The Turquoise Queen, page 18
part #1 of Coalition Series
Not just colonial leaders though. Many actions, big and small, had been arranged. Lowly, disgruntled employees of the vast imperial machine began their small sabotages, precisely when they had agreed to.
Native guerrillas, in turn, perceived these small sabotages as the signals they were. Be it a shield generator going offline, or a malfunction emptying a government building of all water and forcing its occupants to flee, they saw it and sprung to action in response.
As instructed by his superiors in this hierarchy of betrayers, the weapons specialist of the Danchiroon, orbiting the minor transit hub of Arjosat, overrode his ship's launch tube controls, firing a salvo of heavy torpedoes against a neighboring dreadnought. Later, another officer in that same ship made sure that, come morning, there would be nothing but wreckage in orbit. While the local guerrillas conquered the cities street by street, that Sencris struck the final blow against his imperial brethren on the planet's capital.
If the imperial armada were a living organism, it would find itself afflicted by a sudden, aggressive cancer, as admirals and foot soldiers alike worked to destroy it from within.
No agent, however, wielded any semblance of the power Corhadriam had. So he set about playing the main part. With a gesture, the lights in the throne room dimmed, obscuring the many golden murals. In their place, came alive a vast hologram of winding canyons and neon lights. Mockups of winding oceanscrapers surrounded him, and waterways flowed like arteries into the distance. Scarlet Reef, glorious capital of a dynasty to be.
He wore a headset. At that moment, he looked not unlike the leader of the Urvasatij rebellion. However, where Uljer Nourdolvi was an unskilled musician, forced to improvise with too many instruments, Corhadriam was a conductor with a fine-tuned orchestra.
Scores of Sencris and Aquatic soldiers were his instruments. Those on Illuminated Ocean were mostly under his command. With a few words, he instructed them to remove the word "mostly" from that sentence.
Far from Corhadriam's throne room, in a busy commercial district, a gun for hire received a transmission. She would have been surprised to find it came from her homeworld's highest-ranking official, had she not been alerted to the possibility several days prior.
She was in a disco, chewing on a bar of Lowly Fuchsia, a mid-tier brand of low concentration intoxicant jelly. The place had a distinct Earthling feel, despite being underwater and made to accommodate locals. A bit of cross-cultural influence. The lighting was dim, but for a myriad of dancing lasers and holographic projections. They painted colorful, abstract forms all over the walls and the ceiling, from which several mirror balls hung. There was no music. Aside from the thrumming and bubbling of moving water, it was eerily silent, as Aquatic dwellings tend to be. The light show fit the same role as loud music though. It encouraged dancing while making complex conversation nigh impossible.
This late, it should have been packed with natives, encounter suit wearing tourists, and the odd parties of Sencris, both local and foreign, craving for a change of scenery. Tonight, however, it was possible to swim from one end of the dance floor to the other without bumping into anyone. It took some skill, but it was doable. Though the viceroy had not announced his plans, there was enough tension in the water to keep many people at home or in their hotel rooms.
The ones who had shown up appeared to be having a good time. Munching on jelly, spinning and waving their tentacles to the rhythm of the holograms and lasers, flashing loud colors at each other.
Three Purple Screams observed. She stood by the bar where they served food and jelly. Another mimicry of Earthling layout. Stillness came naturally to her, a byproduct of her work. She managed to ooze confidence doing it, even when it felt so out of place.
The bartender was a Sencris, dressed in a form-fitting magenta suit with a pattern of little orange lozenges. He looked absorbed in his work, dispensing jelly and food to customers with near-mechanical precision. It made sense, Purple Screams thought. To his tiny eyes, the whole place must look gray, mute and dull.
The Lowly Fuschia was overpriced, and she could not yet spend the large sum of money she'd received for Four Curved Daggers' untimely death. So she nibbled, making it last. Besides, she felt this was not the time to get too drunk.
