Dominating Dekalia Read online

  Worse than that, it was the result of his poor command because if that stubborn fool Gortal had obeyed his orders in the first place he’d have been dead instead of the other.

  Where was the heroism in this?

  Dekalia had seen it for herself. She’d lived through it but how far into the story had she gotten? He’d stopped her before the end.

  Which was why she was still standing.

  No civilian could endure those memories.

  By the Corps, where was his head, leaving her alone? He ought to have guessed she’d have found the maximum trouble because that’s what she did.

  It was her modus operandi, which is why the head of the guardians had needed to send her halfway across the universe.

  Scratch that. It was the would-be assassin who had forced this.

  Let me find him, thought Marax, and I will deal with him.

  The idea of terrifying Dekalia that way was beyond unacceptable.

  Something didn’t add up though. If a person or group of persons could build a wormhole bomb why the hell couldn’t they get the actual job done and wipe out the intended target?

  Was the bomb just a warning? Or had it some other purpose? Again he was thinking too much.

  Thinking like Dekalia to be precise.

  “Marax?”

  He froze. She was waking up.

  That was the last thing he needed right now. So why was his heart palpitating?

  Dekalia blinked, getting her bearings. She was nude, her body entwined with that of her jailor-protector. So they had wound up back in bed. No big surprise there.

  The pattern was emerging. Argue, separate, nearly fuck and then argue again. How many times did they keep pulling the trigger on this game of Russian roulette?

  Something flashed in her brain. She sat up, her hands on his chest.

  “Russian roulette,” she announced.

  “What of it?”

  “I’ve never heard of it and yet somehow I know all about it. You put it in my brain. Or rather it got there when we linked during the crash.”

  He frowned slightly in that delightful way of his, pensive, seemingly annoyed, but deep down full of intelligence and patience. “You could have known about it from any number of sources and simply forgotten.”

  Now Dekalia frowned. The sex exchanges seemed to be augmenting the process.

  “In the academy you had an instructor named Baraxian. He gave you a hard time about your rigidity. He said you needed more intuition, especially if you were to command a ship of your own.”

  Marax sat up with her. “If you are reading my mind…”

  “I have no way to do that and you know it. And there is more. He made you feel…not quite angry but—”

  He cut her off. “All right, I get the point.”

  “But I haven’t gotten to the point.”

  “I will listen to nothing more.”

  “Do you know how I got on the council?” she said in a seeming non sequitur.

  “No, but I will be sure to demand a recount when we get back to Earth.”

  “You’re developing sarcasm. I’m impressed.”

  “Who said I am being sarcastic.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said, pressing on. “I went to a rally one day for the Embracer party. I was barely old enough to be on my own. A housemate of mine was going and it was kind of a lark really. I hadn’t thought much about politics before this. Like most of my fem friends I was interested in mems and interesting careers, definitely in that order. The notion that something was fundamentally wrong in someone else deciding who and what I should be before I was even born hadn’t even dawned on me.

  “Anyway, at the rally a number of people spoke. Most were fem scientists and artists and there were a couple of mems too. But then this primale got up and you could have heard a pin drop. People obviously expected him to say something harsh about how irresponsible or disloyal we all were but instead he just stood behind the podium.

  “For the longest time he just looked out at the audience. Finally when he had everyone at the point of snapping like a twig he began to read the oath. ‘I do solemnly swear to defend the freedom and rights of all whom I protect and to obey my superiors…’”

  “It was the Guardian Oath.”

  “Yes and the way I saw that crowd react made me realize we were all just prisoners every one of us, the primales included.”

  “They booed him?”

  “No, but after he was gone they began singing a song. It was something derisive about the Corps. I’m almost ashamed to think of it now.”

  “So you haven’t always hated us?”

  “I’ve never hated you. My point is, that day I connected, I felt the pain of everyone there, the soldier’s included. That was my gift and my curse.”

  “And now you want to deal with my pain.”

  “I can’t deal with anything. I can only say what I see and encourage people. It’s why I am in the party and why I ran for the council. I don’t want war, Marax, here or anywhere else.”

  “That is well and good. But you can’t change human nature. You think we are engineered into four subspecies by accident? You think it’s cruel not to let us make our own children willy-nilly? Dekalia, nature is no friend. It’s at war with us and you need look no further than the Narthian swarms to realize that.”

  “I know and I hate what they did to you. If there were only some way to—” Dekalia cut herself off. This was dangerous territory. Any more attempts to heal and reconcile might be construed as fraternizing with a sworn enemy.

  “Look, Marax, I’m only saying I was obviously born with some kind of empathy. I’m not sure how that was engineered in or why. The genetic computers use their formulas for their own sense of balance. I might be one in a million, who knows. But I can read things and I know you are worried. We are in danger here, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “It was stupid of me to pretend everything was okay,” she chided herself.

  “The blame is mine. I am supposed to be responsible. But I’m not…clear.”

