by Loren Rhoads
* * *
The younger boys crowded into the mess to talk to Jain. He kept one eye aimed down the passage toward the cockpit and his father as he pulled the men’s magazine from his rucksack. He’d swiped it from the grave-robber’s apartment on Brunzell, but he felt so ill now that he didn’t want to keep it for himself.
Jin frowned at the slippery pages with their photos of naked human girls, too young to understand their appeal, but Jarad snatched it away, eyes aglow. “Got any more of these?” he whispered.
“Not like that,” Jain said. “There’s some inter-species stuff . . .”
The boys stared at him like he’d turned green.
“They still have tits,” he hissed in his own defense. He decided to keep the bottle of Old Kentucky Home to share with Jamian and Jozz. Maybe his older brothers would understand him better.
* * *
Wedged behind the controls inside a disabled gun turret, Raena got her first view of Thallian’s home. The city was larger than she’d hoped. A collection of domes clustered on the ocean floor. The central dome contained a sort of castle, its crenellated security wall overlooked by narrow towers. That would be her primary target.
Other domes held barracks, workshops, and, undoubtedly, the cloning lab. After her initial dread, Raena noticed how few lights burned in the buildings. Most people were either asleep—she had no idea what the planetary hour was—or else much of the city was vacant. In fact, on closer examination, one of the darkened domes sported a web of ominous cracks. Money certainly seemed to be running out for the Thallians.
Perhaps her presence wasn’t even necessary here. In another decade or so, they’d be forced out into the galaxy, scattering to survive. Maybe what she planned to do was more of a mercy than she’d suspected. At least they would all die together.
Oh well. She was here. Jonan was here. Might as well finish the job. Priority one had to be to evacuate all non-essential personnel. Raena had some ideas about how to go about that, using one of Jonan’s own schemes. She wondered if he’d recognize it and see it as the tribute it was meant to be.
* * *
The boys lined up as an honor guard to meet the Predator when it returned with Jain. Eilif took her place at the end of the line beside Jarl, the youngest boy. She would have preferred to hide somewhere less conspicuous, but her absence might be noticed. She had learned not to invite trouble.
She anticipated seeing her rival marched off the submarine in shackles, but only Jain escorted Jonan down the gangway. Jonan halted beside Merin and leaned close to whisper orders, but Eilif was too far away to guess what they were.
The pause granted her a good long look at Jain. He had grown since he’d left home. His ankles and wrists showed white beyond the cuffs of his dress uniform. He seemed more gaunt, but maybe it was just that the large bruise gave his face a hollow, hunted aspect. He looked beaten.
Eilif wondered what had happened to her husband’s favorite son. She wondered if anyone else could see the transformation, or if the boys, crowding around Jain now with scuffling hugs and resounding slaps on the shoulder, were merely so relieved to have him back that they’d overlooked the change.
She was startled when Jain’s eyes met her own. She saw that her assessment had been correct. Then she stepped briskly forward.“Let’s have Dr. Poe look at that bruise.”
The normal Jain would have shrugged off the injury and worn it as a badge of pride. This Jain looked grateful for the excuse to flee the homecoming commotion.
“Jamian, Jarad, Jimi, with me,” Merin commanded.
The rest of the boys lined up again beside Jozz, at attention as the others marched off to their new duty.
“I think Dr. Poe will be in the kitchen,” Eilif said to Jain, leading him away. She knew better than to ask what was wrong.
* * *
The cloning facility wasn’t abandoned, as Raena first thought. It was merely short-staffed, scarcely warded by a skeleton crew that seemed to be janitors more than guards.
Curiosity drew her from one deep, narrow tank to the next. Most were empty, but six held clones of Jonan, small black-haired boys curled forward with knees drawn up. They were so pretty that it was a shame she’d have to destroy them all.
