Y
19
Six months earlier:
The warrior worked the deployment pod’s controls furiously. Outside, bulkheads were distorting from the enormous strain put of them. The lights in the launching bay flickered on and off. Metal and ceramic shavings bounced off the tiny vehicle. Pressurized gases sprayed from now horizontal ceilings. Worst of all, the great molten mass of metallic gold seeping in from outside of the vessel was still approaching.
From behind the pod’s sealed screen, Pasqualina watched the amoeba-like material flow towards her.
She had known the ship was being attacked before even the alert sensors sounded, and certainly long before any of the humans onboard had a clue. She had felt the initial vibration ring through the Independence’s hull, and in an instant she was up and on her feet. She was just opening her cabin’s crisis pod when the first real shudder occurred and the lights went out. A moment later she was in the corridor adjoining her and Reuben’s cabin dragging her bewildered husband by the scruff of the neck.
“What’s happening?” he sputtered, and Pasqualina felt a moment of rare and real joy at his dismay.
“It’s only a drill, my dear,” she said, voice dripping with irony. “Go back to bed and sleep it off.”
The ship groaned. The corridor’s perspective twisted along its axis. People screamed in the background. The emergency lights began flickering wildly.
The warrior turned and left Reuben then, her Thane mind having already calculated her best options for survival. Reuben’s presence actually decreased her chances of surviving this disaster by three percent; she abandoned her husband of nearly six years—closer to sixteen adding the time they had spent in suspended animation, truly the best time of her marriage—without looking back.
She was the one who had decided—she made all of their decisions, really—they should accompany The Flags of Centauri Independence on its expedition to the Flowerworlds. The trip to Indi represented her best chance for ultimately returning home to Venus. It would be a roundabout journey, to be sure, and she might have to wait many additional years for a Solarian ship to arrive, especially if she had to call for one herself, but it was better than the alternative of remaining in disguise among the humans of Beta II and the Sovereignty of Outer Alpha Centauri.
She had had few other options remaining, truth be told. Three years ago, her plot within the Beta Assembly to have the Sovereign assassinated and replaced with a regent had unexpectedly fallen through. Someone on the inside of their cabal had betrayed them. Someone had exposed and eliminated the Countess Xarusha, Pasqualina’s pawn in the affair, but even she hadn’t been able to discover whom. Subsequently, the Thane had been playing increasingly intricate cat-and-mouse games with Royal Intelligence, throwing the Betans a name or a few bones while keeping her own involvement an increasingly difficult-to-hide secret. Eventually, had things continued, she would have been exposed. Pasqualina could have gone to the Drads and tried to arrange a passage to Sol through them, but she trusted those disembodied brains less than she did R.I., and in the end the mission on the Independence had seemed her only escape route.
Her plan had been simple: at some point during the negotiations with the Florans, she would privately speak with the former high-castes of the Empire, identify herself as a Thane, and use her Congressional status to arrange a trip back to Sol, one way or the other. Although the Florans did not travel the stars, the Empire did, and it still made occasional visits to the Indi system.
Now even that remote option was looking less and less likely. Using the handrails on either side of the corridor in the suddenly almost nonexistent gravity, Pasqualina had propelled herself to the nearest escape vehicle. She heard the ping of support struts snapping. The vibration rate increased fourfold.
The ship wasn’t being attacked so much, she eventually realized, as something was sitting atop it and crushing the vessel, literally. She tried to picture what that possibly could be and failed. The Thanes were brilliant but not particularly imaginative.
The warrior called up a mental image of the starship’s deck plans. There was a shuttle bay closer by her, but Pasqualina predicted too many safety-seeking and panicky people would show there, and that would inevitably cause a fatal slowdown. So, she bypassed it, traveling up an access tube to the Marine levels of the Independence. Her best chance, she had calculated in a split-second, was a marine deployment pod: a small landing craft designed to be fired and forgotten from its primary vehicle while carrying up to a dozen Royal Marines through hostile enemy fire. The Flags of Centauri Independence was not a warship, but it did carry a detachment of Marines, and they did have their own deployment vehicles. Three of them, to be accurate, spaced equidistantly around the rim of the Dome, the Betan starship’s forward-facing defensive platform.
