Chapter 40: Lily Hjon
“Why does it always fall to me?” Lily muttered. She pushed through the gate, noting the unusual absence of guards, and made her way into the exercise compound.
Because, Lily, you get things done.
“Oh, yeah. Let’s get Dangerous Lil’ to do the dirty work. Crazy Lil’. Just look at the tattoos on her face. Lily will do anything. Why can’t it be someone else for once? How about that damned Zhoogene girl?”
Carnolin can’t do anything like this. She’s just a frightened little civilian.
“I’m frightened too,” she snapped at herself.
The prisoners didn’t cease pushing weights or their callisthenic drills, but her appearance did generate a ripple of unease. They sensed something was up.
And the Zhoogene prisoners could hear her one-sided argument with herself. Not that she cared much.
You’re the right one for the job, Lily. Suck it up and get it done.
“I know,” she murmured, seeking out her target. “I’m getting real tired of that.”
Bullshit. You’re about to kick things off. People on this planet will be talking about you for centuries. Admit it. You love it.
“Never said I didn’t,” she whispered.
Lily found what she was looking for by a corner of the high fence. A group of four men were doing press-ups, jumping jacks, and all that kind of crap.
“Hey!” she called, jogging over. She tapped a man with dark curly hair, who was about to transition up from a set of press-ups, on the shoulder. “Are you Stefan Gamal?”
The man slapped her away. Around him, his lieutenants halted their exercises and began looming aggressively instead.
“Who the hell are you?” snapped the man Lily knew damn well was Gamal.
She tutted. “Really! Such rudeness. I only asked—politely—because my friends told me you’re a piece of filth who gets his rocks off by torturing children.”
It wasn’t true, and she laughed when she saw Gamal’s eyes widen in shock. He had no shame about all the horrific things he’d actually done, but accuse him of something he hadn’t, and the poor dear was mortally offended.
His dismay allowed her enough time to land one really satisfying punch before his men bundled her to the ground and began pummeling the hell out of her.
“Are we going to stand for this?” yelled one of Lantosh’s plants.
Initially, the call was echoed only by those in on Lantosh and Fitz’s plan, but soon, it spread throughout the exercise area and beyond.
Gamal and his thugs were pulled off Lily before she suffered too bad a beating.
Already, REEDs were thundering in to break up this unprecedented display of disorder.
They soon found the prisoners turning their fists and makeshift clubs on them, which only drew in more REEDs from other areas of the camp.
Lily sat up and wiped the blood off her face with her arm. She shuffled back a few feet so she could get a view of the top of the main gate.
According to Fitz, Zavage and Enthree had unexpectedly become best buddies, combining their skills in signal tech and hacking to great effect.
The main gate slid open under Zavage and Enthree’s remote control.
She couldn’t hear Lantosh and her best fighters move in to secure the gate, but she could hear the struggle—screams and punches and the occasional blaster bolt screeching through the air.
And in the distance, she could hear the rebel army approaching.
The REEDs froze, looking at themselves. Behind their gas masks, Lily hoped there was terror on their faces.
They’d been caught with their rubberized hazmat pants down, and they knew it.
She heard disciplined volleys of blaster fire from the area of the main gate.
Lily couldn’t see the battle, but she knew what the result was going to be.
So did the REEDs. Some hurried to join the battle for A-10, but most abandoned the hopeless fight and ran deeper into the camp.
“Run as much as you like,” Lily told them. “But you can’t hide. Today is Payback Day.”
And tomorrow, said her inner voice, you get to rest, Lil’. But there’s gonna be at least one more big battle before this planet’ll let you get away. And you know you’re going to be right in the thick of it…
* * * * *
Chapter 41: Blayde Asher
Asher pushed open the door to Shelter 66. Immediately, she froze.
It was the worst thing she could possibly do in a place like this. Like all speak-free coffee houses, it was rumored to be crawling with police spies.
She frowned and rubbed her chest, trying to pass off her hesitation as a momentary pang of heartburn, then she panicked when she feared she might drop the precious object concealed in her right hand.
She supposed her trouble really was a pain in her heart. Cornflower had brought her here a few times in those heady early days of reckless love before she forbade it.
Well, now I’m back, darling. And I’m here for you.
Her sense of purpose restored, she walked over to the east wall, surreptitiously looking for her contact among the late-morning drinkers lined up against the shelf carved out of the stone.
Tens of meters of solid rock and a lead-lined roof above her head made these former emergency shelters popular locations for speak-frees. They had been built in the early years of the Eiylah-Bremah colony and abandoned a thousand years later. In the modern world, people had to shield from dangers more subtle than radiation storms, terraforming disasters, and alien invasion fleets.
The shelters were called speak-frees, but it was difficult to tell how accurate that description was. Even for her.
Although the breakout from the A-10 camp had shaken their totalitarian reputation, the authorities still promoted the narrative that Eiylah-Bremah’s citizens were protected by an all-encompassing police state. Widespread, hidden recording equipment and informers were impossible to evade.
