The Snare (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 4-6) Page 5

  Too bad these unlucky souls won their lotteries in the wrong season. She stared down at a pair of curious human children clinging to their parent’s hands. These children would be adults by the time the agricultural season changed. Adults with a full share of their parents’ debts appended to their own. Their own children, if they were permitted to have any, would be the first generation to begin to chip away at the generational debts. Every member of the family riding the skyhook today would be long dead before the family could neutralize the indenture tattoos branded to their wrists. Her eyes flicked upward. Even the nursling’s tiny hand, flailing at its mother’s breast, showed the mark.

  Indenture didn’t seem to dim the family’s excitement. An older child with the same mark stood against the divider that kept the first class safely insulated from the rabble, peering into the compartment with the unabashed curiosity of any creature her age. Steerage, where Xenna shared limited space with the other immigrants and indentures, was a narrow corridor around the inner ring of the large torus-shaped pod. The bulk of the torus was transparent steel arranged in wide steps offering panoramic vistas of the planet below.

  The first class of the skyhook pod was occupied by those with business or property on Cetares. Separated by a window panel with ventilation cut into the top third, the elegantly-dressed folk enjoyed more room, cushioned seats, and cafe tables rather than the hard benches on this side of the pod. The first-class mingled with one another among carelessly distributed food and drink. The corporate folk were interspersed with individuals wearing the green and gold insignia of the New Morality. Some gathered in groups for their ridiculous chants, others held court in conversation circles with property owners, commerce partners, and their other fellows.

  At least we don’t have to suffer their proselytizing.

  Although Xenna’s cloak hood was drawn up to prevent her mask from making her race obvious, a woman reading a datapadd with a corporate logo etched on the case glanced up and saw her. Her gaze shifted to Xenna’s left and her mouth tightened. Xenna followed the woman’s gaze and saw the indentured girl staring hard enough at the woman’s half-eaten abandoned confection that she would have burned a hole through the pane if she had even a hint of Micah’s talents.

  The woman wrinkled her nose and flicked a finger over the window, darkening the pane. Beside Xenna, the little girl sighed and an audible gurgle came somewhere from her midsection.

  Xenna turned away, her stomach churning with rage. She shifted her pack and pulled out a small container, popping the lid off. The scent of Tenraye blacks, dried to raisins, hit her nose. She pulled a glove off with her teeth and poured the raisins into her hand, squeezing them for a good thirty seconds to allow them to absorb her skin oils and enhance their flavor. She funneled them back into the box and offered it to the little girl. “On one condition.” Just out of reach of the grasping little hand. “You must share with your siblings.” She peered through her mask and met the girl’s eyes, as wide and innocent as a child’s ought to be. Reality would intrude soon enough. “Share them, and remember that joy is not a sin.”

  The child nodded and closed her fist around the tube. “‘nkyou,” she mumbled, and darted back to her mother. Xenna lifted her chin just slightly at the woman’s nod, then turned back to the now darkened panel. The identity she carried—that of a Hathori re-education specialist—afforded her privilege only a half-step up from freshly-immigrated indentures, and scorn a half-step down from the upstanding citizenry. She kept her glove off and acted very casual in rubbing the inside of her wrist and holding it up to the vent.

  The skyhook passed through the thickest part of the cloud cover and another passenger, wearing a weatherall cloak, took the space vacated by the little girl. Xenna was about to put her hand back inside her glove when the hooded sent’s arm shot out and fingers closed around her wrist.

  Her skin burned where male fingers touched the back of her hand. She snatched it away. A mark appeared on the back of her hand, a welt in the shape of a spider. A bead of blood welled up between the spider’s forelegs. The gravelly whisper was for her ears only. “The plucked thread has earned the notice of the spinner.” Xenna nodded once, and slipped the glove on over her stinging flesh.

  An hour later, she strode off the skyhook and spared not a look back, neither for the family, hurried in their efforts to keep their brood together for indenture check-in, nor for the segment of the first class cabin, whose members stumbled off the skyhook with disheveled hair and improperly-fastened clothing, or for the New Morality missionaries, whose chants echoed, loud and desperate, through the skyhook docking bay. She slipped, anonymous, into a throng of immigrants and side-stepped a squad of skyhook security desperately trying to restore order without offending the discretion of the currently very indiscreet first class.

  She twitched the hood down further, the data-stamp making her hand itch inside her glove. “Welcome to my web.”

  ***

  His first stay in the Hathori temple, Micah had wondered how anyone got any sleep. In the crystal-littered cave on Guerre, he couldn’t even say where dreaming ended and memory began. The temple’s living quarters were so open and the temple’s residents were so restless. Even though he’d grown used to it in the course of his service to them, this morning seemed unusually loud. Zara kept whispering something to him—something he almost understood, but whose meaning eluded his grasp. Ordinarily, he would have lifted his head and sought participation in whatever secrets she shared, but exhaustion won the battle with curiosity this round. He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her against him, burying his nose in her hair. “Shush, love. People are trying to sleep.”

  “Mmmf.” She wriggled against him, waking up southern parts, against which his worn-out brain protested. Too tired for that.

