by Carysa Locke
A cursory search of his quarters satisfied him that no one had tried to enter them in his absence. He shoved aside the heavy wooden frame of his bed as though it weighed nothing. On the wall behind it was a scanner. He laid his hand against it, and felt the telltale thrum of low level energy as it activated. A seam appeared, and a slight push swung open the compartment he’d framed in himself when the palace was built.
From inside, he pulled out an assault rifle dating back to the Ascension Wars and outlawed in the time since, as well as a locked box about the length of his forearm and the width of his hand. Out of habit, he checked the charge on the assault rifle.
Full, of course. This system’s sun would probably die before the crystal that powered it burned out. Arabis II was destroyed, the planet’s surface a wasteland. But once, the stunning crystal spires had hidden a treasure deep within them. The crystal hearts that grew deep inside the spires were natural batteries of immense power. Deadly to harvest, damn near impossible to get, considered priceless by the galaxy’s most wealthy.
Casimir had two in his possession. The one inside his assault rifle, and the one inside his body.
He used that energy now, channeling it into his hands and focusing his will. There was a faint, barely perceptible sound, like a seal popping open, and the assault rifle and box both vanished. He didn’t know where they went, exactly. Only that he would be able to access them whenever he needed to, pulling them from whatever rent in reality he’d sent them through and back into his possession. Over the long years, he’d sent many items and weapons into otherspace. He had no idea if the place he sent items had any connection at all to the otherspace ships jumped through, but he had no reason to think it didn’t, either. Most of the time, he could easily call items back. Rarely, he couldn’t.
It was only that hint of the unknown that had made him hide anything here in the world he knew, but he could no longer afford that uncertainty. Now was not the time to be clouded by emotion. He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling the rage that had simmered for the past three weeks drain away. Anger accomplished nothing.
He walked out of his quarters and headed to the throne room. On the way there, he checked in with Gideon over his implant, or ‘imp’.
“Report.”
“Just wrapping up the last of it, sir. The transfer is almost done.”
Good. He had just enough time.
The throne room was on the ground floor, situated straight on from the main entrance, the better to keep petitioners and visiting dignitaries away from the rest of the palace. He walked down the hallway often referred to as the “citizens’ path” and stepped into the antechamber.
The doors were closed. Locked.
But not for him.
He ordered it open, and the lock disengaged. The doors to the throne room harkened back to simpler times. Inside, tech controlled them. But their facing was carved of natural wood, heavy and imposing with fancy scrollwork worked around the Ashir crest, a star exploding into a supernova on a field of empty space dotted with smaller stars. They swung open with a whisper of sound, smooth and graceful.
He walked through them, a path he had taken countless times before. Inside, the banners of the original twenty-seven council worlds hung from the walls. The original council table still stood in the center of the room, chairs around it as though a session might be called at any moment. Four people sat in those chairs, looking bored. Three men, one woman. They wore expensive suits that belonged in a corporate boardroom, and at their throats flashed the metallic glint of slave control collars.
Talented. None of them matched the girl he’d seen on the security feed. Not that he’d expected to find her here. She, he remembered, hadn’t been wearing a collar.
Miles Vandencourt was not the kind of man to plan and execute the assassination of an entire government. He was the vulture that swept in after, hoping for scraps from the carcass.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Miles stood up from the throne he had no right to, his drink sloshing over the side of his glass with the movement. He was young, full of himself, and not particularly bright. Just wealthy enough to believe himself invincible.
Five years ago, when his father died from an inexplicable heart attack no one saw coming, Miles inherited the largest banking conglomerate in the Commonwealth. He owned entire planets, along with a personal fleet that rivaled the Royal Navy, and he’d been just twenty years old. A famous playboy, he spent his time traveling the galaxy on his personal yacht, flashing a million-credit smile and showing off a sculpted body created by nanotech.
Given time, Miles probably would have matured to some degree. His father would eventually have taken him in hand and schooled him on running the family business. Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened. Gideon joked that Miles was only the eleventh richest man in the galaxy. When his father died, the Vandencourt fortune had been in the top three. Miles had gambled, partied, and generally wasted away enough of the family fortune to fall eight places down the list.
Casimir ignored him. He kept his attention on the four seated around the table. They, too, had noticed his entrance. Two of the men stood up.
“I’m only going to make this offer once,” Cas said. “I can remove your collars, and you can leave here free people. Or stay, and die with him.”
Miles sputtered. The four Talented looked at each other, then back at Casimir. He knew what they saw: a null. Not a threat.
Two of the men stepped forward, hands raised in identical poses, outstretched toward him in a clear indication of a Talented focusing his will.
Someone with real training would never have telegraphed what they were doing. These were amateurs, not soldiers.
Three things happened at once: a force of wind buffeted Cas, so strong it should have lifted him off his feet and thrown him back out into the corridor; another force gripped his throat like a hand, squeezing; and his symbiont stirred, a cool wash of strength flooding his limbs, grounding him as a matte gray liquid beaded on his skin, pooling and connecting until it sheathed his entire body. It was like a second skin had formed, malleable and thin, yet impenetrable.
