Empress Game 2
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Contents
Cover
Also by Rhonda Mason
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Coming Soon from Titan Books
Also Available from Titan Books
Also available from Rhonda Mason and Titan Books
THE EMPRESS GAME
EXILE’S THRONE
(August 2017)
The Empress Game: Cloak of War
Print edition ISBN: 9781783299430
E-book ISBN: 9781783299447
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 2016 by Rhonda Mason
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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This book is dedicated to my amazing husband, James Douglass.
Not only is he my biggest supporter and best friend, but he also
gave me the greatest gift a writer could ask for: Time.
Dear James, I hope you hear all of the unspoken
words in my heart when I say, “I love you.”
1
PRINCESS ISONDE VERILEY’S TOWNHOUSE
FALANAR CITY, SOVEREIGN PLANET FALANAR, HOMEWORLD OF THE SAKIEN EMPIRE
Kayla Reinumon lay wide awake in the darkness of a bedroom, on a bed too comfortable to be her own. A high window gave a glimpse of the city skyline of Falanar at this late night hour. Things looked muted, quiet.
And foreign. Nothing like her homeworld of Ordoch in Wyrd Space. Or the slum side of Altair Tri, where she’d been exiled for the last five years. It was somewhere in between, a place as alien to her as she was to it.
A place she found herself stranded in.
As it often did, the night’s quiet weighed on her, like a g-force on her chest, breaking loose questions she couldn’t answer, doubts she ignored during the flurry of her waking hours.
“Who am I?” she whispered to the dark.
She’d always known, since the moment of birth, who she was. She was a Wyrd, member of an advanced race of psionics. More importantly, she was a ro’haar. She was one half of a bonded pair, trained in martial arts to protect her il’haar—her twin, Vayne—as he protected her with his superior psionic gifts.
Kayla Reinumon, ro’haar.
A title that meant everything. An empty title now. A title that mocked her.
Vayne was long gone. He and their younger brother Corinth had blasted off from Falanar two weeks ago, headed for sanctuary.
What was a ro’haar without her il’haar?
Just a Wyrd.
Wyrds had psi powers, though, and she had lost hers. What was a Wyrd without her powers?
Just a person. Nothing more.
So, who was she supposed to be now?
The comm in the room buzzed with an incoming transmission. “Princess Isonde? Are you awake?”
Princess Isonde, Kayla’s assumed identity, while the real princess died slowly in a coma. Was that the only identity Kayla had left?
Kayla rolled out of bed and absently retrieved her kris from beneath her pillow. Its mate sat atop the shelving unit near the door. She gave the dagger a pat before thumbing the comm’s switch.
“What is it, Orna? I’m sleeping.”
No, she wasn’t, and hadn’t since her brothers had fled Falanar and left her in the wake of their hyperstream. She strapped one kris to her bare thigh.
“Ambassador Bredard of Geth needs to speak with you; he says it’s quite urgent.” Her junior aide sounded harried. “The word ‘emergency’ was mentioned more than once.”
Kayla blinked dry eyes at the chronometer. “At three in the morning?” He wouldn’t be the first person to come seeking an audience with her in the dead of night—not even the dozenth. Oh-three-hundred on Falanar was another planet’s mid-day commodities market crash, or a dinnertime peace accord crisis.
Isonde, she was learning, lived an exhausting life.
Kayla couldn’t decide if she wanted to be left alone with her demons, or saved from them by hours of mind-numbing political wrangling.
“Ambassador who?” The name wasn’t familiar at all. The province of Geth she remembered—a contentious nation on a Sovereign Planet, pushing for dominance and threatening military force. Isonde’s home nation had cut diplomatic ties with them.
“Bredard.” The aide was very clear on the name, and none too pleased, by the sound of it.
Kayla looked back at the bed—Isonde’s bed, her own private battleground—even as her mind spun on the name. “Can he be put off?” She hated going in blind. Playing the part of Isonde took more than a convincing hologram and an air of authority. It took research and study to be up to date on the latest political situations, to gain at least a basic understanding of the players involved.
“I don’t think he’s leaving, Princess. I could barely contain him in the front lounge. A few more minutes and he’ll make a run for your room.”
If Orna couldn’t put him off, it couldn’t be done. The girl was a master at screening the various political entities clamoring for Isonde’s time and only allowing the most important through.
That settled it. Kayla wasn’t here on Falanar just to make appearances as the triumphant princess, fresh from her victory in the Empress Game. She was here to act as Isonde while the princess was still in her coma, until Malkor—her Malkor, Senior Agent Malkor Rua of the IDC—could find someone better suited for the job.
