As the waiter took back the photograph, Azheelah suddenly recognized who had done this to her.
“I’ll leave you to enjoy your drink, Re-educator. If you need any assistance, all you need to do is ask.”
Senior Truth Definer Azheelah felt her final heartbeat.
Her chest was still now.
She had moments left. She used them to watch the woman walk to the preparation room. She never saw her reach the door.
* * * * *
Chapter 34: Revered Leader In’Nalla
In’Nalla internalized her seething anger until they had walked calmly into a private breakout room and Asher had locked the door behind them.
Only then did she scream.
“Why must they be so stubborn?” she growled, waving her flexi-viewscreens and paper notes. “Why can’t they cooperate? It’s a time of global crisis, but the transport corporations show no signs of noticing. They would rather exploit a small advantage over their rivals than cooperate and provide a vastly superior service for their passengers. In the war of ideas with the WCDs, I need to demonstrate provision of decent basic services. Instead, I’m betrayed by trans-cos who are greedy, petty, and led by utterly short-sighted assholes. It would be better if we had fewer companies, and they were steered by a central authority.”
Asher was as impassive as ever, but In’Nalla thought she detected the merest twitch of an eyebrow.
Grimacing, In’Nalla reluctantly accepted she’d gone too far. What was wrong with her? Was the relentless advance of the rebels finally getting to her nerves?
She’d just endured a breakout debate on regional transport networks for the lower zones. It had been soul-sapping, dysfunctional, and bloody. But this was the Global Economic Forum; it had always been that way.
She cleared her throat and composed herself for the benefit of her aide. “Obviously, I would never condone government ownership of corporations. Jacobin socialism and leveler ideology are dangers that seduce the simpleminded into treacherous thoughts. Nonetheless, this crisis demands we open up to new ways of thinking to support the people of our world. They expect nothing less of me.”
“Of course, ma’am. The people would struggle to follow even their Revered Leader into such ideologies. Not without a significant preparatory campaign. Now, two rather more prosaic matters, if you please. The police have announced another murder. A REDD truth definer poisoned in a downtown foam café. They’re ruling nothing out, but it seems unlikely that it is a terrorist act because there have been no claims of responsibility or demands. Most likely, it’s a demented serial killer. Old school criminality is not to be underestimated, ma’am, despite all the additional forms of criminality we have defined in the modern age.”
“If this is, as you say, a drooling old-school psychopath, I don’t see why this would be of interest to me.”
Asher adjusted her pebble spectacles, her way of politely disagreeing with her Revered Leader. “Nonetheless, ma’am, it would be prudent to select a permanent replacement for your personal bodyguard since Halm met with that unfortunate accident.”
“I don’t pay you to beat around the bush, Blayde. You’ve already selected someone, haven’t you?”
“Guilty, ma’am.” Blayde Asher grinned and gestured to the door. “If you have a few moments to see him now…”
In’Nalla waved at her to get on with it.
Asher opened the door and in came a heavily built man with an air of danger. He wore black military-style battledress devoid of insignia.
“He’s an off-worlder,” said Asher. “No allegiance to any Eiylah-Bremah political group or ideology.”
In’Nalla addressed him. “So, your allegiance is to money. That right?”
“No, ma’am. I am completely loyal to whomever I’m contracted to protect. I would defend you with my life until such time as my contract expires.”
She gave a curt nod. “I can work with that. Strip to your underwear. And hurry. I must reconvene a meeting in five minutes.”
The man didn’t hesitate to comply.
He was a handsome creature. If she’d had more time, she would have enjoyed her power over him, caressing her gaze over his muscled body.
“Do you know why I wanted you stripped?” she asked, deciding not to put a teasing edge on her words.
“On Eiylah-Bremah, political allegiance is frequently displayed in tattoos. You wish to see mine.”
She smiled. In his case, checking for ink was a pleasure she did little to hide.
Her gaze rested on the left side of his chest. A woman was tattooed there, a young girl with lilac hair spread out in zero-g.
