Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future (4 page)

The outer rings of the spaceport were easily breached, but Claire and her daughters had more difficulty getting through the high levels of security that protected the incoming and outgoing ships.

Fortunately the fighting still taking place around the palace and the city around it meant that
not even the authorities guarding the port seemed entirely certain who was in charge.

Dropping the pretense of being a child, Claire
lowered the servant’s hood that hid her distinctive length of glossy black hair and stood before the guards as the well-known figure of the woman who was so recently empress of Aremia.

Even more important to her identity were the two princesses standing just behind her. Either their mother or their grandmother currently ruled the planets that made up the empire. The fact that a small revolution was spreading out from the empire’s core didn’t make Adaeze and Lillianne contain less of the all-important royal blood in their veins.

Claire faced them down and in her naturally authoritative voice told them she wished to be escorted to the royal cruiser.  As she saw the Aremian guard who to each individual towered over her five foot four body glance at each other, she could only be glad they had none of the technological communications she would have found on Earth.

Their ability to communicate to the palace for instructions
was limited. They could talk telepathically with each  other, but only over limited distances. Even the most talented could get across only a few miles and the empress had nothing of her late son’s gift to speak across this planet and throughout space to the many worlds that had been under his command.

“We wish to be escorted to the imperial cruiser immediately,” she ordered, and knowing the expression on her elder daughter’s face,
guessed that the person closest to the throne after the cousin who now occupied it, was backing up her instructions.

They were taken to the cruiser Princess Adaeze, so named after the birth of their first child. At the time she had protested that if they had other children, they might resent the name. Mathiah had laughed and said other things could be called after subsequent children and, of course, Lillianne had been honored in other ways.

The armed cruiser, the latest in a line of such space vehicles since the one that had first departed Sanctuary with Claire on board as the young emperor’s prisoner, was a state of the art vessel and kept constantly staffed by an expert and, hopefully, loyal crew.

They were given priority
take off and soon were speeding beyond the planet’s atmosphere. She didn’t allow herself to breathe easier yet. Too many problems lay ahead of them.

“Mom,” Lillianne complained. “I’m starving.”

Her sister joined her in somewhat hysterical giggles. It was most unusual for either of the princesses to lose composure in front of others, but Claire supposed she had to forgive them. They had been through so much in the last few hours.

She smiled at them. “Give instructions to the galley,” she told Adaeze, “that dinner is to be served.”

She looked up at the ship’s captain, who was an old friend of her husband’s, a man of unquestioned loyalty to his family. “To Capron,” she told him.

Dinner was served in the cabin Claire had so often shared with her husband. The first one she’d occupied as they traveled to Aremia had contained a secondary compartment, smaller in scale in both the room and the
scaled down furniture meant for the emperor’s always accompanying blood-donor, a role she had served for Mathiah at that time.

A
well-defined part of Gare society, those had been dramatized and at the same time bemoaned as something slightly less than human, but never before had a Gare actually married so disgracefully.

It was something that most members of the Gare, as well as the Aremian population in general never fully accepted, but for the first time in modern history, Mathiah and his mad father were the only living far speakers. And after the death of the deposed and dangerous former emperor,
the people had silently sighed their relief and came close to deifying her husband.

Mathiah had been revered and she had been tolerated. He had hoped to protect her by naming her regent.
Instead his own mother had taken over her position and assumed control of the empire.

Now, she thought with wicked glee, her daughters’ grandmere had the empire in her slender hands, but she might find the whole too hot to handle.

And Mathiah, who had been less than trusting of his dear Mere where his little family was concerned, had arranged several bolt holds for them.

Capron was only one of those.

Now she watched her daughters forgetting some of their usual dainty manners as they ate hungrily of the delicacies provided for their first meal in a good many hours.

They had never before gone short of anything they needed or wanted, raised as the most privileged children in the empire. They had always been carefully guarded, but never been
truly aware of danger to themselves. Trained in the military arts, they had yet never worked hard at anything other than in practice exercises.

They had been educated to command, to lead society and government.

And here she was, taking them to the most barbaric of the Aremian worlds. Capron was so insignificant in the scheme of the imperium that nobody knew much about it or its people.

For over
three hundred years, the prison planet had been allowed to go its own way. The situation had some similarity to a system in the distant past in England when offenders were sent off to Australia or America, a fate considered comparable to death.

Those sent to Capron were dismissed from society, never expected to be heard
from again.

And it was to that harsh world that Mathiah had planned  for Claire and his daughters to seek refuge if worse came to worst.

Nibbling at food which seemed tasteless, she finally came right out loud and said it. “I’m proud of my girls. The two of you could have chosen to stay with your grandmother in the lap of luxury and I wouldn’t have blamed you. And yet, here you are marching off to the hellhole of the empire with me.”

“Capron,” Lillianne said dreamily. “I would prefer to go to Blood.”

“Not much to choose between,” Adaeze told her, then took a sip of a bubbling drink.

“But we could have met mom’s friends.” From early childhood, they’d heard the stories and now her younger daughter listed the names:
“Jamie, Mack and Isaiah.”

“Can’t
bring danger to them,” Claire responded practically.

