Pandora's Gambit

by Randall N Bills

  She took a deep breath—her dress suddenly constricting—and marshaled her defenses. Snagged a drink from a passing waiter in his ubiquitous white uniform (how does he keep it so white?) and took a long pull from the glass before realizing it was not champagne but white wine. She never did well with white wine. And in front of these two men? She swallowed past the fruity taste. A different tactic. And show strength.

  “The fighting will spill here.”

  Lester slowly clasped his hands as though in meditation and eyed her silently before responding. “You believe it will?”

  “Yes. The renegade senators and their pocket ex-knight will make it to Geneva.”

  “Before Victor’s funeral?”

  “I can’t say. But they’ll come.”

  “The Republic will stop them,” Lester said, but his eyes told the truth of his own thinking.

  “Perhaps. But at what cost?” Despite sitting fifth from the throne, she’d received the same exacting education as her siblings and had excelled in military theory and tactics. Despite what others obviously thought of her, she was smart enough to gather as much information as possible on current events. Smart enough to think things through and wonder if our own necks just might be on a chopping block. “It’ll be a Pyrrhic victory at best. Geneva will be smashed.”

  Lester’s eyes seemed to pierce and prod. “So you are saying that Exarch Levin will sow what he has wrought with the disbanding of the senate?”

  She shook her head, glancing down as she swirled the wine in the glass, choosing her words carefully. Never know who might be listening. “I didn’t say that. The senators were corrupt, seeking the downfall of his office. Regardless of what lies are spread, that is truth. What choice did he have?”

  “Corruption?” Anson said, pulling both their eyes to him. He sucked on his bottom lip as though tasting some new cuisine on his tongue, while he ran a hand down his considerable paunch. “Truth? These words are too subjective. Results are all that matter to the masses, and that golden rule has determined the rise and fall of far more empires than any real truth: victory is its own success and the victors write history, making truth.”

  Nikol managed to hide a grimace. That sounded all too much like Mother.

  “What happens if we are all drawn into this coming fight?” Lester responded with aplomb, his face and voice betraying not a hint of emotion.

  “I don’t believe even the renegade senators would be so stupid,” a new voice cut in. “Besides, as soon as Victor is in the ground, we’ll all be burning to jump points, putting ourselves out of harm’s way. The senators have to know that, and will want us out of the way as badly as they want to take Geneva.”

  Nikol let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, glancing to her right as Jessica glided into their conversation. The brilliant mauve of her gown was echoed in her rouge, eyeliner and lipstick, as well as a heavy double knot of amethysts around her neck. Absolutely radiant.

  “Mother,” Nikol breathed with a warm courtesy. Resolve or not, tension along her shoulders eased at sharing the confrontation.

  “My dearest.” She smiled at Nikol, before a more serious look took in the two older gentlemen. “Duke Marik, Duke Cameron-Jones.”

  “My lady,” both said almost in unison, voices frigid.

  Nikol managed to not gape again, but barely. The hatred these two felt for Nikol was a matchstick flame next to the DropShip’s burning-fusion plume of vitriol directed toward Jessica. She marveled that such cool language could walk hand in hand with such hot hostility. Marveled more at her mother’s composure under assault.

  You always told me the hatred these two men held for you, Mother, but I never grasped it. I never imagined.

  “An interesting assessment, my lady.” Lester finally spoke, the first to master his emotions.

  “Yes, my lady, interesting,” Anson said, unable or simply not caring to curb the emotions that twisted his features grotesquely, despite an attempt at a civil voice. “But it doesn’t change what I say, eh? Victors write history. If the senators think they have what it takes, then they’ll take Geneva, smashed or not. Sometimes it’s the holding of the prize that matters. Even if the prize is smashed all to hell and back.”