From the Sencris bartender, her gaze drifted to a girl, dancing alone right in front of her. Her smooth skin was tinted a joyous light orange, and she thought she caught a brief flash of purple. Her motions were fast and fluid, as assured as the relaxed assassin's quiet. Her panels, wide and beautiful, snapped back and forth with every sudden change in direction as she swam.
The girl spiraled up towards the ceiling far above, before plunging back down in response to a sudden change in ambient lighting. Then, another flash, no doubt about it this time. Just a patch of her right face panel, just for a moment, like a wink. Aimed at her, who else could it be. Screams took a larger bite of Fuchsia, puffed up, decided to go there.
Then she halted at the well-known ringing in her skull. Her instincts, a bit inebriated by lust and actual toxins, tempted her to reject the call. She glanced at the orange tinted dancer again, whose name she was eager to find out. Those long, sinuous tentacles beckoned her. With anger, she wondered what could possibly be more important than this.
Reason prevailed, and she checked who the call was from. While not entirely unexpected, it was still shocking to see his name. It meant the revolution they'd talked about was really happening. Right now.
She gave her own face a quick tap to answer, expecting a Sencris in pompous clothes to appear before her. Instead, there was an assortment of text and images, an information dump. How impersonal. Understandable, since coordinating an interplanetary uprising must stretch one's attention to the limit. Screams shook off her brief disappointment and focused, leaving the unfinished bar of jelly on the counter. She knew she could touch it no longer. She turned away from the surrounding noise.
It was a list of names. Very recognizable, impressive ones. All high ranking officers of the Aquatic government. Attached, what was to be done of them. The timetable was tight, the rewards promised insane. Yet, from her talks with Natalie Kadomodo, she knew those rewards to be quite plausible.
It made her wonder why she'd even gone through so much preparation and effort to eliminate the governor when now, it seemed, his entire cabinet was to become a shooting gallery.
No, that could be the jelly talking. She knew too well how these things worked. His death had been pivotal to set all this in motion. It was all happening because of a few of her well-planned trigger pulls and stabbings. That filled Screams with pride. She left the bar in a hurry. There was some equipment to retrieve, before the night's work could begin.
The girl stopped dancing, looked around for a bit. Once it was clear that mysterious, athletic woman would not be back, she swam to the bar and let out a long, frustrated yellow sigh, before nabbing the unfinished Lowly Fuchsia and spiraling up and away.
Screams summoned a pod, ordered its navigation computer to take her to a storage space where she kept her work materials. The building was fairly new and well kept. It stood away from the more populated neighborhoods, in the bottom of a dark pit where daylight never reached. It was designed, as its location suggested, for activities that required little to no sentient interaction. Activities such as secure, discrete storage.
After a biometric scan, a door slid open and lights went on to reveal a small, windowless white room. Inside, in meticulously organized, mislabeled and locked crates, an arsenal sufficient for a small army.
Each crate claimed to contain some expensive, yet legal and harmless, piece of tech, yet she knew by heart what they all truly held. She went straight for the largest ones. No need for subtlety or subterfuge this time. She knew that, come next tide, the authorities would sanction whatever actions she took. The fantasies of large-scale violence she'd kept at bay until now, it was time to put them in practice. This was a moment for heavy ordnance and brutality. She blushed at the thought.
Moments later, she was back out, with bags and a railgun, which would not look out of place mounted on the front of a tank, in tow. Sheathed, by her side as always, Radiant's wavy dagger.
From there it was a short trip downtown, to the rendezvous point indicated in the transmission. Right in front of the Aquatic administration office. A place she had, when planning Four Curved Daggers' assassination, made sure to avoid due to its heavy security. Much of that same security, she assumed, must now be on her side, fighting for the viceroy.
There was a momentary standstill in the small battle already taking place. That's how Screams interpreted what she saw upon arriving, at least. There were broken windows in the distance, and walls marked by flechette fire. Bodies maybe, though they must have sunk to the bottom of the sea by now. Nothing like the concomitant carnage at Arjosat though. Corhadriam had made sure Illuminated Ocean's waters would remain as unblemished by bloodshed as possible.
