At least no one would ever guess that this was my home world, she thought.
She’d given herself the last name of “Felaris” when she settled on Nova Angeles, hoping to leave shabby little Miala Fels and her past far behind. Most of her friends there called her Mia as well; she’d taken her father’s pet name for her and given that to everyone she met on Nova Angeles. In her mind, however, she was still Miala and always would be.
“The captain informs me that we are about to land,” Master Dizhan went on. “A transport is already waiting to take us to Mungar’s home.”
“Thank you, Master Dizhan,” she replied, then stood. “I’ll go and ready the rest of my things.”
He nodded, then stepped aside to allow her to move past him and down the corridor toward her cabin, one of only eight the small passenger liner contained. These days she was used to flying in much higher style, but Iradia was far enough off the beaten path that the first-class passenger ships generally did not travel there.
As she tidied up the cabin and set her two suitcases near the doorway for the handler mechs, she wondered again at herself. So much for resolutions. Then again, even Felaris Security Systems didn’t get a 1.5-million-unit contract every day.
At first she had refused. But that was before she had known what they were offering...
“I’m afraid I’m not interested.” Miala had pushed the pale blue sheet of synth-paper and its accompanying credit voucher toward the lavender-skinned Eridani who faced her. “This really doesn’t sound like the sort of project that requires the services of FSS.”
The alien man blinked his dark blue eyes. “Mistress Felaris, it is imperative that my employer secure the services of a reputable security agency. Your company’s reputation has spread far beyond this sector, all the way to Iradia. He insists that no one else will do.”
Iradia, of all places. Just the mention of the planet that had been her home for the first twenty years of her life brought a dry, bitter taste to her mouth. She’d vowed when she left that she would never return, and this unappealing offer certainly wasn’t enough to make her change her mind.
Still, she’d felt a little sorry for the poor man who had come all this way on a fruitless errand. She said, “My apologies, Master Dizhan, but I’m afraid you’ve made a long journey for nothing. I’m sure that you can find someone a little closer to home to take on your project.”
The Eridani’s face remained expressionless—at least, the alien male revealed no visible emotion. “I’ve been authorized to bid up to 1.5 million units, if that is what it requires.”
One point five million? she thought. That put a different spin on things entirely. Why anyone would think a standard software security installation required that sort of cash outlay boggled her for a second. If she’d learned anything over the past few years, however, it was never to underestimate the lower limits of human or alien intelligence. If the Eridani’s mysterious employer really felt it necessary to pay her almost double what the job required, far be it from her to dissuade him.
She’d allowed herself a small smile, and extended a manicured hand to the alien. “Master Dizhan, I believe we have a deal.”
The Eridani took her hand briefly, then inquired, “And how soon will you be able to fulfill the contract?”
“Some space appears to have just opened up on my schedule,” she replied. “Within a standard week, if not sooner. As soon as I have everything set here, I’ll be en route.”
He nodded. “Excellent.”
Mia pushed a button on her intercom, opening a direct line to her assistant. “Risa, Master Dizhan is ready to sign a contract. Standard security setup, expedited fulfillment. I’ll be on this one right away.”
“Of course, Mia,” came her assistant’s reply, with the slightest lift of a question at the end. Normally things didn’t move quite that quickly around Felaris Security Services.
Dizhan bowed his head once more, and rose as he saw her assistant appear at the door. Risa ushered him out with practiced ease, leaving Miala alone in her office.
Once she had committed herself to the project, she experienced a slight twinge of unease. She had gone away on business trips before, but never so far—merely to New Chicago, Nova Angeles’ neighboring planet, and then only for a few days. This trip to Iradia would require at least ten standard days. Then again, her son Jerem was almost eight now. Perhaps it was time to be a little less protective of the boy.
But Iradia—she closed her eyes for a moment, recalling the heat and the dust, the odd smell of baked rock and gritty sand. Were even a million and a half credits worth it? Felaris Security Systems had thrived over the mere four years of its existence, and she already had a waiting list of clients. Of course, she’d had plenty of seed money to get the business started—her half of the units she and Eryk Thorn had taken from the unguarded treasure chambers of Mast’s compound.
Mia shook her head. No need to start thinking of that now...thinking of him. He was gone, buried in the past, as had been the name with which she was born. No one here on Nova Angeles knew that her last name had once been Fels, or that the long-absent father of her son was none other than the notorious Eryk Thorn.
And she’d been reminded of that fact once again when she’d broken the news to her son that she would be traveling to Iradia and would be gone for at least a week and a half.
The level dark brows had pulled down in a scowl while he contemplated her words. “I want to come with you,” Jerem said finally.
She buried a smile. How typical of him. Most children would have wondered why she had to be gone so long or why she had to leave at all. Jerem didn’t bother to question her on these minor points—he had merely wanted to make sure he wouldn’t miss out on anything interesting.
“That’s impossible, sweetie,” Miala said. “This is a business trip. Besides,” she added, as she saw his frown deepen, “You know how dull it is when I’m working on the computer. Imagine a whole week of that.”
