Steve Perry - Matador 03 - The Machiavelli Interface

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2024-12-04 0 0 846.83KB 132 页 5.9玖币
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THE MACHIAVELLI INTERFACE
BY STEVE PERRY
Part One
When you have mastered the Way of strategy, you can suddenly make your
body like a rock, and ten thousand things cannot touch you.
—MIYAMOTO MUSASHI
Therefore the best fortress is to be found in the love of the people, for
although you have fortresses, they will not save you if you are hated by the
people.
—MACHIAVELLI
ONE
DEATH CAME FOR him wearing a smile.
It came in the form of a trusted friend, a counselor with the Wall since the
dangerous years, so long past. Here was one of Marcus Jefferson Wall's best,
a man who was, in a galaxy where lying had become an art, a true artist of
spoken prevarication; a man who had fooled the best machinery the Confed
could devise; a master of verbal fugue. Always before, the lies had been
under Wall's direction, for his own purposes; now, however, the liar had
shifted his aim. Such a pity, Wall thought. Truly it was.
"Ah," Wall said, "my old friend Cteel! Come, let me get you something.
Some dust? A flare of wine?"
The other man smiled, and nodded politely. "Perhaps a spiral or two of kik-
dust."
Wall rose from his orthopedia. The machinery whirred silently as he shifted
his weight, trying to accommodate his leaving. The man padded toward his
drug dispenser. It was a nice room, he knew. Big, lush, all the comforts of
true civilization. The floor was covered with handwoven carpet from the
Green Moon, fibers of bioengineered tutch wool dyed indigo and scarlet. It
was the most pleasing substance man had yet devised to walk upon barefoot.
The walls were hand-waxed persimmon wood three centimeters thick—
overlaying, of course, a ferro-foam armor and zap fields. The ceiling was
hung with spider silk from the New Zealand Arachnida, formed into a
gossamer sheet that shined with a natural silver color. And the electronics,
well, certainly there were none finer. Wall could have had a servomech
deliver Cteel's amphetaminic, but he preferred to do it himself.
At the dispenser, Wall said, "Kik-dust. Variant P."
A small mirror extruded itself from the slot of the unit and a fine nozzle
laid a left-hand spiral of the pink powder onto the shiny surface. Wall picked
up the mirror and returned to where Cteel stood.
"Variant P?"
Wall smiled, showing a fine and artistic etching of smile lines radiating
from the corners of both eyes. "Yes. A new one from my custom lab. As
exquisite as any you've ever had."
"Thank you, Marcus." Cteel produced a noselining tube, and with the grace
of a tea ceremony master, inhaled the pink dust. When he raised his head, his
eyes were already gleaming. "Excellent! I must recommend this to my
friends."
"Do sit down," Wall said. He waved lazily at the second orthopedia as he
climbed back into his own form-chair. Gel-like, the chair accepted him and
fitted itself perfectly to his contours.
After Cteel sat, Wall said, "Now, what brings you here in person?"
Cteel's smile was perfect, without a trace of guile. "The matter of Khadaji."
"Ah. The Man Who Never Missed. What about him?"
"He is, as I am sure you already know, in the hands of Confederation
troopers on the backwash world of Renault. Very much alive, despite reports
to the contrary."
Wall smiled. "I have just been reviewing that file. Has anyone determined
how he managed to convince a very savvy Over-Befalhavare Venture that he
was dead?"
"Not as yet. No doubt someone will soon."
"No doubt."
"In any event," Cteel continued, "I am sure you will wish to have him tried
and executed here on Earth, rather than in some provincial camp away from
the publicity we must milk from him."
"Such goes without saying," Wall said. "Unfortunately, Over-Befalhavare
Venture is now in charge of the Shin System, which includes Renault, and he
would very much like to flay Khadaji personally. He lost a great deal of face
originally, none of which has been restored since it was discovered that
Khadaji had been running the bodyguard school practically under the Over-
Befalhavare's nose."
"I can understand his desire."
"If we are to have Khadaji, there will have to be some... concessions made
to Venture."
Wall nodded. Of course. The Confederation was built on concessions. "What
do you think would be appropriate?"
