Relic of Empire

by W. Michael Gear

  Any questions, or communications should be directed to my office, or, in the event of an emergency, contact Minister Takka directly.

  As loyal servants of Internal Security, you have our utmost admiration and trust.

  Good luck to each and every one of you.

  Deputy Director’s Office Gysell

  CHAPTER 27

  Mayz stepped out of her temporary sleeping quarters, half-asleep, and trying to pull her armor on. She yawned and blinked at the compound. A faint smear of gray marked the sunset beyond the humped outline of the HTs parked in rows beyond her headquarters. The air carried a chill bite, and the very thought of putting together a search-let alone coordinating it, chafed way down inside. Nevertheless, Sinklar had been worried, and if he was, that was enough for Mayz and the rest of the First Targan.

  Rot it, when am I going to get some sleep? Everyone had been run ragged over the last months, but with no little pride, they could see the improvement. The Regulars were coming around, turning into a real army, the sort that could fight to win-and not just mop up after the Companions.

  Mayz walked toward her LC, and the command center that would allow her to assemble the First Targan. She’d have to pull Shiksta away from the exercises he and Ayms were running to coordinate the LCs while she monitored the communications.

  Mayz windmilled her arms as she walked to stimulate some circulation in her shoulders, and hopefully, to wake herself up.

  Buchman wasn’t the sort of individual to slack offor just up and vanish. The fact that she couldn’t raise him on her comm added to her concern. Or had that faint reading been him? Where in Rotted hell would he have gotten to that his signal would be so cursed weak? The last time they’d faced that problem had been inside Makarta Mountain, where comm had been line-of-sight only.

  Makarta ... underground. Mayz stopped in her tracks.

  “Buchman? You’re not down in the substructure, are you?” Or, perhaps inside a very large arcologybut most would only muffle a battle comm.

  “First Mayz?” a voice called from behind her.

  She turned, her hand up to stifle a yawn. “Yeah, what is it?”

  Two grim-eyed young men in armor walked up on either side of her. One presented her with a flimsy, saying, “This just came in, ma’am.”

  Mayz unfolded the flimsy-the sort official messages came on-with one hand, while her’other fished in her belt pouch f Ior a flashlight. Her attention on the odd message, she barely noticed the other men and women in uniform who appeared out of the night to gather around her.

  “What kind of a Rotted joke is this, anyway? What does this mean? I’m under arrest? What kind of. . . .” Mayz caught the gleam of weapons by the light of her flash. A hand snaked out of the darkness to neatly disconnect her comm.

  “I’m afraid it means exactly what it says, First. You may come with us quietly, and have a chance to sort it all out, or you may come under the influence of the stun rod. If things really get out of hand, we’re directed to kill you and bring you in that way. The choice is yours, First.”

  “Under whose authority?” Mayz hissed through clamped jaws, her heart beginning to pound. She filled her lungs, ready to scream, but the blinding pain of the stun rod caught her full in the back. In catatonic agony, she stiffened and fell into a man’s arms Hovering on the edge of consciousness, she barely remembered being borne to an aircar, her body swaying limply. Then a dizzy grayness closed around her.

  Skyla watched Arta Fera through slitted eyes. The game had escalated, with each acutely aware of the stakes. Skyla, playing for her very life, and Arta for the domination she now couldn’t afford to lose. The ragged battle of wills had intensified, each playing for whatever small advantage they might gain.

  Skyla sat on the curved bench behind the dining table, her hands clasped loosely at her ankles, her knees drawn up to her chest. The gleaming fittings irritated her now, as did the opulent filigree that traced golden patterns over the rich grain of the wood. Even the conforming cushions mocked her. Prisoner in your own splendor.

  In the forward lounge Arta exercised, her toned body flushed from the workout. From the angle of the light, and the sheen of perspiration, the woman’s skin had taken on a satin tone as supple muscles bunched and slid. Arta’s full-bodied hair had been pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore nothing more than a brassiere for support and a g string. Arta stretched and bent, chest rising and falling as she followed her rigorous workout. She reveled in her body, flaunting its beauty, every movement a tease and a threat as she adopted a combat stance and practiced her strikes, kicks, and punches.

