The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (4 page)

Now instead of their old, modest apartment in a refugee building on the opposite side of town, they lived in an exclusive diplomatic building near the Imperial capital. Their neighbor was the chargé d’affaires for Umberland, a small principality in the Pleiades. Jack went to work every morning with a driver and a security detail. They had more money than the Apollonian Pope, and there were people who did their shopping for them.

And for the two months since their move, Anna had been miserable. For Anna, their new living arrangements felt more like a gilded cage than a palace, but it wasn’t the ridiculously large apartment and the stupidly ostentatious neighbors which bothered Anna most. What she missed most was her community, particularly Deirdre. Another refugee from the Unity, Deirdre Beacock had taken Anna under her wing in the dark days after their arrival. She had offered more acceptance and loved her with more grace than Anna had ever known.

In the Unity, the people steeped like tea leaves in the brutality of the regime. No one took the effort to care for their neighbors for fear that an act of compassion might bring trouble upon their own head, but here in the expat community, Unity citizens watched out for each other. It was as if, free of the toxic bath of government meddling, the best of her people came out. All the warmth, acceptance, and love which could never be expressed at home bubbled to the surface and overflowed. All of it done even though they hardly ever acknowledged their shared heritage, for fear of spies and reprisals. Now, after two years adjusting to her new life in that community, Anna felt isolated once again.

Earlier that evening, when she had stepped into their bedroom, Jack’s latest apology had waited on the bed. Olive green velvet with a blue embroidered pattern, the dress must have cost a fortune. The label—
L’Atmosphere d’Excès
—declared its desirability in high society. Anna knew there was no way Jack had picked it out himself. He had given someone at the office the appropriate number of credits, and she had done the shopping. Anna had just finished getting dressed when Jack had arrived home in a new tuxedo and announced that their car was waiting downstairs.

She couldn’t remember the last time they had gone out together. Jack’s work at the ministry demanded everything from him. There had been little left for her in the last couple of months.

Now Jack stared down at his empty dessert plate, wise enough to know to let the silence between them linger.

Anna wanted to speak, but she didn’t know what to say.

She had never intended to become a refugee from her home. As oppressive as the Unity had been, she had never seriously thought of leaving. It was her relationship with Jack which had led her into the constricting noose in which she now lived. Anna had met Jack on the orbital above the dirty snowball moon Aetna where he served as manager. She had arrived as a wholesale food buyer interested in a contract with the local fishing guild. Naive and willfully stupid, she had let herself get drugged by a punk on a mission. Jack had chivalrously intervened.

What had started as a “thank you” turned into a decidedly asymmetrical relationship, with Anna arriving on the station every few weeks to spend a couple of days in Jack’s bed, then leaving, knowing full well that Jack didn’t share her sense of commitment and loyalty.

Three years into this unhealthy pattern, Jack had seemed to make a change, saying he was sorry—there was that word again—promising fidelity in the future, and planning to run away with Anna the next day. Only it didn’t turn out that way.

While Anna had been away, Jack had gotten himself into a bit of trouble with the authorities. He was caught in the crosshairs of a ruthless political climber, Timothy Randall. They didn’t know it at the time, but apparently Randall had his eyes on the Unity CEO’s chair—a seat he had gained in the last few months, after the mysterious death of the former CEO, Cowhill.

As luck would have it, the morning of their planned escape something went wrong with Randall’s machinations, and Jack was expected to take the fall. When the gendarme arrived to take Jack into custody, they found Anna instead.

The next three days had been the darkest Anna had ever known. The Unity had no qualms about method or dignity when it needed something from its citizens. Anna had been repeatedly mind-jacked, with implanted memories laid on top of the truth. There was really no way for her to distinguish what horrible things had been done in her mind and what were real.

It was Jack who had orchestrated her escape and then brought her here to the galactic capital. It was Jack who had rescued her, and Anna was grateful, but she still had panic attacks. Sometimes they made sense, like when Jo suddenly turned off the light and left her in the dark. Other times, they didn’t, like the time a woman in a gray suit walked passed her on her way to work. Although the panic had diminished in frequency and intensity, the attacks could still be debilitating. The drugs and an implant helped, but to Anna, it still felt as if a monster lived underneath their warm comfort, waiting for its chance to escape.

