Fearful Symmetry (The Robert Fenaday and Shasti Rainhell Chronicle Book 2) Read online

  “As you wish,” Jenner said. “The bathroom is through there.”

  Jenner looked at their equipment, discarding a jacket of Kim’s she ruled too ostentatious for his social status. Only Rigg, for all his size and lean strength, and Minaravitch, with her beautiful and symmetrical Russian face, could pretend to claim a status marginally exceeding Jenner’s own. Jenner discarded a dress of Minaravitch’s, pulling out something more suitable from her own closet. “That dress,” Jenner said, “isn’t even close. It would be fine on a comedian. Who picked this material out for you? Was your briefing no better than this?”

  Rigg shrugged. “Best guess I imagine. It’s not a secret to you that we came with less preparation than these missions usually get.”

  Shasti chose a black, form-fitting body suit and a jade green jacket to match her eyes. “Am I all right?” she asked uncertainly. She had little experience of even Olympian civilian society.

  “Aristos can wear anything,” Jenner replied. “A woman of your breeding would display your physique with pride, so you are quite in fashion. That’s good. You’re far too big for anything of mine to be alterable. My jacket won’t even cover your shoulders. I can take in this other for Minaravitch.”

  “Good,” Rigg said. “Everybody else get some sack time. We have a lot of ground to cover in the morning.”

  *****

  Morning dawned over the desert. Shasti greeted it alone. She’d been suffering a mix of emotions since returning to her homeworld. Sleep eluded her, so she’d opted for guard duty. It gave her time to think, to remember things she usually blocked from her conscious mind.

  Her life on Olympia had been hard, the training strict, but it had not been all bad. She remembered enjoying the animals in the K-9 Corp. She’d excelled with all weapons, including her hands. Even as a child, Shasti knew she was something special from Jalgren Pard’s interest in her. At fifteen, Pard introduced her to sex. Shasti did not question it and had taken to the physical pleasure eagerly. She’d felt honored when told of her impending marriage to Pard. It never occurred to her that she had a choice. All her life she’d obeyed orders without question.

  Pard finished teaching her normal lovemaking. Then the trouble began. He enjoyed using force, inflicting pain. He’d taught her to enjoy sex but could not teach her to enjoy such games. With that, everything between them came undone. She no longer saw him as a god-like force of genetics and power but as a degenerate.

  She finally recognized their marriage for a mockery, his public claim of ownership. Worse still, she saw herself as an expensive, beautifully made toy, held for his exclusive use. Her training as an assassin and bodyguard gave her pride. Life with Pard denied her that pride. She began to learn of the world outside Pard’s domain, enough to realize what she’d been cheated of.

  Shasti waited her chance, enduring his abuse as best she could. Until one night, overconfident, he did not have her drugged or partially bound. Her hands tensed on her weapon as she remembered that night…

  *****

  Shasti had secreted a kubaton in Pard’s bedchamber, slipping it between the pillow and headboard. She hadn’t struggled the last few times he had taken her, or rather had struggled feebly, letting him think that he had at last dominated her.

  “On the bed,” Pard said, his eyes roaming over her slender body. She feigned submission, stretching out on the bed and buying time to reach under the pillow for the small metal spike of the kubaton. She felt the bed sink under his weight as he positioned himself above her. Her hand seized on the kubaton and Shasti exploded into action. Pard, not anticipating a fight, missed his block, and the weapon slammed into his temple. Any other man would have died. It only knocked Pard on his side, though blood splattered on the sheets. He even managed a swing that knocked her off the bed. Like a tigress, she’d sprang back at him. He staggered upright just as she crashed into him.

  Shasti was two hundred pounds of perfectly engineered, organic killing machine, the latest model. Her bones bent and gradually reshaped. Pard, for all his massive size and strength was First Generation Engineered. His bones broke. Her system pumped adrenaline and painkiller into her body. Cuts ceased bleeding almost instantly. Pard, powerful as he was, couldn’t shake off the blow to the temple and he was too slow to catch the decades-younger Rainhell, powered by her frenzy of loathing.

