Rayker’s consciousness snapped into reality like a ball that had been cracked off a bat. Every nerve in her body was still firing pain signals, and her head throbbed with the worst hangover she had ever experienced.
She lay still on a carpet of leaves, buried beneath thick tree roots overhanging a fold in the earth. A gentle breeze carried the sounds of resort guests from further down the forested slope. Jasulio—she remembered from her intensive study of the terrain around the chateau. Fortunately, they wouldn’t venture in her direction. The Helvetic Elite who liked to visit Ambrosia didn’t risk contact with the wild outside of the specially cultivated zones.
Memory of the impact overtook her senses—the crushing pressure of icy water suffocating her mind, the panic of waking up as her lungs began to fill. She had crawled onto a rocky bank to vomit the liquid, before diving straight back into the river for the long swim. The effort had nearly killed her, even as she struggled to stay conscious through the pain, but she couldn’t risk her pursuers seeing her falter—realizing she was vulnerable.
Now her muscles, torn and frail from the exertion, refused to respond. Her superior healing powers had been pushed to their limit, first by the bullet wounds, still searing hot knives embedded in her flesh, and then by her flight. Even her bone spikes hadn’t regenerated, and they were normally replaced within an hour. For the time being she would have to stay still until she could move again.
Another image flashed through her thoughts. That girl had appeared again, the same one from the lab on Caldera. She had destroyed Rayker’s fledgling army with the flick of a switch, killing her loyal commander, Captain Reed, in the process. Pain followed that memory, followed by hot rage. A rare wave of grief threatened to drown the other emotions, but she knew too well how to seal that part of her mind off.
She had often fantasized about the tortures she would inflict on the whelp when she finally caught her, but the attack had left Rayker in shock, badly wounded, and with barely enough time to react. So, she had jumped.
They had even dared to attack Ambrosia? That fact alone threw out all of her calculations. As far as she knew, only suicidal terrorists had attempted such a feat… or had she been wrong about that too? In any case, while she did not know exactly what kind of force was pursuing her, she knew the look in that girl’s eyes. They wouldn’t stop until she was dead.
Fortunately, she had gambled that they couldn’t reveal themselves to the world, and that seemed to have paid off. So close to a public bastion of Helvetic luxury, where phones broadcast social vapidity non-stop to a jealous galaxy, she was safe. So long as they believed she could keep running, at least.
During the night’s swim, she had heard a drone moving about in the canyon. It had searched among the rocks and shore of the river, but she had maintained her hard strokes and left it behind. Now, with the arrival of daylight, she hoped she could recover in peace. Until she was ready.
A distant flutter of leaves made her carefully turn her head. Pain flared in her neck, then faded. A rabbit was searching the forest floor for something to eat. Welcome to the club, Rayker thought, then dared to hope. She let her body go limp, and slowed her breathing as much as possible.
With nothing in the area to concern it, the rabbit shuffled a little closer. When it caught her scent, it became curious and wondered over. She was a helpless, wounded animal, no threat to anyone. And of course it would be used to the presence of humans.
Rayker felt its whiskers brush her neck, but didn’t stir. It moved its way down her body, until it wasn’t far from her hand. Then she moved like lightning, seizing the animal’s legs as it tried to dart away. Ignoring the lightning bolts of agony from her limbs, she brought her other hand up and took hold of its neck, snapping it with a quick twist. Her mouth watered and her stomach growled, and her teeth ripped through the fur into the hot blood and meat beneath. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
Night was beginning to fall again by the time she could stand up. Her legs were shaky, but she succeeded in walking slowly, avoiding roots and fallen branches as she made her way through the forest to the beach resort. An hour’s observation of the apartments revealed one that could be safely raided. After emptying a fridge of food and swapping her bullet-riddled, blood-stained party dress for reasonably comfortable clothes, she headed towards the beach.
A carefree couple had left their belongings in the sand while they enjoyed a romantic moonlight swim. Rayka stole a phone, then used a VennZech security code to hard reset the device. Once she was able to activate her own ident, she took a moment to catch up on the news feed.
