Prison Moon_Ice Heart

by Alexandra Marell

  “Sorry, that’s just not good enough. Wish we had time to watch you die. That would be so much more satisfying than straddling your disgusting body, but we have a transport waiting and I have an appointment with a tech medic for a face change.” She slipped a second phial from her garter. Tipped back her head to drink down the antidote, hair dark as the farthest recesses of the universe streaming down her back.

  Did Janie Roberts have hair so lustrous? Kelskar found himself yearning to see it.

  He should find that yearning strange. It was surely strange. The chip implanted in his brain quelled emotion and subversive thought, but of late disturbing questions were teasing their way through the protective web. Flashes of another man in a different place. In happier times.

  He would report this malfunction on return from Planet Earth.

  Paralysis was instant. The Great Pakma stared open-eyed, unable to move or utter to summon a guard. Frozen to a statue by the poison invading his flesh.

  And still, Kelskar had thoughts of the innocent woman who would be blamed for this deed.

  The murdered monarch lay muffled by bed covers, carefully position to be found on the next security sweep by the patrolling guards. Appearing for the cameras as a man asleep.

  “Madame Lakmi, I will help aid your escape. This innocent woman need not be involved.”

  A flash of irritation darkened Lakmi’s beautiful face. “When I want opinions, big man, I’ll hire a sage. When I want walking muscle who obeys without question, I’ll buy me a gladiator. Get it? Do you know how much I paid for you?”

  A warning charge fired in Kelskar’s brain. Small detail came into high focus as the strange thoughts fell away. Blissful emptiness returned.

  “You’re not faulty, are you? You will be able to complete this mission without going soft on me?”

  “In perfect condition, Madame Lakmi. You have no need of concern. The guard will look in soon. We should be away.” His tone was clipped though he should not feel emotion.

  “Oh, come now, don’t worry about this Janie Roberts.” Lakmi flipped a dismissive hand and turned a cold shoulder to her inert lover. “It won’t be the executioner’s blade for her. That would be far too swift a death for a crime like this. She’ll end her days as prison fodder for reality viewing, likely some psychotic barbarian’s plaything on some forsaken prison planet. Now yes, we need to leave. My decoy transport is waiting at MC17. When you’re sure they’re following, you will take the pod on to Planet Earth. Got that?”

  “I have it.”

  “Make sure you do. And if you manage to evade the hunters, I’ll be waiting for you, big man.” Madame Lakmi cocked her head, listening to the thunder of boots on tile in the corridor beyond. “I’ll have a new face by then, of course, but security has finally noticed His Greatness has a problem.” A slow smile lit her beauty, like a satisfied feline after a relishing kill.

  “Time to leave.”

  Kelskar moved to the open window. Below a small cohort of guards streamed into the palace from the square courtyard. The Great Pakma’s murderer offered herself to his waiting arms. Four arms-men stood guard at the grand exit to the inner court. Kelskar swept up the concubine, holding her close, squeezing breath from her slender frame. Another charge from his malfunctioning chip flashed through his brain. A renegade thought crossed his mind.

  Why today did so many thoughts come unbidden? So he took blows to the head at the last arena contest. They said that could interfere with the delicate balance of waves and neurons controlled by his obedience chip. A tech medic visit was becoming a necessity.

  The renegade thought beat on in his mind.

  Throw the whore from the window. Save the human stranger so far away and so innocent from her coming fate.

  Give her the chance denied to his family. To him.

  Beneath his implanted armour, his heart beat a sonorous warning. Do not think. Better to forget the past than to go mad in thinking. Kelskar thumped the back of his head, once, twice. Had his phasing unit malfunctioned along with the chip? Why did it not blank out these blighting thoughts? Why did it allow memory?

  Kelskar Vespasian was a killer. No longer a hero.

  “For Jura’s sake, are you going to stand here all day?” Madame Lakmi’s eyes widened. Behind them the door flew back to crash against the polished Cyrene wall. The guard charged across the room, roaring for help and leaned over the stricken king two fingers pressed to the man’s forehead.

