Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (5 page)

Rainer stared at Sara’s hand to
avoid looking at the rest of her. He had more discipline than to let his
physical desire show, but involuntary responses like pupil dilation were more
difficult to control. Few citizens ever overcame that genetically hardwired
reaction to sexual stimuli.

Except for the Sovereign.

Had he lived so long that
coupling was no longer important to him? Perhaps that would explain why he
hadn’t produced any offspring for nearly sixty years. Speculation about a true
genetic link to his previous children still surfaced occasionally, mostly due
to their early deaths, but most citizens shied away from gossiping about the
Sovereign for fear of repercussions. Of course, most wouldn’t have guessed
that his longevity bots were more than a myth, that his scientists had found a
way to lengthen his life, and that this technology wouldn’t be shared with
anyone who couldn’t pay the exorbitant price.

Rainer wondered if, now that
Prollixer’s supposed immortality was threatened, the panic of being heirless
gnawed at his guts.

The Sovereign dissolved a
sedative strip on his tongue as if in answer.

Rainer’s gaze drifted to Sara’s
breasts, which were larger now, but he quickly pulled it back to her face.
Considering the circumstances, any type of arousal displayed by Rainer would be
expected, but he feared Prollixer knew of the unauthorized visits to Sara
during her modification.

“I don’t see much difference
except for the longer hair. Good color choice, by the way. I’m kind of partial
to dark-haired women.” But, changing her hair color still wouldn’t make
her a contractor, and that disappointed Rainer more than he cared to admit.

“I’m glad it pleases you. I
chose a similar hue for her eyes.”

“Quite a change from the
honey color they were,” Rainer said.

“You remember the color of
her eyes? Surprising. I believe it was quite dark and dusty the only time you
saw them.”

Rainer gave Simon a guarded look,
but his response was even. “Eyes are just my thing. Some guys focus on a
woman’s mouth or her ass. I always go for the eyes.”

“Precisely why I didn’t hire
you for the modification.”

Rainer’s mouth folded at the
corners. “You didn’t even know about the eye thing until just now.”

“I knew there was something
you liked about her. You took great care of her…”

Rainer didn’t blink.

“…before Contractor Renault
took over that night.”

“I took care that she didn’t
die before we got any information from her. Then you cut me out of the
modification process. I would have charged less than Faya.”

“Really? Contractor Renault
wouldn’t accept any payment to break the woman.”

Rainer’s breathing paused for
just a moment, but the Sovereign had caught it. His smile said so. “Not to
worry. I have more important jobs for you.”

He looked back at Sara. “And
you, Ambasadora Mendoza, have the most important job of all. You get to lift my
curse.”

“Why her?”

“Bait. The rogue who left
her at Palomin will be very interested to know she is still alive, and now
serving as one of my ambasadoras. He will either come back to save her or to
kill her. But, either way, he will come back.”

Prollixer’s rising tone hinted at
desperation, a trait emerging more frequently in the ailing Sovereign. Rainer
supposed curses would do that to a man.

The deafening hum of the engine
room aboard the
Bard
drowned out the sound of Sean Cryer’s fist slamming
repeatedly against the bulkhead. It wasn’t a technical problem like he often
faced here on the luxury cruiser turned science vessel that vexed him, but
rather one of a more personal and illegal nature.

“How could my prints not
smear?” He threw an electric wrench into the shining metal framework just
to the right of the open console. If someone monitoring his last exit from the
V-side traced his digital prints back to this ship, they could also find out
which virtual worlds he’d visited. He’d be swept away by a contractor patrol
and imprisoned as an Embassy agitator. Until they found out he was a node in
the fragger organization, then he’d just be tortured and executed and
forgotten.

Sean had suspected someone
shadowing him during his last couple of ventures into the V-side, the virtual
world. Possibility leaned toward probability now that he found the door to the
comm chamber slightly ajar.

