Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future

by Barbara Bartholomew

  Instead, the door opened, and the younger fair-haired princess stepped aside to allow him to enter.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he apologized when he saw Claire and the other daughter seated near each other as though in conversation. “I thought we might talk things over.”

  The older girl glared coldly at him, but Claire nodded. “We do need to have a discussion,” she agreed, her tone neither friendly or unfriendly. He might have been just another suppliant granted an interview with the all powerful first lady of the Gare.

  Nobody invited him to sit down, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to remain standing for long. He was too weak. So he seated himself in a huge, cushioned chair designed for someone considerably larger than himself and prepared to do more listening than talking.

  The silence would have become awkward after a few minutes if he had not been somewhat accustomed to the company of the telepaths of Terrainaine. The two girls weren’t even looking at each other, but he had a strong feeling they were saying all sorts of things to each other. Claire sat just as silently, but her forehead was wrinkled with thought.

  He waited until she looked directly at him. “What’s going on?” he asked as though they were alone in the room.

  “Mr. Jamie Lewis Ward, you presume too much,” the older girl exploded furiously.

  “Adaeze, I’m sure he didn’t mean . . .” her sister began apologetically, but Claire interrupted.

  “This isn’t the empire, Adaeze, and he is not your subject.”

  “Really, Mother,” the girl responded, but stopped when her mother raised a restraining hand.

  Jamie was impressed. He wasn’t sure he could have managed a child with the powers this one had. At the same time he couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the pretty impulsive young girl from Chicago who had depended on him.

  She’d ruled as empress for half her life, he reminded himself.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he told Claire, ignoring the girls. “Maybe I’d better go. We can talk later.”

  “No.” Claire still held that slim little hand in the air, restraining him as much as her daughters. “We need to talk now. Adaeze might prefer to be excused.”

  The girl’s lovely face turned red, but she shook her head. “I’m staying right here. I have a right to be heard.”

  “We will listen to your opinion, Adaeze, but the adults will make the decision.”

  The girl leaned back reluctantly in her chair, but didn’t look any more resigned than she had a moment before. Jamie guessed that Claire still held the reins on this filly, but only by a light hand.

  Claire turned to Jamie. “At this point, we are still headed toward Sanctuary, but my daughter has just confided some info that might change our plans.”

  Again he waited, settling more firmly into his chair as he felt the darting glances of the two girls, one concerned and the other fiercely angry.

  “What she has heard may be only rumors, Jamie, but the people in Terrainaine are saying there has been another raid on New London.” Her face looked pinched and white. Claire had herself once been the subject of one of those raids. “The first since my husband obtained power. Mathiah is no longer here to keep his promises to you or to me, Jamie. He did all he could when he named me regent, but his mother saw to it that his plans were put aside and that she, in the name of the little emperor, rules the empire.”

  Jamie allowed himself a single comment. “Can’t be much of an empire when they can’t communicate from one world to another.”

  She nodded. “Power is consolidated on the home world. The rest are in various stages of independence, but Terrainaine is under the firm grip of the dowager empress’s forces.”

  Jamie felt as though his stomach dropped. He’d left New London to come looking for Claire and terrible things might have happened while he was gone. “You said there was a raid?” he directed the question at Princess Adaeze.

  She looked at her mother as though for permission to refuse to answer.

  “Tell him what you heard,” her mother instructed.

  “It’s just rumors, talk on the streets in Terrainaine, but they’re saying that two children were taken. Michel, my cousin the emperor, is unwell and will need the services of a catere.”

  Catere. Jamie closed his eyes briefly. Not only Claire, but he himself had been used for that purpose. He had been injected with drugs that made his blood seem to boil in his body and tortured close to death, all in the futile attempt to save Prince Darin, the emperor’s older brother.

  “Do you know who they took?”

  She shook her head. “A boy and a girl. No names were known.” She looked away from him to her mother. Claire gave a little nod. “The gossip is also that you have run away from New London to join my mother. It is considered a great scandal.”

  He wasn’t worried about that. “How soon can we get back to Sanctuary?” he asked Claire.

  “You might best ask if we should go there, Jamie?” she said with what was for Claire uncommon gentleness. “I’m not sure we wouldn’t draw more fire to the community if it should become public knowledge what my daughters are. And you can understand that I don’t want to put them in danger.”

  It was as if the two of them were alone in the room and the two young girls had faded into the background. “That’s your choice to make, but it seems to me that there is no place more safe for them than New London itself. There’s not a person in the empire that wouldn’t recognize you on sight and there’s no disguise that would hide your identity for more than a few days.”

  She inclined her head slightly, but made no comment.

  All right, that was for her to decide. “No matter what you do, Claire, please, please help me to get home. They need me there.”

  He sensed, or imagined, a furious exchange of words between the two princesses and wondered if it wouldn’t be terribly frustrating to be parent to children like these who could talk right over your head without you understanding a word.

  The debate went on all night and well into the morning with Claire’s daughters both arguing that going to New London would be a huge mistake.

