by CH Gideon
She turned her back to her father and met the eyes of the presidents onscreen, knowing where her best chance at success lie. “Further, should you have something to offer us above and beyond our stated interests, we can most certainly enter into individual discussions.”
V’ariat cackled. “You’ve got balls, dearie, coming into your father’s house to propose separate negotiations with the two of us,” she told Jiya. “I love it.”
Sumor nodded. “The Melowi people are interested in your proposal, Representatives Lemaire and Reynolds,” he said, emphasizing Jiya’s last name as a clear shot at her father. “We would be grateful to speak with you in private here in our homeland.”
“The same goes for the Toller people, dearie,” President V’ariat agreed. “We’d love to speak with you both,” she motioned toward Reynolds with her eyes, “soonest.”
She grinned at them both, locking gazes with Reynolds.
“We’ve noticed your ship has some hull damage while we’ve been stalking you,” she said, not bothering to sugarcoat her military’s reasons for having sent destroyers into orbit near the superdreadnought. “We have some experimental metal we’ve been crafting armor out of, and I think that’d be the perfect bonus offer to squeeze a little more out of you, don’t you think?”
“I like this one,” Tactical muttered over the comm. “Feisty and straight to the point.”
Reynolds grinned. “It would indeed, Madam President. I’ll have my representative reach out to you momentarily,” he told her, shifting his gaze to Sumor. “And to you, Mister President. You can expect us to be in touch shortly.”
“I, too, would be interested in your offer,” President Lemaire said behind them.
Jiya started, having almost forgotten the man was there, and spun, eyes narrowed.
“In fact, we can discuss terms once we’ve concluded the meeting,” he offered, “if that works for you.” Jiya noted he only spoke to Reynolds, but she really hadn’t expected anything different.
Reynolds nodded. “That would be perfect,” he answered. “My first officer and I will be glad to meet with you.” Reynolds gestured to Jiya and offered a furtive wink.
Jiya swallowed her smile at her father’s snarl.
“Perfect,” Lemaire said, his voice still as smooth as glass despite the obvious frustration deepening the color in his cheeks. He glanced at the viewscreens. “I’ll send them your way once we’re finished here,” he told the other presidents, not offering them a chance to reply before Gal cut the connections.
“See, that wasn’t that bad,” Reynolds told Jiya over the comm. “Could have been much worse.”
Jiya groaned, realizing Reynolds had just jinxed them.
It very well could have been worse.
A moment later, it was.
The guards filed into the room, weapons out and at the ready. Gal Dorant grinned and waved them over.
“Please secure our guests,” Gal told the guards.
The men circled Reynolds and Jiya.
“What is this?” Reynolds asked.
“This is karma biting you in your big metal taxi-cab ass,” Jiya answered aloud, shaking her head and sneering. “‘What’s the worst that could happen?’” she mimicked. “This, Reynolds. This is the worst that could happen.”
Reynolds shrugged. “I’d hardly call this the worst. I mean, they could easily—”
“Don’t. You. Say. Another. Word,” she told him, a growl punctuating each word.
“This is for daring to bring my child into my house and trying to use her against me,” Lemaire said, coming over to stand before the surrounded pair and curtailing Jiya’s threat. “I will not be made to bow to some foreign power in my own home, nor will I have my daughter prance around thinking she’s my equal.” He waved the guards off. “Take these two away and have a full complement of security services standing guard around each. Do not let them out of your sight.”
He stepped close and glared at Reynolds. “I suggest you keep your ship on a leash, android, or you might find you and your first officer make better shields than you do negotiators.”
“You’re making a mistake—” Jiya started, but her father cut her off.
“The only mistake I made was not dealing with your insolence earlier,” he answered. “I should have known you’d return and cause trouble, just like your mother always did. It’s in your blood, child, but I didn’t put up with it from her, and I damn well won’t put up with it from you.” He slapped a guard on the back. “Get them out of my sight.”
Jiya growled and turned her glare on Reynolds.
He shrugged. “How was I to know this would happen?”
“Because I told you!” she shouted, fuming as the guards marched them out the door and down the hall.
Reynolds acknowledged. “There is that.”
Jiya sighed and let the men lead her away without another word.
At least she wasn’t hanging out with her dad anymore.
Chapter Seventeen
To her surprise, Jiya found herself not in a cell but in a small room in the servant’s quarters only a short distance down the hall, which had apparently been cleared just for her. The windows had been barred at some point in the past and all the personal belongings had been removed, leaving only a couch, a chair, and a small bed without any covers.
She paced the room’s narrow width, mumbling to herself.
“He had this planned before we even arrived,” she said, furious that she’d let herself be walked into a trap of their own making.
Reynolds had been taken elsewhere, and given the direction she’d seen him dragged off, she had a pretty good idea that he had ended up in a cell.
Not that it mattered, considering his mind wasn’t confined to the Johnny taxi android.
She considered his various personalities, splintered into various positions, and wondered if maybe he was actually trapped in the cell while the other hims went about their business independently.