"Perhaps command of Ground Forces. That way he'd be here on Earth,
where we could keep an eye on him. He's what—pushing a hundred? It's
about time for him to bow out, anyway."
Wall stared at his ceiling silk. Lovely, truly it was. "I could have President
Kokl'u arrange that, I am sure."
Cteel nodded. "Good. I'll deliver the message personally."
"I think not, old friend."
"Pardon?"
"Delivering the message. I'll have my man Massey do it. After all, he was a
student at Khadaji's training school, he'll be able to recognize him better."
Cteel looked perturbed, but only for an instant. "I was given to understand
that Khadaji wore a disguise, that none of the students ever saw his face."
Wall leaned back in his form-chair and sighed as he watched the pale silk
sheet over his head. "True. But I'm afraid I can't let you go, Cteel. You see, I
know about your plan to ally yourself with Venture." He looked at the other
man. "The Confed hasn't collapsed yet, and when it does, I still plan to be the
supreme power in whatever is left, old friend. You should have known that,
after all this time. Oh, I understand your thoughts—the Military will be a
factor, to be sure—but I'm afraid I can't allow such an alliance to take place.
It would upset the balance I'm striving to achieve."
Realization dawned on Cteel. Wall admired how well he took it.
"The kik-dust."
"I'm afraid so," Wall said. "I am not a cruel man, Cteel. It will be painless;
quite enjoyable actually, so I'm told. And you'll have several hours for last
minute good-byes, that sort of thing."
Cteel managed to smile. "Well. Thank you for that, Marcus. You do
understand it was not personal?"
"Of course." That might well be a lie, but Wall preferred to pretend to
believe it.
"I won't take any more of your time." Cteel rose and moved to kiss Wall's
hand.
Wall decided, for the sake of old memories, to allow Cteel a final victory.
He stretched out his hand and allowed the man to take it. He hardly felt the
jab of Cteel's sharpened fingernail against his palm, and he pretended to take
no notice of the new light in Cteel's smile. "Farewell, old friend," Wall said.
"And you, old friend."
After Cteel was gone, Wall called his vouch from its tether, to check on the
scratch. The servomechanism inspected the cut with its sensors, bonded the
skin, and pronounced Wall unharmed. Poor Cteel thought his nail carried
slow-acting neurotoxin; in fact, his biomed tech had worked for Wall for
years, and the nail was laced with nothing more than a mild antiseptic. It
wasn't so much for Wall to do, to let his old friend think he'd been revenged.
He was, after all, The Wall: he could afford to be generous to a dead man.
TWO
EMILE ANTOON KHADAJI sat on a slab of silicon, staring at the inside of
a room that seemed carved from that same material. An interesting cell, he
decided. The rubbery substance was hard enough so that it could not be torn
and, say, stuffed into one's mouth, if suicide by choking might be desired. At
the same time, the silicon was soft enough so that it would take a very
determined effort for a prisoner to effect self-damage. He could, he supposed,
stand on the chunk that served as bed and chair and dive headfirst at the
floor. With his head tilted just so, it might be possible for him to break his
neck. Such would do him little good, Khadaji knew. A military-issue vouch
no doubt prowled outside the door—itself hidden under layers of silicon—
and it would be inside at the slightest hint of physical danger to the cell's
occupant. Probably ultrasound telemetry fed the vouch Khadaji's vital signs,
but they might be using Doppler.
Khadaji grinned at unseen watchers. Suicide wasn't on his mind. Oh, there
were risks to being here, but calculated ones. He had, after all, given himself
to the Confed willingly. Not that he'd had any choice—the decision had been
made years ago, even before he'd left Greaves and his one-man stand against
the Confed machine. The Man Who Never Missed. That's what they called him,
though it was no more than a fairly clever trick. He'd blown a few shots at
the troopers with his spetsdöds. The trick lay in hiding that, so the Confed
only thought he'd never missed. He darted plenty of them into a six-month
long muscle clench with neuro-muscular poison flechettes. Thousands.