She had opened the hatch to the pod launcher when she took note of the two figures already in the cabin. The first was a pleasure drone, brightly pink, its generous breasts bobbing weightlessly. The second was a human, Marine Commander Gila Aosha, half in his uniform and shouting into a communicator. Aosha’s face was flushed. His dick was bobbing around in the zero gravity as well.
Pasqualina possessed a Beta-level intellect, but it didn’t take a genius to recognize what had been going on. Prior to all hell breaking loose, the marine officer had been using the pleasure drone in the relative privacy of one of his deployment pods, and now he had been caught with his pants down, figuratively and otherwise. One was a threat, the other definitely wasn’t. She didn’t give the Marine time to react to her presence. Pasqualina waded in, jumped, and struck the semi-naked officer in the side of his head, knocking him out in a heartbeat. Not even a Royal Marine was a match for Thane strength.
Still, they weren’t an entirely worthless species. A human might come in handy on the surface of the planet, Pasqualina thought. A trained human, anyway, which is why she had discounted her husband.
Moving at breakneck speed, the Thane hurled Aosha into the already open pod. She glanced briefly at the pleasure drone. Waste not, want not: she thrust it inside as well. It had been a minor mystery on the starship as to exactly which Betan aristocrat had sent the pleasure drone, anonymously, to Indi along with them. Even Pasqualina had entertained various theories, none of which she could prove. The pink drone was ostensibly a gift for the Florans, though over the course of nine years the plastioid fuckdoll had been used by nearly every member of the Independence’s senior staff. Pasqualina was likely the only person aboard who could appreciate the irony, based on her knowledge of the former Congressional species: the Florans were neuters, one and all. The Artist-Princes of Epsilon Indi had long ago given up sex to concentrate on the pursuit of art and beauty. It was the primary reason they had abandoned Sol and the Solarian Empire.
Pasqualina had just finished sealing the pod when the bulkhead of the cabin caved in, and that mass of flowing plastioid cells and chemisensitive plastic began oozing towards her. Her thoughts, accelerated by Thane genetic enhancement, sped up more so than usual. The Expansionists, she thought.
She looked around the small interior of the pod and located its communication terminal. I thought they were extinct. The golden mass was almost on top of her. At almost the last second, Pasqualina used the board to send a code on a very old Solarian frequency.
“I am the Lady Pasqualina of Venus, of the Thane Hierarchy, of the Solarian Empire,” she identified herself to the fluid mass of chemiprocessors and micro-sized machines. “I am of the Imperial Genus.”
The golden mass paused, and Pasqualina smiled.
The Planet Y: Modern Day
Whether male or female, the Yn liked their living spaces austere and monolithic. The warrior entered the audience chamber of the Imperatrix of the Yn Matricharate, and what struck her was the utter barrenness of it: the undecorated, slate-gray walls; the cold, uncarpeted floor; the echoing sense of emptiness despite the crowd of people observing. The great hall was triangular. The walls to either side slanted inwardly: tier upon tier a series of immense angled surfaces that gradually got closer and merged a hundred meters above the Thane’s head. Beneath this zenith, the floor’s vast pavement swept smooth and unyieldingly, to either side where the women nobles of the Matricharate gathered beneath shadowy overhangs, and to the rear of the chamber where the cold stone surface rose in a mountain of steps to the block-like throne at the end where the Imperatrix herself sat and watched her supplicant approach.
Pasqualina was escorted to a space within a few meters of the base of this throne-hill. She cast her eyes around, categorizing every detail with typical Thane perfection.
The Imperatrix of the Yn Matricharate was, she observed, physically anyway, a typical female Yn.
She was, in other words, short, voluptuous, and exquisitely feminine. Her red skin, of which a great deal shown, was a bright, almost glowing crimson. She wore the least amount of clothing Pasqualina had ever seen on a sovereign. Her ensemble consisted of a pair of golden nipple guards, large enough to cover just the nipples; a set of thin gold chains that linked these jaunty caps together; and a brief plate between her legs, from which descended a long, gold-colored piece of cloth. Over all this, she wore a thin, practically translucent white mesh. The combination of red skin, rich metallic yellow, and lucid white was visually quite striking. The lights in the audience chamber focused on the Imperatrix practically made the woman shimmer. Her mesh was connected to a gold mask-like affair that wrapped round the sovereign’s head. The intricate array hid nothing of the woman’s stern and unemotional visage. Its design rather was reminiscent of a fencing mask: a succession of thin gold bands that swung within centimeters of her skin without touching any of it. The Imperatrix sat on the edge of her seat like an ancient statue, her bare legs primly together, her arms spread out and resting on her throne’s sides.
