Criselda I, Criselda, Eriuman Republic
Criselda was only the secondary system in the Dejulii portfolio. No one had bothered to give the one livable world a unique name. Everyone called it Criselda, rarely bothering with the “I” that should come after the name. The equatorial band barely supported human crops, forcing the natives to depend upon imports. The Criseldans were more fertile than their land. They turned trading into big business. Criselda housed the Republic’s supply depots, equipping every ship in the Erium Navy. Security around the city-sized depots was backed up by the might of the military cruisers and destroyers constantly overhead. No one in their right minds would consider breaking in to the depots.
Which was why Bellona and her people were busy doing just that.
Khalil, Sang and Bellona crouched in deep moon-shadows cast by the nearest building to the depot perimeter, a good twenty-five meters away from the fence. The night was dark, the moon a sliver and the shadows and pockets obscure. The depot, though, was ablaze with lights.
“This is complete madness,” Khalil said as they watched guards armed with ghostmakers cross-examine a civilian at the single, highly secure gate of the primary Criselda supply depot.
“I heard you the first time.” Bellona worked to keep her voice even.
Sang lowered the trinoculars. “Laser nets across every open space, with barely half-a-meter between each strand. If we step into them without the tags the guards have implanted, we’ll be detected.” He looked at her. “There are easier targets than this.”
“None of the others have the stash of ghostmakers Criselda does,” Bellona replied. “And that is the last time I will say it. Clear?”
No one replied. Khalil merely nodded.
Bellona looked over her shoulder. The long alley they had crept through to reach this point was now empty, with only fused dirt and tendrils of early morning fog wreathing around the base of the buildings. Even the air she breathed tasted damp and lifeless. Nothing grew here without constant encouragement.
“Are the others in place?” Bellona asked.
Sang paused, his gaze focusing inward as he discussed everyone’s status with Connie, the private yacht. Connie hung in the outer atmosphere overhead, coordinating communications.
Khalil wouldn’t look Bellona in the eye. He kept his back to the corner and peered around it, even though Sang had the trinoculars.
“This was your idea,” Bellona reminded Khalil.
“I said you needed a coup, something to make the free worlds take notice. Breaking into Criselda is grander than what I had in mind.” He glanced at her and away. “We’re here now.”
“Your fatalist streak is showing,” Sang said, his tone chiding.
“Says the android, the ultimate in fatalism,” Khalil replied.
“The others?” Bellona asked Sang.
He nodded, his pale, freckled face grave. “Hayes says the door he was expecting is not there.”
Khalil frowned. “It was on the blueprints.”
“It’s not there now,” Sang replied. “The blueprints are wrong. Hayes says no door is not a problem.”
“Is he going to bust his way through the wall?” Khalil asked, the frown still in place. “This is supposed to be soft-shoe.”
“Connie wasn’t certain. She didn’t understand what Hayes said he would do. She said something about ‘peeling’.”
Bellona looked at the walls of the structure on the other side of the perimeter. They were made of pre-fabricated panels of steel sheets sandwiching a layer of insulation, bolted to plasticrete stub walls. Someone had added a lackluster color to the steel a long time ago. The average human would not be able to broach the seams with their bare fingers. Hayes was not average.
“If he says he can get in, leave him to do it,” Bellona said.
Neither Sang nor Khalil spoke. The silence was telling. They didn’t agree with her. They had not agreed at any point in the operation, yet they were cooperating anyway. It was an isolating sensation, one she didn’t like. She would have to get used to it, she realized.
Since the news of Xenia’s defection from the Karassian Homogeny to take up the Free Worlds cause, Bellona had resisted the epithets heaped upon the Karassian puppet she had once been. Traitor, the Karassians called her, while her native Eriuman Republicans decried her utter lack of character. The Free Worlds were confused by her. All of them were convinced she was crazy.
Perhaps she had absorbed some of those beliefs—especially the last one—and that was now why she was trying to break into the most secure armaments depot in the known worlds.
“What’s happening at the gate?” she asked.
“It looks like they’re taking the woman into the barracks,” Sang said. He lowered the trinoculars. “For questioning, I presume. Perhaps we should take advantage of their distraction? There are nearly a dozen of them escorting her.”
“We stick to the plan,” Bellona said as firmly as she could, hiding her reaction to the idea of being surrounded by guards and being forced to go anywhere. That had been her life for far too long. She spared a moment to pity the woman.
* * * * *
The woman was petite and might have been beautiful, Ravi Dejulian decided, if her face was clear of fear and her eyes not red from crying. She stumbled along the fused earth footpath, sniveling and looking around fearfully at her escort.