It looked easy enough to pull the cords that kept them warm and nourished, that circulated their bathwater and carried away their waste. Unfortunately, someone might discover her sabotage and be able to re-engage everything before serious damage was done. She kept moving through the lab, looking for a permanent solution.
After she passed several rows of empty tanks, she came across a handful more that were occupied. These clones were younger, almost full-term human infants. Female. As she watched, one of the clones opened its night-black eyes and looked up at her.
Raena’s reaction was visceral. Hot anger quivered through her until she trembled like a struck bell. He had cloned her.
Now her search for poison took on new urgency. She surged forward in a fog of horror and disgust, determined that these abominations would be spared what he had done to her. Her clones could not survive to have him touch them. The only mercy she could offer was to wipe them out.
Just beyond the lab, Raena found a broom closet stocked with just the sort of thing she needed. Sodium hypochlorite should do the trick.
* * *
It took longer for Jain to find a moment alone than he expected. The boys buzzed around him, relieved that he was home, but also curious about the galaxy beyond their confinement. Not that he’d really seen all that much, between the week on the desolate Templar cemetery world and all the transit time on the Raptor. But he’d had his hours on Kai, marveling at the spectrum of creatures shopping in the market. And he’d had his days conversing with Raena Zacari. Even Jamian and Jozz, who had gone on supply runs before, could not claim to have spent as much time alone with a woman.
Between the weeks on the hunt and the hours spent in confinement, Jain’s days and nights had gotten turned around. After the other boys turned in for the night, he lay wide-awake. Eventually, he crept out to a terminal. He slipped Raena’s recording sphere into the player, plugged in his earphones, and hunched close.
Raena Zacari filled the screen. She wore crimson hands’-breadth bands across her breasts and low on her hips, but the rest of her skin was bare. She had turned away from the camera and looked back over her shoulder. Her back was ridged with old scar tissue. A starburst scar scrawled over her ribs where she’d been shot protecting his father. A rope of scars encircled one ankle.
“Yes, this was consensual,” she said in her sweet, low voice. “When I consented to be beaten bloody, your father allowed me to continue to live. I knew the price of saying no, of begging him to stop, would be paid with my life. I bought my life with blood and pain. What have you paid for yours, Jain?”
Jain froze the image, sat back from the computer, and closed his eyes. What was she doing? As far as everyone knew, she’d been killed in the Raptor’s explosion. He was sure his father didn’t believe that. Even now, Uncle Merin was out searching the minefield for evidence that the ship had not been destroyed. If his father saw this video, he’d be after Raena like a dog after a bitch in heat.
Despite his revulsion, Jain wasn’t immune. Like the other boys, he’d watched his share of degrading entertainment online. This was the first time he’d seen a woman he knew basically undressed. It didn’t matter that she was scarred or old enough to be his mother. As ashamed as he felt, he could make no apologies for his reaction to her.
But what did she want from him? Even though he’d enjoyed hearing her stories aboard the Raptor, he knew she hadn’t confessed to him by accident. She’d chosen him to listen, chosen what to tell. Why had she chosen him to see this?
He couldn’t figure it out. He knew he was being manipulated, but to do what?
He shook his head and tried to look at the problem from another direction. What was she asking him? What had he paid for his life?
What made her
think that he’d paid any less than she had? He didn’t have the visible scars to show off, but he had the mended bones, bad memories, and the knowledge that his father was older, stronger, more ruthless, implacable . . .
Ice trailed down his spine. Was that her point? That the price they’d paid was comparable? That he was a slave, just as she had been?
Jain leaned back again, rubbing his eyes, and wondered what she wanted him to do. He wouldn’t betray his family. They were all he had in the universe. And yes, he understood that was because they were protecting his father’s generation for war crimes that had occurred before the boys were born.
He tore the sphere out of the player, unwilling to see if there was anything else she wanted to say. He was tempted to deliver it immediately to his father.
