by M. D. Cooper
The captain got two shots off, one hitting her in the leg—specifically, the a-grav emitter in her en pointe monotalon—and the other missing her altogether. She twisted in the air, slashing at his head with her lightwands, but the man was fast, twisting out of the way and only taking a light graze on his right shoulder.
She pumped her wings to gain altitude, and his pistol flashed again, a kinetic round tearing through Petra’s left wing. She decided to change tack.
She killed her remaining a-grav and folded her wings, dropping toward the imperial guard. A deft kick with one of her needle-sharp feet, and the man’s pistol went flying. A second later, they hit the deck, one of her talons piercing his hand while another punched through his opposite shoulder.
She drew a lightwand against his neck and was about to decapitate her opponent when a strangled cry caught her attention.
Petra’s head snapped up to see the remaining Impera Protego at the airlock with his arm around Kory’s neck, a gun pressed against the agent’s head.
Kory rattled off the words, fear evident in his eyes.
“You’re not getting away,” the captain growled from beneath Petra.
“Neither are you,” she replied. “Let my agent go, and I’ll let you go.”
The Impera Protego captain shook his head and laughed. “You’re outnumbered, and I’m not afraid to die.”
He glanced to his right, and Petra saw four more guards advancing down the concourse, their weapons trained on her.
The captain was still laughing when two blue-white lightning bolts streaked down the concourse and hit one of the imperial guards, burning a hole clear through the woman’s torso.
“Not as outnumbered as you might think,” Petra growled. “Now, I—”
Kory’s gargled cry cut off her words, and she looked up to see that the guard holding him had snapped the agent’s neck.
“You motherfucker…” she whispered hoarsely before flinging her second lightwand at the man’s face as he let Kory fall to the deck.
She turned her head to again face the captain, her jaw setting in anger as he laughed at her with defiance in his eyes. Her gaze flicked back to Kory as he hit the deck, his wide eyes staring at her as the guard who had held him a moment before fell across his body, her lightwand sunk to the hilt in his forehead.
Behind them, the airlock’s blast shield irised closed, cutting off access to the shuttle.
Petra looked back to where the other agents were positioned, firing on the Impera Protego advancing down the concourse.
Petra wanted to argue with the man, but his eyes were filled with an unshakable resolve. He was right, there was no way she could get away with him in her arms.
Petra looked down at the captain, speaking through clenched teeth. “You’re going to regret this.”
“I doubt—”
His words were cut off in a gargled rasp as she cut through his neck with her lightwand. A moment later, she was in the air, pumping her wings, rising to the concourse’s decorative rafters with the captain’s head tucked under one arm. Dipping and weaving, her erratic flight managed to keep her safe from enemy fire until she reached the Hand agents providing covering fire.
She passed over Lucy’s position, then Delwar’s, finally dropping down to the deck behind the dubious protection of a decorative fountain.
The moment her talons touched the deck, an explosion rocked the concourse, and she closed her eyes tightly, knowing that Kory had made his final sacrifice. An agent’s long career, ended to save her from people who should have been allies.
“Director!”
She turned to see Danielle, another of Kory’s detail, beckoning her toward a bank of escape pods set into the concourse’s bulkhead.
Petra shook her head. “Not till everyone else is ready.”
“Ma’am, no one else can get to their pods till you’re in yours.”
Petra knew the woman’s words to be true, but hated them all the same.
She blew out a long breath and waited for a break in the weapons fire before dashing from the fountain’s cover to the pod Danielle had indicated. Something struck her leg, and she lunged forward, diving through the pod’s opening as rounds impacted the deck and bulkhead outside the bank of pods.
A dozen affirmative responses came across the Link, and a moment later, Danielle dove into the same pod as Petra.
“You should be in your own!” she scolded the woman.
“Not with how singed you are, ma’am.” The agent shook her head. “If we go through all this and you’re too beat up to make it to a safehouse on the planet, it’ll have been one big waste.”
Though the woman didn’t belabor the point, Petra knew that the ‘it’ was Kory giving his life.
She gave a resigned nod as she looked down at the dozen scorch marks on her body, and a sigh slipped past her lips. “Thank stars for ISF flow armor.”
