The Catch (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 7-9)

by Athena Grayson

  She spoke as if she’d forgotten she was right next to her worst enemy. “Must we truly be enemies, Treska?”

  She lifted her eyes to his and he didn’t need to be a psypath to see the cracks beginning in the soul behind them. “I—”

  Enlightenment held up the chain. “What fine beauty have we got here?”

  Micah caught sight of the chain, the Guerre crystal winking in the light from Enlightenment’s magnifying monocle, and everything of the past few days fell away. His mind, unbidden, reached out for the artifact, attempting to connect—

  “AAUGHH!” The neuro-collar sent voltage pumping through his body. White filled his vision, static filled his brain, and his senses shut down, removing him from consciousness.

  Fracture

  When Micah cried out, the scream of feedback from the neuro-collar nearly deafened her. Enlightenment even hissed at the offensive sound. “Remove it,” he insisted.

  Treska’s hands nearly went to her wrist cuff. Invade your mind, steal your will, call a Marauder dreadnought down on your head! She pressed her lips together. “I can’t,” she whispered.

  Treska shivered as she finished cleaning up the used equipment from the surgical kit. She refused to consider any meaning to the fact that she’d taken a blanket and tucked it around him, or that she eased a pillow under his head after he fought her attempts to bring him around.

  Because she also refused to remove the collar.

  She left the lounge, but left the curtain open, in case Micah awakened. In the galley, Enlightenment wouldn’t look at her as he took an extra sheet of syntha-skin and sealed the jewelry inside it. “It is a psypath artifact. Artifacts from his people’s heritage tend to send Micah into paroxysms of joy most of the time. The boy used to spend hours just gazing at—” He shook his head. “Well, nevermind that.”

  “I’ll need that,” she said, with no joy. “It should be confiscated, and destroyed so it can’t be used to call the Marauders.”

  “I shall do no such thing. It is an ancient thing of sublime beauty and deserves to be considered as such.” The Mauw suddenly seemed twice his size. “You appear to labor under a grave misrepresentation of persons with mental talents.”

  She reached for the wrapped artifact. “Can they not pull the very thoughts from your mind and force you to their will?”

  Enlightenment held the parcel away and hissed. “They?” He growled low in his throat. “There is no ‘they’ anymore, my dear. Your Union saw to that. Now there is only him.”

  She turned away. Enlightenment’s words haunted her. Her training said, Enemy. Freak. Security risk. But Micah was—he was none of those things.

  As long as he had the collar. “Stop, I—” She shook her head again, dizzy with the second set of senses that overrode what she knew to be true and forced questions into places where nothing but airtight certainty existed before. “Psypaths can’t be allowed free to prey on ordinary people. You never saw the havoc caused when one of them took over a freighter crew—”

  “I don’t believe you truly comprehend.” Enlightenment shifted his weight and put a hand out to the side, stretching his arm to block her exit from the counter. She looked up into his tawny eyes to find they’d lightened to golden disks bisected by the narrowest of vertical pupil-slits. The tips of his whiskers were close enough so that she could see the fine hairs quiver when she exhaled.

  The air between them changed in an instant. She was suddenly aware of her position, trapped in a corner. She realized that the wire-framed spectacles perched on the end of his nose only made him seem harmless. Enlightenment, for all his quirks and gentle humor, was still a Mauw. He still had claws, and fangs, and the instincts of a people who liked their dinners to start the evening still living. One of those claws was extended now, and she felt the needle-sharp tip pressing into the skin of her jaw, dangerously close to her jugular. “Many Mauw enjoy a good hunt of hairless primates such as yourself, and sentience only sweetens the thrill of the hunt. The claws tingle in anticipation and the senses sharpen almost painfully when presented with the opportunity, not to mention the taste of sweet blood made even more delightful with the sharp aperitif of fear.”

  His soft-spoken words had taken on a rough undercurrent that reminded her that the Mauw prided themselves on acting in a civilized manner precisely because their wilder instincts were so close to the surface. A cold thrill tensed her muscles and she brought her wrist up between them at gut level, ready to fire her darts. Something small and squeaky in the back of her brain told her that the weapon might do good, but it would do so too late for her. She licked suddenly dry lips. “Back off, cat,” she said in a voice that felt too thin.

