Chapter Forty-Five
I only collect on promises. I don’t fulfill them.
—Doge Lorenzo del Velli
The Doge Lorenzo del Velli prided himself on his nefarious plots and schemes. He liked to do things behind the scenes to effect important changes, so that the persons targeted were blind-sided, and never figured out what happened to them. It was a game he liked to play. In his position, of course, he didn’t have to do that, because he was the most powerful man in the galaxy. But he preferred subtle methods rather than using hammers. He liked to compare his “little tricks,” as he called them, to a whispering wind that slipped up behind the victim unawares and suddenly transformed itself into a hurricane.
Several years ago, a warlord prince had been openly critical of Lorenzo’s administration, making the ridiculous assertion that the Doge was doing such a terrible job that he should relinquish his throne to the first person who asked for it—since anyone could do better. It was such an absurd idea that it didn’t deserve a response, at least not a direct one.
So, after considering the matter at length, Lorenzo and his Royal Attaché came up with a way to silence the outspoken critic. Pimyt spread a convincing rumor, complete with falsified evidence, that the grumbling Prince was having an affair with General Mah Sajak’s attractive, flirtatious wife. The General, who was often away from home in battles against the Mutatis, became so convinced of the story that he hired assassins to go after the Prince.
It all went perfectly, and when Lorenzo received confirmation of the killing, Pimyt could hardly control his elation, for he claimed that he had come up with the plan. The furry little Hibbil did four back flips and half a dozen spinning rolls, landing on his feet at the base of the Doge’s throne.
“Whatever do you think you’re doing?” Lorenzo had asked. “It was my idea, not yours.” This was not true, and the Doge knew it. But he also knew he could win any argument with the Hibbil.
“Oh, my mistake,” Pimyt said, in a tone that bordered on the sarcastic. Then, as if to sublimate any anger he could not express, he did the reverse of the gymnastics he had just accomplished, with six reverse spinning rolls followed by four front flips.
“There,” Pimyt said. “That neutralizes my little celebration, as if it never happened.”
Now the Doge had another serious problem, one that his lover Francella Watanabe wanted taken care of. She had told him about it in bed, asserting what a terrible, deceptive man her own brother was. Of course, Lorenzo was not foolish enough to believe all of those distortions, for he knew Noah personally and also knew how to spin his own tales. But he let on that he believed her, and she was most grateful for the sympathy he expressed, just one of his many skills.
That night—in return for his promise to have Noah killed at the first opportunity—Francella bestowed her generous personal favors on him. In the morning Lorenzo set in motion his own plan to accomplish the assassination. After all, he had plenty of excellent ideas himself, and didn’t need to always rely upon that fur-ball Pimyt to solve every problem.
Having solved that for the moment, Lorenzo turned to other matters, and conferred with his royal astronomers over the Earth-Mars disasters. They cited examples of other odd events occurring around the galaxy … ground giving way underneath people, exposing immense, seemingly bottomless sinkholes, and large chunks of planets (or entire small planets) disappearing into voids. Survivors told harrowing tales, and investigators were working on the problem, but thus far had not come up with any solutions.
“How could entire planets disappear?” Lorenzo asked them.
“If it were only Earth and Mars, we might think it was a problem with the yellow sun in that solar system,” the lead astronomer said, a grizzled old man who dressed impeccably. “We’ve seen at least one example of a sun giving off destructive solar energy that destroyed all of the planets orbiting it, one by one. But that can’t be the case here. The problem is too widespread, and the results differ. Sometimes we find space debris, and other times there’s nothing left … a complete vanishing act.”
“My grandfather used to tell me about Earth and Mars,” Lorenzo said. “He said that Human migrations departed from them thousands of years ago, spreading the seeds of our race across hundreds of star systems.”
“It’s a big loss,” the old astronomer said, shaking his head sadly.
Afterward, when he had time to think by himself, the Doge was left with an unsettled feeling. What if something terrible were to happen to Canopa or Siriki … or even worse, to Timian One? He could hardly imagine such events, and yet, something told him they were entirely possible.