Behind the Throne Page 33
“Majesty?”
“Fasé, if you don’t go take care of the others, I’m going to be very upset with you.” I didn’t even look up from the toilet when I said it.
“Easy, Majesty.”
“Don’t you tell me to be easy, Starzin,” I snapped, struggling to keep my voice low. “Someone just tried to blow me up. Someone just killed my mother.” I stood up, steadying myself against the wall. “Emmory got toasted, you got shot—the others—and Jet—all these people dying for me. What’s the fucking point? I’m nothing more than a gunrunner.”
Zin caught me when I sagged forward. The door closed behind him, shutting us in the tiny bathroom. “You’ve got a minute, Your Majesty. Then you have to pull yourself together.” His words were shocking—flat and cold. All I could do was stare at him in astonishment. “Those are friends out there, but you don’t want them to see you like this. They need to see their empress. They need to see—”
“Stone.” I shoved away from him as far as the space would allow. “You want me to be a gods-damned statue.”
“I want you to be the empress! Those people need you to be that leader.”
“No.” I shook my head so hard stars flashed in my eyes. “I saw what that did to my mother, Zin. I won’t do it. I won’t pretend like I’m not grieving for my people or the fact that Jet’s wife will have to raise their daughter alone. That I’m not dreading having to talk to Rama and Salham’s parents and tell them how their sons died. That I don’t feel like total shit because I can’t remember the names of the other three BodyGuards who put themselves between that bomb and me and paid for it with their lives! I won’t pretend that a little girl”—I jabbed a finger into his chest with such force I was surprised it didn’t sink knuckle deep—“didn’t die right in front of me today.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend. I’m asking you to do something with it rather than wallow in it. You don’t understand how much your people love you. Look.” He held his hand up, using his smati to project the images onto the bathroom wall with the tech in his fingers. News articles about my return, comments on the Hansi network, more beaming selfies that I only half remembered taking.
“Being loved doesn’t make me a good empress, Zin. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Cowshit,” he replied. The curse so at odds with his normally polite demeanor that I blinked at him in shock. “You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for. We’re on the brink of war. The gunrunner I retrieved knows what she’s doing and right now we need her.”
“Make up your gods-damned mind,” I hissed at him. “Gunrunner or empress, Zin.”
He shook his head slowly and smiled. “This isn’t an either-or proposition, Majesty. You are a gunrunner. You are the empress.”
Which meant I got to decide, I realized. I was the Empress of Indrana. I got to decide how I behaved and no one could tell me otherwise. “Let me out of here.”
“Of course, Majesty.” Zin reached behind him and opened the door, stepping out of my way with his head lowered.
“Emmory, find us a safe place to get into the palace. Don’t argue with me about it, just do it. I know you’d rather take me to some damn safe house but that’s not the way this is going to work.” I whirled in a tight circle, meeting the eyes of everyone on the shuttle.
“Listen up, all of you. I’ve lost some very good people today and I will probably lose more before the day is done. Innocent lives were sacrificed by people who value power more than decency. Those are not the people who control the fate of Indrana. I do. You do.
“I don’t know what’s going on out there, but it doesn’t matter if the enemy is my cousin or the Saxons. I’m not going to cower in a hole while they try to destroy everything we have built here. You won’t get stone-faced cowshit from me, you won’t get some prim and proper royal line. Get used to this now. Everyone wanted me back, well, now they’re going to have to deal with having a former gunrunner as an empress. Is that understood?”
Their murmured “Yes, ma’am” was somewhat stunned.
Emmory, however, didn’t seem at all shocked. “I got in touch with security at the landing pad, Majesty,” he said. “We’ll land and get you in as fast as we can. You’re right, I don’t like it, but I do think that we’re better off dealing with this now as swiftly as we can.”
There was just the barest flicker of emotion in his eyes. A tangled dance of relief, pride, and amusement that winked out of existence before it was even fully formed and tipped me off to just what Zin had been after.
