by Holly Lisle
She swallowed hard. It was impossible to see Suzee. She was somewhere in that tall mass of green, moving forward. The roar of sound that had hammered Charlie’s ears doubled, trebled, quadrupled as the block of men—only men—moved solemnly forward.
The men split off and lined the inside of the walls as they neared Charlie, and suddenly, there was Suzee, dressed in a green gown, her long black hair tumbling in curls down to her waist, her eyes dark and for just an instant startled as she recognized Charlie.
She hid it well—Charlie had been looking for the reaction, but she thought there was a good chance no one else would see it.
Charlie did not smile. Suzee did not smile.
Then the guard outside the moleibond barrier parallel with Charlie’s position turned and began cutting his way through the barrier with a moleibond cutter, screaming, “Suzee Delight, I love you! I’ve come to save you!” From Charlie’s perspective, he provided a welcome diversion. His fellow guards tackled him, and in the chaos, Suzee stepped behind Charlie, Charlie imprinted the transfer documents with her Gen-ID, and the crew of the Longview, skipping solemnity and pageantry, hauled ass into the Longview before things got any crazier.
Suzee Delight
A SMALL, STRANGE, DANGEROUS CLIENT once promised me that if I ever had to take a stand—if I ever had to do something that I knew was right but that was criminal, I should do it, then demand public execution by Death Circus, and his ship—the Longview—would come to rescue me.
I’d done something unforgivable in the eyes of the Pact Worlds elite and many common citizens, but I had done it for what I believed to be just and compelling reasons.
And as promised, the Longview won the bid and came to rescue me.
But it was Charlie—my Charlie—who was standing there watching me walk toward her, waiting to take me away from my nightmare. Seeing her waiting to greet me and get me out of the reach of the Pact Worlds let me know everything was going to be all right.
I had never dared to hope that I would see her again. Discovering that my only love waited to sign with her blood to buy my freedom—that was the moment when my life became a fairy tale.
I hid my joy. If I had been able to bend the whole of the universe to my will, I could not have made that first sight of her more perfect, more wonderful, or more welcome.
Before, I had hoped. Now, I knew. I was going to escape. I didn’t know how, but Charlie and Mado Keyr were going to save me.
CHAPTER 7
Charlie
SUZEE DELIGHT AND CHARLIE MARCHED side by side through the airlock to the ship and entered the bridge, where Captain Shore, First Mate Laure, Two Gold Melie, and Owner’s Representative Shay waited to greet them. They did not touch. They did not look at each other.
They had to pretend they had no previous connection, and neither of them wavered in the least.
Shay explained to Suzee that Mado Keyr was suffering from his condition and regretted that he could not meet her in person. The captain, stunned by her beauty, stammered a short greeting, then flushed bright red. The first mate bowed and said nothing. Melie said, “You’re more beautiful in person than you are in your holos.”
And the two women moved on, accompanied by Melie.
Charlie, having walked prisoners to the core units hundreds of times before, thought she knew the drill, but once they were off the deck and headed toward the sleeper units, Melie said, “The owner told Shay the two of you were to complete the documentation of Suzee’s arrival alone. So, Charlie, please call me when you’ve filed the paperwork and I’ll join the two of you at the sleeper cores. If you have any problems, you only have to notify shipcom, and I’ll be there.”
Charlie nodded.
Melie left.
Once they were off the bridge, Charlie took Suzee’s hand. As their fingers interlocked, Charlie began to smile.
They reached the sleeper unit designated for Suzee, and Charlie opened the core.
She and Suzee faced each other.
“Oh, Charlie,” Suzee whispered. She wrapped her arms around Charlie and kissed her.
Charlie kissed her back. “I love you so much,” she whispered.
“I love you, too,” Suzee told her.
From the time they were two, Suzee and Charlie had been best friends. Their ident numbers had been Bellowary-Mews-K-42G85N and Bellowary-Mews-K-42G86N, so they’d shared a bunk in their dorm from the day they’d been taken from their mothers and put into their General Consumer cohort. As they grew up, they’d whispered all of their secrets to each other, held hands, made promises that they would be best friends forever.
They were the two most intelligent students in their cohort. Because they were girls, that was like being the two most intelligent fish in a fish tank. They were still fish, so no one cared.
When they turned nine, Suzee’s beauty and entertainment skills had lifted her out of Charlie’s life, and for years, neither of them had word of the other, or any idea of the other’s fate.
Then Charlie, barely eighteen, was assigned to the Longview as a Pact Covenant Observer, and with access to open datastreams, discovered that her one-time best friend had become famous. And an Order A citizen, if only in name.
There was no way Charlie could contact Suzee legitimately. Order E citizens were forbidden to attempt any sort of fraternization with Order A citizens.
But Charlie had a plan.
