Asymmetry

by A. G. Claymore

  He took a series of deep breaths before realizing he was gazing into the eyes of the chimera. He felt the connection take hold, her unique perspective showing the monks’ projected fear as suggestion, rather than fact. It was like opening a pressure relief valve. The fears that had threatened to swamp his mind and force him into compliance were made small and insubstantial.

  But his anger took their place.

  “I have come before you,” he said loudly, “resolved not to use my own abilities in this discussion as a gesture of respect and goodwill. I see, now, that you employ no such scruples.”

  “We took you in,” the abbot spluttered, “to protect you from your enemies!”

  “You took me in,” Viggo countered, forcing himself to seem calm, in command of facts rather than emotions, “to lessen the chance of the pursuit accidentally finding evidence of your existence.”

  “And what if we did?” a monk behind him demanded. “We could have killed you and let your pursuers find the body. That would have served our interests even better! Then we would have…”

  An angry warbling from the chimera silenced the monk.

  “Indeed you could have.” Viggo nodded, his eyes still fixed on the abbot. “And your tone tells me that you were one of those arguing for just such a course. A just reward, no doubt, for my father keeping your secrets for more than a decade…”

  He trailed off, letting the silence amplify the indictment for him. The abbot, at least, had the grace to look somewhat shamefaced. “Let me tell you,” he continued, “just how much that would have served your interests.”

  He turned to face the monk who’d advocated for his death. “The mutineers would have been wholly committed by my death. Those who were on the fence would have realized there was no going back, not when they’d killed the heir.” He began stalking around the center of the circle, wondering where he’d suddenly found this deep well of nerve.

  “With their son dead, my parents would not be in a forgiving mood when they arrived in orbit. That’s where your fate would be decided.” He continued to stalk, finding it easier to string the words together. “I’d say the chances are as close to dead even as makes no difference. The mutineers have to hold the orbitals or it’s all lost. They’ll have help from the trade consortiums and whatever mercenary bands happen to be in the sector.

  “The traders deal with my family because they have to but that means accepting the low quotas we’ve been setting for targeted harvest. This keeps the price of spice-wood high but they know they’d make more profit with a less restrictive regime. If the mutineers win, this world will be wide open to mechanized harvesting platforms licensed to the traders that stood by them.”

  “You can’t do that!” a monk shouted.

  “No,” Viggo agreed, turning. “I can’t do that because my father is committed to maintaining the harmony of this world. I can’t possibly imagine where he got that idea,” he added wryly.

  “But the mutineers can do it and they will,” he insisted, “because, if they don’t have me to bargain with, they’ll be desperate enough to promise the world, literally, to whoever’s willing to risk helping them.”

  “Perhaps we should hand you over,” another suggested.

  “But he knows too much!” another shouted.

  Viggo shrugged. “Well, it’s no different from asylum, as far as I’m concerned. If you force asylum on me, then sooner or later this place will be discovered while they’re stripping the surface of spice-wood.

  “Once they get their hands on me, they’ll take me somewhere quiet and bash my skull in.” He looked back to the abbot. “And I’m sure that, given a moment’s thought, you’ll come to the same conclusion. Anyway, it means the same thing, the planet stripped and you exposed.”

  The abbot appraised him shrewdly. Though this had quickly gotten out of hand, she was still willing to negotiate. “I suppose you wish to propose another course of action.”

  “I do,” Viggo said. “You release me, I go back to the Solomon arco and retake control from the mutineers.”

  “Gods!” the old abbot exclaimed dryly. “Such a complicated plan. It’s no wonder we never thought of that ourselves!”

  “Intricate plans rarely work,” Viggo said, waving a dismissive gesture. “Every plan-point is also a potential failure-point. The more you have, the more likely you are to end up with extra holes in your body. I prefer to work with a set of simple objectives.”

  “And those are?”

  “Firstly, I need to get back to Solomon. How long would that take?”

  “Two days,” Roj supplied. “There’s another river that takes us most of the way and a short walk gets us to a wide creek that goes most of the way to our cell. It runs near the arco.”

  “Underground?”

  “As most rivers on this world, yes.”

  “Good!” Rick nodded. “Next, I need to get inside the city undetected. I should be able to get in through the ventilation system easily enough. Once in there, I have to find the head of the snake and kill this rebellion from the inside out.”

  “You’re going to do all this by yourself, are you?” the abbot asked, her voice betraying her lack of confidence.

  “If I must,” he said, “but this is a matter that concerns both our peoples. I think I was rather persuasive on that point or did it sound rushed? I was up all night practicing…”

  “I propose we put the matter to a vote,” Roj suggested, drawing the abbot’s pensive gaze.

  “I don’t believe we’ve ruled out execution,” insisted the same monk who’d earlier claimed that killing him would have been for the best.

  “Enough!” snapped the abbot. “A vote at this time is premature!” She waved to Roj. “See him to a cell. We’ll return to the matter when heads have cooled.”

  While heads cool, someone is solidifying their hold on my planet! Viggo thought angrily, his own head far from cool. He turned to Roj, who approached him from behind, guards waiting just outside the circle. His gaze slipped past Roj to the monk who’d advocated for his death.

