The Machiavelli Interface Read online

  THE MACHIAVELLI

  INTERFACE

  The third book in the Matador series

  STEVE PERRY

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  PART TWO

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  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.