Now, waiting to board another ship that would again take her to make war on the humans, her hand, as if by its own accord, strayed to her belly. She thought of the life growing within her, and fervently prayed that it would be a female. A sterile female. The thought of bringing forth one of the misshapen males was unutterably vile, and she would not willingly see the torture of mating inflicted upon any fertile offspring. The child was now nothing more than a small but rapidly growing collection of cells, a tiny nub of tissue inside her womb. There would come a time, soon, when its spirit would awaken. It was then, long before even the healers could determine what the child’s gender was to be, that she would know if it was to be male or female. She knew the souls of the males formed part of the Bloodsong; but if the songs of the females formed an ever-churning river of emotion, the songs of the males were little more than tiny pebbles at the bottom of the river over which the water flowed. She would know the birth of a female’s spirit from its strength and clarity; from a male, she would sense little but its existence. Yet her apprehension about the nature of her child remained. In her darkest dreams she plunged a dagger into her belly, but to do so would have cast her from the grace and love of the Empress to spend eternity in the infinite Darkness.
She knew such thoughts were tantamount to heresy; thus they remained unspoken, especially to Tesh-Dar. She trusted the great priestess with far more than her life: Tesh-Dar had touched Li’ara-Zhurah’s spirit in a way that was rare among her people, a gift possessed by only a few of the great warrior priestesses. That was before Li’ara-Zhurah’s mating, during the battle for Keran. She would never willingly allow Tesh-Dar to so openly probe her spirit now. Tesh-Dar had the authority and the power to do so if she wished, but Li’ara-Zhurah hoped that the priestess’s respect for her would hold her curiosity at bay should she sense anything amiss.
Li’ara-Zhurah knew that her emotions were transparent to the peers, and particularly to Tesh-Dar, but none of her sisters could fully glean the focus of her fears. They believed her soul to still be grief-stricken over what had happened to her at Keran, and she was content to allow their misperceptions to continue. For herself, deep in her heart, she wished for death before the turn of the next great cycle when she would again have to mate. The war with the humans offered her a convenient solution: there would be many opportunities to die with honor for the glory of the Empress.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dmitri Andreevich Sikorsky sat in a small booth in one of the many nondescript cafés that were scattered about the city of Saint Petersburg, the capital of the planet that bore the same name. The founders had tried to recreate some of the ornate majesty of the original city in Russia on Earth, but had only succeeded in producing a tawdry imitation of Peter the Great’s vision. The only thing they had duplicated with uncompromising success was the tyranny and despotism that had characterized so much of the history of their ancestors’ motherland.
In times long past, in a nation on Earth that had once been known as the Soviet Union, Sikorsky would have been known as a dissident. He was a member of a quiet underground movement yearning for political change, but unable to openly express it without suffering severe reprisals. More active demonstrations of political discontent, such as armed rebellion, were simply impossible, as the government controlled all the weapons. Even street rallies were tantamount to suicide. The secret police rarely kicked down doors in the middle of the night anymore because they did not have to: most of the real “threats to the state” had long since been imprisoned, exiled to Riga, or executed. That did not keep them from periodically terrorizing the populace to remind them of the true power of the state, but Sikorsky and his underground companions were thankful for what few blessings came their way.
Unable to confront the power of the state in any other fashion, Sikorsky had done the only thing he could to fight back: he had become an agent for the Alliance Française. Sikorsky considered himself a patriot, but after he had experienced first hand the excesses of the government and the Party that controlled it, he had to do something, no matter the risk.
After the armistice ended the war and he was released from military service, he managed to get a job as a foreman of a construction firm (which, like all commercial ventures, was owned by the state). He was involved in the reconstruction of the Alliance Embassy, which had been burned to the ground when the war started, and had made a number of friends on the embassy staff. Over the years, he had been required to maintain and repair a number of the buildings on the compound, which gave him continued opportunities to maintain contact with them.
Years later, when the provisions of the armistice that ended the war expired and the Alliance and Terran inspection teams returned home, the true power behind his own government came out of hiding, and a new cycle of repression began. Sikorsky had looked the other way, trying to ignore the truth, until the secret police came for his son-in-law. Like many citizens of Saint Petersburg, the young couple could not afford their own place to live, so Sikorsky and his wife had taken them in until their fortunes improved. Sikorsky had never viewed this as a bad thing, as he cherished his daughter and loved having her around, and her husband was a good young man who treated her well and was respectful toward her parents.
Then, one night, the secret police came. Sikorsky had never thought it would happen to him. Why should it? He had always been loyal. He had fought in the war. He did his job and kept his mouth shut, and his family did the same. Or so he thought.
Roused from sleep when the apartment’s flimsy front door was kicked in, he tried to protest. He shut his mouth quickly when a cold-eyed man wordlessly shoved a gun in his face. Without any explanation, without even a single shout, a dozen members of the secret police swarmed into the apartment, beat his son-in-law unconscious, then dragged him out. Sikorsky’s daughter, Natalia, was taken out, too. She was not beaten, but was bound with handcuffs. She had looked at Sikorsky as they paraded her out, while he looked on in wide-eyed shock. Her expression had been calm, even proud. The look in her eyes told him that this had not come as a surprise, and that there was a reason the secret police were here. She and her husband had been members of the underground. Dissidents.
