Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1)

by T. Mountebank

  From the corridor, Nika could just make out someone cautioning the prisoner might throw it at him, but he stared at her and said firmly, “No, she won’t do that,” then asked, “Black, cream, sugar?”

  “Anything,” she said. When the coffee arrived, he let her drink and then hold the warmth of the cup to her head.

  With his hands clasped between his open knees, the General sat forward and said, “You’ve got yourself into a bit of trouble.”

  He was waiting, but as much as she wanted to hug him for the drink, she wasn’t talking.

  “That was a great plane you had. Blue Hawk 599. I used to fly one back in my youth. Couldn’t have made it come down the mountain like you did, but it was a hell of a plane.”

  She hid her smile in the coffee.

  “Have you eaten? I’ll make sure they bring you something after we talk so you can get some decent sleep.” He sat back. “I remember nearly killing myself in that bird.” He laughed at the memory. “You know how the altimeter freezes if it’s rained?”

  She drank to keep from laughing.

  “I was so low I could have read a gravestone on that mountain. But then I was never much of a pilot. Where’d you learn to fly like that?

  “My father.”

  “Started you young, did he?”

  “Mmm,” she nodded.

  “Best way really. All the real geniuses start young. What’d you start in?”

  “A Redbird.”

  Berringer laughed so genuinely she laughed with him.

  “They’re shit, aren’t they?”

  “I’m surprised you’re alive. No wonder you’re good.” He smiled on her. “Kid, I like you. I don’t want to hold you here. Youth wasn’t made for walls. What was on the train?”

  “No one you’d know,” she said it before she knew she was thinking it.

  “Don’t worry about it.” He waved away the look of self-censure. “We already knew you were at the hospital.” He was fishing and trying to pull something in. “You’ll fly across all of hell to save someone you love.” He cast again, “It’s a pity what happened to them.”

  “Fuck you.” She let loose with the screaming accusation again. “Fuck you for it. What did you—? Oh, fuck you.”

  He let the tired defeat of her last words settle her shoulders low before offering, “Just ask me and I’ll fix it.”

  She considered him so earnestly, Berringer thought she might accept his offer and reveal her interest, but then she abruptly shook the idea off, finished the drink, and said, “No, I’m done. You’re good and I’m stupid, but I’m done.”

  “Alright, kid. I’ll make sure they treat you right, and when you want my help, you just ask.”

  ~~~~~~

  Berringer questioned Major Dominic, “Did anything happen in Eudokia you failed to share?”

  “Sir?”

  “Did your men hurt any civilians?”

  “No, sir, none at all.”

  Berringer didn’t like the direction his mind kept going. There’d been someone on the train the pilot held his uniform responsible for affecting. Berringer watched Sable from the second floor window. She was staring with Cloitare eyes at the stammering housekeeper who hoped to affirm all was to Sable’s wishes.

  Poor nervous woman, Berringer thought, there was not a single wish of Sable’s she could fulfill.

  Berringer could see Sable was dismal and wasted. She’d been caught ten months ago and had returned to drop before the King a well-shaped beauty which not even the bulk of robes could conceal. Her face had been pleasantly colored by the sun, and despite having spent a month in a military hospital, she was radiant with life. Even six weeks past, when she had pulled an axe from the wall, she still maintained just enough vitality to wield it, but now the General saw her ghostly white in the sun, hollow and haunted. She hadn’t looked this bad during all the days and nights she spent next to the injured nun’s bed. The four nuns had been moved into a domestic room weeks ago, and even Amele, who no one dreamed would live, now seemed vigorous compared to Sable.

  Berringer knew the reason: the King would not speak with her. Remy wanted her to say she was sorry, but Sable would only bow her head and respond, “I will not lie to you.” In the first week after the massacre, Berringer had heard her begging forgiveness, but Remy said she wanted absolution without guilt and denied it. Sable did not think she had done wrong. When Remy asked her if she would do it again the same, she pleaded for him not to make her answer.

  They presented pleasant faces at meals, but when the door to the private hall closed, she would go someplace distant and frozen. Every day she went farther, someplace colder.

  Berringer knew he couldn’t directly ask her about the pilot and then hope to guess her feelings. He needed her to ask him. He wanted to see her feign disinterest but have to ask nonetheless. If she were anyone else, he would call her to his office and let her see a picture of the pilot on his desk, but he could not think of a reason Sable would need to come. He felt awkward doing it, but he could imagine no other way. He walked with the still amiable couple back through the main halls to the King’s quarters. Keeping Sable between them, he passed a tablet with the young woman’s picture on it to the King, and said, “Ellis Dee, the pilot with the counterfeit batteries, she’s about to break.”

  Sable had no reaction. Berringer wondered what made him think she would. Remy closed the screen to black and said nothing. It had been so clumsy and for nothing, except now the King thought he’d lost all sense of discretion. He walked with them into the private hall and felt the chill as the doors closed. Sable wordlessly dropped from their company as they passed her rooms, and he followed Remy to the end.

  Remy was fairing far better than her, but he looked oppressed. He told Berringer, “I’m going back to the salt flats tomorrow.”