He didn’t let down his guard, even though the others had decided that she was as helpless and intriguing as she appeared. Kerran, she said her name was. She was looking for the man who had told her he would come back for her. He was a Dejulian who she had met on Kalay. He’d told her he worked here and when she had discovered her pregnancy, she had come to find him…
It might even be true, Ravi decided. She was curvaceous and very pleasing to the eye. Eriuman, of course. Ravi suspected she was classless, without a clan to claim as her own. Perhaps she was a forgotten by-blow of some clansman’s dalliance, or she came from a family so poor in antecedents no clan wanted them. That would make her even more eager to snare a genuine Dejulii…if she was truthful about the man who had professed he loved her.
Ravi’s supervisor, Corvi, had clearly decided the distraught woman was lying, his thick lips curling up into a disdainful sneer as he examined her from head to toe tip. So many recruits rotated through the depot; the disgraced, the untried, the injured and recovering. This woman’s man may have come and gone in the time it had taken her to learn of her pregnancy and find passage here. There were not many civilian ships travelling to Criselda.
As the woman sniffed and hiccupped and wiped at her wet cheeks, Corvi pushed at her shoulder, encouraging her to move a little faster. She threw her raised hand out for balance, unconsciously gripping the nearest support, Gregory, who had been walking a little too close. Gregory was tall enough that the view inside the woman’s dress would be interesting from his angle.
As Gregory supported her while she found her footing once more, he ran his hands over her. Ravi hid his own grimace. He knew what was to come.
They passed into the barracks. The deployment station was at the front, living quarters behind, while the passage into the depot itself was attached to the back. The rain on Criselda was mildly acidic, which was why nothing grew here and why the passage was roofed and sealed.
The deployment station was also used as a clerical office for the administration of the guard roster. On rare occasions when interrogation was needed, the empty office at the end of the short row was used.
Corvi marched the woman into the office. She spun to look behind her when the door lock activated with a quiet snick of the bolts, but couldn’t see beyond the men crowding in behind her, pushing up close.
Ravi moved into the corner. He was in no hurry and someone had to listen for the approach of other guards, who might interfere and spoil the fun.
Corvi faced the woman and slid his hand down to the fastenings of his pants. “Hold her,” he said shortly.
The woman gave a little cry, trying to back away from him. She rammed into the wall of men, who gripped her arms. She struggled. When her feet slid out from under her, she dangled from their hands, writhing.
Ravi knew it didn’t matter what she did. It wouldn’t stop them.
Corvi closed in, feral delight on his thick features, as the men lifted her and stripped her clothing away. One clamped a hand over her mouth, holding in the screams. Her struggles intensified. She got one hand free and beat and scratched at whatever she could reach.
“Luscious…” one of them said, his voice hoarse, as her curves were revealed.
“Hold her still,” Corvi demanded. He gripped her hips and forced himself into her, grunting at the pleasure of it. Then he rode her, in hard, grinding jerks.
The woman grew still, defeated, letting him do what he wanted. She stopped screaming. Her gaze grew steady, watching Corvi’s red face as he took her.
Gregory, who was as skinny as he was tall, coughed and thumped his chest to clear it. He didn’t like being indoors. His lungs were as weak as the rest of him. His eyes glowed as he held the woman’s knee and the high boot to one side and watched the action.
Corvi’s motions accelerated and his grip tightened.
The guard’s hand fell away from the woman’s mouth, for he was too interested in watching. She didn’t try to scream again. Her gaze remained on Corvi. “You can do better than that, surely?” Her tone was dry.
Corvi jerked his head up to look at her face for the first time. It was a quick glance. He looked back down at her body and what he was doing to her. He was in the deep end, committed to finishing this. Lust had control.
The woman sighed and arched, inviting him deeper. “Yes. Mmm.”
Ravi’s mouth fell open. It looked almost as though she was taking Corvi. There was no reluctance in her face, or resistance in her body.
One of the others holding her—one of the new ones whom Ravi didn’t know yet—coughed as well. It was the same booming, wheezing hack that Gregory had made. The man gripped his chest, the deep gouge on the back of his hand from the woman’s nails oozing blood. He tried to clear his throat.
Azat, who really liked these “sessions”, sank to his knees with a tired sigh, letting her go. His head hung as he breathed in shallow wheezes.
Corvi didn’t seem to notice. Neither did the woman. She was riding him now, wriggling with pleasure. Her eyes were nearly closed and she was making little panting, mewling sounds.
Gregory let go of her knee as a series of back-bending coughs exploded from him. He propped himself on his knees, whooping and panting.
