by Richard Fox
“We will sign the treaty tomorrow afternoon, correct?” one of them asked. “We are already behind schedule.”
“Most certainly,” Francis said.
The three men bowed deeply and in unison. “Chugha habnida,” they said.
“Chuck-a had needy to you too,” Francis said.
Cosima scanned the crowd again, looking for Remi. She saw her sister, already drunk and flirting with the son of a shipping magnate. Her father had a steady stream of well-wishers, all no doubt inquiring as to how quickly his space station would expand to handle the influx of trade and tourists once the Gaia system was settled. Remi was nowhere to be found. He must have found a way out of this assignment.
Maybe he actually cares enough that he didn’t want to see me married off. Maybe I’m just being a silly little girl, she thought.
She glanced at Francis, whose clothes smelled of cigar smoke and breath reeked of alcohol when they’d kissed at the altar. He’d spent the rest of the evening focused on their guests and barely paid attention to her, which was something of a relief for Cosima.
“My lady,” Lana said in her ear, “would you care to retire now?”
Francis overheard the suggestion and wiped a napkin across his mouth and backed his seat away from the table.
“Isn’t there some sort of formal…anything else on the schedule?” Cosima asked.
“Yes, but the bride and groom normally leave well before the party ends,” Lana said.
“Come, darling,” Francis said, “let’s get out of here.”
Cosima wished there was some way to handcuff herself to her chair, but the touch of Francis’s clammy hand against her bare shoulder put an end to that idea. She stood, hesitantly, and left with her husband.
****
Remi had bargained for a spot on exterior security, far from the wedding and the feast, but the duty roster—signed by Prince Vincent—listed him for principal intervention and internal escort for the night. Appealing to Stolzoff for a different slot had been met with a firm rebuke. Tonight was critical, there would be no chances taken.
Instead of redirecting drunken guests who’d wandered beyond the velvet ropes, he spent the evening on the other side of a wall from the wedding and feast, ready to rush in and remove the royals at the slightest hint of trouble.
He watched Cosima and Francis stand up from their dinner table, and steeled himself for Stolzoff’s next order.
“Remi, Volenz, on shadow,” the colonel ordered over the radio.
Damn him, Remi thought.
He jogged through an access tunnel and caught up with Major Volenz, who was already two steps behind the newlyweds.
Cosima saw Remi, and she looked down at her feet, a brief sorrow crossing her face.
Francis had a spring in his step as they made their way to an elevator, though Cosima walked as if she was going to the gallows.
The elevator opened ahead of them. Cosima and Francis took up the back. Remi and the major stood in front of them.
“Your place or mine, my lovely?” Francis asked.
“I—mine,” she said.
Remi, his back to them, jabbed the button for Cosima’s floor.
He kept his eyes focused on the steel doors in front of his face, forcing himself not to watch their reflection behind him. He heard the rustle of a hand against fabric and the smack of lips.
“No, not yet,” Cosima said.
“Sweetie, they’re sworn to secrecy. Just treat them like furniture,” Francis said.
Remi had an overwhelming desire to turn and punch Francis right in the mouth, but his military bearing bore out.
“Just wait, OK?” Cosima said.
The elevator chimed and the door opened. Remi hated every step he took toward Cosima’s quarters. He heard at least one slap against Francis’s wandering hands.
Cosima rushed into her room. Francis gave Remi a wink as he followed her in. The door shut and mag-locked behind them, leaving their escorts in the hallway.
Remi put his back to the door, a glacier of pain sliding into his chest. He and Cosima never had a chance. His brain knew this, could rationalize this. His heart…his heart felt differently, and it made him suffer for it. She was another man’s wife now, and he would have to stand outside while…he forced his mind to the next day’s schedule, moving VIPs to and from the atrium where the treaty would be signed.
“Hey, Remi,” Major Volenz said, “I got this. Why don’t you do a perimeter sweep?”
“Shadow detail is one per principal. Thank you, but…no,” Remi said. The major knew better than to compromise the standard operating procedure. She just had more heart than Vincent and Stolzoff.
He heard a thump from within Cosima’s room, and his nervous system jumped into high gear at the thought of trouble.
“I said no!” Cosima’s voice carried through the door. Remi’s hand went to his pulser; Major Volenz grabbed his wrist before he could draw the weapon.
“What’re you thinking?” she hissed. “I don’t like it either but remember your oath.”
Remi pulled his hand from Volenz’s grasp and slammed a fist against his thigh. What he wouldn’t give to be anywhere but here.
The door slid open, and Francis, his shirt stained purple and reeking of wine, stumbled out. The door closed and locked again.
“Whew, she’ll take some time to win over,” he said. He looked at Major Volenz and ran a finger over his wet shirt. “Let’s go change, then back to the party.” He handed an empty wineglass to Remi. “Take care of that, would you?”
Francis left, no worse for wear.
The instant the elevator doors closed on Francis and his escort, Remi overrode the lock on Cosima’s door.
She sat on the bed, still clothed, her back to the door. She was hunched over, sobbing.
