“I want you to be still.”
He liked that – she read it in his glistening eyes – the idea of being reduced to a thing of flesh and given instructions rather than dishing them out was liberating and seductive. She read the subtle signs in him – the curl of tongue at the corner of his mouth, the flush of heat and subtle flex of muscle under her grip.
She milked him, alternating between watching his face with dispassion and fixating on the rigid shaft. Joltu kept his eyes open, not entirely trusting yet given over to her. His lower lip trembled; she wanted to bite it. Not through passion, but some desire to sink her teeth in and make him bleed.
It fascinated and aroused her to have such a true grip on the man who bedded down with her in spite of the lice. His sex twitched under her grip, the muscles across his groin spasming. To Kali, the cock in her hand had its own life force. She stroked that blind and naked vertebrate, feeling its ridges and tender tip.
“Be still for me,” she insisted as Joltu’s breathing became laboured.
He cleared his throat, forcing the rising of breath and ecstasy to quieten. She stayed emotionless, even as she felt the pulse of heat and slickness pump between her fingers. It would have been easy to ride him, bucking and carousing as the sweat broke between them. It was a finer, tighter wire of discomfort to hold back and drag and tease until his face contorted.
“Argh!” He bucked, greasing her clutching fingers.
She continued to watch, noting the careful ease of motion and loosening her grip. If he had been her experiment, she felt her knowledge had advanced. ‘I told you to be still,’ she wanted to tell him, pinching his sticky red bud by way of punishment. Instead, she did not take her eyes away from him, just let her hands fall back by her sides and was still herself.
Joltu didn’t have the chance to explore what lay beneath Kali’s rough layers. A curt rap on the door was met with Joltu’s sharp command to “Enter!”
A guard came into the room. The man was panting, his face red as rind fruit. “Commandant Superintendent! Apologies, sir, but we have a small group of insurgents directly outside this building. Shall we activate their wrist nicks now or wait until the prisoners are rounded up and take them to the firing range?”
“You interrupt me for this?” Joltu snatched his jacket off the back of his office chair and stormed from the room, leaving the door open.
Left behind, Kali waited a few seconds, breath rising high in her chest. She was very nervous, which surprised her. She had engaged in plenty of active service during her time in the guard. This was just another mission, albeit one where it was the Vary she called allies and her kin, the Bleek, who threatened her with discovery.
Forcing herself to act, she ran round to the other side of the desk and took a seat in front of Joltu’s gel frame. Stealing glances at the open doorway and ignoring the itch of her nicks – made worse by the threat of discovery – she entered the string algorithm she had memorised from watching the Commandant Superintendent log in. Metadata spooled before her eyes. Seeing the streaming lines again made Kali nostalgic for the regime of her past and nauseously reminded of another time she betrayed another’s trust.
To Kali, it felt like only yesterday that she typed her Discharge Manifesto into the country’s metadata, calling for a kinder resolution to the Vary Problem. She had pressed SEND so easily. Was it strange that she stood by the contents of that document? Even after everything she had endured, her father’s politics of ethnic cleansing struck her as clumsy. If she allowed herself to truly feel, they might even be perverse.
The key code was hidden beneath a firewall of bruise code and mundanity. She memorised the sequence of Bleek glyphs. Strapped against her chest by two lengths of braided stone wool, the dalma plates were her secret to guard – as was now the passkey.
She was about to step away from the gel frame when another folder caught her eye:
TITIAN K PRECEDURE NKR.
Kali checked the doorway. Still empty. The uproar from outside had subsided – which meant her window for accessing Joltu’s gel frame was closing. All the same, she had to know what was in that folder!
The files were open access. Apparently she was the subject of a series of transmissions between a Doctor Harris and the Secretary of State, Weilen Von Kirkland. She gleaned what she could, eyes flitting across the screen as if the words she read there threatened to burn her retinas. She latched onto a smattering of phrases – ‘Kali Titian’, ‘Subject 952187’, and ‘Under the Sanction of High Judge Titian.’ A physical operation was described – talk of her suitability for the experiment and the bio-fusion of her chemical makeup and something called the NKR nucoid. She pressed a hand to her throat and held back the fear. She didn’t understand the science, but the idea of being subject to cross-genetic experimentation was gut-wrenching.