  Just as suddenly, he stepped away from her and used the claw he’d touched her with to slide the spectacles back up on his nose. He scraped the claw against the wire frame of the bridge, shaping it to better fit his broad feline nose. “However, ability does not equate with intent, and I find the claws make excellent tools for more civilized pursuits.” He took a breath and exhaled in a long, controlled sigh. The corresponding tension left her own shoulders, and when he spoke again, she listened. “There was no ambassador to plead for the freedom of the psypath people. No delegate to negotiate terms of surrender. No dictator to overthrow. Only people. With families who cared about them.” The Mauw’s eyes darkened. “Families who did not understand why their loved ones suddenly vanished.”

  She fled Enlightenment after the confrontation, escaping on the pretense of salvaging a minor part for the Needle’s Eye. The Mauw’s parting statement sounded very personal. She wondered if he had a loved one enslaved by a psypath. The Union’s interdiction of Ursis Amalia wasn’t something people talked about. It was a protective measure, and in those days, protective measures did not meet with much opposition. As she wandered up from the warehouse level of his cavern home an hour later, she wondered why. Even though she knew what she knew and she knew what she’d been taught. Mindsnakes were dangerous. Without the collar, Micah would be, too. He couldn’t help it. Even with the collar, he’d tried to use his talents. Thank the stars the collar had disrupted him or she might now be a slave to his will.

  She shuddered. She slipped between the curtains to check on Micah and found herself staring down at the sleeping man. Again. And he looked just as innocent in sleep as anyone. Shadows darkened the skin beneath his eyes, and a scruffy growth of beard had crept across his lower jaw, cheeks, and upper lip. Oddly enough, it made him look younger than he was.

  There was something odd about her behavior. She expected the Voice to be screaming in her head right now. Possibly for the past several hours. Wine, flirtation, permitting unlicensed trade activities on a world in contention with Union membership—any Vice Hunter in their right mind would be calling in the Dreadnoughts, ready to lock the place down tight.

  Instead, she’d lost a dogfight with a space pirate, lost her bounty, lost herself, and lost her ship. And maybe her inhibitions, as well as her inhibs. The absence of the bitter little ovoids was like forgetting an ident-band or a credit-chip. Something you always carried and so never noticed, but when it was gone, you felt naked and couldn’t remember the last place you had it. And it messed up your whole day.

  She couldn’t remember not having inhibs at hand. Ever since she woke up in the trauma hospital with no past and no future, the inhibs had been part of her life. Dr. Rimana had explained it all in a very serious voice. “In spite of all our advances in the medical sciences, the brain still holds many mysteries. Your memories may or may not return, but the evidence of your physical trauma will probably stay with you for the rest of your life.” She held up a slender tube—the first of many. “These are beta-inhibitors. They act as a suppressant to stress chemicals your brain wants to overproduce in response to your injury. You’ve had extensive reconstruction, and some enhancement as well. The inhibitors help your body stay compatible with the enhancements and prevent it from rejecting your reconstructions.” The silver-haired woman smile
d gently. “But you must promise to take them regularly. No harassing my staff over too many pills and injections.”

  She’d never asked Rimana what would happen should she stop taking the inhibs. Over the years, her headaches had decreased, but Dr. Rimana had increased her dosage to improve the enhancements. Treska saw no reason not to trust the medical officer, and made sure to report to her personally for physical checkups every time she returned from hunting a bounty. And she made sure to always have a generous supply of the ovoids at all times.

  She hugged her knees and rested her forehead against them. It has to be the inhibs, she thought. Sweat tingled at her temples and at the nape of her neck. She didn’t feel nausea, as she sometimes did when she’d gone too long between inhibs, but something felt definitely out of sorts in her body.

