EasyPrey
by Stephanie Barr
Copyright 2018 Stephanie Barr
Discover other titles by Stephanie Barr at Smashwords.com
Conjuring Dreams or Learning to Write by Writing
Tarot Queen
Beast Within (First of the Bete Novels)
Nine Lives (Second of the Bete Novels)
Saving Tessa
Musings of a Nascent Poet
Curse of the Jenri
Legacy
Ideal Insurgent
Dedicated to Stephanie, Roxy and Alex, always.
Cover by Brendan Smith
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
Starstruck
Easy Prey
Out of the Box
About the Author
Starstruck
This is your craziest idea yet, Bryder. Talking to himself wasn't the problem—he'd been doing that since childhood—but he was generally more complimentary.
He had hated the Empire for as long as he could remember. So, why was he here, training to be an analyst/agent for the self-same Randian Empire? He should have checked himself for a fever before signing up. Had he been drinking?
Not that he hadn't worked for them before. Everyone did at some level or faced being trapped forever on a backwater planet. Not for Bryder.
Bryder had set his heart and mind—an extraordinary mind if he said so himself—set on taking down the Empire. Not a practical ambition, he admitted, but it had already taken him further than he expected, even if the solution still eluded him.
Who would have guessed it would bring him here?
Someone clicked his heels and an imperfect silence settled over the assembled cadets. They were seated on the floor of a sparring mat like schoolchildren facing another empty mat. Behind and to the side were perhaps a dozen instructors in dull dark colors denoting rank and specialty. The cadets, like himself, wore black. "What is this, a funeral?" Bryder muttered.
A woman stepped into the room from the far side, a vision in white. Her jumpsuit was the same utilitarian one-piece as the cadets' but as brilliant and spotless a white as theirs was black. Her pale flawless skin was only a shade or two darker than her clothes and unsullied by makeup or artifice. Her white-blonde hair was cut close to her scalp. Only her brows—shaded somewhere between the black of her lashes and the pale of her hair—and her large gray eyes showed any color in her face. Her face seemed chiseled in white marble but her eyes were more like hardened steel. Who was this woman?
"Attention, class." Though she didn't speak loudly, she had enough authority in her voice to eliminate the remaining murmurs among the cadets. "My name is Nayna Rand. You'll note that I used the Empire as my surname. Those of you who have retained family ties and identities will do the same. When you entered this class, your families, your homeland, your planets of origin, children, parents, friends—those ties are no more. You are part of the Empire now, and your loyalty must not be split with any others.
He hated her. Cold, proud, callous, ruthless, and selfish, she was the perfect embodiment of everything the empire was and why he was so determined to take it down. That was Nayna, the woman his mother told him about? The girl his mother had reminded him to pity for ten years, explaining why she had no family. The poor child stolen from her mother at birth? The woman her mother had pined over, wept over, fought for for more than a decade? What a waste. He should never have come.
He should never have volunteered for this class—but he was here. He'd learn all he could about his enemy and maybe throw a few wrenches into the mess before he sneaked out to join the underground in earnest.
But he needed to get the info first, something that would give him a plan and the leverage to have a chance for success. Knowledge was power and he was going to need more power if he was going to take on the horrific monster that had already sterilized fifty-nine worlds and subjugated fifty-five more.
He glanced up from his musings to find himself locked in the pale instructor's gaze. "Are you volunteering, Cadet…?"
"For what?" he said. "Name's Bryder Kass."
Several of his fellow students sniggered.
"Perhaps you think you don't need to pay attention, Bryder Rand? Let's test that notion, shall we? Come, Bryder, spar with me." A tiny, not pleasant smile touched her lips.
He took in her lithe body, nearly his own height. She wore the self-confidence of someone who knew her abilities and had faith they were superior. She was planning to make a lesson of him.
His own grin stretched across his face until he could feel his cheeks all but touch his ears. He bounced to his feet. This was going to be good.
Normally, Bryder wouldn't strike first—his own fighting style was more an adaptive response, instinctively finding the most effective counter move to someone else's attack, but he doubted he'd need it here. This instructor was clearly a by-the-book creature, just short of an automaton. She was not going to surprise him.
Also, he was riled—at her, at himself, at the Empire. He let his temper lash out with a leaping snap kick as soon as he was in range. Niceties be damned. The kick would have felled most, especially since she hadn't given the signal to start. Instead, she ducked and spun around him before he had landed back on his feet, tapping his kidneys as she went by. He turned as well with a backhand, but she blocked him. She kicked low and might have taken his knee if he hadn't dodged—and if she had kicked at full force. She hadn't.
Bryder stepped back and reevaluated. She didn't pursue but regarded him calmly, her lifted eyebrow mocking him.
He'd underestimated her—she was quick and adaptive. More, she was pulling her punches or he'd likely be hurting by now. She might be Rand's flunky, but she was a canny fighter with exceptional control.