The woman merely wrapped her boot around Corvi’s hips, encouraging him.
Corvi climaxed with a grunt. As he came, so did she, with a hitch of her breath and a smile. “For your pleasure,” she said, staring at Corvi.
He stiffened, his eyes snapping open, wider than seemed possible. His body froze. The red in his face deepened and tremors ran through him.
“Sir?” Ravi whispered.
The other six were all coughing or breathing hard. They had lost interest in the woman or anything other than their next breath. They let her go. The woman merely propped herself up with one hand and unwound her leg from around Corvi, who stood in frozen shock, still.
Her movements dislodged him from her body. His member emerged bloody and…bitten.
The woman rose to her feet. She was naked except for the tall boots yet Ravi barely noticed her curves. A long lock of wavy hair hung over her face and might have seemed gamine, except for the hard look in her eyes and the sharp line of her jaw. She lifted her chin to look down at him.
Ravi swallowed.
“Give me your pass,” she said.
“My…my pass?” The only pass he could think of was the chip they had implanted under his collar bone when he had started here. It let them move about the compound without tripping off the always-on security grid.
The woman smiled. It was a warm, inviting expression that made him shudder. She reached for the collar of his tunic and pulled it open, revealing the flesh of his upper chest and shoulder. Her fingertips slid over the skin beneath his collarbone. His heart thudded. Terror rippled through him.
“This pass,” she cooed.
Her fingernail dug into his flesh and tore a channel through it.
* * * * *
Sang spun on his heel, the trinoculars dropping. “The net just went down,” he said sharply.
“Tell the others,” Bellona said.
Khalil leaned back against the wall and let out a heavy breath. “Hero did it.”
“Just as she said she would,” Bellona reminded him, for Hero’s role in the affair had been one of his greatest objections. “The others will all come through, too.”
Khalil straightened and checked his aging ghostmaker one more time. “Time for us to do the same.”
Bellona looked at Sang. He nodded.
“Go,” she said.
Sang’s gaze grew unfocused as he told Connie to pass the go command along.
The three of them sprinted for the small, man-sized door in the side of the big, rambling building. There was a knee-high fence marking the perimeter, that carried signs every ten meters declaring the lethalness of the security layers beyond. They hurdled the sharp edges of the fence and kept going.
Shouts and the soft thud of running boots sounded from the official gate, a hundred meters away. Bellona risked a glance over her shoulder and saw many of the guards heading for the barracks building at a run. They were confident the net would alert them if anyone penetrated the perimeter and didn’t bother to look around. The fuss inside the barracks was taking all their attention.
She ran.
Sang slapped his palm against the doorplate. “Connie!” he said sharply.
The door clicked to unlocked. Khalil shouldered his way inside and Bellona and Sang followed.
It was not dark inside. Artificial sunlight was diverted and diffused across the hectares of open area. The light was needed, for there were small mountains everywhere, in regimented rows. The mountains were made of stacks of crates—metal, plasteel, carbon-compressed and good old-fashioned wood pulp. Each mountain was made of identical containers. No mountain resembled any other.
“Where?” Bellona said.
Sang hesitated, then pointed toward the middle. “Row thirty-nine, Section gamma-epsilon.”
“Does Hayes have the truck yet?” Bellona asked as they ran again, heading for the nearest cross-corridor.
“Working on it,” Sang called out.
* * * * *
Peeling back the prefabricated section of the wall had been no challenge at all. Once Hayes had burrowed through the hole he’d made and stood inside the depot, he relaxed. Security measures were less stringent inside, Sang had assured everyone.
It turned out that relaxing was a mistake.
He oriented himself. He was at the back of the building, where the forgotten and abandoned supplies sat gathering dust. Well, not much dust, for the air scrubbers were efficient. Yet, despite the bright daylight, the lack of dust and the ordered arrangement of the mounds of containers, an air of neglect hung over the area. While there was no direct evidence, it felt to him as if people rarely came back here.
Hayes recalled Bellona’s careful instructions and the blueprint she had blown up large on a screen taking up most of the sidewall of the Alyard’s bridge. The bay where the trucks were kept was to his right.
He craned his head to peer over the tops of the rows and could see a walled off section against the far side. That would be the bay.
Hayes didn’t run toward it. He had long legs and if he walked fast enough, it covered ground almost as quickly. As he went, he checked off Bellona’s instructions in his mind. It was important that nothing went wrong, this first time working on his own without a handler to give constant directions. Xenia—Bellona—would lose trust in him if he messed up.
