Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future Read online

  Sage dared to publicly appear as their friend and supporter no longer. He and his family would be at risk if he did so.

  He’d given them more than a fair trade and wished them the best before they left his market. The words had not been actually said, but Jamie knew anyway that he was warning them to prepare to defend themselves. He felt the bad old days were coming back.

  As they climbed into their little truck with Karen as the most skillful driver behind the wheel, nobody approached to smile or perhaps exchange a word or two as they would normally have done. They only watched with hidden glances, a few even daring to stare.

  No matter how they felt about the aliens who occupied New London, the people of Terrainaine realized policies had changed. Jamie sensed something different from hostility. They were being looked at with a kind of fearful pity.

  They drove slowly until they were a few miles beyond the shining, metallic city with its tall windowless buildings, then without having to be told, Karen stepped up the pace and Jamie found himself hanging on with all his strength as they bumped across the desert at an alarming speed until they reached the mountains where they were met by a trio of their hardiest supporters, two of them Mack and Karen’s young sons.

  Each carried a share of the modern Aremian weapons they’d bartered to gain as they climbed up and then down the mountains where, on their own side, another and swifter vehicle waited for them.

  Once again Karen drove like a wild woman, expertly managing consistent high speeds even when they entered the lush terrain of their own community with its obstacles of trees and creeks. Jamie knew he should breathe more easily now that he was back in home territory, but instead he was gripped with a terrible awareness that they had to get back with all due speed to warn the people of New London.

  They had been chosen and brought here for a purpose and that purpose was once more alive and active.

  Mack and Karen’s two boys began to engage in brotherly skirmishing and name-calling as the city that was their home came into sight just ahead of them. New London was a beautiful place with homes and public buildings designed like those in the warmer climates on Earth. The houses were long and low with graceful arches and colorful tiled roofs.

  Large bladed plants and tall grasses, brilliantly colored flowers impacted eyes that had only too recently witnessed the subtle browns and tans of the desert. The people of Earth occupied less than one percent of the planet, but undoubtedly it was the best part.

  They were all glad to be home, even if they were the bearers of bad news.

  It was the wet season in New London and as they drove toward the center of the city, a heavy rain began to fall.

  Old George greeted them after they pulled into the huge garage that was part of the old council building which they’d taken over as their headquarters after the city government had moved into newer, and in Jamie’s opinion less defensible headquarters. In the days when the original settlers had fought to their deaths to defend New London, this had been the most secure building in the city.

  And Jamie and his followers had spent the last dozen years shoring it up, making it safer from the attacks they felt certain would finally come.

  After securing the new firepower, they told George what they had learned and then sent messengers out to those like them who were ready to defend New London that it was time to take up residence here in their safest place.

  FOUR

  Once Aremia, the original planet settled by humans who had departed for space in a wave of colonization that occurred centuries before the western European cultures had even risen to recognizable civilization, had been a crowded planet, filled with its pueblo-style habitations. But these days only the most privileged lived on the empire’s governing world and so there were open spaces of cherished grasslands and carefully tended trees and other plants.

  When Claire had first traveled throughout the planet as the new empress, she had thought it all reminded her too much of the huge public parks on Earth. Even the ‘wild’ animals were only of the more gentle species. They had no bears or tigers or elephants.

  Of course on the Earth she’d left behind, such creatures only existed in carefully controlled habitants, but hers had also been a crowded planet.

  Now, as she awakened from a night spent sleeping on the grass, their sleeping forms having been concealed by low growing shrubbery, the only fear she had for her daughters were from the Aremians themselves. They had named their whole system after this carefully tended picture-perfect planet with its ancient culture.

  Biting insects, stinging ants, creatures that barked, howled or snapped were not tolerated. This was a safe place for the empire’s two princesses to slumber.

  She looked at them now, dark-haired Adaeze and fair Lillianne, and thought how much she loved them and how she would do anything, even give her own life to save them from the life their grandmother planned for them.

  Once they’d left the river behind, she’d felt a little safer with the sounds of battle in the distance, though they could still hear the noise of exploding bombs in the distance and the night sky had been lit by the flash of weapons.

  This was small scale warfare. Mere and her followers had seized control of most of the planet’s armaments, but they had no wish to do real damage to the beautiful home planet. The emperor’s guard was loyal to his memory, however, and would not quickly surrender their duty to his widow.

  He had said Claire was to be regent and they would die trying to keep their promises to him. Strong as they were, however, they could not long withstand the armies of Aremia, now under the dowager empress’s control.

  As the girls awakened, tired and hungry and perhaps close to shock, she began to tell them her plan.

  “We’ll head for the spaceport today,” she told them briskly. “And take ship for Capron.”