As she glanced across the table at Jack, Anna realized all the dresses in the world wouldn’t help her shake the sense she was trapped, forced to be a surrogate mother to two children not her own, forced to flee her home, and now alone in a strange world, left entangled with a man who had not loved her until the last second. A man who understood charm but still struggled to grasp relationship.

And yet he tried.

Jack spoke with care, avoiding all emotion in his voice. “Let’s go home.”

Anna nodded and gathered her wrap from the back of her chair.

On the way out the door, Anna contemplated whether she could explain to him that saying “yes” would make her feel as if he was trying to justify all of her pain. “Yes” felt like admitting that something good could come out of her suffering, and Anna could never—would never—say that. The suffering she had endured had no meaning. It wasn’t purposeful, and it hadn’t provided her with any kind of poignant beauty. It had no redeeming qualities. She had been brutalized and remained scarred by the experience. She couldn’t say “yes” to Jack because he was in some way partly responsible for those scars.

Yet, she couldn’t leave him, either. She didn’t want to. She was content in the nether region of lover and confidant, and she did care for Jack. He meant the world to her. For whatever silly and backward reasons, he always had. Maybe it was the kindness he showed her when they first met. Maybe it was that he seemed to listen to her in a way that he listened to no one else, and maybe it was that she had watched him grow, sometimes in fits and starts, but always growing. Maybe it was all of these reasons, but she loved Jack. She just couldn’t be his wife. This was a term which closed the door to the cage and sealed her in it forever. That she could not do.

The ride home quickly filled itself with whole mountain ranges of silence. Jack and Anna sat on opposite sides of the car, holding hands but not speaking. In the two front seats, the security personnel tried to look impassive and busy, but they really had nothing to do. A web of satellites and AI guided every bit of their journey as they glided in and out of the traffic several hundred meters off the ground. Anna reached forward and closed the privacy screen between the two compartments.

Her voice felt thick and sore when she spoke. “Jack, I wish I could.”

“Wish you could what?” Jack’s voice felt like the verbal equivalent of dumping a glass of wine down the front of her dress. He wasn’t going to make this easy on her.

“Marry you, Jack. I wish I could.”

“And why can’t you?”

Anna felt her pulse starting to race. “Jack, they did things to me. They hurt me…”

Jack interrupted and spoke with a deadly calm that Anna hated. It meant he had lost patience with her. “I’m not them, Anna. I’m not the ones who hurt you. I can’t make that better, and they can’t make that better. You have to make that better.”

Anna’s voice pitched upward and became more animated, even as Jack’s became infuriatingly calm. “I can’t just make it better, Jack!”

“You can try.” This he spoke barely above a whisper as he looked away from Anna and stared out the window. He let go of her hand.

Anna started to speak again but stopped. The seat behind her morphed, sucking her body downward into its growing cocoon. She wanted to ask Jack what was happening, but she didn’t have time.

In less than a second, the car lurched sideways and sped up so that the traffic outside blurred. Forced to look forward by the cocoon of foam which had now enveloped her chest, torso and legs, Anna could see little else than the privacy screen and the seat in front of her. In the front cabin, the security personnel were just flipping down their heads-up displays when Anna saw the thin threads of light coming directly toward them. Before she could blink, they became ribbons of flame, and then the privacy shield went dark and the cabin in which she rode seemed to erupt with some kind of foam.

Anna opened her mouth to scream but couldn’t as it was suddenly filled with the vile stuff. She couldn’t breathe. The explosion deafened her, and the concussion felt liked it might have killed her. Gravity seemed to move around her body at random as she felt herself begin to tumble. The world was silent now, even as her body demanded oxygen which she couldn’t provide. She wanted to flail her arms in some way to control her spin, but there was no way for her to move. The remnants of the car rolled and twisted in free-fall long enough that Anna had time to anticipate the inevitable end.