The only real difference between her and any other Yn woman Pasqualina had seen was the color of her hair. The Imperatrix of the Matricharate, surprisingly, was a blonde, the first blond Yn of either gender the Thane had observed on Y. The bitch’s hair, in fact, was a shade not altogether dissimilar from Pasqualina’s own: it had a rich, golden sheen that precisely matched that of the metal adorning her.
Thanes counted automatically. Having spotted one, Pasqualina quickly noted three other Yn females in the hall with odd-colored hair. Two were blondes like the Imperatrix. The third, even more oddly, was a Yn redhead! This latter’s hair was a burgundy only slightly less intense than her own bare skin color.
One of the other blondes stood near the Imperatrix on her hill a couple of steps down. Like her sovereign, this Yn female was minimally dressed. A similar fencing-mask array of gold was wrapped round her face. Instead of nipple guards, though, this attendant wore a deeply plunging metal bustier. In one hand she held a decorative staff, tipped, naturally, with gold. She wore no encompassing mesh.
Pasqualina’s escort brought her to the base of the throne-hill. A line of steroidal male guards formed a barrier between the wild-looking crowds to either side and the great empty space in the middle.
A second semi-nude Yn female with breastplate and staff was waiting. She spoke.
“Her Magnificence greets a Daughter of the Thane, the Lady Pasqualina of Venus, of the Thane Hierarchy, of the distant Solarian Empire. You may bow.”
Keeping her contemptuous feelings only barely inside, Pasqualina did bow, though she kept her eyes on the Imperatrix as she did so. She did a battle assessment. Not including herself, there were seventy-eight people in attendance, including the sixteen armed guards. Like the primitive barbarians Pasqualina considered the Yn, all of them showed skin and lots of it. The nobles’ garments, on the whole, were reminiscent of their sovereign’s. The entourages they had brought were totally unclothed: female slaves, distinguished from their owners only by the abject looks of devotion on their faces; and brain-reduced male animals, crouching, sniffing, and licking at their owners’ feet like the large, dumb brutes they had been turned into. Even the Imperatrix, she saw, had brought a toy: a black-haired Yn slavegirl lounged at the throne-hill’s base, linked to her regal owner by a leash chain, made, naturally, of gold.
The Lesser Voice of the Imperatrix continued.
“Her Magnificence expresses her gratitude for the gift presented her.” The woman turned partially and indicated with a wave the impassive pink pleasure drone standing near the Imperatrix’s slavegirl. When Pasqualina had performed her count, she hadn’t bothered to include the drone, for it was a drone.
“She is much amused with it.”
The Imperatrix actually showed neither amusement nor any other emotion. She remained perfectly still, the symbol of inapproachability. The slavegirl rattled her chain and cast a jealous look at the drone. According to a rumor Pasqualina had heard, this kept slut-animal was the current Imperatrix’s immediate predecessor, who had fallen, and fallen rather abjectly, in an internal power struggle.
“You may speak,” the Lesser Voice finally said to Pasqualina.
“The drone is but a small token of my esteem for the mighty Imperatrix,” Pasqualina began. “There are many greater services I could render Her Magnificence should my petition be granted.”
The Thane’s plans were loose. Luck and her genetic superiority had brought her to this crossroads, and she would see now which avenues looked the most promising. If she could gain entry into this petty sovereign’s service, nothing would be denied her, including the Imperatrix’s own seat. Grand visions of her future, and the exact probability calculations for achieving them, danced through Pasqualina’s head.
The Imperatrix lifted her right index finger.
The Greater Voice of the Imperatrix, at her side on the throne-hill, spoke. “Her Magnificence desires to know the extent of your influence over the Brahma.”
