The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  Poor Teddy looked as if he didn’t quite know just what to make of that one, but of course, there was no one with time to explain it to him. For her part, the General was preoccupied. It wasn’t the relative ease with which they had accomplished their goal that made Dominia suspicious. It was that they’d accomplished it at all. The Ichigawas would be checking in at the government’s airport using false Halcyon accounts just a mere twenty minutes after she’d fed her younger brother that pill—only lightly tainted with Lazarus’s blood, in case of emergency.

  Because Dominia was almost certain that there would be an emergency.

  So be it. She could handle it. Given danger came in the ideal circumstances, anyway—but it would have been nice to have a little foreknowledge. Then she really could have handled anything. That was the rub, wasn’t it? Especially when all your enemies, and even some of your less helpful (read: absent) friends, had been through this great, sordid game before. Sure, Lazarus was on her side, but he was so old and dry about it, and so withdrawn about what information he actually knew, that it was impossible to count him as wholly trustworthy.

  For instance: at no point in the past year had he once acknowledged the alarming frequency with which Dominia heard the voice of the Hierophant in her head. Worse, he had never addressed the external visitations. Like now, as her Father spoke unseen from the periphery of her restored right eye, approximately he would sit were he in the passenger’s position beside Farhad:

  “It is woefully difficult to know who to trust in a world such as this.”

  “Such as yours,” she muttered, taking advantage of her position outside the vehicle, amid the relentless beating of the rotor, to address her pursuer aloud. It was an alarming habit in which she engaged with increasing frequency since the traumatic hieros gamos of the Lady and Lazarus, so far away in Cairo. A bad habit, talking to him out loud, but she couldn’t shake it.

  “At least you know to whom this world belongs.” His innocent retort led her to look sharply into the seat and find it empty but for the assault rifle. Good. That couldn’t always be said of the apparition that haunted her, almost nightly, since its first appearance in the tanque from Cairo to Jerusalem. Sometimes her Father’s specter remained when she looked at it, staring her down in defiant mockery of her impotence to accomplish its dismissal.

  Gethsemane, noting Dominia’s eyes narrowed for something unseen, leaned past fretful Theodore. “Are you all right, General?”

  “Fine,” she lied, reaching into the helicopter for the sniper rifle as, from below, similar fire shattered the air. “Stay back, stay small, and keep the Governor from getting shot. You think what I did to your man in that bathroom was bad, Teddy?” With a glance for her terrified baby brother, Dominia leaned out once again and flicked on the high-powered scope. “Just imagine what Cicero would do to these guys for accidentally killing you.”

  II

  In the Event of a Water Landing

  After their escape from New Elsinore airspace, Dominia was almost looking forward to their second flight. How sad, what passed for pleasure these nights! It was only natural, though, that she would be grateful for even two or three hours of smooth sailing. For one agonizing year, the General had no rest.

  Just over a year, truth be told. If she was counting the months, it was something in the order of fifteen. Maybe eighteen. It was certainly that if one counted Cassandra’s death as the starting gun of her bloody, tiring race. And race she had, from San Valentino to the isle of Japan, and then aboard a train to Kabul, to Cairo—and finally, against her will, to the Israeli desert. She’d remained there since, her race contained to a constant cycle around Jerusalem’s vast cityscape. Here to build goodwill among Abrahamian humans by making public appearances in Catholic Mass and allowing the global broadcast of her hasty confirmation as a nice big “fuck you” to the Holy Martyr Church; there to investigate the ruins of a drone bombing or to join a unit in pushing back UF troops; off to her labs for a chat with the researchers about her needs from them; and somehow in the course of that same day, she’d find time to throw on a suit and scrape and bow before the Knesset, the legislative body of the state of Israel, to beg that what meager legitimate funds the isolated nation had left be given to her army.

  Yeah. She had her army. Her homophobic, misogynistic, trash heap of a terrorist cell had straightened out somewhat when forced by honor or religious principle to follow a lesbian and work with a cabal of prostitutes—but only somewhat. Some still forgot their rank when (in)convenient, and the seven-something-foot martyr had more than once resorted to screaming in their human faces until grown men wept like children at her feet or, in the harder examples, deserted the unit.