A terrorist attack? How fascinating. Whoever had been after her had apparently been too limited to cover up the missile strike that had set her free. That also told her something. The weapon had obviously been activated and fired by her eternally vigilant benefactor, but she wouldn’t be able to enter into contact with him—or her, or it, she was never quite sure—until she had moved to a more secure network. Every publicly accessible communication link on Ambrosia was monitored by security. If only they could be so competent monitoring for intruders.
The real question was, who would have dared attack the luxury planet of the Helvetic elite? And just for her? A group that could disappear into nothing, while the most powerful security service in the galaxy stared helplessly at the shadows.
It was certainly a bold plan, Rayker acknowledged, and hinted at the desperation of whoever wanted to lay their hands on her. Of course, she had made many enemies over the centuries, but never any so competent. The last of her kind, if they hadn’t already died out, were few and far between. They were a breed of egomaniacs, incapable of co-ordinating anything by the dozen, much less the hundred that would probably have been needed to knock out the chateau’s security force.
As she sat on the beach and watched the blissfully happy couple frolicking in the waves, Rayker thought back to her defeat on Caldera. They had destroyed her small Special Forces contingent with ease, and quickly overcame the loss of a vessel, brought down by a well-aimed missile. Assailants had penetrated the lab, though she had pinned one angry girl to a pillar with a spike through her arm, only to see her return an hour later ready to take her on again. Unnatural strength, speed, and healing—these abilities alone had convinced her that none of the League’s forces were responsible. They couldn’t hide that kind of breakthrough from her.
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Then again, in the chateau, another young girl had played her like a fiddle. She had been so believably drunk and stupid up until the last moment, when her mind had lost control of her emotions, and Rayker had smelled the fear flowing from her pores.
Outplayed by mere girls. No doubt she had gotten arrogant in her time outwitting dimwitted mafiosos and corporate hacks.
She felt the anger grow like a fire inside her. It was not often she experienced defeat, and she didn’t like the taste of it.
A small pressure in her wrists made her aware that her spikes would soon be ready for use again. Would she kill the unsuspecting couple and leave their bodies on their beach? With the blood-stained dress in the apartment she had robbed, the local authorities would be usefully distracted.
It would certainly provide her with some entertainment, but as she ruminated on her approach, she stopped and cursed at her shortsightedness. There had been a terrorist attack on the chateau. The murders would be assumed to be connected. They would lock down the entire resort immediately.
She was obviously still tired. An irritating sensation made her scratch her ribs. Clearly there was a lot more healing needed until she was back on form. Waving goodbye to the oblivious lovebirds, wrapped in each other’s arms as they enjoyed the surf of paradise, Rayker made her way back towards the resort to find a bar. She would drink until she felt nothing, then find herself a billionaire to spend the night with and later extort for a comfortable trip off the planet.
A few days later, she was safely ensconced in the high-security zone of Raisa station, her full ident, and VennZech privileges restored to her through a new phone. Rayker checked into a spoofed, private connection, and accessed her benefactor’s message service.
There was only one, dated a few minutes after the missile strike. It was a series of stellar co-ordinates, followed by standard planetary co-ordinates based on degrees of longitude and latitude. A position on the surface of an uncharted planet.
Not even an enquiry after her health.
She pulled up an astronomical database and looked to see where she would be going. A star winked out at her, a dozen light years into unexplored space. ZN-19766. A telescope had once noted its location, and it had been largely ignored forever since.
Rayker trawled through the older astronomy archives looking for anything she could learn. A spectrographic survey revealed the existence of water on a planet suspected of orbiting nearly a light hour from the host star.
An ice planet, then. Terrific.
She logged into the VennZech corporate network and sent a message to Joakinn Meissner. He called her almost immediately on a video link, his face pale.
“Good god, Rayker, where have you been?” he demanded.
“On the run,” she said matter of factly. “I’m not sure if you noticed Meissner, but whoever attacked your chateau was there to kill me.”
She frowned and reached a hand around her side to scratch an irritating sensation beneath her ribs.
Meissner gawped at her for a moment. “Kill? You? But…but they’ve taken Kolar!”
