Guardians of Paradise (Hidden Empire)

by Jaine Fenn

  This time, she took the lead.

  As she rocked up and down and he writhed under her, she felt their physical union strengthening their mental connection, a coming together of minds that fed off the coming together of bodies.

  This wasn’t unity, because unity had nothing to do with such mindless grinding and rubbing to stimulate physical pleasure. But it was what he craved, and perhaps what she needed.

  Letting her body do what it wanted, she dived deeper into his head. The resistance was gone. In return, she felt her mind opening, just as her body did.

  Opening to him.

  He knew this sensation well; his life was built around such false unity. She was new to it, inexperienced and uncertain. He began to take control. She felt her resilience cracking, felt herself falling into desire, willingly becoming its slave. He knew how sex could affect the mind. Even as he gave himself to her, he was undermining her psyche.

  But he was only human.

  She was Sidhe.

  She neither knew nor liked this man, but in some ways she understood him more completely than she did Jarek or Taro. He was a creature of the Sidhe, conditioned to their touch; his joy was to love and obey them.

  To receive such adulation was her birthright.

  First she reined back her own pleasure, dissociating herself from what her body was doing so she could focus. Then she clamped her will over his, deflecting his attempts to subvert her mind. At the same time she froze his pleasure, cutting his consciousness free of the cycle of arousal and fulfilment.

  He gasped in shock.

  She released him again, amplifying and enhancing the sensations he yearned to feel. He bucked beneath her, giving a wordless cry. Those parts of his mind not drowning in ecstasy were filled with remorse, a wordless pleading for her forgiveness for having dared to become the dominant partner.

  She took him to the brink and left him there, not granting him the release of orgasm, pulling back even as he begged her to let him go.

  Then she did it all over again.

  This was almost too easy. He revelled in the exquisite torture, any ambition to fight her driven from his mind. And she had free access to his thoughts.

  The wave of rising pleasure surprised her. The signals from her own body were interfering with her concentration, and for a moment she considered blocking the sensation, or else bringing herself to climax quickly, the better to free herself of such distractions.

  But then, why should she not enjoy this to the full?

  Maintaining her hold, forbidding him to orgasm, she forced him to work faster, slaving his will to her pleasure. As she came she heard herself cry out and wondered at the lack of dignity, even as she relished the mindless release.

  After the last shudders had passed through her she pushed herself fully upright, focusing on her partner for the first time in some minutes. His skin was grey and filmed with sweat, his half-healed stomach wound livid. But he looked up at her as a worshipper looks upon a goddess.

  She touched his forehead with a quivering finger, smiling as pleasure exploded through him and he shuddered beneath her. She let herself ride the sensation, all thoughts of reading him forgotten in the face of this wordless, animal communion.

  She felt his physical climax riding hard on the mental one, and retained just enough self-control to block it.

  Her eyes were still closed when he spoke in her head, his voice ragged with yearning.

  She opened her eyes, and looked straight into his.

  As she began to move on him for the last time, she sensed the fear in him, the soul-deep realisation of what he had committed himself to.

  A final wave of resistance passed through him.

  She dispelled it effortlessly.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jarek woke slowly, wondering what the weight on his leg was. Of course: Taro. They’d ended up in his cabin eventually. The couch on the bridge wasn’t built for sex, though that hadn’t stopped Taro trying. Jarek smiled to himself, before remembering how the evening had started. Hot on the heels of that memory a new realisation swam up from the depths; another discovery he’d made at Serenein, one that hadn’t seemed immediately relevant before last night.

  He eased Taro’s leg away and sat up, wincing at a twinge from his bruised ribs.

  Taro opened his eyes, smiled up at Jarek, then frowned, no doubt also remembering why they’d ended up in bed together.

  ‘Did you want to stay here for a while?’ asked Jarek. He hoped he would. The extra complication that had just occurred to him was going to make things even worse for the boy.

  ‘No,’ said Taro, though he didn’t look convinced. Jarek found some relatively clean clothes, and lent Taro a robe.

  Nual sat alone at the table, nursing a steaming mug. From her still-wet hair Jarek guessed she’d just showered. ‘Good morning,’ he said with forced cheerfulness.

  She looked around, surprised; she must’ve been so deep in thought that she hadn’t sensed them there. Taro put his arms around Jarek’s waist, with his head on his shoulder and one hand dangling just above Jarek’s groin. Jarek resisted the urge to shake him off; pleasant though the contact was, Taro wasn’t doing it for his benefit.

  Nual said nothing, just looked at the two of them, her face unreadable.

  Jarek decided there was no easy way to tell her what she needed to know. ‘Listen, did you . . . if you didn’t, uh, take precautions you might want to get yourself checked out.’

  He felt Taro tense.

