Denner_s Wreck

“No,” Aulden replied. “You weren't listening. Thaddeus told it not to disturb him, with no qualification. Even if it hears us it won't tell anyone. It's a really stupid machine."

“What should I do?” Bredon asked eagerly.

“First,” Aulden told him, “you need the emergency codes."

Two levels and a corridor away, Thaddeus settled into a grey floating chair and gestured for the Trickster to do the same.

Geste obliged. Something felt very odd about the room, and he realized as the chair adjusted itself that no music was playing.

When both were comfortably seated, Thaddeus asked politely, “Now, why do you think I should stop my efforts to rebuild my stolen empire?"

“Because it's stupid and pointless,” Geste replied quickly.

“Oh?” Thaddeus's reply was cool.

“Yes,” Geste said. “Seriously, Thaddeus, what can you get by ruling an empire that you can't just buy now, with what you have? You can have any material possession you could possibly want; our galaxy is jammed with raw materials and energy, and all it takes is time and technology to make whatever you want-food, shelter, clothing, amusements, even women, whatever creatures you want. What good will an empire do you?"

Thaddeus cocked his head and smiled cruelly. “Can you really be that naive?” he asked. The smile vanished, and his voice turned hard. “I can have power. I will prove my superiority to all you young upstarts, with your foolish egalitarian beliefs and petty social rituals. I'll get the human race organized again, put an end to all this hedonistic anarchy."

“Will you?” Geste asked, almost sneering in mockery of Thaddeus's own behavior. “Do you really think you can do that?"

“Of course I can!” Thaddeus roared back. “I'm thousands of years older than you, Geste; show a little respect for your elders. I'm not a manufactured immortal like you, dependent on machines and symbiotes for longevity-I'm a natural immortal, a member of a superior race, one of the chosen people. My family is destined to rule over you ordinary humans. I have a head-start of more than two thousand years on any artificial immortal, and that two thousand years gives me experience and knowledge that you can't even imagine, with your pitiful few centuries behind you. You've lived all your life in pampered comfort, and you've been content with that, but I grew up in harder times, boy, I saw my mother's family murdered, my homeland destroyed, by you normal humans. I've lived through wars and disasters that would frighten you into catatonia, and I've learned from all of it."

“Have you? Then why did you fail twice before?"

“Because I was betrayed!” Thaddeus bellowed, rising from his chair, his face red with fury. “I trusted people, and they betrayed me!"

Geste resisted the impulse to taunt Thaddeus further. “All right, you were betrayed,” he said quietly. “Doesn't that show you that people don't want you to rule them?"

“What the hell do I care what they want?” Thaddeus asked, as he sank back into his seat. “I want it! I never claimed to be doing this for anyone else!"

Geste abandoned that line and groped for another.

“You could get killed,” he said. “You don't know what's happened out there these last few centuries. You might run smack into some sort of interstellar police force, or somebody else's empire, and get yourself killed."

“I'll risk it,” Thaddeus said. “I don't believe it, for one thing; I saw what you decadent babies were like, and now that you're all fake immortals, four hundred years wouldn't be enough to change that. You people need a thousand years just to decide what to have for breakfast."

“But what if some group of short-lifers took charge, caught someone by surprise…"

Thaddeus stared at him in such open disbelief that Geste did not bother to finish his question.

“Short-lifers,” Thaddeus said, “are absolutely harmless. They don't live long enough to learn anything dangerous. I've survived seven thousand years of the worst short-lifers can throw at me. If there's a short-lifer empire out there, all I have to do is wait for it to fall. It never takes very long."

The Trickster was by no means certain Thaddeus was right about that, but he did not see any sign that Thaddeus could be swayed by logical argument, and he did not continue that line of debate. “All right,” Geste said, “let me think.” He reached up and scratched his ear.

Thaddeus took the opportunity to signal a housekeeping machine for a drink. He turned to Geste, intending to play the gracious host and offer the Trickster something, and found himself staring at a sparkling web of metal in Geste's hand, a web he recognized immediately as a stasis field generator, though he had never seen one so small.

Before he could say anything, Geste triggered his weapon, and Thaddeus froze into total immobility, a sphere of air around him freezing with him. The soft light in the room refracted strangely through the interface between normal air and the motionless field, and the colors within the field-the red of Thaddeus's angry face, the grey of his chair, the black of his hair, the brown of his clothing-seemed to fade.

As the stasis field reached full intensity the three-meter globe first turned a dead, flat black, then brightened to gleaming, reflective silver, as light became first unable to leave the field, and then unable to enter.

Thaddeus was gone, sealed inside a mirror-finish bubble of timelessness. The housekeeping machine carrying his drink, a floating wedge of black with a crystal goblet embedded in it, bumped futilely against the bubble's bright, impenetrable surface.

Geste stared, trembling. He had forced himself to remain calm while arguing with Thaddeus; he had had his internal machines and symbiotes under orders to keep him calm, and a semi-intelligent biochip chanting gently hypnotic reassurance directly to his audial nerves. He had been as slick and smooth as anyone could have wanted in pulling the stasis generator from the bent-space pocket he had built into his ear.

Thaddeus had sca

Their symbiotes had been damaged, their own tissues somewhat damaged as well, and Geste was fairly sure that he had lost some magnetic memory somewhere, but Thaddeus had been reassured that he had disarmed his visitors.

However, he had not checked on the shape of the spaces they occupied.

Even Thaddeus could not think of everything.

Geste had counted on that. He had never heard of putting a bent-space pocket into a human body, and he had hoped that Thaddeus hadn't either.

Not that that had been his only trick. Thaddeus had wiped out a wide variety of artificial bacteria and a few viruses with his disinfectants and ultraviolet, and had confiscated more than a dozen weapons of various kinds in Geste's clothing.

The bent-space pocket had been the Trickster's best gimmick, though, and he knew it. People built the pockets into floaters all the time, but not into themselves; it seemed somehow unhealthy to put a hole through one's own body, even a polyspatial hole that bypassed mere normal-space flesh. For one thing, an opening was needed. Virtually all the natural openings in the human body were already spoken for, and creating new holes was dangerous and unesthetic.