by Gary Gibson
Her orgasm, when it came, washed through her like a warm tide. She tipped her head back, her breath emerging in sharp gasps. She had carefully taught herself not to cry out; though Cassanas might be easily blackmailed, the same could not be said for others who might overhear them, should they be passing anywhere near the door to her chambers.
Karl finally slid over to one side. ‘I can’t stay long,’ he declared.
‘You never can,’ she replied with a groan. ‘I just want all this to be over.’
‘Hey.’ He squeezed her shoulder with one hand. ‘It’s going to be all right.’ He was still breathing heavily from his exertions.
She laughed shakily. ‘You say that, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘We never talk about what comes after. After we’ve gone – after we’ve escaped. Where do we go? Where can we possibly live?’
‘A long way from here,’ he replied. ‘I’ve made arrangements to get us off Redstone and out of this system as soon as possible.’
‘But where, exactly, are we going to go?’ she insisted. ‘Aren’t they bound to come looking for me?’
‘And risk exposing the Demarchy of Uchida to the kind of scrutiny people like Thijs would rather die than allow?’ He chuckled. ‘I’ve been preparing for this day for a long time, Gaby. We’ll soon have new identities and new lives.’ He squeezed her shoulder again, then raised his fingers to tousle her hair gently. ‘Picture us some place warm where it never gets as cold as it does everywhere on this damn world, and living under some other sun. There are a thousand places I could get work as a security consultant, and you’ll be able to decide for yourself what you want to do with the rest of your life. Just another day or two, and all this will be behind you, I promise.’ He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and flashed her a reassuring smile. ‘Why do you ask? Having second thoughts?’
She frowned. ‘No, of course not.’
‘There’s no turning back after this, Gaby.’
‘Haven’t I told you often enough how much I hate every last one of them?’ she hissed through clenched teeth. She remembered times before she had met Karl, when it had taken all her willpower not to scream and to suppress the raw red anger she kept so tightly bundled deep inside herself. ‘I despise them all, more than you can—’
He reached down and pressed a finger against her lips. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I still needed to ask.’
She pushed his hand away and laughed. ‘I’m not sure you could ever really understand, Karl. Not without being a woman.’
Karl had not been her first. That had been Thijs, who had come into her quarters one night years before, when she had been little more than a child, chasing Mater Cassanas out of Gabrielle’s bedchamber before raping her. It had given her an insight into her true value in the eyes not only of Thijs but also of Lampard, Abramovic and even Mater Cassanas herself.
‘Gabrielle—’
She silenced him with a kiss. ‘But it’s true what you say. It’ll all be over soon, and then the both of us will be gone from here forever.’
‘Then there’s something you need to do,’ he said, sliding his legs over the side of the bed and standing up. She pushed herself up on one elbow as he started to dress.
‘What is it?’
He pulled on his trousers, then removed something from his jacket pocket, holding it up where she could see it. ‘Do you know what this is?’
Gabrielle saw a thumb-sized vial filled with a dark red liquid the colour of blood. ‘What is it?’
‘This,’ said Karl, ‘is our ticket to freedom. Nanocytes, carrying a neurotoxin cargo. They’re entirely harmless unless activated by a remote signal. When that happens, they release the neurotoxin into the bloodstream. Death then follows quite quickly.’
‘It looks so small,’ she whispered, through suddenly dry lips. She felt a creeping dread at the sight of the vial. It was small, yes, but full of deadly promise.
Karl nodded, replacing the vial in his jacket. ‘There’s been a slight change of plans, since Thijs has decided he doesn’t want me present at the banquet. I’m to wait outside with the rest of the guards.’
‘Why? I thought—’
‘He doesn’t need to hide his dislike for me any longer,’ he replied. ‘In fact, he’s probably planning to have me thrown out of the Demarchy as soon as you’re dead.’
