The room clerk needed no prompting to remember Ms. Geordana. He described her as being tall and slender, with an arrest-ingly beautiful face and long, silken red hair. Ridzik smiled because he knew she'd colored her hair to match the shade of his as a sign to him.
He entered the hotel unnoticed among a group of guests, then joined them in the elevator. He ignored their chatter, thankful that the eleventh floor came before he lost control and shot one man for seditious talk. Ridzik let the doors snap shut behind him, then forced his anger away. You cannot let that idiot spoil your evening. Find him tomorrow and have him killed, but tonight is for you and Elizabeth.
He rapped gently on the door, then slipped the magkey into the door's slot. As he waited for the lock to open, he suddenly recalled his first visit to a bordello when he was a raw recruit bound for the Academy. I was a gawky kid then, nervous and more afraid of the woman that I was of the ridicule I'd get from my comrades if I did not go through with it.He forced himself to smile confidently. That was long ago, the end of an era in my life.
The lock clicked open and he slipped into the nearly dark room. Candles, three on each of the twinned bedside tables, illuminated the wide canopied bed in their wavering glow. She stood beyond it, silhouetted in the moonlight before the window. The white light shone through her diaphanous gown, tantalizing and teasing him with an erotic outline of her slender body. Her hair, red only on the edges where the moon touched it, formed a black veil against her back.
Ridzik swallowed hard. He felt his desire for her stirring, and for a fleeting moment, he wondered if so noble a woman might not make him a suitable consort for life. He closed the door, then removed his coat and tossed it onto a chair. "I have come, Elizabeth."
She turned from the window, filling her right hand with the dark pistol that had been hidden on the sill. Before Ridzik could react, she raised it and fired one hissed shot. Ridzik felt something sharp sting him, then looked down at the silver syringe cartridge sticking in the upper left portion of his chest.
Before he could frame a question in his mind and give it voice, his legs collapsed. He landed on the floor with a heavy thump, overturning the chair where he'd laid his coat. He tried to scramble to his feet, but his body refused to take orders. What is happening to me?
The woman tangled her fingers in his hair and tipped back his head. She lay on the bed, hanging over the edge just enough to reach his head and let him see her ample cleavage. Her red hair flowed down toward the carpeted floor, veiling her face in shadow. "Well, if it isn't my old friend, Pavel Ridzik."
With her left hand, she pulled off her wig. The candles provided just enough pale light for Ridzik to recognize her. His jaw trembled as he tried to speak, but her predatory grin stole any desire to make himself heard. "Yes, Pavel, I am the one they sent to kill you six months ago. You escaped the bomb I left for you, which reflected badly upon me. I had to leave the service and start freelancing." She pursed her lips and shook her head. "That's such a nasty life for a nice girl like me. Wouldn't you agree."
She moved Ridzik's head up and down to make it nod in agreement. "Fortunately, my current employer is a woman with exquisite taste and the unusual ability of knowing what she wants and how to get it. In this case, she wants you dead.
"The drug I hit you with," she continued with clinical detachment, "has knocked your voluntary muscles out of whack. It's nice because it goes away without a trace after a dozen hours or so—not that you'll care. Even so, it should deaden the pain a bit."
She released his head, then slid from the bed and lifted him up. She pulled him onto the bed, rolled him onto his back, and crossed his forearms over his heart. She nodded and winked at him.
"Let's see, what else did Lady Romano want me to tell you?" She looked toward the ceiling, then smiled. "She said you would want to know that Elizabeth did make the verigraphherself. No one can forge them, you know. At least not in the Capellan Confederation, though there are rumors of a process in the Federated Suns. But that's news that doesn't concern you. In any event, Romano said that Lady Elizabeth created the verigraphafter Romano promised to ship her off to you if Elizabeth would renounce all ties and claims to the throne. Then, of course, Romano had her killed."
Ridzik felt a thickness in his throat. No! This is impossible! This cannot be happening. I am Pavel Ridzik!
The assassin smiled down at him as she filled a syringe with a clear liquid. "I do want you to know that, under normal circumstances, I would not use this on a person of your stature in the Successor States, but Lady Romano was rather specific. In fact, giving you as much of the dart juice as I did would have displeased her because it will numb you somewhat."
She shook her head as she felt for his carotid artery. "They made this stuff in the Draconis Combine, to be used on traitors to the state. It supposedly attacks only neurons, nibbling them away like a slow acid bath."
Ridzik dimly felt the sting as she plunged the needle into his neck. "They say it will kill you in just five hours, Colonel, but the agony will make if feel like five centuries." She smiled sweetly, men bent down and kissed him full on the mouth.
She caressed the side of his face, igniting fire in all his nerves. "Sorry, Colonel, to leave you this way, but I have a reputation to maintain, and you've been living on borrowed time ever since you escaped my bomb." She straightened up, then winked at him. "They say that if you're lucky, you can swallow your tongue before die pain becomes too great."
Her mocking laughter and the click of the door shutting behind her were the last sounds, save his own sobs, that Pavel Ridzik ever heard.
28
Moore
Dieron Military District, Draconis Combine
1 August 3029
Chu-iJinjiro Thorsen pressed his thick glasses back onto his nose, but otherwise dared not stir in the corner of the briefing room. Why didTai-sa Sanada bring me to this meeting? This is not the place for my sort.He knew his lighter skin and blue eyes marked him as a half-caste from the Rasalhague District, giving the great and powerful people in the room yet one more reason to look down upon him.
Jinjiro looked over at those seated at the table. Generals and Warlords all. While at the Sun Zhang Academy, I and my fellows dreamed of taking their places one day. Never, ever, did I imagine actually meeting them. Especially not the Coordinator's son.
Theodore Kurita stood tall and slender at the head of the table. The other officers were well-groomed and dressed in freshly laundered and pressed uniforms, but Theodore wore his black hair long and unkempt, as if the war had given him no time to mind his personal appearance. Neither did his black jumpsuit bear medals or insignia denoting unit or rank. It had only been zipped halfway up the front, giving those assembled a view of his cooling vest and the shoulder padding for his neurohelmet. A heavy pistol hung from his right hip.
Jinjiro smiled to herself. How ironic that theTai-sa only told me at the last minute of the request for my presence at the meeting. I had no time to change after morning exercises.Jinjiro resisted the temptation to lower the zipper on his jumpsuit to the same height as Theodore's.