Purple Worlds: A Space Fantasy (Planet Origins Book 4)

by Lucia Ashta

  Ilara attempted again. “You were saying that splicing was evil. Why is that? What is splicing, exactly?”

  Lila turned to Ilara, redirecting irritation from her horse to the woman. Lila huffed. Then she shrieked.

  I felt Dolpheus’ chuckle rumble through my brain. He knew better than to offend a she-dragon unnecessarily. I’ve never seen Jillee stumble before.

  Jillee’s feeling Lila’s nervous energy. It’s getting to her, poor Jillee. Jillee was my oldest surviving horse. She was nearly a century old, but still as surefooted as the day I took her from a soldier who was beating her for being too gentle for war.

  Lila better start relaxing soon or she’s going to be too sore to walk tomorrow. Her ass is clenched tighter than a war drum.

  Maybe I should make her walk, for Jillee’s sake.

  Aye, maybe you should.

  But both Dolpheus and I knew I wouldn’t. We’d make her ride with one of us before we made her walk. Not only would she hold us up, but she’d just get more annoyed, and neither one of us wanted to be around a more-annoyed she-dragon.

  “See,” Lila snarled at Ilara. “This horse isn’t safe. She’s trying to throw me.”

  Ilara blinked at Lila.

  Kai nudged his horse into a trot and drew up to Lila’s open right side. Only Ilara had been riding next to her, we men put as much distance between as we could whenever possible.

  Kai leaned in his saddle to run a hand down Jillee’s neck. “Shhhhh, girl. It’s all right. Shhhhhh. Don’t you mind your rider, she’s just not used to riding.”

  “And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Lila said.

  “It means that you’re relaxing about as much as someone staring into the red eyes of a mowab, and your horse is feeling it. That’s why she just stumbled. Because of you.”

  Dolpheus locked wide eyes with me. I tried to suppress a grin at his comical expression, but couldn’t. This was the first of Kai’s fiery side we were seeing. Even Dolpheus and I had tread more carefully with the she-dragon than this.

  Lila sputtered her indignation.

  “You can be offended all you want,” Kai continued, “but it won’t change the truth of what I’m saying. Unclench your butt, sit in your saddle, relax your shoulders, and let your horse lead the way. Things will go much better, you’ll see.”

  Lila made some more sounds of offense, but she didn’t say anything while Kai soothed Jillee some more.

  “It’s all right, girl. Lila here’s going to relax now so she won’t stress you out. Shhhhh, that’s a good girl. Just be patient with her. She’ll get the hang of it.” Kai gave Jillee a final pat on the neck and straightened in his saddle. He didn’t bother looking at Lila, just straight ahead.

  Lila hadn’t softened her attitude, but she did appear to be trying to relax in the saddle.

  I knew Dolpheus would have something to say about the exchange even before I heard his amused voice in my mind. Damn. Look at Kai kick some she-dragon ass into shape. I guess now we know who should handle Lila from here on out.

  What? And let your ladies man skills go to waste? No way, I said even though Dolpheus was right. If Kai could manage Lila, then that was an advantage Dolpheus and I would gladly use. Every good soldier knew to play his advantages, and Dolpheus and I were better than good.

  Dolpheus chuckled again, rising to my joke. Don’t you worry, I’ll make sure to put my ladies man skills to good use before long.

  I didn’t doubt that he would.

  “Will someone please tell me what the hell splicing is?” Ilara said.

  “I’d like to know too,” Kai said. “I’ve heard so much about splicing, but no one really seems to know what it is, other than a way to extend natural life.”

  “Splicing extends life?” Ilara asked.

  Kai shrugged from the other side of Lila. “From what I understand, but I’m sure I know less about it than any of the others.”

  Lila huffed again, and Ilara’s expression clouded over dangerously. “Look,” Lila said, “I’ll give you the summary of splicing. Basically, the eternality is taken out of the body—”

  “Eternality?” Ilara asked.

  “Yeah. The eternality.”

