War Games

by K S Augustin

  It didn’t matter. The Fusion were appreciative but unmoving. In a fit of wrath, Laisen had even demanded a meeting with the Strategy Panel. They gazed at her with compassionate but detached expressions as she paced and ranted before them. They regretted that somebody she cared about got killed, but that was how wars went. And, on a smaller version of the scale the Fusion used to quantify the effectiveness of its campaigns, wasn’t Rumis’s death balanced by Koul’s? Yes, Rumis Swonessy’s life was cut prematurely short, but could she imagine what life would be like for the Menon, or any other unfortunate species, if Koul Grakal-Ski had survived?

  Their sophistry was maddening, but Laisen had three years’ experience in hostile isolation. She used the self-discipline she had honed during that time to fiercely clamp down any further outbursts of righteous anger. Not only wouldn’t it do any good, but the last thing she wanted or needed was a diagnosis as a psychotic. The kindness exhibited by the Fusion under such circumstances didn’t bear thinking about.

  The only scrap of satisfaction she could salvage was on the topic of Lith. Even the Strategy Panel had been discomfited when she bought that up. The Fusion had known about the Free-Perlim Council and had kept careful tabs on it but, while they knew Nils had broken away from the organisation, his entire plot to have Cheloi Sie killed completely bypassed them. They didn’t like to admit that they had overlooked something, especially something that had the potential to upend their carefully laid plans, and Laisen smiled when she thought of how much agitation that little conspiracy must still be causing them.

  Even with her mind made up and Copan finally acquiescent, it still took six months to fully extricate herself from the clutches of the intelligence service. She hadn’t known how much baggage she had accumulated until it was time to shed it all.

  Her very first mission for the Fusion had been a simple burglary on one of the Nedron worlds. From that simple task to the last psychological disaster on Menon IV, Laisen had to plough through every record to verify that everything was as complete as she could remember it. Everything she had done as an agent was kept in an extensive knowledge base for use as reference and training material. The Fusion also appreciated post-factum analyses of her past missions and, if she was now bereft of ideology or optimism, the one thing Laisen did not run low of was a supply of opinion. She knew the Fusion took her work seriously, that every word she appended would be read, analysed and commented on by others, and that made her think as comprehensively and dispassionately as possible as she trawled through the records.

  Even though she was still angry with how it had turned out, the Fusion decision about the desert planet had been the right one. She bore that in mind as she relayed her experiences and conjectures.

  Over the years the Fusion had shortened her, lengthened her, bleached and darkened her skin. In a couple of missions, they had even changed her sex. Her gender had been the only obstacle to an otherwise excellent match for two deployments and the Fusion let little stand in their way.

  Looking back on those memorable assignments in the soft quiet expanse of the main intelligence library was soothing, and it was difficult for Laisen to keep her amusement in check. It had been an interesting experience being male. The change in hormonal balance altered the very way she looked at the galaxy. There was none of the almost-obsessive introspection that had been so important on Menon IV.

  In contrast, her missions as males had been delightfully and ruthlessly direct. She’d even had sex as a male, pursuing attractive females with verve and no small amount of flattery, honed on what previously had best worked for her. Plunging fingers into a willing orifice was one thing, but plunging an erect and sensitive penis, once she remembered it was there, was something else. She remembered the sensation, the ripples of orgasm joined by the novel sensation of spurting alien ejaculate into slick and eager cunts. It had been an interesting set of experiments. And a pair of memorable missions.

  It was two seasons on, a cool and sunny spring on Tatrex, when she finally finished. She had grown strangely reluctant near the end and had to force herself to keep up the pace of work.

  “Where will you go?” Copan asked during one of their last face-to-face sessions. The worry was still evident on his face.

  Laisen knew he was still unconvinced of her complete rehabilitation.

  “Floks,” she said.

  Near the end of their long relationship, she had become as uncommunicative as possible. She saw it as protecting her mental privacy. She knew he saw it as a hurdle to healing. Laisen felt there was no common ground without her compromising her very thoughts.

