Rebel Princess

by Bancroft, Blair

  One of them tossed a carry-all onto the portapad’s keyboard. “Pack,” he barked. “No uniforms.”

  They were letting her pack for prison? Internment? Whatever the Regulons wanted to call it when they declared war on Psyclid. Poor Psyclid, it wouldn’t last a week against Regulon legions. Kass swore softly as she threw clothes into the bag. She didn’t care what Tal Rigel said, it wasn’t supposed to come to this. She was supposed to graduate, become something no Psyclid had ever been before. An explorer and a warrior.

  The three men stood silent, rifles at the ready, and watched while she packed. Did they enjoy their view of the lacy and nearly transparent undies she chose to wear beneath her austerely gray cadet uniforms? Were they were smirking beneath those masks? The little Psyclid squadron leader in sexy frills. Ha!

  Kass gasped as the large hand of the tallest of the three men reached into the breast pocket of her jumpsuit and grabbed her handheld comm unit. He threw it on the floor and stamped on it, his heavy boots crushing it with ease. “No!” she cried as the same man picked up her portapad and threw it on top of the remains of her handheld. His rifle butt crashed down. Again, and once again. Kass felt the blows in her heart. Her whole life was in that comp unit, everything she had learned at the Academy, every paper she’d ever written, every grade received, every meticulously coded comm she’d written home, and every carefully composed reply. Her life on the planet Regula Prime, now in nearly as many pieces as the crystal vase, her future suddenly as short as the already drooping flowers lying in a pool of water.

  No further words from her captors as they motioned her out of the room and down the hall. Obviously, news of the midnight invasion had spread. Cadets stood in every doorway, some shocked and gaping, some cheering, some . . .

  “All hail Regula! Got the little witch at last.”

  “That’ll teach the Psyclid bitch. Give her a good one for us!”

  “Hey, no fair. We had our own plans for her.”

  Kass could swear she still heard the jeers as the elevator doors slammed closed. Dear goddess, these were her friends. Head bowed, her spirit as crushed as her portapad, she let the three men lead her where they would.

  Kass was in the back seat of a groundcar driving toward the city when she realized she’d picked up a scent in the elevator. A spicy blend she recognized from the times Dorn Jorkan, Orion’s First Officer, sat next to her at Tactical. Or maybe her growing awareness of her captors was due to the leader’s arrogant king-of-the-galaxy stance, the flash of hard blue eyes through the holes in his mask. Or maybe it was because all three had taken care to say as little as possible. She knew these men. And they weren’t cadets.

  They’d told her to pack . . . was it possible they were sending her home, putting her on the next transport out before war was declared?

  No. Kass stifled a sigh. The Titan InterSystem Spaceport was in the opposite direction, the Fleet’s main base as well. She was not being deported, not going home to Psyclid.

  The great lighted towers of Titan, the Regulon Empire’s capital city, grew taller and brighter, glowing in shades of white, gold, brilliant red, and royal blue. A city of oversized imposing buildings by day, Titan turned into beauty worthy of Psyclid at night. As much as Kass admired the Regulons’ dynamic approach to life, she could never understand their concept of bigger is better, their devotion to rules and regs, their lack of interest in anything but conquest.

  No, that wasn’t true. Regulons based their culture on the great civilizations of old Earth. Philosophy and Spartan military discipline from the Greeks, lessons in conquest from the Romans, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Karlmann, Napoleon, and Hitler. But they had little interest in music, art, and architecture. Most particularly, they abhorred the acrobatics of the mind practiced by Psyclids.

  People fear what they don’t understand.

  Yet she’d flaunted her special skills in their faces. Oh, she’d thought she was being subtle, that only the captain had caught her playing games. But maybe not.

  The Regulon Psyclidphobia was generic. No matter they shared the same Earth ancestors, Psyclids were weird. A good enough reason to obliterate them.

  What a meshug she was to believe she could fit in.

  So where were they taking her? Interrogation? But by whom? An internment camp in the city seemed unlikely, Fleet HQ was behind them, and Kass could think of no reason why she’d be turned over to the Titan City Police.

