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Palace Prologue

He stood where he liked standing, alone on the edge of the crowd and watching, above the crowd, too, on a ramp half-way up and curling round the dome of the spaceport terminal. Checking tickets, carrying luggage, herding children, sapients rushed past in both directions, but no one more than glanced his way. He was hidden in plain sight by his clothes, the finely tailored but utterly undistinguished suit of a merchant. Pale soft shirt, gray short-tunic, and a slashed kilt of the same gray -- human trousers, graceless wear for a stub-ugly species, did you no good when you carried a tail, even a short stump of one like his. In one hand he held a sample case, splashed with color and the name of an importing firm. Inside lay jewelry, artificial amber from the planet of Souk, opals from Kephalon, providing him with both a cover story and money to live while he got his real job done.

He leaned on the railing of the ramp and looked down at the swarming terminal, where sapients of half a dozen races milled around or squabbled over the scanty seating. He heard the crowd as a roar and babble, half a dozen languages mixed with the flat tones of Gen, the official trade-talk of that region of the galaxy known as the Pinch. Over it all a booming noise sounded, as if a thunderstorm were gathering under the forcedome far above. He could see the source of the booms: hundreds of saccules, the short and pouchy native race of Palace, scurried and dodged through the crowd. Dressed in simple shifts, as if they were children ready for bed, they carried luggage, offered refreshments, cleared paths for their human masters, while they boomed and squealed and did their best to mimic real speech with the throat sacs and pouches clustering round their eating mouths. Their odor reached him as well, even up as high as he stood. The saccules gave off a smell-babble of scents that had earned them their nickname, Stinkers.

In his mind, though, the real stench came from the humans who swarmed thick below, all soft and somehow pulpy with their pale tan or dark brown skins stretched over fat and flesh. His own race glittered with gray-green scales, smooth and hard and pure, not tufted with dirty hair or clotted with the stuff, hanging limp from round skulls. Unclean -- he stopped himself from spitting on the ramp just in time. He was here for vengeance, after all. He could follow their ugly little customs and courtesies as part of the game.

He'd have his revenge, that is, provided he could get past the autogates that led from the terminal into the city. Although his view was partially obscured by a bank of vidscreens displaying a constant barrage of news footage, from his distance the gates looked deceptively simple, a pair of featureless vertical rods a few yards high and set about five feet apart, but each one contained a sophisticated array of scanners, all tuned to different frequencies, as well as password protected, encrypted, and monitored round the clock by highly trained customs agents. No one but a fool would try and pass through them with contraband or weapons. His prospective employer had promised him safe passage so long as he carried the photonic token he'd been given, but he found it hard to believe, not when you couldn't even to bribe your way through. The AI in charge kept the locking codes secret from the agents and changed them daily for good measure.

For a better look he leaned forward, frowning with a twist of his long mouth; then he felt, rather than heard, someone stop behind him. A slight pressure from a hand touching the case he held, a faint draft of moving air -- no more than that. The thief was good, but Vi-Kata, the deadliest assassin in the Pinch, was better. In utter silence he spun, kicked low, saw a human face grimacing with pain, its mouth open for a scream -- grabbed with his free hand and flung -- the shriek rang shrill as the thief flipped over the railing and plunged down, still screaming, his scream drowned in other screams when he hit headfirst, splattering across the floor.

"Stop him!" Kata yelled in Gen. "The murderer! That way! Police! Police!"

Yelling, pointing, Kata raced down the ramp. A few young human men followed him, calling for the police as they chased their imaginary murderer. Down below chaos swirled around the corpse. Muttering weeping sapients shrank back from the bloody mess on the floor or else stared, frozen in horror, blocking the way of the security guards trying to cordon off the corpse. Everywhere clots of saccules clutched each other and boomed. Their fear smelled like old vomit. Police sirens sounded, shrill and urgent. Kata had no trouble losing his impromptu posse as the confusion spread and swelled. He slipped off to one side and strode for the gates. Up close, he could see that every exit stood guarded by not just one gate, but a series, a long tunnel of autogates stretching toward the gray light of outside and safety.

Behind him, he could hear a police loudspeaker shouting for order and commanding everyone to stay where they were. Now or never. One customs officer, a pale pinkish human, had stepped a few paces away from his gate to stare slack-jawed at the cluster of police around the corpse. A perfect chance, but Kata hesitated for the briefest of seconds. He was under sentence of death on more than one world, and the police of all of those worlds had encoded his DNA signature into their security systems. He stepped forward, hesitated again, then shrugged and walked through, strode through, swinging his sample case, his skull crest raised at a jaunty angle. Eight gates passed, nine, ten, and then the door ahead, opening with a hiss of air.

None of them gave an alarm.

Kata walked out into a cold, gray light. Overhead, clouds swirled with the perpetual fog of Palace . . .

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