Adaeze took another sip as though for courage, a quality she didn’t normally lack. Like her mother, Ada
eze was not overly possessed with tact. She blurted things right out. “Looks like it’s already found them.”

Claire frowned fiercely, feeling her forehead crease in the way that made wrinkles. “What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t?”

The two girls exchanged a guilty gaze. “It’s only something Grandmere said,” Lillianne finally admitted.

Claire waited, staring at the two of them in the way they found hard to resist. She might be several inches shorter than them and not able to communicate telepathically,
but she was still mom!

She saw their exchange of thoughts. Then Adaeze spoke aloud, “Grandmere was really excited when she came to see us. It was because Michel was beginning to develop far speaker abilities.”

“Little Michel?” Claire asked stupidly. This was the last thing she’d expected. The boy, sensitive and frail, seemed the least likely in the family to develop the gift. He didn’t remind her at all of Mathiah with his strength and inborn poise. In fact he was more like her husband’s brother.

The thought sickened her. Her husband’s older brother had been a tragedy all in himself. Born with the curse of the gift and not its blessings, he had died horri
bly and shortly been followed in death by his Earther sweetheart and blood donor. She had loved both of them.

Would Michel be like that, requir
ing endless supplies of the blood of her people and yet unable to supply the needs of his own kind?

Then she put it all together. “They’ll be going back to New London to take more of our youngsters.” Strange how she still thought of them as her own, even though they had spent only days together back at the beginning.

She shivered slightly, remembering those days when they’d begun to vanish one by one until it was herself who was taken away by the Gare.

Jamie and the others had been captured eventually as well and used as hostages to force the deal she’d made with Mathiah to wed him and produce children with the dual heritage of Earth and Aremia in hope that the gift would be passed on and the curse left behind.

In return the small colony in New London was to be left unharmed. But now Mathiah was dead and the contract ended.

“Grandmere planned to use you first,” her oldest daughter said. “
You would have died. That’s why we had to flee.”

S
he blinked tears from her eyes, brushing them away angrily. She got to her feet, “I must go tell the captain there’s been a change of plans,” she announced and left the cabin without further explanation.

Jamie couldn’t have been more proud of his friend. Isaiah Michaels, the boy from Washington State who had the most subtle mind of them all, wasn’t always a particularly good speaker. This afternoon, however, he had risen above himself as he presented the accumulated information on the state of the Aremian Empire that so affected them all.

He was quiet, calm, matter-of-fact, holding tight to his control and refusing to yield when the more bombastic Mayor Kevin Hartley tried to shut him up. He continued quietly making his points even as the chubby, bald-headed mayor shouted for him to sit down, that he was upsetting the people.

Without raising his voice, Isaiah went on, “With the death of the emperor everything changed. Mathiah the tenth was our powerful protector, but now there is no one in government to fight for our interests.”

The first words were lost in Kevin’s shouts and the responsive roar of the crowd, but forced to silence by the need to hear what he had to say, the last words were clearly understandable.

Isaiah went on, his eyes seeming to stand out against his light skin. He used to have freckles, but now his skin was the unrelieved white that would not tan no matter how much he stayed out in the sun.

His was not a physical presence to inspire confidence, but over the years the people of New London had come to love
the gentle leader who worked so tirelessly in their interest.

Instead of keeping his eyes focused on Isaiah, Jamie allowed his gaze to drift to the face of young Alice. A pretty, delicate girl with fine, light-brown hair and her father’s eyes, she was almost as intense as he was. Now she sat unmoving, taking in every word he said.

He looked back again to Isaiah, who had obviously concluded his presentation. His friend was not one to belabor the issue; he would not go on and on just to sway the crowd. He’d told them the facts as he knew them, trying to force them to logically see the danger coming and react to it.

Now he quietly thanked them for listening and went back to his seat.

The people of New London sat in silence broken only by the sound of a wailing infant. Then Alice stood, evidencing her support of her father without a word. Immediately the others of their party—Mack, Karen, their sons and others right around them also rose to their feet.

Jamie wasn’t quite certain Isaiah would benefit from his support, but after a few seconds passed, he too got to his feet.

Throughout the crowd only a sprinkling of others did the same.

Isaiah might be loved and respected, but only a few others of his community were willing to support his militant views.

Jamie wasn’t exactly surprised. His friends and neighbors liked living in the world as presented to them by Kevin where they could live comfortable lives with no extraordinary fears.

The people who were now the adults in New London had been removed from beloved homes and families on Earth and deposited on this planet where they were to serve nothing more than a biological function for the Gare.

Nothing about them, not their personalities, their intelligence, attractiveness, courage . . .none of that had mattered. The Gare wanted them only for the qualities their  blood could produce under torture.

They didn’t want to believe that nightmare could come back.

As the meeting was dismissed and an excited buzz of conversation broke out across the crowd, Jamie’s eyes met the gaze of his long-time friends. “Time to give up,” Mack said grimly. “I’m thinking about taking Karen and the boys and going to Kyria.”

Kyria
, the pirate planet. Certainly Karen and Mack, strong and self-reliant as they were, would have a chance of surviving there.

Jamie gave a brief nod, dismissing them from his cause. “You do what’s best for your family. You can’t defend people who are blind to their own d
estruction.”

“Want to go along?” Mack asked bluntly.