He buttoned up his shirt and pulled on the jacket, then tossed a slim device onto the sheets, landing close to her hand. Gabrielle stared at the object as if it were a poisonous snake.
‘My original plan,’ he continued, ‘was to introduce the contents of the vial to the ceremonial wine, prior to the banquet. That much, at least, hasn’t changed. Then I would use that device beside you to trigger the poison, once Thijs and the rest had taken a first sip. All those present but ourselves, of course.’ He shrugged. ‘But it appears that last opportunity is now to be denied me.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘I can’t activate the poison if I’m not actually in the banquet hall along with the rest of them.’ He picked the device up again, this time folding the fingers of her hand around it. ‘Its range is much too short, and anyway the whole of the banquet hall is shielded. Which means, Gabrielle, that you’ll have to be the one to do it.’
She felt a surge of dizziness wash through her. ‘Me?’
‘If not you,’ asked Karl, ‘who else?’
‘But I thought—’
‘That I would take care of everything?’ Karl chuckled. ‘This actually works out to our advantage. Once they’re all dead, I can come rushing in and perform a daring rescue of the Speaker-Elect. The crew’ll be cheering me on, even as I sweep you off the Grand Barge – never to be seen again.’
‘What if I make a mistake?’ she asked, her insides suddenly feeling hollow. ‘What if it doesn’t work? What if . . . ?’
He snorted with exasperation, sitting down once more on the edge of the bed and reaching over to grab hold of her hand. ‘Belle’s tits, Gabrielle,’ he said, his expression fierce, ‘don’t you want to get out of here before they flush your mind away? This is your chance to be free, damn it!’
She stared into his eyes, her lungs frozen in panic. Everything he said was true, and yet . . .
‘How can you be sure I have it in me to go through with all this?’ she asked.
He smiled at her. ‘Because I can see you have it in you. I know you can do this – and you will. It’s for both of us, remember. My life was ashes before I met you, Gaby, and I can’t imagine a future without you being part of it.’
‘Both of us,’ she echoed, her voice suddenly sounding hoarse. He was right, so very right: without him she would be dead within a few days. ‘You can rely on me.’
She remembered the first time she ever set eyes on Karl Petrova, almost six years before. For a long time he had been nothing more than another adult amongst the many who surrounded her. Even in the years that followed, she had been only peripherally aware of his reputation, of those stories regarding his spectacular victories against isolated pockets of militant Freeholders.
Even then, however, she had known Karl was different from everyone else: an outsider born on some other world within the Accord. She had also seen the way Thijs and Abramovic’s faces hardened whenever his name was mentioned, as if each fresh victory he brought to the Demarchy somehow carried him further and further away from their favour.
Ordinarily, his refusal to have a faith chip implanted would have excluded him from any position of power within the Demarchy. But his tactical skill – and his astonishing ability to predict what the Freehold’s next move would be – allowed him to rise through the Demarchy’s ranks with astonishing speed regardless.
Finally, after many years of service to the Demarchy, he had been appointed her bodyguard.
For an outsider to be given such an exalted position was extraordinary, but Karl had explained to her the reasoning. There had been, he told her, an attempt by unknown forces to
kidnap the previous Speaker-Elect immediately prior to her Ascension, twenty-one years before. Drastic measures had been introduced to prevent any such attempt ever happening again, and Karl’s military and strategic skill counted for far more than whether or not he happened to have a chip lodged under his scalp. As her bodyguard, he had gradually won her trust, albeit slowly. She had come to look forward to seeing that dry smile, those world-weary eyes.
After they had finally become lovers, just a year ago, he had told her that he originated from a place called the Three Star Alliance, which had acquiesced to the Accord’s political demands rather than face a brutal war it could not possibly win. Deeply embittered, he had fled across the stars to Redstone, having learned there was a need for experienced mercenaries within the Sacerdotal Demarchy of Uchida.
