by Greg Dragon
A smile broke the hardness of the trooper’s dark brown face, and he nodded at his fellows, then extended his hand for the knife. Marian slowly reached down and lifted her dress, then took out a wicked-looking black knife and handed it hilt first to him. The trooper examined the blade and motioned for another to take a look at it. One of the large, black masked men walked over, hefted her knife, tossed it up into the air, then caught it and proceeded to do a variety of tricks with it.
He spoke with a muffled, robotic voice through the mask. “This is some kind of knife. Her husband meant business. It’s rare sir, deadly in the hands of a skilled assassin, but little more than a toy to one such as her.” He regarded Marian and gave her a respectful nod, and then handed the knife back to his superior before melting back into the ranks with the rest of the men.
The first trooper walked over and handed the knife back to Marian. “Enjoy your stay on Talula, Sha’an, and be wary of rebels. If you see any suspicious activity, be sure to report it immediately. Do not try to use that knife.” When he said this a few chuckles went up from the men that had her at gunpoint.
Marian bowed to the group and placed the knife back in its sheath. She noticed how intently they stared at her legs whenever she hiked up her dress and wondered if they had even the slightest clue how dangerous she truly was. She picked up her bag and walked into the lobby. There were a variety of people milling about but no one paid any attention to her as she slid between them and made her way towards the exit.
The Starport was majestic, and the nostalgia almost made her stop to soak it all in with gusto. The crimson carpet felt soft yet durable beneath her soft-soled shoes, and the walls reflected the finest of Lucan tapestries, draped over wallpaper that held patterns that were true works of art. Like most interior designs on Tyhera and Talula, there were countless paintings depicting scenes of conquest by Palus Felitious. The numerous chairs that lined the walls were sculpted from a single piece of Primian base rock, and in the center of it all were giant statues, warriors welcoming visitors to the moon.
This was Talula, a tiny moon where the ideal was to have the biggest and most expensive of everything. It was on this moon that Rafian had first blinked in from Anstractor, back when he’d had no memory of who he was. She stepped through a pair of large, sliding glass doors into a metropolis that defied everything that she assumed would have been. By the way the people were going on with their lives, it was hard to believe that a bomb as vicious as a scortchet had been dropped on them.
The sky was the color of lavender, and a thick gathering of clouds obscured much of the celestial wonder that she was used to seeing. Sunlight was not bright on the moon, either, but its pinkish purple atmosphere brought on a mood of romance that she couldn’t shake, no matter where she looked. On the curb next to her, a pair of Tyheran lovers kissed, and across the street she could see more couples walking hand in hand, this way and that. In the distance, she saw mountains faded across the horizon, and all along the roadway speeding cars zoomed past, as if this was the place to be in all the galaxy.
Marian walked over to the taxi terminal where an ancient model of android stood, staring out into nowhere. When she got close, his odd grey limbs animated and he turned to look at her with a stoic face of holes and creases sculpted to favor a humanoid face.
“What … is … your … destination?” it intoned, and Marian walked over to the terminal and brought up the map. She pointed to an area west of the city where a long bridge extended across a massive expanse of water. There was a small settlement there, and she knew it would be a good place to lay low until her Ranalos friends arrived.
“Coryn Station, please,” she said to the droid and he replied affirmatively and motioned to a bench where she could sit and wait. Marian sat down and placed her bag next to her. Five minutes later, an automated car zoomed into the terminal area, settled down in front of her, and the door lifted up to invite her in. She looked around to see if anyone was watching her, then entered the vehicle. She was still leery that all wasn’t as well as it seemed, but at least for now she would allow herself to sit back and enjoy the long drive to Coryn.
~ * ~
Two days had passed since the assassination of Qeran Kyle, and Veece city was locked down and placed under martial law. The troopers were busy, too busy to worry much about their resistance prisoners, and it seemed like the best time for someone to get them out. Marika and Delyi were camped out inside of a shallow cave on the edge of a mountain to the east of the city. It was a great vantage point for Marika to see what was going on, and it provided them shelter for the few days they would be staying there.
“So what’s the plan, Marika?” Delyi asked. She was seated with her back against the cave wall, poking at the embers of their fire, while the Casanian assassin touched at areas on her holographic map. Earlier on in the evening when they had first set up camp, Marika had tossed out the proximity orbs to warn her of any lurkers. She put up her cloak across the entrance of the cave to hide their fire from anyone looking.
On the outside, they had arranged branches across the entrance to further hide the fact that they were there. For the moment they felt safe, and the only thing that could give them away was a hole to the right side of the entrance that Marika used to spy through her rifle.
“If we were back in my galaxy, I could send out a rigged flobot to fly into the prison and send a message to the rebels. It was too big for me to bring with me, so I’m going to have to get them out using more primitive ways,” Marika said. She poked some more at the map and then sighed as if frustrated. “This place is so unused, it’s amazing. It’s as if this entire galaxy is new. You all haven’t filled out the planet, and you live concentrated in tiny cities like Veece. No wonder a Palus Felitious can bully himself into power.”