  The man sitting beside her shifted in his seat, drew a deep breath, and spoke at last. “There are some things you need to know,” said a voice she’d know even if they’d been transported to the farthest corner of the galaxy. “At the moment we’re improvising. I hadn’t expected things to go bad quite so soon, and we’re scrambling to put some very tentative plans in place on the instant. But we had no choice. Last night Mica—ah, there was talk at the Perseus Club. The minute war is declared—a matter of days—some of the pilots you pissed off were planning gang rape.”

  She couldn’t have heard right. Regulon officers would never—

  “Followed by spreadeagling you, naked, on the nymph statue in the fountain.”

  The images that flashed through her head were so cruel, Kass couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Bile rose in her throat. No-o-o! She’d loved Orion, was so proud to serve those six weeks. Proud to serve with Captain Talryn Rigel.

  But of course every word he said was true. She was the fool, seeing only what she wanted to see. Training, Kass, training. Suck it up. Deal with it. “I should have listened to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now . . .?”

  “Technically, you are a prisoner of war. You will be guarded around the clock. Conditions will be stark at first, but they will improve. You will be alone, perhaps for a very long time. No one can tell when, or ever, it will be safe for a Psyclid to walk our streets again. But you will be alive.”

  And forever a virgin. Perhaps she should have thrown herself at Tal Rigel when she’d had the chance. As all the other females on Orion had done. Or attempted to do. Girl-talk said he rarely succumbed to passion. Only Liona Dann, Orion’s psych doc, had been able to boast she could guarantee the captain wasn’t celibate. Kass couldn’t stand the woman—what Tal Rigel saw in that tall, cool, absolute bitch she could not begin to imagine.

  Not that it mattered. The captain had not come for her because he had any interest in her as a woman. He was Talryn Rigel, son of one of Regula’s great families, brought up on honor, integrity, and all the old Earth legends Regulons so much admired, from Greek gods to knights rescuing fair maidens. It wasn’t Kass Kiolani he was saving but a damsel in distress, following a code far more ancient than the Regulon Empire.

  And yet one day soon, he would join—no, likely spearhead—the Fleet as it made war on the defenseless planet of Psyclid. A planet that was Regula’s nearest neighbor, a planet that had been ignored as the Empire expanded, considered worthless, beneath contempt. Everyone knew Psyclids were a backward, bucolic race whose thought patterns didn’t fit with the rest of the galaxy. Just plain crazy, the lot of them. How many times had Kass heard an incipient argument broken up with the Regulon expression, “Hey, don’t go Psyclid on me”?

  So what had changed?

  Show-off, show-off, show-off! You hit them where it hurt. Twisted the knife. Not just last summer, but every day of every academic year.

  You betrayed your people.

  Couldn’t be. Kass refused to listen to that nasty jeering voice deep inside. The Regulon High Command had simply noticed the inexplicably independent blip on their holoview of the Nebulon Sector and decided it was time to do something about it. The recent hate campaign must have been part of their plan. It had nothing to do with her personally. Surely. But what about . . .

  Mama. Papa. M’lani. Do you know they’re coming for you?

  Kass lifted her head and responded with the strict formality drummed into her since childhood, a formality designed to cover even the most challenging s
ituations. “I am most sincerely sorry for causing so much trouble. You and your friends have put yourselves at risk for me, and I thank you. The fate you describe is beyond my imagination. I had not thought it possible.”

  She thought she heard him murmur, “Nor did I.”

  The groundcar turned hard left into an alley behind an imposing building Kass didn’t recognize. One weak security light illuminated a small door, dwarfed by the size of the loading platform next to it. Dear goddess. Maybe these men weren’t the friends, or at least sympathizers, she’d begun to think they were.

  Their leader—surely the captain, her captain—took Kass firmly by the arm, steering her through the unlocked door, down a corridor, and into what appeared to be a large storage room. Plasticrates were stacked to the ceiling along one wall and what looked like haphazard stacks of metal shelving along another. A uniformed guard, armed with a P-11 as nasty-looking as the one held by her captors, stepped out of the shadows.