When his rapid promotion attracted Thijs’s enmity, he had sought to learn as much about the chief of security as possible. And, in the course of his investigations, he discovered what the Demarchy had in store for their Speaker-Elect. Moreover, he discovered that the Magi ship at Dios – known as the Ship of the Covenant – had crash-landed only after being very nearly destroyed by the woman of whom Gabrielle was a clone.
The mind of that woman, whose name had been Dakota Merrick, had somehow come to be encoded within the memory banks of the Magi ship. Following its crash-landing, the ship itself had by some means recreated Merrick in body as well as mind, apparently in the hope that she would be willing to negotiate with the Demarchy in order to ensure the ship’s survival until that time, centuries hence, when it could complete its repairs and depart from Redstone.
Gabrielle had listened to all this while his hand caressed her hair as they lay together in her bedchamber, and her skin grew increasingly chill as awful detail followed upon awful detail.
At first, the Demarchy had been intent on dismantling the alien craft with the aim of penetrating its secrets. Extraordinarily powerful though it was, it had suffered incredible damage, for its drive-spines and much of its outer shell had been burned away during re-entry. But then this woman – this Dakota Merrick – had suddenly emerged, disoriented but physically intact, from the Magi ship. The Demarchy’s investigators had interrogated her for days, running tests that confirmed her physiology to be entirely human.
And yet there was evidence that she was not the original Dakota Merrick. She was clearly a clone of some kind, one whose last memory, prior to emerging from the ship, was of dying halfway across the galaxy, some centuries before.
This clone proved to be entirely unwilling to fulfil the task for which the Magi ship had apparently brought it back to life; nor was it willing to cooperate with the Demarchy’s interrogators. They had resorted to torture in the hopes of gleaning from Merrick any information relating to the Magi ship that might be turned to the Demarchy’s military or political advantage.
Their attempt proved wildly successful, for Merrick’s clone proved to be in some way able to tap into the wealth of knowledge contained within the Magi ship’s memory banks, and it imparted some of this knowledge under duress. But then the clone died while fleeing its guards, and before they had a chance to extract any more.
That might have been that, but the scientific and technological data the Demarchy of Uchida had thereby gained was valuable enough to barter in return for financial and military aid from the Accord. With such support, the neighbouring River Concord States were beaten into submission, while the Freehold – once the dominant military force on Redstone – was eventually reduced to a few violent extremists living in mountain caves.
But even that wasn’t enough for the Demarchy’s rulers, Karl had told her, for they saw a way in which they could secure the Demarchy’s future for as long as the Magi ship remained there by the shores of the Ka.
They took tissue samples from the clone’s corpse, and from them fashioned a new clone of their own – one that they themselves could control. That first Speaker-Elect had grown to adulthood with its own personality and memories – and none of Merrick’s – and had undergone surgery to install the machine-head implants that would allow it eventually to communicate directly with the Magi ship.
Once such a clone reached the age of twenty-one, the cerebral circuitry had matured sufficiently that the clone could be transported to Dios, and to the Ship of the Covenant. Each Speaker was forced then to enter the alien starship, after which she would emerge once more carrying within her mind a cornucopia of data offered up by the ship in return for it not being torn apart by the Demarchy’s engineers and scientists.
The only problem, Karl continued, was that each time a Speaker returned from her encounter with the ship, her own personality and memories had been wiped and replaced with those of the long-dead Dakota Merrick. And, each and every time, she proved just as wildly recalcitrant and unwilling to cooperate as before. The Demarchy’s interrogators found it necessary, on every such occasion, to torture the clone until she gave them the information they wanted.
At first, Karl explained, the Demarchy considered trying to keep each of the clones alive, or even to produce multiple clones, but the ship refused to divulge data to more than one such clone at a time, perhaps realizing the speed with which it might otherwise be drained of knowledge; it also set a limit on how much data each clone could siphon from its memory banks. In this way the ship ensured its indefinite survival, by giving the Demarchy of Uchida sufficient leverage to rapidly dominate the whole of Redstone. And since it would take a little over two decades for a clone’s implants to reach maturity, that set a definite limit on the frequency with which the ship could be interrogated.
