Nara Page 4

  Bryce continued his descent, putting the light out of its misery with his passage. At the bottom of the stairs, he pushed through a blast door and slapped a red button on the wall from instinct. The door slammed shut behind him and a deep shock vibrated the whole room. The floor danced beneath his feet ever so slightly and then the cascading sound of tons and tons of rocks collapsing inward to block his escape tunnel rang against the blast door. Echoes from two other points about the room informed him that he was now safe from any who might try to follow, and thoroughly trapped unless he found a way out.

  Upon proceeding forward, the lights came up revealing a small cavern filled with four transports. A one-man submersible, a hovercraft, a flitter, and a low orbital jumper were all gleaming, awaiting his choice. These, unlike the passage, were in perfect condition. Some trusted servant must be maintaining these.

  The jumper was tempting but even searching his memory revealed just a few hasty lessons over two decades before. He might survive to orbit, but his chances of reaching a station alive would be very slim. Bryce was desperate, but not that desperate. He’d take the more familiar gamble of the flitter.

  It was a long, low bullet of bright plas-steel and tinted glass. His thumbprint opened the canopy. He inspected his thumb carefully. It must be his parent’s print. Another tickling memory demanded attention. That was how grandfather had opened Suzie’s office door so easily, his thumbprint, not James Wirden’s, but his, had been programmed into every electronic lock built since they took power. Only the most out-of-date mechanical door locks could stop the Old Bastard. Therefore only the most ancient could stop Bryce.

  He clambered into the flitter and thumbed the engine to life. The harness and seat position fit his long frame perfectly. Not much of a surprise. The indicators leapt to their nominal threshold, this craft obviously included the very best engineering. Beyond the windshield, there was only rock, but he knew the way out.

  In a motion rehearsed a hundred times in another life, he reached down for the firing controls and launched a pair of rockets at the wall. They blasted through the thin exterior shield that kept out the ocean. He’d descended to sea level. Another layer of protection. The sea would quickly destroy any craft in the cavern that a pursuer might hope to use.

  As a wave crested inward, it rattled the submersible against the space jumper. He lifted the flitter into the air as the hovercraft floated by below him.

  Bryce, not Randall, not Stevens, not Junior, just Bryce, laid into the throttle and flashed into the dark eastern sky as the sea reclaimed a little bit of his past. None of the other craft could follow. He stayed within a meter of the wave crests for far longer than necessary for the sheer joy of seeing his old world flash by in quick flickers of rippling phosphorescence.

  # # #

  Suzie felt the rumble of the tunnel’s collapse as she lay on Brycie’s bed. Another roar, louder this time drew her attention to the window above his pillows. She pushed back the curtain in time to see a flitter’s blast of bright exhaust cut a rooster tail out of the waves.

  Gone.

  Brycie was gone. But he was too young to run away from home. At seventeen, what did he know of the world? She almost laughed, would have if her heart wasn’t hurting as if her son had just carved a hole in her chest, he was also sixty-three in his brain and it was long since time he should be gone.

  Gone.

  She told him that she’d stayed to be there for him. To protect him. What was she supposed to do now?

  Father had his heir, even if his heir didn’t want him. She could leave and if he ever noticed, it would only be to sigh with relief. But what could she do? Money wasn’t a problem, the Right Hand had more important things to worry about than her trivial use of her draw account.

  She turned on the bedside lamp and opened the curtains, their cheerful patterns of bunnies dressed as firemen left over from a simpler, happier time. The only evidence that Brycie had ever grown beyond her baby boy was the size of the clothes in his closet and the normal-size desk that had replaced the little one she’d crouched at with him so many times.

  He’d always liked sleeping alone, but the intercom circuit was good enough to let her listen to his steady baby-breathing for hours before she fell asleep herself. Curtains tied back, pillow fluffed, sheets and quilt smoothed. He hadn’t even taken the quilt she’d made him so long ago. Even faded with age, it still echoed the hundred shades of the sea out his window. She wished he’d taken the quilt, though it was understandable that he’d want to leave all the past behind. She slipped it free and folded it under her arm though the room looked barren without it.

