Chapter 8 - An Explosion in the Palace

 

Zara felt the scorch of heat as the world became a confusing mass of noise, smoke, and movement.  She found herself no longer at the table, but on the ground, her ears ringing and her right side in aching pain.  She tried to use her hand to push herself into a sitting position, only to hiss at the realization that the skin on her palm had been sandpapered raw by the courtyard concrete.

“Don’t.  Stay down.  Wait for the Korkudai to handle it.”  Prince Senthir’s voice was raspy, but certain.  He said something else, but she couldn’t make it out.  He’d ended up in a crouch next to her, and there was blood running down his face.  

Zara tried to gauge where she’d ended up.  Everything was a jumble.  Smoke clouded the courtyard, making it difficult to see what was happening.  The screaming and weeping of hundreds of Concubines made it difficult to discern if the bomb had been a singular attack, or if additional danger persisted.  And she knew it to be a bomb, or at least an incendiary device of some kind.  You didn’t spend ten years being bombed by the Galactic Empire to forget the smell, the sound, the confusion of it.

“No.  We should find cover,” she called, her voice’s pitch not modulating well due to the ringing in her ears.  Zara had no idea if he heard her.  “If there’s another blast…”

Senthir’s eyebrows drew downward at the thought as he looked around.  He pointed to a nearby garden box.  The Leonara tree there had a thick trunk, and there were several stone benches that could possibly provide some cover should anything else happen.  She could see Madame Lisette’s red hair peeking over the top of one of the benches.  They weren’t the only ones with the idea to find cover.

“Help…”  

The faint voice caught Senthir’s attention first, causing his head to swivel in that direction.  “Narisa!”  His half-sister lay nearby, her arm punctured by several pieces of shattered porcelain, and her leg twisted grotesquely.  Turning back to Zara, he yelled.  “Go.  I’ll grab Narisa.”  

She nodded, believing the Prince more than capable of carrying the tiny slender woman she’d seen earlier.  Zara darted through the smoke and ended up in the grass next to both Madame Lisette and Lady Vivienne.  “Are you both alright?”

Vivienne looked to be bleeding fairly heavily from one eye.  Zara assumed the glass in her spectacles had burst  She immediately tore the sleeve from her dress and wrapped it around Vivienne’s head.  “I know it hurts, but try to keep pressure on the eye.”  Then she said to them both, “If you smell something that burns your nose, use your sleeve to breathe through.”  It wouldn’t completely prevent them from getting burned by conchem, but would give them a few more seconds to try to flee to somewhere better ventilated.  Madame Lisette looked too terrified to respond verbally, but after a moment of shock, she managed to nod.  

Prince Senthir joined them and placed Princess Narisa on the soft grass.  She looked to be in a poor state, losing blood from both her punctured arm and her leg.  Zara immediately crawled in that direction to take a better look, gritting her teeth whenever her hand made contact with the ground.  She’d helped the medical staff during the war often, fetching supplies when she was younger, and in recent years with more complicated tasks such as prepping tools, taking temperatures, changing bandages, or even holding someone down during the setting of a bone.  War didn’t care if you had a medical degree, every hand was needed, and she’d learned a lot, especially from the triage nurses.  

“Your coat has a silk lining, doesn’t it?” she asked Senthir.

He nodded.

“Rip it out.”  Zara figured it’d be the cleanest and strongest option they had available.  She couldn’t imagine the Forbidden City servants would give Senthir anything but a perfectly clean coat for the event.  “Her arm is bad, but her leg is worse.  Leave the porcelain pieces in, but elevate her arm above her heart.  Keep it still.  I’ll wrap the leg.”  If only she had a needle, thread, and some alcohol she might have been able to make a few haphazard stitches the doctors could cut open later.  For now, she’d have to rely on pressure.  When Senthir handed her the lining from his coat, she nodded and immediately scooted over to get in a position where she could tend to Narisa’s leg.  The woman had turned ashen from blood loss and fallen unconscious as Senthir moved her, but for the moment, Zara was glad.  Narisa wouldn’t feel the pain.  She used all of her strength to yank the leg straight and push the bone into a better position before binding Narisa’s leg with Senthir’s coat lining.  

By this time, several of the Concubines and guests had started to stand up.  Senthir yelled at them to stay down, and while a few obeyed him, others looked dazed, unable to understand why they should remain low if the bomb had already gone off.  The Korkudai began to filter in from a northern corridor.  Some repeated the command for the concubines to stay down and, additionally, to keep their hands visible, while others moved through the area, assessing the situation and looking for further threats.  At that moment, a second explosion shook the courtyard, but this one was much further away than the prior one had been, near the corridor where the Korkudai had emerged.  