  Shasti feinted left and then drove low, catching his groin in her right hand and straining it through her fingers. Pard’s agonized howl finally alerted the exterior guards. They began to yell through the door. Shasti abandoned piling killing blows on Pard, who still weakly warded her off, to leap to the doorway just as the door crashed open. The first guard plunged past her. Shasti landed a knife-edged palm on the second guard’s neck, snatched his weapon out of the air and shot the first guard. Shasti whirled to finish Pard, only to see him disappearing behind a secret door. The weapon bucked in her hands on full auto. Blood splashed on the door as it sealed, but she couldn’t tell if she had killed him.

  Shuddering with reaction and loathing, Shasti pulled herself together. She had only minutes to make her escape. Shasti pulled a dead guard’s jacket over the bedroom things Pard forced her to wear, grabbed both weapons and fled. She killed everyone she encountered: guards, visitors, servants, a terrified maid. They were all apparatus of her rapist. All his things. Nothing in her life had introduced her to the concept of noncombatant, and the greater the confusion, the more chance of escape. Shasti started fires with her weapons, caused explosions. She hoped much of the encampment would react to the attack as if it were an exterior threat, never dreaming she was the cause. She shot a young valet in the garage, leapt into an aircar and disappeared into the night.

  Hours later Shasti had traded the use of her body to an offworld spacer and escaped Olympia. She killed that spacer at their next port of call and fled into Kandara’s spaceport underworld, promising herself to remain free or die. More killing secured her a position with a local enforcer. Shasti was merciless, having never learned mercy, but she did not enjoy killing as an end in itself. Gradually, she came to prefer bodyguard duties and acquired a reputation. Offworld contracts followed. Every chance she got, she worked her way farther away from her homeworld.

  Now she was back and there would be hell to pay.

  Chapter Three

  Rigg roused the others shortly before dawn. After securing the heavy weapons and equipment, they dressed in street clothes and grabbed a hasty breakfast.

  “I have two vehicles outside,” Jenner said. “That will make our party appear smaller and we can travel separately. Rainhell, I want you to ride in the coupe, posing as an insurance consultant for the Trakia Mutual Combine. I’ll be your secretary. Rigg, you’re our bodyguard. Olympia is a semi-lawless world. An Aristo like Rainhell would have a bodyguard, even several.”

  “You others will ride in the light truck. Your cover is that you are agricultural workers on a trip to the capital.”

  “Good,” Kim said, slapping his hands together. “Rubes heading for the big city. It may explain any lapses we make.”

  “Just so,” Jenner replied as she packed her suitcase. “Rainhell and I can cover Rigg. As bodyguard he won’t do much talking anyway.”

  “Strong and silent, that’s me,” Rigg said.

  Shasti looked at him with an arched eyebrow.

  “Okay,” he growled, “it’s you.”

  Jenner looked a little perplexed at their by-play.

  “Let’s go,” Rigg said, grabbing Jenner’s case off the bed. They loaded the red sport coupe and the larger green truck-van, quickly leaving the farmhouse behind.

  The team drove out of the mountains and high desert districts, making good time heading for the capital and the seacoast. When they stopped in towns and restaurants, sometimes they pretended to know each other, sometimes to meet for the first time. Other times, they didn’t communicate at all. Olympia, difficult to land on for offworlders, was not difficult to travel in. Society was factioned between the s
electively bred and the genetically engineered, then between different groups of the Engineered.

  In the late afternoon of the sixth day, their vehicles crested a highway and pulled into a scenic overlook. Shasti stepped out of the car and stretched, glad to be free of its confines. The others piled out too, also glad of the break from the long drive. Shasti walked over to cliff edge and looked out. The air was humid and smelled faintly of the sea; they had outrun fall for the time being.

  “Marathon,” Jenner said from behind her.

  The capital city gleamed in whites, blues and silver, stretching for miles.

  “I can see the coastline beyond,” Minaravitch shaded her eyes from the strong sun.

  “Not bad,” Rigg added. “It’s got a fair skyline. You folks like to build up. Good. I had enough of underground cities on Enshar.”