  ~~~~~~

  Well, I’ve done it now, Berringer thought and called Lieutenant Fallon to his office.

  “Lieutenant, you are here because I think I can trust you, but if I can’t, you better get the hell out of my sight before I figure it out. And I move fast, son, I move real fast.”

  Too alarmed by the threat to respond, Fallon could only nod.

  “This goes no further, Lieutenant. You and I are the only two people who will know of this conversation.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand.” I am too slow to outrun you.

  “You had a fairly technical conversation with Sister Sable when you tried to get the shackle off her wrist. From your exchange, do you think she has the ability to gain access to our secure network if she wanted?”

  Berringer watched him search his skull for answers. “Possibly, sir. It’s hard to know. We weren’t discussing that.”

  “If I told you she might try to do this tonight, or in the next few days, could you catch her?”

  His eyes went big and sought a place to settle. They finally rested back inside his head where they jumped from one idea to the next. “Can you tell me where in the network she might be going? What is she after? And from where you expect her to gain access?”

  ~~~~~~

  For the second time in one night, Sable moved her mind through the distance into the corridor. When she found it still empty, she exited the King’s rooms, leaving his computer clean of her trespass. She moved down the private hall, back to her chambers, and then she returned to the distance.

  Moments later, security cameras recorded the progression of the four sisters from their shared room as they walked down the stairs and through the passageways that led to the guards outside the King’s private hall. Sable held the door open.

  Just before the sun rose, three sisters left. They moved back under the scrutiny of the cameras straight to the garage where video showed one of them could drive.

  Under the trees and well beyond the palace’s gate, Sable was untying and shrugging out of the robe while she steadied the wheel with her knee. The sister beside her pulled at the great swath of material beneath her and passed it back.

&n
bsp; “Don’t let them wrinkle, Amele,” Sable told the woman in the mirror. Beside Amele was a pile of black cloth that had been draped to fill the seat.

  “Lieutenant Fallon first,” Sable told them. “Then we arrange things at the airport.” She pulled cash out of her pocket and handed it to Ava. “For travel. I have to be back before anyone expects me to leave my rooms, so it’s just the two of you on the ground after that.”

  Leaving the King’s woods to enter the city, Sable glanced at her companions dressed for public in her clothes, looking almost like civilians, almost but not quite. She remarked on the obvious, “You two need shades.”

  ~~~~~~

  With the sun just above the horizon, Lieutenant Fallon came back to Berringer. He was so roused by what he had discovered he did not appear sleepless. “The whole prison system needs to be firebombed. It’s past saving. It’s completely unsecure. I wouldn’t let my grandmother search for recipes on it. It needs upgrades. Parts of it have been ignored for a decade. It’s a real whore’s cunt of the scariest shit. Sorry, sir, I am completely geeked out.”

  The General watched him with steadfast composure. “Take a breath, Fallon, then tell me.”

  William wanted to rant about the architecture, the microcode, the kernel, and a particularly insidious rootkit, but instead he put his hands in front of him to illustrate a large circle. “There are rings of security. The outer rings, say ring three, if it’s breached, it will gather information, and ring one will give access to hardware, like cameras. Well the prison had someone in the kernel, the core, right in the center of it with access to the whole thing and everything in the network the prison had access to. The place needs to go offline right now.”

  “Who was in the core?”

  “Well, it wasn’t the Queen, but all the same, I’d say they were after the pilot. They took control three days after she landed.”

  “What can you tell me about them?”

  “Not a thing. There are layers of encryption and a chain of relays. We can tear apart the virus they came in with and hope they left a signature, but that’s so unlikely, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Is it secure now?”

  “No. No, it’s a mess. I have them out for the moment, but they can come right back in the same way until we completely change the software, and more than half the hardware can’t support the new software. That’s not all. You have to assume they did a memory dump of everything they had access to, and I don’t know where all they went.” Fallon didn’t think Berringer fully understood. “It’s a catastrophic failure. If they did the dump, and I don’t know why they wouldn’t, they have copies of everything we have to read, release, or blackmail at leisure.”

  “Ok, Lieutenant, take it offline. Get the people you need and see that the whole thing is cleaned up. There will be no mention of the Queen or the prisoner to anyone. I want you, Fallon, to make sure there is nothing on any of the networks that remain active that will give information about the pilot. Not a goddamn trace that she’s there.”