Asher knew the reality was different. Police recruitment numbers were far below target, and even if they weren’t, they would fall far short of the numbers required for the police state people imagined. But that was the sick genius of the system. If you didn’t report a crime you observed, you were awarded the same punishment as the perpetrator if you were found out.
There was an all-seeing police state, but its eyes and ears and recording devices were those of the public, coerced into oppressing themselves.
It had been that way for generations. In’Nalla had just refined the system for her own ends.
But very soon, it was going to end for good if Blayde Asher had anything to do with it.
She walked almost the length of the wall before she saw a man wearing clothes that matched the description she was looking for. He wore a loose hood over smartly pressed coveralls. Dark blue with gold stitching and lining, except where the left sleeve joined the rest of the garment. That stitching was silver.
She took a stool next to the man.
After apparently trying the service request console in front of her and finding it didn’t work, she leaned across the man, who was nursing a tall, cream-colored drink, and used his.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“No problem,” he replied in an accent that sounded vaguely Zone 40-ish but had a hint of somewhere far more exotic.
Asher swiped through the beverage options. Normally, she would have chosen a foam coffee, but having used one as a murder weapon, she’d lost her taste for them.
That’s an unintended consequence of becoming a serial killer they don’t tell you about, Cornflower.
She selected a plain synth-caff instead and drew two sachets of sugar from the dispenser and dropped an identical sachet she’d been concealing in her hand since she came in.
The man shifted his arm on the shelf. It was the barest motion, but the sachet in which she’d concealed the recording of incriminating evidence disappeared.
Asher took heart. Whoever the hell this was, claiming to rep
resent the Trucker, was good.
“We can speak freely,” he said, “as long as you face the wall to defeat any lip readers. There are no active recording devices nearby. And if spies in Shelter 66 take an undue interest in us, I have friends here who will warn me.”
He glanced casually at his wrist slate, as if checking whether he had time for another drink before his lunchtime appointments.
She glanced over, and his slate was indeed showing appointments. At least, from the angle she was observing, it appeared to do so. She guessed he was viewing something quite different—the recording of In’Nalla she’d passed him inside the sachet.
“I’ve not been on your world long,” he told her. “And most of that was as a prisoner of RevRec, but even I can guess who you are, Blayde Asher. When we release this, it will incriminate you too. Why do this?”
“My world is hopelessly screwed up. The Trucker is the only one who can change that. And he needs this.”
Her contact sucked his drink through a straw, ice cubes clanging against the glass. He gave a satisfied sigh. “I don’t believe you. What’s the real reason?”
“Revenge.”
She spoke quietly, but with such intensity, he didn’t question her motives again. Instead, he asked the question that terrified her the most.
“Will this be enough, though? I’m guessing this is not the first time someone has shared a recording that compromises In’Nalla.”
“You’re right. It’s not enough, and it’s not the first time. Every few years, someone throws her words back at her and tries to destroy her. Most people think she would be the perfect victim of such an attack. After all, the Churn is all about those who abuse their power and authority being ruthlessly cut down by an outraged, baying public. But In’Nalla controls the information flows to the public and the way in which the public communicates with itself. The Churn belongs to her. Each time someone tries, In’Nalla turns the matter over to a binding Court of Public Opinion. And because she controls the message and the medium, she always wins. For my recording to be enough, you must take away her control of EB-Link, the data sphere, and the media conglomerates.”
“And I suppose In’Nalla knows all this and guards her sources of power jealously.”
“Of course. I can’t help you defeat her defenses. That kind of thing’s not my specialty.”
With a slurp, the man finished his drink. “Luckily, it is mine. Thank you, Asher. We won’t waste what you have delivered to us.”
He pulled a clay pipe from his coveralls and was about to light it when her synth-caff appeared in his dispensing receptacle.
He handed it over. “Yours, I believe.”
Those were the last words he spoke to her. Soon, he was wreathed in a cloud of smoke.
When she got up to leave a short while later, he showed no sign of acknowledging her.
I hope it’s enough, Cornflower, she said inside her head as she left Shelter 66, but she was petrified it would not be.
Nonetheless, as she headed back along the underground street, making her way to the city above, she felt a lightness in her step she hadn’t felt since the day they took her lover away.
* * * * *
Chapter 42: General Gzeiter
The viewscreens arranged across the wooden kitchen table showed the same image. The capital city of Kaylingen was tense—barricades were even more numerous and more heavily manned than after the surprise A-10 breakout—but there were no signs of violence. Not, at any rate, visible to the drones feeding the images.
“You should get rest, sir,” insisted his aide for the hundredth time.
“I can never sleep before battle,” Gzeiter replied tersely. Then more gently—because Captain Bryn meant well—he added, “I’ll just chill in front of the screens. I find it relaxing to see the battlefield. But you, Bryn, could sleep under the barking guns of a field artillery battery. I swear you’re gene-spliced with a kill droid. Go. Rest. Be back at 05:00.”
Bryn saluted and left Gzeiter alone in the farmhouse kitchen.
Although he couldn’t sleep, this was a restful place. Homey.
