The handlers gambit, p.19
The Handler's Gambit, page 19
Another jolt, and he surrendered. No tears squeezed from his dry eyes. The tension made it difficult to draw a breath through his clenched teeth, so he stopped breathing. He dreaded the next jolt, and the next, until he could no longer dread.
“Let him be,” said the faraway feminine voice.
His mind wandered in the darkness.
* * *
Shortly after joining the crew of the Lupis, Boone had quickly learned the order of things: three Saxen, superior to all, led this fleet. She rarely made an appearance, and Greming had warned him to avoid her, but one day Lady Reia’s eyes followed him around the command center. Self-conscious, he was sure he was being evaluated. He tried not to look at her. Her attention made him blush.
Greming must have noticed; Boone recognized his smirk.
Boone took the first opportunity to disappear out of the command center, far from Reia’s presence. When he returned, she was gone. Avoiding her turned out not to be so simple. A commander told him he had a message on the console. He retrieved the message and his stomach tightened. Lady Reia wanted him to come to her suite.
She welcomed him by pressing a drink into his hand and asking him to sit down on one of her curved sofas. Compared to the officers’ austere staterooms, her spacious apartment was colorfully and tastefully decorated, with objects and wall hangings in just the right places. He sat down on the edge of the sofa.
“You’re not drinking,” she said.
Looking at his glass, he said, “I’m still on duty.”
“Well, your duty is to me, so relax and let’s talk.”
He took a tiny sip.
A Semii brought a spread of food—real food, grown on a colony farm somewhere. Boone had eaten real food only once since the Academy, when Reia brought an entourage to serve the officers after a long, exhausting drill sequence. That was when he had first met her. When he was drawn to her intense presence like a star to a black hole.
Reia caught him eyeing the fruit. “Go ahead, Lieutenant. On second thought, I don’t want to spoil your appetite for power cubes.”
The green slice tasted sweet and watery. After taking a bite, he stared at the piece that remained between his fingers. He felt juvenile. He was juvenile.
“Why am I here?” he asked.
She smiled. “I hear you’re the brilliant new strategist.” He blushed. “I thought I should get to know you in case I ever need your advice.”
With that smile he would have given her all the advice in the galaxy right then and there. However, he wasn’t that new. He had been through a lot in his first few months on the Lupis, including a few perilous missions. There was already uncomfortable talk of Lord Vindik’s favor for him. She needed him for something—something political.
Reia and Vindik were rivals, night and day; he in the shadows doing Baisen’s dirty work, and she the face of his business affairs and special projects. The two were rarely seen in the same quadrant of the ship together.
She moved closer and took the fruit out of his hand, set it down, and placed her hand on his thigh. Boone tried not to squirm while every alarm bell in his brain rang.
After that meeting, his torn loyalties paid a heavy price. His responsibilities under Greming and Vindik grew. Reia called on him to discuss the occasional strategy for missions she would barely reveal. Then, one day, it stopped, and she was all cold shoulders. Something had changed, and he didn’t know what—but his heart remained attached, even when his mind was loyal to her rival.
His obsession with her had to be suppressed. If she knew, it would compromise his security. If Vindik or Greming knew…
When the day came that Vindik betrayed Baisen, no one was more aware of how it would play out than Boone. He warned them all—the captains in the fleet who were loyal to Reia, and the people on the Lupis who would need to escape. He still lived with the fear that Greming would find him out. Reia fled with a substantial portion of the fleet, leaving Boone behind.
Leaving the weapon.
In the frigid cell, waves of pleasure mingled with hurt as he remembered how much he had loved Reia. His was not special; everyone loved her. She simply had that power over her people. As his mind drifted in and out of moments he had all but suppressed, he wondered if this sacrifice had been worth it. He wanted her to love him now, but that was a failure to which he had long since resigned himself. His heart had numbed as Vindik’s man. There was no room for attachment in an environment of imminent death. Thoughts of Reia warmed him, then cooled. He had expected to never have those feelings again, trapped in Vindik’s fleet forever.
Until the weapon.
And now Elyon was also far out of reach, but she was safe and would know love. He had done what he set out to do. They were both free, at least for a short while.
30 Aftermath
“Just walk beside me.”
Elyon had rested and bathed, and when Reia returned she brought with her a host of andrones and young women who were eager to help Elyon find the right attire for the evening’s festivities. They primped her, brushed out her hair and folded it into strange knots behind her head, trimmed parts, and scrubbed her face and hands. None of this helped the throbbing inside her head, and the attention from the attendants was overwhelming. Swept up into Reia’s strange and lavish world, she was too tired to resist.
Elyon did as directed and walked beside Reia, who was explaining the occasion. Anger lingered in her aura. “Your former master’s assault has left our little fleet in poor condition,” she said. “We don’t have warships and weaponry—we have civ ships and business. We need to convince some of our wealthiest lienholders to part with some property that we can use directly or sell or put on loan for defenses.” These words meant little to Elyon, who was looking at the floor and fighting a dark mood. “You might remember some of my senior officers, and there will be a few executives, and they are all lienholders in my dominion. We all share business, and they like to be pampered.”