  “We can fix that.” Dekalia had no idea where the confidence came from or the eagerness behind it. She wanted to help and that was enough.

  For both their sakes.

  For his sake.

  “You have a fem’s enthusiasm and I won’t belittle that. Not anymore. But you don’t understand. You didn’t experience everything I did.”

  “You pulled me out before the full effects of the holo pill set in, I know. But we could try again. You could guide me through it. We’ll go back to Three Comets together and find out what’s locked away inside you.”

  His face was stone.

  “You have to trust me.”

  “I trust in the power of life and death.”

  “Well, now you need to trust humanity or at least this small sampling.”

  He eyed her, such a deep complicated sea of blue. It would take a lifetime to understand everything.

  What was she getting herself into?

  “We’ve played with fire enough, the sex and the melding and you stealing that pill.”

  “There are reasons for everything. We are supposed to be in each other’s lives like this.”

  “Spoken like a true politician.”

  “And you’re a soldier, I know.” She took his hand. “So fight this battle with me.”

  His brow furrowed. “It could be your last, Dekalia.”

  Then we’ll fight it together, she thought. Better to be by his side than alone out here.

  Or did she mean alone in here, trapped in her own head?

  “We will have to holo share memories,” he said. “A pill won’t do it.”

  “Whatever it takes,” she insisted. “I can handle it.” Though she was too smart not to be scared. And too tenderhearted not to trust he would keep her safe.

  Some might call that love or at least a good start. Dekalia was not one of those people. She was fem. And fems did not fall in love.

/>   They had flings. Call it another tragedy of biology never to be overcome. At least not in this generation.

  For an instant she wondered what kind of father Marax would make if by some miracle he could pass along his own unique genetics mixed with those of a single female. Creating for better or worse a combination of their unique DNA and not the result of statistical needs and artificial genotypes, perfect artificial human beings spat out of the common DNA pool solar rotation after solar rotation.

  In short, what if they had…a baby?

  “You do realize that trying to augment the effects of the mind link could go both ways. I could enter into your memories as well.”

  Marax studied her now. He waited for one expression or another. She had so many.

  The subtle movements of her eyebrows when she was defiant or upset, the way her lips curled up and down and her brow furrowed when she was happy or sad or perplexed.

  Obedients tended to be mirrors. Dekalia was a puzzle to be solved. An endless mystery.

  “I have nothing to hide,” she replied.

  Her eyes indicated she did not. They were brighter, more resplendent.

  Was this new or was he paying more attention to her now?

  “Everyone has their private concerns, Dekalia. The areas they consider off-limits.”

  “Even primales?”

  “We learn to sacrifice the individual for the whole. My identity belongs to the Corps and to the men I am with.”

  “So you’ll reveal nothing secret inadvertently?”

  Marax had considered this exact possibility. “I am able to store things away, so to speak.”

  “Like battle memories.”

  “I will seek to open this part of me.”

  She nodded. “And I will open to you.”

  “We may find the sex-making would have been safer,” he mused.

  “There’s no turning back, Marax.”

  Indeed not.

  He put his hand to her forehead and bid her to do the same.

  “No time like the present, Councilor.”

  “Agreed, Guardian.”

  They sat across from one another. It was possible nothing would happen.

  Perhaps he’d dreamed up what he felt before during the crash, that sense of being in her mind and knowing her almost as well as herself.

  And maybe she had dreamed too when she claimed to feel his experiences at Three Comets.

  Sure, she had swallowed the holo pill but that didn’t mean anything. People walked through each other’s memories like shadows just because the technology was there and the power of the hologrid.

  Nothing was happening. It was a failure. He ought to be thankful.

  He was about to tell her so when he felt a quake beneath the bed.

  Dekalia reached out and called his name.

  They were in each other’s arms.

  “It’s working,” she cried.

  Marax clung to her, knowing he could not afford to let go.

  “No,” he said, speaking fiercely into her ear. “This is something else.”

  “I don’t understand.” He barely heard her above the wind.

  It sounded like a cyclone, though behind it he feared was something much worse.

  “Just…don’t…let…go.”

  That much he conveyed just before they slid over the brink.

  Into the vortex of the wormhole.

  Chapter Seven

  Dekalia had no explanation for how it had happened. Not a single clue how she could be sitting nude on a sleeping slab with Marax one minute and plunging like good old Alice down some crazy rabbit hole the next.

  Only this was no story. They were in the blast radius of another one of those bombs. The same kind that had sucked her living quarters out of existence.

  Which meant the assassin or assassins had caught up to her.

  So why was she still alive? And how had the bomber found them here?

  She called out for Marax. Was he still in the same galaxy? And were her own body parts even in the same quadrant?

  He had told her not to let go. This much she remembered.

  Reaching out, Dekalia embraced the nothingness.

  And again the panorama shifted. There was weight and gravity. Something solid was in her hand.

