Chapter Ten

Poison Versus Bone

Jenna slipped into the seat next to Fallcet in the makeshift movie theater in her living room.

“What? He didn’t want you?” Fallcet said with an arrogant huff.

“I guess I’m a lady and a diplomat and I’m not supposed to be roughed up,” she replied primly.

“I’ll rough you up,” he said in a playful way, trying something similar to Sardius.

Jenna groaned. “Look, I’m thinking of putting a Taser on you. You know, something like one of those collars they put around dogs so they get shocked if they bark. Just a pleasant reminder for you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“I bet Philip has a collar like that you could borrow,” Vash cut in. He didn’t forget his promise to badmouth Philip at every opportunity.

Philip turned red and Jenna gave Vash a thumbs up.

Excelyn interrupted them. “No need to go through my boy’s belongings. Let’s watch what Ryatt is doing.”

Jenna turned back to look at the screen.

Sardius came into the courtyard. He started by doing some basic arm stretches, then worked on his calves until Crimp arrived.

“You know, I didn’t think you were ever going to agree to this,” she said, tossing her gear aside.

“Why?”

“You must know how much I want you,” she said menacingly.

He ignored her. “Have you stretched?”

She nodded, pulling out her tape and taping her knuckles between her fingers. “I’m disappointed our fight has to have this stage. If I do well, will you let me have a real fight with you?”

“A real fight?” he echoed. “You want to fight in the ring, or in a cage, or maybe like they do in movies and video games? On a bridge or on a cliffside?”

“Any of those places are fine with me,” Crimp said as she finished up her taping. “Anywhere is fine as long as you’ll go at me with all you have.”

“I don’t think you’d like me,” he replied, tightening the half gloves he wore to protect Crimp from the sharp bones that protruded from his knuckles. “What you saw that night with the ogre was not what I’m really like in a fight. That was just a play fight for a bit of money and to get Jenna’s attention.”

She fitted a pair of liquid gloves over her hands. “You thought she’d enjoy watching you best a man twice your size? Ya know, I don’t think it had quite the effect you hoped for.”

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, getting into a fighting stance, “but I’m here, aren’t I?”

Crimp suddenly smiled and laughed. “I get it. I get IT!” she howled like she was a mastermind working at a puzzle and the last piece had finally come into place.

Sardius rolled his eyes. “You get what?”

“You weren’t trying to look like a big stud when you fought the ogre. You were trying to look like a gentleman! That was why your fight was so tame and lasted so many rounds. Because above all things, you wanted to hide from Jenna who you really are.”

He looked unphased. “Who am I really?”

“The man in the prison cell, locked away for all the wrong you did, all the hurt you caused, and all the people you killed,” the poison girl said bitingly.

He sighed. “You’re not going to rile me up. I know you're trying to provoke me so that I’ll do more than just bounce around and evade your punches and sneak a random one in to stop our fight from lasting forever. It won’t work. I don’t lose my temper.”

She stepped up to the mark and put up her fists. “Doesn’t that make you worse? You don’t kill people because of your bad temper. When you kill people, you mean to?”

“Well, I’ll be sure not to kill you,” he said before letting Crimp take the first swing.

He evaded it and blocked her second attempt with his forearm.

She pulled her punch back and shook her hand out after hitting his arm. “If I get boxing gloves now, will I seem like a wimp?”

Sardius nearly died of laughter on the spot after all her posturing that she deserved an all-out brawl. Crimp took her chance and got him twice in the face, but he still couldn’t stop laughing. She dove in again, but he blocked her.

“What are you guys doing?” Scion asked from the sidelines.

Apparently, Sardius had been successful at drawing him out. The man could smell fights.

Scion had changed his clothes. For his interview, he had worn a pinstripe suit that made him look like a mobster. Now he wore workout clothes that allowed him to show his muscles. Otherwise, he was a young man on the green side of twenty-five with a short goatee that made him look five years younger.

His entrance made Sardius stop laughing. Keeping his eyes on Scion, he took a swing at Crimp, which she dodged.

“We’re sparring,” he said with a grin.

“Here? In the middle of the night?” Scion asked.