  “It’s grown,” Shasti said with the faint surprise of the returned traveler.

  “Population 2.1 million,” Jenner smiled. A hint of colonial pride sounded in her voice.

  “You can see how it was all planned,” Rigg said. “All very orderly.”

  “Olympians hate random chance,” Shasti said. “We like it all mapped and pre-planned whether it’s a city or a strand of DNA.”

  “Has kind of a Mediterranean look to it,” Minaravitch said. “Like somebody grabbed a tour book of Greece and decided to update the ruins.”

  “Enough sightseeing,” Jenner said. “Let’s get going. We want to make it before evening.”

  On reaching Marathon, they moved into one of two safe houses Jenner’s cell set up. Shasti chose the larger, so they could be housed together. They took several apartments in the structure, connected by interior doors. The neighborhood was transitional, frequented by business travelers and Aristos either at the beginning of the way up in life or on the skids down. People minded their business. Shasti switched their cover. Now they posed as a team of disaster consultants looking for work.

  Jenner contacted the other members of her cell, seeking information on Pard’s movements and the purchases of armaments. “It’s safer for both teams if we don’t meet face to face,” she answered when Rigg asked about the cell members. Rigg didn’t like it but he couldn’t argue with the logic.

  Shasti began checking the places Pard had frequented during their brief marriage. She found all the changes in Marathon a bit bewildering. The population had doubled. Many of Pard’s old haunts, including his city home, were gone. Denshi’s downtown offices had not moved, though it seemed most of their operations had been transferred to the old desert training facilities outside Marathon. That facility had grown into a huge installation, nearly a fortress.

  They split up and began to follow leads, seeking contact with their target. Pard remained elusive. The head of the Denshi order kept his movements secret and had not been seen in person for some weeks. Shasti began to fear they would have to take him at the Denshi’s public offices in Marathon. This made the mission far more difficult. Chances of success and survival dropped to minimal. They continued to search.

  *****

  Weeks passed and they were no closer to accomplishing the sanction on Pard. Shasti, Jenner and Rigg headed back to the apartment after a day’s fruitless search. They stopped at a market for groceries and necessities, which Jenner and Rigg carried. It would appear strange for an Aristo like Shasti to carry anything. The oppressive stickiness of Marathon’s tropical fall was breaking. It would be winter soon. As they turned onto the street, the same sense of wrongness Shasti had felt in London struck her again. Nothing showed in her face as she turned to the others. “Tara, I want to take a look at that electronics store.”

  Jenner, addressed by her assumed name, nodded and followed. Rigg trailed her. Shasti triggered a portable music com, hoping it would defeat any sound-detecting equipment aimed at them. They stepped into the storefront. Shasti pretended to be looking at a computer monitor. “Something’s wrong,” she said to her companions over the music. “It’s rush hour and there are too few people on the street. Those here don’t look right.”

  Rigg cursed and looked up at the apartment. “The towel is out on the window.”

  Shasti looked at him, annoyed. “I’m aware of that. Don’t look again. The team may not be aware of any problem and have hung out the all clear. Or they are dead and someone else has hung it.”

  “What do we do?” Jenner asked. Shasti looked into the older woman’s drawn and frightened face and felt a moment’s pity for her. Jenner was not cut from the same merciless cloth as she and Rigg. It hardly seemed fair.

  Shasti used her excellent peripheral vision, looking beyond the others. She could see several men lounging in doorways behind them, with no obvious reason for doing so. Denshi or police, she thought. They must have trailed them onto the block. So the gate was shut behind them. There were too many people who looked like police or troops on the street. Surely more snipers and others laired out of sight. It’s sad, she thought, to die, leaving Pard to pollute the universe. She regretted not lingering on that last kiss with Robert Fenaday, lingering enough to taste it now.

  “We need to run,” she said, with no hint of her interior deathsong. “There are too many hostiles on the street and that’s just the ones we can see.”

  “I’m not leaving my people without trying to warn them,” Rigg snapped.

  Shasti looked at him as if at a child. “They can’t get out,” she said patiently. “They will be blocked on all four sides, above and below.”