  Kelskar’s heavy boot crashed into the coloured window glass, shattering a rain of rainbow shards onto the guards below. Twisting to the wall, he slammed his skull three times into the polished stone. A feeble spark, then a welcome pump of numbing current flooded his brain washing everything away but this and the imprinted instructions to fight, escape, and lead the chase to the remote planet called Earth, to a dwelling in the land of Brit Ain in the northern seas. To the province of Dev On. To an eating place of name The Pink Cupcake.

  And then when he’d completed this betrayal, he would find Madame Lakmi and beg her to implant him with a phasing unit of double, triple strength so he would never have to feel or think again.

  Chapter Two

  Kelskar – Earth, Present Day

  So it was done. Janie Roberts would never see Planet Earth or her dwelling place again and he would now continue his existence of blank submission. His life of killing and sex.

  The pod awaited him, cloaked from prying eyes in an area of vegetation behind the dwelling place named in his brief. One touch of a button would initiate the programming to take him on to his new mistress.

  A simple affair, this current life of his and yet it had not always been so. These unwelcome flashes of memory told him that. Standing in the centre of a stone-paved area, watching the circling lights of the hunter’s vessel, Kelskar touched fingers to the back of his head, tracing the jagged break in the domed armour fused to his skull. Only so many times he could bash his head into walls and hard objects to get the blighted chip to work as it should. It was firing now, on and off like a flashing strobe, sending shards of pain through his brain, messing with his eyes.

  On, off. On, off. Forget, remember. Forget, remember.

  The terror on Janie Robert’s face haunted him. She begged for help and he, a warrior with strength to take those two hunters without breaking sweat, stood watching, obeying orders to the last.

  Above him, the lights circled and dimmed. The Earth woman would be bound and brutalised en route to a prison moon reserved for murderers of kings and worse. Cameras would beam her plight to surrounding planets. Bets laid on her chances of survival. Fought over and claimed by the strongest male, her body might survive, but what of her mind?

  She would not receive benefit of a chip implanted in her brain to help her forget, to help her endure.

  Why should he care?

  He tore his gaze from the light. Get into that pod before he did something stupid.

  A gleam of sliver light from the open door caught his eye. Curiosity, another gift of the malfunctioning chip. He should not wonder what lay beyond that door. Independent thought was a subversive thing that led to questions. The masters did not welcome questions.

  But the scent of something sublime invaded his enhanced senses. Nectar-sweet like the juice of the boral palm, enticing him inside the small space lined with surfaces covered with a shiny metal like a laboratory or a place of food preparation. A tall box hummed in the corner. Beyond, another open door and a space with chairs and tables covered in fancy cloth and small bowls of living plants. Something soft and sticky squished beneath his boot, releasing more sweetness into the breathable air.

  Crouching, Kelskar scooped up a handful of sticky pink and white crumbs and sniffed deeply, touching his tongue to the creamy mess.

  His mouth twisted in a smile as unfamiliar as the urge to cram the confection into his mouth with unrestrained greed, swallow, and kneel to reach for more. He groaned, deep in his throat. Food fit for the gods themselves. Janie Robert
s might have made her fortune bartering this fare at the great Courts.

  What harm in indulging a little sweetness before he returned? He pushed the remaining confection into his coat pocket.

  He knew sweetness once, so long ago.

  A traitorous thought threaded through his fogged senses. Bracing an arm on the wall, he shook his head, blinking away the blurring dizziness, the rush sparking in his veins. He should have shunned the confection. Too much sweetness was apt to befuddle a man—that was known.

  He smiled again, remembering a woman so long ago.

  So sweet.

  Did she mean something to him?

  Pain like a jagged stab from the monster of Deville lanced his temple. The room spun around once, twice. The chip in his brain fired sending ripples over his skull, barely in control now, leaving him vulnerably lucid and knowing.