Not that he could remember a handler and being directed. Xenia, though, assured him he had worked that way—a dog on a long leash. Bellona, he corrected himself. She was no longer Xenia, the graceful dancer he had known in Ledan. But then, she hadn’t been a real dancer, any more than he had been a real gardener. Bellona had slipped her leash, just as Hayes had. Just as they all had.
His instructions were detailed yet missed a vital point. They didn’t warn him the corridor he was striding down had a break in it, where another corridor intersected. He stepped out into the middle of the intersection before he realized it was there. He was exposed.
Two Eriumans were leading an empty truck down the length of the cross-corridor. They were three rows away. The one with the truck’s control panel in his hand dropped his mouth open in surprise.
The other was a faster thinker and his hands were free, too. He reached for the one-handed ghostmaker on his hip, brought it up and fired as Hayes reached the other side of the wide intersection.
The bolt skimmed past the small of Hayes’ back. He felt the heat of it sizzle through his shirt.
No alarms, Bellona had insisted. No surprises, no full scale security responses. In and out, very quietly. We don’t have the numbers to engage.
For a second, Hayes dithered. If he went after the two guards, then he would be delaying the others, for they were waiting on him to bring a truck to the location of the stash.
Preventing the guards from raising the alarm seemed like the higher priority, though. He could bring the truck afterward, although he worried that the delay may cause further problems.
He realized he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. If he stayed here waiting, then he would disappoint Bellona in yet another way, so he pushed himself back around the corner into the wide cross-corridor and ran at the guards, fending off the ghostmaker bolts with his hands.
The two guards backed up a step, looking almost comically surprised. Postings to the Criselda depots were considered the soft assignments. Inside the warehouse itself, the guards were even more relaxed. Now they were slow to react.
Their shoddy reactions gave Hayes the time he needed to skirt the low truck, grab them both by the neck and knock their heads together. They slithered to the ground.
Hayes bent and picked up the small ghostmaker, pleased, for now he had a gun. It would offset his delay. Bellona had given the only two guns they had to Khalil and Thecla, leaving everyone else to use their preferred weapons or bare hands. That had stressed Retha more than usual, because he was smaller and weaker than all of them and guns were his first choice. Bellona had not given him a ghostmaker because the only two weapons they had found on the Alyard, after the Karassians had sabotaged the weapons store, had been two old, large guns that had been tossed in a bin.
Thecla had decided the guns were for spare parts, which was unlikely, for the Karassians did not preserve or recycle anything. Thecla, though, had fixed the guns. She was useful that way. Both of them were two-handed weapons, which Retha didn’t use, so Thecla had got one and Bellona’s Khalil, the other.
Hayes tried to check the weapon’s charge, but his left hand didn’t move. It twitched by his side, while he could feel something grinding in his upper arm. The external tendon whined, as if it was overloaded.
Hayes looked down at his hand where it hung uselessly. It was a strange sensation, to lift his hand and not have it obey.
Peeling back the outer layer of the wall must have damaged the hand in some way. Thecla would be able to diagnose the problem, later. For now, Bellona was waiting on him and he had delayed long enough. He could use the two-handed gun just fine in his right hand.
He put the gun on the top of the truck’s casing and punched the green button on the controls the guard had been kind enough to leave sitting on the top, too.
The truck floated forward and Hayes nudged it toward the intersection with his knees.
A small delay, a little issue. Nothing critical. Bellona would still approve.
* * * * *
Retha stood back while Vang dealt with the guard they had come across on the darker perimeter of the warehouse. He was bothered by the lack of weapons. With a ghostmaker, Retha could have taken out the guard from the last corner they had turned, even the heavier ghostmaker they had found on the ship.
Vang, though, didn’t need weapons. He preferred using his bare hands, as he was now. His pale brown eyes under the thatch of white-blond hair were dreamy and peaceful as he throttled the guard.
Not for the first time, Retha marveled at the strength of Vang’s hands. Vang wasn’t much taller than Retha. Which meant he was short, too. His shoulders and arms, though, were astonishingly powerful.
Retha was glad that, for reasons he still didn’t understand, Vang chose not to use that strength against him. With Retha, Vang was extraordinarily kind and gentle.
Which was why Vang was taking out the guard right now. He had pushed Retha back out of the way and leapt on the taller man with a grunt of pleasure.
The guard finally dropped and Vang picked up the ghostmaker and turned it over, examining it. He held it out to Retha. “Big guns for big idiots. It works, though. Want it?” His eyes were peace-filled and calm. That wouldn’t last long.