  In his sleep, Micah twitched. His arm brushed against her leg and she jumped. The simple contact magnified into something more than it should have been. She shifted, edging away from him and hugging her knees tighter. She felt oversensitive and raw. Even the air currents drifting over her skin had a tactile sense to them. Even the little hairs on her arms ached.

  She felt diffuse, as if the boundary between herself and everything else in the room was a fuzzy field instead of a clearly-defined border between everything Treska, and everything Not Treska. Just by the way the air moved, she could sense Enlightenment a nanosecond before he appeared in the doorway.

  “My apologies for my behavior earlier.”

  She shook her head. “You were proving a point. I’m not sure I disagree.” It seemed very important to some untethered part of her that she make peace with Enlightenment.

  “It is healthy to doubt.” He perched on the edge of the cushions. “You are comfortable like this?” he asked. His whiskers twitched and she wanted to stroke them, see if they were silky or coarse under her hand.

  She nodded. Her nails dug into her palms. “Yes, thank you.” Something else dug into her ribs and she pulled the lotus bowl out from a space between the pillow and her side. She fumbled with the release absently. The ring caught on something and she spent half a minute squinting at it, until she found a small thread from one of the pillows that had caught between the moving parts.

  “You seem tense,” Enlightenment said. “Something troubling you?”

  She had doubts about his loyalty to the Union, and what that should mean to a Vice Hunter, but he was kind, and she knew his people considered it a great shame to behave in anything but the most civilized and respectful of manners. And he was easy to talk to. She shook her head. “I’m out of medication and worried about the side-effects.” She picked the thread out with a fingernail.

  “Doesn’t one usually wonder about the side-effects while taking the medication?”

  The mechanism loosened with use, this time the petals slid smoothly out of their slots. “I’m backwards, aren’t I? I’m more worried about the side-effects of not taking them.”

  “That would be withdrawal symptoms. Only I would never dare accuse a Vice Hunter of being dependent on a pharmaceutical.”

  She tilted her head to look up at him. Her lips twisted. “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “Is it really so humorless on the Capitol planet? Is patriotism tied up that much in sobriety?”

  She looked at her hands. They looked so pale as to be sickly, even in the tiny lights of the fiber-optics dancing along the edges of the lotus petals. Maybe it was the washed-out light from the thick vein of crystal that gave the room its ambiance. “It’s important to acknowledge the gravity of being the Capitol planet,” she said. “But it’s not a joyless existence. There’s artistic expression. There’s beauty.”

  “Yes, there has always been a certain appeal in asceticism. The extremes of control are a common way to expand one’s self-discovery.”

  Treska blinked. “What did you say?” The sense of deja vu made her want to examine her surroundings to make sure she was still where she thought she was.

  He cocked his head. “Merely that many religious and philosophical orders consider entertainment to be a distraction to enlightenment. No pun intended, of course, since I, myself, consider entertainment the path to Enlightenment, as it were.”

  She shook her head. “No…I mean about—nevermind.” She snapped the lotus bowl closed. She was tired, it was late, and her mind was playing tricks on her. The sense that she’d heard Enlightenment’s words before had to be a result of exhaustion.

  “Goodness, I’ve nearly forgotten.” The Mauw held up one hand. In it was a small, lumpy bit of metal and crystal as unassuming as it was ugly. “Your actuator. Just where I put it.”

  Her lips twisted and she forgot the past, but she tucked the lotus bowl into a vest pocket. “Knew where it was all along, did you?”

  “Of course I did. I just didn’t recall where it was in relation to everything else.” His whiskers twitched. “All it needs is a bit of polishing up and some calibration, and it’ll be ready to carry you back to the cosmopolitan skies of the bosom of the Union.”

  “I’ll calibrate the actuator tomorrow and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Enjoy your rest, then. Make use of the pillows. I can tell you from experience that Ariesis rarely completes a night without rolling off pillows and casting blankets to the far corners of a room. You may as well get some use out of them.”

  She didn’t want to know how the Mauw had come to be intimately acquainted with Micah’s sleeping habits. The back room of her mind seemed to suggest all sorts of scenarios involving the two men and activities that ought to make a Vice Hunter’s head explode. Instead, she busied herself with taking one of the pillows not too close to his head and tucking it between the small of her back and the wall. “Good night, Enlightenment. And—thank you.”