Tucked behind a natural rock wall, at the exact designated coordinates, stood a platoon of heavily armed Sencris. As instructed, she signaled her friendliness to them, while maneuvering the pod away from their presumed opponents' line of fire.
She disembarked, switched on her shield generator, and greeted the soldiers with a wave of the tentacle and a bright orange ideogram, which her translator converted into a loud, jolly ultrasonic hello.
"We were wondering if you would show up," said an imposing, dark copper scaled man.
From the look of the creatures adorning his helmet, he must be the highest ranking officer present. Knowing Sencris military symbols was, on occasion, useful to her, though this was the first time they were on the same side.
"Yeah, the message I received was more an invitation than an order. A last minute invitation, but irresistible." Smiling, she gestured at the ridiculously oversized weapon strapped to her back. "What's the situation?"
The defenders, ironically, were a poorly organized bunch of Aquatic loyalists, he told her. They had only light armament, but were entrenched inside a fortified structure. It should be an easy task, but the troops had been instructed to avoid risks, to keep casualties to a minimum.
"Unfortunately, our hails were responded to with gunfire. They even managed to take down our negotiator's shields, after he got a little too close. So now we wait and think of something else." There was frustration in the Sencris leader's voice, which the translator device detected and showed by dyeing the ideograms a sickly yellow.
Screams chuckled at this ill-advised, ill-prepared minority. So determined to defend the old order. So fond of their masters. Another might feel sympathy for whatever principles guided them. Some skewed notion of honor perhaps. But she was turned on by the prospect of slaughtering them, those naive fanatics, devoted to such an unworthy, hopeless cause.
The assassin needn't ask about specifics on the administration building itself. She had studied it before, when preparing for the Four Curved Daggers job. It was, as most adjacent structures, embedded in the canyon wall, its winding facade covered in crimson tiles and glass. Being owned and run by the Empire, it had a weird lack of neon signs or advertisements. A mute among blabbermouths. But its windows were fortified, every single pane of glass able to withstand considerable damage.
There were shields too, fed by a dedicated power source. As was the water circulation system. So the viceroy having cut power to the whole block would neither leave the defenders exposed nor suffocate them in oxygen-poor water.
Three Purple Screams decided to conduct a little trial. Before any of the soldiers could protest, she pulled a grenade from her bag, armed it, and tossed it across the narrow chasm. Painful slow, it drifted away until, from one of the windows, came a red flash of weapons fire, and it exploded, halfway across. They were paying attention, it turned out.
"There are plenty of pebbles lying around," she said. "When I say go, I want all of you to start flinging them at the building, as fast as you can, got it?"
The commander paused for a moment, before nodding compliance. The others followed suit.
Not so fast though. In a moment of perfectionism, she had them select stones with roughly the right shape and size, set them aside in a neat pile. The diversion needed to be convincing. Next, she added several live grenades to the pile, kept a few more for herself.
When she gave the signal, dozens of pebbles rained across the canyon at the administration office. Except a few were not pebbles at all. Those inside knew that, and scrambled to shoot them all down.
It would never have worked against soldiers with proper training. They'd have detected the live grenades, using either the naked eye or some specialized tech. But these people were too few, too unprepared. It was plain to see even as they battled inanimate objects. It made her wonder what kind of speech or promises their leaders could have used to convince them to take up arms, to accept this suicide mission. It didn't matter. For what little lifespan they had left, she'd teach them the error of their ways.
Lines of fire streaked the water. Most shot down harmless rocks, a few hit dangerous explosives. Not enough though. A few made it across. For each there was a shattered window, a cratered wall, maybe a dead Aquatic buried under the rubble. More than enough unobstructed paths now led inside.
In addition to that, a few of the grenades were ink bombs. They released a black shroud upon detonation, clouding the waters, obstructing all lines of sight. Useless against Sencris, who could navigate by sonar, but perfect against Aquatics.