And Isonde, Kayla knew, would be knowledgeable of the importance of such a visit from this Ambassador Bredard of Geth. She wouldn’t hesitate to take the meeting.
“Tell him I’ll be down shortly.” The sleeping tunic and robe she’d been wearing would be the most comfortable, but Isonde never arrived anywhere looking less than micro-precise in her attire. Kayla sighed and headed to the dressing room.
Fifteen minutes later she arrived at the lounge, looking elegant, if austere. Her sole consideration for comfort had been swapping out a long skirt for leggings so that she could strap a kris to each thigh.
Rawn, her favorite of Isonde’
s guards, stood sentry outside the front lounge.
“How did you pull the midnight shift?” she asked him with a smile.
“Ethan had a rough afternoon with the new baby, so I sent him home to get some extra sleep. I was due to start in a few hours anyway.”
“You’re a big softie, Rawn, you know that?” Not to mention big in general, with a physique that would have frightened her a month ago if she hadn’t gotten used to dealing with the larger males.
He returned her smile. “Just don’t tell anyone.”
Kayla straightened her shoulders and gave him the nod to open the doors.
Bredard waited in the shadows near the bank of windows, silhouetted against the sleeping city. Lights dotted the night behind him like a swath of electronic stars across the backdrop of towering buildings, with the exception of a dark blot mid-center. A power outage uptown? A single lamp illuminated the room, its weak light spinning out a web of intimacy—or secrecy.
Imperials did love their games.
After a day like hers had been she was too weary for such affectations. The lounge doors slid shut behind her and she tapped the base of a second lamp, bringing up enough light to make her squint for a moment. His gaze fell immediately to the kris and she pretended not to notice.
“Princess Isonde.” Bredard gave the traditional Piran greeting, touching right fingertips to right shoulder, then lowering his arm, palm up. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”
If the Gethans had a traditional greeting she certainly didn’t know it. “Good evening, Ambassador. Unusual circumstances.”
His gaze drifted again to her kris. “I apologize for the lateness of the hour. I fear this is known as the only way to have a moment of your time without scheduling weeks in advance.”
Lovely. She’d have to tell Orna to be stricter or they’d be deluged with visitors.
She gestured toward chairs arranged opposite each other across a low table—it was what Isonde would do. Left to her own instincts, Kayla would prefer to stand, one hand resting on a kris’s handle, her back to the door she knew Rawn guarded from the other side. The tenor of the room, Bredard’s posed stance near the dark embrasure of the windows, set her slightly on edge. What sort of meeting did he intend?
He took a winding course to the chairs, tapping the base of the first lamp as he went, powering it down, and sat facing the windows. She took the seat opposite, annoyed to find herself looking into the only lit lamp in the room directly behind him.
She stared him down. Let him start the conversation. That would work much better than her demanding, “Well, what do you want?” in a perfectly Kayla tone. He was well-dressed and handsome, she supposed, in the blunt-featured, craggy way of some imperials. He seemed to have more in common with Trinan and Vid, IDC agents from Malkor’s octet, than he did with most diplomats.
A minute ticked by. Two. She resisted the urge to sigh with impatience—barely. What sort of quasi-cloak-and-dagger nonsense had he roused her from bed for? Hopefully he would be quick. She had more not-sleeping to do. She could be lying awake, worrying over the whereabouts of her brothers, the war crime charges levied against her people, and best of all, the fractured state of her relationship with Malkor.
On second thought, maybe Bredard could drag this out all night.
The silence stretched to uncomfortable levels and she cracked first. “You have my full attention, Ambassador.”
“The full attention of Princess Isonde?”
His reply put her on guard. She nodded once. “Of course.”
“That’s odd, because the Princess Isonde I know wouldn’t come to a meeting armed with daggers.”
“The Isonde you knew hadn’t survived a terrorist attack and a brush with death at her own attempted wedding, either.” Radical elements from within the empire had tried to infect the planetary rulers of the galaxy with the incurable Tetratock Nanovirus after the Empress Game. Kayla had thwarted the attack and avoided infection by the slimmest margin.
“The Isonde I know,” he said, “wouldn’t come to a midnight meeting with a Gethan—period.”
Stars burn it! What else didn’t she know about Piran’s involvement with Geth? She should have put him off until the morning and spent the night researching. Damn Orna for being intimidated into summoning her.
“Things have changed,” Kayla said. “I am no longer simply one of Piran’s representatives on the Sovereign Council, I have wider concerns.” At least, Isonde would, if she ever woke from her coma, married Prince Ardin and took her place on the elite Council of Seven at his side. Bredard didn’t need to know those concerns stretched beyond the empire, to the fate of Kayla’s homeworld in Wyrd Space.