Inside, snuggled into a protected
wall, lay the secret port he had installed six years ago after initially
purchasing a suite aboard the
Bard
and becoming the ship’s engineer, or
mech tech as the others referred to him. This port allowed him access to the
V-side without detection, without shadows tracking him, without suspicious
Embassy officials lifting his digital prints from this source. Or at least he
thought. He probed the port and watched the readings scroll over his palm from
a wrist reporter implanted under his skin. Everything checked out. Maybe there
hadn’t been a shadow, just his paranoia.

David would enjoy hearing that.

The new nav leader on board
already hinted at Sean’s stim abuse and his consequent bouts of paranoia. But
what did he know? David Anlow was little more than a hired pilot who flew a
bunch of independent scientists to appointments throughout the system. Problem
was that David, being a former Armadan captain, fancied himself still in charge
of a ship.

Sean had caught him looking
around the engine room on one other occasion. The ensuing argument had turned
physical on Sean’s part. Risky since Armadans were bred to be warriors, how
their caste came to be named after the military in which most of them served.
As a result, their bone and muscle structure was stronger than that of
Socialites, the other Upper Caste. Of course Sean’s real father passed along
some of that Armadan strength to him, even if no one but his immediate family
circle knew Sean’s true genetic history. That wasn’t the biggest secret,
though. Sean’s mother had been from the Lower Caste. His father took care of
them anyway, even helped to buy them into Socialite society before he died. But
Sean and his brother always knew they were different, not as deserving as other
members of their father’s family circle, including their siblings by other
mothers.

Heading to the
Bard
‘s
bridge, Sean reminded himself to be calm when confronting David, to keep his
head. He didn’t want to tip his hand if David didn’t already know what was
happening.

As soon as Sean burst through the
open bridge door, he flew into David. “What the fuck were you doing in the
engine room again? Thought I told you to stay away from there.”

David swiveled his nav chair
around inside the orb of holo-controls.

“How you doing, Sean? Coming
down from a binge?”

Sean resisted the impulse to leap
across the shining black floor of the bridge and grab the bigger man by his
throat. Truth was Sean had just taken several restors to bring him back to
equilibrium.

“Just asking if you visited
the engine room recently.”

“It sounded to me like you
were accusing me of something.” David manipulated an airscreen in one side
of the orb.

His nonchalance and cheery
disposition grated on Sean’s nerves. “Just tell me if you were
there.” Sean scratched at his chin and neck; an itching sensation rose
with his blood pressure, a restor side effect. He forced himself to stop before
David noticed.

“Like you said, I’m not
welcome in there. Besides, it’s too bright. All those glowing white walls give
me a headache.”

David’s lack of eye contact
proved he told the truth. After two months, Sean could read the man well,
especially considering they had pulled together to help Mari, another passenger
from the
Bard
, just a few weeks ago. A tenuous trust had begun, but just
as quickly deteriorated. It was probably Sean’s fault, but he had issues with
getting too close to people, especially ones which reminded him of his dead
brother and father.

Like most Armadans, David was
open and content, the latter most likely a result of certain aggressor genes
being turned off at birth. Sean envied that. He secretly suspected some of his
problems fitting into society stemmed from being an intercaste hybrid, a
halfcaste. His mother had him classified as a Socialite so he wouldn’t have to
spend his life in the military, but as a result, he never underwent the
appropriate
procedures
that would have helped him to adjust, that would have
calmed
him.

He certainly wasn’t calm now.
Maybe he was overreacting. He could have left the door ajar during his last
visit to the chamber. That seemed unlikely; he was seldom careless. He was
about to hurl another accusation at David when a whir in the back of his brain
clipped off his response. The fragger bosses had just summoned him to another
meeting in a specified world in the V-side. Second one today. Something big was
breaking out.

“Just…stay the fuck out of
there,” he managed, making a less than graceful exit.

