by J D Huffman
But here, she saw that he truly knew how to use the blades. Martan exhibited some difficulty in keeping up with his master, and Sasha suspected that the Grand Vizier had once been Cylence’s instructor, but over time their roles had shifted so that the student became the master, in more ways than one. Despite herself, she found an almost poetic beauty in how the men moved across the purple carpet, occasional blue and white sparks showering down from where their blades collided. The whole thing looked choreographed to her, giving her the sense of a rehearsed performance that Cylence and Martan were, for whatever reason, putting on for her benefit. She worked to convince herself that this wasn’t true—that Cylence surely didn’t care so much about how he appeared to her, of all people. She couldn’t escape the possibility that he was trying to influence her with it, to some unknown end.
While the men clashed, she thought over what she and Zotz had discussed before. He informed her about the Order—that shadowy yet ubiquitous organization—and how he’d been working with one of their fleets for months, passing information back and forth, helping to set the stage for a final Order incursion into the Dominix itself. She wanted to believe him. She also wanted to believe something besides the Order was coming to the rescue. Fred had cautioned her about them, and from what she’d heard, she doubted very much her vision of the future would align well with the Order’s priorities. Beyond sharing an enemy, she didn’t anticipate finding a lot of common ground. Zotz assured her the Order would be their salvation. “They’re quite powerful. I’ve been involved with them for some time,” he told her the other night in Cylence’s office. “They have a plan, and because of my assistance, they’ve been able to move up the timeline considerably. The Totality are too close to upsetting the balance of power for the Order to allow it. The time to strike is not in some hypothetical future when the Order have a clear advantage, but now, as the Totality are on the verge of a terrible breakthrough.”
She knew that he meant whatever project he’d been working on—the quintessence device, the Source, and whatever peculiar way those elements fit together to allow the Totality complete, unrestrained access to every human body in the universe. The prospect terrified her now in a way it hadn’t in the past. Before, she knew it as a distant possibility. An entity could slip into one’s body unbidden, but prior to Angel being taken over, she’d believed no one besides men never fell victim to it. The reasons behind that remained unknown to her, of course, but Angel’s violation left her unsettled, and now she’d learned that the Totality were perilously close to achieving their wildest fantasies, putting the rest of the universe at terrible risk.
An abrupt, loud clang made her instinctively jump, banging her head against the top of her cage. As she rubbed her head, she saw Cylence kneeling next to her with that obnoxious grin of his. “What has you so distracted? Plotting your escape?”
“I wouldn’t be much of a rebel if I wasn’t,” she goaded.
“Careful, now. You wouldn’t want to exhaust my patience, especially with the way you’ve been boring me lately.”
“I apologize for not being more entertaining,” she quipped.
He appeared amused by her willfulness. Her sense was that, while his inability to break her used to frustrate him, at this point it had become a source of entertainment. She was a curiosity to him, like a wild animal in a cage: something to be pointed at, laughed at, mocked. This meant that Sasha had to think of other ways to irritate him, lest he believe he’d somehow beaten her after all.
Before she had a chance to raise his ire with further disobedience, Cylence began to monologue in his self-aggrandizing manner. She tried not to pay much attention, but the musical quality of his voice won her over. He was a monster, but his voice had a way of making her listen.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked. He continued, not waiting for a response. “Of course you have. You’ve killed many people. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. But have you done it up close? Have you choked the life out of another person? Delivered the killing blow with your own hands, or a weapon acting as an extension of your hands? I can tell by the look on your face that you haven’t. You think I’m mad.” He tilted his head and smiled again, so broadly his eyes narrowed to a squint. “You wouldn’t be too far off the mark to think so. In some ways, I’m a man out of his own time. This universe of spaceships, superluminal travel, beam weapons, zipping from star to star and planet to planet… it’s a bit over the top, don’t you think? I’m not talking about the difficulties of managing a great empire. That’s simple. You command respect, and when it isn’t given, you purchase it with force or favors. True leadership is knowing which to use in any given situation. I’ve bought many favors in my tenure, and rarely regretted it. But the one thing no one can give me—the thing I must take for myself—is that act of killing, up close, face-to-face, as personal as possible. I don’t have to know the poor fool whose throat I’m slicing open. You learn more about a person in the instant of death than you ever could by talking with them. That must sound so very ironic to you, coming from me, of all people, doesn’t it? But it’s true. There’s just something about a blade. It’s not like a rifle or a pistol. Firearms are so impersonal. You pull a trigger and the magic of chemistry or plasma physics does all the work for you. You never feel the bullet or the bolt striking your target. The blood spatters off somewhere else, or the skin singes and you only get to smell it. But a blade? A blade is the amplification of your own force, the physics of your own body. If you don’t have the strength in you, the sword doesn’t just hand it to you. To sever flesh and bone, that’s your own sweat, your own direct effort. You have to feel the blood on your own hand. You have to stare into the face of a man who is dying before your eyes. Will he go out with stoic dignity, not even giving me his last words? Will he curse me like a brute? Will he weep like a child? It’s a different flavor every time. Every one is unique. There always comes that moment, when you realize the eyes staring back at you have become lifeless. People think you can just tell, that there’s somehow this instant at which you know the life has fled, and if you could cleave history into two equal parts—the moment before death, and the moment after—there would be this tiny increment, a sole moment where death finally occurred. But life exits the body in phases. The breath doesn’t follow the blood, and the blood doesn’t follow the brain. When the eyes have gone still, there may still be blood leaking from the body. It’s a messy business. It’s an art. Is it wrong to say killing is an art? Can a man not paint in corpses as on a canvas? And the true beauty is that there are no mistakes. No corrections. An opened throat can’t be closed. A pierced heart can’t be restored. When a head is parted from the neck and rolls on the floor, it’s like a comedy, the way blood spurts out from the neck wound. It’s absurd. It’s the absurdity of all life—the absurdity of humanity. The more I kill you, the more I understand you, and the more I realize there is nothing to understand. You’re all nothing but curiously animate chemicals. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that only the Totality are truly alive. That we were denied physical form is an extended cruelty, perhaps a joke played upon us by powers higher than our comprehension. But it is also the crucial difference that sets us apart. Without your bodies, you do not exist. But we—we Totality endure. Is it then not right and proper that we take what we need to experience the full glory of our own existence? And to take it from soulless animals is surely no crime, is it?”
