The Queen of Sidonia

by Richard Fox

  She curled into a ball and pulled the covers over her head, then lay there, trembling.

  “My lady? Everything all right?” Lana said.

  Cosima didn’t answer. The memories of the bombing on the day she’d arrived on the planet, the smell of burnt leather and plastic from the car, and the screams of the crowd enveloped her like the blanket she had wrapped around her body.

  “Cosima?” Lana asked. She felt her handmaiden’s touch against her shoulder. Cosima rocked from side to side to shake off the attention.

  “Call if you need me,” Lana said. Cosima heard the sound of her door close.

  The memories faded away, but in the hours that passed Cosima couldn’t sleep. She went over the attack as well as her strained memories could manage. Details of the bombing nagged at her. Something was off with the official story, and she’d get to the bottom of it. Her life really did depend on it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Cosima opened the door to her room and stepped into the hallway, Theresa a few steps behind her. Remi stood guard at the door, and Cosima did a double take when she saw him. She glanced at his right thigh, no worse for wear, despite the video in which she’d seen a hunk of metal sticking out of him.

  Remi was as stern as ever, no hint of the man who had pleaded for a wounded soldier to live, who had charged across a battlefield where death waited for him, ready to die for his prince. She looked him in the eyes and saw a deep sadness behind them.

  “My lady, are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Remi said.

  “Yes. No. I mean…” She cleared her throat and composed herself. “Mr. Remi, you will escort me to the Household Guard’s forensics lab. Theresa and Lana will go to my appointment in my stead.”

  “My lady.” Lana went pale. “My lady the florist is expecting you there. The bouquets, wreaths, window treatments…why, we haven’t even tried to coordinate the color scheme with the caterers.”

  “Theresa knows what I like. She’ll be fine until I can catch up,” Cosima said.

  “But the appointment time is—”

  “The florist will make a veritable fortune on my wedding and will brag about it for as long as they remain in business. They. Will. Wait.” Cosima stomped her foot in emphasis. She stared down Lana for a moment, then spun on her heels and left.

  Cosima glanced over her shoulder after they’d taken a few turns through the hallways. “Oh, thank goodness.”

  “May I inquire as to your interest in the forensics lab?” Remi asked.

  “Why? Do I need to justify myself to you too?” she snapped.

  “I can send a message ahead, have whatever you need ready. Your time is valuable.”

  Cosima’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. She chided herself for taking offense to Remi’s question.

  “I want a 4-D mock-up for the blast scene from the attack on me. Have whoever put together the final report on the incident there as well. Something’s been bothering me,” she said.

  Remi whispered into his gauntlet and nodded to Cosima.

  “Have you read the final report?” she asked as they stepped into the elevator.

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Summarize it for me. I swear you people use an acronym for every possible word combination instead of plain English.”

  “Sturm Hedelson, a known dissident, assembled a shaped charge bomb in his home using common materials from his farm in the mountains. He set it underneath Richthofen Avenue and triggered it with a command wire from his vantage point on top of a building. He tried to shoot you with heavy mass darts designed to beat your body shield when the bombing failed. After the attack, he returned to his residence and overdosed on thebaine before we could arrest him,” Remi said.

  Her father had hired body language tutors for her since she was a girl—knowing when a prospective partner or employee was lying by the way they shuffled their feet, touched their face, or inflected their voice was a vital business skill. Remi’s summary had an even kilter, no indications that he knew different from what he said.

  “You believe all that?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t involved with the investigation after the explosion. I have no reason to doubt the report.”

  “Something is off, Mr. Remi. Maybe I’m just overly worried. Is that wrong? Being so paranoid?”

  “It’s my job to be paranoid, my lady. Not yours.”

  Cosima sighed, her shoulders drooping. In the reflection off the elevator’s control panel, she saw Remi lift a hand to touch her, stop, then return it to his side.

