Was Once a Hero (44 page)

Eventually Sandara collapsed, exhausted. Shasti felt vaguely frustrated
despite the other woman’s enthusiasm. At least the experiment confirmed her
belief that she preferred men. She wondered if it was her genetic programming
or her own desires shaping this.

Shasti showered and dressed quietly, but Sandara woke as she put on her
shoes.

“Won’t you stay?” Sandara asked blinking sleep out of her eyes.

“No,” Shasti said. “I have
work
to do in the
morning.”

“Please take my number,” Sandara
asked,
disappointment on her face. “Call me before you leave Earth. I’d love to see
you again.”

Shasti took it to avoid argument. Clearing the door of the apartment,
she threw the number away, dismissing Sandara from her mind.

A hangover couldn’t be as easily forgotten, even by her genetically
engineered body. She’d allowed the alcohol in her blood too long. Still she
detoxed faster than a standard human. A growing depression waited beyond the
physical misery. As she walked back toward her hotel, it occurred to her what
she done with Sandara was callous, even brutal, a symptom of the emotional
deadness with which she struggled.

A final revelation lay beyond that one. Fenaday would be hurt if he
knew. With that realization, she came face to face with what she had been
avoiding. The reason for her restlessness, for the trip away from the comforts
of his home on New Eire. She no longer belonged entirely to herself. The
realization brought a stab of an old fear. Fenaday cared for her, maybe loved
her, whatever that meant. He was not like her ex-husband, Jalgren Pard. Yet,
the thought of any man having a hold on her opened old wounds. She wanted,
needed, the closeness he offered, but the reflexive habits of a lifetime bound
her.

Suddenly she felt a new emotion, shame. She should not have been with
someone else. Created as property, Shasti would die before becoming chattel
again, but standard humans made different claims on each other. They lost some
freedoms, gaining new and different ones. The thought of the hurt Fenaday would
feel gave her a strange, weak feeling. When she finally reached her own hotel,
sleep eluded her. She sat by the window, watching the city lights, feeling more
alien than ever. Hours later the sun came up, and she was no wiser for the
vigil.
Well,
she thought,
I can at least do what he sent me here for.
Quickly, she dressed and summoned her security.

*****

Shasti spent a long day negotiating the purchase of a five-thousand-ton
Standard Assault Transport from the Confederacy. The vessel would be perfect
for landings on unimproved fields on Colony worlds. She left the Confederate
embassy, deciding to walk back to the hotel alone. Her hired security
protested, but the driver dropped her back in downtown London as she directed.

Again she wandered about the old city, hoping that the crowds of humans
would ease her aloneness. They didn’t. She wandered deeper and deeper into her
own thoughts.

As Shasti turned the corner by Harrods, something jarred her from her
reverie. There was
a wrongness
about the street. She
drifted into the storefront and studied the area with a trained eye. It took a
few minutes, but she spotted several overlarge and bulky men, positioned where
she would have placed them. They were aware of her, trying to watch and not
watch. Another minute revealed a woman of average build with a bag the right
size to conceal an auto-pistol or laser. Shasti began to wonder about the
wisdom of her unprotected venture.

A heavyset, middle-aged black man strolled up her side of the street. It
attracted her attention, as he intended. His slow approach was meant to signal
peaceful intent. As she studied the oncoming figure, it clicked. Fenaday had
given her an exacting description of Mandela, the code name used by the
spymaster who blackmailed them into the near suicidal Enshar expedition. A
standard human, strong in his youth, she assessed, but late middle age had
begun to show. He met her eyes and smiled broadly, walking up to her.

“Fenaday described you well,” she said. With the street so crowded and
Harrods’ front door at her back, she felt safe enough. She gazed over his head
at the gunmen in the street, wishing she’d been able to smuggle a pistol into
England.

“Hello, Miss Rainhell,” Mandela said, his voice rich and pleasant. “I’ve
seen images of you. They don’t live up to the real thing.”

