pretorius had reassembled the team.

  “Perhaps,” was his answer. “Snake found something interesting enough for us all to check it out, and we couldn’t leave half the team exposed for much longer.”

  Apollo looked dubious. “That’s not half the team. That’s two-fifths of it plus a Kabori officer.”

  “Only until he starts to speak and says a wrong thing,” answered Pretorius. “It’s better—and safer—this way.”

  “So what did Snake find?” asked Apollo.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.” Pretorius turned to Snake. “Lead the way, and signal me when we’re getting close.”

  “Right,” said Snake, heading back the way she had come. A glowing ceiling illuminated the corridor.

  They had proceeded for about thirty meters when Pretorius noticed a camera lens embedded in a wall. He froze, staring at it.

  “Not to worry,” said Snake, as the rest of the team also saw it.

  “I assume you have a reason?”

  She withdrew a small device out of as pocket. “From my less-interesting but better-paying job,” she said, pointing it at the camera lens. A blindingly brilliant beam of light came out and hit the lens. “It didn’t do anything this time, of course,” she explained, “but the first time blinded it permanently.”

  “It also means we’re on the right track,” said Apollo. “I never saw a camera the direction I went.”

  “Ditto,” confirmed Pretorius. “Okay, Snake, let’s keep going.”

  She led them in a straight line for another twenty meters, then turned sharply left, then right, and suddenly they came to a door of hand-carved, sculpted bronze, with various medallions lining each side of it.

  Pretorius positioned himself directly in front of it to see if it would respond to his presence by opening. It didn’t. He then touched it lightly, prepared to pull his weapon if it sounded an alarm, hoping it would vanish into the wall. It did neither.

  He turned to Snake. “How the hell did you open it before?”

  “I didn’t,” she replied. She knelt down and examined the door minutely, pressing here and there, but nothing happened.

  “Well, it’s not visual and it’s not tactile,” she said softly. “The only thing left is music.”

  “And words,” said Pretorius.

  She turned to him. “Okay, there’s got to be fifty million songs, and probably ten times that many words. Where do you want to start?”

  “By using our brains,” answered Pretorius. He turned to the team. “Think of a word, a term, something that’ll have special meaning to Michkag.”

  “I think I’ve got it,” said Pandora. “If he’s got one friend, one ally that he can trust who’s not part of his empire, one intruder he doesn’t want killed, who is it?”

  “The original Michkag?” asked Snake.

  “Hell, no,” said Pandora. “He’s masquerading as the original, has taken over his empire. He’d want the original dead before he could talk to anyone.”

  “Oh, shit!” said Pretorius. “Of course!”

  “You know?” said Snake.

  “So do you,” answered Pretorius. “Would it help if I told you that Proto also knows, but Irish and Apollo don’t?”

  “You gonna play games or you gonna tell me who it is?” demanded Snake irritably.

  “I’ll tell you, of course,” said Pretorius, “and I’ll bet the damned door opens when I do.”

  “Okay, I’m waiting.”

  “Who’s the one friend we know Michkag has in the Democracy?” said Pretorius. “Who’s the Kabori who brought us the DNA we needed to clone him, and who spent years training him to impersonate the original Michkag?”

  “I feel like an idiot,” said Snake. “I know who you mean, and I can’t remember his name.”

  “Try Djibmet,” said Pretorius—and as he uttered the word, the door receded into the wall.

  The room that was revealed was circular, roughly fifteen meters in diameter—and four Kabori who had been sitting on chairs jumped to their feet and went for their weapons.

  They were too late. Apollo and Irish already had theirs in hand, and Snake had hers out and firing a fraction of a second later. It was decided more by the element of surprise than superior marksmanship, but in another second all four Kabori lay dead on the floor.

  “What now?” said Irish wearily. “More killing?”

  “They were the enemy,” said Pretorius.

  “I know, and the rest of you have been doing this for years. But th
is is only my second assignment as a Dead Ender, and all this blood takes getting used to.”

  “Just be glad it’s their blood,” said Snake.

  “It won’t be long,” said Pretorius. “There are three doors plus the one we came in through. If we’re lucky, Michkag’ll come bursting through one of them any minute now.” He gestured Apollo to one door, Snake to the other, and he positioned himself by the one in the middle. “Proto, you’re Michkag now.”