  “What’s an eternality?” Ilara said with pronounced care. I could see the anger beginning to rise to the surface.

  “You don’t even know what an eternality is? Wow. You really have forgotten everything.”

  “And you seem to have forgotten who you’re speaking to,” Ilara warned.

  Lila studied Ilara for a second and I felt as if I could reach out and grab the anticipation as Dolpheus, Kai, and I waited to see what the two women would say. Any ordinary Oer would understand that it was to her benefit to treat the royalty of O with respect and subordination. These were unique circumstances in that Ilara couldn’t confirm whether or not she was a princess, and Lila was obviously no ordinary Oer. But still. Lila was treading dangerously and for no apparent reason than a lack of desire to temper her overly abundant personality.

  “You’re right, Your Majesty,” Lila said, her use of Ilara’s title negated by the sarcasm in her voice. “I’ll remember to treat you as a princess even if you don’t remember being one.”

  “Lila!” Kai gasped.

  “What, Kai?” Lila ground out the one syllable of his name.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “We don’t even know if she’s really the princess, so why do I need to treat her like one? The Andaron Dynasty has taken enough ill-earned respect from us Oers already.”

  “Lila,” Dolpheus censured, his tone severe. When Dolpheus spoke, Lila stopped. “You’re crossing a line you shouldn’t cross.”

  I seethed at the she-dragon, readying myself to speak my mind.

  But Ilara beat me to it. “You know what? You’re an unpleasant little woman. My father back on Earth, Sand, whatever, has this saying: ‘If you have nothing pleasant to say, then don’t speak at all.’ You should heed his advice. He might only be an auto plant manager and not a mighty king, but he’s a wise, kind man. You hurt no one but yourself with your comments, because we all see you for the unhappy shrew that you are. You can take your eternality, whatever the hell it is, and shove it up the ass you’re squeezing so tight that the eternality’ll never come back out. You owe me respect regardless of whether I’m a princess or not. You owe me respect because I’m a human being who’s done nothing to harm you. You owe all of us here respect because we’ve done nothing, that I’m aware of, to indicate that we don’t. So, you can go fuck yourself. Don’t speak to me again unless you’re ready to treat me with kindness. I’ll give you my respect again once you’ve earned it.”

  Ilara tapped her horse and lunged ahead of Lila, where she rode the rest of the way to the splicing lab. Ilara’s back was straight and regal. She didn’t bother looking back at Lila even once.

  “I guess I’m not going to find out what splicing really is at this rate,” Kai muttered to himself, but I heard him. I would have told him what Lila had told Dolpheus and me of splicing, but Ilara had set a tone I didn’t want to interrupt.

  Lila’s face vacillated between anger and sulking. It seemed better to enjoy the silence than to engage Lila in an explanation of splicing. We’d get to it soon enough. It seemed Dolpheus and I were no closer to ridding ourselves of the she-dragon than we’d been on our last journey to the splicing lab.

  14

  “So this is it?” Ilara asked me, breaking the silence that had stretched on for the last quarter hour.

  I’d moved forward to ride next to her, while Kai remained behind to ride next to Lila, and Dolpheus rode between our two groups. In the quiet, I’d settled into the pleasant, easy rocking motion of my horse. I’d spent much of my life atop a horse, and much of that time on this particular one, riding to and from battles, and the movement soothed me. It was one of the first prolonged times of calm I’d experienced since pulling Ilara through a portal between worlds. I nearly managed to forget that the woman
who rode next to me might not be the princess born to rule O. Nearly.

  “This is it,” I said, turning to look at her. She was magnificent. My eyes had grown hungry for the sight of her over the last several years, and now I couldn’t get enough of her. Unabashedly, I trailed my eyes up and down, across and over her body. My desire for her, barely dormant, sprung to life.

  She smiled, comfortable with my obvious ogling. “It doesn’t look like much.”

  I started until I realized she was referring to the splicing lab and not the movement going in my pants. Of course she’s referring to the splicing lab and not you, I scolded myself. Seemingly, I’d reverted to the waves of lust—ever at the ready, especially at the most inconvenient times—that I thought I’d cured myself of after my younger years. This woman just had a way of making my blood boil. She always had.

