The Knights of the Black Earth

Vengeance is mine;
I will repay, saith the Lord.

Romans, Chapter
12, Verse 19

Confront them with
annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them in a deadly situation,
and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to
strive for victory.

Sun Tzu,
The
Art of War

Be extremely
subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the
point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

Shortly after they
landed on Laskar, the four men went out and bought a car.

They paid cash for
it, so Friendly Burl, the friendliest vehic dealer in Laskar, was not fussy
about such details as
Who are you really?
and
Where have you come
from?
Besides, he thought he already knew the answer. Four gray and
faceless suits; probably on an illicit holiday; an escape from boss,
sig-others, kids.

“You guys planning
on being in Laskar long?” asked Friendly Burl of Burl’s Friendly Vehics.

Two of the men
carried briefcases; none of them carried luggage.

“No,” said one of
the suits, handing over the requisite number of golden eagles.

The manner and
tone in which the man said that single word sucked the “friendly” out of Burl
and caused him to revise his original estimate. These were not stressed-out
execs. He began immediately and somewhat nervously to count his money. Finding
it correct, he relaxed.

“Salesmen, huh?”
Burl ventured. He winked knowingly. “Or maybe not selling but dealing?”

The men did not
answer. They put their briefcases in the car.

Buying a vehic
rather than renting one on Laskar was not unusual. Like everything and everyone
else in the sin-soaked city of Laskar, rental cars tended to lead brief, albeit
exciting lives. Consequently, rental dealers demanded a hefty amount of plastic
up front. Insurance, they called it.

It cost a bit more
to buy a vehic on Laskar, but the purchaser was generally glad to pay extra for
the convenience and the peace of mind. Upon leaving the city, the car could
always be resold—for scrap metal, if nothing else.

And paying in cash
left no trail.

By now, Burl was
really curious. He had a lot of friends and some of them in the city would be
very interested in knowing if competition was about to move in.

“You fellers ever
been to Laskar before?” Burl asked, eyeing the briefcases.

“No,” replied the
same suit who had paid for the car. He was staring in the direction of the
city, squinting against Laskar’s garish green sun.

“Then you sure don’t
wanna lose your way drivin’ around town,” Burl offered casually. “If you’ll
tell me where you’re going, I can give you directions.”

He waited
hopefully. No response.

He tried again. “I
got a compu-map I can install in half-a-jiffy. No trouble. Just tell me where
you’re headed and I’ll program it—”

“No,” said the
suit.

The four men climbed
into the car—an ordinary, midsize hover, nothing special, nothing fancy—and
drove it off the lot. Two rode in the front, two in the back. Friendly Burl saw
them off the lot, gave them a friendly wave, then hurried inside to contact a
few “friends.”

Friendly Burl’s
was conveniently located near the public spaceport, on the outskirts of the
city. Finding the way to the city was easy—the only highway ran past the
spaceport.

One man drove. The
man seated in the front next to the driver navigated. The two in the back
removed needle-guns from their inside suit jacket pockets, kept watch out the
windows.

“All going
according to plan, Knight Commander.” The hover’s driver spoke into a small
handheld voice-recorder.

The hover reached
the entrance to the highway. Here a decision was required. Turn to the left and
there, silhouetted against the green sky, were the high-rise whorehouses, the
glitzy casinos, the holodomes of planet Laskar’s major claim to fame, the city
Laskar. Turn to the right and there were cactus and weird rock formations and
eventually, a long distance away, the box-shaped barracks, the half-moon
hangars, the sand-blasted tarmac of the Royal Naval Base.

Glancing up and
down the highway, the driver said, “How far is Snaga Ohme’s from here?”

“Straight across
country. About fifty kilometers,” was the reply.

Those fifty
kilometers brought one to the palatial mansion and vast estate of the late
Snaga Ohme, former weapons purveyor to the galaxy’s rich and warlike. Several
years previous, the wealthy Adonian had died, leaving his extensive and
complicated financial affairs in complete disorder. To give him credit, Ohme
had not expected to be murdered.

Always pleased to
be able to help one of its citizens, the military had assisted Ohme’s creditors
by immediately seizing control of the Adonian’s estate, including all weapons,
designs for weapons, and prototypes of new weapons that the late Snaga Ohme had
invented.

“Is Knight Officer
Fuqua still inside the Ohme estate?”

“Yes, sir. But
according to his latest report, his unit is due to transfer out anytime now. He’ll
have to leave with the unit, of course.”

The driver nodded.
“He has served his purpose. I doubt if we could learn anything more from him.
We will proceed to Laskar.”

Arriving at the
intersection, the hovercar turned left.

Laskar was not a
planned community. Its streets had not been laid out according to any grand
design. Rather, its buildings had sprung up like fungus, sprouting wherever the
spores happened to fall. Buildings rarely faced each other, or fronted a
street, but stood sideways to one another, like two hookers working the same
block, who pretend to ignore each other yet keep a watchful eye on the
competition. Consequently, the streets had been laid out around the buildings,
which resulted in a great many serpentine roads, innumerable alleys, dead ends
(aptly named), cul-de-sacs, and streets that had started out going somewhere
only to end up lost and confused in the center of a very bad nowhere.

The four men were
driving to one of the worst nowheres in Laskar.

Which was why
there were four of them. And the needle-guns.