  Proto promptly changed his image to become Michkag’s duplicate.

  “And if it’s not Michkag coming through one of the doors?” asked Pandora.

  “Then having Proto standing in our midst will give us a momentary advantage,” said Pretorius. “Either way there’s no sense hiding your weapons.”

  They stood, tense, silent, and motionless for almost a minute, and then Michkag burst out of the central door, a huge laser pistol in his hand.

  “Hi, Michkag,” said Pretorius, turning his burner on Michkag’s hand until the Kabori screamed and dropped his pistol to the floor. “Remember us?”

  “You’re as good as dead, all of you!” snarled Michkag.

  “No,” said Pretorius, stepping aside so Michkag could see the four dead guards. “They’re as good as dead.”

  “You don’t think you can get out of the best protected castle in the galaxy, do you?” demanded Michkag.

  “Why not?” said Apollo with a smile. “We got in, didn’t we?”

  “You should have stayed where we put you,” said Pretorius. “A ready-made empire, and all you had to do was play ball with us.”

  “Ball?” repeated Michkag, frowning. “What is ball?”

  “A colloquial expression,” answered Pretorius. “You think about it, while I think about what to do with you.”

  “There are only six of you,” said Michkag, “and this one”—he indicated Proto—“may look like me for the moment, but he is actually the size of a pillow. You are surrounded by more than a million Kaboris. Surrender now, and I promise your deaths will be quick and relatively painless.”

  “I’ve always wanted a quick, painless death,” said Apollo. “But not for another half century or so. Or do you think you can deliver it personally?”

  For an answer Michkag lunged at Apollo, who fell back against a wall. Even as Michkag was reaching for his throat, he delivered a powerful blow to what passed for the Kabori’s solar plexus and followed it up with a karate kick to Michkag’s knee. Michkag howled in agony, and suddenly he had a curved blade in his hand. He tried to slash Apollo’s neck open with it, but Apollo was turning, and he practically cut the man’s arm off instead.

  “That’s cheating!” snapped Snake.

  Michkag turned to her, a look of total loathing crossed his face, and he began advancing on her, blade still in hand.

  “Of course,” said Snake, drawing her screecher, “if you can cheat, so can I.”

  She pressed the firing mechanism with a forefinger, and the room was filled with a low humming sound from the sonic weapon—everywhere but between Michkag’s ears, where the sound began scrambling his brain, and finally turned it to something resembling glass and shattered it.

  “You okay, he-man?” she asked of Apollo.

  “Nothing that a transfusion and fifteen or twenty stitches won’t solve,” he said through clenched jaws.

  “Can you hang on until we treat it?” asked Pretorius.

  “I think so.”

  “Good.”

  “Why don’t we do something for him now?” asked Irish, ripping off a sleeve of Michkag’s uniform and tightly binding Apollo’s arm.

  “First, because I suspect we weren’t as quiet as we think, and second, if Czizmar’s diagram is right, we’re not that far from Michkag’s ship, which surely has an infirmary or the equivalent.” He paused and looked around. “First things first. There’s no trash atomizer here, at least none than I can see, so we’re going to have to hide the body. Irish, you’re bigger than Snake and Pandora. Give me a hand. Let’s drag him back to where he came from.”

  Irish walked over, they each grabbed a foot, and they began pulling the corpse into the next room.

  “More like a study than a bedroom,” noted Irish.

  “Still, it’s got a closet; that’s all we need.”

  They stuffed the body awkwardly into the closet. Then, before they closed the door, something caught Pretorius’s eye, and he reached in and pulled it out into the open.

  “Just what I wanted,” he said. “Get Proto in here.”

  Irish left the room and came back a few seconds later with Proto.

  “Take a look,” said Pretorius, indicating the full-dress uniform, replete with dozens of medals, that he had pulled out of the closet.

  “Impressive,” acknowledged Proto.

  “You’re going to be Michkag from here to the ship. Can you duplicate it?”

  “Give me a minute to study it,” he said, and Pretorius and Irish moved back out of his way. After some forty seconds had passed he said, “All right, I think I’ve got it,” and turned to face them.