From her receipt of her first payment from the Office of Licensed PCOs, she had lived on ship rations, slept in her assigned quarters, skipped off-ship travel, and in every other way hoarded her money toward one single, impossible goal. Shay, noticing that Charlie never went anywhere and never spent any money, asked her why—and Charlie had told Shay she was saving up for something special. Shay had offered to let her join the crew’s recommended investment plan, and had sworn she would never tell Charlie’s controller or anyone else that she was earning extra money.
Charlie had poured every rucet she made into the plan, and had rolled all her profits back into her investment... and she had profited greatly.
When she’d earned enough—which took her four years—she bought her dream.
She purchased the Ultra-Deluxe Suzee Delight Package, which was one whole week alone with Suzee Delight, with no public or client-identified purchasable Sensos of their time together, no monitoring except for vital signs (to guarantee that Suzee lived through the week), no public appearances.
One whole week.
And Charlie had purchased an Order A ident through a trusted source used by a crew member who’d escaped from Norel, a minor Pact World.
For one week, Charlie and Suzee were together. Suzee played guitar and mariole and sang for Charlie; Charlie read novels she’d loved to Suzee. They told each other everything about their lives, the bad as well as the good. They discovered they were still best friends—but more, they discovered that they loved each other.
For that one week, they pretended their dreams had come true, that they lived as permanent partners on the space station Suzie had so hoped to reach, and that Suzee designed body modifications while Charlie built hand-crafted in-system planet-hoppers.
They talked about their imaginary work, held hands, kissed, and shared each other’s bodies. Woke up together. Fell asleep together.
Knew what it meant to love and to be loved.
It was the life Charlie would have given anything to have.
And then she had to leave. She’d known before she got to the Diamond Dome that she would never again have the means to repeat that one perfect week. At most, she could hope for another year or two from her controller before she was recalled and reassigned to a different ship, or to some PHTF world monitoring the care and feeding of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and thieves.
That one week had become Charlie’s whole life.
Her time with Suzee was everything she’d wanted, everything she could have dreamed of, everything every instant of her existence had forbidden.
She lov
ed Suzee with every cell of her being.
And she would be damned if she would let her die.
She’d tried to figure out a way to fake Suzee’s death, to certify her execution, put her still-living body in the wooden box, and to get her out of the coliseum where she was scheduled to be executed with no one the wiser.
But Suzee was to be executed by Deathmasters, and Deathmasters could not be bribed, could not be threatened, could not be cajoled.
So Charlie had found another way. It would mean killing every single person in the coliseum except for Suzee and Charlie herself—but the Deathmasters would be there to kill her, the audience would be there to cheer her death, and the administrators from the Pact Worlds would be there to gloat.
To Charlie’s way of thinking, they all deserved to die.
The crew of the Longview shuttle that took Suzee and Charlie to the coliseum were another issue—but Charlie knew what she was going to do about them.
So when their kiss ended, she put her finger to her lips, then pulled two hairs from Suzee’s head. She clipped the base of each hair into the receptacle on the side of Lee’s little invention. When she was done, she yanked two hairs from her own head, and clipped the important ends into the sieve with Suzee’s. She sealed it, then dropped it into her pocket.
Suzee took Charlie’s hand, and with a finger, wrote What did you do?
Charlie, following Suzee’s lead, wrote, I just saved you.
When Suzee nodded and smiled, Charlie said, “You need to get into your core. I have to make sure your Gen-ID from the unit is logged into the database so the Pact Worlds can verify that you’re confined and alive.”
Suzee winked and climbed into the core. The straps slid in place over her arms, legs, chest, and forehead. She looked startled.
“Don’t panic,” Charlie told her. “You’ll sleep until we arrive at the coliseum.”
“Coliseum? How are you going to—” She mouthed the words rescue me. “—You know... from there?”
Charlie almost laughed. But because she knew someone was probably listening, she simply smiled, kissed Suzee once more, and said, “Dream of the future, my love. I have this under control. You’re going to be all right.”
Shay
SHAY WATCHED CHARLIE SEAL SUZEE Delight into the core and sighed.
Charlie hadn’t opened her weapon in the ship—yet, anyway. Shay, though, had become certain that Charlie planned to use it in the coliseum, to have her vengeance on the Pact Worlds Administrators who were sure to be present, and to wipe out those in the audience who had come to cheer Suzee’s death.
Which meant Shay had two extra problems to deal with, and just less than ten hours to solve both.
Suzee first. She waited until Sleeper Level One was empty, then blocked all ship tracking on herself, went to Suzee’s core, and pressed her fingertip against a hidden square tucked behind the core’s data panel.
The top of the core opened without registering that it was open, without awakening Suzee, without causing so much as a blip in the core diagnostics that fed almost constantly into the Pact Worlds’ monitors.
Shay took a lumpy white patch out of her pocket, peeled off the bottom protective cover, and pressed the patch against Suzee’s neck. Beneath her fingers, the lump beneath the top patch quickly flattened. Shay held the edges down until the squirming stopped and the lump disappeared. Then she lifted the flat white square that was all that remained of the patch, checked for marks on Suzee’s neck, and reassured that there were none, shoved her trash into her pocket.
