He floated in a transparent tube within a long corridor lined with identical vessels. Each held a sentient being drifting within it. Many were human, but he also made out a few three-eyed beings with frost-blue skin and fleshy beards—Cleebians. There were more than a few Relaen as well, marked by the ten centimeter long ears sprouting from their temples. Long braided hair drifted beside them from scalp, forearms, and shins. All of them had wounds of various types, from plasma burns to gaping punctures indicative of the impact from high velocity slugs. Nero’s brain was functioning slowly, but he was able to deduce that he was in a Confederate medical bay aboard one of the capital ships.
Once he reached this conclusion, Prospero gently settled his vision on the figure barely a meter outside of his med-bay tube. It took longer for Nero to focus on the being hovering before him than it did the others. His brain processed a rail-thin body, pale, veined skin and a mane of black hair longer than the rest of her frame. Even if she hadn’t had such a malnourished physique, the ethereal green glow of her large eyes was unmistakable.
“Hi,” she said.
She was wearing a clean, light-gray jumper. It looked like she’d showered since he last saw her. Nero figured a standard week on whatever ship this was might have her putting on more weight as well. He was relieved the Corps had rescued her from the planet surface, completing his mission for him. Daedalus would not be happy, but Daedalus could screw itself. The girl was alive, in one piece, and that’s what mattered.
Nero tried to speak, but only a wheeze got past his lips. He inhaled deeply, tasting the unique flavor of antiseptics and nanomachines the tube pumped into the air around him. He had to fight the urge to retch—such things were never pretty in zero gravity.
“I’ve been watching you.” Her voice was child-like, but with an added weight beneath that was rare in one so young. It complimented her eerily steady, unblinking gaze.
“How long?” Nero whispered.
“Twenty-two days. General McCragen asked me to tell you that the war is over when you woke up.”
“Thank you,” Nero responded. Just talking made him feel dizzy.
Take it easy, Nero. Slow, measured breaths. I’ll put you out again once we’re done.
Nero tried to move his head down to see himself, and found he couldn’t. He wanted to see how badly he was hurt. The hazy colors of his skin’s reflection in the tube’s surface didn’t look good.
“Thank you for saving my life. Irin asked me to thank you, too.”
“Who’s Irin?” Nero licked his dried lips.
“Chief of the Savorchan tribes. He babysat me sometimes when my parents were too busy.”
Nero would’ve whistled if he could have. She was remarkably nonchalant about having such a casual relationship with the leader of an entire planet.
“Is it special? I grew up on starships, I don’t know if it is,” she said.
“Is what?”
She stared at him, face neutral in a way a mother stares at a child who’d just asked a stupid question. The look sent shivers down his back and he resisted the urge to squirm beneath it.
“Okay, sorry. Suman says we have to go soon now that Paula is dead.” Her tone was so even that it took Nero a moment to realize that she was talking about her parents.
“She’s dead?” Nero said loud enough to hurt his throat. It still sounded barely above a whisper in his ears.
“The lava flow killed her after your grenade exploded. Tengu had to drag you out by your neck. I wasn’t strong enough.”
The echo of the woman’s screams came into Nero’s ears, a wailing reminder of his failure. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, driving the sound from his head. It took too long to fade.
“Tengu?”
“My cerberai, but he’s also my friend. He says you’re heavier than you look,” she answered.
Nero recalled the brown-and-tan engineered canine. He knew they had a higher than average intelligence and could follow complex commands, but hadn’t realized they were smart enough to—
“Wait, he speaks?”
“Of course not, silly. Cerberai can’t speak. They aren’t made for that,” she said.
“I know. So how do you know he thinks I’m heavy?”
“I can hear him,” she responded.
Nero wondered if she was at least mildly insane from her parents’ neglect.
It’s not uncommon for children as young as she to suffer a kind of psychotic break in such situations. She must have seen her pet struggling and imagined him saying you were heavier than you looked. Prospero sounded uncharacteristically concerned.
Nero frowned.
Kiertah looked down and to the side, as though embarrassed by something. “Suman says—” she stopped herself. “He says that we’re going to a place called Zov.”