Shasti ignored the comment and waited.

Mandela sighed. “I have a business proposal for you.”

“Why would I consider working for you?” she asked, disinterested. “I
almost died on your previous assignment.”

“For the best of all possible reasons,” he replied in good humor. “Like
last time, I have something you want.”

“What would that be?” she asked.

“How would Jalgren Pard’s head on a silver platter suit you?” He smiled
again.

Shasti faced him directly for the first time. Something terrible looked
out of her beautiful eyes. Mandela froze; the gunmen in the street shifted
nervously.

“Keep the platter,” she said in a silky undertone known to very few
still alive. Mandela offered her a chance for something she longed for, even
dreamed of, Pard’s death at her own hands. Only one thing could bring the
spymaster to her, an assassination.

“I take it I have your interest,” the spymaster said. He turned, waving
a hand. The woman with the bag nodded and spoke into a concealed mike. A
late-model aircar, its road wheels down, cut through traffic and pulled to the
curb.

“May I offer you a lift?” Mandela asked.

She remained still and silent for a few seconds, evidently surprising
Mandela. She was thinking of Fenaday. On Enshar, he’d impulsively promised to
help her against Pard, if they lived. She didn’t doubt that Robert would fight,
even die, to protect her, but it was another thing to go into the lion’s den.
It suddenly came to her why she’d never reminded him of the promise. She’d
feared Fenaday would follow her to almost certain death on Olympia.
Unconsciously, she had put Pard as far from her thoughts as she could,
delaying
the crisis. Shasti stood, hovering between the life
only recently opened for her and death—hers or Pard’s.

“Yes,” she said, choosing death.
I
can’t give up a chance at killing Pard,
she thought fiercely.
I can’t forgive what he did to me, how he
touched me, what he made of me. It’s all I know,
she thought, in mixed
relief and sorrow.
If I live,
she
promised herself,
maybe I will be able to
make it up to Robert. If not, maybe he will be better off anyway.

Chapter Two

A month later, Shasti stood next to Captain Daniel Rigg, Confederate Air
Space Assault Teams, on the small bridge of the Marine Raider,
Wraith
. Rigg had led the ASATs on the Enshar
expedition. At six-foot-six and in perfect training, he could pass for one of
the lower to middle orders of Olympia’s genetically stratified society. Next to
them, Captain Wargo, the
Wraith’s
skipper, stared intently at the images on her screens as the five-thousand ton
attack transport crept toward Olympia’s orbit. The other four members of the
bridge crew manipulated boards and controls in the low, red light of the
horseshoe shaped bridge. The world Shasti fled years ago loomed in the screens
of the stealthy marine raider.

“Olympia,” Shasti said, “an ideal gone mad.”

“How’s that?” Rigg asked.

Shasti shrugged.

“Come on, Rainhell,”
Rigg said, a smile playing over his dark, lean face. “Talk once in a while.
I’ve read what there is to read. I need more. You’re my native guide. Start
guiding.”

After a moment, she replied. “You’ve been to some of the separatist
colonies.”

“Yeah. They didn’t always work out as well as New Eire. Think of:
Retief, Sappho, Lakota, and that disastrous Croat Colony.”

“Olympia is unique,” Shasti said. “It’s a creed, not an ethnic group.
Many of Earth’s finest athletes followed Dr. Allessandro to this place. After
minimal terraforming, they built a society based on ancient Greece’s worship of
human perfection. The healthiest mind, but only if in the healthiest body. It
started with high ideals and beneficence. It degenerated to where the deformed
or ugly need not apply. To where people became products. Olympians are supermen
and superwomen. Failing to measure up courts death.

“Most of humanity
regard
us as a bizarre cult.
Only a few Olympians served in the Conchirri War and only under their own
officers.”

“Things are changing,” Rigg observed. “When the Conchirri brought the
roof down, going your own way seemed like less of a great idea. Even the Moroks
and the Dua-Denlenn have stayed in the wartime alliance.