Shay closed and sealed the core unit, then changed the settings on it so Suzee would be kept unconscious instead of in suspended animation.
Shay tapped twice against the hidden access panel. The unit gave a soft cheep. From that moment on, anyone tampering with the unit would once again set off alarms across the ship.
One down.
Shay returned to her quarters. There, datastreamed interviews from the City of Furies protested not just the execution of Suzee Delight, but the injustices that had caused it. These interviews, now numbering in the thousands, had set off a firestorm of other protests, both in the Pact Worlds and across the rest of Settled Space.
They’d sparked more than five billion unique holovid protests tagged through pingball traffic. And those protests were a fraction of the nova blast of voice pings and screen demands bombarding the Cheegoth Administrative Center, from which the planet was run.
Threats of riots on Cheegoth; threats of trade boycotts by non-Pact Worlds against all the Pact Worlds and systems; demands from even Order A Pact Worlds citizens for the replacement of Administrators...
...It was everything she had dared to hope for.
But it wasn’t, and could not be, enough.
For any of this to matter, injustice would have to be fed.
Suzee Delight’s death was the injustice that would feed it.
Shay checked ticket sales to the live event, had the shipcom vet each ticket application, then got to work on the solution for her second problem.
Transcript: Danyal Travers Reports on the Execution of Suzee Delight
Danyal Travers, SPORC Capital Offenses Interviewer, The Voice of the Pact Worlds, on assignment in the Arena of the Ritalath Free City:
Welcome to Ritalath, and to the Arena of the Kings, one of the largest coliseums in Settled Space.
I am honored to be the commentator chosen by Longview owner Mado Werix Keyr, the wealthy and mysterious entrepreneur whose Death Circus enterprise is only part of an empire that includes art, commerce, and industry.
We are here today to witness the execution of Suzee Delight, confessed spree murderer of the administrators of the five most powerful worlds in the Pact Worlds system.
This is the most-watched event in human history.
Above us, the dome is closing over the arena—rain, thunder, and lightning would have interfered with today’s proceedings, and with the 227,450 observers who pack the stands today and who have paid tens of thousands of rucets apiece for their seats.
Thirteen Pact Worlds Administrators, including all five replacements for the men murdered by Suzee Delight, are guests invited by Mado Keyr. They have the only arena-floor box seats, just meters away from the execution.
The Administrators are waving to the holovid operators. Unlike most executions, the execution of Suzee Delight is being brought to you only by FurioCity Entertainment, a private production company hired by the Longview’s owner to do all of the promotional work surrounding this execution.
Meanwhile Universtat-verified datastream purchase links confirm that more than twenty billion households are paying for the access-locked live feed, which is being simulcast by closed LokStream technology through origami points to every world capable of receiving it, for an estimated audience of nearly a trillion total viewers.
We are only minutes away from the moment when Suzee Delight will be brought to the center of the arena—
—Wait! The Longview shuttle is opening, and all the screens surrounding the arena have lit up. We can now clearly see Suzee Delight, her right arm bound to the left arm of the now-well-known Pact Worlds Observer Charliss Bellowary-Mews of Cheegoth.
Suzee is wearing a white gown, and her hair is loose. According to my sources, the gown is a Pertha Fyne original, valued at twenty-five thousand rucets. It is a gift from Bashtyk Nokyd, well-known dissident writer who was an Order A1 citizen of Meileone on Cantata before he broke the Covenant of Peaceful Speech, then escaped his own death sentence. The criminal Nokyd, still at large, has been one of the most vocal supporters of Suzee Delight, and one of the loudest in demanding her pardon.
Suzee Delight looks… young. Twenty-three Standard years, her birth record says—she would have turned twenty-four in thirty-seven Standard days, but right now she looks much younger.
She is stepping up to the recorders positioned just outside the Longview’s shuttle.
Clamor of questions from news scriptors: “What do you
have to say for yourself?” “Have you heard about the protests?” “Are you going to be pardoned?” “Do you think you deserve to be executed?” “Who’s the last person you sexed?”
Suzee Delight: “I have been brought here to die. I chose to claim my actions, I chose to confess my deeds, and I chose to sell my death to the highest bidder.
“I accept that I will die for my actions, even though I believe that what I did was both right and just.
“I place myself in the hands of my executioners, certified Deathmasters from the Slaver world of Trabinknya. I didn’t know about the protests, I don’t know about any possible pardon. And those are all the questions I wish to answer.”
Danyal Travers: I have just been handed the Official Order of Ceremony for today’s execution. The dozen Deathmasters before you will be executing Suzee Delight by the Death of the Hundred Knives.
The order of the ceremony states that Suzee Delight will be bound to the frame assembled in the center of the execution dais, in such a fashion that she can neither move nor collapse. Bannaman Billion-Point holographic recording equipment and VanTarka audio capture is already in place, and Suzee has been fitted with InfinaFeel Sensodine neural recorders…