Then the sphere slipped in his hand and Jain scrambled to catch it before it could roll away and escape. If he turned over the recording, he would have to make up new lies about how it had been made. How had he undressed his father’s girlfriend and why. Jain knew with clearer certainty than anything else in his life that one did not lie to his father. That was why Raena made sure Jain was unconscious when the Raptor exploded. He honestly had no idea what had happened and that might keep him safe. His father was usually sane enough to recognize honesty when he saw it.
Jain changed his mind, bent down, and rolled the recording sphere under the desk. He knew he should destroy it; that if anyone else found it, he was doomed. But destroying it wasn’t going to be a silent process, and he didn’t want any sleepy boys asking questions. Later, after things had settled down, he could retrieve it, watch it one more time if he had to, and then find a way to lose it permanently.
CHAPTER 16
Raena stood amidst the vats holding the latest crop of Thallian boys. She tried to feel a touch of pity for them before she dumped the bleach in, but really, the pity was that they would grow up to be Jonan’s sons, part of his army. It was kinder to spare them that future. They would die for him either way.
She moved on and dispatched all the baby Raenas. She turned her back on them, unable to watch as her clones thrashed and perished. Even though she’d had no connection to them other than genetically, their deaths still chilled her. She stood guard until she was sure nothing could be salvaged to start the process again.
After the job was done, it was easy enough to steal the appropriate cleaning supplies to evacuate the city. Raena traced the building’s air supply until she found its connection to the dome nearby, where the proles lived.
It wasn’t until the chemical spill spread its fumes throughout the ventilation system, when she could finally see the city’s inhabitants coughing and shouting, fleeing—they thought—for their lives, that she noticed women seemed a rare luxury on Thallian’s world. The men had an eerie similarity to each other: all human, all dressed in black, and all pallid from their lives under the sea. They were even all roughly fortyish. Her suspicion was confirmed when she saw a man she recognized. Leuwis had served Thallian during the War.
These were the surviving crewmembers of the Arbiter. Thallian’s warship had been large, with a complement of over a thousand. As Raena watched the men streaming toward the lifeboats with remnants of their military precision, she counted a fraction of that. Had the others died in service? Defected when a chance presented itself? What were the remainder still doing serving the madman twenty years after the War was over? Didn’t they have anywhere else to go?
The lifeboat station had armed guards, but they put up minimal resistance to the hysteria. One soldier who opened fire on the crowd was quickly swarmed, disarmed, and beaten to death. The rest of the guards could smell the corrosive air and feel it in their eyes and sinuses. Perhaps if any of Thallian’s clones had been stationed there, there would have been less of a rout. As it was, Raena was pleased by the efficiency of the evacuation. It left her only the people in the castle to handle.
* * *
It was more difficult to get into the castle than she’d expected, which was to say that its defenses were actually online. Raena watched a crew of sleepy boys follow their father down to try to stanch the flood of refugees. Thallian had grayed, but she knew that from the family photos she’d found on the family’s private channel. He was also smaller than she remembered. She shook her head, amused. Her memory had built him up to be a towering figure, even though she knew logically that couldn’t be true. He was only a man with a penchant for snappy dressing and an air of command predicated on a total disregard for anything other than his own agenda. Kind of pathetic, now that she thought about it.
She turned back to the scanner she hoped to ghost past.
Someone who worked for, or was part of, the Thallian family was a mechanical genius. He’d rewired the security system so that it was full of elegant redundancy. He’d probably been the one to keep the transport flying decades after it had gone out of date. Whoever he was, she expected to see more of his work before she left the city.
* * *
“Come back,” Aten told his younger brother Merin on the comm screen. Since the chair regulated his breathing, he couldn’t force the words to sound more urgent. He explained, “We’re under attack.”
Merin glanced sideways, checking a monitor Aten couldn’t see. Looking for spaceships, probably. When he didn’t see any, Merin stared at the viewscreen as if his gaze could penetrate it. “Attacked by whom?”
