LEGACY LOST (2 page)

              Kaizen’s obsession had culminated within days of her release into the township, and he’d had Legacy arrested and brought to this very room. His bedchamber.

              He’d bathed her in a steaming tub of rose petals. He tensed at the memory of the sponge trailing down her bronze thighs, of her pouty lips opening to emit the soft cry of orgasm. He’d given her an extravagant gift of silk, taken her to see the lovebirds in the conservatory, and fought with her. Again, she mentioned the other man. He had to set her free, she said. What were they doing, she asked. And he’d agreed. They weren’t doing anything of any real sense or consequence, and he would let her go – as soon as the coronation ceremony was over.

              That morning, she’d been tense. Clingy, yet defensive, demanding and high strung. Just strange. Very unlike herself. She’d blurted then that he was the target of an assassination attempt to be perpetuated by her group, Chance for Choice, and that she had a lot to lose by confessing this, but she could not let an innocent man be murdered under her eyes. He’d gone to tell Malthus, but of course, Malthus hadn’t cared. The coronation ceremony had advanced, the automata had gone mad, and his father was killed by his own personal footman,
Valkenhayn-2.
After all the horrific carnage of the event, his own wounds patched and the dead cleared from the grounds, he’d returned to Legacy, but she’d been gone. Of course. He never quite knew what she was doing, yet he trusted her, implicitly, like an idiot.

              She was dead now. He was sure of it. The last time he’d seen her, less than two hours before the collapse, she’d wrenched from his grip and flown from him into those insane streets. If only she hadn’t been so thick-headed, she might still be alive! He could have taken care of her! And he’d heard what the Duke of Celestine had told her just prior to ascending the royal carriage!

              “
It seems that Icarus has become quite the hotbed of upheaval and unrest in these most recent days,”
he had concluded thoughtfully
. “I can assure you that the township of Celestine is a much more hospitable environment to the ideals of your people.”

              They would have accepted her there!

How had she died? he wondered morbidly. Like an open wound, he couldn’t help but analyze and prod, ensuring that it would fester and become gangrenous.

If he knew her at all, he would have to say she’d driven straight into the thick of the mayhem: the police headquarters in the business district, embroiled in those riots. Had she perhaps been broken in some way, her skull cracked, bones trampled in the hysteria? Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine this as her ending. She would never have allowed it. She would have survived the mob. But there was no way to survive a fall of that magnitude. Not when combatting such debris.

              Kaizen gulped.

              She likely perished in the same manner as every other poor soul in that city: clutching some stranger or even a wall or a post, anything, as gravity gave way beneath their feet, until the strain was too dense to bear and they were thrust against the dome, or crushed or impaled or buried in the violent impact of the fall.

              Kaizen winced, grimaced, and pressed his face deeper into the pillow.              

              For the next four hours, he alternated lying in bed with pacing and groaning and calculating the needs of a dozen, no, twenty people? Gratefully, fantasies of Legacy’s obvious death gave way to more practical concerns, and maybe he was a little like Malthus after all. He wondered how much food they would require every day, and when would that well run dry? Should their rations become staggered to imply importance? No, no, he couldn’t do that, but then, what if the crisis reached a fever pitch? The castle was its own island indefinitely, and supplies were not infinite. There was no automaton for the generation of pure matter. And would Celestine even take them? Duke Lovelace had seemed sympathetic, a friend of his father’s, even, but docking an entire castle was more than a favor. In a way, Kaizen was suddenly much like the refugees from N.E.E.R. who had caused those riots, now. Now he, too, was drifting, asking for help from people who barely had anything to give.

And even if he were accepted into Celestine’s fold, would Kaizen still lose his title as duke and become a member of the working class? What would he do then? He had no skills. He’d been almost as sequestered as Sophie. Would he be held responsible for the collapse of his city by the monarch, Archibald Ferraday the Third? Would he perhaps become a courtier? Even courtiers, after all, had their skills. The only thing for which Kaizen Taliko had been known in his week of dukedom was the total collapse of an industrial hub which had been his jurisdiction.