  With one last look, she shut the door to his bedroom. The final umbilical was cut and she was floating free like a spacewalker. All she needed was a destination and she could go there with a quick burst of steering jets. But where? She crossed the hall to her bedroom. On her way to the shower shedding bathrobe, flannel nightgown, even the worn-out slippers that Brycie had bought for her so long ago.

  She plunged into the shower, letting the hot, needle spray prick and lave her skin. Scrubbing and scrubbing until the past sloughed off at last. Suzie fluffed her hair as she stepped through the drying field and all the water was stripped away. She buffed her skin with a warm towel until it glowed with the light of fresh milk in the full moonlight setting of her bath lights. With a flick, they lit the room to broad daylight.

  In the mirror, she was revealed anew. She’d had Bryce at twenty-two, now at thirty-nine her figure was little the worse for wear. Breasts still a little too small, despite having nursed from them, hips with a birthing broadness as a badge of honor that no amount of exercise could remove. But a slender waist on a trim figure, an unlined face, which was a miracle after living in this house for so many years, and nice thick brown-blond hair trimmed little-girl cute. She could pass for thirty with this body.

  Suzie stepped back into her bedroom and looked at the frumpy clothes lying on the floor, her disguise that ever so carefully said, “Oh don’t mind her, she’s not important.” She threw open her closet and kicked them into the back corner. A vast array of clothes hung before her.

  Most were blues and grays, ignore-me colors. Even the glittering formal dresses and gowns for her father’s parties were not standout pieces, but were rather intended to be elegant. At least as elegant as something could be on her pint-sized frame.

  Then she spotted it. Black lace panties and a terribly sheer eggplant-shaded camisole from an overeager man who never again crossed the threshold to lover. She pulled them on and the fine silk left her feeling both naked and dressed at the same time. A sky-blue silk blouse revealed just a hint of the camisole’s outline. And… she prowled back and forth across the hangers until she spotted it.

  She’d only worn the white pantsuit once and that had been for some luncheon. The fine cotton pants and tailored jacket drew sharp lines in the mirror. She turned one way and then the other, a sharp woman at the top of her game was looking back at her with an appraising raised eyebrow.

  Who was this woman? The one with the sexy underwear, the power suit and the hair now sassy instead of cute? She tried loafers and sneakers before settling on sandals with a basket weave of leather revealing just enough of her foot to be intriguing.

  Suzie tried to imagine this woman’s attitude. How would someone who dressed like this carry herself? She raised her head and began following the edge of the room. Before she’d gone five steps, she already had her next destination mapped out, a high-backed chair would hide—

  No! She moved back to her starting point. Raised her chin and took a deep breath. This sassy woman wouldn’t be looking for little places to hide, cozy places of half-revealed safety. No, she’d voyage out into the room like the sailors of old; no port-of-call but what destiny held in store. One careful step and another. Shoulders back, a shorter stride. Too mincing, too subservient 1800s Japanese.

  O
nce more back at her starting place, she stepped out strongly and almost fell flat onto the dark cherry wood.

  A broad swinging stride, she wasn’t a long-legged male like her son either. This time she did stumble on a slippery throw rug and land hard on one knee. As she nursed it with cupped hands, she tried to understand how she had let him go.

  Dark and lonely loomed ahead without him hanging about doing his best to brighten her world. The world. He was out in it. Well, she had to admit even to herself that he was better prepared than most to survive out there, if only he didn’t do anything too stupid.

  Suzie returned to her feet and tested her knee. Sore, but sound. Suzie. What kind of a weak-ass name was that? She giggled at the expletive, but who was to know what she did in her own room. Suzie, Suzanne, Suzan, Athena—the mother goddess, Aphrodite—the goddess of love, Diana—the goddess of the hunt, cupid—the ugly dwarf. Suz Stevens.