  What he saw there was chilling. The monk’s look of frustration was morphing into one of firm resolve.

  Rescuing… Somebody…

  The Main Fleet, Near Rykeria

  “And they really believed you didn’t know what kind of pillow they were inventing?” Freya wiped up the coffee she’d just spit on the table when she laughed.

  “I swear I could hear the gears coming apart in his head while I was talking,” June said. “‘I use one myself’,” she quoted herself. “‘I’d even be open to doing a promotional video to show how it’s used’,” she added.

  Freya put her coffee mug down. “Almost got me again, you sneaky little wench!”

  “Imagine how Odin felt! He was practically begging me to leave the room.”

  “Speaking of leaving…” Freya looked at the chronometer. “We’d better get down to the hold. We’re almost in comms range of Rykeria. We want to be ready if there’s any information waiting for us.”

  They started toward the hangar, not a long walk in a Hussar.

  “You had a vision about this?” June probed.

  “No,” Freya answered a little too quickly. “They’re not as convenient as that. I just have a vague premonition that things will come together, though my premonitions are no more reliable than yours, probably.”

  “Folks give you a hard time because of the visions?”

  Freya looked over at June. “Haven’t you wondered whether I know the manner of your death?”

  “That’s what lies behind the unease?” June shook her head. “Death is the ultimate trickster. How many of us gets to understand why or even how our life is ending? I’m the least likely one to know how I died; why get upset if you know more than me?”

  “I’ve never thought about it like that,” Freya admitted.

  “If you know how I’m going to snuff it, then you’re just the first of many to have a knowledge that I’ll probably never share. A b
ullet to the head tends to disrupt your thoughts on mortality.”

  They walked on in silence for a few moments.

  Freya leaned over toward June a little. “I don’t have any idea how you die, by the way.”

  “Would you lie about it just to put my mind at ease?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Doesn’t admitting it undo the effect?”

  “You made me snort coffee out my nose with that sex-pillow story. You’re lucky I’m not making up some bullshit wild story.”

  “Hah!” June gave her a shove. “Tell me I should avoid sex if I want to cheat death or something?”

  “Um…” Freya feigned a worried look.

  “Oh… you evil little bitch!” June’s laughing eyes gave the lie to her mock angry expression. “Just remember that being married to an accidental pagan deity is comedy gold. One of these days, you’re going to be drinking whiskey and I’ll be there, waiting for my moment!”

  They walked, laughing, onto the small hangar deck where June’s assault-shuttle was crammed into a space made by shoving Freya’s own craft out of the way. If June was providing the scalpel for this operation, she got to choose the tools.

  Her team was already sitting on the boarding ramp, checking weapons, telling the same old jokes they’d heard a thousand times. One of them was telling a story he’d heard so many times he’d genuinely come to believe it had happened to him instead of his squad-mate who was loudly insisting that the guy was williamsing himself.

  They sat there as the fleet slowly edged toward the planet, their reconnaissance screen sending a constant feed of data back to her ship. Freya forced herself to watch a command holo without interfering. The fleet had their orders and her officer of the day was someone she’d served with for decades. He could be counted on to keep the plan in motion.

  June managed to drag her into the give and take of her small team. When the call from Thorstein was routed to her, she was in the middle of an argument with three of the team over whether the Dactarii, who thought nothing of cloning invasion forces, had a firm grasp on the concept of the soul.

  “Thor,” she greeted his hologram, her relief evident. “I’m glad to find you here!”

  “That’s mutual,” the hologram told her. “If you want your man back, you’ll have to go down to this prison.” He gestured and a map of Rykeria’s surface sprang into view.

  “If, huh?” she grinned at him.

  “Well, he also took Tim along, so we should probably get them out. Barry would be upset if his kid were left in a Republic lockdown.”

  “They got arrested?”

  “They arranged to get themselves arrested,” Thorstein corrected. “It was the most likely place to find the commander, according some new friends of ours.”

  “Lead us in,” she told him. “We’ll launch a team now and follow you down to the prison.”

  “Will do,” he confirmed. “Also, there’s a Republic fleet in the sector. I don’t think we have a lot of time to work with here.”

  “We know they have spies in our territories,” Freya said. “I was just hoping they wouldn’t have been so quick to figure out our intentions.” She caught a look from June as the former SEAL was chivying her team into their assault-shuttle.

  “It changes nothing,” Freya decided. “We’re already here. I’m not coming this close only to walk away.” Plus Rick and Tim are down there.

  She followed the team onto the shuttle.

  “Why does it look like you’re coming down with the grab-team?” Thorstein asked.

  “Because I’m coming down with the grab-team,” she explained.

  “Who’s in charge while you’re doing that?”

  “Nils has that honor. It’s not like I need to be standing on the bridge. This is mostly a standard Midgaard smash-and-grab. The only thing that counts as an LRG op is the rescue and I’ll be damned if I sit it out.”

  She made her way to the center seat in the cockpit, sitting behind the pilot on the left and June on the right. They were already out of the hangar by now and the black curve of Rykeria’s night side was dropping down from the top of the cockpit windows to fill their view.