“Jonan’s phantom, it seems. Someone contaminated the air supply down in the city domes. The men are fleeing en masse. Jonan has taken most of the remaining boys to try and re-establish some sanity.”
“Jamian—” Merin began, but the boy interrupted him.
“I’m turning us around, sir.”
“All possible speed,” Merin ordered unnecessarily. Then to Aten he said, “The men know they won’t survive long on the surface.”
“It’s a full-scale panic. I doubt there’s logic involved.”
“How did she get into the city?”
“My best guess is that she somehow stowed away in Jain’s escape pod. I’m going to take the youngest boys and see what I can find out about that now.”
“Do it. We’ll be home as soon as possible.”
* * *
Ariel tugged her braid out from under Kavanaugh’s shoulder so she could get up out of bed. As she crossed the cabin, she pulled his shirt over her head. If she sat close enough to the monitor, it shouldn’t be obvious she had no pants on.
When she was situated, she turned on the computer. Its screen filled with a Shtrrel, who clicked his beak disapprovingly. “Miss Lex? Sorry to wake you.”
“That’s all right.” She brushed her hair back toward its sloppy braid, trying to come awake enough to place him. Then a poster over his shoulder—showing a sail race past a familiar set of stone arches—made her realize this was Kai’s Head of Planetary Security. “Did you find Fiana?”
“It’s rather more complicated than that.” He shuddered slightly, resettling his feathers. “We have Gavin Sloane in our custody now.”
The change from pseudonyms to real names jolted Ariel awake. “Go on,” she encouraged.
“Sloane ingested a large dose of some form of human truth serum. Apparently, he came back to Kai under false pretenses, intending to, shall I quote? ‘Beat the truth out of Thallian’s goons.’ Kai City Prison Security captured him in the process of doing just that.”
Ariel put her forehead in her hand and hunched forward so she could prop her elbow on the desk. “Is anyone injured?”
“Not permanently.” He resettled his feathers again, evidently feeling awkward. “Ms. Shaad, your party has brought nothing but trouble to Kai. As no lasting damage has been done beyond a spate of negative news reports, we are willing to release Mr. Sloane to your custody, effective as soon as you can return to Kai to claim him.”
That wasn’t where she’d thought this conversation was going. “Commander, I’m not interested in paying Sloane’s bail.”
He hooted in
surprise.
“After we left Kai together, Gavin Sloane attacked me. In fact, I was forced to stun him. It’s not my habit to be armed on my own ship, but I was lucky to have been able to stop things when I did. I put Sloane off my ship at Mallech and consider myself lucky to have been armed at that time. I do not, under any circumstances, take responsibility for Sloane or his behavior after we parted ways.”
“Ms. Shaad, you understand that Sloane has been under a truth serum. You understand he’s told us everything about your stay on Kai.”
Ariel gave him a wry smile. “I’m sure he gave you much more detail than either of us is truly comfortable with, sir.”
The Shtrrel inclined his head.
“Then no doubt he’s told you who Thallian is, who Fiana is, and why I don’t want to have anything more to do with what’s going on between them. I am in hiding, Commander, until I’m sure Raena’s vendetta has been carried out.”
“If you won’t take Mr. Sloane off our hands, we will be forced to have him bound by law.”
“Understood, Commander.” She relented a little. “I’m sorry we have been so much trouble for you.”
He made a gargling noise that she recognized was a laugh. “It’s been much more excitement than we are used to on Kai.”
* * *
An hour later, poking around the Thallian family’s transportation yard, Raena found a hopper parked in a bay apart from the family’s other ships. The antique hopper had hoses hanging out its undercarriage. Tools lay spread out nearby. They were polished clean and very orderly in their arrangement, but the implication was that someone had been repairing the hopper and might get back to work on it soon.
She crawled around and under it, approving the modifications Jimi had made. It appeared ready to go. The sprawl of hoses was merely well-done camouflage.
