Mantivore Prey

by S. J. Higbee

  “Shoot her! Shoot her – a fortune for the man who does!”

  “Ahh!” I howled my grief for Seth. A wordless wail of despair. We’d so nearly reached the makings of a solid life together! And this ambitious sack of shit and skin saw fit to invade my territory… turn my guards with false promises and real threats… drug and belittle me… beat and murder the one person in this world who made me happy…

  All this was scrolling through my head as I fell on Clete, gouging, battering, jabbing and beating. Over and over… Until there was nothing of his head but a red ruin his own mother wouldn’t recognise.

  I staggered to my feet, spattered with blood, bone and brain. Everyone was staring at me as if I was about to sprout horns and a tail.

  It took a couple of goes to speak as my throat was fiery agony where I’d been screaming so much. “Why are children and oldsters still out here in the noonblast? Get them into the Meeting House, yesterday. All those with medi-skills, tend to the wounded and get them to the Medical Centre. Crayler! Round up all those you know to be disloyal and herd them into the Security Suite.” I looked down at my red, dripping robes.

  I can’t go to Seth like this. He’d hate it if I said my last good-bye all covered in blood. I need to get clean, first. “I’m going to change. And then, I’ll return to sort things out.”

  Before I marched off to Felina’s, I spun back to the director of the film. “I want all your cam footage, unedited, by the end of the day. No one is to view it. Is that clear?”

  He bowed, a disturbing gleam in his eyes as he straightened. “It shall be done, Your Ladyship!”

  Another shower. How different from the last one. Then, I was full of emotions – anger, fear, hope for a chance of escaping… Now, I was empty. Numb. I’d lost the one person in the world who mattered more than everyone else and gained more responsibility and duty than was bearable. And yet, I’d have to go on bearing it, because if I didn’t, the consequences were unthinkable. Thousands and tens of thousands would likely die, the strong would turn on the weak, a generation of children and babies would be wiped out.

  I showered and changed, as emotionless as a trashbot. When Madam Stylist tapped on the door, I sent her away. This wasn’t the time for elaborate hairstyles and flawless make-up. My face was swollen and sore from the heat, my lips cracked and bleeding, why deny it? Staring at my reflection before returning to the carnage in The Square, I ripped off the goggles. I no longer needed them and it was time people got used to the way I really looked.

  Felina was waiting for me in her sitting room. “You shady, Raindrop?” She looked at me, her bright, silver-flecked eyes sad as she clicked her tongue. “Course you’re not. You been to hell and back.”

  “What Vrox did,” I lowered my voice, despite no one else being in the room. “I’m gonna say that Burch was beheaded by my orders. And that stealth business… I’m guessing Jessob was behind that stunt. Because I can’t work out quite how a seven-foot-high mantivore was able to sneak into the middle of the square without anyone noticing.”

  Felina sighed. “I wanted him to get to that piece of pus before you had to… do what you did.”

  “Once he shot Seth – that made him my business.” Cos Vrox never really liked him.

  She nodded. “Are you going to see Seth? I’m guessing he could do with it.”

  I stared at her. I knew she also believed in God, but why would Seth’s corpse need me?

  “I’m not gonna pray over him. And I’ll be honest, there’s things I’ve got to do before I can let go and mourn him.”

  Felina’s eyes widened. “Has no one told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “Seth’s not dead, Raindrop. The shot made a bit of a mess of his shoulder, but it should heal up well enough—”

  She might have said more, but I didn’t hear it because I’d sprinted for the door, stopping only to grab my sunscreen. I was supposed to wait for my escort, but not this time. I was heading for the Medical Centre as fast as I could run and nothing was gonna stop me.

  *

  Nothing quite works out, does it? I’d been all set to run across The Square, but halfway there, my nemmet-bitten knee gave out and I came crashing down, rolling several times along the path, before coming to a stop. I was all set to scramble to my feet, dust myself off and continue hobbling to Seth, but the interfering, insubordinate articles who called themselves my guards had caught up with me and weren’t having any of it.