  The computer auto-dimmed the windows just before the local star came up over the horizon but the effect was still magnificent. It was almost enough to make Freya forget how high the stakes were. She had to get her husband and Barry’s son back but she had to get Gabiola in order to embarrass the Dactari into keeping their noodle-holes shut about the whole thing.

  They were coming into the atmosphere now, the shudders in the ship growing steadily in intensity. The temperature was rising slightly from the friction but it was still a controlled descent.

  They were coming down as fast as possible. There was no sense in giving the Dactari time to organize a more effective response and it was especially important for them to take note of the sonic booms from all of the raiding ships.

  Freya already had her enemy responding to her lead. She was holding the up-side of the decision cycle but she also wanted to influence how the enemy responded to the raid. She wanted them panicked and spread out.

  The prison was highlighted in green on the holo-HUD and it was coming up fast. “You’re sure your comp’s are ready for this?” Freya asked June.

  “You’ve got my iron-clad guarantee,” June said, an edge to her voice. “If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize to you in a few minutes!”

  They laughed. There’d be no apology. If June was wrong about the inertial compensators…

  They came to a stop above the prison’s main landing platform. The assault-ship went from supersonic to full stop in a short enough distance to wake Alliance engineers up at night in a cold sweat.

  The sonic boom blasted its way across the roof and the aft boarding ramp dropped open, hitting the paved landing deck with a dull clang. The assault-team – not turned to pasta sauce by the sudden stop – poured out.

  By the time Freya exited the craft, the pad had been secured and a small detonation announced the ‘unlocking’ of the access door to the secure areas of the prison. She approached the roughly rectangular hole in the large door and stepped through, her weapon tight to her shoulder.

  The team had pushed up to the far end of the corridor and one of the operators was inside the air operations cubicle, accessing the prison’s systems. A terrified guard was lying on his belly, hands secured with plastic ties.

  “She’s in solitary,” the operator said. He slid a control on his wrist-pad and Freya saw a new icon appear in the HUD projected into her vision by her implant.

  She opened it, getting an orange-hazed line-diagram of the facility that overlaid her vision, aligning as she moved her head. Gabiola’s cell was five levels down from the rooftop landing pad and to her right.

  Sound and Fury

  Odin shuddered with the thrill of his arrival on the surface. He loved making a big splash and the sonic booms of his assault group must have deafened half the city. He leapt out of his shuttle while the ramp was still dropping, screaming at his people to get moving.

  He’d selected one of the larger prison complexes several thousand kilometers away from the one where his wife was helping to rescue Gabiola. It wasn’t lost on him that the Alliance’s law-giver was about to rob the Dactari justice system.

  One of the biggest exports from Rykeria was registration modules for trade-ships. It sounded like a mundane objective but those modules were a key part of trade regulation in the Republic.

  A module could be hacked, if you had the resources, but you had to get your hands on one. With the armistice in place, newly captured freighters were in short supply. Stealing a fresh batch straight from a prison factory represented some lucrative smuggling opportunities.

  They’d landed in the yard between the outer wall and one of the bigger prisoner dormitories. Coming out the back of the shuttle, Odin was looking up at the huge doors to the outbound storage warehouse. Fenris had a team placing breaching charges on the employee entrance but
a guard happened to open the door just before they inserted the detonator.

  Not one to look a gift-idiot in the mouth, Fenris grabbed the guard and led his team inside, assured of an easy entrance thanks to the walking biometrics bank who’d blundered into their midst.

  Odin knew that part of the job was well in hand. He led his own group over to the wall of the dormitory. They blew a large hole in the carboncrete wall and ran inside.

  Everywhere he looked he saw confusion. Guards still held their weapons but they were displaying a distinct reluctance to point them in any specific direction. Inmates were slowly coalescing into groups, seeking protection in numbers.

  And all of them were looking to Odin’s team for some sign of what the future held for them all. He grinned. So much to work with here – the scum of a thousand worlds.

  “What are you waiting for,” he shouted, “an engraved invitation?” He gestured behind himself just as another explosion sounded, leavened with the sound of falling masonry. “The outer wall is breached,” he told them. Dust swirled in through the hole in the dormitory wall.

  They all stared dumbly at him.

  “Go!” he roared.

  That single imperative served far better than his previous harangue. One of the inmates cheered and started toward the hole in the wall. He was the pebble that started the avalanche. The delay following the cheer was almost too short for anyone to notice who had acted first. The rest of the inmates were now screaming, laughing and pushing for the newly made exit.

  Not a bad diversion, he thought. A few thousand hardened criminals turned loose in this corner of the republic would make life difficult for the enemy. His eyes widened. “Shit!”

  He turned and started fighting his way through the mass of escaping convicts. “We forgot to put a strong guard on our shuttle!” he shouted at the Midgaard around him.

  They forced their way back outside just in time to see their shuttle lifting off. Three convicts were hanging from the boarding ramp. Two of them let go, falling to the ground, and one of them shrieked as one of the bones in his legs snapped.