  Skyla tore her gaze away, concentrating instead on the polished platinum shee-n of the dispenser. Fera had increased the stakes the night before. As Skyla lay shackled in the EM restraints, Fera. had gone through her closet, pulling out Skyla’s snowy white suits of armor and carting them out one by one.

  Skyla closed her eyes, remembering how she’d screamed, demanding an explanation.

  “I shoved each one into the disposer,” Arta had told her matter-of-factly. “You’ve got one left and I locked it safely on the bridge. You decide how you want to be handed to Ily. In that last suit of white armor or in the clothing I’ve left for you?”

  When Skyla had been freed to rip her wardrobe open, only two wispy teddies and a pair of greasestained coveralls had remained. In muted rage, Skyla had turned and slammed a callused fist into the wall with enough force to dent the jetwood. Then she stalked toward Fera, a killing clarity in her mind.

  “I can trigger the collar before you’ve even launched that first kick,” Fera had cooed victoriously. “How many options are left, Skyla? Think, before you act.” “Stop toying with me, you bitch!”

  “Toying? Oh, no, Skyla. This is deadly serious now. I don’t just want you, I want you pleading, desperate.” She’d cocked an eyebrow, amusement in her lustrous amber eyes. “You’re next move is to try and make me kill you. Would you like to bet?”

  Skyla had frozen then, her limbs shaking with the gnawing power of frustrated rage, her jaws grinding so hard a molar should have cracked.

  Fera had laughed, knowing full well that she was in control. “I can read your mind, Skyla. You’re a proud woman. The proudest woman I’ve ever known. That kind of pride is a weakness, and it will break you in the end, Skyla.”

  Fera had stepped close then, running her fingers along the paneling in a delicate caress. “Try, Skyla. Right now. Strike! See if you can hit me, drive me to use the collar with such a vengeance that you die under its grip. Come on! Here’s your opportunity.”

  Skyla had held herself in check-but just barely. “Look at you,” Arta had chided. “You’re shaking ... and burning bright red from desperation. Strike, Skyla. Get it over with. You might as well learn now. Love me, Skyla. Love me with all of your heart and body-and I’ll keep you safe ... keep Ily from raping your mind.”

  Skyla had turned away on weak knees, staggering to the sleeping platform, trying not to think of the blaster and vibraknife which lay so close and so impossibly far beyond her grasp.

  “Is that it? Rape my body so Takka won’t rape my mind?” Arta chuckled. “Not at all. Like I demonstrated the other night, I could rape you anytime I wanted. No, Skyla, I want you to plead-I’ll have you no other way. “

  The words burned in Skyla’s brain as she watched Arta panting and pirouetting in her exhausting combat routine. No doubt about it, the woman was very good.

  Better than me? If only she could get the chance to find out.

  Skyla shook her head, strangling in a renewed sense of futility. How did you win when the enemy knew your plan-knew your lack of options, and the desperation that drove you to try that one last chance, no matter how slim the odds?

  Skyla stood as Arta finished her last lightning attack on an imaginary foe and began her cooling out. Head down, Skyla punched the controls on the dispenser for a cup of stassa, dialing it extra hot. Her heart thudded with a sodden intensity in her breast.

>   Arta walked forward, grabbing a towel off one of the gravchairs to dry the trickles of sweat that ran down her face and neck. “You have a choice, Skyla. You can sit in the shower with me, where I can keep an eye on you, or wait it out shackled to the bed. What’s your choice?”

  Skyla shrugged dejected shoulders. “Bed, I guess. Keeps me out of your sight for another Blessed couple of minutes. “

  She started for the cabins -in the rear, her cup of steaming stassa in her hand while the adrenaline built. Stepping into the master bedroom, Skyla hesitated, started to turn ... and used the momentum to fling the boiling stassa on Fera.

  The woman shrieked, shocked by the burning liquid. Skyla launched herself, striking with all the coiled hatred that drove her. Fera barely got an elbow up, deflecting the kick just enough to avoid a killing blow.