The last communication had a feedback link from Joltu. He had signed off on the procedure. The date was irrelevant; with no concept of how much time had passed since her arrival in Abbandon, Kali couldn’t begin to know if Joltu had put his mark to the experiment before she had even arrived or in the moments before she jerked him off.
“Kali.”
She looked up to see Joltu standing in the doorway. His face was hard. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” He eyed the gel frame.
Kali stepped away from the desk. It hurt her to be discovered in the act. Her tasks had been so simple. Find the keycode. Deliver the dalma plates to the docking bay. In return, a pair of Vary martyrs would cause a scene outside the officers’ quarters, giving her the opportunity to search Joltu’s personal datastacks. Her part in the plan was paramount and now she had outstayed her welcome and been discovered. All for the sake of a glance through files she might never have had to worry about if the plan had come to fruition.
She went with the truth, a part of it at least. “I wanted to know if my father had enquired after me.” She swallowed. “I wanted to know if he had tried for a pardon on my behalf.”
“No. No, he hasn’t,” said Joltu, keeping his eyes on Kali as he came into the room. At the desk, he shut down the gel frame and sat down heavily in his office chair.
“Two Vary males decided to start a fight outside the building. They were bled out by their nicks on the spot.” He gestured to the door. His eyes narrowed. “Mind the blood on your way out.”
Kali had her arms folded like a barrier against Joltu’s reprisal; she forced herself to lower them, aware of the stone tablets strapped to her skin. There were no apologies to be made, no admonishments or making up. She had overstepped the boundaries. There would be no more meetings in private.
She left the office, closing the door at her back.
This much Grizmare had learnt from the Resistance. High Judge Titian’s gunners were winning him the war. While the United Dominions had inflicted considerable damage on Bleekland’s smaller craft, the aerospace was littered with enemy debris. By all accounts, there was a chance that Bleekland would push through and secure a globe-wide surrender by the end of the year. Victory would give the nation free rein to commit genocide against the Vary and to spread out beyond Bleekland’s sweltering, ruptured landscape.
“The war is being lost because no other country is willing to sacrifice its hardware so readily,” 94 had told her at the rebel’s cave. “The Bleek have Vary labour. No other country can boast those resources. It would take a miracle to sway the war’s outcome.”
Days later, it was time to test that theory as she walked a corridor lined with the offices of government, the occasional stretch of window giving out on a city that looked like a land of giants. Officials passed her now and again. All nodded in recognition. Not a soul thought to stop her. Grizmare carried on lurching forward. Hips crackling. Knees threatening to give way.
She had memorised the route from the Resistance blueprint. Finally arriving at the airlock, she used the inbuilt suck syringe to extract a fine spray of her blood and thumbed the gel patch. The door revolved on greased tracks. Beyond,
a corridor stretched away to a distant square of black.
Titian blood. Grizmare smirked as she sucked her thumb and hobbled inside. The door revolved back into place and all noise cut out. For a few seconds, she was suspended in total darkness. The sensation was eerie; womblike. Then tiny recessed fire lamps burst into life on the floor, lighting a pathway. Pushing herself on, she made it to the far end of the airlock, where, with a small pish of releasing air, a second inner door revolved and gave her access to the inner sanctum.
Twenty-Six
The twenty-five were stationed around the circumference of the gunner. To the National Guard, they were Vary swine going about their daily labour. Males took to the riser rigs, logged out tools, poked and prodded at the shell of the warship, and tried their best to survive another day.
Officer Hockle never understood why the Vary strove so hard to survive. Wasn’t the easier option to make a nuisance of themselves early on and get the painful part over and done with? By his reckoning, nicks were clean and controlled mechanisms which guaranteed death. But the bastards would insist on eking out their miserable lives, even as the fat melted off their bones and the lice and rot set in.