Elyon didn’t know what a lienholder was except that they had immense wealth. “They hand over their ships?” she asked.
Reia laughed. “Of course not. We’ll discuss our options and perhaps decide on some favorable outcomes. Our role is to salvage morale and help the weary mourn our dead.”
Elyon trod on, head pounding with each beat of her heart.
“Lift your head and shoulders back,” Reia commanded. Elyon complied, but the posture only lasted for a few moments before Elyon was staring at the floor again. Occasionally she gazed up at the intricate artistic designs integrated into the walls and doors, tendrils of color from the floor to the ceiling. Fascinating pieces of art, sculptures, and tapestries adorned various walls in rooms where corridors intersected. The colors were brilliant against the white-and-blue-lit textures of the ship’s interior. She glanced at them, but her eyes were mostly downcast.
At last they arrived at a foyer. Large double doors opened to the grand hall, where several high-ranking officers and a formal three-woman color guard greeted them. It was all for show. Hundreds of eyes diverted to the young woman accompanying their executive, but Reia reveled in it. Elyon felt strangely out of place. They entered a room easily ten times the size of Vindik’s observation deck, and significantly brighter. The ceiling had viewscreens of a scene outside, mostly space but in view of what appeared to be a star cluster. A transition line swept across the scene, covering one starfield and revealing another.
Dozens of people, all extravagantly dressed, some with odd hair styles or head pieces, mingled near the center of the hall, but all positioned for their turn to greet the domina.
Elyon found herself moving closer to Reia as her eyes darted around at all the faces that were staring at her. Reia strode through them with grace, acknowledging them with a cheek-kiss or a brief handshake, deftly guiding Elyon along with the other hand. Elyon’s stomach swirled, her chest tightened, and her breathing became shallow. Never had she been near so many people who weren’t soldiers—and she had rarely been around this many soldiers at once. There was no question she was the center of everyone’s attention.
The color guard fanned out around the base of a circular dais. The crowd pressed in. Elyon began to perspire. Her hands shook as a wave of heat washed over her. Reia said, “Breathe deeply,” and Elyon realized she was working herself up. She tried to take deep breaths and not think of the staring faces—no, not staring, they were all standing there, waiting to be slaughtered. Her fists clenched as if around invisible firen stones. The heat was like fire all around her…
Reia wrapped an arm around Elyon’s shoulders and tipped her head toward Elyon’s ear. “Do not,” she said, and her tone snapped Elyon out of her protective trance. She continued in a whisper. “Why don’t you bring your temperature down, and for everyone’s sake, breathe deeply and stay beside me.”
Elyon switched focus from fire to water, which helped her to cool down. The heat subsided, but she was barely hearing what Reia was now saying about the fleet, and their great loss, and the plans for their future. Then she heard her name, “…our young lady, Elyon…” and there was applause and cheering. Elyon didn’t know how to respond. How could she be some kind of hero? She had killed so many of them on her rampage to reach Reia.
Reia put her hand on Elyon’s shoulder again. “Let’s celebrate,” she announced, to which everyone cheered. Music started, and the crowd swirled as people moved to various places in the hall for food, conversation, dancing, or whatever was around. Elyon wasn’t even sure what she was looking at among the stations set up around the hall for various festivities. Someone moved her off the dais. She and Reia spent the next half hour receiving praise and tribute from various dignitaries and wealthy couples and anyone with enough clout to press through the throng. Reia’s influence commanded a strength that carried in her aura, and Elyon shrouded herself within it.
“The progress toward representation in League politics is going well,” said a man in a shimmering burgundy suit.
“The Sincate is happy to hear you survived Yucretia,” said a thin, dark-skinned Saxen woman in a near-black gown.
Elyon found it exhausting. She shook hands but didn’t listen to a word of what these people were saying, all the while watching them transform under Reia’s Saxen tone into satisfied, grateful drones.
When they finally arrived at a table set up for them, Elyon found herself separated from Reia. An old man was speaking to her, and Elyon nodded at whatever he was saying. Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to sort out the memories. Her head felt heavy, and she worried that a storm was coming.
She excused herself and scanned for Reia. Traces of Saxen pheromones lingered, but the domina was nowhere in sight. Taking this opportunity, she shouldered her way through the crowd to the double doors and retraced her steps to the lift.
A console spewed directions to the detention deck where Boone was held, but Elyon’s mind was hard-pressed to keep them straight. On a ship the size of a small city, it was not a matter of making a few turns in the corridors, and unlike the Lupis, this ship had different vibrant designs at every intersection and down every corridor. Detention was as far below the head operational functions as possible.
The underbelly of the ship did not disappoint, as the detention deck’s atmosphere was dark and noisome. The deep hum of a power source vibrated the fumes and stale air. Far down a long corridor, someone wept. Elyon found the place comforting in its familiarity.
The young man that stepped from behind the guard station attempted to protest before Elyon’s finger-punch crushed his windpipe. After a pause in which she stared absently at the dying man, she stepped over his writhing body to examine the console and unlock Boone’s cell.