  “We will stand out among the Earthlings,” Lillianne pleaded. “Mom, they will bomb us and that little town out of existence.”

  “Or send in the army to shoot everybody, these people you want to protect and us as well. We must go someplace where we can blend into the population,” Adaeze was uncompromising.

  “Like where?” Claire asked in a carefully assumed tone of reasonableness.

  She watched her daughter’s face that betrayed nothing of her whirling mind. Adaeze’s intelligence was off the charts by any Earth standard, but Claire figured she was going through a list of the known habitable planets. The Aremian Empire had spread out from the home planet to many worlds and she would be willing to bet her daughter couldn’t think of one where both girls wouldn’t be immediately recognized.

  Finally Adaeze said, “Only give me a little time. I’ll think of the perfect location.”

  Claire shook her head. “It doesn’t exist. Our images have been shone across the worlds. And the superstition that a woman with a man’s talent must be destroyed is deeply ingrained in the people. They would consider it an honor to kill you, my love.”

  Adaeze refused to yield, but Lillianne asked a question in a quivering voice. “Does that mean we might as well give up and die, Mom?”

  “Never! If you think that’s what I’m saying, then you’re totally and absolutely wrong.” She played her trump card. “Your father would expect more than that from us.”

  Lillianne’s shoulders sank. “Then where would he expect us to go.”

  “New London.”

  Adaeze stared at her with distrust. “He said that?”

  “Well, no, but . . .”

  “You are only trying to make us do what you choose? You want to live among those barbarians.”

  Claire didn’t bother to argue about the barbarian status of her home world. As fa
r as Adaeze was concerned, the inability to speak telepathically was all the evidence needed. “We will go to Sanctuary . . .”

  “Blood,” Adaeze spat out the word.

  “To Sanctuary and New London, and we’ll go openly as the former empress and the two princesses of the Gare. We won’t even try to hide. Everybody will know we’re there and we will be sheltered by that very openness.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Adaeze said with disgust.

  “But Mom, they will come and kill us,” Lillianne agreed.

  She shook her head, getting to her feet. She had a lot to think about before they landed on Sanctuary. “The last thing your Grandmere wants is to destroy the people of New London. They provide the best chance Michel has of surviving his newly discovered heritage.”

  “But they already have two,” Lillianne argued reluctantly.

  “They’ll be afraid more will be needed. And we will be surrounded by people the empire wants to keep alive. That will be our fortress.”

  Lillianne nodded slowly and even Adaeze couldn’t seem to think of a good argument against the plan.

  They went home without a lot of fanfare. Nobody came out to watch them land and most certainly there was no welcoming party when they walked the few miles into town.

  The houses they moved past were not lighted against the dark and only the glow of the moon gave them visibility to move ahead. It was the middle of the night so the residents of New London could be sleeping quietly in their homes. Jamie didn’t think so.

  He felt sure they had taken refuge in the fortified building he and his friends had worked on all these years. He took no pleasure in the thought that he’d finally been proved right and they’d needed what security they could find to protect them from the Gere. He’d rather have been wrong.

  He wondered if this was how Churchill felt during the bombing of Britain; vindicated and yet somehow sorry that he’d been right after all. He’d been like the mythical Cassandra, gifted with the ability to prophesy disaster, but cursed with disbelief.

  “It’s actually rather pretty here,” Lillianne said in surprise. “Lovely homes, flowering plants that scent the air. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

  “Where are the people?” her sister asked.

  “It does look deserted,” Claire agreed, sounding concerned.

  Jamie barely heard them. “We’d better stop and camp at my house.” He led the way to a cream-colored stucco building with the red roof he’d recently repaired. It wasn’t a large dwelling; as a bachelor he hadn’t needed much space, but there was room enough and blankets enough to make extra beds on the floor. This reminded him of the nights when he and the other youngsters recently arrived from Earth had slept in just two houses, trying to keep safe from the unknown danger which was stealing from their populace.

  At least now they knew what was going on and had collected weapons to protect themselves. Oh, he knew they wouldn’t have a chance if the Gare decided to eliminate them. But the advantage was that the last thing their enemy wanted was to see all of them dead. They were needed.

  Inadvertently another memory rose. Just outside town there was a cemetery where the original settlers had been buried. Encouraged by revolutionaries among the Aremians themselves, they had determined to fight back against the steady stealing of their children.

  The result had been the official execution of every man, woman, and child, excepting only the board of elders, who had been left to suffer the penalty of losing all their kin and friends, for the sin of leading their people to stand up for themselves.

  Old George was the last survivor of the twelve elders and Jamie and the others were the sacrifice sent by Earth to prevent the incursion into their world.

  He and ninety nine other fifteen-year-olds had been chosen for their blood type and sent to the planet called both Sanctuary and Blood to serve the Aremians.

  “Have the people all left, Jamie?” Lillianne said in a scared voice. For the first time she sounded to him like the little girl she was and he remembered that in short order she’d lost dad and home.

  “More likely they’ve gone into hiding. You see some of us have worked for years to make the old city hall as secure as possible and I figure that’s where they’ve gone for the night.”