Better rethink his methods.
"Well?" she asked when he didn't attack again.
"It's your turn. I blew mine," he admitted and had to dodge an elbow strike that could have easily knocked him out. He tried a standing front snap kick to her kidney, but she blocked him with her other hand, and tried to knock him down with a high roundhouse kick at his head level.
He moved to her inside, grabbing her leg and taking her down until she overbalanced. She should have fallen, but she twisted her leg in his grasp and somersaulted away, back on her feet and facing him before he could take advantage.
She might actually be better than he was, though she was sounding a touch winded. At least, he was no easy conquest.
As the fight continued, her attacks, his dodging, blocking, or counterblows were almost at the same level, a real rarity for him. Seemed like it was a rarity for her as well, given her furrowed brow, the sweat—like his—that was soaking her uniform and making her pallid hair spiky. As they danced, Bryder felt his black mood lifting and his view of her adapt. She was no slave to tradition and, as his respect for her ability increased, he began to wonder what else he might have misjudged.
He wasn't sure if he had made a mistake or if she'd just outfought him, but she managed to knock his legs out from under him and had him in a chokehold before he could escape. "Yield," she said, panting, the perspirations dripping down her face.
He thought about making her knock him unconscious but tapped out like a gentleman. "That was pretty damn impressive."
"Yes," she said and offered hi
m a hand up. "You surprised me. Where did you train? I haven't seen that technique before."
Bryder searched for an acceptable answer. His records were devoid of much of his history—since it would hardly make him look trustworthy—and nowhere had he admitted to formal martial arts training. He couldn't just say that, after his mother died when he was twelve standards old, he had hitched along with one brother's crew after another, sparring and learning from the dregs of the their black market buddies. Or that, also one after another, each brother had made a mistake and gotten himself killed by Rand, leaving Bryder to scoot out on luck and quick talking. Probably a good thing he'd only had three brothers.
He had never been close to his brothers—since he'd been born after they'd achieved manhood—but it still bothered him that his family, from father to brothers, had all been killed by Rand. Oh, wait, she was wanting an answer. "I liked to hang out at the spaceport and spar with pilots and aliens. You see a lot of different techniques that way. I mostly just learned how to counter 'em." Which was true enough. Wonder how she'd feel if she knew her mother had signed the recommendation that had gotten him his first job in the Empire's civil service.
"Interesting," she said, and turned away. "Someone else care to spar as well? Show off your skills? Bryder almost beat me. Any of you like to try?"
Bryder found himself intrigued. On the one hand, she was clearly in the thrall of her government role, but his mother had told him Nayna had literally spent her entire life—from birth—raised by government hacks and fed government stories. He'd heard that she'd never lived anywhere but this facility, meeting only people who were dedicated to the government.
And yet.
His moves were anything but by the book, but she adapted, analyzed, and anticipated them anyway. That meant there was more to her then following rote. She was reputed to be the best analyst in the Empire despite her youth, just twenty-one standards old, with perfect recall and flawless logic. Extrapolating effectively from very little data requires a creative mind. Even her tactic here—fighting a cocky cadet—became clear in hindsight, was to demonstrate to a class that they had much to learn. That gave her students a real sense of her authority—over and above her role as teacher—and a goal to strive for. Brilliant but not the work of a rote thinker.
Who was this woman? He could have taken half a dozen placement opportunities—he was that good—but, when he saw her name as chief instructor, he had to come here. And how did his strange fascination with her play into his goals to topple the Empire? She certainly wasn't going to help him.
He wrestled with it as she took out the next cadet who came up against her with ease. She made a few more love-the-Empire type announcements and dismissed them until class would begin in earnest the next day.
Activities for the cadets were limited and he was bored senseless. Cadets were housed in a large room with the lower level analysts. Bryder had snagged himself a top bunk and was trying to figure out a way to keep from stabbing out his own eyeballs from ennui when he saw Nayna slip surreptitiously into the room and into a bunkbed in the corner. Surely a teacher would have her own stateroom. But she slept, acting like she wasn't in a room full of her own students and her students doing their damnedest to pretend she wasn't there.
Insanity. He couldn't wrap his mind around any of it.
Bryder reminded himself that, since he was there and didn't want to be tortured to death, he should be on his best behavior. So, for the next few days, he sat stolidly in his chair while Nayna taught a bunch of lies, misinformation, and slant to her class of receptive cadets. No one made the slightest move to contradict her, including himself, though he had bitten his tongue numerous times. He was convinced by the second day that she believed every frickin' word she spoke.
How could she not know that there were twelve more planets destroyed than she described? How could she possibly think Rand was the injured party when they had subjugated or destroyed literally scores of planets in the past century or so?
He couldn't ask in class, or risk becoming a statistic, but he wanted to know. He started to follow her outside of class. She was definitely a creature of routine.
