Chapter Twenty Four
The Dark Atmosphere of The Mercury Palace
The news crews that Celestina invited to Octavia Prime for the occasion of the final crownings had filled every hotel, every empty house, every empty space where an Adamis could be housed—they were all full. Jenna sat in her living room with Favel, Vash, Misha, and Smoothie, as they watched the aerial view of the eight palaces coming together into a perfect octagon.
The Dahlia palace didn’t move. Everything was moving around Jenna and her palace. She wasn’t the center of the octagon, but she might as well have been according to the Octavians. As far as they were concerned, everything depended on her. All the palaces together made the eight sides of the shape with a hole in the middle like an enormous geometric donut.
When the last palace slid into place and was locked down with the bridges, Favel clinked the goblet he was holding in his tentacle against the goblet he was sitting in. “Now comes the surprise,” he said jubilantly.
Jenna had never seen it before, but several of the broadcasters had and they spoke of the last time the center of the eight palaces had been seen. The center palace was called the Mercury Palace. It was their diplomatic meeting room, a palace in its own right, built only for the purpose of allowing all eight diplomats a place of common ground where they could meet. It rose high, levels above the height of any of the other eight palaces, making the stuff of underwater fairytales suddenly very real. Apparently, it had been dropped into the ocean on the last day of a peace summit, before a recess began. During the break, enough diplomats died for it to have stayed under the waves for years.
Jenna didn’t understand how she had never seen it when she swam so often. Where had they been storing it? What other secrets did the Octavians keep hidden?
She clucked her tongue and Favel took it as a sign that she was impressed.
Favel had told Jenna and the other diplomats to dress well for the day as it would be a historic one. Jenna hadn’t understood the instructions. She was crowning Iker and Rennett that day, so she already knew she had to look good for the ceremonies. Celestina insisted upon it. Why was Favel involved?
When she saw the center palace, she understood. Jenna had performed the previous crownings in garden decks and in great halls. No longer. From now on, those ceremonies would take place in the Mercury Palace, on common ground. It would also be where Jenna and Favel would get married. From the slightly greedy look in her Octavian fiance’s black eyes, it was fairly obvious. The fame was getting to him.
Jenna clicked the three black crowns between her fingers, stood up, and went to the glass doors that led onto her deck. From there, she could see mechanical locks clicking into place.
“Don’t go out yet, darling,” Favel said. “It’s not safe until they’re finished.”
Jenna rested her forehead against the glass and watched the clamps that looked like metal tentacles latch onto her floating palace.
She had brought all these people together. Everyone was here because of what she had done.
One part of her was pleased that she’d been able to do what she’d set out to do, but another part of her was scared stiff. How could she know if she was doing the right thing? The Mercury Palace looked like a dark version of the little mermaid’s palace. It was foreboding. Yet, the Octavians lived under the sea. In their culture, it was beautiful. There were loads of cultures on Earth that gave Jenna the willies. That didn’t mean those people did not deserve defending.
Jenna swallowed.
She wished Sardius had been there to reassure her that she was making all the right moves.
“Do you think he’s killed Don Leo by now, Ixy?” Jenna whispered to her PA.
There was only one ‘he’. Ixy knew who Jenna was talking about. “I think he’s a son of a bitch who made it through the prison riot next door. If there was a prison riot in my jail, I’d die. I’d be one of the first to die. I don’t even work out. I weigh 85 pounds and half of that is my hair.”
“She’s joking,” Ivy said, having pulled Ixy’s microphone away for a moment.
“Give that back! Anyway, Jenna, it seems a little weak to assume that Sardius couldn’t make it through whatever they put him through on board the ship. He was all confidence.”
“But they knew he was coming,” Jenna whimpered. “I heard them.”
“And so did I,” Ixy shot back. “No matter how gentle he appeared when he was with you, make no mistake, Sardius was a cold-blooded killer. And now he has something to fight for.”
Jenna rubbed her fists into her cheeks and for a moment, she felt like a boxer about to strut into the ring. In a way, she was. The last of the clamps on the Mercury Palace locked into place and Favel had given her the tentacle up to tell her she could go out.
She saw the drones hovering over her deck as Ixy opened the doors for her. Jenna strutted out like she was better than a Hollywood movie star. When she got to the end of her deck she waved for the other diplomats to join her.
