by C. J. Ryan
Yet this morning, even Petra had sent her flying. Of course, after last night at the Club Twelve Twenty-Nine, Gloria was short on sleep and hungover on wine, brandy, jigli, Orgastria-29, and a nightlong explosion of sex. She figured she was operating at no better than about 70 percent efficiency. Still, Petra had honestly bested her, and that had never happened before.
“You’re getting good at this, kiddo,” Gloria said. Actually, Petra was still pretty awful at it, and Gloria doubted that she would ever become truly skilled. But mastery of just a few moves, and the element of surprise, might save her in the future from what had happened to her on Sylvania.
Sylvania had changed their relationship as much as Mynjhino. Before Mynjhino, Petra had simply been her cute little assistant—flighty, smart-mouthed, and devoted. They had become best friends after Mynjhino, but Sylvania had somehow altered the balance between them. Petra, who was two years older than Gloria, no longer seemed like a little sister; on Sylvania, Petra had even asserted herself once and told Gloria to stop behaving like a self-pitying jerk. There was now a growing equality in their relationship that belied their relative positions in the Dexta hierarchy.
Gloria wearily assumed a crouch and spread her arms. “More?”
Petra shook her head. “That was one to quit on,” she said. “Anyway, it’ll give you something to think about the next few weeks while I’m away on New Cambridge.”
“And give you time to gloat. Enjoy it while you can.” Gloria picked up a towel and mopped away some of the sweat.
Petra picked up her own towel. “I’m going to practice on Pug,” she said as she walked toward the door.
“Does he know that?” Gloria asked.
“Not yet,” Petra cackled. “Hit the showers?”
Gloria shook her head. “I’ve got the room for another twenty minutes,” she said. “And after the way you just humiliated me, I think I’m going to stay here a while and work on a few things. And maybe sweat off some recent excesses.”
“Why are your excesses always so much more excessive than my excesses?” Petra wondered.
“Probably because you’re smarter than I am. Go get your shower…before I decide to bounce you off the ceiling.”
“Sore loser,” Petra called over her shoulder as she left the room.
Gloria concentrated on some stretching exercises and leg raises, trying to ease some of the tightness she felt in her muscles. Twenty-nine tended to make the muscles spasm, and the day after a session could sometimes feel like the day after a triathlon. She had begun doing sit-ups when the door opened and a very large man entered the gym. He was at least a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Gloria, with short, spiky blond hair and a thick neck. He removed the warm-ups he was wearing, leaving him in nothing but a breechclout and his rippling muscles.
Gloria got to her feet and said, “Excuse me, but I have the room for another fifteen minutes.”
“Is that so?” the man asked. “Well, I think you’re wrong. In fact, I know you are. This room is mine.”
“If you’ll just check the—”
“I don’t have to check anything. The room is mine.”
Gloria was becoming annoyed; more than that, a tickle of fear and suspicion began to play at the edges of her mind.
“You’re Gloria VanDeen,” the man said. “A Ten.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Erik Manko,” he said. “Also a Ten.”
“Level doesn’t matter. I signed up for this gym, and—”
“Level matters a great deal,” Manko contradicted. “In fact, in this case, it’s the only thing that matters. As you know, Dexta has a time-honored method of resolving disputes between those of equal level.”
“What?” Gloria was aghast. “You can’t be serious!”
“I’m perfectly serious,” Manko said. “Let me show you how serious I am.” With that, Manko calmly stepped toward her, balled his fist, and swung at her. Gloria saw it coming and just managed to duck, so that instead of breaking her jaw, his fist merely glanced off the side of her skull, stunning her and sending her spinning to the padded floor.