  I cleared my throat and ordered my dick to settle down. “Trust me. It might not look like much on the outside, but inside it’s—”

  “Evil,” Lila interjected, coming to a stop next to Ilara and me.

  I rolled my eyes, wishing her silence would continue. When Ilara asked her, “Are you willing to elaborate on your opinions on splicing now?” I groaned inwardly. While all of us, including Dolpheus and myself, could use more information about the splicing industry, I wasn’t in the mood for another exchange with Lila like the one we’d endured before.

  But Lila, as before, surprised. Her moods were as fickle as the direction of the wind. “I say splicing is evil because of the effects I’ve seen it have on its clients.”

  “Wha—”

  Lila cut Ilara off. “Basically, splicing involves removing the eternality from a person. The eternality is that essence that makes a human being a person. It’s what leaves when a person dies, transforming the body into an empty shell.”

  “Is the eternality the soul then?” Ilara asked.

  “You can call it whatever you’d like. Won’t change what it is.”

  “Keep going,” Ilara said.

  “Splicing involves removing the eternality from the body, extracting a small piece from it, then reinserting it into the body. If something happens to the client, maiming or death or what have you, then the splice of the eternality is reinserted into another person and then I use the client’s collected memories and project them into the new body to give the new form all of the memories and the identical body image as the client.”

  “What happens to the old body? The one that’s maimed or dead?” Kai asked from next to Lila. Our five horses met in a rough circle.

  Lila shrugged. “I don’t know. Discarded or incinerated along with the rest of corpses, probably. Does it matter?”

  “I’d think so,” Kai said, but I wasn’t surprised at her answer. When she’d told Dolpheus and me that Brachius experimented on many rebels until he determined the exact window in which the eternality could be extracted from the body to be spliced, she wasn’t bothered by the many deaths these experiments required.

  “How do you extract their memories?” I asked, the memories of my exploration of the King’s memories too fresh and raw. I’d barely survived them.

  “Easy. I just have the clients focus on putting all the memories and body image references I’ll need inside one of my vials. Even if they’re terribly unimaginative, which nearly all courtiers are, they can normally manage it with my guidance. Usually just their intending to put their memories inside one of my vials will do the trick, especially since I use mind merge cables going one way from their heads into the vial. It’s worked every time, even if some of the times it’s taken several tries.”

  “And what of the transporting off planet?” Dolpheus asked. “Where does that come into play? At what point do the clients or bodies or whatever need to be sent off planet? And to which planet and why?”

  “Whoa, that’s a mouthful, huh, Olph?”

  I watched Dolpheus tense at Lila’s use of the nickname only I called him. Dolpheus only let those he trusted call him by a nickname, and since he only trusted me, and he definitely didn’t trust Lila, I waited for what I anticipated.

  “My name is Dolpheus.”

  “But he,” she pointed at me with her chin, “calls you ‘Olph.’”

  “Yes, he does. And you can call me Dolpheus.”

  “All right. Whatever. Everyone has their panties in a bunch today, huh?”

  Ilara laughed.

  “What is it?” Lila and I asked at the same time.

  “Nothing. It’s just that, of all the expressions that could carry over from Earth to O, panty bunching is a funny one to have made the cut. I guess wedgies are a universal inconvenience.”

  “Wedgies?” Kai asked.

  Ilara laughed again. “Never mind. It’s not important, trust me on that. Please, continue.”

  “Thank you very much, your Majesty,” Lila said with a dangerous amount of sarcasm.

  Ilara let it slide easily. Lila was finally talking about stuff we wanted to hear.

  “To answer your question, Dolpheus,” Lila said, “I don’t know much about the transferring off planet. I’ve told you guys, Brachius doesn’t let me or any of the other staff, other than Aletox of course, be involved in many of the steps of splicing. We’re involved in the extraction of the eternality and then I’m in charge of getting all the memories and such that we need from the clients and monitoring them regularly, but other than that, for the most part, the staff isn’t involved. I don’t even know where Brachius stores the eternality splices.”

