Hunted (21 page)

Of course, lots of folks speculate on what Fasskisters look like. The species has to be pretty small to fit inside those chests…the size of an otter or a big barn cat. Most diplomats on our mission believed Fasskisters were nothing but great big brains: the rest of their bodies withered up shortly after birth, and their robot shells provided everything necessary to keep the brains alive. Samantha thought this theory was too tame—that the old brain-in-a-box cliché was melodramatic hooey, and the truth was probably a lot stranger and more interesting—but neither she nor anyone else could say for certain.

One thing everybody knew was that Fasskisters could change robot bodies whenever they wanted; and on that first night of our mission to Troyen, all the Fasskisters came in identical mock-ups of a Mandasar queen—-each full-size and sulphur yellow, with four working claws, bright green venom sacs, and a brain hump even bigger than Verity’s.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they all came reeking of royal pheromone…which none of us humans could smell, but which practically paralyzed every Mandasar but the high queen.

Royal pheromone is a special scent queens can produce at will. One whiff is enough to reduce other Mandasars to trembling wrecks—barely able to think straight, and pathetically eager to do whatever the queen tells them. Like an obedience drug you inhale. It takes a heck of a lot of self-control for any Mandasar to resist it, and most don’t even try. After all, why would you disobey your rightful ruler?

Verity hardly ever used the pheromone herself; she thought it was beneath her dignity, doping her subjects into submission. Almost no one in the palace had ever smelled the stuff before, till the Fasskisters doused themselves like it was cheap perfume. Heaven knows how the Fasskisters reproduced the pheromone—maybe a secret team of nanites hung around Verity till she produced some, after which the nanites carried a sample home for analysis. However they did it, the Fasskisters had obviously worked out the formula to perfection…because every last warrior, worker, and gentle dropped belly down and groveled as the Fasskisters pranced into the hall.

Every voice fell quiet. No sound but the babble of fountains and the slow thud of feet as the Fasskisters came forward. The six of them stepped over each prostrate body in their way, walking up to the silver dais that Verity used as a throne. I had no experience reading Mandasar facial expressions back then, but any fool could see the queen was almost homicidally furious. Any second, I could imagine her saying,
To hell with sentience and the League of Peoples, these Fasskister fucks are going down.

That’s when Samantha stepped forward, straight in front of the Fasskisters, between them and the throne. I stayed right at Sam’s side, determined to protect my sister for the full second and a half it would take the queen to kill me. The two of us stood bang in the middle, with six elephant-sized robots to our right, and a seething Verity, just as big and up on a meter-high dais, to our left. I felt small and surrounded, outnumbered and overshadowed…so it was a darned good thing I had absolute confidence Sam would fix everything with a few clever words.

“My job,” she said, “is to get people to talk. When people aren’t ready to talk…” She turned toward the Fasskisters. “When they just want to piss everybody off and deliberately cause
scenes
…” Sam reached into her handbag. “Then you need a way to catch their attention.”

She pulled out a small globe of glass crystal. Every eye in the room followed her hand as she passed the globe to me. Under her breath, she murmured, “Break it.”

For a second I hesitated—I hated all the fuss whenever I broke something—but Sam was smarter than me and must know what she was doing. With a sudden clap of my hands, I smashed the globe between my palms.

Glass tinkled down to the floor. Little drops of my blood fell too, though my palms were callused enough from martial arts that I didn’t get cut too badly. What I felt more clearly than the shards of glass digging into my skin was a kind of fuzziness in the air between my fingers: nano.

I lifted my arms and spread them wide, feeling blood trickle down my wrists; but I could imagine the teeny nano-bots fanning out, zipping toward the Fasskisters who loomed above us.

The closest Fasskister must have known enough to worry about what the crystal held—Fasskisters of all people know about nanotech weapons—so the big queen robot tried to take a step back. The body moved, but the legs stayed where they were, quietly separating themselves from the main shell. With a muffled thud, the robot’s body clumped onto the turquoisy blue carpet. The legs stayed standing a heartbeat longer, then toppled sideways away from the body, like tent poles flopping down from a collapsed tent.