Gloria was dazed for a moment, but realized that she was in grave danger. As a coequal Ten, Manko could all but kill her if he wanted. The Dexta Code forbade superiors from striking their inferiors, or subordinates striking their superiors, but it allowed those of equal level to work out their differences by physical force, if necessary. It was a fairly common occurrence at the lower levels, usually among Fifteens—just another aspect of the brutal Dexta routine. Gloria had been involved in such conflicts twice before. Once, as a Fifteen, another Fifteen had thought that he would teach her a lesson, and was, instead, taught a quick and painful Qatsima lesson by Gloria; then, on Mynjhino, she had literally kicked the ass of a traitorous fellow Thirteen. But a fight between Tens? Over whose gym it was? Gloria couldn’t quite believe it, but had no time to ponder the meaning of it all. Manko was moving toward her, so Gloria instinctively assumed the Qatsima posture known as the Wounded Bird. Manko was in for a surprise…
Except that it was Gloria who was surprised. Manko countered with a Dancing Cobra that not only neutralized Gloria’s Wounded Bird, but used it against her to get a grip on both of her ankles. He knows Qatsima, Gloria thought as Manko whirled her around and threw her against one of the padded walls. She slammed into it with her back and shoulders, then sank to the floor.
Before she could recover her breath, Manko was on her again. She tried to claw at his eyes and knee his groin, but he was too fast and too big and simply overpowered her. Qatsima moves could defeat sheer size sometimes, but they had little hope of prevailing against both size and Qatsima. Manko punched her hard in the belly, doubling her over, then picked her up and threw her against another wall. Then did it again.
Gloria began to lose track of what was happening. Somehow, she found herself stretched out across his knee, and he spanked her with the flat of his hand, the impact so hard that it sounded like the crack of a whip. Then he picked her up, whirled her around again, and threw her against another wall.
As she lay crumpled against the wall, her legs splayed, Manko approached her again, smiling slightly. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to rape you. That would be against the Code, wouldn’t it?” Instead, he simply gave her a powerful, barefooted kick in her groin. And another.
“Why?” Gloria gasped. “Why are you doing this?”
Manko leaned over her and smiled in her face. “Administrator DuBray will be contacting you in a few days,” he said, “after you’ve had a chance to heal. Don’t disappoint him, Gloria. I’d hate to have to do this again.”
He straightened up and started to turn to go, but stopped and looked back down at her. “No, that’s not true,” he said. “I’d enjoy doing it again.” Then he left.
Gloria tried to get to her feet, but couldn’t. The pain overwhelmed her, and she sank back to the floor and passed out. The person who had signed up for the gymnasium next found her there ten minutes later, bleeding and unconscious.
“NORMAN? IT’S GLORIA. I NEED TO SEE YOU.” Gloria stood in the access booth at the Dexta VIP Transit and waited for Norman Mingus to respond to her audio signal. A few moments later, an overhead light turned green, and Gloria stepped through the Transit ring.
She stepped out into Idaho. The guard at the Transit booth nodded to her, quickly ran a detector over her body, then nodded again. “Welcome, Ms. VanDeen,” he said. “Just go into the house and up to the third-floor observation deck. I believe you’ll find Secretary Mingus there.”
Gloria thanked him, then walked along the heated sidewalk, across a broad courtyard hip deep in snow, to the front porch of the home of Norman Mingus. Snow might have been scarce in New York these many centuries, but there was still plenty of it in the northern Rockies. The house looked like it might have been built by a nineteenth-century robber baron, with its gables and cornices, gingerbread and Victorian flourishes. In fact, Gloria knew, Mingus
had built it barely ten years ago. With access via personal Transit—something available only to the very rich or very powerful—there weren’t even any roads connecting the house with the rest of the world; it was completely isolated, two miles above sea level and twenty miles from the nearest town. As she stepped onto the porch, Gloria paused and looked around Mingus’s aerie, seeing the snow-covered mountains and valleys as they must have appeared to the Crow and Blackfeet whose land this had been fifteen centuries ago.
An aide met Gloria inside the front door and led her up two flights of stairs to the third floor. He pointed toward the observation deck and departed. Gloria opened the outer door and stepped out onto an open-air platform with a sweeping view of the mountains marching off to the south. Mass-repulsion units preserved a bubble of warm air over the deck, but Norman Mingus sat in a comfortable-looking chair under a layer or two of thick blankets. He looked up at Gloria’s arrival but didn’t attempt to rise.