“We’re here to make sure it stays that way,” he added. “Pard and the
Olympian government are buying surplus ships and weapons at a phenomenal rate.
Part of the buildup is showing up in a much more robust Olympian military, much
to the annoyance of Mr. Mandela. He wants to know where the rest of the stuff
is going. Mandela tried getting sanctions passed, but the legislature wouldn’t
go for it. Too many individual planets are strapped for cash and want to sell
their surplus military equipment.”

Shasti shrugged. She didn’t care about the government’s motivations; she
wanted Jalgren Pard.

“There’s a nice ice ring looping around the planet,” Wargo said. “Never
saw a ringed Earth-type world before.”

“An ice-comet shattered in Olympia’s orbit sometime before the planet
was colonized,” Shasti said.

“Must be pretty at night,” Rigg said. “Good for tourism.”

Shasti eyed him.

“Joke,” he said.

“Olympia is very mountainous,” Shasti said, turning back to the screens,
“with many volcanoes. The interiors are deserts, freezing at night, brutally
hot in the day. Most of the settled areas of the planet are in the greener,
more comfortable equatorial regions. That’s where we will find Marathon, the planetary
capital. It’s on the coast, at the foot of a gigantic plateau.”

“Not a lot of ocean,” Rigg observed. “Well, we won’t have to worry about
parachuting into the sea then.”

“There will be plenty to worry about without that,” Shasti continued.
“Our weapons will be enough to deal with the oscots, vendran and other
wildlife. My fear is running into a Denshi patrol or a force of Olympian
regulars. What is the latest from your ground contact?”

“We’re still on for a HALO drop over the northern sector near Manki, at
0300,” Rigg said. “Nothing new. I hate landing so far from the capital city,
but we don’t dare drop any closer. It will take at least a week to get from
Manki to Marathon. Then we’ll have to see what we can do about getting a shot
at Pard.”

“Pard,” she
said,
her voice cold as February
moonlight.

Rigg looked at her curiously. He knew she held a grudge against Pard,
though he didn’t know the nature of it. What he did know was that the woman was
a consummate killing machine. It comforted him to think she was with them,
until he remembered even she feared Pard.

“Yeah,” he said. “The big trick is getting off planet again.
Wraith
will wait as long as she can. The
Intruder
will head for the rendezvous
two days after the attack signal is sent. If we can’t get back to the
rendezvous point, then we’ll have to try to break out using civilian transport.
We have no other means of contacting the raider ship once the
Intruder
moves out of range.”

“I remember the briefing,” she said coolly. “As a last resort, we get to
the Confed embassy, and they try to get us out.”

“Yep, they’ll be just thrilled to see us too.”

“Mr. Rigg,” Wargo called. “ETA to the drop point is five hours and three
minutes. From there you go in the
Intruder
and hope the brain boys are right about her invisibility to detectors.
We’ve got
two big space stations and a couple of patrol
lines to cross. So far we’ve been lucky.”

“Well, time to check equipment,” Rigg said. “Thank you, Captain.”

Shasti nodded and followed. They went down the narrow, green painted
gangway to the armory.

“So, Rainhell,” Rigg said, ducking through a hatchway, “how did
assassination become so respectable on Olympia?”

“Like everything else on Olympia,” she replied, ducking even lower to
follow him in, “with the best of intentions. Allessandro knew there would be
conflict. He saw war as means by which the powerful fight each other using a
couple million proxies, ordinary people fed to the God of War by leaders who
stay behind in safety. Allessandro believed that the powerful should fight
directly, leaving civilians out of it. Society would be less disrupted, and it
supported his views on survival of the fittest. He sanctioned the Order of
Assassins, House Denshi, led by his brother-in-law.”

“Did it work?” Rigg asked as they walked onto the armory deck.

“There’ve been no wars on Olympia.”

“Can’t say the idea doesn’t have its appeal,” Rigg added. “Nice to think
of some REMFs stopping bullets or beams for a change.”