Zov is in the VoQuana Remnant. I’m surprised he managed to obtain a visa to do so. All VoQuana planets are under quarantine since the Quae-Sol war.
“I don’t think I want to go. Irin was upset, but said he can’t do anything.” She put her hands up against the glass, gripping the tube so she didn’t float backwards. “Can you?”
Nero’s eyes widened. The image of her father leaving her to die in the corridor flashed through his mind. He knew what she was asking, and he would have said yes if he could have, but then what would he do? He was an Abyssian, it would be impractical and dangerous for him to drag this girl around the galaxy. What if he saved her from one fate only to deliver her into the hands of another? Going from crime to crime, war zone to war zone was no life for a little girl. He owed her something, but she was probably safer with her father. He had to make himself believe that.
“I—”
Her eyes softened, and in an instant she appeared as the tired, maltreated child that she was. Her shoulders slumped along with her expression. “I know. I had to leave Tengu with Irin. Suman says I can’t take him where I’m going. He didn’t say ‘we’, he said ‘you’.”
Nero felt a lump forming in his throat. Her look alone made him want to beat her son-of-a-bitch father to death.
“I’m sorry,” Nero said.
“Don’t be. You saved my life.”
Kiertah took a big gulp of air and straightened up. The motion set her drifting backwards away from him, the strangely serene facade returned to her face.
“Bye,” she said.
Nero watched her touch the surface of the tube behind her with a foot and kick off towards the medical bay’s exit. Watching her go felt like another failure, though he didn’t understand why.
Chapter One
Keltan Arcology, Sol-III (Earth)
40:8:36 CST (J2400:2916)
Cylus groaned at the noise assaulting his ears. He rolled over, determined not to let it intrude on needed sleep, but it was too late. The pounding in his head made further sleep impossible, and he was forced from the oblivion of alcohol-induced darkness. Among the noises coming through the oak door to his bedchamber were the words “Heiress,” “sleeping,” and “don’t care.” The latter was spoken in a strong female timbre that Cylus knew well. He groaned again, forcing himself to roll over towards the door and open his eyes.
Although he was now the sole master of the place, he refused to take his parents’ bedroom after their deaths, and the four poster bed he awakened in was the same that he had on countless mornings since he was a child. It was generations old, dating from back before the cataclysm drowned the Earth. Carved from a single piece of sequoia wood and stained with a dark finish, it was clad in brown sheets with a vine pattern sewn with silver thread. Six pillows made from cotton were bunched up at one side, while a thick wool comforter rested neatly across the foot of the bed.
A picture window with a gilded metal frame on his left looked out on the gardens six stories below, its fountains and trees reduced to shadows by the polarized glass. Opposite it was the door that guarded his room.
Cylus’ arcology was much like the ones owned by every major house in the Confed
eration. It was a floating fortress held aloft by the gravitationally repulsive force known as dark energy. Massive generators in the arcology’s underbelly released waves of it into the air below, visible as a blood-colored haze beneath the structure. Considered the height of fashion a century ago when the technology was invented, the aging fortresses were now gilded heirlooms—dated status symbols required to fit in among the elite.
His was one of the largest in atmospheric orbit around Earth. Six towers rose from a rounded base wide enough to cover an entire hectare. Each kilometer-long tower was coated in a thin layer of diamond dust that both cut down on its wind resistance, and made it shimmer like a crystal bauble. They rested on the arcology’s tiered base, each with gardens, fountains, and ornate statues from all over the Orion Spur filling the space between them. Protected from the harsh winds by the arcology’s dynamic aegis field, it always felt like a warm spring day in the gardens.
His father had been Baron of the Keltan Securities Firm, the largest brokerage firm in the Confederation. Upon his death access to a level of wealth that rivaled even the Confederate treasury passed to Cylus along with trinkets, like a personal FTL ship, and the arcology. At one point Cylus was excited about his inheritance. He, Sable, and Sophi were all going to live fairy tale lives one day, but all that changed when his family was slaughtered. Nothing mattered now; not the expanse of his inheritance nor the size of his arcology.
