Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (2 page)

Since tonight’s invitation came
to Chen, Sara didn’t even know the man’s name, only that he was part of
Sovereign Prollixer’s distant family circle. She felt guilty that she really
didn’t care who the celebrant was and uneasy because of Chen’s behavior. She
finished her vodka, enjoying the vanilla-tinged fire as it slid down her
throat.

She watched Chen’s suited figure
cross the expansive dance floor to the dining area. He stopped at a table near
the balcony exit, leaned toward its sole occupant, a female with short, sleek
hair, and helped her up. Her leg peeked from a waist-high slit in the silver
gown she wore. Chen placed his hand on her lower back, and they left.

Looking for a new amour
already?

The thought of him with another
woman so soon pinched, but it was better than the alternative, business—probably
the rule-breaking kind. For once she worried.

A rumor that the Sovereign
himself would be attending tonight made security at the party tighter than at
any other social event she’d ever attended. Embassy contractors, clad in their
traditional black clothing, policed the crowd, watching as closely as any
voyeur.

She moved to follow Chen, but a
man stepped into her path. “Enjoying the celebration?”

Though he wore a formal charcoal
suit, the man’s black hair and deep blue eyes marked him as a contractor. He
reminded her of Chen, though a dozen years older, with his short jaw and the
perfect angle between his nose and upper lip. Without a doubt, the two men came
from the same distant lineage. In other circumstances she might be interested,
but her anxiety multiplied the longer Chen was out of her sight.

“It’s a beautiful party.
Unfortunately you caught me on my way out.”

The contractor slipped a hand
around her wrist and brought her arm up to admire the cuff. She caught a whiff
of musky sandalwood on his skin.

“Is this for your first
child?” he asked.

“It will be.” She tried
to pull away, but his grip tightened.

“So you just recently
received this?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch
your name.”

“Rainer Varden, Head
Contractor for the Embassy.”

Her mouth went dry.

“I didn’t catch your name
either,” he said.

“Sara Mendoza.” She
ignored the shiver moving down her spine and tried to play confident. “You
obviously come from an impressive line, but I won’t be in the market for a new
amour until after my child is born.”

He chuckled, his look making it
clear that he would never be in the market for her.

She blushed, but ignored the
insult.

“Have you already
conceived?” he asked.

“No.” She hated
admitting that she was still on mandatory birth control.

He didn’t look surprised, and
that turned her annoyance into anxiety.

“Maybe we can talk
later,” she said with a shaky smile. “Right now I have to meet
someone.”

“I’d like to meet him,
too.” Rainer pushed aside his long formal jacket to reveal a gun strapped
to his thigh. All Embassy contractors carried the same static charge weapon—an
incendiary pistol commonly called a cender. Chen carried one, too, but not
when he could be searched, like tonight.

Rainer kept a firm grip on her
elbow as they moved through the mass of bodies. To anyone watching, they would
look like two newly met individuals stealing away to get more intimately
acquainted.

Her heart raced. She looked
around for Chen and tried to offer pleading looks to the people they passed on
their way out. Most of the returning glances showed drunken indifference, some
expressed a hint of envy, none recognized her fear.

Rainer gracefully maneuvered her
through the exit. The door shut out the energy of party guests and fast music.
Outside, the sudden stillness rang in her ears. She fidgeted from foot to foot
as they entered the grav lift and waited for it to activate. From the curving
outside balcony of the hippodrome, she stared into Palomin Canyon Reserve. The
moon illuminated the orange and pink undulations of the sandstone walls
surrounding them. A fleeting scent of sun-baked rocks trickled into her lungs,
and she shivered in the cooling evening.

Two other white rotundas, like
the one she just left, sprouted from the purpled stone of the ancient river
valley like bloated mushrooms. Even from six hundred meters up Sara could make
out the ambient light circles below each building. An amalgam of salvaged
worldship sections, these edifices provided a home to all the archives of the
Embassy’s six-moon system, its short, but all-powerful History.