Danielle jutted her chin out, indicating Petra’s lap. “You going to do something with that?”
Petra lifted the guard captain’s severed head. “Hell yeah, I’m going to see what this asshole knew. Should be an interesting interrogation.”
“There’s a cryopod in the bulkhead,” Danielle pointed behind her as she sealed the escape pod.
Petra pursed her lips, weighing the pros and cons. “Cryo could damage it.”
“More damage than the head’s decay if it takes us a day to get somewhere we can look inside? Plus, it’s gonna start to smell…well, more than it does already.”
“Good point.”
Petra pulled open the pod and set the head inside, sealing it and activating the cryofreeze process before buckling herself in. Five seconds later, the last of the agents had checked in, and Alastar initiated the Hand’s escape from Delorum.
Danielle laughed as a message came over the general network.
“Here goes,” Petra whispered, and she couldn’t help a small laugh as every evac pod on the asteroid jettisoned at once.
“I just hope the empress doesn’t go on a rampage for this,” Danielle said as they watched the planet rapidly fill the forward display.
“Shit,” Petra muttered, knowing that Diana would. “I don’t envy Harold in an hour or so, what with him being the new head of the Transcend’s delegation.”
Danielle shrugged. “He’s had worse. Surely you know about that time he infiltrated the Aquila Consortium?”
A grin tugged at the corners of Petra’s lips as she recalled the details of that mission. Then she remembered that Kory had been with Harold on that job, and a burning rage settled in her breast.
Someone is going to pay for this. Dearly.
And she had a good idea who that someone was.
RECRIMINATION
STELLAR DATE: 10.07.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Imperial Palace
REGION: Alexandria, Bosporus System, Scipio Empire
Diana hadn’t slept
a wink all night.
Not that she’d tried. Most of the night had been spent pacing across her office, thinking of that moment when she’d finished her ice cream and decided to apologize to Petra.
She’d even selected the words, owning the fact that she’d let her capricious nature become more than an affectation, when Dominus, the head of her guard detail that night, had alerted her to a fight on the docks.
Her first reaction had been to reach out to Petra, which she did, only to find that the ambassador was off the Link. Tenna checked the logs and found that the disconnect had not been clean. Fearing for Petra’s life, they both reached out to Alastar, but he wasn’t responding either.
As Diana had frantically tried to contact her friend, the Impera Protego got her moving, escorting her out a secondary dock that the upscale restaurants used for food delivery, and from there, onto a military corvette.
The empress had just settled into her seat and was about to order the pilot to stay docked, when a glance out the ship’s window had shown them already pulling away from Delorum while every escape pod on the asteroid blasted away into space.
“My Empress?”
The voice brought her back to the present, and she looked up, remembering that General Corpus, the man in command of the Impera Protego, was standing in her office.
“We found a nuclear warhead on the ambassador’s shuttle,” the general said in a voice that was eerily calm for relating such news. “We believe that the dock-side team discovered this and accosted the ambassador. They’re heroes, stopping her before she was able to plant it on the asteroid and make her escape.”
Diana had to admit that it would have been the perfect way to kill her and maybe even get away. Petra had the highest security clearance, and it would be easily believed that she had leveraged that access to stage an attack.
But she was making plans for the future, Diana thought, poring over possibilities. Everything she wanted hinged upon an end to the war. Killing me destabilizes Scipio, which doesn’t end the war; it makes it go on longer.
The empress considered—and dismissed—the notion that the Transcend had been playing her entirely. There was no way they would have taken a month to draft the Alliance documents if they were planning on throwing it all away a week later.
The general was still waiting for her response, and she swiped a hand through the air. “There are dozens of explanations that do not paint Petra as the instigator, General.”
“Perhaps, but all the sensors on the dock were shut down. What we have is the word of your surviving Impera Protego, and the bodies of the dead. Do you believe the amb—”
“Those bodies include Petra’s head of security,” the empress interjected. “General Corpus, allow me to be perfectly clear. Ambassador Petra is not a suspect. I want you to find her with all due haste because I think she was abducted more than anything else. When you find her—and I expect you to do so very quickly—I want her brought directly to me. I will speak to her personally.”
