The handlers gambit, p.15
The Handler's Gambit, page 15
Boone began to run scenarios for how he would explain this to Vindik. He decided he should not return to the Lupis. Ever. Rordis might take him offworld, perhaps directly to Reia. This was his chance. But this was not the plan.
Abruptly, off to the left, away from where they had been following the train of collapses, water exploded. The shock wave knocked the hoverafts against the root mass and sprayed the onlookers with mist. Boone had to shield his face from the sting of the vaporized water. When he looked up again, the last thing he expected to see was a girl walking atop the water toward them. She was drenched from head to foot, but the water was steaming off, and she carried a smooth black object in her hands.
“What in the name of—” Gunner muttered.
“Impossible, even for a Saxen,” said Rordis.
Boone, relieved to see that both Elyon and the artifact were now within his reach, salvaged his professional sensibilities and stepped back, out of the sight of the guides. He regretted what he was about to do, but he had to go through with the plan.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” said Gunner to no one in particular as Elyon approached.
Reaching for his pistol, Boone walked up behind the two guides, putting a slug in the back of each one’s head while deciding whether to trust his own troopers to keep this incredible feat to themselves. Vindik wanted Elyon’s talents to be a secret. He would have to brief his troops on the way back.
He turned to one who doubled as their pilot. “Can you guide the shuttle remotely to this location?”
“I can, sir, if these giant trees don’t get in the way.”
Boone faced Elyon, who now walked up the root mound. Her pale blue eyes were almost without pupils, and she radiated heat that evaporated the water from her hair, skin, and clothes. He wasn’t quite sure whether she was herself or possessed.
“Elyon,” he said, extending a hand.
She took it and he helped her up. “I have his prize,” she replied, her voice her own again. She gave him a wry grin. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”
* * *
Surrounded by Boone and his troopers, Elyon held the geode in her lap. The shuttle launched itself into the sky. Although she felt at peace, she was anxious to approach Vindik with this new crystal—not because she wanted him to have it, but because she was certain she could channel its power to destroy him.
When she sensed its call above ground, she had no trouble winding her way in the dark to its location. An old stone bridge collapsed under her as she crossed to the chamber where the geode rested in its cradle. The closer she came to it, the stronger her attraction. Unlike the Life Crystal, which had drawn her in through her own anguish, the geode amplified the feelings she already had. Among those feelings was her hatred of the warlord.
Removing the geode from its cradle triggered a shock wave. When the walls imploded, the water flooded in. She channeled the geode to strengthen the shield that surrounded her, blocking the flood from passing into the tunnel, but it would not protect those who had followed her down. Encased in her bubble, she slipped through the broken wall and floated herself to the surface.
A new kind of energy erupted inside her. Now she was eager to return with this prize, because its power would enable her to kill the man she despised above all things in the galaxy.
As soon as she stepped off the shuttle, she collapsed under the sudden vacuum of a suppression field. It ripped the energy from her core, leaving only exhaustion. She stumbled down the ramp and rolled to a stop at Vindik’s feet. He pulled the geode from her grasp as she tried to right herself.
With his boot, Vindik knocked her back onto her seat. Their eyes met, both full of mutual hatred.
She steeped in the all-too-human emotions that had been frustrating her for too long. One of them would die someday, and she no longer cared which one.
23 Bow Shock
Quadrant: League (Sol)
System: Zeta Ophiuchi
For two weeks, Boone put up with the menial tasks assigned by Spresic in the command center for his eight-hour shift, then spent the next six hours preparing, thinking, and covering his tracks. Sometimes he managed six hours of sleep, usually less. His mind constantly turned over new possibilities, new probabilities, new threats to his plans, and new solutions.
When he was confident his plans were perfect, he laid the final piece into place. Although he knew Vindik would come after them, he had a plan for that too. There would be no going back—either he and Elyon would get out, or they would be imprisoned forever.
Or dead. There was always the likelihood of that.
Using his facer, he scanned the nodes dispersing Plexes data across the galaxy. If one knew how to look, they could find anything.
Dudorr’s slip had been to reveal the miners at Zeta Ophiuchi, a star that had been racing toward the galactic core for millions of years. The bow shock of Zeta Ophiuchi was several light-years across, and finding a speck of a fleet in the gas-off was nearly impossible. At any hint of progress, Boone quietly shut it down. He would let them find the miners when he was ready. In the meantime, he conducted his own search using the multiplex to narrow down transmissions to and from the various mining operations. He also used this method to locate Reia herself.
He sent the Ophiuchi coordinates anonymously to one of his groovers.
* * *
While not visible with the naked eye to any but a Saxen, the bow shock of the Zeta Ophiuchi star was like a fiery crescent at its front, leaving a wealth of fused space dust in crystalline deposits in the void around it. Elyon had rarely seen anything so beautiful, like a rainbow stretching across the dome of the observation deck from horizon to horizon.