After class, she would eat, always in the cafeteria, usually ordering the day's special. She ate alone, lost in her thoughts per her outward appearance. After eating, she would head to the analysts' room—even though she also had not only her own stateroom but her own office—and would work on her analyses for Rand there. She seemed to absorb data as fast as it could scroll on her screen, but, if she was writing reports there, he never caught her.
He couldn't get a bead on her. She was exactly as by-the-book as he'd first suspected and thoroughly indoctrinated with all of Rand's garbage and yet…there was a humanity to her as well. The antipathy toward her from the other cadets, even the other analysts, surprised him. He presumed perfect and spurning of would-be sycophants had cost her allies, but she made no sign of missing them.
If she remained an enigma, his class provided a rationale that made his decision to join not nearly as stupid as he'd first thought. Amazingly, analysts apparently had access to sheaves of useful data on different planets and governments and considerable autonomy in how they directed Rand to deal with them. And cadets had access with the computer codes the received the second day. It took very little of Bryder's imagination to see how he could set things in motion that would cause Rand considerable pain—that only manifested long after he was gone. As a field agent as well, he could go anywhere, talk to anyone. He could literally hook into the rebel underground while still gathering a paycheck from Rand. Not a healthy long-term strategy, but the possibilities were appealing.
She caught him following her at least once. "Do you not have something better to do, Bryder?"
"Good Rana, no!" he said without hesitation. "Or I'd be doing it."
"And what do you expect to learn from me?"
He feigned shock. "Everything, right? You are our teacher, though you look desperately young. How old are you?"
The faintest of blushes touched her cheeks. "I have completed twenty-one standards."
"And you're teaching? Hard to believe your two standards younger than I am."
"Indeed," she said, deadpan. "I've thought so many times myself."
She looked flustered when he threw his head back and laughed and slipped away while he was still chuckling.
On the third day of class, another instructor took them from the class on a "field trip." In this case, the field trip was a facility on the other side of the planet, still underground, but this time filled with "villages" and "towns" of various conquered peoples to practice their methods for defending and ingratiating themselves with the locals. Bryder found the idea ludicrous, but it sounded more interesting than more days in a classroom.
He was almost surprised to see Nayna on the shuttle with them all. He didn't think she left the center, not that this was much different. Did they really think this exercise would be realistic?
Well, he could always use another good laugh.
When they landed at a little spaceport, Bryder noted the lack of ships, just empty berths. Nayna came behind him. "They don't leave the ships here in case someone tries to escape. Once, some of them overwhelmed the guard and stole a ship. Unfortunately for all involved, they didn't know how to fly that ship and ended up crashing, causing considerable damage to a nearby town and, of course, the escapees did not survive."
Bryder glanced up at the oversized shuttle they came on. "So, what keeps them from stealing that while we're here?"
Nayna raised her brows. "We do."
A couple of guards—well-armed—guarded the checkpoint going in, but Bryder wouldn't take a bet on their chances to stop an enraged group of rebellious test subjects.
"Alright," said one of the other instructors, the leader of this trip, "we're going to split into groups of five students. We'll be doing this exercise multiple times, so, if you don't get a group that works for you, you'll have other chances. Each grou
p will have an instructor lead and an assignment. Do you each have a number?"
Bryder glanced at Nayna's clipboard and then shamelessly looked at his fellow cadets' numbers until he had one that matched. "Hey, trade with me."
"You got it. Don't know why anyone would want to go in the ice queen's group, anyway."
When he queued up behind Nayna, she gave him a bland look. "Were you assigned to my group, Bryder?"
"One of the other students has a crush on, er, Meichen, so I offered to trade with him." Nayna's eyes strayed to Meichen, a tiny man, balding, who spoke in a squeak.
"Odd how that happens nearly every time," Nayna muttered. "My team, with me. We're heading to a Woden encampment. But first, everyone check to see that you haven't lost your badge."
"What's it for? Identification?" Bryder asked.
"The different groups are kept separate by way of force fields. These badges allow us to go through the fields, but won't let the subjects we'll be working with."
The force fields they passed were hazy but not opaque. He spotted a number of people, with varying degrees of human characteristics, watching as they walked by, but pretending they weren't. Some experiment, trying to interact with people who've been through this same routine dozens of times.
He couldn't see it, but he could feel the eyes on the back of his neck, the animosity. These people—or whatever—were on the edge. "What's our assignment?"
"The Woden, as you should know from our briefing kit, are particularly pugnacious. We need to find a way to build a rapport using diplomacy, bribery, artifice or force. Diplomacy nets you the best grade." She paused and then looked around in case anyone from another group was listening. "You are not to kill if you have another option. These are Randian citizens, however reluctantly, and they should not be killed out of hand."
"Why are we going in with blasters? A Woden's bone structure absorbs blaster energy so you're not really hurting them. Mostly you're giving him a painful flesh wound and maybe piss him off."
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