  Puzzled looks crossed their faces and they exchanged glances. It had been one of the difficult things about being the parent of mind talkers when she wasn’t one herself. They didn’t have to go behind her back to talk about her. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  She couldn’t even punish them for being sassy. Of course when Mathiah was alive, he’d kept them from too much covert rebellion by insisting on courtesy to their mother even in their private speech. They had found it close to impossible to keep secrets from their father.

  Now, she supposed, they were wondering if she’d cracked under the strain. Though, of course, they’d never use such an expression.

  Claire couldn’t help grinning. After having spent half her lifetime confined to the more formal speech patterns of Aremia that her new family used when addressing her, it was all coming back. Damn, but she felt like that scrappy Chicago girl again!

  “Arrangements have been made for members of the Imperial Guard to meet us at the emperor’s ship and from there; it’s off, off and away.”

  They stared at her. “We’re going to Blood?” Lillianne asked with unusual timidity.

  Claire frowned, hating the name the Aremians had given her planet. “No,” she said. “We’re not going to Sanctuary. I’ve had second thoughts. New London is already at risk and we can’t add to that by going there. Grandmere is fairly busy right now trying to head off a rebellion, but before long she’ll turn her attention back to us. And she’ll be in control of most of Sanctuary. I don’t want to put Jamie . . .that is the leaders of New London at extra risk trying to defend us.”

  She remembered them all too well, the one hundred children chosen from her home planet to bring their blood as sacrifice to the Gare. Her own health was no doubt permanently compromised by those last days when Mathiah was no longer able to protect her.

  She’d never known such pain and weakness as they injected chemicals into her body to bring her blood to the state needed to fight the hereditary disease that was torturing her husband as preliminary to taking his life. He’d begged them to leave her alone, but it hadn’t happened.

  Many Earth youngsters from the or
iginal settlers on Sanctuary had died as they were mercilessly used by their captors.

  “Then where are we going?” Adaeze asked in a hoarse voice.

  “Like I said, Capron to start with and then after that, who knows? Maybe Kyria.”

  Lillianne frowned. “Two pits of the universe. I hadn’t planned on being a barbarian.”

  “You can always hike back to the palace. I’m sure Grandmere will welcome you with open arms and you will live your life surrounded in luxury,” her sister told her.

  “Perhaps better than being a Kyrian pirate or a Capronian farmer.”

  “Certainly. You could always marry Cousin Stepan. It wouldn’t matter that he drools and is six times your age.”

  The girls rarely quarreled, at least in voices their mother could hear. She reminded herself that mature as they sometimes seemed Lillianne was just eleven and Adaeze only thirteen. She was the mom. She was in charge.

  “Enough,” she said gruffly. “We still have to manage to stay alive long enough to get to the port and head out of here.”

  Under her direction, they dug out the jewelry they’d buried under the bushes last night. She’d taken none of the crown’s property, but only the personal gifts Mathiah had made to her over the years. For her they held considerable personal value, like the twin blue diamonds he’d given her when the girls were born.

  She couldn’t afford sentiment anymore and the jewels were worth a fortune. She only hoped freedom and safety were on their shopping list.

  They made their way back toward the city, blending in with the silent people on the street, two servant girls and their little sister. The Aremians were not a people given to displaying emotions on their faces, but she thought she saw worry and even fear on some countenances.

  Their long stable lives looked to be encountering some major changes with the death of the last far speaker of the Gare.

  She wished she could hear what they were saying to each other, but knew she would have to wait for that info when the girls had time to brief her. Adaeze in particular was talented in intercepting messages from total strangers.

  But nothing would draw more attention right now and in this place than talking to each other. It would be like putting a sign on herself saying, ‘Escaping former regent of the Gare.’

  Except, hopefully, Mere still thought they were in their apartments, hiding out in sullen resentment of the new order.

  She was just thankful that everybody was too busy fighting everybody else to be trying to find them. Otherwise their attempt at escape would have most likely lasted about five minutes tops.

  No matter. Her two daughters, always accustomed to living in the greatest luxury, set off cross country with her, their hair unbrushed, their bodies unwashed and their stomachs empty.

  If they complained, she didn’t hear them.

  Jamie forced himself to sit still and let Isaiah do the talking. His intellectual friend was largely apolitical and served the community as a medical expert. It was hard to hate the person who had saved your son’s life or patched you up after you fell off the roof and broke your leg.

  Isaiah didn’t exactly fit in as one of them, but he commanded tremendous respect while Jamie had become a lightning rod for controversy.

  If the public felt that Isaiah ran with the wrong crowd, namely the group called the Defense League, they excused him on the grounds that he’d long been friends with Jamie, Mack and Karen.

  Of course everybody knew how much they owed the four who had been their leaders during those first hard days on Sanctuary, but it was time to move on. No point demonizing the Gare and the people they ruled for what had occurred in the past.

  Now Jamie sat with Mack, Karen, along with the two Russell boys and Isaiah’s daughter, drawing to their area of the new city hall’s comfortable seating those who were brave enough to face public censure by agreeing with them.