  Never too tired for that. It would be an insult to the goddess of your hosts.

  The voices whispered about the irony of his situation. He should care about the gossip, but he couldn’t muster the ire. When the monastery “released” him—kicked me out for being a political liability—he’d been sent back to his House, where the House Patriarch—currently his biological father—placed him on the auction block for alliance with other Houses. There, without a fleet or influence of his own, he hadn’t shown well in comparison to the other young men. His father was canny enough to hide his identity as a psypath, but ordered him to increase his value in other ways.

  One of the voices in his head shifted to his father’s calculated tones. “You are a child among men. You stink of the monastery and you reek of innocence. I will not make a weak alliance.” He remembered the man, whose impressive stature had nothing to do with his actual size, glaring up at him with narrowed eyes. “It’s going to take a Hathori to drill the virginity out of you.” His father’s guards had taken him right from the solarium of the strato-yacht that floated over the spires of the Capitol, tossed him into a flitter, and dumped him without ceremony on the front steps of the Hathori temple.

  The whispering swelled as his lips curved upwards. He had shown the old man. When the flitter returned after a fortnight, expecting him to be suitably sullied, he’d sent it back empty, with a note saying he’d entered the Hathori temple as a novitiate.

  The other novitiates and acolytes, all Hathori, didn’t know what to make of the human in their ranks. The high priestess, a keen woman of great intelligence well-hidden behind her physical charms who was aware of his situation, had agreed to his request with bemusement. She did so on the condition that, even if he did not share their religious beliefs, he would at least support their desire to maintain a degree of autonomy in the political realm. Given the inevitability of what eventually happened, her machinations were not without risk. Betrayer… The whispers coming from all around shifted into a minor key, punctuated by staccato hisses and dissonant cadences. He shook his head, feeling heavy pressure at the base of his skull.

  She reached behind her and rested one hand on his leg. Her touch drov
e the whispering back and closed off the places his mind did not wish to go. Not that—I never meant—

  She turned and her hands were there, cupping his face. Her warmth beneath his hands radiated through cloth, then nothing, the whispers drowned out by the rustle of fabric. Cool, dry air hit his skin where his own clothing had fallen away. There was a brittle, gritty quality to the air that didn’t feel right, but the brush of her lips giving way under his own chased the discordant note from his awareness. The odds were stacked against them, taboos broken in both of their castes, but things would work out. He kissed her with all the ardor in his outcast soul, leaning over her until she wrapped her legs around him and cradled him with her warmth and her presence, kissing him back with the same desperate hope and a passion that blazed like the Jewel itself.

  Treska was in that light and airy space again. Breezes fluttered whispersilk sheers suspended from the multi-storied ceiling, concealing and revealing the carved marble columns ornamented in semi-precious stones and rich metals. Behind them, she knew, were the ordinary conduits and duct work of a modern functioning building, but this place hid those things as well as it obfuscated her name.

  She wished to be alone, to think, but experience told her this was the closest she could find to solitude. Sheers separated her space from others along the promenade, but it was only the suggestion of privacy, rather than the actuality. It had never bothered her, until now, when she had something very serious, and very important to think about, and no place in which to do so alone.

  She shifted, and he was there, curling his body around hers like a protective shell. He was at once familiar and exciting, bubbling up something inside her, but that effervescence never came without a bitter aftertaste and the desperate craving to take his hand in hers and just—run.

  Instead, he pulled her close and his mouth moved over her skin. Shivers raced over her skin along the path his lips made to the point of her shoulder, and she turned so they were facing one another, her eyes drifting closed at the simple pleasures of touch that turned warmth to heat, and heat to a burn that made her crave.

  She knew this feeling, reckless and heady as it was, held danger, too. Something about the catch in her chest shouted, “Forbidden!” She wriggled her shoulders and the clothing that kept them apart fell away. He pressed her back down again and the cushions gave way to—to—

  It didn’t matter whether he lay her down in the luxuries of the bower, or the hard exposed surfaces of the most humble and primitive of lairs, as long as they were together. This place—this place of perfumes and silks was a prison, its cushions hiding insurmountable walls that closed her off from the rest of the world. The low curl in her belly wound tight as his lips left a moist trail down to her collarbone. Tiny pebbles at her back mixed flashes of pain with his touch, and the result was not diminished, but intensified. Give us the bare dirt of a desolate world, and the freedom to do as we please, and we own the universe.

  Free of the prying eyes and curious glances of others, Xenna removed the lumisteel mask from her face and flipped her hood back. She peered up at the massive stained doors before her. “Terrific. A refuse reclamation facility.”

  The pungent air was redolent with organic garbage. For all the varied worlds and life in the civilized and not-so-civilized worlds, the odor of garbage never changed. As an interdicted people, Hathori moving about in Union space had to be legally registered and assigned to a limited subset of positions that minimized public contact with their pheromone-based influence. Because New Morality forbid that a party should break out. Cetares might be an enviable place for settlers, but it was certainly no destination for anyone who wished for excitement. They wouldn’t know where to look or what to even look for.

