Spreighformed wheels of pneumoplastic hissed along the gritty corridor beneath a drapery of cobwebs hanging from the block-formed ceiling.

Nor, upon either side of the corridor, did the many dull-eyed Cossack warriors, searching by twos and threes for escaped Sorokin retainers in the basement's dozens of twists and turns, bother to look up as the wheels passed. They would come to be a familiar presence in this place.

The man conveyed upon the wheels was equally oblivious to the warriors, deep as he was inside the warm, dark embrace of his own familiar thoughts. Although he hoped this might be among his final rides in the uncomfortable contrivance, it was a necessary one.  He had tired himself, straining to stand as he had in the Holding Hall, standing as he never had in decades.  It'd been worth it, thus, to confront his lifelong enemy.  Still, the regenerative enzymes he had begun administering to himself during the long Deep-voyage here would need many months, if not years, to manifest their powers to the fullest extent.  Now, naturally enough, would follow and endless, agonizing period of daily exercises----therapy, his scientific staff would term it, astounded at being ordered to heal someone for a change---a time for reteaching blunted nerves and withered muscles too long allowed to grow forgetful of their duties.

Yet this fledgling effort, even the subsequent exhaustion it had engendered, had been worth the toll it was taking.  It was a matter of pure chance, he repeated a kind of litany to himself, which of the two, he or Eugene---no longer "the" Sorokin, had become a celebrated hero and which a cripple, pitied and laughed about behind his back.  Rather than feeling the gratitude towards Sorokin everyone always expected, and which he himself had simulated for his own purposes, Zaytseva had burned with the resentment of the man for 30 years. How dare that nameless social-climber overreach himself to an expectation of gratitude, when he had only been acting as any decent servant ought to!

Zaytseva shook his head.  He'd already thought those thoughts a million times.  He had even---at long last---spoken his thoughts out loud in denunciation of his tormentor.  What was happening to him?  He halted his chair and sat a long while in even deeper thought than was usual for him.

To his dismay, he discovered he was angry all over again, as if he hadn't just completed his revenge, as if Sorokin were not a helpless captive whose survival depended upon his captor's merest whim.  With something resembling horror, Zaytseva found his thoughts traveling the same, slow, smoldering circle which had burned into his brain for three decades.   He wondered if a moment would ever come when he did not starve, did not feel parched, was not consumed altogether by a need for the revenge he'd already accomplished.

No! No such moment could ever come!  Not until Sorokin himself, his whole misbegotten half-bred family, every one of his lickspittle retainers, and the very memory of his vile name were erased from the galaxy!  Not even a snippet of DNA must remain which could call itself Sorokin!  Zaytseva sat quivering, locked in the murderous throes of blackest fury.  Passing his way, Cossacks and their officers---more had arrived from the starship in orbit---trod quiet as they could around him.  He regained control of his thoughts and feelings, set his chair in motion once again, and his thoughts with it.

Now he, himself, had really arisen from humble beginnings, as the second (and, upon that account, he felt, disenfranchised) son of a powerful family which ruled the faraway mining planet Chychak.  To his eternal humiliation, unlike the battle-wounded Zaytseva himself, his family had been grateful to young Eugene---at that time not yet "the" Sorokin--for saving their son's life.  Upon Zaytseva's account, therefore, and this was what had rankled most, this nameless nobody, this soldier, had been elevated in a twinkling to the peerage and given outright grant of Genrich, an independent Holding the likes of which Zaytseva himself, as second son, could never hope for.  Thus Zaytseva's secret resentment had grown deeper, although it had needed ten thousand bitter days and nights to reach full flower from the seed planted inside him by mere circumstance.

They had not been empty days and nights.  Ruined in body and spirit by wounds from which, by all rights, he should have died, he had come to owe Sorokin another debt, one which even now evoked true gratitude, and which he was about to pay in full.  Eugene had given what was left of him reason to go on living, to martial his resources, along with what he could accumulate of his now-indulgent family's, to rise upon his merit within the Cosmopolitan Droom of Premier Murad IIXI.

In some ways it'd been childishly easy.  Whatever was asked of him, he simply did superbly.  Maybe after all he could have been a hero but for terrible mischance.  Maybe, upon the other hand, only terrible mischance had made it possible to concentrate himself without distractions---those of love and merely mundane hatred---which ordinary men fall victim to.  It mattered not.  In either event, he had, over a long, steady course, acquired vaster power and wealth than even he might have awaited once upon a time, for no other reason than to obtain the revenge he ached for in body and mind.  Maybe now, he thought (and it was not displeasing), with the inevitable return of his health, he, too, could sometimes be distracted by sensual diversions which other....