Hockle thought about his family. His youngest, Giselle, would have pitied the Vary perhaps. She was, after all, a solemn child with a tendency to cry at the death of a mouse or finding a bone in her jack rabbit supper. His son, Dolg, would have a different view. Hockle sucked on his smokestick and rested his elbows on the railings, staring down at the prisoners in the holding bay. He saw the Vary with the same dispassion he had bred in his son.
“It is a waste of Bleekland resources to endure them to live.” Hockle could imagine his son’s reaction to the creatures below – and yes, his son might have started to spout High Judge Titian’s official indoctrinations with the same ease as childhood rhymes, but he had a clear way of thinking that Hockle envied.
Only once had he wondered at the purity of Titian’s vision. Face-to-face with Lieutenant Kali Titian, he had asked himself what kind of monster could dispatch his own daughter to Abbandon. It made him sick to the stomach to imagine Giselle subjected to the humiliation and degradation of life in the prison camp. It hurt him to the marrow to know a child could betray her father as profoundly as Kali Titian had, but he still couldn’t reconcile the violence of her punishment. As he explained to his wife at the time of her sentencing, “It wasn’t like she committed murder. She just had a breakdown of sorts. Somehow those Vary swine must have polluted her mind, don’t ask me how! But at the end of the day, was any harm really done? After all, it wasn’t like her so-called manifesto made the slightest bit of difference. Sure, folk read it, and yes, it proved there was a flaw in High Judge Titian’s datastack security, but nothing changed, did it? No one thought any differently because of her words.”
His wife, Clara, had nodded in agreement. Her eyes, though, had gone to the far end of the room, settling on Giselle. Their solemn child – too long in the womb, the midwives had explained. Hockle’s little girl, who didn’t quite act like her Bleek compatriots. His precious Giselle. A child born different.
Staring down at the prisoners, Hockle dragged on his smokestick and dreamt of Giselle’s sweet-smelling hair and ticklish feet. He allowed himself a smile. There were Vary enough to keep High Judge Titian appeased. As long as he kept Giselle in the shadows, she would be safe.
“There has been an outbreak of lungrot in the quarry,” Sister Eva told the pair of guards stationed at the door. “I need to make an assessment of your workers. The disease spreads like wildfire.”
The guards nodded. They knew all too well that lungrot could take out a colony in a fortnight and no one, Bleek or Vary, would be spared.
“This one’s with me,” she said, nodding at Groff. She might have been Ju’s younger sister once upon a time. But today she was Sister Eva – tight-mouthed and efficient.
Who were the men to question one of Gothendore’s Sisters? They stepped aside, envying the pitiful prisoner with the bleeding rag at his mouth. Lungrot was airborne and even that filthy rag was better than no filter.
More of the National Guard peered down from the balcony. They saw the two on sentry duty wave the sister in along with her Vary companion. They watched the sister direct the male to gather saliva samples from the Vary workers on the ground.
Groff made his way over to Mohab.
“You have it?”
Groff nodded. He slid the final vial into Mohab’s hand.
Mohab frowned as he pocketed the contraband. “What happened to your mouth?”
Groff took away the rag. He opened his mouth and prodded a finger at a second gap in his teeth. The gum was soft red jelly.
“Harris took a tooth. It is nothing next to his usual butchery.” It was difficult for Groff to talk. His speech came out mangled.
“Any idea where Kali is? She’s late.” Mohab was sweating.
Groff shook his head.
Sister Eva arrived and offered Mohab a spit pot.
Mohab put the pot to his lips and handed it back over. “Have you seen Kali?”
Sister Eva forced cups on a couple more workers and shook her head.
Mohab searched the hanger for Kali’s face, remembering the day he left the infirmary and saw the lieutenant exiting the officers’ quarters. Was it so surprising that she had chosen to fuck one of her own kind? Joltu was not just Bleek, he was Commandant Superintendent and one of the Bleekland elite, a club to which Kali had herself belonged. Was it so very unusual to want a taste of the familiar in Abbandon’s alien landscape?