The only time Sean lay on his bed
was to enter the V-side. It was more comfortable to sprawl out on the puffy
mattress than to fold himself up on the couch in the sitting room where he
normally slept. Plus he could get the bedroom dark enough that his pupils
opened to their fullest. The bigger his pupils, the faster the neural
stimulator would kick in.

With the tips of his fingers, he
slipped the silver v-mitters onto his corneas. The tinny smell of the conductor
fluids was unpleasant, but would allow his brain waves to hitch a ride on an
electro-magnetic stream emanating from the engine room’s secret port.

Ninety-nine percent of those citizens
who entered the V-side were gamers looking to escape from a bad day into a
fantastical landscape or flex their muscles through neural stimulation. Some
users sought out stimulation of another type, which was why sex worlds proved
so lucrative.

To fraggers, it was a medium for
discreet training and communication without need of a physical headquarters.
Compliments of the Embassy, the virtual submersion worlds and plethora of drugs
associated with them were meant to serve as an outlet for aggression amongst
the more unruly Uppers and mindless entertainment for the Lowers.

The original V-side source was
the now defunct comm system from one of Palomin’s worldships. But once new,
unregulated technologies sprouted up all over the V-side, the Embassy attempted
to shut down the virtual arena in order to control the latest advances. The
Sovereign withheld the tech from the normal population until such a time as he
and his corrupt council could profit from it.

A group of tech savvy individuals
staged a protest by taking over the Media for exactly nineteen minutes and
thirty-three seconds to broadcast anti-Embassy sentiments and to expose Simon
Prollixer’s illegal takeover of the Embassy. The first fraggers were born, and
abruptly died by the hands of the Sovereign’s contractors.

Fortunately, others listened and
managed to create a secret array with the remaining comm systems scattered
around the six moons. No matter what the Embassy did, they couldn’t bring down
the V-side. For years no protests arose, but all that time the fraggers were
regrouping, Uppers and Lowers, Armadans and Socialites, even a scarce few rogue
contractors, coming together for the same purpose—policing the Embassy and its
oppressive policies.

Sean relaxed as the sensation of
a cool liquid flowed behind his eyes, preceding the insertion of his avatar,
Zak, into the virtual lobby.

Okay, Zak, time to go to work
.

It was like a very lucid dream.
Sean was completely immersed as though he were physically there, not just lying
motionless on his bed aboard the
Bard
.

His ears buzzed and popped. The
space around him transformed from dark nothingness into a purple sea and
silver-grey sky.

Inside the V-side lobby Zak stood
on a floating platform that was barely a meter square. Sean’s stomach on the
Bard
detected the rise and fall of the softly undulating virtual sea as Zak kept his
balance on the slate-colored raft. The popping in his ears gave way to a gentle
lapping. His brain reacted with the phantom smell of the Archenzon Shore on
Tampa One, but the salty scent faded immediately. In the V-side, nothing had a
scent. This little detail kept the immersive world from ever becoming truly
real.

Six fist-sized globules rose out
of the sea in greeting and encircled him. Each was a different shade of blue,
indicating the type of invitation being extended. The darkest came from a group
of regular gamers Zak and Topper had befriended during a slasher session. Zak
had joined them once, but he didn’t get into gaming like many fraggers did,
just the training.

With a wave of his hand, Zak sent
the globules into a slow orbit around him until the palest one whirled front
and center. It was almost transparent and took on the purple sheen of the
surrounding sea on bottom and the silver of the sky on top. He reached his hand
out and made contact with the slippery surface.

A quick pulse began in his
fingertips and rushed through his body, probing for his identi-markers. His av
was recognized immediately through the idents. The globule opened at the top
and fanned out, enlarging enough to allow Zak to step through to a training
world.

On the other side, grassy plains
welcomed him. Half a dozen dragons with purple heads and green and silver
iridescent bodies eclipsed the dwindling light of a late day sky. Zak observed
three of his virtual companions figure the trajectories and energy expenditures
needed to bring down one of the iridescent beasts. Six others practiced hand to
hand techniques in a field nearby.