“We’re fighting and we’re placing bets,” Crimp explained. She wasn’t looking at him, she was winding up to slug Sardius again.

“What sort of bets?” the young man asked as he edged closer.

“We’re betting on you,” she said, without reservation. “I bet that you will use your position as a diplomat on Octavia Prime to have shipments of weapons brought to the planet illegally. Then all the weapons the Adamis need to invade Octavia Prime will already be here. Ryatt disagrees. He thinks you’re an assassin, trained by your daddy, meant to kill each one of the existing diplomats in order to replace them with your own people. Then the AAMC will always have the majority vote.”

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The kid’s jaw hung open. “What?”

Sardius put Crimp in a headlock and brought her closer. “Come on, Scion. You must know that those are the sorts of things Jenna and the other diplomats are worried about. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they want you? You’re young and cute.”

“You look great through a camera lens,” Crimp added, even as she fought to free herself. “Agh, Ryatt, your arms are like the jaws of life.”

He ignored her and kept talking to Scion. “You’re well educated and you can speak to a crowd without getting rumpled or sweating. They should want you… if they weren’t terrified that you’d kill them all.”

“That’s what you’ll do,” Crimp squirmed. “Kill them all!”

Scion’s brown eyes were wide with dread.

Watching him, Jenna licked her lips as the tension mounted.

“Hey, Crimp,” Sardius said with a wicked smile. “Have you ever had a noogie from a boneman before?”

“Uh, no! Do not jab your knuckles into my head! It’ll be like scalping me!”

“Aw… but you wanted me to go hard on you. With everything I have? A noogie is light bullying compared to some of the things I can do with my knuckles.”

“Shut up, you two!” Scion shouted.

Sardius and Crimp paused.

“Are you serious?” the young man continued. “That’s what the diplomats think? That I’ll cause a war rather than help stop one?”

Sardius eased Crimp out of the headlock and the three of them stood there awkwardly.

“Well, yeah,” Crimp admitted sheepishly. “Can’t you understand, considering who your father is? If the AAMC were to go to war against the Octavians, your father would be the one to provide them with the arms. If they want that, it’s in their best interests to have you down here, helping to start one. Didn’t they explain that to you?”

“No, that wasn’t what my father said,” Scion said, with a touch of defiance in his tone.

Sardius scoffed. “And you believed him? Out of morbid curiosity and because I still think I’m right, how did your father describe your position here? If you got it?”

“He just said that I should vote as a representative of the AAMC or I should not vote at all.”

Sardius and Crimp nodded together.

“Very wise,” Sardius said.

“Very wise,” Crimp echoed.

Scion frowned. “You clearly think his instructions were the stupidest things in the world. Say what you think!”

“I think it was wise, don’t you, Crimp?”

“Very wise,” Crimp said again.

“If I was your dad, I’d be delighted,” Sarius explained. “It would be like I got a vote on the council without any of the work. I wouldn’t have to go to any of the meetings or live on Octavia Prime. I could just trust that my little proxy would vote however I said.”

Crimp chuckled. “And if I didn’t want any of the votes to be passed or counted and I just wanted to gum up the bureaucracy as much as possible, I’d tell my little dummy not to vote.”

“See? Very wise,” Sardius said, crossing his arms.

“We’re not going to see which one of us is right tonight, Ryatt,” Crimp said, slapping Sardius on the back. “This little dummy will do whatever his daddy tells him to and so, maybe we’re both right. Maybe he’ll get a bottle of wine from his dad in the mail and he’ll give it to Jenna, just like daddy told him to. She’ll drink it, drop dead, and then you can say you were right. It was assassination after all.”

“But then, he’ll get asked if he can store some boxes at his palace,” Sardius chortled in a way that was designed to get under someone’s skin. “Don’t look inside, son. There’s a completely legitimate reason why you can’t open them. So, let’s say he doesn’t open them and they’re still here when the army arrives. Then you’re right, Crimp.”

“Or let’s say he grabs a brain, opens the crates,” Crimp laughed almost hysterically, "and accidentally blows himself up! Kablooey!”