  Isaiah, looking weary and frail, sat among the reps, including old George who was kind of an emeritus rep, on the raised stage in the middle of the huge forum-type room.

  Kevin Hartley, who went by the official title of mayor of New London, was issuing a rather boring report on matters with which most of those in the small community were already familiar.

  Kevin, already balding at age thirty, and a little pudgy from lack of physical activity, flashed his toothy smile at the listeners and reported an increase of population of four from the births of infants in the last six months. Everybody clapped and cheered when he added that there had been no subtractions, nobody had died during that period.

  “With our young population, we have been lucky enough to see few losses over the years,” he said. At these words everybody stared at old George, who was at an age few of them could imagine, as though he might drop dead at any minute.

  They had mourned the loss of each of the eleven other senior councilors who had been the only survivors left in Sanctuary when they arrived and now they looked to George as the slightly senile former fount of wisdom numbered among those who had saved them in the early years.

  Years ago they’d named him as a permanent rep and now, Jamie smiled briefly at the thought, they didn’t know how to get him to retire from active participation.

  “Mom, do we have to stay?” Charlie, the older of Mack and Karen’s two boys whispered loudly.

  Karen glared at him and he subsided to whisper to his brother.

  Alice, Isaiah’s daughter, sat quietly taking everything in. Although two years younger than her dad had been when Jamie first met him, she reminded him a lot of the younger Isaiah, though fortunately she’d taken her slim blonde good looks from her late mother.

  He listened while Kevin and other reps droned through the detailed facts and figures of the city’s dwellers and their accomplishments in the way of crops and building repair and construction.

  According to Kevin, the now two hundred and eleven residents of New London were doing fine in this best of all possible worlds.

  Not a cloud in the sky. Jamie’s thoughts were of necessity grim. The news he and his friends had brought back to their city would surely wake them up to the need to prepare for a changing world.

  Hell, the people of the varied worlds in the empire dominated by the central planet of Aremia weren’t getting along too good among themselves. His people, the grownup children of New London and their children, would be no more than a footnote in Aremian history.

  He tuned out as figure after figure was announced and discussed endlessly, thinking they could just have said it had been a good crop year and the cities utilities and repairs were going well.

  His attention was caught when Kevin mentioned the recent trading mission to Terrainaine and how generously the Aremian residents had bargained for their delicious peaches. He credited the growers, than casually named Jamie, Mack and Karen as those who had taken the product to market.

  How generous. Kevin didn’t like to say good things about the three people who were the flies in the ointment of his contentment.

  Now, having received permission to speak, Isaiah rose and Jamie’s attention sharpened to a keen edge. He was a better speaker than his friend, he knew that, but he was discredited, reviled. They wouldn’t listen to him, but Isaiah was respected. Surely they would have to pay attention to what he had to say.

  He saw Mack glance at his wife, saw her give her head a slight shake. None of them were exactly optimistic about how much they were going to be able to influence Kevin’s ‘peace at all costs’ policy.

  FIVE

  The outer rings of the spaceport were easily breached, but Claire and her daughters had more difficulty getting through the high levels of security that protected the incoming and outgoing ships.

  Fortunately the fighting still taking place around the palace and the city around it meant that not even the authorities guarding the port seemed entirely certain who was in charge.

  Dropping the pretense of being a child, Claire lowered the servant’s hood that hid her distinctive length of
glossy black hair and stood before the guards as the well-known figure of the woman who was so recently empress of Aremia.

  Even more important to her identity were the two princesses standing just behind her. Either their mother or their grandmother currently ruled the planets that made up the empire. The fact that a small revolution was spreading out from the empire’s core didn’t make Adaeze and Lillianne contain less of the all-important royal blood in their veins.

  Claire faced them down and in her naturally authoritative voice told them she wished to be escorted to the royal cruiser. As she saw the Aremian guard who to each individual towered over her five foot four body glance at each other, she could only be glad they had none of the technological communications she would have found on Earth.

  Their ability to communicate to the palace for instructions was limited. They could talk telepathically with each other, but only over limited distances. Even the most talented could get across only a few miles and the empress had nothing of her late son’s gift to speak across this planet and throughout space to the many worlds that had been under his command.

  “We wish to be escorted to the imperial cruiser immediately,” she ordered, and knowing the expression on her elder daughter’s face, guessed that the person closest to the throne after the cousin who now occupied it, was backing up her instructions.

  They were taken to the cruiser Princess Adaeze, so named after the birth of their first child. At the time she had protested that if they had other children, they might resent the name. Mathiah had laughed and said other things could be called after subsequent children and, of course, Lillianne had been honored in other ways.

  The armed cruiser, the latest in a line of such space vehicles since the one that had first departed Sanctuary with Claire on board as the young emperor’s prisoner, was a state of the art vessel and kept constantly staffed by an expert and, hopefully, loyal crew.