In’Nalla had enjoyed a lover in the Legion for a year—a woman called Leyla. Both had been of Jeanneppien descent, their skin color a pale blue, like shallow polar waters. Leyla had worn the exact same tattoo on her breast—the image of the Immortal Empress.
In’Nalla had never liked it on Leyla. She considered the design to be crudely stuck on such a handsome woman, but this man was different. His skin was far darker than Leyla’s had been. The tattoo felt organic, as if it had been exuded naturally by his body, an expression of his inner Legion spirit.
“What is your name?” she asked him.
“Marc Sanderson.”
“Why did you leave the Legion?”
“Excessive use of force against civilians.”
“Are you a murderer, Sanderson?”
He regarded her through cold, dark eyes. “I get the job done, ma’am.”
She closed her eyes and soaked in his danger. “I believe you will. Asher, arrange the details of Sanderson’s employment. I want him at my side before I leave the conference this evening.”
As she gathered her papers to leave, In’Nalla paused and looked back at the big man. “Sanderson, in which unit did you serve?”
“Chimera Company.”
“I don’t recognize that name. Should I?”
“Not yet, ma’am.” He gave a wolfish grin. “One day you will.”
* * * * *
Chapter 35: Vetch Arunsen
“I unleashed verbal violence against innocent Colonists. I caused real hurt in doing so, but my bigotry blinded me to the damage I was inflicting upon members of an entrenched group. Worse…”
The Zhoogene girl sitting alone at the confession desk sniffed.
In the confession audience, Vetch rubbed dampness from his tattooed eyes. He couldn’t see the girl’s face clearly at this distance, but he was convinced this was the person they had rescued from prison in Kaylingen. It was Carnolin Indoh.
“My greatest crime,” the girl continued, her voice trembling, “was to continue my arrogance after my imprisonment. Instead of accepting society’s just and lawful program of atonement, I helped a group of Militia troopers desert in return for taking me with them.”
The breeze blowing through the gap Enthree had blown in the camp’s outer wall suddenly felt very cold on Vetch’s bare legs. He thought of his friend and comrade, Sward, buried beneath an Eiylah-Bremah hillside. Killed in this girl’s rescue.
It had all been for nothing.
Carnolin couldn’t finish the speech prepared for her. It was too much. REEDs advanced on the girl in their sinister black hazmat suits with the gas mask helmets.
Two hundred prisoners were lined up to watch this afternoon’s confession practice. Standing with Vetch were Zhoogenes, Pryxians, Gliesans, Ellondytes, and several more races, but mostly humans. Lily was there, too, in the second rank of the lineup. Her tattoo had changed in the days since their capture, taking on bright shards of color until her flesh looked like it had been painted with dazzle camo. More cover. It had never changed so fast, and he worried that it reflected a frail mental state.
They lined up with the young and the old, with members of every gender. Many were off-worlders sent by the authorities of their own planets to the world that had made atonement services a major export industry. And every one of them was dressed in plain white shorts and vests, hair un
covered and feet unshod.
Facing them, with their backs to the scaffolding of the breach repair building site, was a line of armed REEDs. Their faces were hidden behind the black visors of the helmets that stretched down to their necks. Bullies were the same the galaxy over. They had absolute power over their prisoners, and they were itching for any sign of disobedience so they could exert that power with shock sticks, knuckle dusters, and metal-toed boots.
The REEDs dragged Carnolin, who was screaming in terror, off her chair. There was a cry of pain. Then nothing.
Vetch searched the faces of his fellow prisoners, looking for darting eyes and angry visages—signs that an outraged group of wronged prisoners would launch themselves at the REEDs and punish them for their abuse of this innocent girl.
But their grim faces were as impassive as the REEDs’.
He searched inward, but he didn’t find the spark that would launch him at the guards with his fists and bare feet, knowing the fight would be hopeless, but making him fight anyway because it was the right thing to do.
I’ve been here less than two weeks. Has this place beaten me already?