  Her brain told her it was an ancient device for transmitting sound. A microphone.

  And there was smoke in her nostrils. People were smoking sticks of tobacco.

  The words poured from her mouth. It was music, something called appropriately enough the blues. She was in a place where such music was made…and she was the singer.

  Marax had never been to a speakeasy but he was in one now. The last of them had died out millennia before his birth and yet here he was in an antique suit with a hat on his head, drinking the most bitter of beverages and sitting at a table made of actual wood.

  Other men sat around him and he knew they instinctively feared him. He was powerful and he was in his element.

  He was not, however, on the right side of the law.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught a man watching him.

  The man’s gaze quickly averted back to the singer.

  Marax was just noticing her now. She was gorgeous in her slinky blue dress with long black gloves. She had short, dark hair, very cute but still feminine.

  It must have been a style.

  The metal sphere on a stick she was touching was poked with tiny holes. It rested on a stand also made of metal. It was a sound augmenter used by the ancients prior to the development of nanotechnology. The ancients called it a microphone.

  The outfit he was wearing with bone and wooden closures was called a suit. The knotted cloth around his neck was a tie. Some of this he had learned in his studies while other things seemed to come of their own accord.

  The performer was watching him now. She was a torch singer. A very good one, he surmised. She sang with soul, a blend of pain and wisdom and courage.

  The melody sounded familiar.

  The woman reminded him of himself.

  If a primale were to sing it would be like this. Marax wondered what pain she’d endured. She hadn’t been to war but there were other kinds of suffering in this universe. This too his teachers had taught him.

  The lesson was not missed on Marax. The warrior who is not attuned to the agony of pain must beware lest his strength turn into brutality and his cunning become cruelty.

  He frowned as she began to sway, lost in some private reverie. Like an obedient. Bewitched.

  “She’s got it for you bad, friend.”

  The newcomer was skinny with a wrinkled version of a suit and a nervous stare. His smile was more rodent-like than human.

  “Do I know you?”

  He laughed. “In this place no one’s a stranger.”

  Marax felt the lump on his left side. Something strapped to him he hadn’t noticed before. It was an old-fashioned gunpowder weapon. A .38 caliber police special to be precise. Snub-nosed.

  He would use it if he had to.

  “May I sit down?” said the Rodent Man.

  Marax saw no point in stopping him.

  “You like her, don’t you, friend?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, friend.”

  The Rodent Man laughed. “You’re suspicious, I can tell. But there are no secrets here. Her name is Lola and she ain’t had it this bad for a customer in ages. I would say you got a good shot tonight.”

  A good shot was right.

  “We were in an explosion.”

  “Were you now?” The Rodent Man signaled the bartender. “Two double scotches for me and my friend and make it the good stuff.”

  “It was a wormhole bomb,” Marax continued. “That woman and I should both be dead.”

  “Wormhole bombs are a scientific impossibility,” said Rodent Man, belying a rather sophisticated knowledge of modern science for an ancient illusion.

  “So is life after death,” said Marax.

  He laughed. “We
ll, this isn’t heaven or hell if that’s your question.”

  Marax considered his options. “So it’s some place in between.”

  “Maybe.”

  He had had enough. The Rodent Man was clearly playing games.

  Marax drew aside his jacket to reveal the weapon and the threat it implied. “I believe you know exactly where we are and furthermore I think you have the power to let us go.”

  “I’m not holding you here, I assure you.”

  “Then tell me what is outside that door.” Marax inclined his head to the windowless portal along the front wall. It was made of hard wood with a hidden metal spy hole at eye level.

  The bartender was back.

  Rodent Man slid one of the two shot glasses across the table. “Our drink first.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You wound me,” he sighed. “Truly.”

  “I’m sure you’ll survive.”

  “But will she?” It was Rodent Man’s turn to incline his head.

  The singer cried out and recognition flashed through his mind. He remembered everything, the bomb, the mission and Dekalia.

  She was the singer.

  No time to wonder how they had gotten here as the man now held a knife threateningly across Dekalia’s neck while holding her from behind.

  “Don’t fight him, Dekalia, you’ll be just fine,” Marax cried out as he drew the weapon.

  She looked at him strangely. Did she know who he was?

  “What do you want?” Marax asked the man with the rodent face.

  “I want you to do your shot like a polite guest.”

  Marax swallowed the liquor. He kept his eye on Rodent Man the whole time. He never wavered with his pistol.

  “Now what happens, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t and neither did you.”

  “I am Lieutenant Marax of the Guardian Corps.”

  Rodent Man licked his lips. “Impressive.”

  “Who do you work for?” Marax wanted to know. “The Embracers?”

  Rodent Man laughed. “That pathetic bunch of tree huggers?”

  “You aren’t with the government either, are you?”

  “I’m a freelancer.” Rodent Man winked.

  “No such thing. Either you are with us or you’re with them.”