  No! Never Stevens.

  Suz… Jeffers. Take her mother’s name.

  That wasn’t half bad. How would Suz Jeffers walk into a room? A few confident steps took her to the tall French doors and their lavender plantings. She turned from the night and looked back across the room. Frilly curtains, a quilted bedspread, a long row of stuffed animals that Bryce had gifted her over the years, teddy bears cuddled next to unicorns, an orange smiling serpent balanced a maroon and white bunny on its head. The rich darkness of the floor was lost in a clutter of color.

  Her first reaction was that it was girlish and she should throw open the doors, let in the warm night, and cast the whole thing into the hungry ocean that had swallowed her son. But she’d learned not to trust first reactions. Somewhere, perhaps from her mother, Suz Jeffers had learned to look beneath and behind for the truth.

  Suzie could be hoodwinked into being a little girl, but not Suz. Suz wore sexy underwear only partly concealed by a white power suit. Suz was a strong woman with a soft, fluffy, stuffed, lime green frog underside.

  No, the room would stay as it was. Every frill and knick-knack in place. This was the Suzie that was her heart.

  But now that she’d created Suz Jeffers, a powerful woman wrapped safely in her mother’s name, what was she going to do with her? Three times she paced about the room, finding the rhythm of her new name. But the answer wasn’t here.

  For the first time since she’d been chased from her office by her parent and Brycie, she braved the door to her office. Where Suzie had shied away for two days, Suz Jeffers strode confidently through, and there was only a small shiver from some dark corner of her soul that she did her best to ignore.

  This room was so different from the bedroom that it was hard to believe it had been kept by the same person. The cozy dark and softness of the bedroom gave way to white walls, fine art, Brycie’s art, and a desk from which she could study the planet. A dozen visers linked her to in-house and extra-house systems. One tap hot-linked directly to an unregistered satellite her mother had arranged to be launched.

  “In case you ever need a private link,” had read the note her mother had left beneath a young, bereft Suzie’s pillow. “Perhaps it will help you more than it did me.”

  Only one viser was active. And its screen saver still twisted and turned in the midst of the vast desk, its multi-colored “Thank you” twisting in a dozen reflections across the darkened bay window.

  She sat in the chair and tapped it awake. A view of the now empty ballroom and the closed piano came back into view. Brycie’s high ground beside the palm had been swept clean by the tidal wave that was their parent. But he had floated free. Now she must find her own high ground.

  Spinning back the recorder, it was filled twice with the light of day before it was flushed full of people rushing headlong, or asslong backwards about the room. She slowed the rate and suppressed another giggle picturing all those fat behinds announcing the arrival of these matrons as their images moved backward through time. She slowed the rate of recall. And there was Bryce Sr. unherding Bryce Jr. from the piano, dancing backward past Celia and departing onto the patio with James Wirden.

  Suzie had enjoyed watching the fancy dresses without having to deal with the people, her own private fashion show. But Suz Jeffers was interested in what was transpiring out on the terrace. It took a bit of poking about the security systems to trace the right feed to the deck pickups. And there was little to see, two men wearing black tuxedos at the far edge of the light. But her mother had left her a private access to the security system that decades of living in this house had expanded into a massive data collection and filtering system.

  She cancelled the party noise that trickled onto the terrace by imprinting a reverse of the pickup inside the ballroom. It wasn’t perfect and the sound tended to pound and surge like a bad sea on someone with a weak inner ear, but she was able to understand enough of her father’s patio conversation with the Premier to piece together what had transpired.

  If she interpolated the missing parts properly, the World Premier had been murdered two nights ago on camera, but he wouldn’t find out until sometime tomorrow. She checked a clock. Near enough midnight. James Wirden was dead today. Could she release the tape? To who?

  The World Economic Council controlled all news media on the Premier and his Right Hand’s behalf. She did have command of that hidden satellite, she could create one massive burst of broadcast before it was shut down, but to what end? There was too much missing for someone who didn’t know her father well to be sure of his plans.