  ****

  Carter, the assassin under the guise of Guardsman Thorgill, completed her review of yet another travel voucher and sent it back into the computer system. Busy work, she’d been on nothing but busy work since her reassignment. As much as the mind-numbing drudgery bored her, it fit with her cover to not complain about her lot.

  But there was only so much idle conversation she could stomach in the cubicle farm where the Guard’s bureaucracy functioned, or didn’t function. Jane from two cubicles over seemed determined to make sure the entire office knew how well her dating life was going, and Eric from procurement was probably selling “lost” ammo to some criminal underground.

  Carter didn’t lash out or rock the boat, that wasn’t her place. Steady determination would get her back to the ideal position. The patient hunter seldom went hungry.

  The doors to the headquarters opened, and Princess Cosima entered. If Carter’s heart still functioned of its own accord, it would have skipped a beat.

  “Room, attention!” the nearest Guardsman to the door announced. Carter and everyone else snapped to their feet and went back to their seats following a lazy wave from Cosima. She walked past Carter without a second glance.

  Carter typed a code into her keyboard, and a small text box opened in the corner of her screen.

  She typed TARGET ACQUIRED into the box, and pretended to work, waiting for a response.

  STAND BY came back, then vanished with a keystroke.

  “Hey, Carter, you’re on feed detail with me.” A Guardsman by the name of Sanders, chinless and with a greasy complexion, tapped his fingertips along the top of her cubicle wall. “Mickey’s been complaining about his bread-and-water diet. I say we change it up and give him stale bread and warm water this time. What do you think?”

  Carter forced a smile.

  “Let’s stick to the schedule and get this over with,” she said. She closed her screen a split second after the text box returned—even her eyes weren’t fast enough to read the message. She’d read it once she’d finished with Sanders.

  ****

  The walls of the 4-D visualization room were a series of linked hexagons, dark green tiles bordered by bright white lines. Cosima, Remi, and Colonel Stolzoff stood in the entryway, waiting while a technician swiped and tapped frantically at the workstation raised up to his waist.

  Holographic images coalesced in the room. Richthofen Avenue with the crowd on either side. The car that carried Cosima, once whole, then a smoking ruin in the street, jittered wildly, oscillating between the two states.

  “Sorry, sir and my lady. I mean my lady and sirs, wasn’t expecting this today.” The technician wiped sweat from his brow.

  Cosima rolled her eyes at the man.

  “You’re trying to integrate multiple time captures from the wrong angle,” she said. “Time sync your points of view with the gamma-filter subroutines.”

  The technician looked at her like she’d just grown a second head.

  “Do you even have the interpolation lattice set up?” She craned her neck over the workstation. “No, you don’t. Move!” She pushed the technician away gently and took his place. Her hands flew over the panel, and a holo picture of Richthofen Avenue sharpened into view. The holograms were slightly opaque, the hexagon lattice just visible through the images.

  Cosima picked up a small control slate and walked into the middle of the room.

  “My lady, I didn’t know y
ou were a holo engineer,” Stolzoff said.

  “We used 4-D to plan our mining operations,” she said. “Asteroids and comets full of Stahlium are difficult work environments. Have you ever done a manual extraction on a comet less than an AU from the sun? CO2 geysers bursting around you and footing the consistency of kitty litter? No? I did when I was eleven, planned the whole operation by myself.” Cosima spoke into the slate. “Show me all capture points of this location.”

  White globes appeared around the room, most from handheld smartphones level with the crowd. Globes covered cameras perched over intersections with Richthofen Avenue, store entrances, and the corners of buildings three or four stories high.

  Cosima pointed the slate at a glove along a wall and clicked a button. The holograms shifted to the point of view of the elevated camera, and Cosima could see the bombing location as if she were a bird perched on the wall.

  She tapped a button, and the crowd came to life. Their distant cheers became part of the simulation. Cosima muted the sound and watched as a car drove into view and vanished into the edge of the holograms.

  “That was Prince Francis,” she said. “Here I come.”