“Or maybe,” Sardius said, abruptly stopping the laughter and Crimp stopped too as if on cue. “He doesn’t get crowned. Instead, he gets shipped off Octavia Prime and Rennett gets crowned instead.”

Scion had been looking at Sardius and Crimp like they were both morons, as that was his mask when he got bullied, but when Sardius brought up the possibility that he might not get crowned, his expression became more serious.

“You think they won’t crown me?” he asked.

Sardius shrugged. “We’re telling you their worries. Are you in the pocket of your daddy? Voting for AAMC interests is not a problem. You can vote for their interests until the cows come home and we’re all fine with that. It’s part of the plan for the AAMC to have a voice in these diplomatic proceedings. What isn’t okay is that the last round of acting Adamis diplomats has already been wiped out with the exception of Jenna. Without a lot of solid proof, the best guess for who was responsible for those deaths is the AAMC. It’s not unrealistic to think that exact thing could happen again. We’re their bodyguards. We’re thinking about threats.”

“I wasn’t sent here to kill anyone,” Scion said sternly.

Sardius matched his tone and replied, “If I was going to send someone here to kill people or hide weapons, I would make sure they knew as little as possible about the operation. It would make them seem more trustworthy when questioned. Just because you don’t know about it now doesn’t mean that plans like those are not in the works over your head.”

“I didn’t have to come here,” Scion said, planting his feet firmly on the ground.

“Then why did you?” Crimp asked with a searching look in her eye like she was really interested in the answer.

Scion’s gaze traveled between Sardius and Crimp as he contemplated whether or not he could trust them.

“This conversation is confidential,” Sardius reassured him, though he left out the part that Jenna usually added, that it wasn’t private. After all, there were half a dozen people watching it unfold like it was a drama on the big screen.

Scion shook his head like he couldn’t stand his position, but if he didn’t explain, he’d get shuffled off into a pod at daybreak. “I came here because I wanted to get away from my father. He was displeased with me and gave me a collection of options that would prove to him I wasn’t a spineless coward.”

“What were the other options?” Sardius asked curiously, breaking from Crimp and taking a seat on a nearby chair.

Scion and Crimp followed suit and sat down.

The young man began, “I could join the AAMC and be fast-tracked to be an officer. The benefits of that are few. Working in space your whole life, you lose your muscle mass. It’s weird that the most violent people in the galaxy can’t lift an empty bottle on my home planet. I don’t want to live on a spacecraft because the Adamis are too greedy to accept help from the Octavians.”

Jenna bit the side of her thumb. Was Scion saying what he thought they wanted to hear?

The boy continued, “The next thing I could do was work with the testers on my father’s new line of lasers. The testing zone is in the middle of nowhere on an inhospitable planet because that’s the best place to test new weapons. He’s cracked entire planets in half and I have no taste for it. I am not a mass destruction kind of man. How will you know if you’re doing what’s right fighting them or not if you shoot them from space? It’s cowardly. It’s ironic that he thinks I’m cowardly because I’d rather have fights and women and things that make sense.”

“So, what do you think of having eight wives?” Sardius asked curiously.

“Oh, that’s why I’m here. If you guys send me away, I’ll choose the laser testing thing because my muscles won’t atrophy and there’s a chance I’ll be able to get out of it eventually, but I’d much rather stay here. What do you think my chances are?”

“Not great, especially if you plan to abstain from voting as a regular course of action. That will slow down talks between Adamis and Octavians and could lead to a war even if you aren’t storing weapons or acting as an assassin.”

“It can’t be that big of a deal.”

“Yes, it can,” Crimp said. “Part of the reason everyone is so on edge now is that all diplomatic talks stopped after all the other diplomats were killed. Jenna needs to reach quorum as quickly as possible.”

Jenna heaved a sigh in her seat in the living room. That was another reason the AAMC had sent her such undesirable candidates. They wanted her to send them back and have to go through the trouble of interviewing new ones. The AAMC probably had candidates she’d crown in a heartbeat, they just weren’t sending them.

Jenna spoke into her earpiece, “Ixy, see if Ryatt thinks he can get any more out of this kid. I believe he’s finished. I think I have a plan to promptly bring all this to a close. I need to talk to Vash, you, and then Ryatt. In that order.”