Excelyn came out first, looking like a country singer with tassels on her vest. She had Philip at her side. He didn’t follow his wife’s fashion. He wore a tuxedo and looked like an Italian supermodel who was about to shoot a cologne commercial.
Celestina came out after that. She looked like a CNN anchorwoman who had elevated her look by a couple ticks for a red-carpet event. The white dress was enough to blind the cameramen, which Celestina loved doing most.
Fallcet was next. He had ditched his boho beige suit and replaced it with a black one. If anything, the cut of it was reminiscent of the suits Misha had dressed Sardius in. Jenna did a double-take when she saw him. Her first impression was that he was trying to mimic Sardius, but when she looked the second time, she decided he wore what he wore to try to fit in with the aesthetic of the floating palaces. He was the kind of guy who made an effort to look the part.
Scion was next and he cut a better figure than Jenna had expected. It was because he was a young man who was used to showboating. He wore a gangster suit of royal blue.
Rennett and Iker came out together. Rennett could walk by himself, but it was slow going and it was good Iker was beside him since he could have carried three Rennetts on his back. They were getting crowned together, so it felt right for them to appear together.
They met, all with their own door, for there were far more than eight doors into the open space of the Mercery Palace. They paused for a moment to allow the drones to get the footage they needed for their newsreels.
When Jenna had had enough, she flicked her wrist and all of them entered the Mercury Palace together. Jenna turned at the door and invited the drones in with them.
Inside the room was made of dark metal, like mercury. The ceiling spiked above them in a rugged cone shape. Chandeliers hung like brilliantly lit octopuses hanging in a circle near the doors. The table in front of them was large and cold and the seats were high-backed with thick upholstered cushions on them. The space felt grand beyond a cathedral because Jenna didn’t know of spaces like it except in churches. Were they worshiping something she didn’t understand?
And she was at the heart of it.
Glancing from face to form to an empty door to the view beyond and three moons of Octavia hovering over the horizon in the daylight, Jenna knew this was beyond what her grandfather expected or knew would happen. She thought of her grandmother, Letty, and what she knew that had been buried with her. What had she experienced? Why hadn’t her grandparents planned to tell her more?
Suddenly, Jenna realized with an odd burst that her grandmother had not gone as far down the Octavian Road. Her grandmother had not orchestrated the crowning of an entire council of diplomats. Yes, she had been given a casket of crowns for safekeeping, but Jenna had never heard of Letty succeeding in crowning anyone other than herself. The differences grew deeper as Jenna thought. Her grandmother had not become engaged to an Octavian. Her grandfather had told her that he was the only man she ever married because she was picky. Well, it turned out that Jenna tried to be just as picky except she could find a husband lurking behind any invitation. The greatest difference of all was that in the end, Letty Osiris had found a way out. She had escaped her responsibilities early enough that she had been able to have children and grandchildren.
Jenna cracked her neck.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
She would never have any of those things. She would die doing this.
Looking over her shoulder, she worried which direction the assassination attempt would come from. The drones buzzing around the room suddenly became terrible whether they had red or blue lights flashing on them. Looking at the chairs, she remembered Sardius’ opinions on explosives and she suddenly became afraid that the chairs had bombs built into them. She half expected her chair to blow up when she sat down, so she didn’t sit down.
It wasn’t on the agenda for her to sit down immediately. Instead, she stayed standing as she went through the motions of crowning Scion first. Jenna set him down on a chair and shaved the top of his head. Scion had a head full of dark hair so thick, Jenna was unhappy they were filming her in real time. It took forever. However, the end result was astonishing. Like Philip, he looked fantastic wearing the black crown.
The time Jenna lost in crowning Scion was more than made up for by the time saved in shaving Rennett. He didn’t have much hair in the first place, so Jenna cut the three hairs in the way without any fuss at all. She removed the adhesive strip on the crown and stuck it down as she had practiced. As good as the crown looked on Scion, that was how bad it looked on Rennett. He looked like a grandpa wearing his goth granddaughter’s headband.
Except for that unfortunate moment, everything else went perfectly.
When it came time to crown Iker, he stepped forward, looking like a rock man with the eyes of a cat. Jenna asked him to sit in the chair.
