House of Shards Read Online Free Page B

anything to say about it, talking was all they'd ever do.
    Sun was on a mission, he considered, from God. Since the Rebellion, humanity had been asserting itself in the reaches, and had also been rediscovering its own suppressed heritage. Along with other rediscoveries—Shakspere, Congo Veiling, Sherlock Holmes, and so on—ancient philosophies had been recovered. Mr. Sun had absorbed two of these. Besides becoming an ardent Holmes fan—the Manichean duality of Holmes and Mortality appealed to him—Sun had become an adherent of a recently excavated creed called the New Puritanism.
    Refined to its essence, the New Puritanism believed that every act had its cost, that everything had to be paid for. Sin was the occasion of a cosmic imbalance, and if the sinner didn’t commit some act to compensate, the Almighty would do it for him; and the Almighty didn’t care who got hurt in the process—God, according to the New Puritanism, didn’t much care who got squashed when the Sin Balance was sufficiently out of alignment: He’d flatten anybody, sinner and nonsinner alike.
    Mr. Sun hoped, in the small matter of Allowed Burglary, to be the Almighty's instrument in the business of flattening the wicked. Fu George and Maijstral had been sinning far too long; it was time, Sun was certain, they paid for it before some innocent party did the paying for them.
    Khamiss watched her superior's face fade away, replaced by a holographic ideogram meaning “may I be of assistance?” She told the machine that it couldn’t, and the ideogram disappeared.
    Behind her, a woodwind quartet was setting up for the arrival of the next ship. Tuning, a bassoon bubbled away.
    Khamiss straightened her uniform and squared her cap, awaiting the next ship and its cargo. She was young for the amount of responsibility she bore—she had just grown her fist nose-rings, which proclaimed her age as twenty-five— and she was acutely aware of the burden of Sun's trust. She was second-in-command of security at the most exclusive resort in the known universe, and she fully intended to prove worthy of the task.
    She glanced down at her medal and brushed it lightly with her fingers. The Qwarism Order of Public Service (Second Class), awarded her when she had stopped a fleeing burglar and held her prisoner for the authorities.
    Khamiss had been a student at the time, studying to follow her parents' footsteps as an insurance broker for the three-century-old firm of Lewis, Khotvinn, & Co. How could she have known, when she was strolling home from school and happened to notice a small hologram-shrouded figure ghosting over the wall of the Reed Jewelry building, that it was an incident that would change her life forever?
    It was luck that she happened to be carrying a briefcase heavy with insurance forms. It was luck that her first swing caught the camouflaged burglar square on the head and knocked her unconscious. But still, it wasn’t the capture of just any thief that awarded her the Order of Public Service (Second Class).
    Khamiss had caught (complete with a satchel full of gem-stones that included the famous Zenith Blue) none other than Alice Manderley, renowned Allowed Burglar listed third in the ratings, a burglar whom the security services of fifty worlds had been unable to apprehend. Khamiss suddenly found herself a civilization-wide celebrity. Offers of employment appeared, and some of them were too good to pass up.
    The most interesting had come from Mr. Sun, who was assembling a top-notch crew of security people which would offer its combined expertise to the elite throughout the civilized stars. Sun promised quick advancement, that and commissions for some of the most exotic and influential people in the Human Constellation.
    Khamiss had done well in Sun's employment, though she hadn’t caught any more top-ranked Allowed Burglars. But now, on Silverside Station, she had a very good chance.
    Silverside Station had been designed partly as a deterrent to