  Her mother waved her hand dismissively. “Only the Davions and Steiners have the luxury of large realms and overbudgeted militaries, allowing them to bask in justifications and half-truths. Small realms that border such . . . immense enemies . . . do not have such luxuries. Such realms are drenched in the harshest of realities. Not ‘real truths,’ but the truths as discovered by soldiers dying in lost battles, and displaced commoners eating their shoes and having to decide between keeping a wife and a daughter alive. Those are the only truths that matter. It is time others, including The Republic, faced their own harsh realities. They will soon enough.”

  If Nikol imagined their hatred before, it couldn’t compare to the detonation of loathing that should’ve swept her mother out of existence. Her mother stood against the blast furnaces of their abhorrence, an island of calm, uncaring. She slaps them with an analogy that points directly at their realms and ours. The dance of tongues . . . there was no better practitioner of the art than her mother. Awe, and a strange reluctance to accept that emotion in relation to her mother, warred within her.

  “It has been so nice exchanging pleasantries with you, Anson and Lester, but it is getting late and I need to speak with my daughter.” Without a further word, she casually placed a hand on Nikol’s forearm and began to guide her away, leaving the two men flat-footed.

  Despite the obvious danger of the situation, Nikol couldn’t help the admiration that blossomed, despite her conflicting emotions. “That was magnificent, Mother,” she said as they wended their way through a small throng of people, heading to a far corner.

  Her mother smiled.

  “But dangerous. You mocked Duke Marik’s bravado.”

  “Sometimes I fear the man believes his realm is as large as he is. All three of us are in the same boat, whether he admits it or not.”

  They shared a laugh, and then Nikol became serious again. “Still, it was dangerous to confront him like that, right? They hate you so. They won’t even call you a Marik.”

  “Of course they hate me. They blame my father for destroying House Marik and shattering the League.”

  Nikol opened her mouth to respond and managed to quickly click it shut, for once curbing her tongue before it got her into hot water.

  They reached the corner and Jessica turned to face the room, as though to keep an eye out for anyone straying too near. “Say it.”

  “Say what, Mother?”

  “Say what you were going to say.”

  Nikol took in the kind yet steely gaze of her mother and responded. “But he did shatter it.” After all the years of always avoiding this topic, she couldn’t believe that here, now, among so many strangers and enemies, her mother finally seemed ready to talk about it.

  “No, he didn’t. Yes, he was an imposter. Yes, he had no right to the Marik name; hence why our esteemed dukes refuse to acknowledge the name in connection with my own.”

  Nikol shook her head. “Then I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, he was an imposter. But he was not the reason the League shattered. He certainly contributed, but they lay the blame squarely on his shoulders. They refuse to see that until the Jihad, until Thomas’ unmasking and all the woes that have come to us since then, he was perhaps the finest captain-general to ever sit in Parliament.”

  Nikol saw a look in her mother’s eye as she spoke, a look that reminded her a little too much of the look on the face of dukes Marik and Cameron-Jones; her previous thought that Anson’s words mirrored her mother’s tickled uncomfortably.

  “My father. Your grandfather. Remember that, dearest,” she continued, looking Nikol directly in the eye. “The hate they spew springs from jealousy. Ours is the better legacy, Nikol.”

  Despite her sudden queasiness at the comparison betw
een her mother and the other captains-general, Nikol felt giddy. She’d faced down two powerful enemies of her realm, and for the first time in her life Mother appeared to be treating her as an equal. Not handing her an opinion. Not constantly testing her as she’d done on the trip here, but honestly taking her into her confidence.

  “Mother,” she finally managed, “why are you telling me this?”

  “You need to discover the answer to that question, Nikol.”

  Only ten minutes before, such a response would have pushed Nikol back into her familiar frustrations. But at this moment the euphoria of standing up to the dukes and her mother’s new openness sparked a need in her to stop asking questions and instead provide answers. A need that demanded action.