The navigator
guided them unerringly through the maze of gambling dens, liquor bars,
drug-bars, cyber-bars, blood-bars. They drove past the live sex, semi-live sex,
semiconscious sex joints. They ignored the hookers of every age, race, sex,
gentler, and planetary origin. They paid scant attention to the occasional
cop-shop—fortified bunkers from which the cops rarely emerged and then only to
collect protection money that provided the citizens of Laskar protection
against nobody but the cops.

“Travel down
Painted Eye half a kilometer, sir. Turn north onto Snake Road. Brownstone
walk-up. Number 757. Our man is on the top floor. Apartment 9e.”

No unnecessary
talk between them. No names. The two men in the back were deferential to the
two in the front, especially the driver. The two in back never spoke unless
spoken to and then answered respectfully in as concise a manner as possible.

The driver, who
was the leader, followed instructions, swerving sharply to avoid hitting a
woman with an Adam’s apple and a low-cut dress, revealing a hairy chest, who
swore at them in a gravelly voice and gave the car a few savage kicks with her
high heels as the hover skimmed past.

The driver pulled up
in front of 757. He, the man in front, and one of the men in back got out of
the car. The leader carried a briefcase. The second man had his hands free. The
third man thrust his needle-gun into his suit coat pocket. The fourth man
remained seated in the car. His needle-gun had been replaced by a beam rifle
assembled from his briefcase. The rifle lay across his knees.

The leader stood
on the cracked and litter-strewn sidewalk, gazing intently at the building,
studying it carefully. It was nine stories high, made of brick formed from the
local stone, which meant that it was sandy-colored and, in the heat of the late
afternoon, took on a slightly greenish cast from Laskar’s oddly colored sun.
(The sun was not green. According to scientists, something in the atmosphere
was, which gave the sun its strained-pea tinge. The natives were proud of their
green sun, however, and disputed the scientific claim.)

Whether the green
was in the sun or the sky, the sickly tint did nothing to improve the building’s
appearance, but rather gave it an unwholesome look. All the windows on the
lower floor were boarded up, with graffiti scrawled across them. Here and
there, on upper floors,
to rent
signs had been plastered onto cracked glass—the spots of white looked like an
outbreak of the pox.

People on the
sidewalk brushed past the men without a glance. The citizens of Laskar had
their own problems to pursue, the tourists had their own pleasures, and none of
them gave a damn about anyone else. A couple of bored-looking women in see-through
plastic skirts sidled over to the driver and, in a few well-chosen words,
described a possible evening’s entertainment. The leader didn’t even bother to
answer and, with a shrug, the women sauntered off.

Several of the
locals, lounging on the pavement, grinned and laughed, eyed the car with the
expert air of those who know the current market value for that particular
model, stripped down.

The leader paid no
attention to them, either.

“Cover the back
exit,” he ordered the man with the needle-gun.

“Yes, sir.”

The man with the
needle-gun took off down a dark and grim-looking alleyway that smelled of body
waste and garbage. A hand reached out—palm up—from a bundle of rags and
cardboard as the man passed. A voice mumbled something unintelligible.

The man with the
gun kept walking.

The beggar threw
an empty jump-juice bottle at him. The bottle smashed into the pavement at the
man’s feet. He crunched calmly over the broken glass, continued into the
noisome dark of the alleyway. He might have been less comfortable in his
dangerous surroundings had he not been wearing full body armor beneath his
nondescript suit.

The two men in
front gave the third time to get into position. When a barely heard beep on a
commlink informed them that he was ready, the two men mounted splintered and
broken stairs— unquestionably the most dangerous obstacle they’d faced yet.
Shoving open a rickety door, they walked inside the vestibule.

The leader took
another careful look around.

“Security cam?”

“Temporarily out
of order, sir,” was the answer.

The leader
examined the entry door.

“It’s locked, sir.
Modern system. The owner doesn’t want any homesteaders. We could blow it. ...”

The leader shook
his head. He shifted the briefcase to his left hand, reached up, pressed the
buzzer for 9e.

No response.

He pressed it
again, this time held it longer.

No response.

He glanced at his
subordinate.

“Bosk’s inside,
sir. He never leaves until after dark. But he’ll be reluctant to answer the
door. He’s in debt. Local moneylender.”

The leader raised
an eyebrow. He pressed the button again, spoke into the intercom. “Bosk. You
don’t know me. I’m here on business. It could be worth your while to let me
inside. I’ve got an offer to make you.”

Still no response.

The leader hit the
button again. Leaning down to the intercom, he spoke two words clearly and
distinctly. “Negative waves.”

He stepped back,
waited for as long as it might take a man to get up out of a chair, cross a
small room.

There came a click
on the lock of the entry door.

The leader and his
subordinate entered, shut the door behind them. The leader again took a careful
look around.

“You wait down
here,” he said.

His subordinate
took up a position in a shadowy corner beneath the staircase. From here, he
could see, but not be readily seen.

Outside, the
locals approached the car, backed off hurriedly when they saw the beam rifle.

Folding his arms
across his chest, the subordinate settled himself to wait.

The leader began
to climb nine flights of stairs.

Vengeance,
deep-brooding o’er the slain . . .

Sir Walter Scott,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Bosk stood
unsteadily by the door, staring at the intercom as if it could answer his
questions. He was a little drunk. Bosk was always a little drunk these days. It
eased his pain, cut the fear. He was always a little afraid these days, as
well.