  Sklya twisted in midair, recovering, and landed, her foot slipping out from under her on the stassa-wet floor. She landed hard, her head smacking the tiled floor and blasting lights behind her eyes.

  Groggy, but determined, Skyla pulled herself up, and got a hold of Fera’s knee, the closest thing she could grab. She caught a blurred glimpse before a wicked punch rocked her head back. Sklya roared in anger, vision gone blurry as she threw herself forward, fingers ripping the brassiere from Fera’s chest and scrambling up to sink her fingers into the woman’s neck.

  They rocked, bucking and kicking, screaming and punching in the puddled stassa.

  Skyla shrieked her victory as she tightened her grip on Fera’s throat, the muscles in her forearms bulging as she sought to crush the trachea.

  For an instant they stared into each other’s eyes, tiger amber and cobalt blue, each berserk with rage. And in that instant, Skyla saw Fera’s gaze clear ever so slightly-and knew in that same instant, that she’d lost. Before she could react, the collar decapitated her and she rolled listlessly on Fera’s wet body.

  As panic paralyzed Skyla’s thoughts, Arta coughed and struggled to sit up. Gray oblivion tightened its tunnel around Skyla’s vision, narrowing, narrowing....

  She came to, feeling oddly cool and loose-limbed. Skyla blinked, aware of the stabbing headache that followed the collar’s choking off of the blood supply.

  “Poor Skyla,” Fera cooed. “You tried ... and you came so close ... so very close to succeeding.” Fingers reached down to tenderly stroke Sklya’s

  hair. With a chilling certainty, she realized she lay on the floor, her head cradled in Fera’s lap. Her hand shook unsteadily as she reached up and rubbed the blur away. Turning her head exhausted her, but she could see up past those giant breasts that hung over her and into Fera’s oddly gleaming eyes.

  “A good try, Skyla,” Arta continued to croon. “But, dearest, you lost. You caught me completely by surprise-and at a most vulnerable moment. I was slow, too relaxed after the workout. The scalding stassa gave you just the edge you needed, and you’d have killed me-and the collar would have done its work on you-if you hadn’t slipped.” She smiled maternally. “The quanta, Skyla. They betrayed you to me .

  “Let ... go of me.” Her voice sounded like carborundurn on wood.

  “No, Skyla. You had your last chance.” Arta cocked her head. “What will it be? You can decide now. Me? Or Ily? Would it be so bad to be my lover? I’ll cherish you, Skyla. You’ve lasted longer than I thought you would. And your resolve to die rather than lose, that took an incredible amount of courage. I don’t believe a woman of your courage and cunning wants to be paraded into the Ministry of Interior in one of those silly sexy nightshirts.”

  “Why don’t you just kill me?”

  “Because I want to save you.”

  “Rot in hell, bitch.”

  Arta nodded, her hands still twining in Skyla’s hair with a lover’s touch. “We’re one jump from Rega. We can be there within a couple of days ... or we can take longer. A lot longer. You decide, Skyla. I’ll give you three hours.”

  Ayms ripped his headset off and tossed it onto the comm before him. “That’s it. They got us.”

  The Army North command center began to shut down as the comms went dead. Once the room had been a reading room in an Imperial resort. Now it had been stacked with computers and a situation board. Where once overstuffed recliners had dominated, now scarred swivel chairs creaked as people shifted. Officers began switching off the comms as the master computer recovered their data and saved the information for later study. Weary men and women collected their things, talking softly as they replayed elements of the battle that had obsessed them for three long days now.

  Dion Axel leaned back in her command chair, massaging the bridge of her nose. Her straight brown hair swung with the motion. “That was well played. They hit us in the soft spot and overran before we could counter.” When she finally looked at him, a grim hardness filled her stare.

  “What’s on your mind, Dion?”

  The corners of her lips twitched. “Something’s not.... I mean, I know Freeman and Cresent. They couldn’t have come up with that maneuver if their lives depended upon it and they had ten weeks to prepare. “

  Ayms gave her a lopsided grin. “I’ve seen just that sort of thing happen. I saw people on Targa pick it up overnight. A couple of times of feeling the pulse fire prickle your scalp, and you learn real quick.”