Her mind reached out for Jack.
Not like this
, she thought.
Not like this! Please don’t let me die without telling him I love him.

The crunch and boom as the remnants of the car hit the ground dwarfed the concussion of the attack which preceded them. The pain was excruciating. She wanted to scream but the vile foam still filled her mouth. Anna felt herself propelled back up into the air again and again before she came down for a final time. As soon as she stopped moving, the foam which encompassed her melted, instantly becoming gel and then liquid, laying her on the concrete of the pedestrian mall with the gentleness of a mother tucking a child in bed. Anna opened her eyes and stared up into the traffic lanes above where they had traveled only seconds before. She inhaled life-giving oxygen and then remembered Jack. She tried to stand, but something wasn’t working with her left leg. Instead, she rolled over to her right side and saw Jack, or what was left of him, lying not far from her. His body was burned, and in places, opened where it should not be. Both legs lay at odd angles to his torso. Anna wailed and crawled toward him on her working leg, dragging the other behind.

It took time. Already, she could hear the sounds of approaching sirens when she got to him.

When she arrived, Jack’s eyes were still open, though much of one side of his face appeared to be torn away.

“Jack! I’m here, Jack.”

Anna watched as one of his eyes turned toward her and focused.

She tried to find one of Jack’s hands, fumbling with the shreds of his torn jacket.

“I love you, Jack Halloway. I love you. Don’t you forget that.”

Jack squeezed her hand feebly, and Anna thought that she saw his bloodied lips move, but no sound came from them.

Vehicle lights suddenly dazzled Anna’s vision. She looked up, and then, feeling overwhelmingly exhausted, lay her head down on the grass underneath her, shut her eyes, and drifted out of this world’s reckoning.

Dappled sunlight shone through the antique glass windows of the palace library, highlighting drifting motes of dust. Minutiae and details flowed past Jonas’ left eye from his heads-up device. With his right hand, he absentmindedly controlled the flow with a flick of his index finger. Jonas scrunched his eyes shut. He couldn’t take it anymore and threw down his data pad with a clatter on the table in front of him.

His older brother spoke nonchalantly, “You do know that Bishop Dominic doesn’t have a dick, right?”

“What?” said Jonas.

Jonas’ eighteen-year-old brother Stephen sat across from him.

“Yeah, they take this pill that suppresses their sex drive. It makes their dicks fall off. You know Miller, on the grooming staff? He told me. His brother’s a priest,” Stephen ended with a confident nod.

“No way,” Jonas answered, laughing at the thought. His meaning remained ambiguous, even to himself. On the one hand, he simply expressed his amazement at the idea of the Bishop not having a penis. On the other hand, “no way” also expressed in equal proportion Jonas’ disbelief in what his older brother had told him. Jonas had heard enough of the stories which the Crown Prince gathered from the staff to know better than to take everything he said at face value.

Leaves from the huge green vine that climbed the walls outside filtered the sunlight flowing through the crisscrossed panels of real glass in the window nearest the boys. Jonas could have sworn that time had slowed to a crawl on this warm afternoon. The light from Metis seemed to stand still as it played on the blue and white polished marble mosaic in the floor and the polished dark wood of the walls opposite.

It seemed an impossible cruelty to be left inside to study on such a wonderful sunny day. Friday afternoons were normally a low-key day off for the boys. They read or did a little homework in either their quarters or, when the weather allowed, the beautiful gardens which erupted from the back of the palace they called home. However, today they had been assigned to the library by their tutor Dmitri, with strict instructions to review the playbook for this evening’s visit to the palace by their father’s only undefeated vassal, Duke Malek. Dmitri was off in meetings all afternoon with most of the staff, making sure the last details of the weekend were in place.

A playbook was the ‘bible’ for important events at the palace. There was one of these on file in the archives for every event going back to the original investiture of the House of Athena, almost five hundred and seventy years before. They were excruciatingly detailed, covering items such as which hall the King would walk and what events were to take place each minute of the visit.