  She leaned her head back against the wall and tried to doze, but her mind just wouldn’t settle. Every single one of her anchors—the Union capital, her ship, and her inhibs—had been taken from her. Even the Voice had deserted her, although she wasn’t exactly sorry about that. She rubbed her stiffening neck. The Guerrans seemed to be thriving outside the protective arms of the Union, and frankly, it baffled her.

  She tried resting her head on her knees. She couldn’t imagine being a small moon alone in the system when there were things like space pirates and Marauder clans. The universe was a dangerous place, and unity gave you better chances for survival. Micah twitched and she glanced over at him.

  He looked different in sleep than he did unconscious. She touched her wrist tranks. Tranking him on the ship so frequently now seemed so—reactionary. And kind of telling, given her own state at the time.

  Perhaps he looked different because he wasn’t hanging by the wrists this time. Instead, he sprawled out on the pillows, with the soft blankets piled around him, and taking up too much space. He’d have fallen right off the narrow bunk in her dormitory back on Prime.

  She rubbed her face. Not that he’d ever be in those quarters. Or in that bunk, either. “Aughh,” she whispered, raking her hands through her hair. These thoughts! When did she stop thinking of him as a bounty and start thinking of him as anything besides a dangerous criminal? When did she start thinking of him as a man?

  ***

  Episode 8: Heart of Betrayal

  Suspicions

  Vakess stood in the transpariglas-domed rotunda of Parliament Hall and gazed up at the evening sky of the Capitol. The sun hung low sending ruddy rays in between the stratoscrapers below, and the winking lights of the traffic grid and satellite networks were coming into prominence in the lavender sky. The patterns of traffic moved along the X, Y, and Z axes with all the precision that finely-honed programming could give them. Provided the drivers of the transportation craft ceded their navigation controls to the grid, the traffic operated in a seamless ballet of movement and order.

  A single craft peeled away from the moving lines of glittering lights along the horizontal plane, spiraling down outside the legal intersection of horizontal and
vertical traffic. Before it could attempt to merge with the vertical traffic, a foursome of security drones intercepted it and deployed an energy net that immobilized the impatient driver’s craft. With the immobilized craft in tow, the drones moved to a checkpoint where a larger traffic network transport waited to swallow it up in a cavernous holding area. The craft would be impounded and its driver processed through the on-board traffic justice system.

  Vakess didn’t so much watch the traffic pattern as the larger pattern in his mind as he addressed the parliamentary body assembled there. “Our Jewel.” He gestured to the setting sun. “She rests in a setting of our making. A delicate web of security and infrastructure carefully woven to support her and display the facets of her glory.” The holographic presentation behind him shifted into illustrations triggered by his words and gestures. “Our web relies upon precisely-timed movement and carefully managed coordination.”

  The Director of Special Affairs, Vox Unificus, as he’d named himself upon his own reconstruction after the attacks, stepped up beside the Prime Minister. “When that web is out of balance,” he said, gesturing to the display, which shifted into the red, along with a minor key shift in its musical score. “The setting betrays its purpose. The web loses its cohesion.”

  Vakess took his turn again. “The Jewel comes loose from its moorings. Becomes lost.”

  The Director continued for him. “Damaged. Destroyed.” The graphic hinted at the disaster of an unmoored Jewel. “That is why, when the net is weak, we must eliminate the damage and remove the corrosion.”

  Vakess shifted the topic from the metaphorical to the specific. “The focus of our society must remain on our unified efforts to ensure that the sanctity of our star system is inviolate. With that in mind, the adherents of the New Morality have stepped forward to assist the government in eliminating the corrosion in the middle orbits. With the assistance of the former Noble Houses who have embraced the future along with our unified vision, we have established local outposts in the middle orbits, and are extending all the way to the frontier. These outposts will act as vigilance centers to eliminate local weaknesses in the web of unity.”