  Nual spoke slowly and carefully, as though each word was fragile, potentially dangerous. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know . . .’ He’d assumed she’d probably use contraception, until he thought about the kind of solitary life she must have led. ‘Precautions, as in—’

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice as cold as space. ‘I did not.’ She stared at him for a moment, then flinched. ‘Why did you not tell me this before?’ she hissed.

  ‘Tell her what?’ Taro’s voice was loud in Jarek’s ear. ‘What is it?’ He pulled back.

  Jarek wanted to go up to the bridge and pretend he was still alone on his ship. But even before these two had come into his life he’d already started thinking differently. His experiences on Serenein had changed him; he was no longer just a footloose trader, and his ship was no longer a lonely refuge from which to view the universe. He sighed and turned to Taro. ‘It’s something I forgot to say. I only worked this out recently. Everyone thinks the Sidhe are aliens, a different race to humans. They’re not, at least not exactly. They’re humans who’ve mutated - they’ve been changed genetically. We had a common ancestor, that’s for sure, so it’s possible—’

  Nual cut across him. ‘I will do as you suggest. Are there any other revelations you have kept back from us?’

  ‘No,’ said Jarek, ‘and I didn’t mean to hide anything, but the Sidhe screwed me up pretty badly. I’m still getting my life back. If I haven’t been as up front as I could’ve been, then I’m sorry.’ In passing, he wondered if Taro had noticed that she said us, not me.

  If he did, he didn’t say anything, and neither did Nual. Jarek was tempted to leave them to it, but it looked like restoring harmony on his ship was down to him. ‘So,’ he said as casually as he could, ‘is it just the three of us for breakfast?’ He hoped it was. The atmosphere was bad enough already.

  Nual pushed her chair back and stood up. She turned to face them. ‘That is right. There will just be the three of us.’

  Jarek wasn’t sure whether it was intuition or Nual’s failure to fully shield her emotions, but he knew something terrible had happened.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘The pilot is dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He is dead, Jarek. I killed him.’

  Taro made a strangled noise. Jarek felt his knees buckle. ‘I - where is he?’ he asked stupidly.

  ‘In the spare cabin.’

 
‘Wait,’ said Taro, his voice breaking, ‘that can’t be right. You—You can’t . . . you didn’t.’

  ‘I did.’ Her voice gentle, she said, ‘It was his wish to die. I granted that wish.’

  ‘You’re saying you killed him, but didn’t fuck him?’ said Taro.

  ‘I am saying that I gave him the death he craved.’

  Taro rushed forward, then caught himself. ‘No fucking way!’

  ‘Shit, Nual,’ said Jarek, as his imagination worked through what she’d just said.

  ‘That was our deal,’ said Nual. ‘That he be allowed to die in the bliss he was addicted to; in return he let down his barriers and permitted me into his mind.’

  Taro stared at her in disbelief.

  Jarek said, ‘Listen, when I said we needed to find out what he knew—Having sex with someone is one thing; taking their life is something else!’

  ‘And what did you plan to do with him?’ asked Nual.

  ‘My plan? I was going to find out what I could - without killing or seriously hurting him - then drop him off somewhere so he could get over what’d happened to him and find a new life.’

  ‘He would never be able to get over it!’ Nual’s voice was fierce. ‘Do you not understand? He had been with the Sidhe since he was a boy - they were his life - and without them, he was already dead inside. All I did was complete the process.’

  ‘Ah, right, so it was a mercy killing, was it?’

  ‘It was, though if you choose not to see it that way then I will have to accept that. You know what I am.’ She sounded upset, and Jarek’s initial horror and anger began to give way to pity. Was she doing that to him? Was she influencing his feelings, making him understand her actions, even though she’d just murdered a stranger?

  She shook her head. ‘I keep my promises, Jarek. Even the difficult ones. Your feelings are your own.’

  ‘So, was it worth it?’ said Taro bitterly. ‘’Cos if you fucked him and killed him and you never got any secrets out of his head, well, that’d be a top prime joke, wouldn’t it?’ From Taro’s tone of voice he thought it was anything but funny. But he had a point.

  Nual closed her eyes and said, ‘I have his life.’

  Taro grunted and said, ‘Enjoy it. I’m going back to bed.’ He turned and walked back into Jarek’s cabin.

  Nual’s gaze lingered on the door after it closed. Then she said, ‘Did you wish me to . . . deal with the pilot?’

  Jarek was tempted to say yes; he’d cleared up enough of other people’s messes back on the Setting Sun. But Nual barely looked capable of holding herself upright, let alone manhandling a dead body anywhere. And he had asked her to do this . . .