Sikorsky would never know what it was that she and her husband had done, for the government did not bother explaining its actions to the great unwashed of its citizenry. He never saw or heard from her or her husband again.
Two months later, the Alliance Embassy’s water supply was having problems, and Sikorsky was sent to direct repairs. Knowing that there would be secret police informants on his repair team, he managed to get a moment alone with an embassy military attaché whom he had met years before as a junior Alliance officer right after the armistice. After a very brief greeting, Sikorsky discreetly passed the man a small envelope when he shook his hand goodbye. On the small piece of paper the officer found inside the envelope was written Sikorsky’s contact information and the location of a munitions factory that his company had helped build that was illegal under the long-term provisions of the armistice. He had hoped that the Alliance would come and shut down the factory and hold the government accountable. It would not bring back his daughter, he knew, but it was something. For the first time since his military service, he felt like he was doing something.
Unfortunately, the French did nothing about the factory that he had risked his life to show them. The inspection teams had long since left the planet, and the Alliance was far more concerned about the state of their economy than an illegal munitions factory. Sikorsky had been devastated, wondering if he had risked his life for nothing.
Even though the Alliance government decided not to act, their intelligence services were very interested in Sikorsky. The information he had provided was the first evidence they had seen that Saint Petersburg was blatantly violating the long-term provisions of the armistice. After verifying the factory’s existence using other sources they already had on the planet, they decided to develop Sikorsky as an agent. As a spy.<
br />
That had been ten years ago. Ten years since Sikorsky’s daughter had disappeared, most likely raped and then murdered. Ten years of watching his wife go from being in a state of near-catatonic depression to becoming a fanatic member of the Party, Saint Petersburg’s ruling elite, in some manifestation of guilt-driven insanity that Sikorsky would never understand. Yet even that, in its own way, had served a purpose, for her rabid support for the Party had led to minor but significant promotions for him that had given him access to more people and information that the Alliance had found useful. His construction work put him in touch with many people who were. The latest was a scientist working on a special project to develop coal as a power source. Sikorsky had no idea why anyone off-world would care about such things as coal power plants, but the information provided by the scientist — one of the many informants Sikorsky had recruited over the years — had clearly gotten the attention of the Alliance.
The Confederation, he corrected himself with an inward smile. He was not sure he believed in the ridiculous tale of aliens attacking human space, but the formation of the Confederation was real, and it was an event that he welcomed. In the last few months, Earth had closed its embassy, consolidating its mission in a newly constructed wing of the Alliance Embassy, that was then officially redesignated as the Confederation Embassy to Saint Petersburg. Then the new ambassador of the Confederation Government, who was the former ambassador of the Alliance, presented his credentials to Chairman Korolev. From what Sikorsky’s wife had heard from her Party friends, Korolev had been livid about this new development,but had been powerless to do anything about it.
To Sikorsky, anything that the Party did not like was good for his people and his world.
The Confederation’s unexpected interest in these strange coal power plants was why he was sitting here in this café. Sikorsky was a frequent visitor here, often holding informal interviews for people looking for a job, and so his presence would not be unusual in the eyes of any secret police informants. He had received a coded message from his Confederation controller to meet someone here who needed the cover of a job in his company. All he had been told was that he was to meet a woman, and her name was Valentina Tutikova. He was to treat her as he would any candidate, reviewing her credentials and interviewing her as he normally would, hiding the cover aspect of their relationship in plain sight of the secret police.
His controller had never had him meet someone like this before, and it had made him nervous. His nervousness had turned to shock when his wife confided in him that one of her Party friends had told her that the daughter of a well-placed bureaucrat was looking for a job, and Sikorsky had been highly recommended. The girl’s name was Valentina Tutikova.
Fortunately, he had been making dinner, and when he spilled hot soup all over his pants in reaction to his wife’s revelation, she had thought his shouts of pain and annoyance were only the result of some clumsiness on his part. He had been stunned that the Confederation would go so far and risk so much to establish their agent’s credentials. It certainly impressed upon him the importance of the person he was to meet. He only hoped that the Confederation was not pulling the proverbial tiger by the tail: the Party and the secret police might have been fooled for now, but he doubted it would last for long.
In the booth, he sipped his tea and consciously avoided looking at his watch as the appointed time for the meeting arrived, trying instead to focus on the morning edition of the latest Party propaganda displayed on the view screen built into the tabletop.
He only looked up when the bell on the door jingled and a young woman walked in.
* * *
While the documents that every citizen on Saint Petersburg was required to carry said that her name was Valentina Mikhailovna Tutikova, the young woman’s true identity, if one could call it that, was Scarlet.