  “Perfect!” exclaimed Pretorius, staring at the false Michkag in the false uniform.

  They went back into the main room.

  “He looks like the real thing!” said Apollo, clutching his arm.

  “Good,” said Pretorius. “Because if anyone questions it, and we don’t make it to Michkag’s ship unseen, he’ll explain that we’re from a rebel colony populated by human stock, we were offering to sell him our vast supply of fissionable materials, you got a little obstreperous, he had to discipline you, and since he wants those materials, he’s taking us back to our planet so he can negotiate—which clearly means make his demands—in person.”

  “Will they buy it?” asked Pandora. “That he’d go without bodyguards?”

  “If we just keep moving, they might question him, but I don’t think anyone’ll have the guts to stop or disobey him.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “You’ve seen the way his empire runs,” replied Pretorius, “both in Orion and here in Cassiopeia. If you were an underling, and he was walking in full dress uniform with some prisoners and a duplicate of that laser weapon in his hand, would you challenge him?”

  “Point taken,” she said.

  “I think I’ll display a minor wound or two,” suggested Proto. “If we do run into any Kaboris, it will show them that nothing hinders me when I make up my mind.”

  “All right, give it a try,” said Pretorius, and Proto instantly displayed a couple of minor flesh wounds on his torso. “Pandora, you’re the one who studied the map. Lead us to wherever the hell he stashes his getaway ship. Apollo, you and Proto bring up the rear. I’ll be just ahead of you if you have to lean on me at some point. Now let’s get lined up properly.”

  Snake walked to the door Pandora indicated and then looked back at Pretorius.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Now,” he said.

  30

  They made it to a large area leading to Michkag’s private hangar in less than five minutes and were confronted by a group of Kabori soldiers when they arrived.

  “Stand aside,” said Proto into the hidden t-pack.

  They did so, and then one of them cried, “You’re hurt, Michkag!”

  “A scratch,” muttered Proto. “You want hurt, try him.” Proto pointed at Apollo.

  “Let us take him off your hands,” said another. “We know how to handle Men.” His voice dripped with contempt at the mention of Men.

  “I promised I would return him to his world,” said Proto into his hidden t-pack. “If they do not give me what I demanded for him, I will kill him there.”

  “We will accompany you!”

  Proto stared coldly at them. “Have I asked you?” he said at last.

  “But you are wounded, and traveling with five Men!”

  “No mere Man can hurt me,” said Proto. “I can kill them all right here if I choose to, but I promised the enemy
their safe return.”

  “What do we get for returning them?” asked a soldier.

  Proto smiled. “More than any Man, any hundred Men, can possibly be worth.” He gestured with his nonexistent weapon, and they all began moving again. “Fear not for me,” he said into the t-pack as the two groups parted, “but for those who sought to harm me.” He turned to Pandora and Snake. “Move, you two, before I lose my temper, which is growing shorter by the moment.”

  The Kaboris stepped aside and Pandora led them down a narrow passageway to the actual hanger, which had no roof above it.

  “Nothing but sky,” said Snake, looking up.

  “Do you think they bought it?” Irish asked Pretorius.

  “They’re not following us,” he replied.

  Word seemed to have gotten out that Michkag was taking his prisoners to some other world, and doing it alone. Though there were a handful of soldiers in the hangar, not one spoke to Proto or approached him, though all saluted.

  “How are you holding up?” Pretorius asked Apollo.

  “I’m good for another five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “You’re too damned big to carry,” said Snake. “If you pass out before we reach and board the ship, I suppose we’ll just drag you by your feet.”

  “Just as well I can’t feel the love coming from you guys,” muttered Apollo. “It’d just be a distraction.”

  “Maybe we should let him rest a few minutes,” said Irish.

  “He needs treatment more than rest,” replied Pretorius, “and he can’t get that until we’re on the ship. And there’s another consideration, just as serious and just as pressing.”

  “Oh?”

  “How long do you think it’ll be before someone finds Michkag’s body?”

  “The man’s right,” muttered Apollo. “Let’s go.”

  They approached the ship, and suddenly an armed Kabori stepped out from behind it.

  “Stop where you are!” he growled, burner in hand.