“Gloria,” he said, “I’m sorry I haven’t been available at the office the last few days. My doctors decided I needed a new pancreas, so they took one out of cold storage and plugged it in. I should be fine in a couple of—Spirit! What the hell happened to you?”
Gloria smiled lamely. “I had a little…confrontation…a couple of days ago,” she said. “But it’s nothing to worry about. I’ll be fine.” The doctors at Dexta had administered Quik-Knit to her three broken ribs and nanomeds that were already repairing her bruises and lacerations, cell by cell. In two or three days, no one would be able to tell that she had recently been beaten and bloodied. In the meantime, her entire body ached.
Mingus started to rise, but Gloria gestured him back down. “No, don’t get up. In fact, I think I’ll pull up a chair and join you. Looks pretty comfy.” Gloria, in tight jeans and a tighter cashmere turtleneck, moved another chair next to Mingus’s and sat down, sighing a little at the still-sharp pain in her ribs as she moved.
“Well?” Mingus asked, arching his eyebrows. Norman Mingus, at 131 years of age, had a face that was pink and almost unlined, with sharply etched aristocratic features and an unruly shock of thinning white hair. Gloria always thought he looked like a retired schoolteacher, or maybe a country parson. But there was nothing mild or passive in his blue-gray eyes; they accurately reflected forty years of experience in running a galactic empire.
Gloria scrunched around in the chair, trying to find a comfortable and pain-free position. “I ran into another Ten named Erik Manko,” she said. “He pounded on me for a while.”
Mingus nodded and sighed heavily. “So,” he said, “you’ve finally run afoul of Cornell DuBray. I’ve been expecting it, but it honestly surprises me that he would resort to such means. Manko is his personal Hammer, you know.”
“I didn’t think there were any Hammers left in Dexta,” Gloria said. “I mean, I’ve heard about them, but I thought they were…”
“History?” Mingus shook his head. “Not quite, although I did try. That was one of the reforms I introduced, years ago. Hammers used to be quite common around Dexta. Some Sector and Quadrant Administrators damn near had their own private armies. I tried to put an end to all that, but there are still a few individuals like Manko around. If you check his record, though, I’ll wager you’ll find that he was either promoted or demoted to a Ten the day before you encountered him.”
“I did check,” said Gloria. “You’re right, he was demoted from a Nine. It seems he’s been bouncing back and forth between Eight and Twelve for the last ten years.”
“As required by DuBray. Tell me, what did you do to set all of this in motion?”
“I went to see DuBray about some routine business. Nothing more.”
“That would be enough. I suppose I should have warned you. Cornell was steadfastly and vociferously opposed to the creation of OSI. Like a lot of the older hands around Dexta, he didn’t see the need for it and resented the potential intrusion into his domain. But it surprises me that he would unleash Manko on you.”
“Well,” said Gloria, “there was a little more to it than that. DuBray insisted on having sex with me, then and there. Norman, he treated me like a Fifteen!”
“I see,” said Mingus. “And of course, you resented that.”
“Damn right, I did! I don’t have to put up with that shit anymore. I’m a Ten now—”
“And he’s a Four.”
Gloria turned in her chair to look at Mingus. “That’s what he said. Are you telling me that it’s okay? That he can get away with that?”
“Of course he can get away with that. Gloria, the man is a Four and has held his present position for over forty years! You’ve been a Ten for what, about a year?”
“About that,” Gloria said sullenly. She didn’t like the turn this conversation was taking.
“Gloria,” Mingus said, a trace of impatience in his voice, “I bumped you from a Thirteen to a Ten. In case you didn’t realize it, that was all but unprecedented in the history of Dexta. And I gave you powers and responsibilities at OSI that were far beyond those normally entrusted to a Ten. I suppose it’s natural that all of that should have gone to your head. But let me remind you that as a Ten, you are just one of some six thousand Tens within Dexta. You are a midlevel bureaucrat, nothing more.”