Casimir’s body grew dense, heavy. He didn’t move as the wind tore at him. A film covered his eyes, shielding them from the effects and painting the room in tones of gray, while active Talent glowed in his field of vision with faint colors of green, blue, and red. The crushing force at his throat was only a dim pressure, barely felt.
The Talented gaped at him in shock. He should have been thrown across the room, his throat crushed. Instead, he stood completely encased in an armored bodysuit unlike anything seen in a hundred years and brushed off their Talent like it was nothing.
“What—what are you?” The third man asked, rising slowly to his feet. His face was white and pinched with pain. A telepath, Casimir decided. The pain he was experiencing was likely backlash from trying to enter Cas’s mind. The symbiont was a jealous partner, extremely protective against any other perceived intruders.
Casimir ignored the question. “Last chance,” he said. “Walk away free, or die as slaves to this coward.” He gestured to where Miles hunkered under the table, a trembling, fearful mess still clutching his glass and slurping at the contents.
The woman shrugged. “All right.” She met Casimir’s gaze without flinching. “They tell us the only way these collars can be removed is through death. We’ve seen the truth of that many times. Are you saying there’s another way?”
He inclined his head. “I have to touch it.”
She moved around the table, walking towards him. He detected a slight tremor to her gait, but her face was composed, and she didn’t hesitate to close the distance to him.
“Stop!” Miles ordered. “You belong to the Vandencourt family. You are my property.”
“Vera,” Casimir said casually, “if Miles speaks or so much as moves again, please send a record of this interaction to the Commonwealth judiciary branch.” Some remnants of the government were still
in operation, and the judiciary branch was out in force, protecting the populace as best they could, throwing insurrectionaries into prison cells where they would likely remain until this unrest ended. If it ended. “I’m sure they’ll be very interested in the head of the Vandencourt banking conglomerate admitting to human trafficking.”
“Of course, Alik.”
Cas looked at Miles. “I wouldn’t suggest trying to countermand that order. Vera, explain to Miles who has the authority to revoke or change an order I’ve given you.”
“You and the royal family, Alik.”
Miles’ face turned florid with color, his mouth opening and closing as he struggled not to scream the obscenities no doubt flooding his thoughts.
The woman reached Cas and stopped right in front of him, within arm’s length.
“I hope I haven’t just made a terrible mistake,” she said. She was young, maybe in her thirties, the brown skin of her face unlined. Her dark hair was pulled back in a businesslike bun, and her green eyes were bright and intelligent.
“You haven’t,” he said, and closed a hand over the collar at her throat. He could feel the thrum of nanotech buzzing through it, the tiny little machines that aligned themselves with her DNA, programmed to explode if the collar was ever removed. It was a fashionable looking circlet, easy to mistake for jewelry. But it was a vile thing, made for one purpose: to kill whoever wore it. If they used their Talent without permission, it exploded. If they tried to remove it, it exploded. It grew or shrank with them, bonded to them the moment it was placed around their necks. He’d met Talented over a hundred years old who couldn’t remember not having a collar. It was expensive tech, and not every slaver used it, but the wealthy ones, like Miles, did. The collars were the surest way of controlling a Talented slave.
The woman’s breathing had become irregular the moment he touched the collar. Fear dilated her eyes.
“Relax,” Cas told her. “This isn’t the first time I’ve removed one of these.”
He gathered the familiar energy in his body and focused it, as he had before. He felt warmth pool in his hand, and he focused his will on the collar. The faint pop as it disappeared made the woman flinch. A moment later, her eyes widened as she realized that the collar was gone, and she was still alive. She put a hand to her throat, feeling at the pale line of flesh where the collar had rested.
“It’s gone!” She spun toward the other three. “It’s really gone!”
They all stared at her, Miles included. His mouth gaped open.
“Anyone else?” Cas asked.
The other three practically tripped over each other to get to him first. He freed them all. He didn’t know if the collars exploded after he sent them to otherspace, or wherever things went when he did what he did. He’d never tried recalling one.
When he was done, and the man who’d tried to choke him with telekinesis was rubbing at his throat, Cas waved a hand at Miles. “He’s all yours,” he said.
Miles tried to scramble out from under the table, but he didn’t make it far before he was lifted into the air, choking on air and clawing at his own throat with futile fingers. Casimir turned away, not because watching Miles die for his sins bothered him, but because something else had caught his attention.
He walked to the throne, his eyes on the wall behind it. Here hung the symbols of the monarchy behind a stasis field. A scepter, a crown, and a necklace. Each was set with multiple jewels, but one blazed brighter than all of the rest.
A huge jewel formed the center of the crown, carved in a teardrop shape, sapphire hued and burning with an inner fire. It wasn’t a jewel exactly, it just resembled one. In fact, the same technology that had created the slave collars was also responsible for the Royal Paragon. The size of a man’s palm, it was connected to the Ashir family on a molecular level, designed to burn with the shimmer of fiery color for as long as the family line existed.
Decades ago, when the technology was first created, many wealthy families purchased them. The Ashir weren’t the first to use it, but the royal family adopting it as part of the crown jewelry had certainly popularized the practice, and suddenly every noble or wealthy family in the galaxy was buying jewelry with Bloodline Jewels, as they were called.