  A second car drove into the hologram. The fence to the right of the car broke free, and onlookers poured onto the street. The Guard on her car ran forward to scoop up a child, and her car swerved around them. A moment later the road exploded beneath the car and sent it flying. Cosima froze the program, her car stuck in midair.

  “My lady, I’ve been through this many times during the investigation. What are you looking for?” Stolzoff asked.

  “Something’s been bugging me,” she said. She tapped the slate, and the hologram shifted to the seat of the explosion. A column of fire and shattered asphalt punched her car like an uppercut.

  She rewound the video, the road reknit itself, and her car returned to it with nary a dent in it. The projection reversed time until a few seconds before the crowd broke through the fence.

  “Tell me, Colonel, do you believe in coincidence?” she asked.

  “Never, my lady.”

  Cosima walked along the fence, her eyes lingering on the joints between each segment.

  She knelt next to where the fence broke and pointed to the joint. “Give me a true image on this part. Max pixel density.”

  She had to look at the technician before he sprang into action.

  The hologram of the hinge grew denser, and details down to fingerprints and oil smudges appeared. Cosima held the slate over the hinge and zoomed in on the hologram.

  “Remi, come here and tell me I’m not crazy,” she said.

  Remi complied and looked at the close-up view of the hinge. A tiny red string ran down the side of it.

  “Burn cord,” he said.

  Stolzoff marched over and snatched the slate away from Remi.

  “That’s what I thought. We use burn cord for precision cuts into certain metals,” Cosima said. “Not an accident—it’s right where the crowd broke through the gate, isn’t it?” She took the slate back from Stolzoff.

  The hologram advanced second by second, Cosima controlling the pace from the slate. The hinge on the gate broke apart, but the crowd didn’t break through right away. Another second, and the faces of those at the edge of the fence line shifted to surprise. Another second, and the crowd surged forward in panic and fear.

  “They’re being pushed,” Remi said. He walked through the hologram and found a gap in the crowd. A man, two hands against a pole held parallel to the ground, shoved it into the backs of at least a dozen onlookers.

  “This can’t be right,” Cosima said. “No one is strong enough to do that.” She advanced the recording another second, and the pole collapsed in half. Another second and the pole had telescoped into the size of a can in the man’s hand as he turned away from the crowd. Several of the people he’d shoved were off their feet from the force of the push.

  “There are augmented humans that strong. Full bio replacements are just as capable as dock-lifter androids,” Stolzoff said.

  “Was Sturm Hedelson augmented? The one you pinned this attack on?” Cosima asked.

  “No, one hundred percent true body,” Stolzoff said.

  “Now, watch this.” She jumped the recording ahead to after the explosion and watched dispassionately as her image crawled from the wreckage, assisted by the Guard. Her image pointed to a roof, and the Guard’s gauntlet shield snapped to life. She stopped the recording.

  “Forty-three seconds between when that augment shoved the crowd into the road—to get my car to swerve over the bomb—and the first shot on me from the roof,” Cosima said.

  “There’s no way the augment got to the roof in that time,” Remi said.

  “There’s more than one assassin,” Stolzoff said. “Damn it, how could I be so blind?”

  Cosima watched as the guard’s shield took several hits from the metal bolts, saw him get between her and the assassin’s line of fire and seize up in pain as a bolt shattered his shield and struck him.

  “I didn’t…” Cosima stepped closer to her image, her fingers passing through the guard as he pulled her projection up and carried her away. “I didn’t know he’d been hit that badly. All that commotion and I never thought of him. Is he OK?”

  “Fine, my lady,” Remi said.

  “Who is he? I should pass on my thanks at the very least.”

  “It was nothing,” Remi said.

  Cosima’s jaw went slack. “That was you!”

  Remi nodded.

  She tried to speak, but words caught in her throat.

  The door to the chamber opened and Carter walked in, her eyes locked on Cosima. The technician stepped between Carter and the holo environment.

