Teaser From In-Progress SF Novel

OK, you (a collective proper subset) have asked for it: here is a sneak peek at a scene from my in-progress SF novel.

The assassin didn’t hear anything until Zero spoke.

“Squire?” said Zero.  The assassin spun, as he had a few minutes before, but without pulling the trigger this time.  He wore a fashionable and semiformal orange denim kilt and a black rugby shirt, fringed in hyperwhite.  A pea-soup duster, which until recently had hidden a belt with matching hip-holsters, was swept back.  He was shod in the trendy faux-bare-feet style, and the weapon from his right-side holster was in his hand, pointed at the middle of Zero’s chest.  Zero’s weapon was pointed at the assassin’s face.

“Easy,” said Zero.  “You don’t want to fire that thing.  What’s your name?”

The assassin barked a laugh.

“You’re Terran,” said Zero.  “Male, maybe twenty-five.  You’ve been captured on camera.  They will have looked up your name by now.  I just don’t happen to know it.  Tell me, and I will have something to call you other than Squire or Assassin.”

The assassin equivocated momentarily.  “Seamus,” he said.  “You can call me Seamus.”

“Good, that’s a start.  Seamus.  Thank you.  Now, if you would, please put that on the floor and slide it over to me with your foot.”

Seamus laughed again, a harsh sound like flint striking steel.  “You would like that, no?”

“Yes, I would,” said Zero.  “But not for the reason you think.  Because I abhor killing.”  Zero took a step forward.

“Stop!  I have a gun!” snapped Seamus.

Zero’s head shook minutely, back and forth.  “No, Squire,” he said.  “What you have is a sidearm, if you are military.  A pistol if you are an enthusiast, a weapon if you are an engineer.  You would call it a gun only if you just purchased it last week.  You slipped it through some of the most sophisticated detection screens on this planet.  How did you do that?”

Seamus chuckled.

“That’s OK,” said Zero.  “I’ll guess.  What you have is a Pulsar-7 corundum pistol.  Recent manufacture — maybe this Rat.  Last Pig at the earliest.  Right so far?”

Seamus’s face remained impassive.

“OK.  It’s all ceramic — that’s how you got it into the IPA Parliamentary room.  Room-temperature superconducting ceramic, which is expensive.  From the charred parliamentarians around us –” Zero gestured with his head without shifting his gaze “– you just pulled the trigger and pirouetted.  That means a highly illegal full-automatic modification.  Full-automatic means you wouldn’t have a gnat’s chance of bringing that through a CQA post, even here on Calymon.  Your pirouette probably took at least five seconds.  Maybe six.  That means liquid oxygen-cooled.  I’m still right.”  The last was a statement more than a question.  “As for padparadscha….”

Seamus blinked twice, then tried to hide it retroactively.

“Yeah.  Padparadscha.  You don’t know that word.”  Statement.  “I wasn’t sure until I saw your reaction.  The best padparadscha is from your corner, on Terra.  The Subcontinent.  Padparadscha is corundum.  A beautiful pink-orange.  Great for jewelry, better for lasers, like the weapon in your hand.  You could have bought some of the stone at home.  But you didn’t.  Do you know what that means?”  He didn’t wait for a response.  “It means,” he said, slowly moving his left hand to the collar of his tunic and pulling it down.  “I wore the right color shirt.”  Under his loose tunic lay a form-fitted mailshirt, ashen spidersilk over blood-red ruby.

Seamus’s hand began to tremble the slightest bit.

“Steady,” said Zero.  “Keep your hand steady.  I’m not here to scare you.  I’m here to educate you.  For instance: if you were to calculate the absolute worst place in the Association to commit a mass assassination this week, you couldn’t have chosen better.  You are in the city of Noki.  So, Noki sheriffs.  Province of Ellssiss.  So, Ellssiss marshals.  On Calymon, but at an interplanetary event, so you have both Interior and Exterior Calymonian intelligence services with jurisdiction.  This is an ad hoc Parliamentary session.  Every single attending delegation has native-soil claims to this meeting hall, and they all brought security.  Plus Parliamentary police.  And why are they here?  To discuss the Flaro ‘problem’.  That means that, begrudgingly, both sher and resh Flaronians have the right to carry arms in this hall.  If all the first part of the list wasn’t enough to scare you, the Flaronian bit should.”

Seamus’s hand hadn’t stopped trembling.  After a pause: “Which are you?”

“Which am I?  No.  I’m just a weapons enthusiast.  I like that pistol in your hand.  I like mine more.”

Seamus looked incredulous.  “That?”

“Yes,” said Zero.  “This.”  He slowly rolled it first clockwise, then anticlockwise, letting Seamus see it without moving his aim from between Seamus’s eyes.  “Yes, I know it’s old.  An antique.  A needler-railgun.  Magnetic coils accelerate iron spikes at Mach-several.  This one has a mixed magazine: it can fire four-nought needles — that’s finer than a sable’s hair — up to 6-go bolts, which are thick enough to hammer into teak wood.  It’s an antique, as I said, and it had an antique stabilizing computer in it.  But I removed it.”

Seamus’s hand began to steady as his mouth began to develop a sneer.

“I’m not done,” said Zero.  “I removed it because it would get in the way.  I can control my aim by one two-thousandth of a degree.  That is more than accurate enough to perforate the three dots of an ellipsis on a printed page at a hundred meters.  Your pistol’s computer couldn’t get within two orders of magnitude of that, let alone this one’s old computer.”  He saw the look of naked disbelief on Seamus’s face.  “Oh, you bet your life,” he said with a fleeting grin.  “Squire Seamus, my liege.  Put your weapon on the…”

Seamus’s forefinger depressed the trigger pad.  The biometer measured the patterns of the nerve running through his finger, more individual than any retina print, in microseconds.  With a scream, Seamus jerked his hand, moving the focus of the beam up toward Zero’s face.

Zero had a moment to smell the dusty scorched flax of his tunic and the slightly metallic char of the spidersilk, but he had been right about the color of the ruby: the corundum reflected most of the energy of the beam, scattering it harmlessly, the little that was absorbed feeling like a matchstick dragged upwards along his sternum.

With a fluid snap of his arm, his eyes still locked on Seamus’s face, his needler moved down and to the left, the air snapped with a whip-crack, and the aim of the needler returned to between Seamus’s eyes.

Just at the top of Zero’s mailshirt, the laser beam stopped moving, stopped burning, and a fraction of a second later Seamus’s shriek of rage turned into a howl of disbelief as his nerves informed his brain of what had happened.  Seamus gazed wildly at his wrist, thrashing his arm from the elbow, trying to move his curled digits, no more responsive than the trigger pad had become when the nerves through his finger had stopped transmitting.

“That,” said Zero quietly, firmly, “was a three-nought needle.  I clipped the back seam of the O2 tank in your pistol.  What you fail to feel in your wrist and hand is what it doesn’t feel like when your carpal nerve is suddenly frozen.  If I call for help now, Squire –” Zero’s expression bore a sadness Seamus could not understand “– the doctors can save the rest of your arm.  Reach for your other pistol with your left hand, and the next bolt severs your corpus callosum.  My Squire, my liege, my master,” said Zero, “I do not want that any more than you do.  On the ground, if it pleases you.  Now.”

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