  “I’ve got to try,” he said, eyes locking on hers.

  She thought a second. “We’ll go into the store and use the phone. We can fight our way out the back and hope they overlooked it.”

  “Hah,” Jenner said.

  Shasti turned off the music com. “I’m going to buy the Zuidai monitor,” she said for any listeners. They had little chance; still even a few seconds of indecision would help. The others followed her as she pushed open the glass doors and stepped into the store. Shasti strode up to the counter with all the imperiousness of her class. She noted one man she suspected was police, then spotted the rear door. “I want the Zuidai monitor in the window,” she told the clerk.

  The store clerk nodded, not meeting her eyes. His physique would be the source of much admiration offworld. On Olympia, his shortness and lack of facial symmetry marked him as a recessive and lower class. Shasti’s engineered senses detected the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the smell of chemical fear on him. So they’re in here too, she thought. “My man needs to place a call on your phone.”

  “Yes, madam,” he muttered.

  From outside came the sharp crack of a rifle shot, then the sounds of a fusillade. Shasti’s hand flashed out, driving the clerk to the ground. Her other hand snapped her auto-pistol from under her arm in a liquid move. Two Olympian police charged from the storeroom door. She shot both through their visors. Their visor armor was no match for the illegal, hyper-velocity, AP rounds the team’s weapons fired. People screamed, the smart ones dropped to the floor. Others ran. One man fled out the front. Police fire struck him, and he crashed into the show window.

  Rigg shot the man Shasti had marked as a policeman. He didn’t see a smaller woman Shasti would never have suspected of being Olympian police. The policewoman shot Rigg in the shoulder with one round. He spun to the ground. Shasti hit the policewoman in the left eye before she could fire again. Jenner fumbled her gun out, but didn’t get a shot off.

  Shasti snatched up a weapon from the floor, flicked it to full auto and emptied the weapon across the storefront, exploding the remaining glass, hopefully delaying reinforcements. Rigg, pale and white, climbed to his feet, stumbling toward the back. Jenner reached to help him, pegging shots out the front. Shasti hit the rear door and ran into two more plainclothes police. She shot the woman officer. The male officer fired, missed. Shasti and he collided. Shasti’s engineered body slammed adrenaline into her blood. Almost quicker than sight, she hauled him off the ground, flinging him into t
he wall. He bounced off. Shasti shot him in mid-air.

  They dove out the rear door of the store and into the street. An unmarked police aircar idled just outside the door. The two police they’d just killed must have come out of it.

  “In,” Shasti ordered. Rigg collapsed through the open front door. Jenner jumped in the rear. Shasti raced around to the driver’s side as shots began to come down from the rooftop snipers. A laser whiffed over her but failed to stay on long enough to bite. It was like hot breath singeing her hair. Anti-personnel flechettes cracked the pavement and dented the roof of the aircar but could not penetrate it. She slid in, firewalling the throttle. There was the sound of a huge blast from the street of the apartment.

  “The explosives,” Rigg gasped. “They must have realized they were trapped.”

  “Yes,” Shasti, steering frantically around traffic, climbed to the express air lane. “If pursuit is delayed, we have a chance. There’s the other safe house.” The aircar raced away at two hundred KPH, leaving the confusion and a towering cloud of smoke from the destroyed apartment in their wake.

  “You’ll never make it with me,” Rigg said tightly. Jenner broke out the car’s medical kit. She sprayed the wound with sealfoam, using a trauma tab to inject painkiller into him. “As soon as we get a distance away, you two get out. I’ll take the aircar and draw the pursuit.”

  “No,” Shasti said. She checked scanners and mirrors. Nothing close. She dropped out of the express lane, Changed streets and levels, heading back for the ground where the car would be less conspicuous. Rigg’s tough, she thought. If he can manage a few blocks and some public transit, we’ll make it.

  Rigg smiled through the pain. “Don’t get sentimental now, Rainhell. Stay in character, willya?”

  “No,” she repeated, “you were right back there. We had to try.”

  “Rainhell.”

  “No. Fenaday wouldn’t do it. What I’ve learned of being human, I learned from him.”