Carnelians (11 page)

“STOP!” Red’s shout registered on Aliana. He was yanking on her arm.

Disoriented, Aliana released the woman, who crumpled to the ground. As Aliana’s head cleared, she realized she
had
been fighting two people. The man lay nearby, one of his arms bent at an odd angle. Alarms were blaring and people had gathered around, watching avidly.

“Gods,” Aliana rasped. What had she done? The man and woman were breathing; in her heightened state, she felt their minds like a blast of heat. They were unconscious but alive.

“We dead,” Red told her.

“Like hell!” She grabbed his arm and took off. Red grunted, running clumsily, but he kept up. They had to hide! If Admiral Muze’s people caught them, that would be it. They’d kill Red, probably painfully, for having the audacity to want to live, and gods only knew what they’d do to her.

People backed away as she and Red ran, watching with the ugly fascination of a crowd that thinks it’s about to witness an execution. No one chased her. Why would they? They had no stake in this and they knew the rules. Mind your business. Keep your head down. She would have done the same.

Aliana ducked into an alley that was so narrow, she and Red had to go single file, their shoulders scraping against the ragged plasti-bricks on either side. At least the wall did nothing to hinder them. The cheap bricks just stayed in place like inanimate objects. Well, yeah, they
were
inanimate objects. She couldn’t imagine living in a place where all objects were this dumb, but right now it suited her just fine.

She and Red squeezed through a maze of passages. She had already explored the old city, obsessively mapping its hidden routes in case her stepfather Caul came after her and she needed to lose herself. She could leave home, learn to fight, learn to survive, but she could never get Caul out of her mind, the specter of his fists hitting, hitting,
hitting.
He lurked there like a trap waiting to spring every time she started to think that maybe, just maybe, she would be okay.

Eventually, when her thundering pulse calmed, Aliana slowed to a stop. Red collapsed against the wall. He was breathing so hard, guilt stabbed through Aliana. She was an asshole. To stop Admiral Muze’s people from grabbing him, she nearly killed him herself. Real swift.

“I fine,” Red said between breaths. “Not even close to dead.”

Aliana slumped against the wall, facing the bricks, her palms against their rough surface. “How can you tell what I think so easily?”

“You same as me. More than me.”

“More
what?
”

“Don’t know,” he muttered. “My chest hurts.”

“You ever run before?” she asked. That freaking admiral hadn’t let him do anything.

He shook his head. “Never.”

“Give it a moment. You’ll feel better.”

They rested there, listening to the slums. People were arguing somewhere, their voices faint and quarrelsome. The air smelled like brine and wet trash.

“We’re near the waterfront,” Aliana said.

“Lake?”

“No, the ocean docks.” She turned and leaned her back against the wall, staring at the opposite wall. “This city is a port for sea ships. You know what those are?”

“They fly above the water?”

“Not above. In it.”

“In? Why?”

“Hell if I know.” She pushed away from the wall. “You doing better?”

Red stood up straighter. “Better. Yes.” Then he smiled.

Aliana froze. It was as if a light had gone on. Even dressed in her worn out shirt and trousers, he was beautiful. Those blue eyes, that mop of brown hair, the perfect features. When he smiled, he was radiant. Yeah, he was a provider all right, designed, bred, and trained to please, to give you whatever you desired, however you wanted it, without resisting, rebelling, or even thinking. Except wonder of all wonders, he had broken his conditioning and run away. Amazing, how the instinct for self-preservation could defy centuries of breeding for subservient, helpless slavery.

“Why you stare at me?” he asked.

She grinned. “Cause you’re just so ugly I can’t get over it.”

He winced as if she had struck him. “My sorry.”

“Red, I was joking! You’re gorgeous.”

“Not. Admiral threw me away. Am hideous.”

“He’s an idiot.” Gods, she was going to get herself killed if she kept this up, insulting Aristos and pounding powerful people. “Did he, um, I mean, did he make you . . .” She was too embarrassed to go any further.

“He not want me for that,” Red said. “Only to provide. Has pretty girl providers for sex.”

“Maybe that’s why he threw you away,” Aliana said. “Because you aren’t a girl.” She drew him away from the wall. “We have to get out of the city. I think we should hide on a boat.”

“Not go back to your hexagon?”