“I doubt it, even though that doesn’t matter,” she said to herself. Loose screws they might be, but there was no way they would leave part of themselves down here in danger.
Then she remembered her comm implant. Still new to her, it wasn’t something she consciously thought about until she needed it or someone else addressed her over it.
She needed it now.
She tapped it and waited for a signal. None came back.
“Great,” she muttered, “he’s blocked the communicators.” Her frustration with her father was ready to boil over.
From the day she was born, he’d controlled her, pushed and pulled and shaped her into what he wanted her to be. And from that day, she’d fought him because she’d been like her mother, too strong-willed to let someone else dictate who and what she was.
She wasn’t going to let him get away with it now.
Jiya went over to the door and pounded her fist on it. An ordinary wooden door, it vibrated and rattled under her fury. If her father or Gal Dorant had expected her to be a prim and proper princess and just accept her imprisonment, they were sadly mistaken.
After a few minutes of riffing punches against the door, she resorted to kicks. The door trembled under her assault, and the lower hinge looked ready to give way, splinters of wood exploding with every blow.
Then the door was whipped open.
Gal Dorant stood on the other side, a handful of security men looming behind him. He went to speak, but Jiya cut him off.
“I don’t care what you have to say, Gal, but you need to let me speak to my father,” she snarled.
She shook specks of blood from her battered fist, spattering the aide’s robes. He glared at the blood droplets for a moment before lifting his dark eyes to hers.
“Fortunately for you, your father is a merciful man. He—”
Jiya chuckled, cutting Gal off. “Oh, President Lemaire the Magnanimous,” she mocked. “That’s what they call him in the streets.”
The aide stiffened, straightening
to his full height. That provoked another burst of laughter from Jiya since the man barely stood as tall as her chin despite the platform boots he wore.
“I suggest you show some respect for your father and his rule or I will defy his wishes and drag you to a cell myself.”
Jiya grinned and drew a step closer to the man. The guards at his back inched forward to meet her.
Much as she wanted to see Gal try to wrestle her into submission and place her in a cell, she knew he was sufficiently spiteful to go through with at least part of his threat. While he wouldn’t dare do it himself, he would gladly have the guards do his dirty work for him.
That was something Jiya didn’t need right then.
She raised her hands in surrender. “Fine. Lead the way, O Master of Aides.”
Gal growled low in his throat and stood his ground. Jiya could see the war waging in his eyes, but as long as she didn’t push him harder than she already had, he’d wilt and give in to his training.
He was a professional servant, after all. He would do what he was told.
Without another word, he spun on his heel and marched through the throng of guards. He threw up a hand as he walked off, and the guards corralled Jiya and marched her down the hall.
Internally, she sighed, striving to keep her breathing level and calm.
As much as she didn’t want to see her father again, if there was a way out of all this, that was where it would emanate from.
She trusted Reynolds to try to break her out eventually, but that wasn’t the best way to go about assuaging her father’s rage and wounded pride. The only real way to do that was to surrender to him, if only outwardly.
It was a tactic she’d learned long ago, although she rarely put it to use. It just didn’t sit well with her, and never had. Still, if it freed her and got her and Reynolds on their way, she’d swallow her own pride—for a minute or two—and do what was necessary.
Rather than bring Jiya back to the meeting room where they’d had their first confrontation, Gal and his flunkies led Jiya to her father’s private quarters.
She groaned. That only exacerbated things.
In his chambers, there wasn’t anyone around to play to. Publicly, he might be a prick, a demanding leader, but privately, he was a tyrant. He demanded obedience. Reverence, even.
Jiya had often wondered if her father suffered from some form of megalomania. More often than she’d thought that, she’d questioned whether sociopathic tendencies could be inherited.
Gal’s knock on her father’s door swept that thought away. There was a muttered reply from inside, and Gal opened the door, ushering Jiya in.
“We’ll be right outside this door,” he warned, staring at her with hard eyes. “Should you do anything untoward, I will personally see you suffer for it.”
Before she could reply, the aide backed out the door and closed it behind him.
Jiya sucked in a deep breath to steel her nerves and glanced around the sitting area arranged nearest the door. Her father stood at the window on the other side of the room, staring out without moving or saying a word.
She stood patiently, waiting for him to say something or move.
The act was familiar, and she found herself relaxing. She’d been in this exact same position a hundred times. All she had to do was wait him out.
A few minutes later, her patience paid off. He cleared his throat and spun slowly, let his gaze drift for a moment before it met hers. He motioned to the small chair that sat across from the coffee table with a built-in viewscreen and the couch where her father preferred to sit.
She strode over and stood in front of the chair, waiting for him to take his seat first. Once he had, she settled in and cradled her hands on her lap. The ritual was strangely comforting.
“This was all a grave mistake,” Lemaire told his daughter, leaning forward as if to impress his disappointment upon her.
“I agree,” Jiya answered, and she meant it—although not for the same reason he did.
“Have you nothing else to say for yourself?”