              Kaizen stared blankly out the sweeping bay window, peering across the sprawling property, shadowed and vacant save its bushes and paths. Beyond the glass-plated dome was the night sky sluggishly chuffing along. The scene should have been beautiful. Serene. Even transcendental. But Kaizen only felt . . . hollow. Nauseated. And trapped.

              Behind them, off to one side, he could see an airship sluggishly but steadily approaching. He’d never seen this one before, and it didn’t resemble the rigid blimps with their sleek cabins which were the typical style of the day. He would’ve remembered seeing this amusing little creature, its potbelly swaying over Old Earth, its balloon comically lumpy and apparently heavily patched.

              Hm. Kaizen had been to the aerial docks any time he was permitted to venture into Lion’s Head, the aristocratic haven of Icarus. He would’ve remembered this funny-looking thing. So where had it come from?

Pivoting from the bay window and striding out into the hall, Kaizen scanned for automata out of habit. Of course, the corridor was dark and quiet. He shared this hall with a gigantic washroom and Sophie’s bedchamber, but no sound came from either. They’d all trundled merrily off to bed, he was sure, and slept soundly now, as if the deaths of their entire citizenry weighed as heavily as a feather in a cap and life as they knew it stood unthreatened. But what was a duchess without her duchy? What was a courtier without a court? Didn’t they realize that they were likely all to be paupers soon enough?

He ventured down the rotunda, taking them two at a time, and by the time he’d reached the grand hall, he was moving at a full sprint past the tapestries and bouquets. From what township had this airship approached? It was impossible that it was from Icarus, and yet, that was the sole possibility!

When Kaizen bolted barefoot onto the grounds and ducked around the side of the palace, the airship – airboat feeling like the more appropriate term – was almost on top of them. The balloon, attached by several ropes, wasn’t the only thing patched. The hull and stern were comprised of so many metals, the dirigible appeared to be a patchwork. And at its helm, unmistakable: Exa Legacy, her silver-white braids fretting in the wind, her fish-tail skirt tarrying in the draft before her, whipping her legs, the golden vest, the boots laced to her knees.
Alive.
She was staring right at him, and it was definitely her. Those round, full cheekbones, that willful, pouting mouth. He’d know it anywhere. It was her.

Up in the castle’s keep, there were two other people who couldn’t sleep: Master Addler, who was determined to return a functional staff to the royal family within the next two days, and Neon Trimpot, kept awake by the incessant clanging of the machinist’s tools. Trimpot stood at the arched window and peered out across the night sky, silently ranting about manners and station, when he caught sight, first of Kaizen dashing off toward the aerial dock, then of that cumbersome airship – Vector’s airship, if he wasn’t mistaken? – chugging toward the island.

Trimpot tore across the keep to where Master Addler was stooped, prying open the brains of a brass skull.

“Do you have a telescope?” Trimpot demanded.

“A what now?” Master Addler asked, glancing up. Strapped over one eye was a thick, snub scope with blinking emerald lens.

“Close enough!” Trimpot replied, ripping the device from the old man’s face and skidding back against the window, leaving the shocked Master Addler to his spasms of sputters. Trimpot leaned out the window and squinted into the instrument. Yes, yes, that was definitely the old
Albatropus,
though it appeared Vector had done some work on it since Trimpot had seen it last. And my, my, that was definitely old Exa Legacy at the helm.

Hm,
Trimpot thought, collapsing the scope and tossing it blithely to the side. Master Addler scrambled after it, rambling about bad programs and poor craftsmanship and how some models would be better left to the scrap bin.
Legacy, Legacy, Legacy. Why aren’t you dead yet, my darling?