  She looked into her mother’s eyes, then gazed out across the gala, eyes going unfocused. Why would Mother be revealing this now, of all times? What’s so special about tonight? Terra? The Republic? The dukes? Her mind snagged. The dukes. That must be what’s important, but why? What’s different now? She swirled the now-warm wine in its glass, completely unaware that she still held it. I’ve never met them before. Right. Her own words floated to her ears on the soft strains of violins beginning the opening phrases of some music she didn’t recognize.

  She looked back at her mother. “I needed context. I needed to meet both dukes. To feel their hatred of you. Of us. Only then could I understand what our own blood means.”

  Her mother’s brilliant smile in response made Nikol feel closer to her than ever before. There were still so many questions left to be answered, and she knew her mother would continue to test her. As they shared a long, companionable silence, Nikol finally began to believe that she would find those answers.

  Not because her mother handed them to her, but because she discovered them.

  5

  K20

  Maplon, Autumn Wind

  Marik-Stewart Commonwealth

  25 May 3135

  The wind hacked at Christopher’s skin like a serrated saw.

  The blisteringly bright red-orange sun turned the endless field of white on the slopes of K20—broken only now and then by harsh pinnacles of the blackest ballast thrust up like a giant’s fingers reaching for the sun—into a glaring canvas of flame that ate at his vision and his brain’s ability to cope.

  Gotta get out of this, or no amount of antiglare is gonna keep me from going blind.

  Squinting, Christopher Marik hunched precariously forward, desperate to keep control of the hoverboard. He screamed, a cry of fear and pure animal joy as the hoverboard shot out into an abyss and his stomach clawed into his throat; the rebreather’s vibrations on his back spiked up a notch as it worked for more airflow.

  For what seemed an eternity Christopher danced above a flame-washed winter wonderland, screaming with exultation before gravity finally tugged hard enough to pull the board down the almost thirty-meter vertical drop-off. Windmilling his arms helped him keep his balance and the small cushion of air under the board managed to soften the blow as he reconnected to the sheer face, but a sheet of powder sprayed around him like a wave thrashing a rock during a surging tide. The force of the impact almost drove his chin into his knees, and pain spiked along his entire body, accentuated by the subzero weather.

  “Hot damn!” Course, another impact like that and not even this Gienah Mark III board is gonna survive, no matter what their ads claim.

  Despite the conditions and the numbing cold working its way through the layers of insulated clothing, another shout slipped out as he expertly raced ahead of the avalanche started by his impact. Slaloming in a short s-track, he began a mad dash down into a large defile, careening through flashing patches of stark white and darkest night: a mad blur of sight and adrenaline that pummeled his senses until he cackled.

  He snatched a desperate look at the lower portion of the heads-up display on his helmet visor, which showed a compacted 180-degree window of what lay behind: a sluicing tide of white, climbing ever higher as the defile compressed the snow wave, rushing forward with increasing speed; an albino monster, ravenous with hunger and seeking its prey. Bright green eyes sought the speedometer in the upper-right corner of the heads-up display and another scream of triumph ripped free as he saw the digital readout climb past two hundred kilometers an hour.

  Crouched low, head almost between his knees, Christopher finally pegged the bright outline of the end of the defile shooting toward him as the wall of snow nearly engulfed him. With all the skill he could muster, Christopher pushed the hoverboard forward, as though increasing its speed by will alone, launching out of the defile as the avalanche detonated around him. The sharp decline following the slight rise at the defile’s end—along with his speed and the concussive blast of snow swirling under him—sent the board into a dangerous canted-edge slew. Christopher bent almost lateral to the left, as far as his binding-encased boots would allow, but he knew he’d lost this fight.

  “Gamma Release,” he shouted, and the outer casing on his bindings exploded away from his boots, kicking his feet off as he thrust farther to the left, toppling him in the opposite direction from the hundred-kilogram hoverboard as it hammered on its side into the snow and began a series of flips that would have shattered his ankles. In an instant, the smooth-as-silk hoverboard would have become a cumbersome death trap.