“Not a chance,” she said. “I don’t know if any holocams caught that fight. Most are broken in this part of town. But Red, I beat the cold crap out of those two. And they know what I look like.” She shook her head. “We got to run, sweet stuff, far and fast, before they find us.”

He didn’t look convinced. “How?”

Aliana grimaced. “I wish I knew.”

“We’re losing her pulse,” Doctor Sashia shouted. She ran with med techs and Jagernauts down a metal corridor toward an air-speed tube, deep within the Orbiter’s hull. The air stretcher floated next to her, protecting its priceless cargo in a cocoon that blocked out physical, audio, visual, tactile, and neurological stresses. The nodes in Sashia’s spine linked to the stretcher’s EI brain, letting her analyze her patient even as they ran.

The door of the air tube snapped open as they arrived. It took only seconds for Sashia, the techs, and the guards to cram into the car there. As it shot off toward the hospital, Sashia bent over the stretcher and administered a dose of psi-active drugs to her patient. Her hands were clammy.

Her patient—the Ruby Pharaoh—was dying.

“He’s lost too much blood!” Doctor Blueson called to his medical team. “Bring me more plasma, nanomed serum five-oh-nine.”

Monitors blazed while slave-bots and Razers loomed around Blueson. The emperor lay collapsed on his back, the gaping wounds in his torso pumping blood as the medics desperately worked. Blood soaked Blueson’s hands, Jaibriol’s shredded clothes, the debris-strewn floor, everything in the ruins of the hall. The empress was in no better condition, and another team was working just as urgently to save her life.

“Gods almighty,” a medic in the other group choked. “She’s
pregnant!
”

“Stabilize her!” Blueson shouted. He felt as if he were on an out of control racer rocketing off a cliff. He was only a lieutenant, but he had been the closest on hand when the explosion shook the palace. Now he was responsible for the lives of the emperor and empress, and gods help him, apparently for the long-awaited heir to the Carnelian Throne as well.

A woman in the uniform of an ESComm colonel strode into the chaos. The badge on her uniform said
Lyra Qoxdaughter.
Everyone but the medics jumped to attention. Blueson shot her a harried glance but otherwise kept working on the emperor. So much
blood
and he couldn’t stop it, not even with adherents and injected meds.

Qoxdaughter knelt next to him. Short yellow hair dusted with grey fell around her face as she helped Blueson close one of the wounds in Jaibriol’s torso. She spoke crisply. “Download.”

The node in Blueson’s spine hurtled data at Qoxdaughter’s spinal node. As the emperor’s personal physician, she had a far greater rank than Blueson even beyond her military status. She could slave his node to hers and take what she needed. Of course she was privileged. She was the half-Aristo daughter of the emperor’s grandfather.

“Your choice of nanomed series is odd,” she said as they worked. “I’ve never seen that combination before.”

Blueson froze, holding an air syringe he had been about to use on Jaibriol. If he had harmed the emperor with his inexperience, he would face imprisonment, maybe execution. He kept his voice calm. “I thought that working together, that combination would rebuild his tissues faster.”

Qoxdaughter nodded as she tended a gash in Jaibriol’s side. “It’s working. You may have saved his life.”

Blueson exhaled and continued with his injection. “Thank the gods,” he said in a low voice, as much for his own life as for Emperor Qox.

“I doubt the gods had much to do with this,” Qoxdaughter muttered.

Blueson didn’t think so, either, unless they had decided to destroy Eube by killing the entire royal family in one blow.

“We have to reach him!” Admiral Chad Barzun spoke urgently into the comm on his mech-tech gauntlet. He was standing on the walkway that circled the War Room high above the amphitheatre. The Command Chair hung in the center of the circle, accessible by four catwalks that led to it like spokes. Accessible, that was, until moments ago. In an unprecedented and supposedly impossible event, the independent systems for all four catwalks had simultaneously failed, the locks holding them in place had released, and they had plummeted into the amphitheatre. It had happened in the same instant that a mental earthquake jolted every telop below and ripped their commander, the Imperator, out of the War Room mesh.

“We can’t release any of the entry hatches,” a woman said on his comm, Major Qahot, the chief of security on the Orbiter. “The War Room is locked tight. I’ve never seen it like this when we weren’t under attack.”