The silicon-covered door slid back suddenly, breaking Khadaji's memory
run. He looked up to see three men and a woman enter the large cell. The
woman and two of the men—Sub-Lojts—spread out fast and pointed hand
wands at Khadaji. The fourth man, a Lojtnant, stood in front of Khadaji, but
three meters away.
Khadaji smiled at the Lojt; it was the man who had killed him on Greaves.
Or so everyone had thought at the time.
"You're a lucky man," the Lojt began. "We were ready to begin neurochem
and brain scanning, the simadams couldn't wait to get at you, but you got a
reprieve—from the Confederation President Himself. He's sending a special
envoy to talk to Over-Befalhavare Venture, to discuss your... ah...
disposition."
"Why tell me?"
The Lojt grinned. "Because the Over-Befalhavare wishes you to know that
no matter what, happens, you belong to him."
Khadaji, who had been sitting very relaxed, tightened his muscles and
shifted quickly forward, as if he intended to jump from the silicon block. He
moved no more than a centimeter with the fake attack.
The Lojtnant leaped back a meter, digging for his hand wand, and the
flanking troopers snapped their arms out stiffly and tightened their aims.
Khadaji relaxed again, leaning back and pulling his feet up. He chuckled.
The Lojtnant's face reddened. Khadaji saw him think about saying
something nasty, then decide against it. Everything that went on inside this
room would be monitored, the Lojt would know, and a hasty word would
surely find its way back uplevels, to brass. This particular Lojt already had
one black mark on his record, that of "killing" Khadaji in the first place; he
wouldn't want another. The brass might think it strange enough that the Lojt
was even here, light-years and time-years away from Greaves, to be seeing
Khadaji again. He didn't want that; neither of them did.
Abruptly, the Lojt spun and stalked from the cell. The guards followed, one
by one, at least two wands pointed at Khadaji until they were all out of the
cell. The door slid shut silently.
Well. An interesting development. Not altogether unexpected. In fact,
Khadaji had been waiting for it. The Confed wanted to pillory him in full
view of its citizenry, of course. Under the glare of its baleful eye, and the
photomutable gel eyes of galactic net coverage, too. And where better than
Earth? Of course, leaving Venture's control on Renault for the heart of the
Confederation was very much like leaping from a small vat of acid into a
larger one, but Khadaji had no intention of being cooked by either chemical
fire. Intentions might not be fact, but that was something he had learned to
live with over the years.
He stood and stretched. The dead-gray paper coveralls he wore didn't tear
as he bent to touch his toes, but he knew the fabric's strength would not stand
much more than that. Assuming he could figure out what to attach them to,
they didn't want him hanging himself. He wished they'd left him his robe and
cowl. He'd gotten quite used to wearing the uniform of the Siblings of the
Shroud in his disguise as Pen over the last few years.
He shrugged. Ah, well. One did what one had to with what was available.
The silicon felt warm and spongy under his bare feet as he began to
practice the martial dance known as the Ninety-seven Steps of Sumito. His
essence settled to his hara, and his concentration became total.
* * *
Dirisha Zuri stared at the holograph on the table. When she looked up, she
saw the others watching her expectantly. It was only at that moment that she
realized how much she had missed them all: Red, Mayli Wu—also called
Sister Clamp—Bork, and of course, Geneva. When she'd left Matador Villa,
the training school for the galaxy's most elite bodyguards, it had been with
regret, but also with some excitement. Of all the students and instructors,
Dirisha had been chosen to protect Rajeem Carlos, a man that Khadaji-
masked-as-Pen thought to be one of the most important in the galaxy. The
Confed was falling, and Carlos might be the one to help the new order stand.
But after six years at the school, it had become home, and these people had
become her family: Red, the spetsdöd instructor; Mayli, the teacher of love's
philosophy and technique; Bork, the big man whose muscles seemed carved
from harder flesh than other men wore; and Geneva, the blonde who was the
best of them with the tools of a matador or matadora, and who loved Dirisha
as she had finally learned to love in return: these were her friends and chosen
family. Only two of them were missing: Sleel and Khadaji.
Dirisha cleared the emotional thoughts and brought her attention back to
bear on the problem at hand. "How did Sleel get these?"