“The crown has to go on my head, yes?” Iker asked, hesitating.
“Do you see a crown on a different body part?” Jenna replied, motioning to all the other diplomats.
“Right,” he said, still hesitating. “Um… you said I don’t work for the AAMC anymore?” he whispered.
Jenna took a step closer to him and kept her voice down as well. “Yes. Is there a problem?”
“I… um… I… am safe here, aren’t I?” he asked, the look in his eyes as feral as a cat who was about to pounce.
Jenna brought her eyebrows together and came even closer to Iker. “Are you worried about assassination right here and now?”
He shook his head. “Can you put the crown on my rock head here and then…” He trailed off. “Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to this.”
“It would be better if you told me your problem.” She looked into Iker’s worried eyes. “Or just gave me a hint as to what direction it might be in. However, if you’re worried that the AAMC might try to assassinate you, they haven’t assassinated me yet. Being here might put you in the same danger, but that was always true.”
He nodded, agreeing. “Yes. That was always true.” He leaned in closer and whispered hotly in Jenna’s ear. “Jenna, I was sent here to steal the crown and give it to someone else. I was meant to trick you into placing that crown on my head and escape. There’s a pod waiting for me. However, I think I want to take the crown and be a diplomat. Would you support me doing that?”
Jenna met his eyes. “Yes,” she replied firmly. She did love the idea of turning an AAMC guy into one of her guys instead.
Iker nodded thankfully and took a step back. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, a spot between Iker’s eyes began to move. Once the motion started, everything happened very quickly. The skin that made up his nose and his chin began to rip apart. Then his neck and his shoulders began to pull apart. With a sickening crack, his head opened.
Then, without any warning, an animal pounced out at them.
It took a moment for Jenna to understand what she had been seeing. Iker had been a mammoth of a man—absolutely huge. But that wasn’t his real skin. He had been pretending to be the same race as Vash. He wasn’t and his cat eyes should have given it away. Once Iker was freed of his mech suit designed to help a space soldier blend in on a planet, he was a man cat the color of a red fox. He stood half a head shorter than Jenna. He wore boots, black pants, and a black vest made of synthetic leather. His tail was fluffy and he had a beard that was almost a mane.
Jenna, a woman who had always loved cats, almost lost her mind. Instead of saying a word, she covered her mouth with her hands and refrained from screaming, ‘I love you!’
Iker translated her silence as reluctance and dropped to one knee. “I know this form isn’t what you were expecting, but I couldn’t be more thankful for the trust you’ve shown me,” he said loud enough for the drones to pick up on what he was saying. “Please accept me like this.”
Jenna swept him up in her arms. “Yes, Angel Puff! I’ll crown you.”
“Angel Puff?” he gasped, craning his neck to get more air. “What? I’m not asking to be your pet!”
“Of course not!” she agreed, putting him down. “I know. I know. I just…” her face was flushed with pleasure. “You are so adorable! Let’s get the crown on you!”
She placed Iker in a chair and measured his head against the crown. Then she took the electric razor and did the best she could on such a different-shaped head.
“I think this is going to work out just fine,” she said as she placed it down and it stayed. She shook his clawed hand in congratulations and then turned to everyone with a look of pure joy on her face.
Iker slumped in the chair. “My suit,” he grumbled. “I need to get back in my suit. I’m not used to this kind of gravity.”
Jenna was about to lift him back into his suit when Scion stepped forward. Proud of his muscles, he carefully picked up the man cat and helped him put his feet back into the leg holes of the AAMC suit.
Once inside, Iker thanked Scion and did up the chest. When he tried to put the helmet back in place, it wouldn’t go. The crown on his head stopped it from being able to fit.
Jenna stepped forward. “Will you be okay without the helmet?”
“Let’s hope,” Iker said, tightening the neck.
“We’ll work on this problem with you,” Jenna reassured him.
He nodded gratefully.
Having achieved quorum, Jenna stood at the head of the table and set the first meeting for seven days from then, and without sitting down at all, the celebration began.
Adamis and Octavians came pouring into the Mercury Palace. Jenna hadn’t been aware that the Octavians had planned the party for them. Food and flowers appeared out of nowhere. Jenna was astonished at the grandeur suddenly surrounding her, as if the Mercury Palace itself had not been grand enough, there was more.