“We’re coming up on the landing pad now, Your Majesty,” Zin said, putting a hand on my arm. “If you’ll find a seat.”
I snapped my mouth shut, crossed back to Emmory, and dropped into a seat next to him. There was a flurry of activity around me as the members of Captain Gill’s team and my remaining BodyGuards prepared for the landing.
“You two are going to keep me on my toes,” I said over our smati link.
“Zin said what he thought would help, ma’am. You were teetering on the edge. The shock is understandable.” He gave a little shrug, not looking at me as he checked and double-checked his guns. “Anger clears the mind, puts things in focus.”
“And going into the palace?” I pulled out my own gun, letting my restless hands do their work.
“I don’t like it, any of it. But we need to be in there. I couldn’t suggest it outright. As your Ekam, my duty is to keep you as far away from danger as possible, not drag you right into a trap.”
“So what’s the plan? Hopefully it doesn’t involve one of us getting shot, because we’ve done that already today.” I grabbed Emmory by the forearm and squeezed until he looked at me. “I’m serious. Don’t die, Emmy. I’m not saying ever, I know what your job is. I know what you’re prepared to do for me and this empire. But just today, please, don’t die. Promise me.”
“Emmory, we’re—”
I snapped my free hand up, cutting Zin off. “Promise me,” I repeated out loud.
Emmory blinked and, after what seemed like an eternity, nodded at me. “I promise, Majesty. And no, the plan is not to get shot.”
Zin shook something dark at me. Clothes, I realized, or more accurately an ITS uniform. “From the pilot,” he said with a grin. “Sergeant Hoff is living every soldier’s nightmare of going to war in his underwear so we can hide you in plain sight.”
My laughter startled everyone in the shuttle, while Emmory groaned and covered his face with a hand. “Could you take this seriously?” he asked Zin, who shrugged.
“Just another day as BodyGuard to the Gunrunner Empress. You’re going to want to get dressed, Majesty. We’re on the clock.”
I grabbed the uniform from him and hustled into the bathroom again, stripping out of what remained of my outfit and wriggling into the flat black pants and jacket. When I came out, Fasé handed me a helmet. There were dark bruised circles under her eyes and her hands were shaking a bit.
“You’re exhausted,” I said. “You should stay with the shuttle.”
“No, ma’am. I need to stick close to you. Just in case.”
I forced myself not to argue and not to run back into the bathroom to be sick again. Get used to it. The voice in my head sounded like Portis and it was sympathetic. You’re the most important person in their world right now. They’ll give up everything, even their lives, for you.
I twisted my hair up into a knot, put on the helmet, and keyed into the com system. The display lit up, making the shield in front of my eyes as transparent as glass from my side.
From the outside it was just one of a dozen blank helmets. No one would know who I was.
Emmory tapped me on the helmet. “No heroics, ma’am.” His voice was clear on the com.
“Back at you,” I replied. “Let’s go get my throne.” It felt right to say it after days of fighting the idea. I was the Empress of Indrana. “May the gods save us all.”
Everyone echoed me and we sprinted from the shuttle.
My breathing and heart rate shot up through the atmosphere. Adrenaline is a funny thing. After all these years, all this separation from our birthplace, from Earth, our biology hasn’t changed all that much. The moment we were all clear of the ramp, Sergeant Hoff pulled back off the landing pad and bugged out for a rendezvous point known only to Emmory and myself.
We were now stranded at the palace, but at least we’d still be able to get off-planet if it became necessary.
I really hoped it didn’t become necessary.
I stayed low, Zin at my front and Fasé at my back, a pretty impressive M2220 in my hands. I was surprised Emmory let me have such a cannon without any kind of hesitation.
Getting into the palace proved easier than I’d suspected, but it made perfect sense if Bial was trying to trap us. We slipped in through a service door used for deliveries without seeing a soul and followed Emmory down the hallway.
We approached an intersection, Emmory slowing cautiously. He whispered something to Iza I couldn’t make out. Emmory gestured for us to stay put, and they proceeded around the corner.