  Once he had a family. He was husband and father. Then came the Purge and he could not save them. No, he did not wish to remember that. He slammed his head on the wall, his plated skull releasing a mist of fine white powder from the wall covering. Another memory dislodged and floated towards the light.

  A man teasing a youngling male with sweetmeats the straining child could never quite reach. A man’s heart bursting with love, the child dissolving into a puddle of squealing delight. A woman watching, lips tilted in a fond smile.

  Crack. The sound of splintering metal split the silence. His head hit the wall over and over. “Not now,” he ground out. “Work, by the dark gods, work you mal-blessed chip. Not now.”

  The cursed chip remained stubbornly dead. Trembling arms braced on a serving counter, Kelskar saw an opportunity. A crossroads in his mind and knew the path chosen here would map the rest of his life.

  His family did not survive the Purge. He could no longer change that history.

  Though for now, the chip no longer dictated his actions, he could still choose to make the rendezvous with Madame Lakmi and have these memories erased. Continue his life as cipher with no past, no will of his own. Slowly his brain fogged and clouded with the tell-tale slide to blissful oblivion. The chip flashed in and out, struggling for control.

  Return. Beg the tech medics to erase all thought, all memory of his old life. To take from him this blighted conscience.

  No. Sweetness melted on his tongue as the chip battled to connect with the phasing unit controlling neurons and thought. Kelskar clung to the memory of a woman loved, a welcomed child, heir to his house. To troubling thoughts of another woman unjustly condemned.

  Janie Roberts would not survive her ordeal. That history remained yet an unfinished story that could be rewritten. He need only make the choice.

  Return to oblivion, or stay and right this wrong.

  Lifting his head, he caught and held the scent of more sweetmeats wafting from a shelf on the far side of the room. A single wedge of dark decadent confection, decorated with swirls and patterns of gold leaf sat under a dome on a shelf labelled with words he did not understand.

  Devil’s Chocolate Temptation Cake.

  If the powerful drug in these sweetmeats helped him remember, he cared nothing for its name. Something in Janie Roberts’ delicate confections affected his dying chip urging him to confront memory and thought. Time to stare into the dark recesses of his mind while he still had control. He’d run from them for too long.

  He made a decision. Give Janie Roberts what he failed to give his wife and child.

  The hit of soft sweet cake, like a charge from a generating machine, made his brainwaves leap and pulse, downloading repressed information like a bursting dam, flooding the plains with jumbled thoughts and memories. For so long these memories danced at the edges of his mind, too terrible to bear. He had welcomed the chip, the wall that held them back.

  Wiping devil’s chocolate temptation from his face, he rode the giddy sugared buzz, knowing he would never return home. With a feeble jolt in his brain, the chip fizzled one more time and for a heartbeat the world around him sharpened to a painful intensity. Without conscious thought, Kelskar slid back a cover on his belt and touched a fingertip ID to the controlling unit, disabling the shield cloaking him from the hunters.

  He aided in condemning this woman. The gods had gifted him a chance to make amends. A chance he must take, though it carried risk of separation and death. He would claim Janie Roberts as his own. She would not survive without him.

  He would claim her because if he did, then no other man could.

  In a flash of light, the hunting vessel’s scanners found him and it was done.

  Janie

  Had she finally woken up?

  Lifting her head, Janie cracked open her eyes, sucking in a hissing breath. A staccato beat pounded her skull. That was some crazy dream, but why was she on the floor? Did she fall and knock herself out?

  A dirt-stained wall. Cold hard metal humming and vibrating beneath her. Where the hell was she? A disgusting smell caught in her throat. Vague memories of masks and faces and another vile stench flashed in and out.

  Definitely not in her bedroom.

  There should be pink roses, painted in tumbling showers on the mural opposite the bed. Velvet curtains trimmed with lace and a view of the harbour and sky beyond, not this streaked and stained wall that might once have been white. And definitely no iron bars.

  Iron bars?

  Frowning, she choked back a cough and dragged her scattered senses together. Had she finally caved and murdered her cheating ex? That would explain the police cell. A laugh bubbled in her throat. She couldn’t kill a spider, let alone Justin. No matter how much she wanted to.