Bork said, "They were in a computer, and Sleel says anything that is in can
be gotten out, if it's important enough. He says you ought to know."
Dirisha grinned. Yes. She had a quick surge of memory, of the night she
had broken into Pen's personal files, using a complicated subterfuge. The
story had gotten around.
"Okay," Dirisha said, "let's do a link-scan on this, just like in training. I
want us all to be able to draw this layout from memory by tomorrow. Three
dimensions and color-codes. I'll put it into the cube's comp so you can do
rotation and angles on it."
Everybody nodded.
"When's Sleel coming back?"
Seated across from Dirisha, Red said, "Eighteen-thirty. He's thickening our
cover."
Dirisha nodded at that. Good. The cube Geneva had leased was sometimes
used for religious retreats, which was the ostensible purpose this time, but
somebody somewhere would run a scan on that eventually. Until they were
ready to move, they didn't want any cools knocking on the portal, locals or
Confederation.
"All right. I'll dump this into the system and let's get to it."
The chairs slid back and the group rose, to go to their terminals. It was just
like a training session at the Villa, only now, Dirisha thought, she was
running it instead of Pen. Khadaji. Damn, she still had trouble condensing the
two men into one. Khadaji had only worn the disguise of Pen, the cowl and
robe of the Siblings of the Shroud, changing his voice and manner so none
would know. Khadaji the Legend was different from Khadaji the Man she had
worked for as a bouncer in a pub almost a decade past. Both were different
from the shrouded figure who called himself Pen, a mysterious and
inscrutable teacher who had taught the defensive martial way. And yet, all
three were the same. Dirisha thought she understood why Khadaji had taken
the disguise and what his intent was, but there were times when it was hard
to remember that Pen was only a role—
"You want me to feed that to the comp?"
Dirisha looked up at Geneva, who lightly massaged the tight neck muscles
Dirisha only just now realized she had. Dirisha smiled at the younger woman
and patted her hand. "No, hon, I'll do it. Thanks."
Geneva looked worried. "Can we do it, Dirisha? Get him out?"
Dirisha wasn't at all sure, but she said, "Yeah. We can. Using what he
taught us, we're the best there is at what we do. If we move fast enough, we
can do it."
Geneva seemed reassured, for she smiled. She used the barrel of her left
spetsdöd to scratch a spot behind Dirisha's left ear, a small gesture she had
begun after the two women had become lovers at the school. "Okay. I'll get to
my terminal and start working it. You're as bad as Pen, giving us one day to
do a full-memorization."
As Geneva turned away, Dirisha's smile faded. There hadn't been any
question in her mind that she would contact the others and arrange for the
rescue of Khadaji; more, none of them had questioned her leadership, either.
Even Sleel, who never accepted anything at face value, had smiled and
nodded when Dirisha began to outline what she wanted. It was a little
frightening, somehow, that they would defer so readily.
Dirisha took the holograph to the computer terminal in her room and began
to prepare the unit to scan the image. Normally, Geneva would be here with
her, just as Bork and Mayli usually shared room and bed. But for this,
individual attention was needed. The plans for the prison in which Khadaji
was being held needed to be as familiar to the matadors and matadoras as
their own bodies. There could be no mistakes allowed, were they to survive.
As the computer's molecular/viral brain digested the image placed before
its scanner, Dirisha allowed the thought she'd suppressed earlier to surface.
Yes, they could do it, if Khadaji stayed where he was. If they moved quickly
enough, they might free him. But it would have to be very fast indeed;
otherwise, what would be left might not be much. The brain that lit Khadaji
and Pen might be broken on the wheel of the Confed's mental machineries,
leaving only a husk without the ability to generate any thoughts. They would
need a puppet for their show trial, and if that was to be avoided, there was no
time to lose.
THREE
THE WALL regarded himself with a critical eye. He smiled, and his wraith
returned the expression exactly. The dop-pelganger produced by the
holographic mirror was a perfect twin; from a third viewpoint, it would be
nearly impossible to tell which was the man and which was the image of the
man. Had he been inclined to existentialism, Wall could have made some
interesting observations.
Ho, brother. We have changed, over the years, haven't we?