“My, my,” Rayker said, as she tapped the screen’s stylus loudly against the desk. “How immensely unfortunate. And your entire security force didn’t notice a thing?”
“No, of course—” Meissner froze, and his eyes darted back and forth as though searching for a memory that wasn’t there. Then he turned stony. “Is this a joke to you, Rayker? Our entire research project has collapsed. Billions of credits of investment—”
“When the Roman legionnaires failed as badly as your men have, Meissner, their commanders would single out one of every ten of them, and have his comrades beat him to death.” She paused as she let Meissner’s expression sink. “They called it decimation,” she continued. “I’ve always been curious to see if it would still work.”
Meissner stared at her in shocked silence.
“You are panicking, man,” she snapped suddenly. “Get ahold of yourself. Our project is not over, and it does not depend on Kolar. Now, what is this they have been saying about a terrorist attack? Tell me every detail.”
Once stocked with equipment and supplies, Rayker paid a cartel freighter to take her to a backwater port not far from Caldera. Her reputation preceded her and she was not disturbed during the trip. From there, a few private and untraceable transactions secured her passage on a maintenance vessel that was checking in with survey drones in the outer systems. Once they arrived within a few light years of her benefactor’s co-ordinates, she loaded herself into an escape pod and shot out into space.
The crew, as per their agreement, diligently logged the loss as an accident following a collision.
The coast through interstellar space lasted several days, which Rayker spent studying events in the galaxy at large. Scanning through the news feeds she noted, with amusement, that VennZech was once again implicated in a scandal involving sex trafficking on Intaba. A government minister had also been named, while a group of activists had arrived on the planet to track down several missing teenagers.
Rayker rolled her eyes. Intrigue! Scandal! How was it possible that humans were still surprised by their own nature after so many thousands of years of almost constant repetition? As far as she was concerned, everyone was a liar, parading their moral righteousness like a peacock waving its tail.
But information was rarely useless, so she filed the story away for future interest. A spot beneath her rib felt sore, and she rubbed it while she stared out at the stars and wondered what her benefactor might want with her.
The Caldera operation had been a miserable failure, while nothing could hold back the inevitable collapse of the bloated, stagnant, and corrupt Helvetic League. Now humanity was in space, the endless project to suppress their freedom was looking more and more like a fool’s errand. There were too many unknowns, and too many directions to keep track of. If she was being honest, she was starting to get bored of the whole thing.
As far as she knew, her leader and the rest of his ‘Council of Elders’ held unfathomable power that could not be revealed to humanity at large. Rayker and other willing followers had been endowed with their gifts so that they could steer civilization in the necessary direction. The first tribes, mindwiped by the Elders into superstitious ignorance, had revered them as gods. To a stone age world, that was exactly what they were, and she had almost begun to believe it. How else would you see yourself if you could live forever and destroy entire kingdoms on a whim? And her benefactor had been brilliant, offering her a grand vision of the future and gifting her the tools she needed to bring it about. Was she not serving a force of divinity? Had she truly even been born a human?
Now, it wasn’t that she was starting to doubt his agenda—obviously humans were a catastrophe waiting to happen all over again. They were barely evolved apes with no self-awareness and an unlimited capacity for destruction. For reasons he hadn’t shared, he didn’t want to annihilate them, and Rayker had to admit that the galaxy couldn’t have been left to her and her fellow deities; the narcissists, and psychopaths they had all been. By contrast, humanity was fun, spontaneous, and endlessly inventive. Rayker had been confident that, with time and guidance, they could attain the wisdom they were lacking.
But the recent setbacks meant that all was not well with the powers that be. Together with the lack of imagination she had been suspecting in her benefactor, it now appeared that he was ignorant of something of profound importance. Since Caldera, she had begun to put the pieces together. Her failures over the post-Earth centuries had been more than the product of pure chance. The remnants of the great battlefields, forgotten for millennia, were apparently being policed. But by who? And, if her benefactor held the control that he always claimed, for what reason?
Rayker felt her nerves thrum with energy as she began to consider how she might try and find out.