Jiya bit back what she really wanted to say and let her tongue wrap itself around the words she should say instead.
Politics was all a game, and as much as she hated it, she’d grown up in this political world of her father’s. She knew how to play.
“I’m sorry,” she answered. “I’d hoped to make you proud, to show you I’d accomplished something with myself despite my defiance. I hadn’t meant to offend you or put you or your government on the defensive.”
“But that’s exactly what you did,” he told her, shaking his head. “You made me look like a fool in front of Sumor and V’ariat. You should have come to me, and me alone.” He grunted and leaned back into the couch. “Now… Now, I’m forced to make an example of you, child.”
Jiya shuddered at that. While she didn’t fear her father, she’d never heard him be quite so blunt about his intentions before. Her imagination ran wild right then, and she couldn’t do anything to rein it in.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t let you get away with this,” he answered, a tinge of frost in his voice. “It was one thing when you ran away the last time, that is, but it’s something entirely different to return to my country at the head of an invading enemy and try to extort resources.”
She stiffened in her seat, head whirling at the accusation. “That wasn’t what we were doing.” So much for pacifying him.
“No?” he asked, jabbing a finger her direction. “I see it differently, as do the Toller and Melowi governments. In the short time since the meeting, both leaders have ramped up propaganda against us, believing you and your pathetic Jonny taxi android alien to be the solution to their problems. Problems that include us—Marianas.”
He chuckled, the sound more like a dog’s growl than a laugh.
“They think they can convince your alien host to provide them with weapons to overwhelm us.” Lemaire sneered and glared at Jiya. “Your own people, child. You would side with an alien and our enemies against your own people? This is treason of the highest order,” he stated. “I cannot let this go, no matter who you are to me.”
Jiya swallowed hard. She’d never seen her father so cold and callous, and she’d seen him both plenty of times.
“What are you going to do?”
He exhaled, the barest glimmer of compassion softening his wrinkled features. “While I can’t find it in myself to execute you, Jiya, I must still uphold the law.”
The word “execute” echoed in her head and Jiya hopped to her feet, head on a swivel, eyes looking around for the inevitable guards who’d try to take her into custody again.
“You can’t do this,” she sputtered.
“I can, and I must,” he replied, not wavering in his decision. “You will spend the remainder of your days in a cell, child, a prisoner of your own insolence.” He stood, so they were eye to eye again. “And although I will suffer alongside you in spirit, my will in this matter is absolute.”
Jiya kicked the chair away, it landing behind her with a thump. “I won’t let you do this,” she warned, hands up and at the ready. Her father hopped up and circled behind the couch. “Reynolds won’t let you do this.”
The door hissed behind her, and she knew the guards were coming. She clenched her fists so hard her knuckles ached. If her father wanted to lock her away, he’d have to beat her down to make it happen. She wasn’t going to go easy.
“Your android will do nothing,” Lemaire told her, motioning toward the men filling the room.
In the arms of two of the guards hung Reynolds. Jiya gasped at seeing him dangling there, limp and silent.
“What did you do to him?” she shouted.
A handful of guards moved to her father’s side to keep her from diving at him.
“I’ve done nothing, child,” he answered. “Your savior abandoned you as soon as he was out of your sight.”
Gal Dorant grinned. “Only minutes after we locked him away
, he shut himself down. We hadn’t even begun to question him, the coward.”
“Rather than stand behind you, your alien overlord fled and left you to suffer the consequences of what he’d convinced you to do,” Lemaire said with a sigh. “It’s a shame, really. I thought I’d taught you better than that, child. But no, it seems you have fallen prey to an alien con artist, using your connections for profit and leaving you behind as soon as things went south.”
The guards tossed Reynolds’ android body to the floor. It hit with a sullen thump.
Lemaire waved a hand at his men. “Secure her.”
Jiya reared back, clearing space around her to defend herself. A dozen guards moved into position. She growled in response and offered up a crazed grin.
She even felt a little sorry for the first guy who tried to lay his hands on her.
“Well, she did tell him her dad was a prick,” Tactical commented as soon as he learned of Reynolds’ and Jiya’s imprisonment.
“He didn’t expect him to be so bold about it, especially given that the other two nations are expecting him and Jiya to show up soon,” XO commented.
“Should we inform them of what’s happened?” Comm asked.
“We should, but not just yet,” an unfamiliar voice said. Someone was shuffling onto the bridge.
The various Reynoldses spun—not that anyone would know—and stared at the newcomer.
General Maddox grunted and glanced around in confusion when he realized the bridge only contained a young woman, clearly not a match for the masculine voices that had been carrying on as he entered.
“Uh…”
Geroux offered a friendly smile. “It’s the AI talking,” she clarified and waved a hand toward several of the consoles. “XO, Comm, and Tactical are here now.”
Maddox raised an eyebrow. “There’s more than one AI?”
Geroux shook her head. “Nope, just the one.”
“I beg to differ,” Tactical muttered. “Why does everyone try to lump me in with the rest of these assholes?”