The image nodded almost sadly. Facing Wall stood a tall and physically
perfect man who looked forty, though he was half again that age; the shade
was dark-skinned, blue-eyed, and black-haired; it wore a face Wall's mother
would not have recognized. Like the caster, the reflection was a careful sham,
a construct built to hide the true form. Even the name was a disguise, full of
historical psychology and no more real than the holoprojic image that
regarded Marcus Jefferson Wall thoughtfully.
"Off," Wall said. His twin disappeared like a light switched off. Wall
grinned. He had come a long way from the Darkworld. He had been born an
albino, one of the experimental sports that still bred true on the far world of
Rim, a hundred years after such genetic tamperings had been forbidden.
Chemicals and dyes and lenses had hidden the external signs; surgery and
implants had changed his face. He no longer looked the part of an exotic,
though he still had one advantage common to his pale brothers and sisters: he
was pheromonically potent. Like all the albinos from the Darkworld, Wall
held an almost magical attraction for normal humans. Such a thing wasn't
totally responsible for what he had become, of course, but it had helped. Ah,
yes, it had helped....
Enough of this stroll through the memory vaults, he decided. Nichole
would be arriving shortly; he must be ready. At the thought of the girl, Wall
felt himself flush. Nichole Miyamoto was a trembling twelve, a rare and
precious flower just beginning to bud. He was looking forward to opening
her petals. That her father was one of Kokl'u's ministers made it easier, of
course. The man was ambitious, and who better than Wall the Kingmaker as a
friend? Wall trusted no man or woman past a near point, but he was generous
with those he considered his friends. Minister Miyamoto could become a
friend, through his daughter....
"A visitor," the security comp said. The voice of the machine was soft,
feminine, even childlike.
Ah, Nichole!
"Show me."
The holoproj lit to his left, filling the space left vacant for it. The image
coalesced from formless color, to show the elfin form of Nichole standing at
the entrance to his sanctum. As he watched, the security computer scanned
the image, giving for a brief moment a flash of bare skin under the thin silk
robe. The skin faded to muscle and the shadows of internal organs, then the
underlying bone.
"Clean," the computer said.
Oh, yes, she was clean. Fresh, alive, not yet nubile, and clean, in all the
senses of that word he loved.
Abruptly, Wall found that his armpits were damp, that his hands felt
sweaty. His heart raced, his mouth went dry. How silly. To feel like a young
boy meeting his very first girl, it truly was silly.
Some cynical part of Wall's mind sneered and shook a metaphorical head.
Silly? it seemed to say. No, it's merely perversion, and you do treasure the illusion
that makes you tremble, don't you?
Wall's grin never faltered. He had learned to tune that part of himself out
when he wished. What use were the best meditative techniques and drugs if
one couldn't avoid a part of one's self when one so desired?
"Admit her."
The door slid open noiselessly. The girl, who barely reached Wall's chest in
height, started at the movement.
Oh, how delightful! She was nervous, like a fawn from a nature holoproj!
"Nichole, how delightful to see you. Please come in."
"H-hello, My—my Lord Factor."
Wall took the sweetness of her fear and respect and allowed it to fill him
for a moment before he shook his head. "Ah, my lovely child, you must call
me Marcus. We are going to be great friends, and I want you to think of me
not as a Factor, but as a... man."
He could not read the look, for the girl quickly lowered her gaze and
bowed her head. "Yes, My Lor—I mean, yes, Marcus."
Oh, the thrill was so sublime! He put his hand on her shoulder—such a
wonderful shoulder!—and massaged the muscle gently through the thin blue
silk. She was a vision for all his senses, the sight and smell and feel of her! He
摘要：

THEMACHIAVELLIINTERFACEBYSTEVEPERRYPartOneWhenyouhavemasteredtheWayofstrategy,youcansuddenlymakeyourbodylikearock,andtenthousandthingscannottouchyou.—MIYAMOTOMUSASHIThereforethebestfortressistobefoundintheloveofthepeople,foralthoughyouhavefortresses,theywillnotsaveyouifyouarehatedbythepeople.—MACHIA...

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