She meant to kick at him, but all her leg did was twitch weakly. Not like this, she thought. Nameless, two-bit thugs didn’t take down the Union’s finest defenders. Unless...I’m not the finest.
The leader flung an arm over her thighs. “Hold her down,” he said, the affable tone completely gone from his voice. Icy dread trickled down the small of her back. Not like this. How could some two-bit thug take down a Vice Hunter? Hadn’t she trained to defeat wretches like this? Wasn’t the Union supposed to have wiped out the cutthroat predators of society?
The gang leader used her dislocated arm to turn her face down on the plasticrete. The stink of old fuel, garbage, and greasy rainwater filled her nostrils. The stench and the pain to her shoulder brought a dry heave up her throat and she clamped her teeth against the nausea. The ease with which he cowed her drowned her in shame.
I’m a joke. All through Tenraye and Guerre, Micah could have easily overpowered her with just his strength. Hells, how he must have laughed at her. How many others laughed at her? The other Vice Hunters? The trainers? The Prime Minister?
How many of them knew the truth about her? Knew it and kept it from her? A knee pressed into the small of her back, bending her spine awkwardly. Her hair hung in her face, and kept her from seeing who wanted to assert his dominance.
“Hey! You!” A new voice sounded from further away. Female. She tried to lift her head.
“Get offa my street, you bums!” She heard the tink-tink of a metallic sphere landing and then rolling towards her just before the explosive hiss of tear gas hit her. She gagged outright and coughed, eyes streaming. But the pressure on her kidneys let up and from the sounds of scuffling feet, her captors had decided she wasn’t worth it. She stayed prone on the ground, to avoid the worst of the smoke.
She felt rather than saw someone bending down over her. “You okay?”
She blinked her stinging eyes and jammed the palm of her good hand into one of them, leaving her other arm to hang uselessly at her side. A large, blurry form hunched over her. She drew a breath to answer and coughed instead, the smoke burning her throat. “How—do you—stand it?” she rasped.
The female pressed a cloth against Treska’s face. “Treemians don’t smell like you squishbags do.”
Treska’s eyes gradually cleared enough to see the leathery brown-gray skin of the Treemian woman. “Thank you for the help,” she said.
The woman shrugged her dense and blocky shoulders. “This used to be a good neighborhood,” she said. She put her sinewy arms underneath Treska’s and lifted her. The jar to her dislocated shoulder shot pain through her and she groaned.
“Sorry,” the Treemian muttered. “Just hold still for a second.”
Before Treska could protest, the woman grabbed her forearm and pulled sharply. “Hwaa!” she yelled. The audible pop came accompanied by a hot burn and then blessed relief as her joint righted itself. She whimpered.
“Come on, squishbag.” The Treemian patted the low wall that lined the walkway leading to the entrance of her building. Treska slumped on the cold plasticrete, vacuum-formed to resemble stone and tinted in a shade that was at least two hundred years out of date. “My name’s Druvvey.” She pulled a container of water from her backpack and held it out to Treska.
“I’m—” Her name turned to ashes in her mouth. Vakess had given her the name when he invited her to be among the first of the Vice Hunters. He promised to give her a place. To bring security to the Civilized galaxy. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Lost your way, eh?” Druvvey gave her a knowing look and shook the water container.
“You might say that.” She took the bottle and drank. It washed the sourness from her mouth. “This used to be a nice place, huh?”
Druvvey nodded. “Wasn’t glammy like up there in the spires, but it was a good place to live. Lots of people worked for the entertainers up there. The Hathori temple and the like. “
She froze in mid-motion. “You worked for the Hathori?”
Druvvey’s head bobbed in the affirmative. “Yah. It was good work.”
“You didn’t get—perverted by them?”
The Treemian snorted. “Squishbags couldn’t survive Treemian love. And we don’t scent like your kind. Anyway, the Hathori were good folk. Treated their employees right for the most part. Kept secrets that should be kept, and leaked ones that shouldn’t. Pity about that attack.”
“The Marauders targeted all the wealth of the Union,” she said.