  “See that she stays here,” the leader told him. “Further orders later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The leader turned back to Kass. “Leave here and you’re dead. Is that clear?”

  She almost snapped out, “Aye, Captain,” but settled for a simple yes.

  To her astonishment the three men spun around and marched out, leaving her alone with the guard who looked as uncertain about what was going on as Kass was.

  That was it? They’d done their job, parked her in a warehouse, and simply abandoned her? Going off to what? Frightening her peaceful, unarmed planet into submission?

  “Cot in the corner,” the guard told her, jerking his head toward the room’s left corner. “Next to the sani-closet.”

  Still stunned by the abrupt departure of her kidnappers—rescuers?—Kass wandered in the direction the guard had indicated. Cot indeed. Nothing more than a thin mattress on legs and a blanket. With her carry-all set neatly on top. The sani-closet was exactly that, a closet barely big enough to turn around in. Never in her life, not even on board the confined space of Orion, had Kass Kiolani been expected to live in such . . . such . . .

  Leave here and you’re dead.

  As prisons went, she should thank the goddess. She would endure.

  Two mornings later, Kass’s vow of endurance was already listing badly as she faced the reality of living in isolation day after day, week after week, year after year. She was sitting on the side of her cot, attempting to hold a paper plate in her lap while buttering a muffin and trying to shut out the smell of coffee rising from the cup sitting on the faustone floor at her feet. As much as she liked coffee, it reminded her of breakfasts in other times and other places, all infinitely superior to this one.

  “Kiolani.” Cort Baran, the guard she’d met that first night, approached her with something close to a smile on his face. “Workers come today to build new quarters, so you get to broaden your horizons. Come.”

  Kass had attempted to talk with all three of her guards, but only Baran had cooperated so far. Though nearer fifty than forty, Cort Baran had kept his military figure and a full head of hair, only lightly salted with gray. A retired Fleet engineer with a wife and two grown children, he’d served on the Ares, Admiral Vander Rigel’s flagship. Not a coincidence that he’d served with Captain Rigel’s father, of that Kass was almost certain. And most importantly, she’d never seen the slightest sign of a threat on Baran’s round face or a sneer on lips that looked ready to smile at a moment’s notice.

  Boredom might be a serious threat. Cort Baran was not.

  The burly guard’s feet echoed on the faustone floor as he headed toward a door that had not been opened since Kass arrived. She watched over his shoulder as he keyed in a code.

  The goddess be praised. Something new. Something besides four gray walls and a sani-closet. She’d already counted the plasticrates four times and estimated the height of the jumbled metal shelves, if they were assembled properly, at least six times. And nearly every waking minute of every day she’d wondered if Tal Rigel was her savior or a villain lower than a Sorian slimesnake.

  The mystery door opened. Oh! Disappointment. Surprise. Closely followed by a strong surge of excitement. What, Kass wondered, was so precious it was hidden by a door inside a door? Before them loomed a huge, circular, fan-louvered door, as solid and imposing as a bank vault. Baran entered a second key code, pressed a silver button, and the fan-blades rotated, sliding open.

  Cold air hit her like an ice storm as they stepped through, but it wasn’t the temperature that made her gasp. Books, real books made of paper, filled a vast room. Stacked on now familiar black metal racks four meters high, the rows of books stretched into . . . infinity.

  Kass knew Regulons had a passion for great civilizations of the past, but this was . . . astounding. Paper books were precious, fiercely guarded by their owners, almost revered. And here was what must be the greatest collection of books in the known galaxy.

  “The Regulon Interplanetary Archives,” Baran announced. “I am told you may go anywhere within this space. The door at the other end is as solid as this one, and to that you will not have a code. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Do you mean I may walk among the books, or may I touch them . . . read them?”

  For a moment her primary guard’s glance was almost fatherly. “My orders are that you have been granted full use of the Archives. Why a prisoner is granted this special privilege I do not know. You must have friends in high places, Kiolani.

  Higher than Tal Rigel, Kass thought, for even he couldn’t have managed this on his own.