“You may speak,” the Lesser Voice next to Pasqualina said again. Pasqualina shifted her eyes to this bitch momentarily, then dismissed her. She would soon deal with the upstart.
“The Brahma are slaves to their programming, mighty Imperatrix,” she said, addressing the sovereign directly. The crowd of Matricharate nobles chattered at the faux pas. “There are codes hidden within their makeup from the time they were the Solarian Expansionists, codes that control their behavior.”
Pasqualina did a quick calculation. She estimated the chances of the guards beside her stopping her at less than 7.5%. She took a quick, deliberate step toward the Imperatrix, angering the crowd.
She put a foot on the first riser of the throne-hill.
“As a Solarian and a Daughter of the Thane, I know these ancient codes. They are how I survived, whole and intact, the destruction of the Centauri ship you saw fit to destroy.”
The guards, the Lesser and Greater Voices, even the slave-slut in chains beside the throne, stiffened at Pasqualina’s arrogant presumption. She had touched the great throne!
Only the Imperatrix herself remained indifferent.
Almost imperceptibly, the sovereign nodded to the Greater Voice. A little shaken, and visibly enraged, this envoy spoke to the Thane. “Can you control the Brahma such that they will attack the Western city-states? Can you control the Brahma such that they will attack the Florans? These are the things Her Magnificence is most interested, offworlder.”
The key to power in the Indi system, Pasqualina knew, were the Brahma. Fighting on their medieval level, the Matricharate could easily crush any one or two male-dominated city-states of the West. It could crush any dozen or so, in fact. But it could not take on the entire West at once, and if all the city-states gathered together in an invasion alliance, they could overwhelm the Imperatrix. Only the fact that the Yn males liked fighting one another more than they did the Matricharate prevented that.
The Brahma could tip the scales in either direction, but because they honored the very letter of their ancient contracts with the Yn, they took orders from both East and West. The Brahma would defend the Yn, but they would not fight for them against each other. The Florans could also easily overpower the Matricharate or the city-states, but either because they respected too much the independence of their former slaves, or they were too afraid of the Brahma, or both, the Flowerworlds stayed absolutely neutral. And the Imperatrix couldn’t order the Brahma to fight the Florans anymore than she could her fellow Yn: the drones’ agreements with the Florans were just as ancient as theirs. If the Brahma could be made to accept orders from just one side, or at least stay out of one conflict or another, everything would change. This was the edge Pasqualina offered the Imperatrix. The terraforming drones still recognized her authority as a Solarian. More precisely, they recognized at least some of the Solarian authorization codes Pasqualina had committed to memory years ago. Pasqualina didn’t know if she could get them to violate their contracts with either the Florans or the Yn—she rather doubted she could, in fact—but the Imperatrix didn’t need to know that.
“You may speak,” the Lesser Voice angrily hissed through her teeth.
The Thane warrior didn’t deign to look at her. “A slave can be compelled to do anything, mighty Imperatrix. Surely even you know that.” She modulated her voice to subliminally magnify the sarcastic remark, filling it with tones of scorn and an implied weakness on the part of the sovereign.
The crowd of Yn nobles seethed.
Pasqualina’s gaze drifted over them, reading every muscle in their pretty faces, predicting the emotions and thoughts behind their yellow eyes. I’ll be running this pitiful excuse of an empire soon, she thought. No one can compete with the Thane. No one!
Seventy-eight targets. She estimated she could kill over a third before they could bring her down. The bodyguards would be the first to fall. Thanes were not afraid of death. They were only afraid of failure.
“Her Magnificence desires to know the Brahma codes, offworlder. Gift them to her, and Her Magnificence will grant you any reward.”
Before the Lesser Voice could tell her she could speak, Pasqualina overrode her. Her look of outrage was amusing. “Upon my formal acceptance into the ranks of her advisors, I would be more than happy to share with the Imperatrix my knowledge of the Brahma, the Solarian Empire, and the Thane.”
The Greater Voice shook her gold-ringed head. “Her Magnificence has considered your petition to join her service. It is . . . premature.”
“How so?” The Lesser Voice beside her wanted to strike Pasqualina—the Thane could read her body language well enough to predict her every move to within a 97.3% accuracy—but didn’t want to do so without permission. In fact, the only person in the room Pasqualina couldn’t read was the Imperatrix herself. The sovereign was giving nothing of herself away to the Thane’s kinesthetic analysis.