  “It’s only the roaching nemmet bite from last night!” I snapped, before wishing I’d sealed it shut. Next thing, I was loaded up onto a hover gurney and hauled along like a crate of olives, while treated to a finger-wagging explanation about how nemmet poison should be treated with respect as it can be very serious.

  “I know! I checked the wound after my shower and it’s just fine—”

  As well as that head injury, because they all saw me repeatedly hit about the head with that skelper’s gun, which also ought to be checked out. Crayler wagged his finger at me while delivering this nonsense. A.Gain.

  “If my behaviour slides away from the norm, I’ll be sure to say,” I announced to a pent silence, before recalling that taking down an armed man with bare hands probably counted as odd behaviour.

  On arriving at the Medical Centre, stacked out with the genuinely wounded and ill, I vainly tried to persuade Crayler to just take me to see Seth. But no. He interrupted Beneth, busy treating one of the children suffering from the effects of the noonblast, with an overblown account of my very minor injuries.

  Instead of giving the wretched Captain the flickoff as he deserved, Beneth immediately whisked me off to a small side room and gave me a thorough examination, while ‘Your Ladyshipping’ me to the skies and back, yet ignoring all my protests that I was shady. Or would be when I got to see Seth.

  Without another word, Beneth immediately had me moved into the overflow ward, where Seth was fighting to surface from the drowsiness of the painpatches they’d used before treating him. While I lay alongside him, she continued treating my wound. I think I promised her a rejen unit out of my own funds, I was so grateful.

  He was thrashing around, muttering a mixture of prayers and curses as he struggled to surface from the drugs they’d used while cleaning his wound and binding it up.

  “Seth? I’m so glad you’re alive,” I whispered, knowing he probably wouldn’t remember. “I thought you’d died. That we wouldn’t have a chance to be together.”

  “Libby? I thought he’d killed you!” His eyes opened, sleepy and unwary, his smile lighting up the whole of his face. He’d never looked so beautiful.

  And I, who had been so desolately numb, was suddenly full of tears, shaking relief and a desperate need for comfort only he could offer. I scrambled across onto his bed – on his good side – and as his arm folded around me, I was safe for the first time in a millennium, or so it seemed. My eyes leaked tears onto his shoulder – the good one – while he mumbled prayers for us as I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  While we slept, Seth and I, the relieving forces sent by The Council arrived and blew through Cnicus like a monsoon. All the soldiers, loyalists and traitors alike, were confined to barracks by a sour-faced Commander, who embodied much of what I hated in Gloriosans – arrogance, entitlement, and disdain for all things Cnican. Though I’ll concede that Paulder Commander extended his disdain to nearly everyone on the planet, so I give him a pass on that one. What he also possessed was shard-sharp intelligence, a raptor eye for detail, a keen regard for the rules until they got in the way; and a magnificent disregard for anyone’s rank, if he felt they didn’t merit it. We locked horns more than once in the coming handful of days, which were some of the longest and toughest of my life. But our first interview was one of the spikiest, given I was furious enough to froth at the mouth.

  While we slept, Paulder Commander managed to winkle out of the roaching film director all the footage of the mess in The Square,
despite my express orders not to show it. He saw it – and not only that, he also managed to get it sent back to Gloriosa Prime. Our isolation from the rest of the planet, miraculously faded away once the emergency was resolved. My gratitude to Master Trask Brarian for his work in keeping Clete from accessing his support was rather dented at his compliance with the Commander’s orders, ensuring that footage was seen by all The Council. This meant anyone who had the resources would be able to get hold of it. And did. I saw it in their faces when we finally arrived back in Gloriosa Prime – a mixture of disgust and awe…

  “That film footage was to be placed in my possession. And no one, but no one was to see it. Were you not made aware of my explicit instructions?” I demanded, after summoning the Commander to Felina’s Reception Room.

  “I was, Your Ladyship,” he said. Just like that. No hint of apology or regret.

  “How dare you!” I snarled, flexing my hands as ThreatDrool flooded my mouth and the air shivered with my fury.

  His eyes widened a fraction and he took a step backwards, but I didn’t feel as satisfied as I might, given I was wrestling a rage of mantivore proportions back into its box.

