by Chad Huskins
“But make no mistake, they are coming to our aid, as I have requested, and they will want something in return. Perhaps not soon, but eventually. We must be on our guard for that.” She looked to her right, at her middle daughter. “Are your girls prepared, Manzanna?”
Manzanna nodded slowly, steepling her fingers so that her jewelry clattered together. “They are, Mother. If the soldiers make planetfall and begin to spread, they will find naught but delight in the ladies I will have attend them. My ladies—and my boys—will come in the guise of innocent farm girls and farm boys, happy to have hero soldiers fuck them silly. They know their task. They will feign stupidity and build relationships with the soldiers, and surreptitiously gather intelligence on their forces.”
“They are prepared to defile themselves for our cause?”
“Defilement is Mahl’s wish for all of us,” Manzanna shrugged. “Mahl has told us.”
“And what of the thaneship? Are they all with us on this?”
“The thanes of most districts have agreed to let their daughters and sons be defiled, but there are some holdouts.”
There always are, she thought. The thanes were governors over individual districts and megablocks, typically elected from the middle class to represent the needs of the people. They were a voice for democracy, screaming at the dictator that was the High Priestess herself. The thanes were always plotting her downfall, not because of Mahl’s treacherous wisdom, but because they simply had designs of their own, and used the people’s foolish belief in their representation as an instrument.
Thessa nodded. “And you, Naori? What of your poisoners?”
Naori, the tallest and most beautiful of her daughters, nodded slowly. “They are working on the foodstuffs in Silos Thirty through Forty, which is what we decided we would set aside as reserves for the soldiers, should they make planetfall,” she said. “The poison I’ve selected should not kill them outright, but instead will manifest as a malady that weakens the immune system. They should die of relatively harmless viruses, whatever is hanging about on the bulkheads of their ships.” Naori shrugged, as if to say that it was a small detail that would work itself out.
“This pleases us,” said Thessa, speaking for both herself and Mahl. “But let us not be too hasty. Should the Republican forces prove more manageable by words, we should not risk hampering negotiations with some new sickness. It might only raise suspicions.”
“Of course, Mother,” Naori said. “I would not think of deploying the foodstuffs from the Silos unless it was absolutely necessary.”
“And unless I gave you instruction to do so, of course.”
Naori nodded. “Of course.”
Thessa turned her attention to the First Traitor. Evalli remained still and stoic, her deep blue eyes, pale skin and dour smile a perfect reflection of her mother. She was the firstborn, and so she was the first to have tried, and failed, to overthrow her mother.
“Evalli,” she said. “How do our fleets look?”
“Poised to offer support,” said Evalli. “Prophet and Malphos have been monitoring two key areas: the asteroid belt and the outer limits of the system. So far, all they’ve detected are the occasional probe drones sent by the Ascendancy.”
“How is fleet armament?”
“Half capacity.”
“Only half?”
The First Traitor looked at her mother. “We would have more, but of course you rejected the wisdom of both myself and the Council of Thanes five years ago, when we suggested that the mines on the Avastar Continent be reopened. If I recall correctly, Mother, ‘keeping up appearances’ was your logic when rejecting our suggestion.”
Thessa heard the quiet, challenging tone, and she both approved of it and felt menaced by it. “It is critical that no one knows what Mahl is truly about. His will must be done by those few of us fortunate enough to be let in on his Great Conspiracy, but we must not defile that which we have wrought through our worship of his ways.”
“Mahl revels in defilement,” said Evalli. “You taught us that. Defilement of Widden’s surface would do nothing but please him. You know it. Mahl has told us. And if we had defiled Avastar with foundries and forges, we would now have plenty of armament for our ships.”
“Mahl revels in defilement, yes,” Thessa allowed. “But not at the expense of ruining one’s gains. Widden is what my ancestors fought for, and I will not have it fall so easily as the rest of Man’s realm. Overdrawing on natural resources is a key reason behind the Fall of Man. A more measured and cautious approach is needed.”