Delyi did not say anything in response but watched Marika go about her mysterious duties. The suggestion that her world was new struck her as odd. The entire world felt so large and old to her, especially when she considered the ruins upon ruins upon ruins that revealed several generations of ancestors that predated them all.
She imagined a world overrun by people, where trees were scarce due to homes and farms having to be built, and imagined that Marika’s world was just like that.
“In Anstractor, are all the women strong … like you and your friend, Marika?” she asked after a long period of silence.
“I guess so,” Marika replied. “We kind of have to be, y’know – unless you were lucky enough to be born a Geralos.”
“What’s a Geralos?” she asked.
Marika thought of her as an inquisitive child pestering a parent about the way of the world. But Delyi had managed to pull her weight. She was the one who had gotten them through the cold rapids that rushed past the city, and it was she who had spotted the cave for them after a long night of walking.
“In my world, Delyi—” she began.
“Dee, Marika. My friends call me Dee,” she interrupted and Marika looked up from the holo to smile.
“Okay, Dee. See, in our world, there isn’t a Palus Felitious. There is an entire planet of predatory aliens. These creatures are known as Geralos, and they want to take over our galaxy. We lost one planet, Marian’s husband’s planet. They now use it to feed on the people’s brains, grow new humans in their fortified farms, and attack the other planets that have allied with them. My planet is allied with Vestalia – which is the name of Raf, Marian’s husband’s planet. So they hunt us down just like they do the Vestalians, so – it’s like I said, we have to be strong. Both men and women.”
“That sounds absolutely horrific,” Delyi said.
“Yep, and there are no breaks from the horror, so we all grow up fast.”
“No wonder you’re so good at what you do,” Delyi said.
Her words moved Marika, who reflected on her past and the life that she had in Anstractor, before and after the Phasers. She was at home with war, death, and the thin fabric of life, but this wasn’t norma
l and if she was going to be honest with herself, she had forced herself to be okay with it. But here was a girl, forced into sexual servitude with no way to escape and lacking the skills to physically fight back as one such as herself would have already done.
She weighed their realities and thought deeply on their differences. The Geralos were monsters, but the Phasers were trained to kill them. For all that her galaxy offered up as nightmares for those who were born human, or allied to humans, at least they had the means to fight back. A prostitute like Delyi was broken for life. She had no way to escape—unless a rich aristocrat fell in love with her and bought her off—and the only way to get out of her skin contract was to become old.
Delyi saw her staring off in the distance and waved her hand in front of her face.
“Are you thinking of home?” she asked, and then lay down amongst the furs to watch the fire.
“Thinking about you, girl. But I need you to stay here until I return, I shouldn’t be longer than a day, okay?” Marika said suddenly as she powered down the holo-map. She snatched up a small backpack and slipped it on. “I’ll bring you back some real food from the city, and a jug of good wine for us to celebrate. I intend to bring us some transport, so that we can fly out to a Starport where we’ll book you a flight to Primia. It’s all going to happen fast, Dee, so just be ready, and if you see the lights flash on that beacon, you need to get the hell out of here and run like you’ve never run before.”
“Leave a gun in case I can’t run,” she replied, raising up on an elbow to look at Marika Tsuno.
Marika reached into her main bag and pulled out a shotgun, then walked it over to Delyi. She showed her how to cock it and how to activate the blinding white light beneath the barrel in order to disorient her attackers when they rushed in.
“The bullets are reinforced sonic pellets,” she told her. “When you fire, it is extremely loud, but it can send a group of them flying backwards, which will give you time to escape.”
“How do I differentiate you from the troopers?” Delyi asked as Marika began to clear the entrance.
“That’s easy,” Marika said with a large smile. “You won’t see or hear me coming.”
~ * ~
Marika beat a direct path through the trees towards Veece, using all of her assassin’s instincts to stay alert to any patrolling troopers. She had run about three miles when she came across a cruiser that had just landed. It had deployed three armed men to investigate the area. She was about to hide when she saw the cruiser, and could not pass up the chance that it would provide her a way to fly out of the country. She glanced back to where she had come and thought about the amount of running she had been doing for the last few nights.
She scampered up the trunk of the nearest tree to wait for the troopers to begin their rounds.
The three men conferred for a time, and then walked towards the area where Marika was. She saw that they were using a device to track hers and Delyi’s movement. When they were below her branch, she remained patient, and the device began to beep, as if it had her figured out.
“Maker, can you shut that damn thing up?” the commander said. “We’re supposed to be covert, you know. Find where those bastards are hiding and then run them out. What’s it saying?”
“There’s footprint signatures leading from that direction. They seem to stop here, but I can’t see where they went off to,” the man with the beeping device replied.
There was a column of foggy light coming from the device, which looked like a turtle shell built out of chrome. The foggy light made her former footsteps glow on the ground, but the steps she made were confusing to them, and they were assuming that she was actually a group of people.
The man with the device looked up into the tree and shone the light up into the branches.
“What are you doing, corporal? Stop playing around. Follow the path of those footprints. I bet they have a hideout back there,” the commander scolded.