The silence that followed carried a tension with it that felt like someone had turned up the gravity on us.
“Majesty, will you join us?” Emmory called for me just before I thought my head was going to implode.
I shoved my visor up and shared a curious glance with Zin. “Well?”
“I don’t know, Majesty. I’ll go first.”
No one had said anything about leaving weapons behind, so I kept a hold of the M2220 and followed Zin around the corner. What we saw brought us both to a standstill.
Bial and half a dozen BodyGuards were on their knees with their hands behind their heads. Emmory stood off to the side, talking with a pale-skinned man with icy eyes.
“Well, this is a surprise,” I said, drawing everyone’s eyes to me. I locked eyes with Bial. “And yet not, disappointingly. Emmory, can you tell me what’s going on?”
“He was conspiring against the throne, Majesty. Some of the other Guards disagreed and disarmed him before we got here.”
“I wish I could say I was shocked. Damn it, Bial, for a moment there I was starting to trust you.”
“I did what was best for Indrana,” Bial said. His jaw was set and there wasn’t a trace of remorse on his face. “Ganda should be empress.”
“Is that so?” It took everything I had not to take the gun off my shoulder and blow him to pieces.
“You’re a criminal! What authority would we have if we just looked the other way for you? How could you enforce any laws when you’ve broken most of them yourself? How could we trust you to keep us safe when you’ve probably sold weapons to the very people who are looking to tear this empire apart?”
“I never sold guns to the Saxons,” I snarled, advancing on him until Zin brought me up short.
“A convenient sense of honor, Your Majesty.” Bial spit my title at me. “A gunrunner on the throne of Indrana would reduce the empire to laughingstocks of the universe.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about honor!” It was a good thing Zin had stopped me. I was too far away to kick the man in the face. “If you hadn’t wanted me to come home, you sorry bastard, you shouldn’t have helped Ganda and Laabh kill my sisters! You shouldn’t have let someone poison my mother! I would have happily stayed away and let Cire have the throne.
“She would have been twice the empress I could ever be. You killed them and I had to come home. This is your fucking fault in the first place, you bastard. You were supposed to keep them safe!”
All the color drained out of Bial’s face. “What? I didn’t kill them. I didn’t have anything to do with that. It was the Upjas. I swear, Majesty, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Liar.” The rejection was automatic, but the misery in his blue eyes drove a wedge of doubt into my fury. “How else did you think they were going to clear the path for Ganda?”
“Clear the path?” There was real confusion in Bial’s voice now. “Majesty, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wasn’t involved in anything until you arrived. All I have been trying to do is talk your mother into naming Ganda as the heir. I don’t—”
“Shut up.” I popped the M2220 off my shoulder at Zin. He was surprised enough that, instead of letting it fall and stopping me, he bobbled the gun. I pulled the Hessian45 we’d retrieved from Rama’s corpse from my belt and advanced on Bial.
Emmory caught my wrist and jerked my hand to the side. The blast I’d been meaning to put between Bial’s eyes instead drove into the cement between him and the man next to him. Bial didn’t even twitch. The other guy dove to the side with a panicked shout.
“He’s got information we need, Majesty,” Emmory said. “Plus, we need him mobile at the moment.”
“What for?”
“To get into the throne room. Indula here says they weren’t going to kill us. They were just supposed to stop us and give you the choice of abdicating or being taken to your cousin.”
“So why aren’t we in custody, Ekam?”
“Apparently, the idea of taking you off the throne didn’t sit right with some of the Guards.”
“I’ve seen the video of you taking out that assassin, Majesty. I’ve heard the stories about your exploits.” The man Emmory had been speaking of gave me a quick nod, lowering his pale eyes to the floor for a moment. “It looks like we’re headed into another war with the Saxons, and I’d rather have someone on the throne who knows what they’re doing.” Indula shrugged a shoulder. “Plus you’re the heir, there’s no denying that. If we were that chaotic mess they call a democracy in the Solarian Conglomerate, our opinions would matter on the subject, but they don’t.”
