“For that reason alone, Harmony must remain united and functioning a while longer,” Gil returned to the original purpose of his visit, pressing the advantage of her disgust.‘ “If you break the caste system all at once, we face chaos.”
“We’ll be vulnerable to invasion. We’ll be lucky if it’s the CSS. We’d all better pray it won’t be the Marils,” Jake added. He looked very uncomfortable with this conversation.
“And if we deserve invasion and death?” Sissy asked. She’d set her chin.
Gil couldn’t allow her to win.
“Perhaps our ancestors deserved it. We don’t.”
“But...”
“Change we need. Breaking we don’t, Laudae,” Jake said. “We need to start looking outward.”
“Gradual change,” Gil coaxed. “Begin with the schools. Penelope wants to help with that. Bring gifted Worker and Military children into Professional schools. Bring the Poor in any way we can. Upgrade Worker schools with more teachers and textbooks. Begin building new schools that merge several castes,” Gil explained the outline Penelope had given him.
“Let the children get used to dealing with other castes. As they grow familiar with each other, prejudice will dissolve,” Sissy mused.
“Now, will you please return to Crystal Temple?” Gil pleaded.
“What about the . . . the ones born with altered caste marks?”
Gil noted that she never could say “Lood.”
“I have it on good authority that the Spacers fix their Loods,” Jake said. A look of hope crossed his face, as if he knew Sissy moved away from her extreme position.
“How?” Sissy asked, suspicion clouding her eyes. “The children cannot be manipulated in artificial wombs like the original settlers did.”
“An easy process,” Gil jumped in. “Much like when Jake had his caste mark upgraded to officer and Lauded to serve the temple. The same way I added sparkle to your caste mark when you were in hospital.” He had to hang his head in guilt over that, but he watched her through lowered lashes.
“That was you?” Sissy laughed.
“I knew that doubters would respect the sparkle and acknowledge your authority. You see that the caste system is too ingrained to dissolve all at once. Give it time while we secure our borders through alliance and trade.”
Sissy flashed Jake a stern glance.
He shrugged and put on a mask of innocence. He must have been pushing the same idea.
“We will tear down the asylums,” Sissy insisted.
“The buildings are large and useful,” Gil protested, seeing them as housing, schools, and hospitals for the Poor.
“Tear them down.”
“Yes, My Laudae.” No reminders of the horrors the asylums represented.
“Now will you return to Crystal Temple?”
“When something is done about Lady Marissa.” Sissy left the room abruptly.
Jake followed, leaving Gil to find his own way out through the darkness.
A darkness that was easier to negotiate than the mess at Crystal Temple.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
"I’M JUST A SNEAK THIEF,” Jake told himself. “Pammy, you have a lot to answer for.” Unfortunately, he’d have to answer to Pammy all too soon.
His time on Harmony drew to a close. Sissy wouldn’t need him much longer. She moved Harmony toward the position Jake needed them in for his plans to work.
But first he had something important to steal.
He pressed himself into the deep shadows of the chapel. A vigil lamp burned on the altar. The permanent array of crystals there absorbed the faint gleams and glowed within as if alive. Maybe they were. On this crazy planet he’d almost believe that.
A huge black crystal stood at the center; an artifact worth several fortunes in the CSS.
Funerals and grief blessings dominated the rituals here. The crystal was essential for those. Strange he’d never noticed it before. But then, he couldn’t remember coming into the chapel before. Sissy only came here on Holy Days, preferring to perform her rituals in the caves. Jake stayed outside, observing the comings and goings of the scientists on Holy Days.
After hearing and feeling the black crystal reach down into his soul and enfold him in love and comfort, he’d grown beyond almost believing in the path of Harmony.
That scared him more than facing Pammy with failure.
At this point failure was not an option.
Jake felt his way forward, keeping to the walls, away from any chairs or other things left surrounding the altar in the middle of the largest room in the complex.
The black seemed to swell as he approached the altar. The reddish lights within it concentrated at whatever point he fixed his gaze. He imagined a big accusing eye following him.
“Don’t worry, you are safe from me,” he told the crystal, with his mind as well as his whispers. As much as he coveted that crystal, he had to leave it behind. It was too big. It would slow him down.
He sought the dressing and storage room on the opposite end of the chapel from the entrance. He’d checked out any number of those dressing rooms—vestries they called them back home—while guarding Sissy. He knew the layout. Getting in and out should be simple.
Except his own guilt made his feet heavy and his steps slow. “It’s for your own good,” he told all of Harmony as well as himself. “You’ll thank me when this is all over.” If it would ever be all over.
It had to be. Everything was in position. All he had to do now was wait, and keep nudging Sissy in the direction the galaxy needed her to go.
“I could use a little help with that, Lady Harmony.”
No answer.
Of course the planet didn’t speak to him, an alien, as it did to Sissy. Lately, Sissy had had precious few conversations with the planet. He couldn’t recall a single prophecy since . . . since Jilly died.
Oh, Sissy had faked a few.
But he could tell when she did that. He didn’t even have to look in her eyes anymore. She gave off subtle signals with her posture and the timbre of her voice.