  Be serious, Janie. Somehow she managed to get herself arrested and thrown into a police cell. Best behaviour and with luck they’d let her go.

  What the hell did she do?

  Kneeling, head down and peeking through a curtain of long dark hair hanging loose onto the slimy floor, she swallowed the urge to throw up.

  Like she nearly did on him—the man who abducted her.

  Now she remembered. Two men in her kitchen, yelling some other woman’s name. Cupcakes on the floor and then that sick, giddy feeling of flying over the village. Christ, what did they give her? The flying. That horrible sensation of soaring high above the beach, the houses and streets felt so real.

  Stand up, cover her naked butt and tell them they’d had their fun. Demand some warm clothes or she’d freeze to death there on the cold metal floor.

  “Be still. Take a moment for your senses to return.”

  Janie’s heart thumped against her ribs. A deep gravelly voice rumbled from somewhere to her left speaking a language she didn’t understand.

  What did he say? That was definitely not English.

  She scrabbled backwards, pulling at her too-short nightshirt. Back against the wall, knees hugged tight, she squinted into the half-light at the direction of the voice.

  “No Fear. Help you.” In her own tongue now, the voice cut like a growl through the gloom.

  Panic beat time with the thumping in her head. A dark shape mimicked her pose, sitting with his back to the wall in the next cell. A large shape, shrouded in shadow but unmistakably a man.

  “Janie Roberts.” In one sinuous movement, he slithered to his knees. Janie pressed harder into the wall. Her name. He knew her name. Was that good or bad?

  The cramped cell hardly contained him. He moved into the half-light and as it streaked his face, Janie remembered a man standing by the gazebo, watching the kidnapping with as much interest as someone watching paint dry. The bastard, so they got him too? Well, wasn’t karma a bitch.

  “Okay guys, this really isn’t funny.” Her voice bounced off the wall and died. Really not funny. Shivering so violently, she barely got the words out.

  “I have a meeting with the bank at ten. I can’t be late.”

  Dammit all to hell, she couldn’t be late for that.

  “Take hand.” It will give comfort.”

  The man spoke, part English, part words that m
ake no sense. Pressed to the bars, he pushed a hand through the narrow gap, beckoning her to him. What the hell did he expect her to do?

  “Who are you?” And why are you dressed like that? A weird costume of leather and metal plating. A long coat fell to his calves, pants moulded tight to his legs. Heavy boots on massive feet. If he stood, he’d skim the bars making up the roof of the cage.

  Janie huddled into the skimpy nightshirt, vulnerable and exposed, terrifying thoughts running rampant in her mind.

  “Take.” The man strained at the bars, pressing with the full force of his large body. No give to the metal. No hint of emotion in the face landscaped with scars and metal plates that looked welded to his head. A small beat of hope fluttered in Janie’s chest. Justin was into fantasy novels, role playing games and stuff. This guy, the men who took her, could have stepped right out of an alien mash up computer game or a Sci Fi convention.

  There had to be a rational explanation.

  “Who are you? Where are we?” He must know. He was so obviously one of them.

  “Janie Roberts?” The man tilted his head, studying her with pale eyes that caught the weak light. A fuzz of brown hair, buzz cut to his skull under the metal helmet. And the hand pushed through the bars? Long fingers, each half-covered with hinged metal plates that moved and flexed with him reminding her of gauntlets on medieval armour. None of it made for comfort.

  “Yes, I’m Janie Roberts. What’s happening? Did Justin send you? Is this his idea of a joke? I’m not moving till I know what the hell this is all about.”

  “Justin?”

  “Yes, Justin.” She shot him a glare. “This is just the kind of stupid stunt he’d find funny.” Beneath her the humming floor juddered with a heavy clanking rumble like an old diesel car engine coughing to life on a cold morning. The man grabbed the bars with his long fingers, holding himself upright. Janie flew sideways, slamming in an undignified heap into the side wall.