Born Mindy Anne Black, she had joined the Terran Intelligence Agency, or TIA, at the age of twenty. She was a talented linguist, was superbly fit, extremely intelligent and a fast learner, and had nerves to cope with the most extreme situations. TIA had a very special program for such talented people, and it did not take long for her to come to the attention of the powers-that-be.
Two years later, Mindy Black died in a staged vehicle accident. At least that’s what the coroner’s report said. Since then, the closest she had to a real name was her codename, Scarlet. She had trained for two more years in the skills she would need to survive in the field as one of a handful of special operations agents. They were only assigned the most difficult missions, ones where the value of their objective was only matched by the difficulty in achieving it. Only five people in the entire Confederation knew who and what she was, and only two of them knew she was on Saint Petersburg. One of them was Director Penkovsky. The other was her controller, a man — or woman — she had never met, but whose coded messages sent her across the human sphere to risk her life.
Her mission now was to follow up on the information the Confederation had received that Saint Petersburg was building nuclear weapons and, if she could, verify if it was true. The Alliance had built an extensive network of informants here, one of whom had turned out to be an innocuous construction manager who had turned dissident, and then had become an asset, an informant. He would help her by providing the information, contacts, and access she required for her mission.
The setup with her contact had been arranged through another set of Alliance-turned-Confederation agents, who also arranged for the proper documentation for her when she arrived. The really hard part had been actually getting planetside: it was virtually impossible for any ship, even a small one, to get to the surface without drawing the attention of the planet’s coast guard. Getting through customs was also virtually impossible, as the customs teams were led by secret police informants who pried apart every box and container.
Her only option had been an experimental sub-orbital insertion system being developed by the Confederation Marine Corps, and a merchant ship was hastily fitted with a concealed launcher. The timing of the operation was critical: the ship had to arrive at precisely the right time and place in orbit for one of the periodic meteor showers that lit up the skies over much of Saint Petersburg. It had been a divine coincidence that would help cover her arrival; a single brilliant streak across the sky might have drawn unwanted attention. The ship’s crew managed to hit the launch window just right, and she was quietly jettisoned from the ship to join a host of other shooting stars. She had never ridden in a deployment pod, which was a grandiose name for a human-sized can covered with ablative material that both absorbed radar tracking signals and acted as a heat shield. She also hoped to never have to use one again: the ride down had been a roaring, bone-jarring experience, and it had taken all her nerve to remain calm as the pod howled down to an altitude of only three hundred meters before it suddenly disintegrated around her. From there it had been a comparatively unexciting, and very brief, parasail ride to the ground.
After carefully burying her chute and other gear that she would not be taking with her for now, she changed into what passed for casual wear in Saint Petersburg City, carrying what she needed with her in a rucksack that could quickly be altered to look like a well-used soft-sided travel bag.
She had landed a few kilometers from a town to the north of Saint Petersburg, and quickly made her way to the train station there under cover of darkness. Arriving in early morning, just as the first rust-streaked commuter train pulled into the station, she made a quick stop in the women’s rest room. There, carefully tucked behind the broken toilet paper dispenser in one of the stalls, were her documents. A rumpled white envelope contained a passport, work permit, a visa to live in Saint Petersburg City, an inter-city travel permit, money card, a Party membership card, and an electronic ticket showing that she had boarded a train yesterday in Vasilevsky, a town further to the north and her home of record as shown in her papers, before transferring to this commuter train. It would not stand up to intensive scrutiny, but it w
ould get her past any militiaman who happened to check her travel itinerary.
After quickly changing into a poor-fitting dark gray pantsuit that was typical of the other women she had seen, she grabbed her bag and boarded the train like everyone else, blending in with the other drab and morose commuters heading to the worker’s paradise of Saint Petersburg.
* * *
Sikorsky watched as the young woman casually glanced around the café. He was about to get up and hail her when the waiter, whom Sikorsky suspected of being a secret police agent, walked over to her. After a brief exchange of words, he pointed at Sikorsky, and the young woman thanked him and headed back to the booth.
“Gospodin Sikorsky,” she said with an eager smile, “it’s so nice to meet you. I am—”
“Valentina Tutikova,” Sikorsky said, standing and offering his hand, “of course. It’s very nice to meet you, as well.” He shook her hand, and watched her as she settled herself into the booth. With drab brown hair cut in the haphazard style typical of the capital city’s women and wearing very little makeup, dressed in clothes that half the other women in the city had in their tiny wardrobes, with ugly black pumps to match, she gave the impression of being just another ordinary citizen looking for a job. Even her eyes were a muddy brown as they looked at him eagerly. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, but he could not pin down her age: he thought she could easily be older, and perhaps younger. She was not ugly, nor was she particularly attractive. She was outwardly unremarkable by any measure, and would have been invisible in a crowd. Even the waiter, who was infamous for ogling the women who came to the café, did not give her a second glance. She made him think of a creature he had once heard about that was found on Earth: the chameleon, able to change the color of its skin to suit its environment. He wondered what she was really like, but decided that it was probably best not to know.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 55