She tucked wisps of her hair
behind her ear and tried to quiet her anxious mind. Rainer loosened his grip on
her elbow as the energy walls of the grav lift enveloped them and hazed her
view. Surprisingly, the sensation of being
pulled up
was somehow more
comforting than
falling down
, though the one meter per second speed was
actually the same both ways. When ascending, it simply was easier
not
to
look down and see there was only a hazy nothingness between her and the dizzying
drop into the mottled canyon.

She thought of her ride on the
lift earlier tonight, how Chen kept promising it would be a night to change
their lives. How quickly perspectives changed.

At the canyon’s rim, the lift
slowed to a stop. Her heels tapped a nervous cadence across the portable metal
gangway then fell silent when she stepped onto the sandy ochre earth. Six other
contractors waited for them. Sara stumbled as her knees buckled. Rainer kept
her steady.

Where is Chen?

She willed herself not to stare
at the weapons strapped to the contractors’ thighs. One on each leg. Seven
contractors, including the one holding onto her. Fourteen cenders, each capable
of scorching her or hurling a sizzling shot right through her.

Rainer guided Sara closer to the
group. Her legs froze.

“What’s happening? I don’t
understand.” Her voice sounded small; she barely recognized it.

“We’re going to ask you a
few questions.”

“About what?” She
forced a little strength into her voice.

“About this.” He
thumbed the cuff just below her elbow.

Her breath caught. The once
purple filaments now burned white inside their black casing. What had Chen
given her? A listening device? An explosive?

She tried to jerk away, but
Rainer held her fast. Racing through escape scenarios in her mind, she saw none
that wouldn’t get her shot or killed.

Her peripheral vision suddenly
caught movement on her right.

Chen?

Hoping for an intervention she
almost cried in relief. Chen could handle this. She was in over her head.

The figure zipped past, not Chen,
but a man surfing the air on a swivel board, rocking on his heels to turn the
board where he wanted to go. Another followed. Then another. They were dressed
in a motley assortment of workers’ pants, t-shirts, and leather. Their eye
sockets reflected with silver lenses.

Fraggers
.

Her muscles tightened in
agitation. She wondered if the rumors were true about the anti-government
techno-militants, that the v-mitter lenses they wore could allow them to see
the real world like a virtual arena, giving the wearers sharper reflexes and
more efficient kills.

Fraggers were killers
.

Around her, the contractors drew
their cenders, blasting at the incoming attackers. Rainer was already on his
communicator. “All units to the rim.”

He let go of her and directed her
to a nearby boulder before adding his guns to the fight. She never hesitated.
Thanks to Chen she would add
running for her life
to the list of things
she’d never experienced before tonight.

“Stay alive. Stay
alive.” Sara chanted the mantra during her dash across the scrubby ground.
She needed to be able to think, to act fast, to find a way out of this. If she
let one tear fall, it would unleash a mind-numbing torrent of sobbing; she’d
save that luxury for when she and Chen were traveling back home.

The boulder rose up to greet her.
She ran faster, her ankles twisting in the strappy heels. Adrenaline shook
through her limbs and she dove for cover. Sand clung to the perspiration on her
cheek and arm where she’d landed. Scrambling on bare hands and exposed knees,
Sara crawled further behind the boulder. Her back scraped against the sandy
surface. She pressed her palms to her eyes. “Stay alive.”

Even in her hiding place she
couldn’t feel safe. Her mind flashed through a hundred stories she had heard
about fragger brutality.

She chanced a look around the
boulder’s side.

A handful of boarders flew out
from the canyon’s depths. The snap of cender fire echoed off the rocks and far
canyon walls. Hoping not to be noticed, she staggered for a tall stack of
rocks further away. The sandstone grabbed at her silky dress, ripping patches
away and shredding her skin. She fumbled with the straps on her shoes, then
kicked them off.

The fraggers unhitched from their
boards and dropped onto a dozen more contractors unloading from an open-air
desert transport that had arrived from the direction of the setting sun.