He didn’t think anyone else knew her well enough to detect those signals.
Jake never got tired of observing and analyzing Sissy. He needed to know every nuance of her. He needed details to cherish when he had to betray and abandon her.
Enough wallowing. He had a job to do. By the light of a tiny portable torch he rummaged through the closet, drawers, and the enclosed cabinet designed to hold nothing but the elaborate headdresses, and special compartments for replacement crystals and the tools to repair the veils.
Finally he looked on the shelves that ran around the walls above everything else. Three black boxes crafted from finely grained wood with shell-and-bone embellishments. The portable kits the priests and priestesses took with them to minister elsewhere. Like the time he’d taken Sissy to ritually cleanse and bless the asylum.
Why hadn’t she used a black for the blessing?
Because that ritual was for hope and new beginnings, not death and endings.
He pulled out a step stool with his toe, climbed the two treads, and reached as high as he could. His fingertips brushed one of the kits, edging it backward. With a curse, he held the torch in his mouth and reached with both hands, edging his elusive prize forward until it tipped on the edge.
With a sigh of relief he grasped it gingerly and lowered it until he could cradle it against his chest and get a firmer grip.
The overhead light flashed on, nearly blinding him.
He stumbled backward, terrified he’d drop the box.
“What are you doing?” Sissy asked.
Her voice sounded as black and cold as the depths of vacuum between the stars.
Gregor waited until midnight to make his way to the garage. The little black car reserved for senior assistants sat waiting, fully fueled. It started with a touch, as it should. Mechanics assigned to Temple prided themselves on keeping all the vehicles ready at a moment’s notice.
He drove along de
serted back streets. As all roads were supposed to be this time of night. In the more populous areas of the city people still milled about, drinking, yelling complaints, burning garbage in the middle of the street, and making nuisances of themselves. No one had enforced the curfew since Sissy closed the government.
He imagined the Professionals and Nobles cowering behind closed doors, waiting for the riots to spill into their exclusive enclaves.
At least a third of the streetlights needed replacing.
He cursed the entire distance to his destination at the reduced visibility. The shrouding dimness might protect him, but only if he avoided crashing into something because he couldn’t see it.
At last he found the long drive he sought. Parking the car in the blackness beneath a tree beside a burned-out streetlight, he prepared himself for a long walk. No one at the house must know he’d been there. No chance passerby must suspect he drove the hidden car.
Six deep breaths and his lungs felt almost fully inflated.
Another six didn’t improve his breathing. Nothing for it. He had to do it now or lose his nerve and everything else he valued in life.
He found the gate across the drive firmly locked; the space between the gateposts and the shrubbery was too small for him to squeeze through.
Cursing with the fluency of a lifetime of having seen and heard the best and worst of life, he crawled along the base of the hedge looking for the inevitable. At last he found an opening between two shrubs wider than most. An ancient plant had died and the two adjacent ones grew to fill the gap with branches, but not the roots.
Long spiky branches grabbed his jacket. Dead spiky leaves pierced his palms. Thick spiky trunks pressed against his sides. He flattened himself against the ground and wiggled and shoved himself through the eight feet of hedge until he was clear.
Brushing himself off, he started walking through the extensive grounds that surrounded Lady Marissa’s town house. Her primary home. Two miles to the palace. At least.
His breath came sharp and heavy by the time the glimmer of lights in the windows pierced the gloom.
Boldly he walked up the front steps and pushed open the door. He’d made certain it would respond to his touch.
“About time you arrived. I’ve been waiting for over an hour,” Lady Marissa said. She sounded petulant and tired.
She sat with her back to him on one of the deeply cushioned lounges in the room to the right of the entrance hall. A small lamp on a table gave her enough light to read by. The cloying scent of her perfume caught in his throat.
“So what is your plan to end this madness and elevate Penelope to HPS?” Lady Marissa remained reclining, a notebook filled with government memos in one hand, her reading spectacles in the other.
“I have no plan to do that,” Gregor said blandly. “I need to keep Sissy in place a while longer.”
“Then what are you going to do?” Lady Marissa began pushing herself up with her elbows.
Gregor eased her back down with a touch to her shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed one of the many squishy pillows she had shoved beneath and beside her to support her back, knees, and head.
“I plan to remove you from the situation so that life can return to normal,” he said, pressing the pillow across her face. “I can’t let you murder any more people.”
She thrashed and kicked.
He pressed harder.
She clawed at his hands.
He ignored the pain.
Her flailing grew weaker.
He held the pillow down.
She grew still. The rancid odor of her loosed bowels gagged him.
Still he held the pillow down.
After, he counted to one hundred slowly, then again, he finally lifted the pillow free.
Lady Marissa lay limp and unmoving. Her jaw hung slack. Blue tinged her lips. Her sightless eyes stared into the afterlife.
He stuffed the pillow back under her knees and left the same way he came.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
"DON’T STOP AND THINK about what you will say, Jake. Just tell me why you are sneaking around in the middle of the night pilfering Temple supplies,” Sissy demanded. Her heart ached as she ran possible answers through her head. None of them sounded good.