Druvvey shot her a look from the corner of her slanted Treemian eyes. “The Marauders didn’t tear down the Hathori temple, dear. The Union did.”
She rubbed her temples. That didn’t sound right. Nothing made sense down here. Nothing made sense anymore. “I have to go,” she said. “Thanks for helping me with those gangsters.”
“You’re not from down here, but we’re not all degenerates and cutthroats. Most of us are just poor.”
“They wanted my boots,” she said. “At first.”
Druvvey looked at her feet. “They’re good boots.”
Treska looked down at her feet. “They are. Government issue.”
Druvvey snorted. “I’ve seen government issue, and they ain’t it. If you got those from the government, you’re somebody special.”
Her lips twisted. “I thought so,” she said. “I was good at what I did.” It hit her then. Everything she’d been doing and working for in the past ten years was now—past. The past. She doubled over. “I can’t ever go back. Even if I didn’t—I wasn’t—who I am, I still couldn’t go back.” Her chest hurt.
Druvvey took her hand. Treska tensed, until the woman simply turned over her wrist. “Vice Hunter?” she said. “No wonder you’re crazy about the government. You can’t make many friends spoiling people’s fun all day.”
“I didn’t do it to make friends. I did it to keep people safe. I lived through the Marauder attack. I don’t want that happening to anyone else ever again.”
“Well now, that’s an admirable goal. But some might say that the government’s taking it a little too far. The Marauders didn’t hit Prime because we drank too much Tenrayan wine.”
“It wasn’t just the wine. We were arrogant, and we paid the price. Vakess tried to stop all that, but this whole solar system still runs on lies.”
“If you said it ran on vratyx-shit, I’d believe you. Listen, girl. Some lies are a comfort to people. They end up being stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, until we’re strong enough to see the truth. And if you want a simple jewelry-maker’s opinion on the Union, it’s another lie we tell ourselves because we’re not ready to admit that with all our technology, with dozens of worlds and travel between them, we can’t know the reason the Marauders attacked. Most people can’t just shrug and say, ‘shit happens’ so they invent reasons and outlaw wine and blame their neighbors for having louder parties than they did.” She motioned to the hole in the sky where the Temple had stood. “But all those things went on for thousands of years before, and they’ll go on for more thousands of years after.” Her tough-looking, Treemian skin was really quite flexible as her expression shifted into a gentle smile for Treska. “Sometimes, you just have to not know for a time. You squishbags forget that, but when you come from high gravity, you have to learn to wait. Even time takes more time.” The smile opened up into a grin, sliding slowly across the woman’s face.
The racing of her heart slowed, as if the Treemian exerted a gravity of her own that pulled Treska, if not upright, then at least in a single direction instead of a thousand different fractures. “That is surprisingly insightful to my current situation.”
Druvvey’s grin reached its full splendor, lighting up the deep lines in her brown face. “They forget how to be, because they’ve forgotten how to just be.”
Druvvey used her access card to set Treska on a lift going up. Her job hadn’t given her much interaction with kind people, but she did know enough not to offer the woman credits—since half of hers were lost in t
he scuffle, anyway. Instead, she gave the Treemian an awkward hug, and slipped a handful into the woman’s smock, next to her flask. A hundred levels later, when the lift drifted to a stop, she turned her gaze to closer buildings and blinked again. Many of the buildings—even the high spires with the impossible-to-afford views—had large swathes of dark and derelict sections cutting through them.
Many more buildings had looked just so directly after the Marauder attack, she remembered. But ten years’ passage had rehabilitated most of the damage, and only a few sectors remained derelict. Places like the Glitterzone and Chance Quarter fell to ruin and stayed that way once their industries were outlawed. The Union had rebuilt The Cabochons as a museum complex, the Noble Houses formerly in possession of the real estate surrendered it in return for seats in Parliament for a term. Not many had survived re-elections.