  “You will stay here during the day until the workmen are finished,” Baran added. “After that, you may come and go as you please.” He rattled off the codes to both doors, gave her a curt nod, and left.

  Kass didn’t even notice the door’s giant fans whoosh shut. She simply stood, frozen in awe, staring at towering racks filled with the most fragile portion of the Interplanetary Archives of the Regulon Empire.

  And that wasn’t all, she discovered when she finally ventured to explore. In a small cubicle just inside the vault door she found a comp unit, an older model, but it readily wheezed to life, opening an inventory of the millions of dusty volumes. And . . . Kass’s heart thudded against her rib cage, her pulse soared. Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. She had access to everything, absolutely everything the library contained, not just paper books but every electronic file, fact or fiction.

  Oh, blessed goddess! She was no longer alone.

  Chapter 3

  By the official calendar of Regula Prime

  Four days later

  Kass had seen prison cells on megavids and on her portapad. They were nothing like the room the workmen erected on the streetside wall of the Archive’s storage room. It was nearly three times the size of regulation prison cells. No window, of course, but it had good lighting, cheerful yellow walls, and a real bed instead of a cot. A small corner of the room had been enclosed to make a closet. And, thank the goddess, a second new door opened onto a spacious private bathroom with a sink, counter space, a sani-fac, and spacious shower. Most amazingly, there were two tri-photos, in-depth studies of Psyclid’s most spectacular panoramas, Mingo Falls tumbling fifty meters into a mountain lake and a full Blue Moon rising over the dark, white-capped Azulian Sea.

  So perhaps Tal Rigel wasn’t a Sorian slimesnake. No. Even a Fleet captain didn’t have this much power. At least she didn’t think so, although his family had credits to burn. Had he turned to his father, who was not only a Fleet Admiral but a member of Regula’s Council of Twelve?

  However it happened, she wasn’t about to complain—although visions of a crushed portapad and handheld danced through her head.

  Ungrateful wretch! Kass stripped and headed for her brand-new shower. She breathed a sigh of pure pleasure as hot water gushed out. Conditions will be stark at first, but they will improve. He’d certainly got that right. Thank you, Captain. Or whoever you are.

  On the fifteenth d
ay after Kass was abandoned by her kidnappers, Cort Baran came into the Archives and plopped a small gray plasticase onto the desk next to the comp keyboard. Was it? Kass’s fingers fumbled on the clasps. Bless the goddess! A portapad. As much as she was enjoying the infinite treasures of the Archives, she longed to find out what was happening outside. This was it. News at last.

  “No messages,” Baran told her, “in or out. All blocked, but everything else is yours to explore.”

  Kass’s thanks was automatic. She was already powering up the unit, searching for news. Huge headlines took up almost the entire viewscreen: OCCUPATION COMPLETE. PSYCLID OURS.

  Well, of course it was theirs. The only surprise was that it had taken the Regulons fifteen days. Nearly four years since she’d been home, but Kass could picture it quite clearly. All the Regulonss had to do was land, march to the palace, and take the king and queen into custody. Psyclid warships were nonexistent, the Psyclid army little more than a king’s honor guard. Kass supposed it had taken the Regulons that long to spread out into the countryside, seizing control of every city, town, village, and farm. Eagerly she scanned the articles about the short war, searching for news of the fate of the royal family. Since the Regs were known for disrupting the citizens of conquered planets as little possible, ensuring their ability to serve the empire as they once served their own countries, Kass allowed herself to be optimistic. If, as she soon discovered, the members of the royal House of Orlondami still resided in the palace, then it was likely the rest of population was not suffering too severely from the Reg occupation. Provided, that is, the official press releases weren’t lying.

  Which was good, if true. Like her own fate, it could have been far worse.

  Before Kass applied to the Academy, she’d known there were factions in the Regulon military that might make her ashamed to wear the uniform. Yet she so wanted to soar into space, to be part of discovering what was out there, that she ignored the bad while embracing the good. And look where that landed her. Solitary confinement in a storage room.