Of a sudden, flushed by the Cossacks from a branching side corridor, a little, fast-moving creature bounded across his path.  One of the local pests, Zaytseva thought, about the size of a man's head, covered with short, soft brownish-gray fur.  Six legs, no more than pseudopods, sprouted from its underside, a matching number of eyestalks from its rounded top.  With a swirling motion and a grateful noise, it ran to him, as if finding long-sought sanctuary, and seemed ready to leap into his lap.

Zaytseva shuddered. With a jerk of his head at its sensors, he swerved the chair.  The animal struck an arm-support and fell, dazed, to the floor.  His left wheel caught the fallen animal in a direct line over its middle. No resistance, the man thought, disappointed.  It had no bones.  As the wheel crushed it, the thing gave a whimper and lay silent, dark fluid oozing from beneath it into the dust atop the paving blocks.  Pneumoplastic wheels rolled down the corridor, one of them staining the floor behind it with a series of successively lighter and dryer spots.

For some unknown reason Zaytseva started feeling better, more aware of his surroundings. As his chair passed crossing corridors, screaming came to his ears of Sorokin servants being tortured. Nothing at all subtle was there in this tough, pragmatic procedure.  It was quite unlike his careful, artful, pleasurable experiments at home, but motivated by a practical desire upon his part to gain as much information he could, with whatever alacrity was possible, as to the most likely destination of the three escaping Sorokin sons.

He was annoyed.  What a shame he might not attend to that old bastard himself, who had killed his officer, making the escape possible.  Zaytseva resolved not to let his regret over a messy detail spoil his overwhelming triumph.  He had accomplished what he had set out to do.  Be pleased with that a while.

He must speak to his commanders, however, and soon----unless it was too late already---about sparing sufficient servants to maintain his comfort in this place. Damage or kill too many (the officers were fond of seeing how much they could remove, yet leave the remainder living, a crude kind of art, but one even he, a patron of higher aesthetics, could appreciate) and they would have the nuisance of enslaving or importing more to do their work.

Also that tidbit----what was her name?---the bride, Maria Petrovka.  Not to his personal taste.  He had enjoyed scant appetite of that kind the last 30 years, although of late he had contrived adequate arrangement against the likelihood of increasing interest.  But she would make a decorative gift.  That was, unless Veronica, who had expressed some interest in her, desired her as a playtoy.  Judging from Veronica's more creative childhood experiments, the Petrovka girl would not be of much use to anyone else, afterward.

On second thought, once his brilliant aesthetists and surgeons had arrived.... At last his musings brought him to the end of the corridor, to a broad, thick, stout-barred door which opened for him without his having to command it.  That was true power, he thought.  He was in charge here, and no one to doubt it.  A slender, feminine figure standing at the door beside the Cossack guard who had opened it reminded him that satisfactions remained yet to be wrung from the prisoner within.  Zaytseva nodded to his daughter.   Smiling, Veronica nodded back.

Across the chamber, Eugene Sorokin stood with his hands in the air, although he had no need to exert himself to keep them aloft.  Titanium staples had been thrust through the bones of each wrist---any bleeding, swelling, or pain this might have engendered, having been suppressed in a manner neat and humane----fastening him to the blocks of which the walls were built.  Without help and proper tools, the man would stand there, hang there, in the end, for as long as he continued to draw the breath of life.  And for a long time afterward, were it the whim of his captors.

Zaytseva opened his mouth, but it was Sorokin who had the first word.  "Black Usurper, you will be ruined when the Premier hears what you have done!"

Zaytseva's laugh, he knew, was not the most pleasing of sounds, but it continued a long time while Sorokin hung before him helpless, just as he had visualized for so many years.  It was obvious that the staples through his limbs, the grinding ends of broken bones in his wrist, were beginning to pain him as the treatment afforded earlier wore off.  At last, Zaytseva's laughter tapered off like the drugs in Sorokin's body.  Servomotors reacting more from 30 years of habit than from any remaining necessity, the mechanisms within his chair wiped tears of laughter from his eyes.