  While his mind chewed on that curiosity, he slammed into the ground, the wind knocked from him in a painful creaking of ribs. He felt ligaments tear in spasms of pain across his body.

  As quick as that the avalanche was on him, the rebreather in overdrive to fill his battered lungs. He ignored the pain and kicked hard to the surface, stroking through the snow like he was swimming. He’d felt the impact tear away his communication antenna, so screaming into his communicator wouldn’t bring anyone . . . yet he screamed anyway, anger that he’d managed to traverse nearly the entire Kallfield ice slope of K20 only to be dumped by a little decline sloshing away his fear.

  A small part of his mind wondered if the avalanche could have expended most of its energy coming out of the defile. Yet that thought hardly sparked on a conscious level as he concentrated on trying to keep above the cresting waves of white. Knew it to be hopeless when darkness brought cool relief to his ravaged eyes and he sank into the bowels of the frosty beast.

  K-City

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  The exasperated voice caused Christopher to wince. He couldn’t see Charlie through the cool packs secured over his eyes with gauze, but from experience knew a dark frown pushed the man’s petulant lips into a pout that would do a five-year-old proud.

  “Thought it was a good idea at the time,” Christopher said, careful to not move any muscles beyond his lips. About the only part of me that doesn’t hurt. At least not too much.

  “You thought it was a good idea.”

  He swallowed and winced as he discovered that even his throat muscles were sore (not to mention the foul taste of multiple medications coating his tongue); he was already growing tired of Charlie’s presence. You need a better name than Charlie. Charlie’s a good buddy to hang out with. Grab some air with. You? You’re a Reginald. Or a Dwight. Officious bastard your mom sticks on your coattails. That still stung— handing him the sports tour with one hand and saddling him with a chaperone with the other.

  “You wouldn’t understand, Charlie.”

  The slap of Charlie’s hand on a counter sounded like a shot in the small hospital room. “You keep saying that. And while you repeat that mantra, I have my own litany. You were specifically told about the Kallfield ice slope. You were told it’s a protected region of K20. They’ve opened up the entire mountain, except for one small section, to men and women stupid enough to strap on a board and try skiing down a natural formation that pierces the atmosphere. That one small section protects an endangered species. But no. You can’t stop yourself. You’re right in the middle of a marathon competition and you simply can’t resist pulling out and going down the most d
angerous part of the mountain. By yourself.”

  Christopher thought he heard the splatter of Charlie’s sarcasm against the walls.

  “Not just because it’s the most dangerous part of the mountain, but because they told you no,” Charlie forged on, voice growing ever more strident. “Her Grace specifically asked permission for you to enter the Commonwealth. She didn’t need to ask, but she felt it to be a courteous gesture before one of her blood entered another former League realm. Particularly a realm where we aren’t exactly welcome. And now you go gallivanting around without a care for how this affects your mother or our diplomatic relations. . . .”

  Behind the blackness of his gauze compress Christopher didn’t try to hide his sigh as his mind wandered. Not even a “glad to see you alive.” The second they wheel me in here after digging me out of the snow and he’s all over me with the same tired crap. Sure, Mom was all about being courteous . That’s exactly it. Had nothing to do with taking my ultimate extreme trip and turning it into her own tool of state. And I don’t evenunderstand the point. Do what I want to do; I’ll get instructions from her later. And then she slaps Courteous Charlie on me like a deadweight shackled to my board.

  “I said, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  Charlie’s sharp tone dragged Christopher from his own bitter thoughts. He resisted the urge to scratch his nose, unwilling to subject his tired muscles to the pain; he knew Charlie wouldn’t help, nor would he ask. “Boarding.”

  “What?”

  “You said skiing. I was boarding. And I almost made the whole slope. The whole damn ice field . . . almost made it.”

  Another slap on the counter, and . . . was he stamping his foot? Christopher bore the pain long enough to smile. Five-year-old, indeed.