Elyon didn’t know what to expect when the door slid open, but she had been holding back so many emotions, so much fear, that the mask of anger she had been wearing burst open all at once. The swelling and pressure in her face and chest were no match for the flood of tears that now streaked down her cheeks.
Boone lay on a gray floor, still glistening wet under the dim light. He was nude and curled away from her, shivering on occasion, but otherwise not reacting to the sounds behind him. As she slowly dropped to her knees inside the doorway, she didn’t see the caretaker she had befriended. He was a dead man, coated in streaks of dried blood that had not washed away; purple and bubbling burns around his neck and back; the scorched muscle missing from his bicep. The entire tiny cell was damp, and Elyon realized he had been cold showered, which, after torture, was known to throw its victims into a hypothermic shock.
She stepped in far enough for the door to slide closed behind her. Removing a long cowl from the back of her dress, she draped it over him and arranged its asymmetric shape over his body for the most coverage it would afford him. He quivered at its touch, though she tried to be gentle on his wounds. She kneeled at his back and realized that his skin was covered in old scars and a thin veil of facial hair covered his cheeks and chin. She had never noticed the small, pale scar behind and below his right ear, which must have been visible all along. When she was finished covering him, she sat beside him and choked back the sorrow.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” she said, not knowing if he could hear her. She sobbed once. “I hate her. I hate her, and I hate being here.”
Boone whispered, “Elly.”
Surprised, she leaned over him, hovering above his face. “Boone.” He seemed to be asleep, but his puffy face was twisted into a grimace. She leaned back a bit.
“Elly,” he whispered again. His lips hardly moved. “Go.”
Elyon stared momentarily as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “I’m going to get you out of here. In fact”—she glanced back at the door—“we can go right now. Nobody can stop me.”
“No.”
Elyon paused again, confused. “But we can go anywhere in the galaxy. Nobody will even miss us!”
Boone rolled his head a few centimeters toward her. His swollen, purple eyes did not open, and again his lips barely moved. “Elly, Findik follow us. Mo’fied HTP. Must tell captain.”
Elyon recalled that the HTP drones were used to follow ships through higgspace jumps and return with coordinates. That hadn’t been good enough for Vindik. When his enemies disappeared, he needed to follow them beyond the initial jump.
Now torn between the moment and a strange sense of duty, Elyon ran the situation in her own head. They had simulated a crash on the escape ship by plummeting into the exosphere of Yucretia 4, then accelerated out before a jump. Elyon wasn’t sure what they had done from there, as she had become lost in her anguish. In fact, she didn’t know how long they had been floating around in space conducting business deals and not shoring up their defenses. Her heart began to race as she realized the potential danger they all were in.
Boone’s head rolled back to its neutral position. He once again looked dead.
“I’ll go tell Reia,” said Elyon.
“No,” the lips formed. “Kezen. Only him.”
Kezen—blowing air out his mouth without curling the R on his lips—meant Captain Krezen. She had not yet met him; in fact, she had not yet been to the bridge. And yet she had heard a lot about him, one of the old fleet’s heroes, and a close friend of Reia’s.
“Go,” he whispered. “Or we’re dead.”
She bolted for the bridge, torment forgotten.
31 Tempers
As it was the end of second shift, the corridors were now teeming with people on their way to or from shift work. With her mind set on finding the bridge and Captain Krezen, she walked through them with purpose in her gait. On a console, she pulled up maps and other schematics that were available to the public, despite her lack of familiarity with the interface. It wasn’t long before she arrived at her destination.
Two security personnel stopped her. “Do you have clearance?” one asked.
Elyon’s first instinct was to crush their heads together, but she restrained herself and said, “Reia is my clearance. Get out of my way.”
The door opened. She had never been on a bridge before, and it wasn’t quite what she expected. The room was large and spherical, twenty meters across. The inside of the sphere was all viewscreen displaying the same star cluster she had seen in the great hall, as well as hundreds of ships all around. Extending from the door was a platform ten meters long, with seats at the end, from which several crewmen monitored a variety of small consoles on thin posts. Stepping onto the platform gave her a momentary sensation of vertigo, as if she were stepping into space itself.
Three officers, distinguished by dark green uniforms with white trim, were conferring farther down the platform. They stopped their discussion and turned to stare at the intruder. One of them, a white-haired man slightly shorter and stockier than the other two, recognized her. Waving the others to remain, the white-haired man met her two-thirds of the way along the platform. “Miss Elyon. An unexpected pleasure.” His voice had a whisper quality to it, not raspy but not strong, as if he had to strain to make a sound. He was smiling.
“Captain Krezen?”
“At your service,” he said with a brief nod. “What brings you here?”
“Modified HTP probes,” she said.
His demeanor changed. “Is that right?” He waved the other two officers over. “We… took care of those a long time ago,” he said, crossing his arms.
The officers joined them in time to hear Elyon say, “Trans-dimensional seekers. He has dozens of them.”
The three looked at each other. Krezen said to one, “I want every ship on alert. We’ll jump together to the Aldres rendezvous coordinates.” To the other, “Scan the region for probes and any other unaccounted-for debris or signatures.” To Elyon he said, “Are you sure?”