  She didn’t look impressed. “That’s just it. None of these guys have had pulse fire humming around their heads. These are aristocratic playboys, Ayms. Listen, you’ve been on the front lines for so long you think everyone has your instinct for survival. You take it for granted. “

  “Maybe.” Ayms crossed his arms. “So what’s the point?”

  Dion took a deep breath, swelling her armor in a way that pleased Ayms-despite the fact she was at least seventy-five years his senior. “It’s too quick, that’s what. And this is the third time we’ve fought Regulars who gave us a run for the prize. This time, they won-and it makes me awfully Rotted suspicious.”

  “We’re working with Regulars ourselves. These guys never would have taken any of the Targan Divisions. Or yours, for that matter.”

  Dion grunted something under her breath and rose, eyes still fixed on the battle comms. “Maybe not, but I smell a Terguzzi rat in the cargo hold. “

  “Look, you’ve been losing sleep over it. Why don’t you fly in to the palace, see what Sinklar thinks of it.”

  She nodded to some of her staff officers as they left. “Maybe in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep tonight. “

  “Me, too,” Ayms declared. “When this is all over, I’m going to settle down and spend the rest of my life asleep. “

  Dion gave him a worried smile, then started for the door.

  For long moments, Ayms sat at his comm, thinking back over the exercise they’d just conducted. These were green Divisions, supposedly just shipped in from Ashtan. So, how had they known Ayms was going to pull his people out of the orchards and strike for the forest? True, he’d used that same tactic on the last three exercises he’d run, but these new guys wouldn’t have known that ... would they?

  His frown deepened and he pulled up the tapes on the last three training exercises, skipping through the recordings, watching the troop deployments. His opponent, supposedly the soft-looking Firsts he’d met at the pre-exercise briefings, had consistently defied the Holy Gawddamn Book, but the on-the-ground tactical execution had been so bad Ayms hadn’t needed any real skill to whip them. But this last time?

  He reran segments of the record, watching the opponent deploy with a familiar ease. Just as if they’d done it before.

  Except how could they?

  Ayms leaned back, tapping his chin with a nervous finger. Comm could always mislabel a Division, switch Regulars for.... Naw, that implied that someone in Comm had to okay the switching.

  “Or Sinklar’s doing it to keep us on our toes.” And the answer to that was very easy to obtain.

  Ayms shut the system down and left, passing two security officers outside the door. He hadn’t taken four
steps when those same officers matched his step, calling, “If you have a minute, sir? We’d like a word with you. “

  Ayms shot the young woman a sideways glance. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had eight hours of sleep?”

  “ Yes, sir. But, sir, we couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with First Axel. If we could, maybe we can shed some light on your dilemma.”

  Ayms slowed to a halt. “You mean there’s something to this?”

  The young woman looked quickly at her companion. “Not here, sir. There’s a room ... just down the hall. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Ayms hesitated, suddenly unsure. Rotted hell, he was in the middle of the Fourth Targan headquarters. If he wasn’t secure here, with two security people, where would he be?

  “Sure, but this had better be good. You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on that room back there. “

  The young man spoke. “It will be good, First Ayms, I promise you.” Ayms grunted and let them lead him down the hall. He stepped into the laundry room, glancing around at the heavy sacks and piles of linen. As the door clicked behind him, he turned, saying, “All right, now what’s the story on this command. . . .” He never finished as the stun rod jabbed him in the stomach. He felt himself falling, and then the clean smell of linen surrounded him as a bag was pulled around his limp body.

  The rod blasted pain through again, keeping him dazed, but he heard the young woman say, “The delivery truck will be here in ten minutes. We’ve got to keep him down for at least that long.”

  “They won’t check?” the young man asked.

  “For what? Dirty laundry? No one will know the First is missing until sometime tomorrow. By then, it will all be over. “

  The stun rod shredded Ayms’ reality again and again, and finally, his screaming nerves simply switched off to leave him floating in an ever blacker haze.

  “This way,” Anatolia called, trying to keep her voice down. The acid of panic had given way to a chronic ache of horror as she wound through the nether regions, reliving that endless nightmare of pursuit and bleak hopes.