Not knowing what else to do, she picked a twisting side path. The path, like so many up here, was dotted with topiary gardens, only these were no longer tended by service bots and so had overgrown, cracking the plasticrete meant to contain them. The landscape lacked order, discipline. But it wasn’t wholly ugly. There was kind of a raw beauty to it. Until the gaping hole in the side of a strato-scraper came into startling view through a break in the greenery.
She rounded a corner and came to the path’s end and stopped, shock riveting her to the spot. Her legs collapsed under her and she stared up at the hole in the strato-scraper. Oh, it had been ten years, and the building’s reconstruction had actually taken the hole and made it into an architectural feature, replacing the lost materials with clearcrete sheets, preserving the illusion of the destruction, but replacing it with structurally-sound materials. She remembered after a minute that the atrium was actually a memorial garden. She’d attended the dedication ceremony, still barely mobile, as a guest of Vakess and the Director of the newly-minted Special Affairs. The Director who lied to me.
She closed her eyes and realized that was a very bad idea, because instead of the memorial atrium, she saw the building from a much steeper angle. The angle from which her broken body had been pinned for days, slowly bleeding out, fading in and out of consciousness, mind full of rubble and lungs full of smoke and ash until the rescue teams had found her weak lifesign. She drew in a breath and could taste burning ash like it was yesterday.
She opened her eyes and turned away. She was much higher than the mid-levels of the metropolis, and recognized the line of the building whose courtyard she sat in.
The building before her had once been a towering ziggurat, with a rooftop garden famous throughout the solar system and a ceiling fresco thousands of years old. Massive twin doors, gilded and lacquered, had once hung on the oversized steel frame, yet swung open with the touch of a finger. No doors barred her entrance now. One whole wall of the ziggurat had crumbled to so much dust, leaving exposed girders to corrode in the open air. Greenery escaped from the once well-tended garden and gamely invaded from above, spilling down the slope to rim the gaping holes in the architecture, somehow softening it and underscoring it at the same time.
Treska’s heart pounded in her throat, threatening to choke her. She could close her eyes and clearly see the Hathori Temple as it was, but only in an historical sense. She couldn’t say it was a memory when so many vids and holos had documented the devastation of the attacks. She knew how the doors were supposed to look, and that the anteroom directly to the left of the foyer was where the security team waited discreetly, just in case any patrons failed to display the proper respect to the Hathori goddess or her acolytes.
This was me, she thought, testing the idea. This was who I was. It felt alien, like a script she’d been given, a dossier on a target, perhaps. But Wullas and her medical scans said that she was the target. She was the enemy of the state. Should be in prison or deported back to Hathor. Quarantined. Yet she walked free, had done so for ten years.
How could I not know all this time? How could I believe I was human?
She stepped through the doorway into the ruined temple. Nothing looked familiar. Nothing felt like home.
She couldn’t remember the way to her room, or whether or not she slept alone in her quarters. She didn’t remember entertaining any clients, or going through the rites of the pleasure goddess, although she suspected she had performed them. Just be, Druvvey had said.
But she knew the scent was off—could perhaps remember faint whiffs of the incense that should have been burning. She took a hesitant step through the main doors.
Light poured in from the holes in the roof. The fresco—thousands of years old, with holes mimicking the constellations, because they’d gone out of alignment with the passage of time—the fresco had been completely removed. It was in one of the museums in The Cabochons now, the pieces displayed as a curiosity of history.
Parts of higher floors hung out, exposed girders dangling and wiring terminated in knotted vines mirroring the actual vines that twined with them. Decay scented the air, along with ‘crete dust and vegetation. The platform outside used to be bigger, she remembered suddenly.
Or was it just a common-sense extrapolation of the obvious huge bite taken out of the semicircle of the landing? A landing that resembled several hundred others clinging to the edges of the ‘scrapers all over the Capitol and a dozen other worlds with urban sprawls.
She shook her head and leaned against a crumbled column. Traces of tarnished gilding still clung in the ornamental grooves cut into the stone. Had she worn silks and gauzy nightdresses while she lived here? She tried to picture herself in something alluring and for the life of her, couldn’t even imagine what kind of dress a girl wore to seduce a man. Any girl, not just a Hathori. Besides, nothing but cargo pants really went well with all-terrain boots and an armored jacket.