The jewels were representative of the family. As long as they burned brightly, the family survived — the whimsical marketing campaign had used the word thrived, but that wasn’t actually true. The glow simply meant the family bloodline lived. Some even used the stones to verify the veracity of a bastard’s claim. A genetic test was just as easy, but not nearly as romantic. The glow of the stones intensified when they were physically held or worn by a family member.
When the bloodline connected to a particular jewel died out, so did the inner fire within the gemstone. It faded to a standard sparkle and looked like a run-of-the-mill, normal sapphire. It could never be rekindled or bonded to anyone else.
The crown jewelry did not look like a normal sapphire. It glowed with life, with vibrancy and fire.
There was only one way that could be possible.
Behind him, there was a great deal of commotion and conversation among the four Talented he’d freed, but the sounds and words washed over him like white noise. None of it mattered.
The royal line was not dead. Somewhere out there, an heir to the monarchy lived. All he had to do was find them.
Chapter One
Skeletal buildings rose like dark monoliths all around Mercy. She stayed where she was, huddled in the shadows between two of them, scanning the empty street. It was night, and cloud cover hid the planet’s two moons. The only light was the pitiful glow from the few bioluminescent stone paths and building enhancements somehow still active, diffused by the rain that sluiced down so hard her clothing was soaked through in seconds. It was too much water, too fast for the mending and cleaning features to keep up with. The material clung cold against her skin, water dripping down her neck.
Really? She swore the sky was clear just minutes ago.
She hadn’t been planetside in months, and she’d never been to this world before, a relic from the Ascension Wars, broken and littered with ruined cities and craters that were the remnants of battlefields. Once a thriving civilization of science and technology, Arcadius V was a husk of a planet, scarred and inhabited by monsters. Rumored to be the birthplace of the Talented, among other experiments in creating the perfect soldier, the planet was destroyed in the wars. Billions of lives slaughtered, its vast databases and archives of knowledge lost.
In the wake of peace, a few intrepid salvagers ventured onto its surface to see what wealth could be scrounged from the ruins. None of them came back. A distress beacon from one of the salvage ops led to a rescue effort from the newly minted Commonwealth Navy. Looking to establish itself as an entity which citizens could count on, the military sent in drop-pods filled with an entire company of Orbital Rescue, their special forces trained to drop in to hostile territory from low orbit, rescue and recover. First created during the wars, Orbital Rescue had decades of experience and training in dropping onto planets engulfed in conflict and coming out alive.
Of the two dozen troops who went down to the surface of Arcadius V, three returned. They rescued no one. The military, cognizant of the PR nightmare they faced, released statements declaring the planet a Level 6 hazard, one level higher than any previously classified world. It was illegal to even orbit the planet, much less attempt planetfall. The Commonwealth had no way of preventing salvagers from trying, of course, but the label meant they were under no obligation to rescue anyone who made the attempt, and any goods or artifacts retrieved from the surface would be confiscated and destroyed, if discovered. Whoever was caught holding such artifacts would face a life sentence in one of the harshest prisons in the galaxy.
No one had been to Arcadius V in decades. Information on it was so classified the only thing listed in the navigational charts was “Quarantine - Level Six Hazard. Threat Tier: Lethal.”
The handful of
reports that escaped the military lockdown mentioned a landscape made barren by war, empty cities falling to ruin, and monsters. Beyond basic flora and fauna, the only life left on the planet consisted of whatever lab experiments had escaped, and lived to multiply and thrive in an unforgiving environment.
One of the files Wolfgang unearthed from his old military contacts had a few holopics, taken of the three surviving Rescue personnel. One of them had four ten-inch gashes from her shoulder to her hip, spaced apart like claws and deep enough to see the white flash of bone.
She’d died days later of an apparent infection.
Another had boils that covered half his face and body: huge, ugly pustules which looked red and painful. He’d lived, but later holos showed his skin pitted and scarred; his body a withered shell of the fit man he’d once been.
The third survivor didn’t have any holopics. The entire entry was redacted, with only a single pronoun use indicating the soldier had been male. Mercy didn’t want to know what had happened to him. There was no indication of how long he’d survived, only that he was ‘deceased’.
Not my idea of a vacation spot, she thought at Reaper. He was somewhere nearby, scouting the area before they proceeded forward. A skilled telepath and telekinetic with a special Talent to see the most efficient way to kill anyone, he was also a highly trained soldier and assassin. If anyone could be considered safe on a planet this hazardous, it was Reaper.
Nor mine. Be still. And quiet.
I am being quiet.
Mercy. Whatever monsters inhabit this world were made by the same scientists who made us.
I know.
So, he said, they could be Talented.
A silence filled with dawning horror fell between them. Or at least, dawning horror on Mercy’s part. Reaper was in his cold place, suffused with his Talent, an icy presence that leeched away emotion, leaving him a cold and calculating Killer.
Mercy didn’t dare say anything else. She let her silence speak for her, and she felt Reaper continuing on, apparently satisfied at her compliance.