A sideways glance from beneath the heavy black lashes. “But aren’t you from Iradia?”
“Yes,” she replied promptly. “And that’s how I know you’d hate it there. It’s hot and dry and dusty. Sand everywhere with no beaches.”
He remained silent for a moment as he contemplated her words. The only world he knew was Nova Angeles, and it was everything Iradia was not: lush, covered in oceans, civilized. From the time he could barely walk he had played in the water; he’d learned to swim long before Miala did. In fact, it was Jerem’s love of the water that had finally forced her to put her fear of the waves aside and join him in the ocean. She’d told herself that it was necessary so she could keep a closer eye on him, but she’d known better. Even at four the boy could swim rings around her. It was more likely that he would have to come to her rescue, rather than the other way around.
In the end she’d gotten him to reluctantly agree that Iradia sounded like a very dry, dull place, and with promises of a special trip to the Marinis Islands, which were a popular resort not very far from their home in the the large city of Rilsport, Miala was able to get herself away without too much more argument. The guilt she was feeling now was just a normal mother’s separation anxiety, she told herself. She could get past that.
They landed at the spaceport at San Drea, which was marginally larger and of better repute than the ’port at Aldis Nova. Besides, apparently this Mungar’s home sat only an hour or so outside the city limits, making San Drea the logical destination.
Miala had never been there before, but as she stepped outside, she reflected that San Drea didn’t look much different from Aldis Nova. The city around her boasted the same squatty structures of sun-bleached stone or adobe painted in shades of ochre and rust, the same motley mixture of humans and a few aliens, all of whom seemed to have a rather furtive look—although that, she thought, might simply have come from squinting against the brutal glare of the planet’s sun.
She lifted her own pair of photo-reactive glasses ou
t of her satchel and planted them firmly on her nose before moving all the way out into the sun. Several men went to retrieve the rest of her baggage, since mechs were too valuable on Iradia to be used for such menial duties. Master Dizhan waved her toward a sleek, dark enclosed aircar that looked somewhat out of place in the shabby surroundings.
The car’s climate controls were working at full blast, and a welcome wave of cold air surrounded her as she maneuvered her way inside. The Eridani followed her and settled himself across from her on the expensive lizard-skin upholstery of the passenger compartment. Whoever this Mungar was, apparently at least he had the means to back up his inflated offer for her services.
Miala felt the car begin to move, and the shabby surroundings of San Drea flashed past outside the heavily tinted windows until at last the vehicle moved out over the open desert.
“About an hour outside of town, you said?” she inquired, wondering whether she should pull out her computer and do a little more preliminary work.
“A little farther,” Master Dizhan replied.
Something in his voice made her hesitate, and she looked back over at him. But his face, as always, held no expression that she could interpret. Shaking her head at herself—barely less than ten minutes back on Iradia, and already jumping at shadows, she thought—she leaned down to retrieve the tablet from her satchel.
Much more quickly than she would have thought possible, the Eridani man grasped her shoulder with one hand and then slapped something against the side of her neck. Miala couldn’t even cry out—the soft hiss of a hypodermic was the last thing she heard before the world swirled crazily into darkness.
Her head felt as if it had been dropped from a very great height and then split open. Wincing, Miala put her fingers up against her forehead, but everything seemed to be intact as far as she could tell. Then she opened her eyes.
She sat in a small cell whose walls seemed to be carved from the native Iradian sandstone. Dark metal rods like teeth barred the opposite side of the cell, which opened out onto a walkway with a sand floor. The whole place looked very primitive, but also oddly familiar. But somehow Miala couldn’t get past the pain in her head to make the connection, so instead she carefully stood, glad that at least she was able to do so without too much difficulty. Her satchel sat on the ground near the rough bench where she had lain. It didn’t appear that anything had been taken from it, including her tablet.
What the hell? she thought. The whole situation was so surreal that she couldn’t even summon up the fear she thought she should be experiencing at finding herself in such a place. Instead, absurdly, she felt more angry than anything else. What exactly was going on, anyway? Did they think they could coerce her into working for them for free, now that they held her captive?
“Awake, I see,” Master Dizhan’s voice came from down the hallway, and Miala immediately approached the bars and glared at him.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. At least her voice sounded reasonably steady, although she wished that her once-pristine synth-linen suit wasn’t quite so rumpled and stained. “Do you realize I’m a prominent citizen of Nova Angeles? Once they find out what you’ve done—”
“And how precisely are ‘they’ going to discover that, Ms. Fels?”
Miala opened her mouth to snap a retort back at him, then realized suddenly that he had addressed her by her real name, not the one she had adopted after settling on Nova Angeles. The words seemed to die in her throat, and she stared at the impassive alien face, feeling the first stirring of fear somewhere down low along her spine.
He nodded. “You begin to perceive something of your situation. Very good. Now you are awake, Lord Mungar will want to see you. Immediately.”
