The Albino Knife Read Free

here for fifty years before Pen had first come to the compound as a new student, and he was as familiar with them as he was the bonsai and gardens outside in the tropical air.
    "Here, have you seen this one?"
    Spiral nodded at a full-scale display of a pair of spetsdods mounted inside a block of clear plastic. The weapons were small parallelograms, nearly diamond-shaped, each with a thin spun-fiber barrel. The magazine ejection button was the only visible control, since a spetsdod was fired by touching the barrel with the tip of the index finger. This rather tricky operation was made possible by the position of the weapon where it rode securely on the back of the operator's hand, held there by a thin slab of artificial flesh. A spetsdod operator learned care quickly.
    Moon stepped close to the exhibit."Khadaji's?"
    "Yes. That's his signature, authenticating them as one of the sets he used. The Smith has another set, and there's a pair in the Provincial Museum on Greaves. As far as we know, those are the only ones on public display."
    "Nice of Emile to give them to us," Pen said.
    The three started to move on.
    Behind them, there was an explosion. The force of the blast knocked all three siblings sprawling. Debris sleeted past, spattering the walls and exhibits.
    Penraised from his face-down position and shook his head, trying to clear the ringing in his ears. An alarm began to hoot, over and over, and he rolled onto his side from his belly, afraid, but not for himself.
    "Moon—!?"
    "Chang and Buddha on a goddamn stick!" she said.
    Thank all the gods. They had been living together for so long that the idea of being without her was inconceivable.Ever since he had left Rim. Twenty years.
    "Spiral."
    "I'm okay."
    "Pen.Your arm!"
    As Moon sat up and pointed at him, Pen became aware of the pain in his left shoulder. He looked at it.
    A shard of thincris had buried itself in his deltoid. The force of the explosion was such that the handsized sliver had pierced the rip-stop weave of thekawa shroud. He touched the clear crystal section with his right hand. It didn't move.Must be all the way to the bone, as solid as it felt. And now it really began to hurt. Blood oozed out through the torn cloth and dripped from the thincris onto the floor. Still, it was a small price.
    He took a deep breath and tripped a mental kuji-kiri to stop the pain. The shoulder continued to throb and he was aware that it was injured, but the hurt diminished greatly.
    Four siblings came running into the museum, all trying to talk at the same time.
    Spiral looked at Pen and Moon. "I don't remember getting an exhibit that blows up," he said.

Prologue Four
    On Thompson's Gazelle, first planet of the three-planet Delta System, the Civil and Criminal Complex in Evets City came to its last proceeding before the midday meal recess.
    In Sentence Room A, the judge sat at his podium facing a single prisoner flanked by four planetary cools. The room was old; the air conditioning unit whistled somewhere in the low ceiling, sounding like some trapped beast unhappy at its fate. The room was empty, save for the six people who had to be there.
    "Criminal Sleel—" began the sentence judge.
    "I'm Sleel," Sleel said, interrupting. "Stuff the criminal part." He was a fair-sized man, well built but not extremely so, dressed in a prisoner-white coverall and neoprene slippers. He was held in place by a pressor field mounted beneath the floor. The field was keyed to movements involving more than a few kilos' effort. He could breathe or blink, but any real effort to move would activate the pressor and it would clamp him like a vise. The field was rated at a thousand kilos and there was no way a man or mue, no matter how string, could break its grip. But because he was Sleel, he kept trying.
    "Can't" was not a word Sleel used very often.
    The judge ignored the interruption. "You have been found guilty of tampering with protected artifacts—"
    "This is all lizard shit and you know