Free The Phoenix Darkness by Richard L. Sanders Page A

line. Unfortunately, the raised stakes also made
it that much more difficult to feign confidence, but he did his
best. Just as the Strigoi was about to answer him, one of the
others spoke up.
    “There are only fourteen weapons here,” he
said, sounding angry.
    “Are you sure?” asked the lead Strigoi.
    “I am sure, I have counted and re-counted
them.”
    “Of course there are only fourteen,” said
Zander. “What did you expect?”
    “We were promised fifteen isotome weapons,”
the lead Strigoi said, hissing as he stood mere inches away from
Zander, his superior height adding to his sense of power and
dominance. Zander felt his knees tremble and he nearly buckled on
the spot, but somehow, by some miracle, he kept himself
together.
    “I don’t know about any fifteen,” said
Zander. “These are all there were.”
    “I was promised fifteen ,” repeated the
Strigoi leader.
    “Fifteen or not, these are all that there
were,” Zander replied in the best matter-of-fact tone he could
muster. “I searched and I scoured and I combed, and all I could
find were fourteen.”
    The Strigoi gave him a long hard look and
Zander met his gaze, managing to keep his expression as innocent as
possible by employing another technique: he used his imagination to
change the context of the conversation and instead of obsessing
over the savage, murderous, killing-machines right in front of him,
who might have just realized he’d cheated them, he thought of
woods, summer grass, a babe on a swing, a mother walking her son in
the park, and anything else which conjured up ideas of pure
harmlessness and innocence in his mind. I am not here , he
thought. I am lying in the sand on the beachy shores of
Zendricun Alpha. I smell the salt of the sea and feel the sun
beating down on me. Next to me sits a beautiful woman. She wears a
sunhat and slowly sips on a pina colada. We make eye contact and
she smiles …
    “Very well,” said the lead Strigoi after a
long pause. He then gave a command to his cohorts and they began to
unseal and remove the fourteen isotome weapons. “If this was all
you could find, then this was all that was there.”
    “As a certainty,” said Zander. He avoided a
smile, but felt a surge of hope begin to balloon inside him. Did
I just get away with this? he wondered. “And what about price?”
he asked, pressing the issue one final time.
    “We will pay one and a half what we agreed,”
said the lead Strigoi. “Less the value of one missile, since there
are only fourteen here. Not fifteen.”
    Zander nodded. “We have a deal.” It was all
he could do to keep from leaping in the air with joy. He was going
to keep his life, he’d successfully cheated the Enclave, squeezed
an extra fifty-percent profit out of them to boot, and he still had
one last isotome weapon. A missile which, once the other fourteen
had been used, would become the most valuable commodity in the
galaxy. I could trade it for a planet of my own , he thought
blissfully.
    “I expect the transfer of payment to be made
before the last missile is offloaded from this ship,” said Zander,
still keeping his tone all business.
    “It will be so.”
     
    ***
     
    At first, the plan unfolded almost exactly as
Mister Martel had said it would. The populace, helped along by some
13,000 CERKO operatives, acting in disguise as the king’s troops,
had risen to overthrow the royal government. The last straw had
been the massive bombing of the planet, in the name of the king,
but also a false flag operation which had left critical parts of
the planet in fiery rubble. The capitol and its districts had
previously been reduced to ash by what appeared to be the ISS Black Swan , belonging to Princess Kalila Akira, and since
then entire city-centers, important agricultural projects,
industrial plants, civilian housing projects, and countless other
targets, many arbitrary, had been obliterated. The people of Renora
hated the Imperial government. They hated the king and just