  “Can I have your permission to speak freely, Your Ladyship?”

  I nodded, grimly aware this was Gloriosan-speak for off-loading fancy-sounding insults without getting punished for it.

  “This mess…” The Commander’s raised eyebrow dismissed Cnicus and our bruising adventures here. “This whole mess revolved around the question of your fitness to rule. Frankly, while your candidacy was beyond argument, a growing faction felt you weren’t sufficiently engaged or knowledgeable enough about Gloriosan affairs and furthermore, you didn’t appear to care enough to learn about them.”

  I opened my mouth to object, thought about it, and nodded. “That’s a fair assessment, I reckon.”

  “Of course, since your personal Healer was MindTrawled, we’ve learnt she was systematically drugging you to make you more pliable. It also seems your mantivore was flushing a lot of the drugs out of your system, which probably also accounts for his mood swings and unpredictable behaviour,” continued the Commander, firing these major info-nuggets at me as if they were the weather.

  Witchbitch! I’d hoped that she had been coerced or recently bribed, but it became obvious that Ellern Healer Prime had always been working to undermine me. I blinked rapidly, my nictitating membrane suddenly giving me a problem.

  “For what it’s worth, it seems she’d got it into her head that your unique situation was a highly abusive one. Wherein the mantivore locks onto your mind whenever he sees fit and you’re the one that bears the consequences. She was trying to free you from that, apparently.”

  Are you throwing all this at me to try and haul me to a halt? Because it won’t work! “Which doesn’t explain why you saw fit to ignore my orders regarding that film footage.”

  Paulder Commander hesitated. “When you were attacking Gator, how much do you recall of the… details?”

  And where’s he going with this? “Not much.” Alight with fire and fury at the death of Seth. Ablaze with pain and the need to revenge him… I shivered, shutting the memory down. It was bad enough dreaming about it – I wasn’t about to relive it during daylight hours as well.

  “You didn’t at any stage think about the Nodery, or the Command Codes?”

  “No! Why’d I think about them?”

  Paulder’s stare packed a punch as he locked looks with me. “Because right in the middle of your assault upon Clete Gator, all the Command Codes failed.”

  I blinked. “In Cnicus?”

  “As far as we can ascertain, throughout the whole planet for the duration of one minute and twenty-seven seconds exactly. Is there any particular significance in the elapsed time you know of, Your Ladyship?”

  “No.” My anger was replaced by crawling dread. “How many died?”

  “Not as many as you’d think, though we still don’t know the final number. There are areas we haven’t yet reached. There were a fair number of accidents in Gloriosa Prime, mostly caused by the gape-brained fools who continually run their trafcars on max, relying on the failsafes to prevent collisions. Seventy were injured, fifteen seriously and four died. When flyers started falling, their onboard emergency thrusters kept them from crashing, apart from six wet-wits who attempted to manually override the controls.” Paulder paused, his gaze burning holes in my soul. “And you’ve no notion of what could have caused the Codes to cut out?”

  “No.” Vrox, was it you? There was the now-familiar empty space. He was either engrossed with something else, or chose not to reply.

  The Commander’s eyes narrowed. “You do realise that if The Council has sufficient reason to believe that you are responsible for harming the Codes or the Node nexus in any way, I am authorised to take you into custody pending a Special Hearing, Your Ladyship.”

  I stared back at him. “I’m guessing that yesterday, some of those autocams in the sky were yours. And you decided to wait and see who would win, before riding to our rescue.” You fickle-fingered roacher!

  It was Paulder Commander’s turn to look away.

  “I’m also guessing that a fair number of the Bridgedeckers and their followers would have preferred a nasty, amoral piece of pus like Clete Gator, rather than an ignorant dust-tic girl with a mantivore in tow. Even though he didn’t have anything to back his claim other than planet-sized ambition and a sense of entitlement to dwarf the sun.”

  “Even so, Your Ladyship.” Paulder resumed his stare, raising an eyebrow. “Fortunately, the right side won. And I chose to circulate the footage for two reasons. Firstly, everyone is rightly very taken up with the question as to what happened to the Codes during your attack on Clete Gator. And secondly, it shows everyone in a hard, dangerous situation. Any kind of façade people construct tends to fall away under those circumstances. As happened during The Siege of the Square.”