“Norman,” Gloria said, “how many Tens come visit you here at your home?”
Mingus stared at her for a long moment, then smiled. “All right, then,” he conceded, “perhaps you are something more than a mere Ten. In my eyes, at least—but not in DuBray’s. And that’s all that is truly relevant here. I’m sorry about what happened to you, Gloria. I regret it more than I can say, and I intend to have words about it with DuBray. Nevertheless, you cannot come running to me every time one of your superiors gives you a hard time. You will have to find your own way of coping with the Cornell DuBrays of this organization. I can’t and won’t intervene on your behalf.”
Gloria felt appropriately abashed. “I understand, Norman,” she said. “And I didn’t really come here just to complain about the way DuBray treated me. There’s something else. You know, don’t you, that someone took a shot at me on Cartago?”
“Yes, I did hear about that. Very disturbing. Have there been developments I should know about?”
“I think so,” Gloria said. “In fact, I need to ask you some questions, Norman. Questions that go back more than fifty years, to when you were the Quadrant 4 Administrator.”
“Oh?”
“The weapon that was used in the attack on me on Cartago was originally part of a shipment of arms that was sent to Savoy in September of 3163, just before the Ch’gnth attack.”
Mingus suddenly leaned back in his chair and seemed to focus his gaze on a distant mountaintop. He was silent for several moments, then breathed, “Savoy.”
“And there’s more. Another weapon from that same shipment was involved in one of the terrorist attacks in Quadrant 4 last week. It would seem that PAIN has somehow gotten its hands on weapons that were supposedly destroyed fifty-five years ago.”
Mingus turned to look into her eyes. Then he looked once more at the distant snow-covered peaks and seemed lost in private thoughts or, perhaps, memories.
“Lewis and Clark returned from the Pacific through that pass,” Mingus said at last, pointing to a notch in the mountains some thirty miles to the south. “Or, at any rate, Lewis did. They had split up by that point; then they joined up again down on the Missouri.”
“Fascinating,” said Gloria.
“I always wanted to follow the old Lewis and Clark Trail,” Mingus said. “Never did, of course, and it’s too late now. I’m too old, and most of it’s gone, anyway. One more regret in a life that’s full of them.”
Mingus closed his eyes for a moment and sighed heavily. “You can’t imagine what it was like, Gloria,” he said. “Wartime, I mean. It was a truly desperate time. The Ch’gnth would have exterminated us if they could. In the end, we damn near exterminated them. But it didn’t have to turn o
ut that way. It could just as easily have gone against us. Believe me, I know—most of that damned war was fought in my Quadrant.”
“I know. You’re in all the history books. You’d have been remembered, Norman, even if you had never become Dexta Secretary.”
“History books!” Mingus snorted. He took a sip of tea. “Let me tell you something, Gloria. If you live long enough to read about yourself in a history book, you’ll never again trust anything you read in any history book. Alexander, Washington, Napoleon, Churchill, Hazar—nowadays, I’m not even sure any of ’em really existed. Maybe it was all lies.”
“Did the history books lie about you?” Gloria asked him.
Mingus gave a short, bitter laugh. “Well, I’ll just say that lies were told, and let it go at that.”
He took another sip of tea and turned to look at Gloria. “I’m very concerned about this, Gloria. I’d always tended to dismiss PAIN as inconsequential idiots. Raving anarchist ideologues, the kind of people who used to throw bombs into the Tsar’s carriage. But these recent attacks are clearly well coordinated, and now it would seem that you were one of their targets.”
“A symbolic one, at best.” Gloria shrugged.
“Those are usually the most important ones,” Mingus pointed out. “You, my dear, are perhaps the most visible symbol of Dexta and the Empire these days. In the warped view of the anarchists, killing you would represent a considerable triumph. I am going to order additional security for you, and you will accept it without complaint. Is that clear?”