  “Your family will be happy to see you.”

  Yes, she owed her family a lot. Perhaps even a decade of her life spent roaming all over the galaxy, just so she could avoid confronting the memories of Eys.

  “Yes.”

  “You never got around to cleaning out your house, did you?”

  Laisen looked at him and frowned, eliciting a small deprecating smile.

  “Did you think we didn’t know? The flurry of missions we sent you on after Eys’ death was as much for you as it was for us, Laisen. It was something we never discussed.”

  So much for thinking she had kept her heart-rending passion for Eys Ttulon secret while she was in Drel’s dungeon. It would have already been old news to the Copan construct. The Fusion had its eyes and ears everywhere.

  She knew his last remark was one of Copan’s opening gambits. Even near the end, he was determined to delve into her psyche one more time. She couldn’t help the smile that curved her lips.

  “And now we have others,” she replied, and her voice and expression were pure Cheloi Sie. Cool, dark and impenetrable.

  He had to be content with that.

  She spent the rest of the day, and the next one, tying up the administrative details. Almost the last thing she did was transfer possession rights of her small apartment on Tatrex to the planet’s governing body for reassignment to future residents. The unit held nothing of value, although she hoped the new owners would like her taste in furniture. Or maybe, she looked around at the muted colours and slanted angularities, it would be too severe for them. She had instructed the apartment to switch off the heating and it was already starting to get cold.

  She had taken possession of the apartment after Eys, when she had run away from Floks and needed another bolt-hole in which to hide. The tidy space was virgin territory, unsullied by a presence other than her own. After Eys, she had let nobody enter her private domain. Even the women who wanted to get to know her more intimately were shepherded to their own residences or private hotels and Laisen made sure she always left before the sun rose the next morning.

  The string of casual affairs and physical couplings had lasted for years. Until Lith came along.

  Copan had told her they were tracking Lith. Laisen wanted to follow up on that statement, use Copan’s Fusion contacts to find out more about her lover, but her liaison was inexplicably tight-lipped on the subject. In order to gain knowledge from him, she had to give him some. Offer more insight into what she was thinking and feeling. Laisen wasn’t willing to go that far. She could have tracked Lith down from the depths of the intelligence library but she knew that her queries could be tracked, and she was even less comfortable laying out her thoughts for some nameless analyst to ponder.

  In any case, what could she possibly tell the woman she had loved then sent away? How could she explain herself or what she did? There was still a gaping hole inside her when she thought of the beautiful honey-blonde but, like Eys, she knew the pain would eventually fade. Wouldn’t it? Lith was ultimately better off with someone more balanced and complete. Wasn’t she?

  Maybe if she could find something else to think about. What she needed was some other career, equally exciting and stimulating, but not as dangerous. That would enable her to put those short chaotic months of her life to one side, wrapping it in forgetfulness and locking it in a mental cupboard. She would leave Lith in her past,
hope that the pain in her heart subsided, and start a new life.

  So she tied up her affairs on Tatrex and paid one last visit to the administrative centre. And it was there that her world shattered again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was her last visit to Tatrex as a Fusion operative. She hoped. The long, low-slung administration building of the intelligence services gleamed silver and white in the slanting morning sun. Its curves caught the bright chill rays of sunlight, throwing them onto the wide pavements that radiated from the building like broad metallic beams.

  The morning was still young, well before the workday formally started, but the Fusion was galactic and there were always some staff on duty. By visiting early, Laisen hoped to avoid running into anybody she knew. She had made all the explanations she was prepared to and wasn’t willing to indulge in any further questioning, no matter how friendly it might be.

  Copan had pleaded and cajoled her to remain with the service, but his entreaties fell on deaf ears. Eventually, he told her that, by leaving, she was running away from the situation. He was right. Like a disillusioned lover, she was finally fleeing the Fusion’s covert service, breaking off a long and intimate relationship that had suddenly turned tragically bitter. But she was also running towards something. For almost a decade, she had harboured a nagging incompleteness regarding Eys and the place they had built on Floks Nine. Finally, she was going to come to grips with an earlier phase of her life and actively search for some peace.