From the center floor, she witnessed the orchestration of warships. Vindik’s fleet overwhelmed and outflanked the miners’ paltry defensive corvettes. The miners put up a fight, firing plasma blasts in all directions, but Vindik’s fleet took little damage, and the small corvettes were systematically destroyed—all but one, which was towed back to the Lupis. The warships moved toward the hot blue star to overtake the cargo ships and containers. The entire battle lasted under an hour.
Elyon had little interest in the battle, however. The giant blue star that pushed the shock wave was energizing—hot and spinning visibly, with a trail of vapor that formed iridescent clouds reflecting cold violet light in flashes.
Vindik emerged onto the observation deck. Sitting in the large chair, he leaned back and closed his eyes. Elyon hoped he would go to sleep. Despite having the geode to counter it, the amber crystal filled her with dread. It burned her soul with every tormenting thought or memory she had ever known, even when she was as far away as her quarters. Its torment reached out to her, and after every session she felt both stronger in resolve to kill and weaker in her resolve to resist. Vindik had been merciless at first, rebuking her for her inability to focus and control her thoughts while it ripped her mind and heart apart. Elyon’s strengths were physical, not mental, and this new effort was taking its toll on her confidence. It did not help that being near him meant they shared their mutual hatred in their pheromones.
If she resisted, she felt pain. If she gave in, she felt anguish.
The geode now gave her the strength to focus. After a few weeks, she understood how to pair the two together to create a surge of energy that she would then unleash on some object or unwitting prisoner. Each session intensified her talents. If not for Vindik’s greater mastery of the pairing, she would have crushed him. The geode had been no prize for Elyon.
Vindik opened his eyes and called her over. Taking her place between the stones, she began to energize. It took tremendous concentration to relive the slaughter of her brethren, the murder of her brother, the assassination of her mentor. She had succumbed at first. The geode enhanced the strength of her mind, allowing her to experience the pain without cracking while focusing on a task.
“Find me.” Vindik’s voice flowed over her as her mind reached out and touched his thoughts—one of the few benefits of the Life Crystal. She often connected with his fleeting visions, memories he had long since suppressed. She often left these sessions with these images in her mind: the pallid woman who screeched at him, the uniformed militia that killed her; the oppressive women in an institution; the long dark nights hiding in shadows, and the people Vindik slaughtered as a rogue teen before being found by Baisen.
He limited what she connected with. When she tried to tap into his betrayal of Baisen, he responded with pain and confusion.
With his barriers up, she reached out farther, beyond the walls of the observation deck. She touched the minds of crew members nearby. She did not relate to their mundane and routine lives, their dreams and fears. A few of them were talking, and their connected energy launched her farther outward.
She continued to hop between minds until she was drawn to one in particular: the prisoner from Karnaan—the one who had spoken to her, the one called Starwind. His mind awakened at her presence, searching for an explanation for this invasion of his thoughts. His mind’s eye propelled her from a solid, faint blue light to images of his own tormented past of murder and terror, including his recent captivity and torture. At first, his thoughts were chaotic, as the power of the Life Crystal was unleashed through her connection. He fought against them with the blue light, and his resistance washed back upon Elyon.
She heard Vindik’s voice, though she did not hear what he said. Her connection to the prisoner sprung backward through the minds of all the men she had been passing through like a tense elastic cord, shocking her out of her concentration with a jolt no less painful than one of Vindik’s arcs. She found herself on her back, staring at the domed view overhead.
“You have gone too far,” he said angrily, stooping over her, but she wasn’t sure what she had done wrong. The Life Crystal continued its emotional torment, and the geode amplified the effect of the suffering in her mind, and she couldn’t get back the concentration she so desperately needed to control it all. Instead, the world was moving, tilting, spinning… The fear of punishment grew rapidly in the uninhibited presence of the Life Crystal.
At the bottom of the lift, she found her feet and stumbled between the two troopers who were hauling her back to her quarters. Farther down the hall they ran into Boone, who dismissed the troopers and took Elyon’s arm over his shoulders. His touch and his scent comforted her. She wanted to explain or to apologize, but no sound came out of her mouth. The effect of the session was still with her, flooding her head with visions of her own tragic childhood and mixing them with visions of the prisoner’s dark past. There was no separating them. More than once she collapsed, forcing Boone to wait while she pulled herself together. In time she lost touch with her surroundings.
Quivering and perspiring, she lay on her bed. Someone brushed a hair off her face. She gazed upward, expecting to see her young brother leaning over her, but it was Boone. She curled up to cry.
For the remainder of the day, she slipped in and out of fevered nightmares. When she was settled enough to rouse herself, she found a drone medic idling nearby. It sprung to life when it sensed her awaken. “Do you require anything?”
“I’m hungry,” she said. The drone produced a meal bar, which she took. “Go away.” The drone zipped off and compressed itself to squeeze out through the service portal, leaving Elyon to eat her bar. There was pressure in her head, and her hands felt heavy—usual symptoms after a session. The melancholy was subsiding, but transient images from the prisoner’s past continued to flash incessantly in her mind. The crystals had amplified his tormented memories, which overshadowed her own thoughts.
If this connection hadn’t broken when Vindik pulled her out of it, she would have to sever it herself. Permanently.