“You have not been through the slave trials, offworlder,” the Lesser Voice’s voice sizzled. “We do not know if you can control your inner slave.” She took a step toward Pasqualina. It was a step too close.
Too bad for her.
“I am not a slave, Imperatrix. I am a Thane.” With blinding speed, Pasqualina’s hand ripped out, seized the ceremonial staff out of the Lesser Voice’s hand, brought it sidewise between them, and broke it in the middle through her grip alone, all before the Yn functionary could so much as blink.
The Lesser Voice rushed forward, enraged. The guards started to do so as well, but the Greater Voice stamped her staff on the floor loudly, stopping them. Their hands gripped their weapons tightly.
The Lesser Voice of the Imperatrix punched furiously at the Thane. To Pasqualina, she moved in slow motion. She stepped casually out of the way, then slapped her erstwhile attacker twice, snapping her face back and forth hard enough that the snapping of the bones in her neck could be audibly heard.
The Lesser Voice fell at Pasqualina’s feet, dead.
The Thane looked at the sovereign without fear. “Your trials are irrelevant. I am above them and you.”
The Imperatrix stood. Everyone in the audience chamber beside Pasqualina immediately bowed.
“You must undergo the slave trials before you enter my service,” the ruler of the Yn Matricharate said.
Her voice was lovely. What made Pasqualina grin, though, was her Thane ears picking up the subtle cues and emotional resonances that would give her a statistical prediction of the sovereign’s behavior.
“Why?” she said, taking a second bold and disrespectful step onto the throne-hill. The guards again rushed forward, only this time it was the Imperatrix herself whose hand stopped them.
I could kill the bitch now, Pasqualina thought. They couldn’t stop me. She began calculating her chances of success if she just made a formal challenge now and got it over with. If this had been a male city-state of Yn, she would have done so already. Their whole culture was based on dueling.
“The thing that separates us from the majority of Yn women is our control over our slave appetites,” the Imperatrix said, herself descending a relaxed step closer to the Thane. The room had grown deathly silent. All attention was on the two of them, two Valkyries about to throw down in blood.
“We do not deny that we are born slaves,” the Imperatrix went on. “We embrace it! In the trials, we unleash our inner slave. We face her. Ultimately, we either conquer the slave in us or become her.”
“And what happens to those who refuse this challenge?” Pasqualina asked. She could have reached out and touched the sovereign now, if that was her wish.
“Only those who conquer their inner slave may join our ranks. Those who can not must join the ranks of the submitted.” There was no fear at all in the Imperatrix, either in her face or in her voice. Nevertheless, Pasqualina laughed. She had decided. The Yn, male or female, respected boldness. She would kill the Imperatrix now and seize her throne. And if she herself was slain, what of it?
The Thane respected boldness, too.
“Alas, mighty Imperatrix,” she said, “I have no inner slave. My Revered Predecessors had a different fate in mind for their descendants. They designed my genetic profile to rule, never to submit.”
She aimed at the bridge of the Imperatrix’s nose. One blow would shatter the bone and drive it deep within the woman’s brain. Then she would kill the Greater Voice kneeling beside them and the male bodyguards. She would make her claim at that point, challenging anyone in the chamber to face her.
It was not a bad plan. It had a better than 84% chance of success. She could live with those odds. Pasqualina’s hand rose with all the speed and strength her genetic design permitted.
She thrust her fingers forward. Her killing blow virtually split the air before her.
And then a hand caught Pasqualina’s wrist in a grip that she could not, even with her awesome Thane strength, break. Pasqualina’s eyes widened. Impossible! she thought.
The Imperatrix, holding her wrist, smiled at her.
“All women are slaves,” she said distinctly.
The Greater Voice’s staff rose in front of Pasqualina. Something sprayed from its tip into her face. Nerve agent! the Thane’s senses recognized at once. She tried to back away, but she was held tight.
This small, weakling, slave of a woman was holding back a Daughter of the Thane!
Pasqualina couldn’t believe it.
The last thing she heard before everything went black was the little bitch’s voice. “Let the trials begin!”