  Being a natural planet, the weather on Tatrex was less regulated than on an artificial construct such as Floks. The morning was chillier than she’d been expecting. Laisen burrowed her hands into the pockets of her jacket as she headed across the massive quadrangle, to the hidden side entrance only employees knew about. The air was bracing and made her feel alive again, even if the tips of her fingers were feeling a bit numb.

  There was only one more task left on her list. In fact, her visit was spurious, but she needed definitive confirmation that the next day’s passage had been booked for the semi-dyson and not for one of her usual off-mission destinations. After more than ten years of not wanting to be anywhere near it, Laisen was now adamant that Floks was the place she had to be.

  She visited the transport office, checked the details and confirmed the departure for Floks Nine. Mollified, she was on her way out, walking back along the silvery path ,when she saw him. It was another early-riser heading along the wide avenue between buildings. He was tall and lean and the way he walked…

  …the way he walked….

  He turned, perhaps sensing another’s gaze on him, and theirs met. Met and held. His walk slowed to a crawl but he continued moving. As did she. That he was there, calm and alone, sauntering easily across the paved expanse, told her he had done this before. Like her, he was an agent of the Fusion.

  She frowned as her gaze skimmed his regular and attractive features.

  If she chopped some length from his legs….

  Changed the colour of his skin….

  Thickened his lips….

  Twisted his features….

  Drel.

  Her feet faltered to a stop as she stared at him openly, her entire body shivering suddenly in the watery sun. After a brief sardonic salute, he broke the connection and continued on his way, letting her dark gaze bore into his back.

  She thought only one person was ever dropped into a covert mission. She thought she was the lynchpin of the Fusion’s Menon campaign. She thought she was critical to how the events unfolded on that dusty, scrubby planet. That was how she managed to rationalise Rumis’s death.

  She was wrong.

  The bastards had managed to outwit her again.

  Her first instinct was to rush after the familiar stranger, the Fusion/Drel spy. He had recognised her too, the quick acknowledgement before he continued on his way was proof of that. She wanted to stop him, spin him around, probe his features, shake him, yell at him, and convince herself of what she already knew.

  But to what end? Like her, he was a pawn in a much bigger game. What did she expect he would say? With the Fusion’s longevity treatments, it was difficult to tell, but he looked to be the same age as her. He was probably still in love with the Fusion and the job he’d been given to do. Would he even understand what she would incoherently try to explain? Or would he dismiss her as a washed-out intelligence has-been?

  Laisen thought she knew the answer to the last question.

  All right then. If not Fusion/Drel then maybe Copan. Did he know about this? He must have. Laisen was disoriented and angry enough to burst in on him, regardless of whether he was in consultation with another agent or not. But, as the silver rising sun beat down on her, she knew it would be like exposing her belly to a predator.

  With dull eyes, she headed back into the centre of the city and stopped at the first bar she came across, briskly ordering a drink while she thought through her experiences on Menon. Of course. That answered the only outstanding question. Why hadn’t Drel denounced Lith as a Fusion spy after their escape from his camp? Because, dear Laisen, he was Fusion as well and probably thought he was protecting a colleague. Game, set and fucking match.

  She nursed a succession of drinks and thought she looked morose and bitter enough to be left alone but that wasn’t the case. A bright and brash young tourist from one of the belter communities bought her a drink. Laisen knew she had been watching her as she downed the Plasma Breaks, one after the other like they were beakers of distilled water. When she was finished, they went back to her hotel room for a quick fuck.

  It was so unlike her lovemaking with Lith. There was no threat of discovery here, just a cramped and strangely-shaped room, with ropes and ledges jutting out from every angled wall. It looked eerie and incomprehensible until her young seducer switched off the gravity control and they twirled in weightlessness, bumping into the soft upholstery that covered every surface.