“Arkady made a similar argument,” Sasha pointed out, finally interrupting him. “You exiled him for disagreeing with you.”
“I’m well aware of what I did to Arkady,” he frowned. “He and I only disagree on methods, but I say ‘only’ as if to imply that method is irrelevant. Method is, of course, everything. Without method, there is no action. Without action, there is no change. With no change, there is… nothing. The universe can only be judged relative to itself. If it remains static, there is nothing to judge, nothing to consider. Arkady belie
ves that he and his kind can exist alongside humans, with humans akin to pets. My view is quite different. You are dangerous animals who need to be leashed.”
“Right now, you have me in a cage and yet you always look like you’re afraid of me,” Sasha lied. “Is that how ‘dangerous’ we really are to you?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he growled. “I keep you because you amuse me, and because you make a quaint prize, even if you won’t perform to my whims. But I will warn you once again: my patience is not infinite, and I bore easily. It’s entirely possible that one day I will come here to my throne room, or my office, and my men will have spirited you away and disposed of because I’ve long since lost interest in you as a plaything, and I will scarcely notice your absence. There is no human whose absence I would make particular note of, except perhaps to celebrate the riddance of a pest.”
“You sure spend a lot of time trying to convince me I don’t matter to you,” she smirked. “It’s not me you have to convince. It’s not like I have any choice in being here.”
“Ah, but you do,” he wagged his finger, pacing back toward her from beside his throne. “Because you will very soon have to make a choice, and I look forward to seeing whether you make the same choice as in the past, or a different one now.”
Sasha recoiled as he got closer, pushing herself into the far corner of the cage. “I don’t give a shit about your riddles, Cylence.”
“It’s a shame you aren’t more intellectually adventurous. It’s very stimulating to the mind, and what’s good for the mind is good for the body. But again, I waste my words on lesser things incapable of coherent thought, don’t I? All I mean to impress upon you is this: the hate you hide behind your eyes for me, the vengeance you wish you had, you’ll have to face it down, or someone you care for very much will pay the price for it. You will have a simple decision to make. Punish me, or save another? What’s worth more to you, Sasha? Vengeance or compassion? Can you at least think dialectically? Is your inadequate lump of neural tissue up to such a meager challenge?
“Could you force a blade into my body while another lies dying beside you? Is that a price you’d pay? At what cost, revenge?”
Sasha would’ve given anything just to ram a sword through his mouth right then, if only to make him shut up.
Chapter 41
A Top Down Approach
The auxiliary maintenance port through which William entered the Dominix Totality Centrality was eerily silent, dark, and deserted. Dim status lights kept the dome out of complete blackness. The tiny airlock through which he entered had been manipulated by a couple of Order technicians who knew how to finagle the electronics without alerting the Totality. “An access port like this doesn’t have a lot of security measures,” one of the techs had told him as she worked to disable whatever minimal safeguards were in place. “It’s too small to insert a large force, much less any big equipment. The Centrality is too vast for the Totality to patrol and protect all of it, so they don’t tend to assume anyone would come in through such a tiny access point. You can’t get an army through here, and security on the lower levels should catch any small teams or individuals who make it in.”
William, on the other hand, was supposed to be smart enough not to get caught. Being a Militiaman required some stealth, of course: pursuing suspects, eavesdropping on vital conversations, things like that. What he’d never done was insert himself into a sprawling military complex in order to carry out a cap-or-kill action. Jobs like that were reserved for the more elite units, not low-rung investigators like himself. Even on Trepsis, he would’ve preferred to send a specialist for this sort of mission. He was certain his mother had access to competent personnel, but preferred to send him out of some sense of… what? She wants to see how much she can control me, maybe. She knows I won’t stand for her outright killing the Totality on the ship, so she’s making me earn that. She’d risk this whole operation blowing up in her face just to prove who is in charge. Then again, maybe she has a contingency plan. That’d be smart. The other team she’s sending in down below. They could do the job if I can’t, right? She’d better hope so—I’m not exactly confident I can pull this off.