“My Empress, I—”
“General…” The word hissed from Diana’s lips like steam rising off water poured on a fire. “Unless the next words from your lips are ‘as you command’, you may resign your commission.”
Corpus’s eyes widened, and he ducked his head. “As you command, My Empress. I shall find Ambassador Petra and bring her to you.”
“Unharmed.”
“Yes, My Empress. Unharmed. Not a hair out of place.”
The empress dismissed the general, who seemed all too happy to be gone. Then she turned back to the window in her office—she didn’t even recall which one she was in—and gazed out over the city stretched out below her.
Despite the general’s belief that he could find Petra, and despite Tenna’s certainty that Petra would be fine, Diana wasn’t so sure. The two beliefs were contrary, and were nestled next to a third concern that Petra had turned against her, and was either going to flee or come after her.
The final moments of her conversation with Petra replayed in her head over and over. At first, she’d been filled with rage that Petra dreamt of leaving Scipio…of leaving her, and going off to live in a forest on the far side of human space.
But as she’d eaten her ice cream—feeling like a child that Petra knew just how to placate, which had made her even more upset at the time—she’d eventually realized how selfish she’d been to expect the woman to plan to spend eternity with her in Scipio.
Never once had the empress given honest consideration to the fact that Petra had been thrust into things as much as she had; that the other woman had hopes and dreams and passions of her own, and not all of those involved being a tagalong to the empress until her eventual assassination.
Because that’s what Diana always expected to happen someday. The notion of passing on the empire to someone else and living out the remainder of her days in peace had never occurred to her.
Well, in my defense, until a couple months ago, I had no idea that there was anything but the Inner Stars, and there aren’t a lot of great, safe retirement places for the former Scipian empress out there.
Diana groaned and rested her forehead against the window. “I feel like I’m at war with myself, Tenna.”
The empress turned and leant her back against the plate diamond pane. “Oh?”
The empress snorted. “Tenna, that was one of the first things I thought. And if my guards weren’t implicated, I’d believe it. But they’re incorruptible. It comes along with their conditioning.”
“They sign up for it knowing what’s involved.”
Diana wasn’t interested in a history lesson at that moment, but she was interested in how her guards could be corrupted.
“Tell me about these dozen ways.”
“I know all this,” Diana replied. “It’s why they all imprint on me, so that they know I am the one to protect at all costs.”
Diana’s eyes narrowed as she considered the possibility. Ensuring that her guards didn’t do harm to others just to protect her was a core part of their mental programming, but it was also the trickiest part. They were frequently evaluated to ensure that nothing was going awry.
HIDEY HOLE
STELLAR DATE: 10.07.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hand safehouse
REGION: Alexandria, Bosporus System, Scipio Empire
“This is the worst safehouse, ever,” Petra complained as she stared out of the window at the refuse-covered street a dozen levels below. “I’ve hidden out in nicer sewers.”
“No one’s going to come looking here,” Danielle said from the table behind her. “Most of the people on the planet don’t even know that this part of Alexandria exists.”
“The people searching for us know about it.”
“Well, there aren’t any remote monitoring systems here—not ones that haven’t been hacked by the locals, at least. If whoever is after us wants to ferret us out, they’ll need to send in searchers, and—”
“We’ll see them coming,” Petra completed the sentence. “Yes, I get it. I understand why we’re here. I just wish we weren’t.”
Danielle laughed. “I don’t think that anyone likes being in a safehouse. It’s not like they’re set up in nice vacation areas on the beach.”
“Maybe they should be. No one would ever look for me hanging out on the beach.”
“No, but you’d be spotted and tagged by one of a thousand drones in minutes—especially with the wings. Are you going to ditch them already?”
Petra looked over her shoulder at the wings hanging off her back. “No, I don’t think so. Provided Mains shows up sometime soon with more flow armor…. Then I can shroud them as needed. What I do need to do, however, is get these damn a-grav points off my feet. They’re starting to get really uncomfortable—especially since one is hosed.”
Danielle glanced at the long spikes Petra’s feet ended in and laughed. “I like a good disguise as much as the next person, but why do you let that costumer do stuff like this to you?”