  Her lover—she never did ask for her name—was slim, androgynous and eager to please. With cheerful tolerance, she unclothed Laisen then herself, secreting their garments in a concealed compartment beneath one ledge, then floated toward her, rich and lithe with lust.

  They grappled and she was ruthless, stabbing with tongue and fingers. She invaded the other’s warmth, licking saltiness and sourness with no thought beyond her own needs. She bit at flesh, suckled and tongued as if possessed, her energy not abating until the young woman screamed out her climax, convulsing for several minutes, and pushed her away.

  “I’ve never had it like that before,” the beautiful svelte tourist panted, after she got her breath back. “Up till now, I’ve only had sex with men. Do you live in the city? Do you want to have dinner together?”

  Laisen smiled and kissed her tenderly on the cheek. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  She waited until her contented lover drifted into unconsciousness, then hunted for her clothes. After half an hour of fiddling with the controls, she gently landed the young naked woman on the floor, dressed and left.

  Almost two years later, the evenings still hurt.

  Laisen rested her forearms and elbows along the smooth bronze-coloured handrail, the heavy metal tube held in place by a pressor field, and looked down upon the darkening outline of Gaard’s Sub-Prime. It was a small city, patterned along the layout of some medieval town of a civilisation she had barely heard of. From where she stood, the design resembled a gigantic wheel. There was a large circular space in the middle, filled with restaurants and shops. Fanning outwards from there was an interspersing of official buildings and multi-level residence towers. Like spokes, wide boulevards ran from the perimeter to the centre of the city. The residents had elected to erect ancient replica lights—on tall physical poles no less—along the boulevards. At times like this, with the day dimming, the warm yellow lights looked ancient and welcoming against the fading sunlight.

  Eys had been particularly happy when she’d obtained permission to build their house within reas
onable distance of the city, known throughout Floks Nine as the oldest artisan hub in the semi-dyson. She had an eye for scouting out unusual and breathtaking locations, and this was no exception. Who else would have thought of approaching one of the local agricultural unions for building approval?

  A breeze caressed Laisen’s cheek, lifting the hair from her forehead and rattling through the surrounding fields of sevet grass. The long stalks drooped, heavy with ripe red-yellow grain, resembling ripples of fire as the wind blew through them.

  The house was built well above the fields of grain. It rested on poles so ethereal-looking that, from a distance, it looked like there were none. A casual observer would see a levitating timber box, surreal and angular, hovering above the swaying fields. Eys had actually considered using propulsive technologies to permanently float their home above the ground, but the union was adamant that it would interfere with their harvesting machines. The couple had to settle on the skinny columns that looked like insect legs and gave the machines something tangible to avoid.

  The debate currently consuming the semi-dyson was the perennial one of whether or not to have artificial starscapes projected onto the atmospheric shields during slices of night. Because people lived in a half-clear tube that encircled the sun and not on a revolving planet, they were constantly facing the light. Night and day were artificially created and maintained by Floks’s general administrative body. Several bands of night rippled along the massive, slowly-rotating, constructed ribbon, bringing a configurable circadian rhythm to the entire system. Night was the blocking of sunlight by the shields. Day was the unblocking. The semi-dyson was even large enough, and the created topography turbulent and varied enough, to sustain its own weather patterns. There were clouds, wind, rain, storms but there were no stars.

  One group preferred it that way. After all, it was part of the reality of living on such an artificial edifice. Another cited the psychological comfort of looking up into the night sky and seeing blinking dots of light. Laisen thought that if that was all people had to worry about—not even the gigantic countervailing forces that kept the giant tube in one piece, or the banks of endlessly working pressor fields that kept the bodies of water more or less stable while allowing people to go frolicking in them with little loss of life, but whether fucking lights should be pinned to the interior of the skyside half of the tube—then maybe the Fusion really was as soft as the Perlim accused it of being.