“Measure and caution,” said Diana, the Second Traitor. “It smacks of weakness. Mahl despises weakness, he has told us.”
The Face of Mahl turned its baleful gaze on Diana, and for a moment the Second Traitor seemed to shrink. Diana glanced at her eldest sister. It was just a look, it only took one second, but the followers of Mahl were taught to sense deception in others and Thessa was most adept of all.
Sensing a plot, Thessa prepared herself. She emptied herself, drew even with the darkness, and found the power that quakes just beneath the surface of things. Her blood raced. Her very cells began to tremble. Had her eyes been visible to them, her daughters would have seen them filling with a milky liquid. Much of her body went numb, and it felt like her teeth were floating in her skull.
“We’ve also had fuel problems, obviously,” Evalli said. “Ever since you ordered the shutdown of our helium-3 plants on Rah’zen and Dor’fahn, it has put a hampering on reserves.”
“Our reserves will hold,” said Thessa, gathering pools of invisible energies into the palms of her hands. “One of the reasons I commanded that we remain isolationist, and that my father so commanded it, was specifically so that we did not have to share with anyone else, and could have stores for such rainy days, my daughter.”
Evalli seemed unconvinced, and waved her hand to activate a holotab. A three-dimensional image projected above the table. It showed the Widden-Suns system, focusing on the Lagrange points around Widden, as well as those around its four moons. Within each Lagrange point, there were nests of scoutships in quiet orbit, about ninety-eight million miles away. They were represented by tiny blinking dots.
“To staunch our bleeding,” said Evalli, “I have ordered any and all ships low on pycno or helium-3 to assume position at either L4 or L5, seeing as how those Lagrange points are more or less parking places in space, requiring no fuel to maintain an orbit.”
“Excellent,” Thessa said. “Exactly as I would have done. How are we doing with sensor sweeps?”
Morganna, the Twenty-first Traitor, spoke up, “Our sensor probes beyond Tretis have not returned. All those within Tretis’s orbit have shown little on infrared. However, neutron-imaging suggests a profile of ships hiding within our Oort cloud.”
She was referring, of course, to the billions of asteroids and protoplanets that swirled at the edge of most solar systems, the random leftovers from their formation.
“Have we seen any patterns suggesting they’re moving in-system?”
“None, mother.”
Thessa nodded thoughtfully. Her fingertips were now tingling. She felt a rush in her stomach, like she was falling. Fingers crawled up her spine and her ears were ringing. The power had almost reached its fever pitch, and would soon demand release. “How go the evacuations?” she said calmly.
“Mastalon is at seventy-three percent,” said Sornalia, one of her youngest, whose burden it had been to both give the order and plan out the staged evacuation of the planet. “Rasta is showing greater reluctance. My own city is at ninety percent.”
“You’ve done well in Perasti, Sornalia. I knew that I was right to place you in charge of it.”
“Mother,” said Diana, “I know I’ve said this before, but I feel compelled to say it again. I think it is a mistake to evacuate. We burden our already burdened fleets by having to escort these civilian ships to L4 and L5. It is not meet that military ships waste their time with these—”
“It is too late to turn away from the course I have set us on,” said Thessa.
“No, it isn’t,” said Diana. “We still have time to call them back. We could modify those civilian transports and shore up our military—”
“With what armament? You’ve just heard your eldest sister tell you that we are low on resources.”
“And whose fault is that?” said Diana. Once again, she cast a look over at Evalli. The look appeared to be a question. Evalli, to her credit, remained still and unreadable. She stared back at her mother, glacially calm and with a lady’s poise.
Thessa was so proud of her. The others could learn a thing or two from her patience.
When the attack came, it was without hint or preview.
It happened quickly. Ten of her daughters rose from their seats as one, and enacted their plan to be rid of their mother.