The Zhoogene farmer who had lived here was one of their field agents, and Gzeiter had expected his command section to be warmly greeted and updated with the latest intelligence. But it seemed she’d left in a hurry weeks ago. His staff had given the place a quick wipe over to remove mold, dust, and rotten food, but he could still smell putrid meat from somewhere and a faint whiff of despair.
He hoped she was safe but strongly doubted that was the case.
His eye was drawn to the shelf on which silver plates and sports trophies were displayed and then to the shelf below where cut glass tumblers were interleaved with bottles of exotic liquor, most of which he didn’t recognize.
He shook away the temptation to drink and studied the lowlight-enhanced images from the drones. A few pedestrians were walking along peaceful nighttime streets, oblivious to his attention. In the morning, those streets would transform into assault vectors.
Appearances could be deceptive, he reminded himself. The people were oppressed by a sickening totalitarian regime. As he saw the city and its people—if not with his own eyes, then at least in real-time—he began to wonder if this campaign was really such a disaster.
True, he’d abandoned the idea of waging the long, drawn-out war of attrition he’d been sent here to fight. But he hadn’t joined the Rebellion to conduct industrial scale slaughter. He’d been propelled by ideals; he still was. Taking out In’Nalla, and the sickness that supported her, would be a victory worth celebrating.
Hers was a strange ideology. One of convenience, he suspected, freely mixing her own innovations into what had gone before, caring little about the philosophy so long as it won her power. She was in favor of small government, ironically enough, understanding that it wasn’t the same as weak government. She stood for both the preeminence of unrestricted free markets and the progressive march of social engineering. High economic productivity was almost a religion to her, as was the delivery of universal and free lifetime education. Anybody who was not in favor of those things either kept quiet or disappeared into one of the jails and amelioration camps until they were ready for their show trial.
His informers told him In’Nalla was on a passionate crusade to improve the world she lived in. He didn’t believe that for a moment, but it made no difference either way. Tomorrow, her era would be over. And, too, if his plan came to fruition, it would be the end of the Trucker and RevRec’s miniature field army.
The Pan-Human Progressive Alliance would rule Eiylah-Bremah unchallenged.
His wrist slate chimed.
“Go for Gzeiter.”
“Signal ops, sir. North Strike Actual reports attacks in Zones 10 through 13 proceeding according to plan. Orbital Eyes confirm Militia troop transports and other air assets redeploying from Greater Kaylingen region, headed to reinforce defenses against the North Strike feint attacks.”
Gzeiter dismissed the signal operator and walked over to the row of liquor bottles. He halfheartedly inspected the exotic labels again, but he couldn’t concentrate. Everything was going according to plan. Everything depended on what happened the next day.
Tempting as they were, he resisted the lure of the bottles.
There would be plenty of time to toast victory on the morrow.
* * * * *
Chapter 43: Izza Zan Fey
She sighed.
It was no use. No matter how hard she tried to distract herself, he was always in her mind, beaming at her with that ridiculous human grin.
Carefully, she lifted the sleeping woman’s arm off her and rolled over the man snoring on the other side of the bed.
The woman moaned, her hand tapping the sheet as it sought the warm body it had been resting against.
Izza pulled the man’s hand until it rested over the woman’s and grasped it slightly.
The woman purred happily and settled back to sleep.
Izza admired her tw
o human lovers for a few moments. They did look sweet together, but they were nothing more than protective concealment to shield her heart. They would never replace him.
She padded along the cool deck plating of the main walkway, enjoying the comforting hum of the Phantom during ship’s night. It was almost as if the ship were gently snoring along with its humanoid crewmembers. On the flight deck, she locked the door and settled back into the pilot’s seat, resting her heels on the console on the spot Fitz had worn a little smooth.
When Phantom and her crew were awake, the pilot station was hers. She owned it, and neither she nor anyone else questioned that for a moment.
But in the quiet, with the lights set to sim-night dimness, touched gently by the distant stars watching her from the other side of the cockpit window, she could feel him out there somewhere in the galaxy.
She could smell his scent, feel his essence in the leather of the seat.
All her imagination, of course. He’d just had the seats re-upholstered, and she’d ordered them thoroughly cleaned after he came back from that damned space station covered in grease and dirt.
Imaginary or not, she rubbed her naked skin against the leather and felt a connection to him.
Within buried system menus, she activated a quantum-entangled comm link no one else on the ship knew about.
She looked out of the cockpit and stared a long while at the stars. One of them held him. She could summon an overlay to highlight the location of Eiylah-Bremah, if that were still his location, but she preferred not to know.
“I miss you.” Her words were the lightest whisper on the edge of the comm’s pickup threshold.
There was no reply, of course. She hadn’t expected one. Even if he had heard, contact was too dangerous. Just the thought that he might be listening was enough for her. No doubt he had already recruited new allies, charmed new followers, and wrung the best out of his Chimera Company.
Laughing, she captured a static image of herself, blowing him a kiss as she lounged provocatively in his seat. It was an ill-disciplined waste of the limited q-bit capacity link, but that was the point—he liked his extravagant statements.
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