  If Sable was going to go for the pilot, she’d either have to find another axe or she’d have to play an old game. Berringer remembered the stack of glass panes under the window and knew he was moving into territory his troops had been lost in.

  ~~~~~~

  The woods were still in his mirrors when the plain sedan entered traffic behind him. Lieutenant Fallon had been on his phone since walking out of the General’s office. He was the asshole waking everyone up. He needed to eat but had little time, so he pulled into the first drive-thru he passed. He did not see the sedan follow.

  He had just paid and then he heard at his window, “Wi Fry.” He remembered her hand on his shoulder, the words she had spoken, the empathy she offered; he remembered the bond. “Let me in, Wi,” her voice was low, full of breath, and rumbled from her throat.

  He unlocked the doors and she sat beside him. She sounded as though she were absently murmuring a poem, and she only broke to tell him, “You want to park there.” He went where she directed while she returned to the slow, indistinct cadence of a lyrical verse.

  “Are you praying?” he asked.

  “Just talking aloud.”

  “It’s pretty.”

  “I know.” Her voice became softer, just a whisper, and he strained to hear. He needed to hear. He leaned across the seat, his face angled to her, and she pulled him closer, her mouth to his ear. “I am the blackness, all embracing, all sound, all forms vanish in me. I am the blackness, the witness, all time bends to me. I am the blackness that holds you, binds you, your will. What I place within will remain to inhabit the dark. I am your mother, your destroyer, the blackness that sustains.”

  ~~~~~~

  Before the sun was high, a single sister returned with the car. She walked with her mind in the distance through the King’s halls, murmuring as she approached the guards who allowed passage without question.

  Within the hour, Sable reemerged. Her manner had become so barren of life, she knew she appeared no more distant than normal, yet her movements were from memory. For all that she saw before her, she could easily trip over an object rearranged, or a person in her path, but her presence was so forbidding, people fell back to avoid her.

  From one end of the great hall to the other, Sable made a slow circuit of the overhead cameras to show she was still present in the palace. While her body wandered, her mind lingered in the distance with Amele and Ava. Ready to join as one, Sable was energy for the sisters to draw upon; she would make them powerful.

  Eyes pale and lifeless to the palace, she waited in her sisters’ thoughts.

  ~~~~~~

  Flicking through the screens on her desk, Girard watched Sable move smoothly across the great hall and disappear back into the private quarters. How she hoped Sable would do something exciting. Berringer should have come to her before he made that poor play with the pilot’s photograph on the tablet. Of course Sable would not react, and if she had, Catherine did not trust Berringer to have caught it. He’d given Sable the whole of the night and most of the morning to do what she would, and now Catherine was forced to play catch-up.

  Earlier, Girard had watched the recorded video of the four nuns going to their sovereign protector, because that’s exactly what she was. In one glorious night, Sable had created a little cadre of devout agents who had already shown they would risk death for her, and she’d rewarded them by laying waste to their enemies. It was too beautiful to have been conceived with intent. Catherine mixed envy with conjecture, knowing two of them were still on the loose.

  “Ah, Lucas,” she sighed, “you let them get away.”

  Before anything else could slip by, she pressed Berringer for a chance with the pilot. “I’ll take her wide awake or half asleep, I don’t care, just let me speak with her.”

  “Tomorrow,” Berringer promised. “After Fallon gets the prison secure again.”

  ~~~~~~

  The only thing about the uniform Amele liked was the hat. The third time she aligned the shirt to appear straight, she decided buttons were infernal, and neither of them could get the laces on Ava’s boot retied as Sable had shown them. In the end, they slip knotted it like the belt on a robe. They stood in Lieutenant Fallon’s uniforms watching the prison and saw William leave the front gate to retrieve software he had forgotten in his car.

  ~~~~~~

  It wasn’t like Fallon to be unorganized. The major in charge of the prison stood outside the secure box of a room attached to his office and rebuked him. “Lieutenant, you understand no one enters or leaves until you have us back up? So you damn well better have everything you need.”

  The prison’s server was protected by single access granted only by the Major to pass behind his desk. In the small area, Fallon and his assistant shared control of a single terminal. Lieutenant Parker told him he needed sleep. “Man, you look like no one’s at the wheel.”

  “While we erase the drive, I’ll take an hour on the floor and then we’ll load the so
ftware and finish.”

  As the prison system’s drive prepared for new software, the cameras stopped recording. The Major paced in and out of his office while Fallon laid his head against the wall and Parker concentrated over a handheld game player.

  ~~~~~~

  At the prison gate, the corporal returned his attention to the road to find two soldiers before him. Ava whispered of generals and Amele pushed her hand through the bars to wrap it around his throat, saying, “Let us enter.”

  Inside the doors before the long stretch of corridor, they both seemed absurd. The soldier in the security booth stood and told them to stop.

  Amele commanded, “Let us enter,” and Ava rumbled the air with control.

  He balked at whatever they were trying. Seeing how small they were, the way the uniforms had been folded and tucked and yet still did not fit, he decided it was some sort of joke being played on him by the corporal at the gate. He opened the door to meet them in the hall and heard Ava humming. When Amele reached for his chest, he thought it was seductive, that maybe they were strippers, and now he was open to whatever they had in mind. Amele whispered, “Quietly you fall,” and he did. One hand on his neck, one over his eyes, she said, “In the darkness you forget,” while Ava murmured of being lost in the night.

  They followed Fallon’s instructions to the cells, Ava melodiously conjuring shadows and Amele reaching out to command the guard on watch with her hand, “Into the darkness.”