  Such improvements gave no satisfaction. Praise the saints there were people like Farhad, reasonable men who assembled around her within a fortnight of her control. In a technical way, this de facto jurisdiction extended to Hunter-plagued Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv, which had clung to its glamorous atmosphere in the face of its country’s violence so that it resembled a kind of coastal Vegas. So she’d heard, anyway. She hadn’t seen it, herself. No time. If not for the doings of her few loyal men, she would have been awake day and night, falling ever more behind. Israel—yes, even Tel Aviv—had been bombed no fewer than thirty times since November of 1997 AL, with Jerusalem in particular facing a brutal thirteen drone strikes. And amid it all, there was the Lady, pouring money into the ad campaign that had encouraged Israeli voters to separate from their union and leave themselves undefended.

  Dominia could understand why She’d done this. It made Israel really theirs—gave them license to do with it, its funds, and its military as was needed, once she discerned the depths of Tobias’s tendrils through the Hunter network. The scientists were her best friends in this endeavor of sorting out the power structure, and the scientists revealed to her that even Tobias had suppressed certain avenues of research which the General was more than happy to encourage. The former leader’s reasoning had been that plenty of research on transport, medicine, and other constructive avenues was done elsewhere. He wanted to focus on what he believed to be “military technology.”

  This was the problem when you let a dentist into a military profession. It took a soldier to understand that all technology was military technology. Take, for instance, a secret project stowed from even the dentist’s prying eyes: the E4-GL3, or the Electromagnetic Glider. Why everything had to resolve to an animal name with these people, Dominia was never sure, but by God she loved those eagles. Filled a woman with real patriotic vigor just to see its oblong shape beneath the tarp as their helicopter set upon the dirt of the abandoned Vermont farm they’d enlisted for the job. There had been a lot of trepidation about whether the thing would be able to make it into the Front at all, but the trans-dimensional vehicle was designed for discretion while flying above Earth. It was, first and foremost, a stealth plane. It just so happened that this stealth plane could, upon entering a safe range, rip through space-time to the point in the future where it would find itself on its associated landing pad, safe and sound. And a stealth plane that allowed its passengers to skip half their journey, well—that was military technology if ever she’d heard of it. It might not have been able to carry a hundred of Tobias’s anti-martyr exoskeleton ALIF-8s, but it would get their asses out of Dodge, and that was all she wanted. Even Teddy, still clamoring on about this horror and that indignity, was silenced into a few seconds of astonishment when Farhad whipped the tarp from the cigar-shaped object.

  “Is that a—is that a UFO, Dominia?”

  “It can’t be unidentified if it’s ours,” she said, masterfully refraining from tacking on an unnecessary (but deserved) “dipshit.”

  “But I mean—it looks like a spaceship, like something out of a video game or a—”

  “Because it’s a new model. It’s just a plane like any other at the end of the day.”

  Easier to let him think as much, anyway. It was, in a way, just a plane; but it was a p
lane designed to navigate inner space, rather than outer space. The graphene-coated surface of the E4 was, strictly speaking, a series of two-dimensional objects stacked to resemble a three-dimensional object; this trans-dimensional quality of graphene was the only thing that helped Dominia grasp why the substance was so conductive to the teleporter technology developed from the blood of Lazarus, because the deeper she stumbled into the scientific explanations of what was happening when electrons and their little friends were introduced to the material, the thicker the dictionary she needed to grab. At certain moments, she wished she’d gone into engineering or medicine rather than the military, but the medical field wasn’t exactly thriving with geniuses. Look at Teddy. Everybody had their own specialized knowledge, she supposed. She couldn’t tell you just how it was the damn plane functioned; but she could tell you how to use that same device to annihilate a nation, or entertain her brother into passivity. Once in his cushy seat with another pill, a collar-free neck, and a book to ignore, his tune changed so much he didn’t even notice Farhad’s smooth takeoff.