"The Premier?" he demanded with a mirthful, choking noise. "The august and horrible Murad IIXI, you mean to say?  Do we speak of the same man?" Exhausted of laughter, at least for now, he shook his head in mock sadness.  "You know better than that, Gene.  I beg you dear fellow, do not compound disingenuous innocence with your manifold other failings."  Even to someone who knew him as Zaytseva did, Sorokin's expression was an odd one.  Zaytseva paused, puzzled, peering into his victim's face as if he could determine in this manner whether the man meant what he'd said.  "Do you fail to understand even yet?  This is too good for belief!  Even I do not deserve such a round, rich reward for my labors!"  Of a sudden, Zaytseva's tone changed from one of disbelieving amusement to something colder.  "Utter fool!  Stupid, hapless dolt!  The Premier is my sponsor!  Yes, even in this absurd and personal affair of Genrich!  I cannot believe---but I see it as true.  As ever he has, our Leader continues to underwrite all my undertakings---an appropriate word, I think me----for the most ancient and obvious of reasons.  Like any other sane being, he desires power and profit above all else!"

Zaytseva awaited further reaction from the Sorokin, maybe indicating soul-shattering disillusionment.  He didn't get it, although within his own soul he believed it was just a matter of time.  The Poohbah sat a moment musing, an expression of irony painted across his features.

"And, too, I suppose in his sagacity the Premier deems it prudent to keep an eye"----here the chairbound figure lifted a hand, in modest gesture of self-indication---"upon what he perhaps conceives an overly ambitious young---for this, believe it or not, dear Gene, is what I am in politics, which has always been an old man's game---upon an overly ambitious young protege."  Zaytseva's face twisted into a grin.  "It is a delicate matter of protocol, you understand----maybe I should say 'etiquette'---in which timing is everything.  Murad would never object should I aspire to his position after he had enjoyed it to the fullest and passed away in his natural time.  Indeed, a responsible ruler always gives considerable thought to his successor."

Still neither fury nor despair.  Maybe Veronica's presence---although Sorokin didn't seem to know she was here.

"I am sure the question in the Premier's mind is whether I possess patience enough to wait him out or would imprudently cut short whatever time he's got remaining.  I think this affair, which you will admit needed a certain superhuman patience, served a number of purposes for a number of individuals at one and the same time.  From the Premier's point of view, it was a kind of examination, which I believe I have passed."  Zaytseva nodded at the sensors.  His chair backed him away from Sorokin. He went on speaking, but it was almost as if he spoke, now, to himself.  "And patience, Gene, was only one---albeit admittedly the most potent---of my many weapons.  I needed to acquire others along the long, tortuous way.  For example---insofar as maintaining your interest in our relationship was concerned---a beautiful, talented, intelligent daughter..."

"Fully evil as you are!" For the first time Sorokin acknowledged his treacherous bride.  She offered no verbal response but stepped forward and stroked him where it would produce the most humiliating reaction.

Her father shrugged.  "As you wish----fully as evil as I am---whom I could train and use as....."

"Bait!" Sorokin spat this in more than a figurative sense.  Veronica again said nothing, but her contemplative expression----how might she most painfully return her husband's discourtesy? ---was more horrifying than any words she might have said.

"Indeed," her father answered for her.  "See you how agreeable I become when I have my own way in everything.  Now, where were we?  Ah, yes.  We mentioned my lovely daughter.  As you may appreciate, my plan required certain connections, as well." Zaytseva paused, thinking again how it had rankled to be a second son, deprived by merest chance of the power and prestige he deserved.  Maybe this was a fate he had been born to?  He shook his head.  "Eventually I came to be in overall charge of the imperium-conglomerate's efforts to increase wartime manpower, being granted the title 'Military Procurer.'"

Even in his pain and indignation, Sorokin managed a small, cynical chuckle.  "Procurer you say.  Zaytseva, if what you've told me of the Cosmopolity's part in this unlawful outrage be true, you deserve what you are called everywhere within it----everywhere, until now, excepting here, where courtesy of lifelong friendship moved me to forbid it----the Premier's pimp!"

It was Zaytseva's turn to chuckle. As a man in his position could afford, he otherwise ignored the slur.  "Naturally my duty to Premier and imperium-conglomerate included overseeing contracts with, let us say, manufacturers of Cossacks.   Where others were too fastidious, I made manifest a willingness to engage myself intimately in the sordid business, winning the esteem of more pragmatic power wielders.  Yet it may shock you to learn that, as far as my personal plans were concerned, my most valuable---and secretest---alliances were with thieves, pressgangers, and freebooters, the very dregs I have accused you of dealing with.  Does this not especially rankle?"