It seemed the answer was clear because Vetch did nothing as Carnolin was dragged away.
Another prisoner righted Carnolin’s chair, which had fallen over onto the stone ground. She took Carnolin’s place at the desk, facing her fellow prisoners through the screen of REEDs.
She was a silver-haired human with an unmistakably military bearing. The upper reaches of her arms and thighs were smeared with livid bruises. She read her prepared speech with dignity and passion, as if she meant every word of her confession.
Vetch tuned out the words—this atonement garbage was always the same rehashed phrases—and concentrated instead on the reactions of the other prisoners.
They had endured Carnolin’s performance with outward indifference, but now they stood proudly as if the woman reading her confession was giving a rousing speech to her assembled troops.
Vetch suddenly guessed who she must be.
“Is that the Colonel?” he whispered to the elderly Zhoogene next to him.
“It is,” he hissed. “Shut up.”
Vetch blinked in surprise. Not because of anything his neighbor had said, but because his ears picked up a word in the Colonel’s speech that fired memories in his brain.
Irisur.
The wicked crimes the Colonel was admitting to had occurred on Irisur. The same place Sybutu’s lieutenant had been killed.
“Is that Colonel Lantosh?” he whispered.
A REED tilted its head to regard Vetch directly. The Zhoogene said nothing after that, and Vetch kept his mouth shut too, his eyes rigidly focused on the Colonel like a good little prisoner.
Since he’d arrived, everyone had told him—prisoners and re-educators alike—that A-10 broke everyone in the end. Even, it seemed, the Colonel.
To his mind, she’d given a perfect confession, humble, with profound regret for her misdeeds.
And when she’d finished, she stood up and neatly tucked her chair back under the table. She took a few steps back before spreading her legs a little and stretching out her arms as if halfway through a star jump.
REEDs smacked heavy shock sticks against her bare upper arms and legs, adding to the collection of bruises.
The Colonel seemed to welcome the pain. The REEDs looked bored by their own brutality and soon escorted the Colonel out of sight. They returned with a trembling Gliesan who they led to the confession chair.
Before the new prisoner could begin, the REED who had looked Vetch’s way earlier beckoned him over with a finger in a rubberized black gauntlet.
Heart pounding, Vetch jogged over, expecting the blows to begin without warning.
But this wasn’t a public beating; the shock stick remained on the REEDs belt. Instead, the sinister figure pointed through the breach in the wall to the outside.
Vetch guessed that his interrogation was finally about to begin. Despite being made to read confessions, he’d not yet been questioned. Darant and Lily reported the same. He wasn’t sure whether the re-educators realized they were the same Militia deserters Carnolin had just spoken of in her confession.
“You want me to go outside the walls?” he checked.
“That’s right, you piece of filth,” said the REED, a Zhoogene woman from the sound of her voice. “Move your fat human arse.”
“And do what? Escape?”
“Idiot. If you attempt to get to the trees, sharpshooters on the walls will gun you down. Quit talking and beat those feet before I do so, literally.”
Vetch hurried to the breach and ran up the wooden boards on one side of the mound of earth piled up before it. He cut through to the inner breach an instant before a hulking Pryxian prisoner crested the other side of the mound, pushing a wheelbarrow of rubble.
He passed through a scene straight out of pre-history—barefoot prisoners reworking the wall’s interior by hand before the professionals finished off the outer layers.
Ouch! He cursed the alloy scaffolding as he banged his head against it.
Bet the ancients didn’t have to put up with low-slung metal scaffolding, he thought, though he quickly decided they’d probably had far worse. At least this scaffolding wouldn’t collapse.
On the far side of the breach, he saw a group of four prisoners waiting for him.
“Hey, Viking!” one called out to him. “Get over here!”
He really needed to get his eyes checked, because it was only when he drew close that he realized the smaller of the prisoners was the woman he suspected was Lantosh.
“You damaged some of my people,” she told him. “There must be consequences.”