One by one, the majority of the passengers aboard the airship
Albatropus
dropped off into a fitful slumber. After successfully navigating the tail-end of a nasty thunderhead, a grim census of the manifest was performed and tallied: forty-seven in a dirigible originally meant to accommodate five to ten souls. Thirty-nine were members of the New Earth rebel faction Chance for Choice, but there were eight refugees from Old Earth present, easily distinguished by their shaven heads, gray smocks, and skeletal frames. Most did not have real names. Two of them were known as “Coal,” two “Zinc,” one “Boil,” one “Slag,” one “System,” and one unconscious since her arrival.

She still slumbered, nude and swaddled in warm blankets, in one of the five small cabins available. Most passengers slept on the floor; however, the captain, inventor Vector Shannon, made a special allowance for the two girls who had very nearly almost died: Exa Legacy, de facto Chance for Choice leader, had been literally fished from the sky, arms bound around her rediscovered twin sister. While one bore a tight midsection, chiseled biceps, and a thick head of silver-white dreadlocks, wearing a fishtail skirt, blouse, golden, winged vest and boots, the other was shaven, gray-smocked, and skeletal. However, they both shared their heart-shaped bone structure, a strong nose, and lips uniquely as lush in the upper as in the lower.

             
Albatropus
had been trundling through the Saturday evening sky for hours now, tethered beneath a large balloon, patched and re-patched much like its hull and stern and sails and everything else. They were headed south, toward the floating city of Celestine, five days’ travel if no stops were necessary. Another airship could have made the voyage in less time, but Vector had designed this darling himself, and while she was home to a laboratory and library, not to mention a giant strategy board and floors of drawers, her body type was not the most aerodynamic of things. He said they couldn’t beat twenty-five miles per hour without a strong wind to nudge them along.

              They’d already been left behind by the drove of airships which earlier fled the disaster site of Icarus, industrial hub of New Earth, duchy of the Taliko nobility, and now, the filling of a deep crater in the surface of Old Earth. It would be the first documented failure of a floating city, this ultimately caused by a maelstrom of factors. The earlier assassination of Duke Malthus had disabled the castle’s manpower, forcing it to leech auxiliary aid from local establishments, including the guard staff of Taliko Center. This, in turn, impeded the security of an illegal chemical shipment from its basement freight lift to the needy New Earth Extraneous Relocation station below. Without that chemical supply, the workers – children raised in captivity and conditioned toward slavery, of which Legacy’s twin sister was one – awoke from their mental stupor, and began to explore their environment.

              When they broke onto the surface of the geodesic island overhead, the citizens of Icarus were flung into a panic, their very presence an added weight on the already tenuous strain on resources. It didn’t take long, however, for those same citizens to realize that these N.E.E.R. refugees were also their children, stolen by the monarchy for violation of the stringent Companion Laws, which stated one child per mandated coupling. They had not been sent to another city as claimed; they’d been sent to toil on Old Earth, providing the city above with the raw materials necessary to function.

Riots surged throughout the city, punctuated by an accidental rend in the glass plating which sealed the heat beneath its dome, making life over a thousand feet above the surface of the “dead planet” possible. Icarus crashed in less than two minutes, killing all within. The lone survivors were this forty-seven, the fleeing aristocracy, and those who dwelled on the grounds of the Taliko castle at the moment that it raised its drawbridge and effectively detached itself from Icarus. (That same castle was the sole “airship” still in sight, though it was actually another heated geodesic dome with a propulsion system attached to its rear. It drifted a few hundred yards ahead, little more than a gleam of starlight on glass and the faint silhouette of spires.)

Chance for Choice stood for a lot of things, but the death of twenty-eight thousand wasn’t one of them. Their name, as of late, had come to be associated with two major tragedies. The first, what was now called The Coronal Massacre, was the assassination attempt of Earl Kaizen Taliko, a misfire which had incidentally blinded the entire staff of royal sentries and killed hundreds of innocent guests, as well as the duke himself, Malthus Taliko.

And now there was this tangential fiasco, which would undoubtedly be tallied on their resume of destruction: the collapse of Icarus.