Some of the other Fasskisters tried to get away; the rest stayed rooted to the spot, maybe thinking they’d be all right if they didn’t move. But it didn’t matter. Within ten seconds, the legs fell off every queen robot there, leaving the big yellow machines (and their drivers) stuck high and dry in the middle of the hall.

Verity’s antennas and whiskers slowly relaxed from anger into a very satisfied smile. The other Mandasars, noses still full of royal pheromone, stayed quivering on the floor till she said to them, “Laugh.”

The room erupted into sound—kind of like human snickering, not loud but intense, with much waving of antennas and clacking of claws. A bunch of warriors dragged the broken robots out of the palace and took them to Diplomats Row, where the legless queens were left on the curb outside the Fasskister embassy. Meanwhile, Verity showered praises on Sam and me, declaring us Beloved Companions of the Throne.

Our first night in the Great Hall might have won Verity’s friendship, but it sure didn’t soothe the bad feelings between Troyen and the Fasskisters. Things got worse…especially because Fasskisters began to use their royal pheromone all around the planet. In a business meeting with Mandasar manufacturers, they might let a bit of the pheromone loose “just to aid in negotiating a fair deal.” There were also rumors of pheromone bombs being triggered in taverns or schoolrooms, and someone telling the gas-shocked Mandasars to rebel against the queen.

I don’t know if such things really happened; but rumors started circulating, and next thing you knew, Fasskister warehouses were getting burned by Mandasar vigilantes. The Fasskisters reacted by protecting their properties with really nasty security stuff, not quite lethal but pretty darned near—poisons that could cause permanent nerve damage, booby traps designed to cripple, flash bombs so bright they blinded every Mandasar within range, including innocent bystanders.

As time went on, Sam negotiated agreements to ease the tensions, but nothing ever stuck. Troublemakers were jailed or kicked off planet; then more troublemakers took their place.

Of course, kicking rabble-rouser Fasskisters off Troyen caused problems of its own. A lot of times, when the Fasskisters had a chance to cool off and think, they’d begin to doubt whether their behavior had been 100 percent sentient. Pretty soon, the banished Fasskisters turned pure terrified how they’d acted “without due concern for sentient life,” and they moaned they’d surely be killed by the League if they left the Troyen system. Our navy ended up paying the Fasskisters to build themselves an orbital habitat close to Troyen’s sun—part of some settlement Sam brokered, as the Technocracy tried to keep both Troyen and the Fasskisters happy.

Why did the Technocracy bother with the expense? Because humans needed Mandasar medical technology and Fasskister robotics. Once we got involved in the mess, we couldn’t walk away without infuriating both our trading partners. And as the situation on Troyen got worse, we all still thought the bickering could be sorted out with just one more formal accord.

Sure.

In one of those accords, I got married to Queen Verity. Sometimes I think Sam set it up as a joke—so she could claim to be the only twenty-fifth-century human who’d arranged a diplomatic marriage. She also had a great time teasing me about snuggling up to an elephant-sized lobster…which I didn’t actually do, not in any sexual way.

Unlike gentles, queens don’t go into egg-heat on a nine-year cycle. Instead, they produce an egg once every twelve weeks; at the right time, they grab themselves a warrior, do what has to be done, then forget about sex till the next egg comes along. In other words, queens are nearly as platonic as gentles: when they have sex, it’s about fertilizing eggs, not, um…well, about all the things that sex is about with humans. Since I was the wrong species, Verity would never even
think
about me at such times.

(Then again, she gave me all those maidservants to sleep with. It never occurred to me before this very second, but maybe she thought I might want to…um.)

I haven’t said much about the other queens: Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. They each had their own huge continents to rule, like provincial governors who answered to the high queen. The lesser queens were never too happy being subservient, but they’d got along okay till things turned tense with the Fasskisters. Then the whole political order started to fall apart. When the world goes to pot, queens have this natural instinct to boss folks around. It doesn’t matter whether they have any good ideas to deal with the crisis, they’re just absolutely convinced they must
take charge.