Three Purple Screams marched in, a wicked smile stamped on her skin, heavy railgun in hand, eager. A platoon of hesitant Sencris soldiers followed in her wake. They were not sure this was the safest course of action. Nor were they sure this was compatible with their orders to minimize damage. The situation had been wrung from their hands, so all they could do now was follow and hope for the best.
The assassin swam fast across the canyon. The ink bombs would only provide cover for a limited time. The defenders kept firing, frantic. But with their vision obstructed, it was difficult to actually hit anything.
She was almost across when a panic-red face emerged from a fading, wrinkly black cloud. Its tentacle held a lance, slowly pointing towards her. Without such hesitation, she turned her own weapon at him or her, squeezed the trigger. The red head turned to red mist. Her first victim, because it was unfair to call such scared, untrained opponents anything else.
She did it again and again, flashing her namesake color with every shot. Oblivious to her allies, who accompanied her, from a safe distance, into the building.
Bodies sank to the floor in the corridors. Each tried to fight, but their reflexes were too slow. So very slow. To her, it was a distant childhood memory, for that long a time to go by between seeing an opponent and firing.
In a moment of particular exhilaration, Purple Screams cut down eight of them with a single salvo of her gun, a flurry of flechettes leaving bloody sliced up walls and slices of flesh scattered about. She knew where to go, where the names on the viceroy's list were most likely to be. A map of the place still lingered in her memory. Once a fortress, now a playground.
Not long after those first explosions, she blasted through a barricaded door, coming face to face with a group of unarmed Aquatics. They were standing in a large, well-furnished meeting room. All resting on the floor, huddled and red.
The Sencris commander approached her then. His hands were clean, though she could hardly blame him for that. Screams hadn't given him the chance to get them dirty. He was going to say something, she could feel it. Something she'd not like. These people were to be taken prisoner, that must be it.
Before he could speak up, she stared at the cornered politicians. They had served the Empire well. Still did, even in the face of certain defeat. They were loyal to something, a virtue of sorts. On the other hand, they had helped keep their own people under a foreign regime. They had also just goaded dozens of fighters into throwing away their lives, in their defense. All for the off chance of evading jail. After a split second of careful consideration, she decided it would be enjoyable to cut them all down. Her tentacle reached for the sheathed dagger, hesitated.
There were other considerations, besides the insufficient value of their lives. Corhadriam's new regime was supposed to be all about peacekeeping and prosperity, an act of defiance to Senchrien's warmongering. So butchering the old administration would send the wrong message.
She glanced at the Sencris officer behind her. He hadn't said anything after all, but his lance arm was tensed. His soldiers' too. Ready to stop her from doing anything too harsh.
It occurred to her, at that moment, that all this was serving as a test of sorts. A test of her skills and methods. Slow and steady, she moved her tentacle away from the dagger. More carnage, entertaining as it may be, would send the wrong message about her too.
"They're all yours," she said. The armored Sencris visibly relaxed when his translator informed him of the friendly, polite colors on her face. "I hope I could be of service."
After that, she watched them drag the frightened Aquatics away to a transport, to be taken to a cell somewhere. Beyond that, their fate depended on what kind of image the viceroy intended to paint of himself. On their way out, they'd pass by plenty of Three Purple Screams' handiwork. Enough, she hoped, to make them regret ever siccing those poor people on someone like her.
In his throne room, Corhadriam received an eagerly awaited transmission. The face was of a large, dark scaled man, who held in his hand a golden helmet adorned with sea creatures. A reassuring sign that all danger was done with, that both of them could be at ease.
The man reported that all members of the Aquatic government sympathetic to Senchrien had been arrested. What few pockets of resistance there were had been subdued. Illuminated Ocean, he proclaimed triumphant, was theirs.
The viceroy felt relieved. This was both his seat of power and, by far, the most strategically valuable star system within his reach. He also knew this to be just the first, easiest step in his secession from the Empire. Illuminated Ocean was the friendliest of territories, where most if not all troops and ships were loyal to him above all others. It was where he could exert the most direct control. The real challenge came next. He could only hope his allies elsewhere would be as successful.