“Whatever happened affected Imperator Skolia,” Chad said. Kelric was slumped in the Command Chair, unresponsive, his eyes closed. Chad couldn’t see him breathing. Was he alive? Dead? No monitors here were working. The consoles were off-mesh, the robot arms were frozen, and the telops were out of their VR suits, all staring up at the holodome. The only light came from the nebulae holos glowing beneath the dome, which were on the emergency generator that kept up life support in the War Room in case of a lockdown during war time.

Two Jagernauts were climbing a metal ladder embedded in the opposite wall, a woman and a man, their black uniforms stark against the silver-white surface. Chad had just finished that same climb on this side of the holodome. He had been lucky; if he hadn’t come to the amphitheatre to check the new mesh nodes, he would be locked out of the War Room along with everyone else on his staff. The ladders were a last resort, and right now their safety meshes were as nonfunctional as everything else here, which meant if the Jagernauts lost their grip, nothing would stop their fall.

Chad switched channels on his comm and spoke to the Jagernauts. “Secondary Panquai, how are the rungs?”

The woman on the ladder spoke into the comm on her gauntlet. “Holding fine, Admiral.” She had a cable gun in one hand, and it clanged against the rungs as she climbed.

The man coming up after her was Sterven Lamong, a Jagernaut with three armbands around each of his biceps, the sign of a Tertiary, the rank below Secondary. Dark and leanly muscled, he was a male version of Panquai. He had ripped a sheet of mesh composite off a console below and now carried it strapped to his back. It was their best try at a stretcher, given that the mobile units were either inaccessible in their inactive storage bins or outside the War Room.

“Admiral Barzun!” Major Qahot’s voice snapped out of his comm. “We’ve isolated the cause of the lockdown. Sir, it was Imperator Skolia! He did this with his own mind.”

Chad swore under his breath. It made a bizarre sort of sense: the
Imperator
was the only “system” with unlimited access to every node in the War Room. Chad’s gauntlet comm still worked because it was one of the few nodes off the grid. Kelric had set it up that way deliberately, so that his top commanders would have autonomous systems in case of an emergency.

“Any headway in breaking the lockdown?” Chad asked Qahot.

“We’re cutting the walls,” she said. “It’s slow going. They’re damn near impenetrable.”

“Do what you can.” He watched as Panquai clambered onto the walkway across from him. Lamong swung up next to her and they stood there, two towering mech-warriors in black leathers with silver mesh studs that glinted in the holographic starlight.

Panquai raised her gun. A cable rifle was an independent system, but Chad still tensed as she fired, afraid it would fail. He exhaled with relief as a thick cable shot past the Command Chair and clanged into the walkway only steps from him. As he grabbed it and secured the end around the rail, the smart cable stiffened, creating a bar across the dome.

Panquai and Lamong studied the cable and Kelric. Panquai grabbed the cable and lowered herself until she was hanging from it over the chasm of air, with the amphitheatre far below her. Using her biomech-reinforced strength, she swung hand-over-hand toward the Chair. Lamong followed, carrying their makeshift stretcher.

Kelric hadn’t moved. He looked like a part of his cyber-throne that had malfunctioned.

He looked dead.

IX: Awakening

IX
Awakening

“Bored,” Red said, his arms around Aliana’s waist, his shoulder wedged against hers.

“No kidding.” Aliana pushed farther back in the cargo hold, between the gnarled grey crates. She liked the dark down here and the rolling motion of the ship soothed her, but they had been hiding for hours.

She imagined a healing blanket spread over Red. She didn’t expect it to help, but his mood improved. She tilted her head against his, her forehead leaning on his temple and he shifted in her arms, his breath warm on her cheek.

“Aliana pretty,” he said.

“I’m big and ugly.”

“Pretty.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair.

Feeling shy, she shifted in his arms. He put his fingers against her chin and turned her face to him. His lips brushed hers. He paused, waiting, and she held her breath. He kissed her then, holding her face, stroking her cheek with his thumb. Blood rushed through Aliana and she kissed him back, her first time.

“I like.” Red murmured.

“Me too.”

His hand slid under her sweater. She tensed when she felt his palm on her stomach.

Red stilled his hand. “Not like?”

“If any Aristo found out I kissed you, they would put me in prison or something.” She was talking too fast. “I could never afford a provider.”