  Jarek hadn’t wanted to look at the man’s face as they covered it, but he did; he wondered what it would be like to go out in such a state of ecstasy. They carried the body to the airlock, wrapped in the sheet on which he’d died. Before they opened the outer door Jarek said the spacer’s elegy, a utilitarian yet sentimental little prayer. He wasn’t a Salvatine - and he doubted very much that the pilot had been - but he felt he had to say something to make their actions less like disposing of the evidence after a murder and more like the aftermath of an unavoidable accident.

  In the rec-room, Nual started passing on everything she had taken from the man they’d just flushed into space. She spoke quickly and quietly, almost as though she was exorcising herself of him. Perhaps she was: Jarek briefly wondered if she’d been in his mind at the moment of death. But whatever the means, they’d got the desired result. He asked if she minded him recording her recollections. After a moment’s hesitation, she agreed.

  The pilot’s information was sketchy, of course. He knew of several corporations and worlds with Sidhe infiltrators, but though he might have been aware which companies harboured Sidhe agents, he’d had no idea of their names or positions. He’d heard of a dozen compromised freetrader ships like the Setting Sun, four of which were new to Jarek. And he had known where the real Sidhe power-base lay, even if he’d never seen it for himself: six Sidhe motherships hidden in the vastness of interstellar space.

  Jarek asked, ‘A mothership - was that what I found you on?’

  Nual started, jogged out of the stolen memories. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘mine was the seventh. The pilot knew it had been lost, but he had no idea how.’ She smiled mirthlessly. ‘We know rather more about that, of course.’

  ‘And was he right about the motherships? Are they where things are run from?’

  ‘I suppose that must be the case, though I saw almost nothing of the world outside our ship when I was growing up; until we come of age and adopt a role in the unity our lives are very insular. I knew only that our community was one amongst several, and that we sometimes met others like us.’

  ‘And do they have labs on board?’

  ‘Labs?’

  ‘Laboratories. The Sidhe on Serenein used a tailored retrovirus to control the population. I wonder if they made it on a mothership. ’

  ‘Possibly. There were places I was forbidden to enter, one of which was the . . . I suppose the concept would translate into words as “birthing area”. That was where most of my sisters started their lives.’

  ‘So the Sidhe really are clones?’ That was the accepted wisdom: the Sidhe were all female, the males were long dead. Legend had it that the last few males had helped humanity to bring down the Protectorate, but they had paid for it with their lives.

  ‘I believe most are clones, though as I never saw these places I cannot know for sure.’

  ‘Most - but not everyone? Are you a clone?’

  ‘No. Perhaps one in ten of us were . . . the term would be “natural born”, though we were all raised together.’

  Jarek remembered the male mute he’d seen on the Setting Sun. So the Sidhe kept male slaves around for more than just heavy lifting. The mutes were believed to be humans, altered somehow by the Sidhe to make them more compliant, but with the close genetic relationship between human and Sidhe, interbreeding wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. ‘So they didn’t distinguish between the clones and the “natural born”?’

  ‘We were not meant to make such distinctions; but we did, as children do. We naturals thought we were superior, and in our mastery of our abilities, perhaps we were, though we also matured more slowly. And we were more prone to question the natural order.’

  ‘Like you did. That’s why you were in that cell, wasn’t it? Because you questioned the way things were on the mothership?’

  Nual nodded slowly.

  She was obviously uncomfortable, but Jarek needed to know as much as she was willing to tell him. ‘Can you explain?’

  ‘I had always been fascinated by shiftspace. During one transit I reached out to the transit-kernel at the heart of our ship. I did not know what it was, merely that there was this sleeping . . . other . . . who awoke during transits. Because I did this from within the unity, I was shielded from the worst excesses of the twisted mind within the kernel - unlike when I made contact with your transit-kernel later. But I sensed enough to know that it was a living sentience, related to us in some way, but tortured beyond endurance. I was appalled, and, because I was in the unity, I could not hide what I’d found, or my feelings about it—Iwas even proud of myself for taking such a stand, fool that I was. Such disobedience is not to be tolerated. I was punished - isolated physically and mentally - and I am sure my sisters expected a few weeks of such torture would cure me of my stubborn streak of morality.’

  ‘But that’s not how it worked out,’ said Jarek carefully.

  ‘No,’ said Nual, and looked away.

  Jarek wondered if that was the end of it. Between her own memories and the pilot’s she’d given him plenty to think about.

  Then she said, ‘There is something else you need to know, though it is not something I know much about. There is an élite faction that rules the Sidhe. I had no name for them, merely the concept. The pilot knew them as the Court. They have representatives on all the mot
herships and, according to the pilot, out in the wider universe as well.’

  Jarek said, ‘Did the pilot ever meet any of this ruling class?’ When she shook her head, he pressed her further, asking, ‘How about you?’

  The pain of recalling her past was beginning to tell; her voice sounded strained as she said, ‘The members of the Court on my ship judged me and determined my punishment. Before that I had had little to do with them. There really is nothing more I can tell you about the Court.’