Most of them sounded like betrayal.
He kept his eyes lowered as his hands fussed with the black kit box.
“Jake?”
“What I do tonight, everything I have done since before I met you, has been for the good of Harmony and the empire. It may not look like it on the surface, but it is.” Finally, he raised his eyes to meet hers.
It was like looking into a deep well of hurt. As deep as her grief at the loss of her family. All of them gone. Gone in a single flash.
All of them innocent.
The pain threatened to choke her again. She swallowed it. Ignored it.
The hurt of Jake betraying her pained her almost as much.
“There was a time when I would have believed you,” she said quietly.
“Why don’t you now?” His hands continued to fidget.
She grabbed the box away from him, checked to make sure the latch was secure and placed it on top of the headdress cabinet.
“Why don’t you believe me, Laudae?”
“Because you are not who you say you are.”
A long silence lay between them. A hurtful silence.
Sissy couldn’t look at him.
“No, I am not who I pretend to be. In more ways than the obvious.” He muttered the second sentence so softly she almost didn’t hear him.
“Then tell me the truth.” Even though the truth might hurt more than the lies.
He took a deep breath. “I am a spy for the Confederated Star Systems. My mission was to steal the formula for Badger Metal. But I have changed my mission. Now I see the best way for the CSS to get access to Badger Metal is to develop peaceful trade with Harmony. The best way for Harmony to maintain Her culture and have peace within as well as without is for a controlled alliance with the CSS.”
“No!” Sissy grew cold at the thought of aliens polluting Harmony. She needed time to make changes. Time for the people to get used to the idea. Time. She couldn’t break things all at once. He’d convinced her of that.
So why was he now pressing for the biggest change of all? Aliens.
“Think about it, My Laudae. Think long and hard. There are many things wrong within Harmony . . .”
“And we need to correct them from within, not change them according to outside influences. I’m working on that.”
“You can’t hold off the Marils indefinitely. Or the CSS. If they can’t get Badger Metal through negotiation and trade, they will take it forcefully. Can you fight off one or both of your enemies while you battle Lady Marissa and Laud Gregor and the problem of the Loods and the breakdown of law and order?”
“I think you had better go.”
“I report back to my unit in the morning.”
“No. Go. Go back to your precious CSS. I owe you my life. I will not take yours. But I can no longer trust you at my side. Be gone by dawn, and I will not alert the Spacers and the Military. Disappear back to the stars quickly before I change my mind.”
With tears clogging her eyes and her throat, she held the door open for him.
“Remember Jilly,” he said quietly as he passed by her.
He slipped away into the darkness as silently and completely as a dream. Only the fractured memory of him remained.
“The answers are out there, among the stars,” Jilly’s voice whispered to her from the darkness.
How to get off this bloody mountain? Jake wended his way downslope from the Temple complex. He’d paused only long enough to grab a coat and a bottle of water from his kit. No time to search for the enhanced goggles. He knew Sissy. She’d follow through with her threat. He had until dawn to find a spot safe enough to summon extraction.
Pammy had kept the details to herself. Jake only knew that when he pressed a s
pecial implant in his inner wrist a two-person fast shuttle would arrive within twenty minutes. He presumed the pilot would take him to a rendezvous with a cloaked vessel, probably empty. A crewed vessel would have trouble keeping quiet enough to avoid detection. Life-support power signatures alone would leave a trail even primitive sensors could find. But a small dead ship could drift for many long months, years even.
“That’s far enough, Lieutenant.” A woman’s voice came from somewhere to his left. “I place you under arrest for High Treason against the HC and Blasphemy against Temple personnel.”
“Crap.” Jake reached to draw his sword. The muzzle of a highly illegal energy weapon pressed against his side.
Only a Spacer would have that weapon. She probably had night vision goggles, too.
Starlight and a sliver of a waning moon revealed only a deeper blackness against the black of night in a remote mountain glen without a lot of electric lights in the background.
Only one female Spacer scientist remained in the funerary complex. Lieutenant Commander Barba du Annalyse pu Science Fleet. The woman who had “found” the altered mural.
“Who gives you the authority to make an arrest?” Jake asked, stalling for time. He kept his hands raised and away from his body. A flick of his right wrist and he’d have a long stiletto at the ready. He just had to stay close enough to Barba to knock the blaster aside and stab her.
Gods, he didn’t want to murder another person. He’d never get used to the intimacy of killing another sentient being with such a weapon. A blaster, on the other hand, gave Barba a sense of distance and detachment. Even if she’d never killed in close combat, she could pull the trigger with ease.
“Laud Gregor has authorized me to do what is necessary to remove your influence from Laudae Sissy.” She sounded uncertain. Barba withdrew the weapon from direct contact, but she didn’t retreat very far.
“You aren’t Military, Barba. Laud Gregor can’t give you the authority to do anything but turn me over to Military.”
“Who says I have to leave you alive to ask questions? You aren’t Professional, so you can’t quote law or precedent.”
Jake had a sense of distance and direction on her.
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