“She’s a gunrunner!” Bial protested.
I kicked him in the stomach, not hard enough to damage anything but just enough to knock the air out of his lungs. “You wouldn’t let me shoot him,” I said when Emmory gave me the Look. “So you decided to side with the gunrunner rather than my royal cousin?” That was aimed at Indula.
Indula shrugged. “My mother worked in a bar, Majesty. My father was a mechanic. Bial’s mistake, and your cousin’s, I guess, was thinking those of us in the Guard care about someone’s breeding. We’re all common folk, though. Most of the nobility go into the Navy. We don’t care where you come from, we care what you do now.”
“I like you,” I said, pointing a finger at him and he gave me a surprisingly boyish grin.
“I’m glad to hear it, Majesty.”
A similar conversation with Jet echoed up in my memory, carrying with it a wash of pain that brought tears to my eyes and I struggled to get back under control. “All right.” I took a step away from Bial and stuck my gun back in my belt. “What’s the plan, Emmory?”
26
The plan made me realize just how much information about my gunrunning life my Ekam had managed to access. It was damn close to a replica of a job we’d pulled early in my career with Hao on Banosh IX.
We left the Guards who’d sided with Bial tied up and stashed in a storage room. Emmory had executed his controversial ability to shut down their smatis just after arriving so there was nothing for the men to do other than sit in the dark and wait for our return.
Bial was not as lucky. We gave him an empty gun and I glued myself to his side.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” I hissed as we headed down the hallway. “You’re going to pretend like you’ve captured Emmory and the others. You’re going to take them in front of my traitor of a cousin. You’re going to keep your mouth shut about me or I’ll put a hole through your chest.”
“Majesty, I—”
“If you try to tell me once more that you weren’t involved in this, I’ll ruin Emmory’s plan by drilling you here and now. So shut your mouth.” I jabbed him with my gun and snapped my helmet closed. My ribs were killing me, but I shook off the pain and focused.
I didn’t want to believe him, but his insistence was odd for a man who cle
arly disliked me and didn’t want me on the throne. There was nothing for him to lose by admitting he’d killed—or been responsible for the deaths of—my sisters and mother.
So why wouldn’t he?
I shoved the conundrum into the back of my head as we crossed out of the hallway and through one of the side entrances of the throne room.
Not being the first person through the door gave me more of a chance to get my bearings, though I’m sure my BodyGuards were just as quickly absorbing all the information about the terrain that they could. It said a lot about the “Saxon” attackers that Ganda was sitting on the throne. No BodyGuard with a milliliter of sense would have allowed their charge to be so exposed in the middle of a crisis like this.
Unless that charge was me.
I choked back the laughter at that thought and gave Bial a subtle prod in the back as we moved into the room.
Nal was, unsurprisingly, standing next to my cousin. No big shock there, even if it did make my hand twitch with a desperate desire to shoot her.
“There aren’t very many Guards,” I subvocalized to Zin over our smati link. “And it’s a mishmash of her own personal guards, Mother’s BodyGuards, and what looks like some Army personnel. Either Ganda has enough support that she isn’t worried about a counterattack or she’s an overconfident idiot.”
I wanted to go with option B, but I knew I couldn’t let my feelings cloud my judgment.
“Remember she thinks we’re on her side, too, Majesty.”
“Ekam Bial. Given that my poor aunt is dead, I am sorry that your services will no longer be needed.” Ganda’s tone went off in my head like a great bell.
“Brace yourselves—”
I’d no sooner gotten the words out than Ganda smiled nastily. “As you can see, I’ve chosen a new Ekam for myself.” She waved a hand. “Kill them.”
Firefights don’t happen in slow motion. They’re messy, chaotic things filled with noise, pain, and blood. I had eyes only for my cousin and brought my gun up.
Bial moved faster than I could, knocking my gun out of the way and tackling me with such force that we went sliding across the marble floor. We slammed into a column on the far side hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and send my helmet spinning into the corner.