Except, at that moment, he needed Kali to put aside the reminder of her old life and prove her loyalty to the same people she had once tried to destroy. Staring at the men waiting on his order, Mohab felt the anger resonating off them. How much longer had they got until the National Guard sensed rebellion in the air?
“Where is your Primary?”
It was one of the guards. Mohab recognised the man; he was the same one who attacked him all those months ago, when he first stepped off the haulage wagon. The man’s face was etched into his brain along with each thud of a boot against his ribs and each crush of a fist.
He steadied his voice. “She has not arrived yet.”
The guard exhaled heavily, hand twitching near the handle of his beater. “Then how are you to do your work?” He leaned in. His breath was sweet with beer sops. “How are you to have a purpose?”
Mohab thought about driving his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets. He wanted to scream into that dreadful face, scream and not let up until the bastard’s ears ran with blood.
“The Commandant Superintendent wanted to see me.” Kali arrived alongside them. She had been running. Her shoulders heaved as she struggled to catch her breath.
“Apparently the Commandant Superintendent likes to swim in the gutter.” The guard looked Kali up and down. It surprised Mohab to see a suggestion of sadness in the man’s eyes. Did he actually feel sorry for High Judge Titian’s daughter?
“Get your tool roll and catch up.” The guard turned away and headed for the nearest riser rig.
Kali choked against the back of a hand. “He saw me. Joltu saw me looking at his datastack screen.”
“And he let you go?” Sister Eva tucked the clutch of saliva samples into her satchel. She retrieved a small grip pistol at the same time. It was an unreliable weapon in Abbandon’s desert atmosphere. Little wonder the National Guard relied on nicks and beaters, thought Mohab. All the same, he wanted to break the woman’s arm for a chance at the weapon.
He stifled the impulse. “The men are in position. Groff, we look to you to start this fight.” His eyes went to Kali. “And we look to you to end it.”
“Yes, yes.” Groff padded the ground. Even given the circumstances, he struck Mohab as extraordinarily twitchy. “There is a girl in the medical suite. I must break her out and bring her with us. I shall activate the chemical and then I must fetch her.”
“There’s no time, Groff
. Don’t be ridiculous!” Thrusting a spit cup into Groff’s hand, Sister Eva directed him to use it with a sharp nod of her head.
Groff ignored her. “I delivered the girl into the hands of monsters. I cannot justify any escape attempt without trying to rescue her too.”
“We will have enough to contend with,” Mohab said, “without additional complications.” He couldn’t understand the stupidity of what Groff was suggesting. There wasn’t time to delay. Everything must be done now, swiftly and effectively.
It was Kali who spoke up for the nurse. Taking in the perimeter of the hanger with its watchful National Guard and resting gunner, she said quietly, “Groff has his morality and he must shoulder it. As I shoulder mine. I will steer the gunner by way of the medical suite. If you aren’t waiting outside with or without the girl when we pass, I will be forced to forget you.”
Hers was a promise so absolute that it left the small group silent. In that moment, Mohab felt the mantle of his existence as the Speaker’s son lift. There was no further need for stories, for the shape and sound of language. All that was left was the plan.
Mohab retrieved the four vials from his waistband, adding them to the spit cups in Sister Eva’s tray of empties. She nodded and turned around. Stalking away from the gunner, she crouched down in a corner of the hanger and busied herself with the contents of the tray.
“Hi, sister! Are you all right there?” A guard leaned out from the balcony. When Sister Eva didn’t answer, he signalled to a nearby pair of blockers. “Go help the sister. She appears to have fallen.”
Mohab was vaguely aware of another guard calling down, demanding that Mohab and Kali get on with their work, threatening to activate their nicks and cursing their mothers’ wombs. Kali fetched her tool roll from the rack, hoisted it onto her back and pushed Mohab in the direction of the gunner.
Rise Page 18
