The Crown Jewels by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

uncertainties flickered unbidden through Maijstral’s mind. He gnawed his nether lip and replaced the detector on his adhesive darksuit. His hand was shaking slightly as he brought out a miniature a-grav unit and stuck it carefully to the skylight. Before he took out his pencil-sized cutting tool and began slicing, he took a moment to stabilize his breathing and calm his nerves. The room below might, of course, be packed with police.
    Most likely, however, it was just a room. Maijstral tried to maintain that thought. Maijstral finished his cut and the skylight floated gently into the air. The a-grav unit would move it toward a preset place on the grounds and set it down. Taking a breath, Maijstral reversed himself and floated headfirst into the mansion.
    His head and shoulders thrust through the skylight, he turned his head carefully left and right. The atrium was two stories tall, with a roof access and a balcony around three sides. Slipcovered furniture crouched in darkness. A wide flagstone fireplace yawned against one wall. The view from the back of Maijstral’s head was absorbed by detectors and projected onto the optical center of his brain; his vision was nearly a 360-degree globe, but he turned his head to get the advantage of parallax. IR and UV scanners looked for characteristic police emissions. Audio pickups listened acutely for the fall of dust.
    He slid into the room on midnight holographic wings. Starlight shone on his fake diamond. Jensen’s researches suggested that the household’s main defenses were alarms triggered by the minute compression waves caused by a body moving through space. This was a very expensive system— in order for it to work, the signals put out by an entering thief had to be distinguished from those created by heating and cooling units, thermal changes in the structure of the house, and those of family pets and robots.
    Maijstral’s darksuit was equipped to deal with such alarms automatically, taking a half step back in time and pulsing out waves that precisely interfered with the waves he made as he moved. This was widely regarded as impossible— both that and a miracle of modern physics. Maijstral’s darksuit was of the best.
    Maijstral’s target, the artifact he was after, gleamed in sliver solitude in a niche by the fireplace. Silently, Maijstral made a circuit of the room in search of other items of value. The place seemed to be filled mainly with souvenirs of the Rebellion, weapons, medals in cases, portraits of heroes. A cool shock wave moved through Maijstral. Admiral Scholder, he realized, was the same young Lieutenant Scholder whose Death Commandos had stormed the City of Seven Bright Rings and seized the Emperor in the last battle of the Rebellion.
    Well, well, Maijstral thought. He was tampering with History, no less.
    The souvenirs had little value except to military history buffs, so he floated to the artifact and gazed at it, his visual scanners magnifying its image. The target was the size of a melon and vaguely saddle-shaped, a pleasant-appearing geometry made of silver and engraved with fine, precise lines. Maijstral saw the Imperial seal— the scrolled N for Nnis CVI interwoven with the skuhl vines of the Pendjalli, ideographs for “good luck” and “happiness,” all encircled by the figure of the Zoot Torque— Maijstral realized that he was looking at something looted from the Imperial precincts themselves.
    Interesting.
    Maijstral made an electromagnetic scan and found a constant low-wattage background emission characteristic of, among other things, certain alarm systems. He looked more carefully and discovered that the object was itself giving off the radiation, not anything it was connected to. Odd, he thought. He wondered if the thing would scream “Help, help!” if he picked it up, like something in a fairy tale.
    It wouldn’t be the first time. Alarm systems had lately begun displaying a regrettable tendency toward twee behavior.
    He scanned the