  “Thorgill, you can’t walk out there without—” Two bullets burst through his back, and Carter shoved his collapsing body aside.

  “Down!” Stolzoff tackled Cosima, his gauntlet shield active between her and Carter.

  Carter aimed her service pulser at Cosima and fired, rapid-fire shots faster than should have been possible for anyone.

  Stolzoff’s shield buckled as bullets pounded an area no bigger than a thumbnail.

  Remi’s blade lashed out and sliced through Carter’s hand. The pulser and most of her fingers fell to the ground, without a drop of blood with them.

  Carter, devoid of emotion, looked at Remi. She snatched her hilt from her hip and thrust the blade at Remi as it extended. Remi parried the strike and cut a quick riposte across her forearm. His strike cut through her sleeve and bit into her arm. If she felt any pain, her face and voice didn’t tell.

  The stump of her firing hand hooked around, as fast as a cobra’s strike and aimed at Remi’s throat. His shield deflected the blow and sent it into the technician’s workstation. The impact broke it to pieces, and the holograms flashed and blinked out of existence.

  Carter grabbed a fragment and hurled it at Remi. It hit his shield hard enough to send him reeling backward. Carter dropped her sword and picked up her pulser with her good hand.

  A pulser round fired and hit her in the eye, snapping her head back. Stolzoff, his pulser barrel poking from the edge of the shield, fired again, hitting Carter in the chest. Carter took a step back, then her head snapped forward. One eye was a torn mess, wires and circuits exposed in her ruined socket. She bent into a sprinter’s crouch.

  A whistle sang through the air. Remi’s sword flew like a spear and embedded in Carter’s side. The cyborg jerked away from the impact and tried to pull the blade free from her body. Remi picked up the cyborg’s discarded blade and swung with both hands. The sword severed the cyborg’s head from her body.

  The head fell to the ground with a thump. Her one good eye looked around in confusion. The body righted itself and clumsily aimed its pulser at Cosima.

  Remi jammed the blade into Carter’s skull. The eye twitched and went slack. Her body collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “Cosima, are you OK?” Remi as
ked. He dropped the sword embedded in the severed head and grabbed the hilt of the blade still in Carter’s body. He grunted with effort and slowly pulled it out.

  “I’m fine, fine.” She pushed Stolzoff away and looked at Carter’s head, dumbfounded. “What is that?”

  “Cyberhuman,” Remi said. “Nothing but a brain embedded in an android body.”

  A hissing sound filled the room. Steam rose from Carter’s exposed flesh, and an acrid stench came with it.

  Stolzoff slapped a hand over Cosima’s mouth and nose and carried her from the chamber with no grace or comfort. His iron grip kept her from breathing, and she squirmed as her lungs burned. He didn’t’ stop until they were outside the garages adjacent to the King’s Guard headquarters. Stolzoff released his grip, and she sucked in air. Remi fell against the wall behind them, fighting to breathe.

  “Sorry, my lady.” He sank against the wall, hacking. “Poison…kill switch.”

  Remi raised his gauntlet and struggled to find enough air to speak.

  “No.” Stolzoff swatted Remi’s arm down. “Not yet. I’m declaring an omega protocol until I know we don’t have another threat in our ranks. Get her out of here. I’ll handle this. Find the other assassin.” His breathing eased.

  “Where?” Remi asked, gasping.

  “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell anyone until you get there. Take an air car, I’ll set the city’s shield for your exit.”

  “What is going on here?” Cosima asked.

  Remi grabbed her by the hand and pulled her away from Stolzoff. “We have to…get out of the city. If an assassin can infiltrate the Guard, we can’t trust anyone now,” he said, his words coming easier

  “Where are we going?”

  Remi opened the door to the palace’s garage. Two lines of cars, air and ground, sat in their individual garages. A robot gently waved a feather duster over a cobalt-blue ground car done up in a classic design from almost four hundred years ago.

  “I’ll figure that out later. Come on.”