  “But he obviously has off planet transport capabilities,” Dolpheus said, a comment directed at me.

  “Right,” I answered him. “That’s how the King sent the princess off planet in the first place.” I realized this was information I hadn’t shared with Lila, but it was no longer useful to keep secrets from her, at least not where it concerned Ilara. We needed whatever contribution she could offer to figure out the details of what happened with the princess.

  “Wait,” Lila said. “The King used the splicing lab’s transport machine?”

  “I believe so,” I said.

  “How’d he manage that?”

  “The King himself didn’t do it. He got a servant to break into the lab and do it. How the servant managed it precisely, I don’t know.”

  “Hunh. That’s surprising,” Lila said.

  “So you have no idea how off planet transport ties into splicing?” Doubt laced Dolpheus’ question.

  “Uh, obviously I have ideas. You don’t think I’ve been bothering to work there all this time and not wondered and tried to figure it out.”

  “No, I didn’t think so. What are your ideas?”

  “Unless there’s a different part of the splicing process that Brachius hasn’t told me or anyone else at the splicing lab about, then I think he must send the clients, once they’ve had the eternality and memories implanted, off planet for some kind of maturation period or reason?” Even Lila didn’t believe this explanation. “Or maybe he stores the eternality splices off planet? Or maybe he sends the maimed or dead client off planet for some kind of regeneration that we don’t know about? Or…”

  “Or maybe Brachius uses this off planet transport machine to travel himself, and he goes to these other parallel worlds, holograms, whatever, and harvests identical replicas of the clients from these other worlds,” Ilara said.

  Birdcalls and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees above us sang loudly. No one said a word as the implication of Ilara’s theory sank in.

  Finally, Lila said, “No. That can’t be,” but she sounded terrified at the possibility that this could be true.

  “The copies of the clients are exact, right? Once they undergo this splicing treatment or however you’d say it?” Ilara continued.

  Lila nodded.

  “You can see no difference between the original client and the final, er, copy?”

  Lila shook her head.

  “So what I suggest could be true, right? I mean, it’d explain why this A
letox guy knows of these hologram worlds that contain identical replicas of the people on O.”

  “It would explain it,” Dolpheus said, sounding awestricken, and I fully understood why.

  I found myself momentarily incapable of getting the thoughts stampeding through my head to coalesce into words. I realized Brachius and Aletox were cunning and ruthless. But culling other planets and stealing people from them? That reached a whole new level of despicability. One I was inclined to borrow Lila’s word to describe. Evil.

  “No, it can’t be,” Lila persisted, even though her voice betrayed her lack of confidence in her argument. “Then there’d be no reason for splicing the eternalities. If Brachius is just harvesting copies of his clients from other worlds, then there’d be no point to splicing their eternalities. He wouldn’t need to insert the eternality splice into anybody to mimic the original client.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Dolpheus said, “which makes me wonder what he’s actually using the eternality splices for.”

  Lila was shaking her head. “No, it can’t be.”

  “From what you’ve described, it sounds like it’s possible,” Ilara said.

  “It does,” Dolpheus added. “If Brachius is some kind of body snatcher, then all that would really be needed would be the memories you collect, Lila. Not even the body image would be needed, beyond their style and way of dress. Have you done memory reinsertions or whatever the term would be?”

  Lila gulped. “I have.”

  “And what was it like?” Dolpheus asked.

  “It was very easy. I attached a mind merge cable from the vial to the clients’ heads, and then when they woke up they had the same memories as the clients had.”

  “And did they already look like the client before you did the memory restoration and the body image thing?” Dolpheus persisted.

  Lila didn’t answer, but her eyes widened.

  “So they did,” he went on.

  “I always assumed it was because there was some kind of transference from the eternality splice.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Remember how it was with me? When you used one of your vials to transfer the body image of Lord Dingaling onto me?”