“My lady, are you…can I…”
Cosima took a deep, heaving breath and waved her hand at him, not daring to look up and show her tears.
“Get out,” she said.
Remi stepped back from the room—and hated himself for doing it.
CHAPTER 14
Glint watched Guardsmen enter and exit the control center from his perch against the ceiling. He had no muscles to tire, no endocrine nervous system to exhaust, and no bodily functions that could distract him. He could stay cloaked against the ceiling without blinking, if he’d had eyelids, for months.
All he had to do was wait for the signal the Sidonians would give him.
There, a Guardsman ran for the control room, hands on his blade and pulser belt to steady them as he went. They were trained to maintain calm and composure, therefore the sight of a rushed or harried Guardsmen meant there was good reason for everyone else to panic. The attack had begun, and now Glint would play his part.
The door recognized the Guardsman’s gene-code and opened.
Glint released his hold on the ceiling and leaped toward the Guardsman standing in the open door. The pistons in his legs shot Glint like an arrow, and he slammed into the unsuspecting Guard, stabbing him in the heart and base of the skull.
The Guard tumbled into the room, dead before he hit the ground. The Guardsmen in the control room stopped what they were doing and looked at the fallen man. Glint held perfectly still, his stealth field holding as a technician scrambled over to the dead Guard.
“Jerry? What happened?” The technician ran into Glint and bounced off him. He looked at where Glint was standing, confusion giving way to comprehension.
Glint loved the look of fear in his victim’s eyes.
“Stealth sui—”
Glint swiped his bladed hands across the technician’s throat, cutting off his warning and spraying bright arterial blood across workstations and the face of anyone too close to the departed Jerry.
Glint leaped at the first Guardsman fast enough to draw his pulser, his stealth field morphing to compensate for his speed. The men and women in the control room would see him as a blur and little else. Glint stabbed the Guardsman in
the chest, then hurled his body against a pair of naval officers standing in front of an orbital display.
He grabbed the wrist of a stunned woman and used her hand to draw her own pulser. He used her to fire the pulser, scoring head shots with eight of the nine bullets in the weapon. He put the pulser against her temple and killed her with the last round.
Glint shoved her body away and let his stealth field flicker off. The two naval officers panicked at the site of him, but neither managed to crawl a few feet before Glint stabbed them, pinning them to the floor until they stopped twitching.
The shield control station was still manned, the dead technician now slumping against his seat, bleeding all over the slates. Glint shoved him aside and took his place. A compartment snapped open on his thigh, and he removed an oblong data spike. He twisted it into an access port and watched as the displays across the room went blank.
Sidonia, for all its pretense about a strong middle class and self-determination, was still a technological backwater. The secondhand automation systems maintaining their defense systems were woefully inadequate when facing the latest in Aquitaine attack software.
Glint went to the door, stepping over bodies and pools of blood beneath them. He ripped open the wall around the door frame and bent the servos that opened and shut the reinforced door. He’d have privacy while the data spike went to work.
He looked at the orbital display, several objects were already through the outer atmosphere and would impact against the city’s bombardment shield in the next few minutes.
A bell chimed and red warning lights flashed along the walls.
“Warning. Shield emitters off-line. Shield emitters off-line,” a computer voice announced.
Glint returned to the empty chair and kicked his feet up on the desk.
****
Quinn looked up through the skylights. The energy shield protecting the city and palace wavered as a pale silver aurora of light danced across its surface. He got up from his table and strode to the outer edge of the dining room, dabbing at the corner of his lips with a napkin.
None of the guests bothered to notice that the protective shield over their heads had ceased functioning. He glanced up and saw one of the twin arches, its silhouette blocking out part of the night sky above.
Guardsmen around the room cocked their heads and looked at the screens on their gauntlets as a message reached them all at the same time. His plan didn’t call for complete surprise; that they had an inkling of what was coming hardly mattered.
A low rumble grew in the sky. It wasn’t until the tables shook that the conversation died away and Sidonia’s rich and powerful realized something was amiss.
Quinn tapped the body shield emitter on his lapel, and a sheen passed over his body. If there’d been anyone but Glint in the control room, the energy signature from his shield would have had guards swarming over him.
A yellow glow grew through the skylight, and Quinn put his hands over his ears.
War bots, not bound by the weakness of flesh, could enter an atmosphere much faster than any human, and could impact their targets with a remarkable amount of force. Quinn didn’t want his palace obliterated, but his army needed to make an entrance.
The drop pod burned through the sky over the palace and disgorged a dozen war bots across the palace grounds. One honed in on the energy signature of his body shield and crashed through the skylight, sending glass and masonry tumbling down on the wedding guests. The war bot crashed into the dining table where Cosima and Francis had been sitting. Its landing cocoon sizzled and snapped as it opened, blossoming to reveal the war bot as it rose to its full height.
Quinn’s shield flared as flecks of glass bounced off the energy field. Screams of pain and fear filled the banquet hall. Quinn stepped around bloodied bodies and shoved aside anyone who stumbled into him.
Guardsmen fired on the war bot, their pulsers useless against its heavy armor.