And what about the clone? Gabrielle had asked, as she lay curled up on top of the bedsheets, her hands clasped around her knees and shivering. Put to death, Karl had informed her, once a clone had outlived her usefulness. The physical remains were disposed of in secret, even as the next Speaker-Elect was being born to a secret birth-mother.
This process had been finessed over the intervening centuries, and embellished with ceremonies as a public demonstration of the Demarchy’s growing power. The city of Dios – meaning literally, the city of God – had grown up around that grounded starship, becoming a place of devout pilgrimage for the Demarchy’s citizens. Few outside a secretive inner circle, however, knew the underlying truth.
In this way, Karl explained in a voice full of regret and anger, he had learned the true reason he had been hired to protect her: for the sake of the riches she would unlock once she was of age.
He had cupped her face in his hands then, assuring her he could never allow her to suffer the awful fate that had befallen her predecessors. She would not, as she had been taught to believe, ascend bodily to Heaven after entering the Ship of the Covenant. Instead, she would become someone else entirely, and then die a miserable, painful death.
She had clung to him, hot tears burning a path down her cheeks, as he promised to take them both somewhere far away from Redstone, where no one could ever find them.
But to do so, he had warned, might require drastic measures – possibly very drastic indeed.
Karl gave out a sigh of relief as Gabrielle reconfirmed her willingness to aid him in his plan. She would help him murder the whole of the Demarchy’s inner circle, rather than allow them to take her life, and then the two of them would finally make their escape.
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he said, with a strange half-smile that left her feeling unsettled, without really knowing why.
‘But what happens afterwards?’ Gabrielle demanded. ‘You haven’t told me how we’re even going to get ourselves off-world. What if Thijs sends your own soldiers out looking for us . . . ?’
He pressed a finger to her lips. ‘I’ve made arrangements, Gabrielle. Believe me, there’s no possible way anyone’s going to stop us.’ He grinned, and she again felt that same curious unease as she returned his gaze, as if someone else were hiding behind his eyes. ‘I promise you this, though,’ he added, ‘they’ll never know what hit t
hem. Literally.’
Karl slipped out of her bedchamber not long after. She let herself fall back against the pillows and closed her eyes, thinking of Karl’s seed now deep within her body.
She wondered why she had yet again failed to tell him about the new life growing inside her. It’s one less thing for him to worry about, before we escape, she assured herself. But another part of her knew that she was just afraid to tell him she was pregnant – strangely fearful of how he might react.
Mater Cassanas stepped back into the room, her mouth pinched tight and her eyes refusing to meet her mistress’s. She moved around the bedchamber, picking things up and then putting them down again, making a show of tidying up but without really achieving anything.
‘I don’t know what you’re planning,’ Cassanas said finally, her voice tight with emotion, ‘but I’ll tell you this: you’re making a mistake in trusting Petrova. He’s an evil man, with evil intentions . . . you have no idea—’
‘Then you could have at least tried to protect me,’ replied Gabrielle, unable to keep the venom out of her voice. ‘But instead you left me alone with him.’
‘With Petrova?’ Cassanas stared at her. ‘But you—’
‘I meant with Thijs,’ hissed Gabrielle. ‘You could have told him no, that he had to leave . . . but instead you did nothing.’
Gabrielle watched the old woman’s face as comprehension finally dawned there. ‘How was I to know that he would—?’
‘How could you not know?’ Gabrielle cried. ‘I remember the look on your face then! You knew . . . you knew why he was there. And yet you still let him in. You never once tried to protect me from him, not once.’
Cassanas swallowed a great gulp of air, in the manner of someone drowning, before she replied. ‘I took care of you as if you were my own daughter,’ she gasped, her voice growing husky. ‘I fed you from my own breast when you were a baby. I—’