That’s what happened with the Fasskister mess: clamp-downs on the Fasskisters, or the Mandasars, or both. While Verity sat in Unshummin and tried to keep everyone cool, the lesser queens ached to exert their own power. Next thing you knew, each lesser queen had created a secret police force to deal with the troubles…and these forces were made up of segregated warriors.

Segregated:
kept in separate barracks, where they didn’t interact with workers or warriors. In troubled times, the queens said, it was important to have elite squads of soldiers who would take orders without asking the tiniest questions. Maybe some bleeding hearts would condemn this as brainwashing, but it was just so darned
efficient.

Verity had to tread softly—if she angered the lesser queens too much, they might revolt outright. Lesser queens had rebelled against the high queen before. So maybe a few segregated warriors weren’t so bad. And after that, what was wrong with segregating workers in key industries, to make sure production didn’t decline? And segregating a few gentles to use in think tanks, because they were so much more focused when not distracted by family.

You get the idea: the thin edge of the wedge prying Troyen apart. But law and order still might have survived if someone hadn’t cracked open the frozen queens.

Just outside the grounds of the high queen’s palace stood the Royal Cryogenic Center: storehouse for the next generation of Troyen’s rulers. The thing was, only an existing queen could create a new queen, by nursing a six-year-old gentle girl for a full year. Then what did you do? It was really really dangerous to have queens hanging around when there was no land for them to rule—that’d just be asking for trouble.

In olden days, the solution was usually for a queen to avoid suckling up a successor till very late in life—by the time the new queen was ready to rule, the old queen would likely be dead anyway. But anyone can see how many things can go wrong: a queen might die before she creates an heir; the queen might create an heir but die before the girl is old enough to take over; the old queen might actually live a long long time, leaving the younger queen seething and plotting a coup.

So the modern approach was for queens to produce heirs whenever they wanted, let the girls grow to age eighteen under the guidance of their mothers, then freeze the kids into suspended animation till one of the old queens died. This made sure there were always young queens ready to take over, but kept them from interfering with their seniors. Even if the junior queens weren’t too happy being put on ice, they accepted it as a reasonable compromise—it guaranteed that sometime down the road, maybe two or three generations after she was born, each queen would have her full chance to reign, without having to fight other claimants to the throne.

All well and good…till the night when I was woken by a huge whacking explosion near the palace.

I leapt out of bed and shouted something stupid like, “What was that?” But the maidservant who’d been keeping me company didn’t answer: she just lay there trembling like a scared rabbit. By then, I knew the symptoms well enough—even if I couldn’t smell it myself, there must be a ton of royal pheromone wafting through the air. The pheromone couldn’t have come from Verity, since she was gone on a visit to Queen Fortitude; I suspected the Fasskisters had set off a big old gas bomb somewhere close by, and they were now up to no good in the palace.

The palace guard had learned to take precautions against pheromone attacks, with gas masks part of their standard equipment and a few airtight security control rooms. I ran to the nearest of those rooms to see what was going on; die sergeant on duty told me the explosion wasn’t in the palace itself, but the Cryogenic Center next door. That was very bad…especially since the palace forces couldn’t spare many people to check out the situation there. They were afraid the big boom was just a diversion to draw guards outside the walls, while the real target was the palace.

In the end, I ran to the Cryogenic Center by myself. Well, not by myself—I didn’t have a squad of warriors backing me up, but I sure wasn’t the only person hurrying to see what the explosion had done. Half the folks from Diplomats Row were racing in the same direction, Divians, Myriapods, even a thing that looked like a tumbleweed with eyestalks. Me, if I’d been a diplomat, I would have stayed in a nice safe embassy rather than going to gawk at the latest act of terrorism in a not-quite-declared war; but diplomats are real big fans of viewing atrocities close-up, and maybe getting their pictures taken in the process.

By the time I got to the Cryogenics building, my sister was already standing outside, staring at a big hole in the wall. Gushers of steam poured out through the gap, so thick you couldn’t see a thing inside…but you could hear sounds like metal clanging and stuff getting thrown against other stuff. Someone in there was making a real mess.