“There are far bigger matters at play here than camp politics,” Vetch answered. “And worlds beyond Eiylah-Bremah.”
“No doubt,” replied the Colonel. “Nonetheless, I find myself on extended furlough in this lovely woodland facility. The galaxy outside is dead to me.”
She nodded. Vetch allowed his arms to be pinned behind him by two of the prisoners. A powerfully built Zhoogene drew up in front of him and regarded Vetch’s vulnerable stomach hungrily, waiting for the Colonel’s signal.
But it was Vetch who spoke first. “It’s a long way home,” he said hastily, repeating the code phrase he’d overheard Sybutu giving to Fitz when they’d first met, “but I’m setting off tomorrow.”
The Colonel’s only reaction was to give him a filthy look. “What is your name?”
“Arunsen, Colonel Lantosh.”
“Well, Arunsen, you’re not going anywhere without the say so of the REEDs, and they are strict about granting leave from this place. It’s clear the tide has gone out in your mind, and your sanity has slipped its moorings.”
Wait…wasn’t something like that part of the recognition phrases too?
“I feel sorry for you, Arunsen. Go easy on him, boys, but make it look good. After curfew tonight, bring him to my quarters.”
She pushed in front of the Zhoogene who was revving up to apply pain and looked up into Vetch’s face. “You know, Arunsen, it would have been so much easier on all of us if you had obeyed my summons in the first place.”
A flash of color just above her vest caught his eye. It was lilac, the outer reaches of an inked woman that was mostly hidden under her clothing.
She caught his attention and raised an eyebrow. “I’m proud of what the Empress’ image says about me. Let’s see if there’s anything you’re proud of.”
She lifted his vest and revealed the black raven emblazoned across his chest. The bird was perched on a branch over his right nipple, leaning over to pluck an eyeball covering his left.
He’d spent everything he owned getting the quality artwork inked, but Lantosh looked disappointed, the first time she seemed thrown by anything.
“This shows your gang allegiance?” she asked.
“Raven Company, Colonel. Currently of no fixed abode, but originally of the 532nd Regiment of Mi
litia.”
“The Militia is a gang, Arunsen. One I intend to eradicate.” She stood back and waved on the Zhoogene.
If this was taking it easy, Vetch would hate to make the Colonel angry. The blows kept coming until he was a ball of pain, groaning on the ground.
* * * * *
Chapter 36: Revered Leader In’Nalla
The orange light above the door lit.
It was a hatch, really, sealed hermetically in a privacy room set inside a Faraday cage, which was surrounded by rotating hoops. Inside the hollow hoops was a mixture of plasma jets, randomly pulsing superconductors, and rattling carbon cubes that produced a highly effective field of low-tech audio interference.
The ten-by-four-foot box beneath her residence in the capital was as private as you could get, and the orange lamp meant the person she was about to see was being thoroughly scanned for any possible surveillance technology under the watchful gaze of her new bodyguard, Sanderson.
The lamp turned green, and the hatch opened.
Ren Kay sauntered in, his sleek green cheekbones and slender form making her feel suddenly old and bone weary.
Dammit! She hated this reminder of her lost youth but took strength from it all the same. She wouldn’t live forever, which was why Eiylah-Bremah’s progress toward a permanently virtuous society had to be accelerated, so her legacy to this world wouldn’t die with her.
He grabbed her hand and gave it an unwelcome two-handed shake.
She slipped her hand from his grip. “We don’t shake hands on Eiylah-Bremah.”
“True, but you aren’t native to this world, are you, Revered Leader? I believe you were born on Jeanneppi.”
“This room is private, Lieutenant. That doesn’t give you license to speak unvirtuous words. If that was a crude and insulting attempt to ask whether my loyalty is to Eiylah-Bremah, the answer is yes. I’m a loyal citizen of the Federation. I respect the Senate, my home world, and the federal institutions…when they do their jobs properly. But my primary loyalty is to the people of Eiylah-Bremah.”
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