The fortress once teemed with thousands of his family’s servants, but Cylus had reduced its crew to just the few hundred—led by his artificial manservant, Ben—necessary to run and maintain it. The place was too fraught with memories for him to ever be comfortable here for long.
Several ornate wooden dressers rested below a square meter portrait of Cylus’s family on the wall. His strong-jawed father gazed back at him with hopeful eyes. His elegant step-mother stood to the side smiling down at two of his three siblings. Among them, Sando resembled their father the most, while pudgy-cheeked Shelly took after their mother, Star. Looking at their impatient faces staring down at him from the picture’s glassy surface thrust a spike through Cylus’ heart.
The scan was done on the day they left for Brogh, a proud ambassador’s family heading off to their first post. Cylus was left behind to watch over Keltan Securities in his father’s stead until things settled enough that he could join his family thousands of light-years away on the alien world. There had been delays, nothing ever quite seemed calm enough, and wanting to do his father proud meant that Cylus put off the trip for several years. Then it was too late.
He turned from the picture and forced himself to focus on the source of the sounds beating their way into his fragile skull. The door exploded inward, swinging so violently upon its hinges that the noise ricocheted off the vaulted ceiling directly above him. He hardly had time to react before a flurry of black silk and electric blue thread pounced on his stomach.
Cylus was forced half-way into a seated position by the weight that violently thrust itself onto his person. A dark velvet-gloved hand with narrow fingers clasped his throat and arrested his forward motion.
He gurgled.
“Shush, baby.” Sophi thrust her hood back, revealing the high slopes of her cheeks, the spade of her upturned nose, and her gleaming sky-blue eyes. In that moment, with her milk-white skin, the triumphant sneer on her face made her look disturbingly like a porcelain doll of her father.
Ben stood in the doorway, frowning. Dressed in a brown suit with silver cuffs, his white skin was a match for Sophi’s. Like all androids, his pate was bald and his eyes were without irises—two black pupils in a field of pure white.
“My master, I apologize. I was unable to detain her on account of your standing order to give her access to all parts of the arcology,” his servant said.
“You’re choking me,” Cylus squeaked out.
“Oh? I’m barely squeezing you, pansy.” Sophi released his windpipe and slid her derriere onto the mattress beside him.
With the weight gone, Cylus fell back into the mound of pillows and gasped. “Thank you, darling.”
It took him several more gulps of air before the pain in his body abated enough for him to fully take Sophiathena in. She was wearing a thin silk robe with a blue trim that ran along its edge in box-like waves. It clung to her in all of the right places, accentuating instead of hiding her gently flared hips and the elegant slopes of her breasts. Her long, omnipresent braids trailed over her shoulders, across his legs, and onto the bed like woven serpents.
“Are you all right?” Ben asked.
“Yes, I’m fine. What did you want, Snowflake?”
Sophi frowned. He knew she hated that nickname, but with her over-dramatic entrance and the relentless hammering in his head, he was in the mood to sting her.
“You’ve overslept. You should be getting ready for the memorial, my gentle flower of a man.” She tapped him on the nose.
Cylus squinted at her. The memorial was why he drank so much last night. It had been five years since the last time, and he still didn’t know why he’d let Sophi talk him into coming this year.
“Ben?” she said without moving her gaze from him.
“Yes, Heiress?” Cylus’ servant stepped forward.
“Get Cy a shot of Nanodetox.”
“Yes, Heiress. Oh, and master, you have another visitor. Heir Mitsugawa is waiting in your sitting room at the base of the tower.”
“Huh? Why?” Heir Mitsugawa Ichiro, Sable, as Cylus knew him, was Sophi’s half-brother and his best friend. The nickname was the counterpoint to Sophi’s “Snow,” though she hated going by that name now that she was grown up.
“He thought it rude to barge in on you while you were sleeping,” Ben said.
“Imagine that.” Cylus gave Sophi a pointed look.
Ben gave a shallow bow and disappeared into the hallway.