  No, James was dead, and though her father might be, would be a far more vile leader, there was little she’d be able to do one way or the other.

  A flitter jerked to a halt outside her window, and for a moment she feared that father’s troops had come to dispose of her. With Brycie gone, what use was she?

  But then it crept ahead, continuing slowly about the building and out of view. She tapped the security system to follow it. A quick trace revealed why no alarms were sounding, it was the World Premier’s personal craft. Suz followed it to outside her father’s bedroom window.

  Perhaps the Premier had found out. Perhaps James Wirden had come to rid the earth of Bryce Randall Stevens, Sr. in one last pre-death spasm of power. The hatch swung down from the sleek craft to make a ramp to the ground. The security imagers caught long legs flashing through high slits in a dark dress. Suz didn’t need to see the woman’s flowing white-blond mane to know that it was Celia Wirden, the Premier’s wife, who had came calling in his stead.

  She kept her in camera view, right into her father’s darkened chambers and to the office door on the far side. It was risky, but one didn’t survive in the Right Hand’s house without some risk.

  James’ soon-to-be widow hesitated at the door, but at last eased it open. Suz tapped into the emergency feed from the office that would alert the guards to an internal attack. It was turned off, but she’d managed to tap in beyond the manual switch, up inside the ceiling. No alarms tripped as she closed the contact and turned up the volume. Her mother had taught her how to infiltrate that system, too.

  # # #

  Celia Wirden swallowed hard as she observed the next ruler of the planet. Bryce Randall Stevens paced about like a whirling Dervish, back and forth, a dozen strides and back again. Sock-footed on the white marble floor of his office. The white desk and walls, made him appear to be floating in space. She waited in the darkness of his bedroom and listened.

  “Who the hell does the World Economic Council think they are? Don’t they know that I hold the power, not them? Don’t they know what I shall do to their lives and their children’s lives and their children’s children’s children’s lives if they don’t get into line and damn quickly?” He slapped the back of one large hand against the palm of the other with such force that it made Celia jump and wish she’d never come here.

  But she had to make her own peace. She had to ensure her future, knowing that her husband’s
life had been cut short, would be cut short this very day.

  Sorry, James, but I have to survive, or what’s the point?

  When Bryce was pacing away from her, she slipped into the room and leaned as casually as she could manage against the door jamb. She propped a foot against the wall forcing a perfectly tanned leg out through a slit she’d made in the same midnight-silk dress she’d worn here just two nights ago.

  She’d have brought back the flapper style long before if she’d realized the power it gave her over men. They had drooled over her that night. Even Bryce had been warmer than he had in years, decades, since that one hot, passionate night when they had used each other to exhaustion and then she had departed to James’ bed as they both knew she would.

  “Sorry, James.”

  She wet her lips as Bryce turned to storm back across the room in her direction.

  “Isn’t it lucky for me that I’m not on the World Economic Council.” He froze there across the white playing field from her. Her breathy voice casting him into momentary confusion. He closed the distance to her before she could draw in the next breath. His dress shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal a strong neck and swelling chest muscles. She’d always liked good pecs. His narrow waist, emphasized by a simple black leather belt and dark pants, was nice too. Physically he was everything James wasn’t, and she’d missed it this last few decades.

  He halted two steps from her.

  “How the hell did you get in here?”

  She moved past him. She held out a single, red manicured nail, another fashion throwback, but sharp and dangerous looking. Tonight she needed every bit of edge. Tracing the blood-red, knife-edge nail down his arm from broad shoulder to sturdy bicep, she moved nonchalantly past him. Instead of turning to her, he turned to his desk. If he had her thrown out, or called others into the room, her gambit was failed and her life was probably forfeit.

  He closed a switch, “Carter?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Find out who is on security tonight and take them all out and have them shot. I want death certificates by first light. And Carter?”