In the next instant, Favel was at Jenna’s elbow, pressing a suction cup against the back of her hand.
“You did it all,” he said, by way of congratulating her.
“I couldn’t have done this without your help,” she replied, suddenly feeling stupid that she hadn’t felt safe. “This is where we are going to hold our wedding, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Their wedding was slated for the day after the next. When they were planning the wedding, Jenna had been confused about where the ceremony was going to take place, and Favel had been very mysterious about the location, but after seeing the Mercury Place, it all made sense.
“Jenna,” he said seriously, raising himself up in his goblet and beckoning Jenna to lower her head so he could whisper in her ear “I didn’t want to tell you before the ceremony, but this morning, Admiral Lou Denver was found dead outside his home.”
Jenna’s feeling of foreboding felt entirely justified as she knit her eyebrows together in concentration. “How did he die?”
“His garage door malfunctioned and cut him in half.”
“What?” she exclaimed in bewildered shock.
“From the look on your face, I see I said that wrong. Let me try again. He was inside a personal transport pod, not unlike your bed, but arranged more like a regular transport pod with seating inside. It had wheels and hover capability. He was visiting his holiday home on a moon in the Umbria system that has no atmosphere. He had been joyriding alone and when he returned home, the airlock door on his transport dock malfunctioned. It cut his pod in half with him inside.”
“How is that possible?”
“The doors are half as thick as the pod. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he was crushed.”
“Don’t you mean assassinated?”
Favel waggled a tentacle. “Nothing can be proven from the report. There was an error log a mile long of that door malfunctioning before the accident. They’re calling it property neglect resulting in death.”
“Was he removed because he was so bad at managing me?”
“Not by the AAMC,” Favel said in a tone intended not to arouse notice by the partygoers around him. “If they were annoyed with him, they could have simply reassigned him. It means he was serving two masters and the other master had no other way of removing him. All of this may mean that the enemy of our program is not the AAMC, but someone else.”
“The people I can think of who have the most to gain from all this are the people who are investing in Adamis space transportation instead of Octavian. Either them or the arms dealers.”
Jenna and Favel both looked at Scion.
He smiled at them and raised his glass to them from across the room.
They mimicked the action. Jenna smiled. Favel looked neutral, but Scion didn’t mind that.
Jenna bent down to Favel’s level. “Let’s stop talking about this. It may not even matter who is behind all this. They may have killed him to cover their tracks so that he didn’t expose their part in the assassinations and not because he would ruin their future plans.”
“That’s some sparkling optimism, Jenna. They may have lost their interest in dismantling your program, but that doesn’t mean that killing the diplomats was the only road to their goal. They’ll find another way.”
“Tell me truthfully. How badly do your people want to keep their hold on space travel?”
“We have to have our own methods of transport because, in the past, Adamis ships have not accommodated Octavians. In all honesty, your people are easier to move than ours. I’m inclined to believe that none of this is actually about space travel. It’s about who has control of the universe. They want access to better resources. You can’t have good resources if you don’t have good space travel. I think most of what you diplomats will be arguing over is who gets control over which resource-rich planets. I can tell you for nothing that the Octavians will not be willing to share the planets that have already been claimed, and that’s going to lead to a conflict whether you do a good job or not.”
“You don’t think it’s about keeping Adamis money in Adamis hands?”
Favel inclined his mantle. “It’s probably that too, but if it is just about Adamis passengers paying Octavians then they’re stupid. The universe is full of wealth and the technology that can spring from it far surpasses the money we bring in with our travel industry.”
Jenna stood there with a pensive look on her face. That was it then, the Octavians had buckets of wealth and tech that surpassed the Adamis. Not only that, but she didn’t understand what they had and she had signed up to arbitrate between her people and the Octavians. Jenna felt a pinch in her neck from the weight of the stress she was experiencing.
“Oh, don’t look like that. Go mingle. Who knows what they’ll say about us in the news if we only talk to each other?” He waved Jenna away.
True to his word, the next day there was a very gushy news piece about how Jenna and Favel were so close it practically took a crowbar to separate them at the quorum celebration.