  “Shouldn’t we go find them?”

  Jamie considered how to answer. Isaiah, Mack, Karen and George had seen to it that there was a considerable stockpile of weapons and supplies stored within the old building. If they tried to approach it at night, they’d most likely be met with firepower, especially considering they were accompanied by two full-fledged Gare guardsmen from the Princess Adaeze’s crew. The rest of the crew members had remained on board to safeguard the little ship.

  “It might be best to rest up tonight and greet everybody by daylight. My friends have some kids about your age and I’m anxious for you to meet them.”

  He didn’t say that an awful lot of the youngsters in New London would be about their age since all the parents were the same age, the original fifteen-year-olds now being in their thirtieth year, just as were he and Claire.

  It was an odd population. He supposed that sociologists back on old Earth would have had a field day doing a study of them and their relationships.

  Well, they’d done the best they could and, God willing, they’d keep on doing the same.

  Claire insisted on taking her turn at guard duty that night, splitting with Jamie and the two crewmen while her daughters slept in Jamie’s bedroom in the only actual bed in the house.

  She took the last duty, which meant she got up in the dark early morning hours to relieve Jamie, accepting the laser gun he handed her, and walking a patrol throughout the house, checking both front and back doors each time she went by.

  Jamie slept on the floor of the living room, Captain Thereon and the other guardsman on makeshift cots nearby. She tiptoed past them as she cut through the room, thinking that she shouldn’t have allowed Jamie guard duty.

  He still was a long way from well and though he wouldn’t admit it, tired easily. They needed him strong and well for the days that lay ahead.

  Though not a habitual worrier, she couldn’t help but think about what direction danger might come from. She wasn’t kidding herself that by now most everybody on the planet knew that the imperial cruiser had landed in the open plain near New London.

  Trouble could come from over the mountains in Terrainaine or from within New London itself. If she’d been one of those people hiding out in the old city hall, she’d already have hightailed it over here to check things out. That the town seemed so sleepily unaware seemed beyond belief.

  Kevin Hartley might be stupid as a dead rabbit, but Mack and Isaiah had brains enough. Where were they and what were they waiting for?

  FIFTEEN

  Jamie was wakened with startling abruptness by the nearly simultaneous sounds of feet racing past him and the high-pitched screaming of young girls.

  He jumped up, paying no attention to the painful jarring the motion gave his damaged body. The girls—Adaeze and Lillianne—must be in danger. He quickly noticed that the racing feet must have been the two guardsmen running past him since they were no longer prone on the floor.

  He dashed down the hall to his own bedroom, only to have Princess Adaeze push him aside as she ran in the opposite direction yelling, “Mom! Mom!”

  Lillianne, looking rumpled as though she’d just emerged from bed, stopped to stare at him. “They’ve taken our ship!” she said a shrill whisper.

  “Who has? How do you know?”

  She didn’t get a chance to answer because Claire came running back, her older daughter trailing her. “Adaeze heard them,” she spoke urgently. “They’re high jacking the cruiser. We must stop them or we’ll be stranded here.”

  He was hardly in condition to run and had trouble keeping up with Claire and her daughters as they darted out of the house and rushed to the edge of town. It seemed to take forever to get back to the ship and he curse
d his slowness. He was too out of breath to question the others as to who was trying to steal the cruiser.

  Once they’d cleared the residences on the edge of town, he felt a sharp edge of relief when he saw that the ship still sat in place, only minimally lighted. Nobody had taken off with it yet, but he wished for the rocket gun he’d carried when he’d last faced a confrontation on this spot.

  Though she was smaller and with shorter legs than anyone else present, including both her daughters, Claire raced furiously ahead of them, the little laser gun he’d given her waving wildly in the air as she charged up to the ship, which opened automatically as its electronic guards recognized her.

  “Claire! Wait!” He gasped out the words, but was hardly surprised when she ignored him.

  She was mad, really mad, that someone would dare to try to take her ship.

  In spite of his physical limitations, sheer adrenalin drove him fast enough to be the first to follow her to the ship’s entrance. Humiliatingly he was left to pound at the doorway which refused to admit him and had to step aside as Captain Thereon entered first, allowing him to follow. He supposed the girls and the other guardsman were behind him.

  They dashed for the ship’s control room on the upper deck and when they entered that open area, Jamie stopped short with sudden relief. Claire was trying to hug both Isaiah and Mack at the same time while Karen, Charlie and David, all armed to the teeth, held four crew members at gun point.

  Jamie started laughing while Adaeze exclaimed in a distinctly annoyed tone, “Mom!”

  Karen gave him a scornful glance, keeping her attention primarily focused on her captives. “We thought you were dead for sure.”

  Jamie gasped for breath, the mending wound on his right side feeling like it would tear apart at any second now. He guessed racing across ground at the fastest pace he could manage hadn’t exactly been good therapy.

  Claire turned to see him choking and gasping and ordered his friends, “He was badly hurt. Stabbed with a thruster only a few days ago. Somebody do something.”