The contractors charged on the
outnumbered fraggers, their cenders releasing enough supercharged energy to
power her ancestral home for a month. Each invisible round left a wake of
static-charged air sparkling in the darkening evening. The heavy smell of ozone
made her cough and wheeze. Flying sand, gritty and thick, coated her tongue.
Her hair follicles expanded with the change in temperature and static heat in
the air.

Activity on the far side of the
battle scene near the rim drew her attention. It was Chen, scaling the canyon
wall with grapplers. He slipped up and over the rim nearby, unnoticed; the
woman he’d left the event with was nowhere to be seen. Looking at readings on
his palm screen brought his gaze up to the rocky outcrop where Sara huddled.

Part of her wondered if he had
known where she was because the bracelet had a tracker. Mostly she just felt
relieved. She pushed away from the rock, but he quickly gestured for her to
stay put.

An intense light emanated from
the battle arena, blocking her view of Chen. On the fringe of the light, she
could discern three fraggers backed into a circle, directly in the center of
the cender onslaught. The contractor weapons seemed to have no effect on them.
The fraggers stood calmly with their hands thrust out in front of them, palms
glowing. It looked to her like the fraggers were absorbing the energy from the
cender bursts, turning it into orbs of intense light that they could manipulate
and hold in their palms.

She almost couldn’t look at their
brilliance any more. Then, the fraggers threw the glowing orbs back at their
attackers.

Sara didn’t hear any screams.

No explosions.

Silence grew as the orbs expanded
and engulfed the contractors. When the flash died down, six victims lay in a
charred heap in front of the fraggers. The scent of burning hair and flesh
fouled the air.

Lights flooded the plateau. A small
ship’s engines screamed to life from behind a high escarpment. Chen signaled
Sara toward it. A boarder spotted the movement and pulled a vertical
three-sixty to dive on him. Chen fired double cenders. When the fragger orbed
the energy back at him, Chen slipped behind a sandstone arch extending from the
escarpment.

Sara ran to help, but came face
to face with a pair of silver v-mitter lenses.

A deboarded fragger thrust his
triton knife at her throat, its three silvery blades already tinged with blood.
Her left arm blocked it, but the knife glanced off the cuff on her forearm and
sliced through the skin. The cuff flew to the stony ground several meters away.

The fragger grabbed her by her
neck and threw her to the ground. He dropped a knee into her stomach, forcing
the air out of her body. Pain shot through her abdomen and erupted in her head.
She felt like she would vomit. The man punched her, shattering her nose and
spilling blood down her throat.

The transport’s lights reflected
in the fragger’s v-mitters. In desperation, Sara ripped the right one from his
eye. He shrieked and rolled off her.

She crawled away.

Chen ran toward her. Another
boarder closed in on him. With a well-timed shot to the board’s center, Chen forced
the rider to dismount. Sara tried to scream for his attention, but choked on
blood.

Just before he reached her, Chen
stopped to pick up the bracelet.

Someone tackled Sara by the legs
and threw her onto her back. She met the dead stare of the fragger. His
functioning v-mitter taunted her, but the frenzied look in the bloody, exposed
eye was terrifying. He straddled her, pinning her arms to the ground with his
legs, then wrapped his hands around her throat. She thrashed, but he cut off
her air, slowly, as if savoring her panic.

She silently begged Chen to
hurry.

Blackness spotted her vision. The
fight died inside of her.

Suddenly the pressure released.
Her assailant’s head snapped back, then the fragger pitched over onto her.

She gasped and choked, struggling
to push the heavy body aside. With the small amount of strength remaining
inside of her, Sara rolled the dead weight off her. Lying on her side, sand
sticking to the blood and tears streaking her face, she stared into the harsh
landing lights ahead. She saw Chen pocket the bracelet and board the ship.

He never looked back.

The door closed. The lights
dimmed, and the ship’s green hull shimmered in the ascent, before disappearing
into the cloudless night.

He left me
.

A shadowy outline eclipsed her
starry view. She grabbed the fragger’s triton knife, but the dark figure
leveled a cender. She knew it was the same cender which had forced her away
from the party and up the grav lift, the same cender which had brought down the
fragger trying to kill her.