  I bit back a groan. The Siege of the Square! If they’ve hung a name around that mess, it means far too many folks have worn their sorry eyes out on it, pawing through our fear and pain and misery. Rot them!

  “What everyone will have seen is Gator’s willingness to sacrifice all and everyone to get what he wanted. And they will also have witnessed your absolute refusal to see anyone hurt if you could possibly avoid it. Yours and Lord Seth’s.”

  They’ll also see me whimpering and making nice with the upswept skelper… grovelling in the dirt… And finally, they’ll see me ripping him apart with my bare hands, howling like the monster I am. I shut my eyes. “Please tell me that you at least edited the last piece of footage. Where Clete died.” I opened them again, and whispered, “Please…”

  “I didn’t, Your Ladyship.”

  Oh nooo…

  “The Council – and indeed, everyone else – needs to understand that though you are apparently pliable, there runs through you a core of durasteel that won’t be bent to anyone’s whims. And braided through that core is a sense of responsibility towards those whose lives are in your hands.” The Commander’s voice held a hint of sympathy. “I understand your feelings about that last section of film…”

  No, you don’t.

  “But your loss of dignity has to be balanced against The Council’s need to fully appreciate your fitness to rule,” announced the roacher. “And now, if I can draw your attention to the situation of the forces who have been compromised…” And as far as he was concerned, that was that.

  Never mind I had to live with most everyone around me knowing what lurked inside me. At least Seth didn’t get to see it, as he was seriously injured at the time.

  But of course, some long-nosed skelper with too much time on his hands thought he ought to see it.

  I knew the moment I sat down by his bed – the shoulder was taking its own sweet time in knitting together, partly because Seth was such a putrid patient. “Oh, Libby,” he said, softly, reaching for my hand. “How you suffered!”

  I looked into his eye
s for a flicker of revulsion. But all I saw was sadness and concern. Leastways he knows what it cost me.

  Because I regularly woke up with the smell of blood in my nose, shuddering with deep, savage pleasure.

  *

  Tangling with Paulder Commander wasn’t the only scuzzy interview I had in those testing days. I’d interceded on Helston Captain’s behalf during the Hearing where he was tried as a traitor. I spoke about his numerous efforts to keep me safe; how he’d arranged for me to have training in close-quarters combat and taught me what to look for. How Clete had openly threatened him regarding the safety of his brother, whom he’d taken hostage.

  He wasn’t executed by firing squad as so many were, behind the Monitor House. Neither was he Collared, but he was DeNamed, so no longer a member of the Captain Family. Instead he joined the Lieutenant Family and was charged with tightening up security at the major flyer park in Gloriosa. There was an understanding that if he managed to sort out the constant pilfering of passengers’ luggage, he might be able to rejoin the Captain Family in a couple of years.

  He told me this during our final meeting, before being shipped back to Gloriosa, adding, “I owe you an almighty sorry for not coming to you when Gator first got in touch.”

  I clenched my hands, swept with panic at the prospect of facing all my future encounters Outside, without his solid presence. “You roaching well do! What made you think I’d leave you waving in the wind?”

  “Oh, I didn’t think you’d do that. Please, believe me. It wasn’t that…”

  “What, then?” I demanded, desperate to understand why this man, whom I’d regularly trusted with my life, hadn’t seen fit to trust me back in return.

  “I knew you’d do everything in your power to help me. It’s just… I didn’t believe you had the power…” he faltered.

  My shoddy attitude affected everyone around me. Seth withdrew, defeated by my self-pitying slump; Vrox, awash with drugs that were skewing his behaviour, took advantage; and everyone else – this man included – got into the habit of under-estimating me. Blinking hard, and missing my goggles, I muttered, “Don’t make the same mistake again.” I pushed down the impulse to fling my arms around his neck and give him a hug, as I added, “Thank you muchly for all the times you saved me. I’m going to mightily miss you.”