  “Well this isn’t so bad,” Teddy said—repeatedly said, because the drug dampened one’s ability to form memories. “I don’t know why I was in such a fuss over flying before. I mean, it’s perfectly normal to most people. Isn’t it, Dominia?”

  Lifting her cheek from her hand and her gaze from the window, the General said, “I used to commute via plane almost every week during the height of our military involvement in the 3900s, going from war theater to the proper Front to Father’s castle and then off again. Even later in the special forces, and then again during the South American Conflict, it seemed like I was always flying. I was glad when I was promoted to Governess—some time to rest. If you can find it, anyway.”

  “Tell me about it! I’ve never been busier in all my life. No wonder you ran off!” The lazy man waved his hands with his flippant mischaracterization of Dominia’s motivations, distracted while she made sly eye contact with Gethsemane. “I admit, some days I’ve thought about doing…well, not the same thing, obviously, but—I just don’t understand what’s happened with you, Dominia.” His stream of consciousness having become less a train than a car driven by a drunk weaving in and out traffic, Teddy crossed his arms and settled back into one of six seats in the tiny cabin. “Even if you can’t take the pressure, that’s no reason to run off and join terrorists.”

  “I’m leading the terrorist organization now. Or its splinter, anyway.” Offense over his half-baked aspersions would be laughable as experiencing hurt feelings on the pitiless observations of a toddler. She squinted to study the night through her reflection against the window. “Terrorism, like terror, is a state of mind.”

  And it was one that sought, increasingly, to envelop her. As a sad result of her control and Israel’s exit from their union, the Middle States were more chaotic than ever—and the same could be said not just of its official governing body but its unofficial one. With the former crux of the Hunters now led by one of the organization’s avowed enemies, those many satellites and associate terrorist cells had refused to acknowledge her fealty and insisted on splitting off. As expected. There were now such groups as the New Hunters, the True Hunters, the Old Hunters…the list went on, and those were only the English tags the news channels gave them. If she got into the Arabic, Turkish, and even the Farsi variations, there seemed little point in even calling them a unified organization. The General had not given a name to her units, but she supposed it was no more proper to call them Hunters than it was for the world to call her a terrorist.

  That was what she preferred to tell herself, at any rate. As the cabin lights stubbornly cast her ghostly reflection against the dark glass, she avoided eye contact with that phantom double as though in shame. She refused the title of “terrorist” and struggled to maintain her old identity, but the truth was that the person ready for Saint Valentinian in the McLintock farmhouse just over a year before was a very different woman from the one sitting in a plane flown by a Hunter with the kidnapped Governor beside her. That difference was clearer all the time, but there were plenty of similarities, too: there she was again in the restaurant bathroom, blistered to hear sounds of violence outside a mere fifteen minutes before she would blow up a helicopter with an RPG; the gunpowder smell of rotten eggs in her nose, and the abrupt end of thousands of screams in those thousand battles of hers; the abrupt end to the scream of Benedict, Cassandra’s beloved husband, when he was just some kid sent to war. It was not a death like a military death, not even a death like the slaughtering of a human for food—although it had been in defense, in a way. Her mind could never escape it, never justify it. Could never justify its own care, either, since she knew she only cared because of his relation to Cassandra. This deepened the shame.

  Nothing in her life was meant to be this way. To feel this way. Dominia could not help but think that she’d never been meant to experience that feeling of grief or guilt. A martyr should have been stronger. The General was supposed to be stronger than this—supposed to be a cold, dark child of the Lord with no pity in her heart for human cattle. She was supposed to be successful, clever, and well-liked by her people. She was supposed to be happy. Supposed to, supposed to… Dominia was increasingly far from the self she once expected to find within her body. Increasingly far from the person she had thought herself to be, who she now realized never existed. It was that self that she expected others to see, and that self that inspired constant surprise in its owner by its perpetual absence.