Treska picked her way through the decrepit building, edging around crumbling columns that had once soared to match the spires themselves. The duracrete hadn’t so much aged as been deliberately destroyed and left that way. The ruin of the Hathori Temple was a deliberate destruction to remind citizens of the consequences of excess. The jagged and burned out arches served as a constant reminder to anyone thinking to resurrect the concept.
A stray breeze picked up a moldering section of half-charred silk, fluttering it in the breeze. The air still tasted of ash, even though the atmospheric scrubbers cleaned the air here just as well as everywhere else. The debris had been allowed to remain, and her boots kicked up odors left undisturbed for a decade.
Strange, though, how she thought she could hear laughter in the old husk of a building. Soft sighs of pleasure. Her imagination, surely. I’m a Hathori. I’m supposed to imagine sex all the time.
The numb feeling was slowly receding, and in the wake of it came mixed emotions. She was angry for having been deceived, and angry with Micah for bringing it about. She was angry at his absence, and angry at herself for being still so confused. She still wasn’t entirely sure this all wasn’t a psypath-induced hallucination, that he hadn’t somehow suggested it to her during their time on Guerre. When he was just as confused as she over their unconscious reactions to each other.
Just to be sure, she touched the column next to her. A chunk of marble facade flaked off in her hand. She curled her fingers around the sharp-edged chip and squeezed, letting the pain blossom from her palm, up her arm and through her body. It felt real enough.
She closed her eyes. If I was a Hathori, I must have lived here. She tried to imagine the temple whole again. Decorated and inhabited by priests and priestesses, and patrons from the noble houses. Full of laughter and pleasure.
But the soft sighing of the wind swirled around on a plaintive note, and her mind’s eye saw flat, two-dimensional scenes. Flimsiplast and holograms, crystal-projected onto a blank wall, absent sound and sensation.
She opened her eyes. “So that’s it, then,” she murmured to the ruined stones. “I am nothing more or less than a construct. Built by the government and programmed with all the proper responses.”
A tool used to complete a task that was now over, unless Iverka and Wullas managed to spirit Micah’s stasis pod away from the Plaza.
“Still not feeling it.” Too much of her held on to hope. Hope that this was all a great, huge mistake. She pushed away from the column. She had a pocketful of creds and a good pair of boots. Might as well keep walking.
Blank Slate
She didn’t know how long she stood there in the ruined rooftop garden, staring down at her hands as her body cramped and stiffened. The setting sun threw an orange light over everything, but failed to completely hide the fact that her hands were no longer the peach-pink shade of a light-skinned human. They were white. Very white, even in the ruddy light. I look dead. Maybe I am dead. Treska Sivekka the Vice Hunter, at least.
From the moment her training ended, she had prepared herself for the return of her memories, expecting to awaken to the reality of a life once lived on the edge of survival. She’d been found in the midlevels of Prime—not the worst cesspit in the galaxy, to be sure, but a place where day-to-day life was a struggle. Had the attack not come when it did, she could expect to find work as a shopgirl or a mechanic, with a high chance of turning to a criminal sideline for extra credits.
But to find out she was a—a—hells, she didn’t even know what to call herself. A pleasure priestess? A whore? It can’t be, she thought.
Still…her behavior with Mic—the psypath—certainly wasn’t in the upstanding citizens’ guide to propriety.
It doesn’t make you a whore, her inner voice said. Thankfully not The Voice. Her gut twisted in a reflexive flinch. She hadn’t heard the Voice in days and in spite of the stresses, it had been a pleasant change, having her thoughts to herself.
She wiggled her fingers in front of her face. I wasn’t a whore, she thought. Being promiscuous didn’t make one a whore. A bad citizen, perhaps. A detention candidate for a Vice bust, definitely. But as she understood it, sex for credits was a business. She could think of a million different ways to make credits, and judging by the natural aptitude tests she’d gone through in Vice training, she’d have made lousy money anyway.
The Catch (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 7-9) Page 13