When the silent third of their number had cleared the tree, Marika jumped, somersaulted, and landed on top of him with her legs around his neck, as if he were giving her a piggyback ride. She clasped her hands over his mask and twisted violently, breaking his neck while springing off of him to take on the startled commander. He had a tough mask on and an armored chest piece, but as with most poorly armored fighters, his neck was exposed.
Marika pulled out her knife and drove it into his larynx, then spun to face the last man who had dropped the device and took off running for his life. She ran after him in the crouched sprint of a predator. As he got to the cleared area where the cruiser was parked, she leapt onto his back and drove him into the ground.
“No, pl—please, please, I don’t want to die,” he begged. She spun him around and placed the blade—freshly stained with his leader’s blood—against his throat. She couldn’t help but feel lucky for the opportunity that presented itself; she would no longer have to sneak into the city and do things the hard way.
“Okay, officer, you want to keep your life? Give me the codes to the lower prison system in Veece. Hesitate and I’ll cut your throat. I will also need the sequence for releasing the prisoners inside of there,” Marika said in a hushed voice.
“32788, the code today is 32788,” the man gasped, barely able to breathe, let alone speak. “But be aware, it takes two keycards to open the high security area. You want your rebel friends out, right? Is this what this is about? You’re going to need another person and two cards.” He swallowed hard and his eyes moved around so rapidly that Marika thought he looked like an android malfunctioning.
“Okay sure, two cards. Once inside, how do I get them out? Do you all have bars here, like a primitive jail system, or is it stasis pods, or something worse? Hurry up, man. I’m losing my patience,” she said and pressed the knife so hard against his throat that it broke the flesh. He could feel the warm blood trickle down into his helmet.
“F-force fields! We use force fields! You have to consult the computer inside to get the individual codes,” he stammered.
“Nice try. It’s a thyping prison. There is a way to open every cell, and I need to know what it is, NOW!” Marika screamed.
“That can only be done with the warden’s keycard, but he’s on vacation off-planet, I swear! P—please, I’m a working class Tyheran, no ties to the Felitians outside of this job. I do this to provide for my family,” he pleaded.
Marika reached down and clipped something behind his ear. She got up off of him, wiped her blade on the exposed piece of shirt beneath his armor, and then sheathed it and waited for him to stand.
“What I’ve just placed behind your ear is a seventh class proximity bomb. If you try to remove it without me pressing this release, it will go off, killing you and anyone else within a ten-yard radius. Do not test me, trooper. I am not the type to be tested. Now, I will keep my promise and let you have your miserable life, but you will have to do a few things for me before I let you go,” Marika said.
“Anything, anything, just please don’t kill me,” the man pleaded as he swept his long, brown hair back and tossed aside his helmet.
“Get in that cruiser and man it until your superiors ask for a status report. Tell them that your commanding officer led you all into a camp where a Primian female asked to speak with him in private. If they ask for more detail, tell them you were commanded to wait and that is what you are doing. If it goes beyond that, your mission is to stall. If you think they will come for you, fly that thing into the mountains and wait until I contact you. I will call you from your dead commander’s radio when I’m ready for the pickup. Do we understand one another?” Marika asked.
“Yes, I’m to aid you in rescuing your friends from prison or you will blow me up with your device. I got it.”
“Good, we’re practically partners, then,” Marika said. “So get over there, clean yourself up, and try to relax. You’ll be hearing from me in a few hours.”
She turned, then and sprinted back past the two bodies o
f the fallen troopers.
Memory 15
When she was a younger woman, the aspects of training and running mission after mission was all Marika Tsuno cared for. The spots on her head and neck formed a perfect arrow, and the point ended in between her eyes and right above her nose. The assassin’s guild master, Roycence, had teased her about it, saying it was a signal to the world that if Marika Tsuno was to ever stop moving forward, she was about to drop dead.
It was a joke of course, but like most jokes that hurt, it was pretty much the truth. She had taken on the most missions, and had accepted them one after another. Even after signing with the Phasers, she hadn’t stopped to catch her breath, and it was on a lonely night sometime after joining that she realized she was running away from her own mind.
When she wanted company and couldn’t get any, she would end up in bed with the worst people. One of those lonely nights had found her in bed with the supreme leader, Rafian VCA himself, when she had gone exploring and found him in the barracks, training with a fencing droid. Marian knew they had been together, but she didn’t know that ever since the first night, she had spent numerous nights with him, training, drinking, and making love.
She was a celebrated warrior for the Anstractor alliance, a once deadly assassin who had changed the outcome of many elections and leads throughout the galaxy. But Marika Tsuno was lonely. She was a beautiful killer without a committed husband or wife to come home to after the throats were slit and the coins exchanged. This was until she found Vallen, a warrior’s warrior and the best friend to the man she was sleeping with – Rafian VCA.
Val had become her light, and he was the only person in over a decade who truly understood her. She loved the big man, and this was evidenced by the way he stayed on her mind constantly. He didn’t seem to know about her history with Raf, but at the same time she knew that if he were to find out, he would only be upset for a day or so. Oh, how she missed her Val, his mop of brown hair, and his loud, booming laughter.