“Things have indeed changed,” Bredard said, “and not for the better, I fear.” His gaze switched to the windows behind her for a moment and an uneasy feeling prickled across her skin, the sensation of being watched from the shadows. She casually lowered one hand from the chair’s armrest to sit atop a kris.
“I wouldn’t be here like this if they hadn’t,” he said. “Things were rolling along smoothly. The results were… promising. However, your recent activities have forced my hand.”
He’d have to be more specific than that.
In the last few months Kayla had impersonated one of the most influential women in the empire, perpetrated that fraud throughout the entire Empress Game, won the rank of Empress-Apparent and a seat on the Council of Seven, helped uncover a clandestine division working within the Imperial Diplomatic Corps, freed prisoners of war that had been experimented on for five years, and killed the empire’s Grand Advisor of Science and Technology.
To name a few of her activities.
He couldn’t know about any of those, though. She and Malkor’s octet had kept all of the details tightly contained, so he must mean one of the more mundane aspects of her charade as Isonde. Which, though? Which of her recent political maneuvers would affect Geth?
And why couldn’t he have scheduled this meeting with her in advance so she could have prepared?
With no notion of how else to go on, she went for the most controversial of her decisions in the past week.
“Piran stands behind its decision to boycott Timpania’s sale of gallenium ore until they improve conditions in the refineries.” Anything that impacted the empire’s supply of the precious fuel resource would have everyone riled. “If you came to change my mind about it, I’m sorry to say my father and I are quite in accord on this.” Star travel depended on gallenium ore. As the largest supplier, Timpania had the rest of the empire in an economic stranglehold over it.
“If I cared about gallenium I would have arranged a meeting with Isonde’s father to discuss it.”
The bastard knew about the identity switch—why else would he refer to her in the third person—but how?
Bredard lifted one finger from where it had lain on the armrest. “I’ve come about something more personal.”
Suddenly the air felt close, thick—too shallow for two people. His attention shifted past her again in a way it shouldn’t have if they were alone. As she drew breath to question him, a hand clamped over her mouth from behind with the force of a vacuum seal. Bredard sat at ease as an arm encircled her throat, locking her against the chair and holding her prisoner.
Her kris were already in her hands by the time the arm secured its grip. She slashed one wavy blade across the hand at her mouth, catching her cheek with the tip and spilling a warm rivulet of fluid down her chin in the process. The hand held firm. She swung her other arm overhead backward, hoping to sink her blade in the flesh of her attacker’s shoulder, if she wasn’t lucky enough to hit his jugular. Instead her blade shanked off something harder than it, tearing a line through flesh as the blade slid aside.
The arm about her throat tightened, constricting blood flow to her brain as the hand bruised her lips against her teeth. She tried to twist and drop beneath her attacker’s arm but it held like a garrote and about as tightly. A scent like… lub
ricant? hit her right before Bredard drew a pistol from his pocket.
“Enough.”
She desperately sucked air in through her nostrils, breathing what little she could get down her trachea, and raised her hands, kris away from her body. Even with the pistol trained on her, it was hard not to kick her feet out and keep struggling with the arm strangling her closer to darkness each passing second. The lubricant smell was everywhere and a clear fluid glistened on one of her hands in the weak light.
She tried to still her rampaging heart and focus.
Where had the second man come from? She flashed through her memory since arriving—the black spot of the city’s landscape, as seen from the windows. Not a power outage, a cloaking device of some sort, used to hide another person’s presence. A cloak that couldn’t flawlessly render the complicated scene behind it, presenting the outline of buildings without the shifting lights.
A rushing sounded in her ears. In a second she was going to have to choose between getting shot for making a move or being passively strangled to unconsciousness.
“If you promise not to make a sound, I’ll have Siño release you.”
Blinking was all she could manage. Luckily, he took it in the affirmative. Siño released his grasp and she sucked in air, filling her burning lungs even as she studied Bredard’s weapon.
The design of the pistol was unfamiliar to her—how in the void had he gotten it past her security filters? For that matter, how had Siño gotten past? And who the frutt did they think they were, assaulting her in her home?
“Knives, if you please.” Pistol still trained on her, Bredard gestured and Siño came around from behind her chair. Blood rimmed the gash she’d opened on the back of his hand. More disturbing, though, was the clear fluid oozing out of it. The wound on his shoulder showed an equally small amount of blood, with a larger stain forming on his shirt.
“I find biocybes are a bit more effective in a fight than your average person,” Bredard said. “Considering your current predicament, I’m guessing you agree.”
If Siño had military biocybernetic enhancements, which she suspected he did, that was some seriously high-level tech for an “ambassador.”