Sorokin disdained to reply.  Zaytseva turned to an attending Cossack.  "I wish an answer now.  Strike him!"

The Cossack's first crushing blow fell backfisted upon Sorokin's cheekbone. At the sound of it Veronica inhaled, licked her lush, full lips, and made a noise, a whimper or a sigh, as if she were being caressed by a lover.  Into the stoic silence that the man, stapled to the wall and helpless though he was, had somehow managed to maintain, came again to the sound of breaking bones.  His face colored and started swelling where it had been struck.

"Have a care!" Zaytseva hissed at the slave, his eyes ecstatic with the long-awaited sigh that filled them.  "Do not end this before Gene and I have had time to fully enjoy it!" Zaytseva turned to address his daughter.  "Sorokin shall endure many, many severe yet futile beatings," he observed, as if discussing a recipe or dramafile, "in service to the Premier somewhat extreme, yet this being a case of treason, understandable, excusable by everyone, and ostensibly meant to extract a confession."

Veronica smiled an odd, crooked, eager smile and nodded agreement.  "In point of fact, they shall serve no more than ceremony's sake, ceremony I have anticipated longer, my dear, than you have been alive.  He shall die before anything useful can be learned, a conviction upon all counts brought against him posthumously.  Much the safest way for all concerned."  Zaysteva appeared to start of a sudden, although the gesture was dramatic and artificial.  "But what am I thinking?" he asked his victim.  "What kind of host have I become, to omit your guests from the main event to which they were invited, to deprive you of the many pleasures that I personally anticipate with much eagerness.  "Kindly advise the guards to begin admitting those witnesses I have summoned and who, by now, should be assembling outside in the passageway."

Veronica obeyed, returning with three individuals Sorokin recognized through a purple haze of pain.  "The Oligarch and Lady Malinovsyn-Korochuvak you know, Gene.  I brought them, not as the wedding guests you thought, but to observe and testify that you cannot keep peace upon the planet with which you were entrusted.  Either this, or as might prove consistent with need, that you engage in an alliance with the forces of disorder, conspiring with them to assassinate certain members of the Romanovan elite upon the greenway."

Malinovsyn-Korochuvak offered a polite nod to Sorokin, as if the latter were not stapled to a wall.  The Lady Malinovsyn-Korochuvak curtsied.  Veronica clapped her hands with delighted laughter.216Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0LeJwWJ5ax

"More than a hundred other such," her father continued, "known to you, can be called upon to swear to whatever they are told they saw.  Likewise, no need to introduce Captain Leon Vagin, master-merchant and owner-in-command of the selfsame vessel by which we came to this unhappy planet, presently still in orbit.  For today's purpose he is self-confessed Deep-rover, testifying under perpetual and unlimited grant of amnesty that you have had frequent dealings with him over the years, a capital offense.  Should corroboration prove desirable, three of his officers---whom you may consider present in spirit---will be shown by file to have been here in the flesh."

Vagin was a short, broad, swarthy individual, wearing a pair of quickblades Cossack-style, arrayed in the outlandish group affected by those following his trade.  As a passenger aboard the man's carrack, even the egalitarian Eugene Sorokin had thought him uncouth and avoided his presence.  All this was to the Deep-captain no more than a business transaction, for he gave Zaytseva an impatient look and turned his back.

"We are somewhat hurried.  The captain has schedules to keep.  Finally, I, Aidos Zaytseva, shall not only be your judge, but another witness against you.   My corroboration shall be the testimony of your own wife.  Against us will stand none but the mute corpse you are soon about to become!" Zaytseva addressed the Cossack.  "Now hit him again---and do it right this time!"

The Cossack gave its master a sidewise glance which, in a human, might have meant reproach. It said nothing.  Being what it was, it was no longer capable of speech.  Instead, it tucked its elbow into its side and unleashed its fist again, which sank deep into Sorokin's solar plexus.  This time, Sorokin made a noise, involuntary exhalation as his body imploded.  He gasped afterward for breath.  Before he could recover, another blow took him in the midsection, and he vomited on the floor.

Zaytseva backed his chair away from the stinking mess while his guests made their own comments upon the Cossack's technique with the expertise of fascinated amateurs. And his daughter shrieked with an unmerry laughter, the laughter of the criminally insane.