Sornalia leveled a long polearm at her, pointed the business end and started to fire. At the same time, Rezvidia, the Seventh Traitor, rose with pistol in hand. Sornalia fired a wave of energy that disrupted Thessa’s plasma field, while Rezvidia’s bullet was meant to strike at her heart. The other eight sisters targeted her honor guards, all of whom fell from a hail of bullets.
None touched Thessa.
Though her plasma field failed at Sornalia’s attack, Rezvidia’s bullet splashed against an even thinner field of energy, and was dissolved into tiny shards that dissipated like dust. In just seconds, their attack had already failed.
To their woe.
Thessa rose to her full height, and, with the wave of her right hand, summoned a power unknown to even her, a power beyond the ken of Man, bestowed upon her by forces dark and conniving.
The air crackled with energy as the bodies of her ten assassins, her ten daughters, went into convulsions. The radius of Thessa’s counterattack was imprecise; some of the daughters that were not in on the attack were caught up in it, too. Quaking power rippled through Thessa’s whole body. Her bladder evacuated down her legs, and a thrill went through her body unlike any other. She was bathed in the unholy power of That Which Remained Not Understood.
She had no control over what happened to them. Sornalia’s bones turned to water. Blood shot out of her mouth, her eyes slid out of their sockets and her arms and legs went limp as noodles. She collapsed in a disgusting heap of wet slush, blood leaking out of every orifice, her boneless face sitting slack on top of the pile in a wide, unnatural scream, like a mask someone had pulled off and thrown away. Urine and fecal matter rushed out of her boneless flesh in puddles.
Rezvidia simply exploded, though it was not one giant uniform detonation. Her head went first, as though she had been chewing a grenade. Then one of her arms, then a leg, and then her torso. Tomali, the Third Traitor, who was innocent of the plot, took one of Rezvidia’s ribs in her throat, and choked to death on her own blood.
Hermessa’s body transformed into something obscene. Her clothes sloughed off of her as they rapidly decayed, her hair fell out in clumps and her face became long and gaunt, like a mule’s skull was being forced through a human’s fleshy face. Her teeth became wide and yellow, her tongue long and slithery, like a snake’s, only limp and unmoving. She grew a cock, or some such protrusion, that swung pendulously between her legs without flesh and bled. Her flesh turned ulcerous and began sizzling like oily meat on a stove.
Something clawed out of Diana’s throat, some hideous tentacle made of briars that turned back on her, stabbing down into her eyes.
Yulmma and Restallia both vomited their organs out onto the table, and collapsed bonelessly on the floor while something appeared to be rummaging around inside of their fast-rotting carcasses.
Dubessa and Heirsi’s bodies were transformed into cousins of Hermessa, only their hands elongated into webbed things, and they tried to run, but their legs became stumpy, chicken-like, and they only managed to run into walls or into the table. They were hacked to pieces by the glaives of the Order Guard.
The screams of the others were deafening, all except for Evalli. The First Traitor had foreseen what was about to happen. She knew their mother better than the rest, and had seen that body language before. She had risen from her seat and stepped backward, just as the heinous sorcery began to unfold. As a result, she had survived.
When it was all over, Thessa stood, trembling and euphoric, the feeling much like post-coitus ecstasy, looking upon a room that had gone from quiet to chaos in a matter of seconds. The hall was redolent with the smell of bile and waste, as well as the coppery scent of blood.
Breathing deeply, Thessa looked upon the faces of her remaining daughters. Of them, only Evalli looked back without any semblance of fear. The First Traitor said, “My mother is powerful. Mahl has shown us.”
The others muttered, almost too low to be heard: “Mahl has shown us.”
Thessa looked to either side of her, at the dead bodies of her honor guard, their corpses riddled with bullet holes. Some of their blood had splashed onto her, defiling her vestments. That was good. Defilement pleased Mahl.
“It is good that my daughters strive to usurp,” she said, casting her baleful eyes on them. “But now would be a foolish time to try. Let us mourn your sisters, my daughters, and make ready for the coming battle. So, if there’s nothing else?”