Still, he was relieved that the dome he entered was empty. No one around, no noise. It was the most silence he’d enjoyed in… weeks? Months? If only I could just stick around and bask in it for a while. But he had to move on.
Slipping out of his skin-hugging extravehicular suit, which he stuffed casually into a corner, he drew the sidearm his mother provided and thought over the mission briefing as he opened the hatch in the middle of the floor and carefully lowered himself to the next level.
The Order troops who sat in on the briefing were clearly unimpressed by William’s presence. They saw nepotism, pure and simple. Mom’s sending her boy to do the big job because she believes in him. That’s what they’re thinking. They don’t get what kind of game she’s playing. Neither do I, for that matter. He hadn’t paid that much attention as Demeter detailed Team Alpha’s insertion and mission objectives. Demeter rattled off what intelligence information the Order had gathered from Zotz, though Demeter referred to him only as “our confidential informant.”
“The main complex of the Centrality consists of eighty levels. Cylence’s throne room and office reside on the sixtieth. He is buffered by three levels above and below of military quarters and security control zones. The soldiers inhabiting those levels rarely venture beyond—their duty is to ensure no one gets past them and into Cylence’s sanctum. Cylence himself is believed to have his own quarters on one of these levels. Our source doesn’t know which. Internal schematics obscure this information, for obvious reasons.”
So, William knew he had that to look forward to: three floors’ worth of Totality soldiers, no doubt the best of the best, trying to take him out, and here he was with no backup at all. He wasn’t an idiot—he was well aware the Totality wouldn’t expect a solitary assassin. Demeter had more on that:
“The Totality base their defensive posture almost entirely upon the assumption of a direct assault on the Centrality, by the Order. We intend to use this posture against them. Rather than engage in a full assault, we will insert Team Alpha and Team Beta using small, nullspace-masked vessels, wait twenty minutes, then begin skirmishing with the Centrality’s outer defenses. Our failure to bring the full force of our power against them is intended to sow confusion as to our objective. They may be inclined to believe it’s a lone marauding vessel, not a coordinated Order attack. We expect that this will bring a muted response on the part of the Totality, but provide a sufficient distraction for our insertion teams to approach Cylence’s inner sanctum.”
William didn’t think it was a bad plan. It was a gamble, certainly. But if the Order succeeded in confusing the Totality—something William figured the Order would know better than he how to accomplish—perhaps they had a chance.
Initially, he was skeptical of the loadout Demeter picked for him. His mother’s Executive Officer claimed she’d approved the package, and that it was “mission appropriate,” but William had significant doubts about undertaking something so dangerous carrying only a sidearm and wearing no protection whatsoever. “Armor would slow you down,” Demeter assured him, “and the RZ-85 is a perfectly deadly weapon in a portable package. Any shot that hits the head or near center mass is a virtually guaranteed kill.” William didn’t care for fuzzy words like “near” and “virtually,” and he’d been given no time to practice with it. The pistol felt light in his hand, even moreso considering the power Demeter promised him it held. William also worried about recoil. “There isn’t any,” Demeter said. Well, that’s something. He wished he had more time to learn the ins and outs of Order tech. Maybe afterward. I wonder if they’d be willing to part with some of this stuff for Lexin’s benefit. If I could even go back. They didn’t let my mother go back, after all. Why am I even thinking about it? I have to survive all this first.
The upper levels were as Demeter had described them in the briefing: “Largely unmonitored, consisting mainly of provisions storage and mechanical works. Patrols are light and erratic. An attentive infiltrator should be able to avoid them with ease, until the barracks levels are reached.” William, of course, was the “attentive infiltrator.” Occasionally, he heard footsteps, and moved quickly but quietly behind one crate or around a corner, evading the pairs of Totality personnel who wandered past to gather packs of food and other supplies. They came and went every few minutes—usually in pairs, but sometimes alone, and he saw at least one trio. Usually, they were too wrapped up in the task at hand to notice William even if he’d gone out of his way to make noise.
Four levels down, as he listened to one group of Totality wander away, he heard more footsteps approach. Pressing his back up against the boxes behind him, stacked on shelves that went up to the ceiling, he breathed as slowly as he could manage just in case they might hear him, pistol clutched to his chest and gripped by both hands, ready to lower it and fire if the need arose in an instant. “These are empty,” he heard one mutter.
“Did you check all of them on the bottom shelf?” the other asked, clearly annoyed.
That annoyance was returned, multiplied. “Yes. I’m not stupid.”
“You must be, because you’d already be checking the next shelf up! If you find the dehydrated fruit pouches up there, we’ll have to come back and move everything down a shelf. You know the day shift gets in a huff if the inventory isn’t kept efficient.”
“I don’t need a fucking lecture.” William heard a lot of rustling around in one or more boxes. “Here. I got the damn pouches. A whole box of them. The kitchen will be happy.”