Her clothes were damp and clung to her, and she smacked of Saxen pheromones, but she did not care. Her mind was caged, and she needed to free it.
Once again the electronic lock released when shorted. If caught, Vindik’s punishment might be severe. She would will herself to die, and none of this would matter.
She drew many curious looks as she stalked through the corridors to the detention block, but no one stopped her. That was power in itself—at least in the Penumbra.
The young sentry in the prisoner’s wing of the detention block stepped between her and her destination. A quick thrust of her fingertips to his larynx and he collapsed, gurgling on the floor behind his station. She studied his fight to survive until the thrashing stopped. Stepping over his body, she sought and unlocked the cell that Yon Starwind occupied. Then she walked down the corridor to his door.
She stared at him through the viewport in the door. He was in a meditation pose, sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, but he said, “Should I not assume I’m safe in here?”
“I’ve seen your memories,” she announced.
His eyes opened, and he peered at her through the tiny viewport. His face was sunken and mottled with veins. “And I yours, apparently. You can heal all that pain, you know.”
“I don’t want to heal,” she snapped. “I want your life out of my head. Standing here, hearing your voice, it’s even worse.”
His voice changed slightly. “It’s your own past that torments you, not mine.”
She recognized that tone—it was the tone of truth. She was not going to hear it. She slammed her fist on the door frame and then slapped the panel to open it. Inside she caught herself before stumbling as the sudden loss of her senses overwhelmed her. Other memories stirred, memories of the isolation, the boredom, the torment. And yet there was a kind of hard-fought peace in the air: the man’s peace—and the absence of the crystals.
The door hissed closed behind her. He did not move. He asked, “Why did you make this connection if you can’t take it?”
“I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“I suspected as much,” he said.
He seemed so calm, so wise. She no longer heard his thoughts in her head, and in his presence, among his calm pheromones, a kind of comfort washed over her. It was a different kind of comfort than she found in Reia or Baisen. With this man it was more like a kindred soul. She reminded herself that she was on borrowed time and sat down in front of him.
“It would seem you have suffered much more than I,” he said.
“How did you learn to control the rage?”
“I’m not sure I can answer that easily,” he replied. “As you’ve seen, I have a violent past. It takes tremendous effort and patience to control your emotions and see the galaxy with objectivity.”
Elyon didn’t know what that meant or what to say. Patience was not one of her strengths. “Can you teach me?”
“Not in here,” he said, almost as if laughing at such an idiotic suggestion. “I learned from someone like us, someone who had overcome a past. Now I pass that knowledge on to others, like you, although it seems my own students were led astray.” She sensed his disappointment in himself.
Elyon closed her eyes, taking in the pheromones of this man, the calm and peace, the strength and confidence rising above the sadness and regret. It filled an emotional void she could not clearly articulate. And it was erasing the dark and painful memories that she had come to sever. “I’m a prisoner, too,” she said sadly.
“You are ill-used,” he agreed. “But there is life in your soul. You are loved, but those who love you are far away. If ever you have the opportunity to escape this fate, I suggest you choose it gratefully.”
Elyon heard a clamor down the hall. Someone had arrived and found the sentry’s body. Starwind heard it too and looked into Elyon’s sunken eyes. His own golden eyes were smiling now.
“Everyone has a choice,” he said. “Even a prisoner.”
Elyon scrambled to her feet as the door opened. Starwind closed his eyes and resumed meditating.
Vindik loomed in the doorway. She began to panic. “Did you do what you came to do?” he boomed angrily. Elyon was confused. Did he know she had intended to kill Starwind? If so, it was a poorly worded question, as the prisoner was obviously alive behind her. She glanced between the two men as Vindik lowered his voice and commanded, “Finish it.”
Everyone has a choice. Starwind’s words echoed in her head. She regarded him, calmly awaiting his fate. He knew he was about to die, and this was his choice. Suddenly she was angry, swept up into conflicting feelings from the two Saxen men. She wanted to direct her anger at Vindik for taking away this moment of peace she had desired for so long.
With a burst of speed, she wrapped her arms around Starwind’s head and kicked herself over his shoulder to snap his neck. He collapsed, his golden eyes staring lifelessly at the wall.
Vindik’s perpetual scowl gave no hint of approval. “Return to your quarters, and don’t be caught outside them again.” He walked away, and the door slid closed again.
Elyon backed against the wall and slid down, burying her face in her knees, wishing, for the first time, that Boone were at her side. She cried until the replacement sentries cleared Starwind’s body and forced her out.
24 The Last Plan
The detention block was more crowded than usual, with every cell occupied and several more security officers on duty than usual. Boone didn’t get far in without rubbing shoulders a few times more than he liked.
“Ready the captain,” said Boone over the controller’s shoulder.
The controller replied, “Two four unlocked.”
Boone walked briskly to the cell to inspect the situation before Vindik arrived. The captain, wearing only pants and showing blood and scarring around his fingers, chest, legs, and lips, lay unconscious on the floor. He had known the captain briefly, and that he had a wife and a daughter who would be around Elyon’s age. He hoped they were far away.