THAT NIGHT FOUND her standing before mighty Rah’zen, as Myelic peeled off her jewelry and licked the blood from her robes. Piece by piece, her vestments fell off and were put away. The most critical piece, of course, was the Item. Thessa knew it by no other name. Her father said it had been found on a rogue planet four thousand years ago, and that one of their ancestors had acquired it, believing it to be forged by the Strangers.
The Item was a palm-sized construct, flat as a coin and made out of an alloy never identified, with peculiar engravings and an inner glow visible only under moonlight. The Item’s power was what allowed her to do Mahl’s will.
There was no real trick to using the Item. One merely needed to be around it for prolonged years, exposed to its power. Her father had compared it to radiation—in small doses it does nothing, but over years of constant exposure, it changed the body’s chemistry. It provided the power to warp. That was what he called its effects: warping. At first he believed, like his ancestors, that it was a weapon made by the Strangers, then he came to believe it was a weapon forged by Mahl himself, vigintillions of years ago in the cold nothingness that went before the universe had been wrought.
Of course, her father only came to this belief once he encountered the religion of the uk’tek. He and his family had fallen into their cult, practically became their slaves, until they overthrew the High Priest. Then her father, his body scarred and his mind driven to near insanity, had taken command of Mahl’s church. He had used the Item to secure his place, and ever since then the uk’tek had believed Thessa’s people were the truest incarnation of Mahl’s will.
Only Thessa knew of the Item’s significance. Not even Myelic knew its importance, she only knew that it was the High Priestess’s most precious family heirloom. As High Priestess of the Faith, it was Thessa’s job to keep at least one secret from all of her daughters, right up until the moment of her death.
Myelic licked her lady’s feet clean, and Thessa rewarded her by defiling her flesh, taking a knife to her arm and carving another line in it before taking her to bed. Once they were finished with coitus, Myelic lay asleep in the bed, and Thessa stood on the balcony, naked beneath the judgment of Rah’zen.
: Asteroid Monarch
“Your Bill is going to pass the Senate.”
Kalder felt a slight thrill as he heard these words. It came with a sense of accomplishment, with the knowledge that all his works had meant something. But as a Zeroist, he had been disciplined to give no outward sign. It also happened that such facial and body control were advantageous in negotiation.
He walked with Pennick in the New Forum. Pennick had hold of his senatorial robe beneath his beltline, and pulled up on it slightly so
that the hem did not drag through the stinking offal spread across the uneven rock floor.
Kalder’s own robes dragged as they always did. He did not care about the filth he was accumulating. However, he did care about the distance between himself and Trix. The bot had so far hung back far enough to give them space, but remained close enough to strike if need be.
“They’re going to give you your Crusade,” Pennick said, “even if some of them are just doing it to laugh at you as they watch you fail.”
“ ‘Rather than fear the mockery of others, learn to rely on it,’” said Kalder. “From Delmont the Zeroist’s Enduring the Scorn of Others.”
Pennick gestured in a way that said he did not give the slightest shit who said it. “Of course, there are items my people in the Corporate Arm will want from you.”
“Naturally. And they are?”
“What you’ve promised so far. Bending on the next piece of mining legislation we push through, which will be Proprietary World Rights Bill for mining new systems.”
In another life, Kalder might have smiled at that. “The ‘finders keepers’ bill. The Corporatists are trying to push that through again?”
“We feel it would help with territorial disputes, minimizing arguments of geopolitics.”
“I’m sure you do. Very well. It’s a small matter.”
Why not? thought Kalder. Oblivion awaits, and yet they’re still worried about securing proprietary rights for the Mining Guild. Let them have it, if it’s so important to them.
“But I’m not finished,” Pennick said, wagging his finger.
Kalder nodded patiently. “Go on.”
“I’ve spoken with the Two Consuls. Without their signatures on the Bill, it will not go through—you need a supermajority to pass it without them, and you will barely have enough to even support the Bill. So the Two Consuls have said that in order to even consider it, they need certain conditions met.”