The Eridani tapped some sort of code into the lock, and the bars retracted into the floor and ceiling. Miala moved toward him, wondering if she dared tackle him—he wasn’t that much taller than she, and between her home gymnasium and chasing after a boy who was Eryk Thorn’s son in more than just looks, she’d kept herself in shape over the years. But then she saw the small but deadly-looking pistol he held pointed toward her heart, and realized it was useless.
With a meekness she certainly didn’t feel, she waited as Dizhan closed the cell behind her and then indicated that she follow him down the walkway and up a set of narrow, poorly lit steps. As they emerged onto the main floor, Miala cast a few quick, surreptitious glances around her. She saw curved ceilings, also of the same native reddish sandstone, dark metal wall sconces, a large circular staircase at the end of the hall they now traversed.
Eight years had passed since she last walked through this corridor, but it still haunted her dreams. Mast’s compound. The place where she had toiled in anonymity, seeking to break the security system her father had built for Mast and for which he had subsequently died. The former monastery where she had brought a mortally wounded Eryk Thorn and kept him from death, only to lose her own heart to him.
She could have been out for many hours. The compound was located on the opposite side of the planet from San Drea, but of course she had no way of knowing whether they had driven all the way here in the aircar, or whether they had simply transferred her into an orbital skimmer or other short-range craft once she was safely unconscious. She supposed that it really didn’t matter.
This Lord Mungar must have taken up residence in the empty compound once it became known that Mast was truly dead. Or perhaps he was just the last in a long line of petty warlords who had quarrelled over ownership of the dead crime lord’s quarters. Miala had never paid attention to Iradia after she had escaped it so many years ago. That part of her life she had put as resolutely behind her as she had her old name. She’d never thought it would return to haunt her in such a spectactular fashion.
The compound seemed cleaner now than it had in Mast’s heyday. The guards she passed in the corridor were all human. And the odd smell that had seemed to linger in the hallways of the building and which she had never been able to place was gone at last. However, these refinements didn’t do much to improve Miala’s opinion of this Lord Murgan, whoever he was.
Then they entered what used to be Mast’s audience chamber. When she had last seen it, the vast space had been empty and still; neither she nor Thorn had any real reason to spend any time there during the short week they spent in the compound together.
Now roughly twenty people occupied the audience chamber, a far cry from the motley horde with which Mast had surrounded himself. The current group consisted mostly of humans and Eridanis, but the creature who occupied the throne was neither of these. He was a large male, his golden skin and the mass of metal-studded braids down his back proclaiming his Stacian origins. His robes were well-made, but not overly elaborate; then again, a Stacian male generally made his impression through his sheer mass.
His copper-eyed gaze fell on Miala and Dizhan as they entered the chamber, and he smiled—but Miala found no comfort in that smile. It seemed too practiced, an expression he had put on because he thought it might be useful, not because the sight of her pleased him.
“Lord Murgan,” Dizhan said. “This is Miala Fels.”
She didn’t bother to contradict him. If they knew who she had been, it was possible they knew far more than that. So she merely stood her ground and waited, trying to ignore the unfriendly, speculative stares of the other occupants of the chamber.
“The famous Ms. Fels,” commented Murgan, and his eyes narrowed a bit as he looked down at her. Then he stood, stepping off the dais and approaching her. Up close he was even more overwhelming. Miala had never been in such close proximity to a Stacian before, as the Stacian Federation and the Gaian Consortium were always on the edge of war, and the two races did not often mingle. But she managed to hold herself still, lifting her chin as she gazed up at him.
“You’re quite young to have such a reputation,” he continued, after a pause. If he was disappointed by her lack of reaction, he didn’t show it. “But even w
ith that reputation, it took me some time to finally ascertain that the successful Mia Felaris of Nova Angeles was one and the same as Miala Fels, formerly of Aldis Nova on Iradia.”
Miala didn’t blink. “Nice detective work,” she said. “So what is this all about? Blackmail?”
To her surprise, he threw back his head and laughed. “No, dear girl, nothing that crude.”
“Then what?”
He did not immediately reply. Instead he made an expansive gesture that indicated the audience chamber and, by extension, the compound which surrounded it. “Many pretenders sought to control this place, to become another Mast. And they all lost. I have called this place home for the past three years, and my network has grown at the same time.” He stepped closer to Miala, so close that she could feel the heavy rolled collar of his over-robe brush against her hip. “But I inherited a compound that had been plundered of its treasures. All my predecessors claimed the treasure was long gone by the time they took control, save for some crates of silk left down in the vaults. But what of Mast’s vaunted storehouses of hard currency, precious metals, and gems? Apparently they had all vanished into thin air.”
Miala knew where this was going. The fear that had lain coiled at the base of her spine seemed suddenly to spread, to move upward and out, strangling the breath in her throat. But she still said nothing.
The Stacian reached out and ran a finger down the side of her face, following the curve of her cheekbone. “You’re lucky I don’t have Mast’s tastes, my dear,” he said. “I’m sure he would have found you delectable. I, on the other hand, am interested in only one thing.” With fingers that felt like iron he grasped her chin, forcing her to meet those inhuman copper-hued eyes. When he spoke again, the words were colder still. “I’m only going to ask this once, Mistress Fels.
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