  She didn’t know whether the Union favored Hathori for garbage collecting for the irony of putting scent-influential people into jobs that involved such rank odors…or because they can’t help but make it too easy for us to hide a spy network in places no one wants to go. She fitted a re-breather over the lower half of her face and followed the somewhat bizarre instructions on the data-stamp dug into her hand, which involved entering a code to open a palm scanner, but placing a lizard acquired in one of the shallow drainage lakes alongside the road on the sensor in place of her hand.

  In her time on the planet, thus far, she’d spoken to almost no one. The identity she carried was one of the most respectable that a Hathori could command, but the less she flashed it, the less risk that someone would challenge her, or insist that she appear for the identity’s actual purpose.

  At the thought, her underarms prickled. She shoved thoughts of the Farm and its “re-education specialists” behind her. She stared hot daggers at the dead lizard in her hand as the device made its tortuously slow scan of the creature’s body. The lizard’s body, squashed as it had been by a passing ground vehicle, still made a better view than the memories waiting on the backs of her eyelids.

  Don’t think about them.

  The massive doors released with an agonized ka-chunk, dragging open to reveal a slice of darkness cutting through the pale glare of the planet’s noonday sun. She stepped in, and wished she hadn’t, because the blackness was just like closing her eyes, and when she closed her eyes, she saw them. Hathori women, lined up on pallets, their skin sallow and graying shades of their ordinarily jeweled hues. Slender tubes going to and from their underarms, stealing an integral part of what made them Hathori in slow, steady drips of pheromone-rich fluid synthesized from their blood. In exchange for the denial of their identity, the betrayal of their people, they were allowed small freedoms, first around the Farm while re-education happened, then later, when they were placed in slightly better jobs than the rest of the exiles who hadn’t had the sense to flee Union space.

  Or those of us foolish enough to believe this was a battle that could be won through diplomacy.

  She chastised Micah for it, but she had been just as naive as he had, in the first days and weeks, believing her paramours, her worshipers from the Noble houses, would remember her before so enthusiastically embracing the New Morality’s proposals for reshaping the government. But when faced with the choice between pleasure and protection, the Nobles thought with their cowardice rather than their cocks.

  She redoubled her efforts and closed the memories away. They all had their tragedies, but the Web was no place to air them. She straightened her shoulders and strode into the malodorous gloom. The noise from the monstrous incinerators drowned out the subdued chiming coming from the data-stamp, but the sudden, crawly feeling alerted her to the stamp’s directional prompt and she bypassed the incinerators, heading towards an industrial-sized door at the far end of the giant room.

  Passing through the blast-furnace heat of the massive processors, she moved further into the dark, towards the chemical vats that broke down the components of garbage prior to incinerating that which was truly unrecoverable. The stink developed a chemical tang and she followed another prompt into a slightly cleaner, slightly brighter area and stopped when the stamp told her to.

  She faced a nondescript door between two banks of storage units and held up the hand with the tattoo.

  “Leave the lizard.”

  She stared down at her hand. “Ugh.” She dropped the carrion, unable to believe she’d kept hold of the thing through her journey.

  On a second thought, she found a food wrapper underneath the storage locker. Unsure of her own motivations in doing so, she wrapped the dead animal in the wrapper and tucked it back under the locker. It had lived and died insignificantly, but it still mattered.

  The door unsealed with a hiss and revealed an airlock. She entered the airlock and did what you do in an airlock—left the filth behind.

  The cloak and mask she hung on pegs provided, the pack, she stowed in the footlocker. The rest of her uncleanliness, she carried past the sonic booth that shook the grime from her skin, and—surprise luxury—a spray of warm water that completed the job, leaving her reborn, dewy-fresh as the
morning sigh of the goddess.

  At least, on the surface.

  Assumptions Challenged

  Her heart slammed against her chest with the onrushing sensations piling on top of one another. Desire mingled with a formless, impending dread, of knowing something was wrong, and there would be consequences. Consequences she needed to heed. She became aware of someone else. Someone else’s heat, someone else’s skin sliding over hers, his body molding hers into spaces hard and soft. Doors in her heart rattled on their jambs with the force of it.

  Her hands plunged into his silky hair, pushing him down to the spot between her breasts. His lips burned hot against her sternum. Light and sensation welled in her, forcing its way up the column of her throat and out in an incoherent moan that echoed through a green crystal tunnel, and her eyes snapped open to see not the silken bower draperies, but a cold stone cavern, and a golden-haired mindsnake cradled to her breast.

  The warm rush of affection shocked her out of her—dream? Hallucination? “Aah!”

  “Zara,” he murmured.

  That name again! She came back to herself with an internal thump. Her forehead stung in anticipation of the impending migraine. How could she have let herself get so close to the edge? “Get off me, mindsnake. I’m not your old girlfriend.” Awareness poured over her like cold water and she squeezed her eyes shut against the Voice.

  Pebbles dug into her back, providing pain in anticipation of her punishment, but the shuffle of cloth was all she heard. She shoved him hard and rolled to a crouch.