  Should it have surprised her? She had given up everything she wanted. Everything. Her eyes skipped across to Gethsemane—more specifically, the diamond lying in the dark notch of the woman’s clavicle—then away as she found the matter-bound naiad studied her with great eyes painted in colors like seawater that recalled those crashing waves, the cerulean sky, the taste of salt on sweet Cassandra’s impossibly plush lips.

  Sorrow! Yes, there was that pang of sorrow, that ache of shame, that terrific tragedy of the question that kept Dominia self-occupying night and day—working until she was so exhausted she could not but collapse into a sleep where she was still not wholly safe. For some reason, when the blood of Lazarus altered her body such that mere human food and a bit of sunshine left her healthier than the false protein ever had, she’d expected the swap she forced in her sleeping schedule to alter her dreams. If that couldn’t cure her tahgmahrs—nightmares, she had to remember to call them now—nothing could.

  And clearly, nothing could. Still, she once a week awoke with the crinkle of her wife’s eye plastered across her mind. Then she would be forced to ask that question she so carefully avoided in waking: Have I given you up? In such moments, she was shamed by her own reluctance to think on her wife. Was that the real way in which Dominia gave her up—neglect of thought? Was it wrong to avoid thoughts of Cassandra? Was it wrong to hate thinking of her? Was it wrong to nonetheless pray every morning and every night that she would someday hold this world’s, that world’s, any world’s, most beautiful soul again in her own arms?

  Dosed though he was, Theodore must have noticed the brief direction of Dominia’s melancholy gaze. “Why are you wearing that?” he pressed of Gethsemane again. “And don’t give me this nonsense about some duty.”

  “But that is the reason, Governor.” With her left hand primly in her lap and her wounded right arm elevated with a makeshift sling provided by Theo’s torn coat, the human insisted, “I fear a matter like this is beyond your understanding.”

  Teddy laughed, too doped for offense. Dominia shrugged. “She’s right. I don’t pretend to understand it, either.”

  “Yes,” agreed the girl, her tone still matter-of-fact. “Such issues are also beyond the General’s understanding. At least, at this point in linear time.”

  “Why do you speak like a robot? ‘At this point in linear time.’” He pronounced the words like an early text-to-speech computer program, stilted and artificial. “If you hadn’t bled right in front of me, I’
d have thought you were some kind of android.”

  “Sometimes,” admitted the Gethsemane with a sad chuckle, “I feel like one. Perhaps it is all the time I’ve spent working in the Red Market.” She glanced at Dominia, who had heard her story just once, in the dark, after the human thought the martyr wouldn’t remember. A miserable story, about human trafficking, and how cruel people could be to kids. The General respected how hard it had been to talk about it by not talking about it, herself, and the human obviously appreciated it. For the sake of the present audience and her desire to leave her early history unspoken, Gethsemane summed it up in simple terms. “One does not require rescue from the Lady and Her formal organization of working women as early as I did, then go on to maintain much desire to experience emotion.”

  “Running around with prostitutes, terrorists, murderers, and thieves.” The sighing Governor shook his holier-than-thou head in a habit learned from the Hierophant. “What kind of person does that?”

  Unbuckling her seat belt, Gethsemane said, “In all fairness, sir, I have not worked in that capacity since I was twenty-one, when the Bearer awoke within me and I was promoted from the fold into my true role. However, this is another matter I would not expect you to understand. Forgive me, General.” The tall woman stooped to move forward, but her dreads still brushed the weapon-stuffed overhead compartment. “I believe Farhad will require company to ensure he is fully awake.”

  “Now that’s a horrible thought.” Teddy giggled. As Gethsemane disappeared up the aisle of the plane and shut herself up with the pilot, the kidnapped Governor returned his attention to both his present sister, and his absent one. “Doesn’t she remind you of Lavinia? I mean, not in looks, obviously. Maybe it’s her devotion to you, her loyalty. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it,” lied Dominia, having noted the comparison on more than one occasion—interestingly, not to Gethsemane’s earthly form, but to her nymph counterpart. Leave it to Teddy to see through the dreadlocks. “You should know better than anyone.”