“It’s better than nothing,” Retha admitted, taking the ghostmaker. “Noisy, though.”
“Use it as a club, then. Save your hands.” Vang grinned and patted his cheek. “C’mon, we’re running behind. Where are we?” He looked around.
The criss-crossing aisles between the stacks of equipment were too similar to each other and disorienting because of it. Retha had used the big, square cargo bay in the roof to orient himself, instead. “That way,” he said, pointing down the wider corridor.
“Maybe we’ll find a guard with a couple of one-handers for you,” Vang said as they hurried down the corridor.
Retha snorted. “These guards are the dregs and outcasts of the Eriuman navy. The bigger the gun, the better.”
“They’re not really discriminating, are they?” Vang remarked, with a grin, for that was a word he had only recently explained to Retha. Now he used it all the time, as if it was a private joke between them. Which it was, really. Retha didn’t care about the others rolling their eyes when they heard it, especially Thecla, who didn’t have much time for anything, which was odd, because she was—had been—Karassian once, just as Vang had been.
* * * * *
The ghostmaker bolt took Thecla square in the chest, knocking her onto her back. She landed heavily, the ghostmaker tumbling out of her hand to slither across the floor.
Fontana bent and picked it up, then fired at the two guards hiding behind a squared-off pile of upper-atmosphere mines. The gun fizzed and sparked. No bolts.
“Shit,” he breathed and tossed it away.
Aideen, hunched next to him behind their mound, drew in a ragged breath. “We’re pinned down, aren’t we?” Her grip on the staff tightened, turning her fine knuckles whiter than they normally were.
“Not if we don’t let them raise the alert,” Fontana assured her. He curled his gloved hands into fists and moved past her, toward the other corridor, breaking into a fast sprint. Around the corner, down to the nearest break in the hillocks, then through the tiny squeeze, back to this corridor.
He came up behind the two guards, who were busy watching Thecla where she lay. Probably, they were watching to make sure she didn’t get back up. As if anyone got up after taking a ghostmaker bolt to the center of the chest.
Idiots.
He tapped the nearest one on the shoulder. The man turned, a comic look of surprise on his face.
Fontana punched him, not holding back anything. The guard dropped with a satisfying thud.
The front man was bringing his ghostmaker around. No problems. Fontana got his fist through the closing space between the ghostmaker and the man’s jaw.
The second guard folded up over the top of the first.
Fontana picked up the two ghostmakers. They were this year’s model, of course. Thecla would know better which particular model they were, because that was Thecla’s thing. They just looked new and shiny to Fontana.
“As long as they work,” he muttered to himself and stepped back into the corridor they had been travelling down before being interrupted. He bent over Thecla and rested one of the ghostmakers against his lower leg.
Thecla groaned. “Son of a bitch…” she muttered and pressed her hand to the scorched section of her shirt and the bloody patch of flesh beneath. “That hurts.”
“You’re lucky. It would have killed anyone else,” Fontana pointed out.
Aideen hurried to them. “We’re late,” she hissed anxiously. Her face was paler than usual and her gaze skittered about ceaselessly.
“Deep breath,” Fontana told her.
“They had time to warn someone,” she added. “Maybe it was a silent alarm. Maybe the rest of the guards are on their way here.”
Fontana held his hand out to Thecla. “Up and at ’em,” he told her. Then, to Aideen. “There’s no alarm. The gutless pair were watching Thecla, worried she might come back and club them for shooting her.”
Thecla gripped his wrist and climbed to her feet, moving slowly.
“Are you okay?” Aideen asked her, speaking quickly. “Are you too hurt to go on?”
Thecla pulled together the front of the ruined shirt. “I’m fine,” she said shortly.
When Aideen bit her lip, Thecla relented a little. “They hit me directly over the chest plate. Burnt skin is the worst of it.” She tested her arms, the external tendons stretching and retracting smoothly. “See?”
Aideen and Thecla had both been Karassians, once, yet apart from the blonde hair and brown eyes they shared, they had very little else in common. Aideen was as tall as Fontana and slender enough to be called bony. Thecla was six inches shorter, ten kilos heavier and all of it was muscle. And tattoos. And enhancements.
Fontana picked up the ghostmaker leaning against his calf and held it out to Thecla. “Aideen, you keep your staff. You’re better with it.”
Aideen nodded.
Thecla patted the firewheels strapped to her belt. “I’m better with these.”
“Not if you’re more than a meter away,” Fontana told her.
She scowled and took the gun.
Fontana looked up at the roof, where the dark rectangle that marked the cargo bay was visible. “We’re nearly there. I want to be first. Come on.”