The war bot leveled its arm cannons and fired single shots from each cannon into the Guardsmen. Some of their gauntlet shields deflected the first hit; none survived the second shot.
Quinn walked confidently up to the war bot, pulser shots bouncing harmlessly off his shield. The war bot ignored him until the final Guardsman was dead. Then it turned its attention to the three gisaeng escorts huddled around the Chaebol executives. The gisaengs’ hands opened at hinges at the wrists, and energy crackled from the laser barrels pointed at the war bot.
“No! Not them,” Quinn said.
The war bot kept its weapons level but didn’t fire. Quinn opened a hatch on the side of the robot and pulled out a pulser inlaid with Stahlium and an ornate sword hilt. He flicked the hilt and a blade snapped out.
“Ah, how I’ve missed you both,” he said.
Quinn turned and pointed the blade at the Chaebol executives, peaking at him from beneath their gisaengs’ dresses.
“No need to antagonize your corporation,” Quinn said. “You may live so long as you do not interfere.” He tapped the sapphire on the pommel of his hilt against the war bot’s armor. Speakers activated on the war bot’s chassis.
“The rest of you.” Quinn’s words boomed through the speakers. Wedding guests, most clustered at the sealed double doors at the entrance, winced at the volume and malice of his words. “The rest of you will die as soon as it pleases me.”
A side door burst open. Three man-sized war bots carrying compact rifles marched into the room. They formed a perimeter around Quinn and leveled their weapons at the crowd. The larger bots were ideal for seizing control, but they simply weren’t designed for stairwells and elevators.
“Deployment complete,” one of the smaller war bots said, words buzzing from the speakers on its faceplate. “Extermination protocols loaded.”
“First things first: we need to find dear Prince Francis,” Quinn said. Now where would his brother be on his wedding night?
****
The percussion of cannon shots came through the floor beneath Remi’s feet. He glanced at his gauntlet, but the alert screen was blank. He tapped at his ear piece.
“This is Remi on quarters 3, what was that?”
No response.
“Any station, respond.”
The floor trembled and Remi decided not to wait for any further instructions.
He keyed open Cosima’s door, and it slid open a quarter of the way right as the power went out. Canary-yellow emergency lights lit up along the hallway, and the thrum of air-conditioners ceased.
Remi tried to force his way through the gap, but it was too narrow. “Cosima! Cosima something’s wrong, we have to go.”
“Stay out of my room,” she shot back.
Remi gripped the edge of the door and heaved, inching it open slowly.
“What did I just tell you?” she asked, her voice angry.
He heard her footsteps approaching.
“I will have you—what’s wrong with the door?” She jabbed at the dead control panel on her side of the wall.
“I think we’re under attack. Help me open the door a bit more,” Remi said.
Cosima wiggled her way through the opening.
“Or that,” he said. “Are you wearing your body shield, is it charged?”
Her hand went to her choker, and the body shield within it, and she nodded.
“Come on.” He took her by the hand and led her down the hallway.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Remi drew his pulser and opened the door to the stairwell. He left Cosima behind, checked to make sure the stairs above and below them were clear, and then pulled her along with him.
Cosima looked over the railing at the dozens of flights of stairs leading down. “Oh, seriously?” she whined.
“Can’t trust the elevators with the power out. Let’s go.” Remi took her hand again, and they ran to the stairs.
“Where are we going? Don’t tell me you’ve got another hunting lodge or something hidden in the palace,” she said.
> “An attacker has two options when it comes to this palace: destroy it outright or eliminate the royal family and take their place. We haven’t been blown to bits, so that means they’re after you,” Remi said.
“And the king and Francis and Vincent. What about them?”
“You are my only priority. Their Guardsmen will get them to safety. We bunch up with them and we’re one big target. I keep you away from them, keep moving until the Guard beats whoever is behind this or the army moves in from Fort Schwehr,” Remi said as they descended. “You have an assigned exit route, an emergency passage that’ll get us out of the palace and into Spillover North. The passage is on level 10.”
Cosima glanced at the number on the level they just passed. “We’re on level 44. I have got to start wearing more practical shoes.”
“Less talking, more running,” he said.
****
With full control of the palace through Glint, Quinn wasn’t going to waste time taking the stairs. The elevator dinged when it reached his target floor, and his war bot escort braced themselves in front of him. The doors opened to still silence.
One war bot should be enough for this target.
“Alpha, go,” Quinn said. The war bot sprinted down the hallway. The elevator doors closed, and Quinn leaned to his side to get a better look at Cosima’s door. Was it open? Might have been just a trick of shadow from the emergency lights.
Quinn thumbed the safety off his custom pulser and waited for the elevator to take them a few levels higher. “No restrictions, shoot everything that moves,” he said.
The doors opened and the war bots opened fire, their mechanical arms holding the pulser carbines with enough strength to fire them on full auto. Screams of wounded men and women echoed down the hallway.
The war bots stepped from the elevator and flanked Quinn as he walked down the hallway, his pulser leveled at the closed door to Francis’s room. The hallway split off and around his room. Quinn could see the palace ground burning through the windows.