Sophi snorted. “Sable’s got more manners than sense. You weren’t going to wake up without intervention.”
“I beg to disagree,” Cylus muttered.
It was her turn to give him a pointed look. He shied away from it, sat up, swooned, and fell back against the pillows with a groan.
Ben re-entered the room, pressure syringe in hand. “Your Nanodetox, sir.”
Cylus obediently held out his arm. His servant pressed the narrow, five centimeter long cylinder against his flesh. Nanomachines flooded his system with a hiss of compressed air. In moments his headache abated.
“Thank you, Ben,” he said.
His servant bowed and retreated to the doorway.
“Now that that is taken care of, you have to get ready,” Sophi said.
“Ready? Ready for what?”
She looked amused. “You promised Sable that you’d come this year. Don’t you remember?”
He stared at her, licking his lips. Last night came rushing back into his consciousness. He had almost bailed out of the agreement to attend his family’s memorial, but Sable had made him promise he would be there tomorrow.
Tomorrow was now today.
“Oh, right.” His stomach twitched.
Sophi patted him on the chest, then drew herself off the bed in a single motion. She began rifling through the drawers of his dressers, and tossing clothing at the foot of the bed.
“Where’s your robe?” Sophi asked.
He sighed. “In there somewhere. Ben handles this, Snowflake. Leave it alone.”
The android started to move over.
“And he’ll do it later,” Cylus added. The artificial froze in his tracks, holding so still it looked like time had stopped.
She pouted, but stopped ransacking his wardrobe.
“Ben, tell Sable that he can come up if he likes,” Cylus said.
“Yes, master,” the chalk-skinned artificial bowed and headed out. He closed the door gently behind him, careful to keep his back to the corridor the entire time.
“Cylus, get up.” Sophi said.
“Um, sure.” He slid his legs out ove
r the edge of the bed and stood up. The long, cool fibers of the carpet felt good between his toes. He held his arms above his head and stretched.
“Stop tempting me and get over here,” she said from behind him. Her playful tone melted the ice in his gut.
He smoothed his chest-length beard with his hands, then did the same to his mane of coppery hair. He moved to Sophi’s side, the air bringing both excitement and goose bumps to his bare flesh. “We’ve got plenty of time, yes?”
Her face contracted into a broad smile that accentuated her high cheekbones. “You know I’d love to, but we really don’t, Cy. You overslept by quite a few hours. You should have had Ben dose you with the detox at seven this morning.”
“Sorry.” He slid his arms around Sophi’s waist from behind and pulled her in close. The layer of warm silk between them licked him from his thighs to his collarbone. Through it he felt the crease of her buttocks stirring his groin to life.
She leaned to the side, twisting her head to bring his face into view. She slid her velvet-clad hand between them, skimming it lightly over his skin in all the right places before cupping him firmly. “We don’t have time,” she said softly.
“Sure we do,” Cylus said.
“No, we don’t.” Sophi squeezed, hard.
Cylus croaked. The pain bent him around her tensed fist, bringing his ear down to her lips.
“Later. Make sure that artificial slave of yours gets your robe out when it gets back with Sable,” she whispered.
Cylus nodded quickly, and she released him. He collapsed into a twitching heap at her feet.
The humidity caused his black mourning robe to cling to his neck like an unwanted lover. It was always humid on Earth, even here in the mountains. The moisture turned his long, coppery beard into a bird’s nest of tangles, and the meter of hair sprouting from his scalp into a frayed mess despite the thong’s valiant effort to hold it in a tail behind him.
Remus City, on the eastern edge of the Alps overlooking the New Venetian Sea, was where the seat of humanity fled after the floods drowned the civilizations of old and gave birth to this hot, sticky, bug-filled world. If not for the ultrasonic repulsion field around the plaza, he would be eaten alive by Earth’s plethora of blood sucking insect life. Part of him wanted to switch it off and let the remaining indigenous creatures devour the gathered crowd. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to come back here and stand before those who had resented his family’s success. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to face the lies of sympathy on their faces—on his face.
Blood Siren Page 2