The distance and the stone bulwark created by the benches made it easier for the group to weather the second explosion without additional injury.  Zara’s concern grew.  It shouldn’t have been possible for anyone to bring an explosive device into the Outer Court.  They’d been checked extensively by the Adjudicants on the way in, scanned for any potentially hazardous items.  Was this some sort of coordinated attack on the entirety of Viverides?  With the security levels of the palace planet, it didn’t seem likely.  Any large attack force would have been obliterated by the battleships in constant orbit around Viverides.

 Zara tried to put her anxiety and confusion out of her mind and, instead, focused once again on the injured.  Princess Narisa remained unconscious, with Madame Lisette holding her arm still as requested.  Lady Vivienne appeared to be taking slow, deep breaths to fight her pain but hadn’t lost so much color that Zara worried she’d be in immediate danger.  That left Prince Senthir.  Zara scooted closer to him and murmured, “Your face is bloody.  Let me take a look?”  

Prince Senthir appeared surprised, as if he hadn’t realized he’d also been injured.  He brought his fingertips to his cheek, and when they came away bloody, he just stared.  “I don’t feel any pain.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Zara murmured.  She dabbed at his cheek with her remaining sleeve, trying to find the source of the blood. 

The second bomb had re-ignited the screaming and pleas and filled the courtyard with even more smoke.  Zara could no longer see far in that direction, but she heard the Korkudai shouting orders, so she knew they must still be there, even if some of them had been taken out by the blast.  

“You have a cut on your brow here.  It’s deep enough to need stitches, but you should be fine, provided we get out of here fairly soon.”

“Hm.  You have a relatively calm demeanor for someone trapped in the middle of a terrorist situation,” Senthir observed, his surprise apparent.  “You spend a lot of time in similar trouble?”

“No, just ten years getting shelled by the Galactic Empire’s forces.”  Zara realized she’d said it a bit sourly, and considering the man she’d said it to was the Emperor’s brother, she probably should have held her tongue.  “Sorry.  I didn’t mean for that to come out as sharply as I said it.”

“It’s fine.  You shouldn’t apologize for the truth.”  Senthir produced a handkerchief from one of the pockets of his fine coat, and pressed it to the wound Zara had indicated.  With his free hand, he stroked Princess Narisa’s cheek.  “I hope she’ll be okay.  I don’t think the Emperor would easily weather losing Narisa, after what happened to Clarisa.”

Zara raised an eyebrow.  Tython had mentioned something about that. “What happened to her?”

“Kidnapped,” Senthir said, voice full of both sorrow and anger.  “The Spiral Alliance took her.  Whenever the Emperor considers attacking them, they send him a video of her to remind him of their hostage.”

“How cruel!”  

“You would know.  You are in the same position, are you not?”

“No, I mean…”  Zara meant to say more, but then just closed her mouth.  There was definitely a difference between being a willing hostage, and being an unwilling one.  At the same time, she could see Prince Senthir’s point.   

Fairly quickly after that, the Korkudai got control of the situation enough for scores of Adjudicants and medical staff to enter the area.  Princess Narisa was one of the first people removed from the scene, and Senthir decided to accompany her.  The critically wounded and dead were hauled off by the Adjudicants to an undisclosed location within the Outer Court, while less intensely wounded guests and concubines found themselves hauled onto hoverbarges and taken out of the gates to a cleared section of the War Garden.  This area, soon covered in large white pavilion tents to serve as clinics, dormitories, and dining halls, defied attempts at calm organization by the Adjudicants and other palace officials.  Some guests and concubines demanded loudly to be allowed to return home, whilst others promoted paranoia and hysteria by spreading gossip and accusations.  Zara heard no end of conspiracy theories, even that the Emperor himself had planned the bombing simply because he wanted a fresh batch of concubines.  She didn’t have the heart to remind the lady spreading the rumor that the Emperor didn’t need a bomb to have them all to be replaced.

That evening, all of the concubines slept on cots in their dance dresses.  Zara had seen cots like this before - they had them in abundance in the underground clinic near the bunker.  Not particularly comfortable, but it did beat sleeping on the ground.  Her hand, bandaged earlier in the evening by a medical attendant, didn’t require any stitches but did burn and throb where the skin had been abraded by her fall.  A few other small cuts required nothing but the touch of a cheap mendmachine to knit them closed.

The next morning, a gold Adjudicant read a statement to those in the War Garden.  Eighteen concubines and seven guests had died in the blast.  For the safety of the Royal Family and the Empire, the bombing would not be reported to the news media, as they didn’t wish to encourage copycats to attempt anything similar.  Therefore, all those present would need to sign a privacy document swearing to secrecy on the matter.  This requirement caused a great deal of discontent among those present, and several of the guests began a loud argument with the gold Adjudicant, claiming they had every right to speak freely about the events that endangered their lives.  The loudest ones were hauled off by the Korkudai, likely to have their opinions changed by force.

Zara tried to find everyone she knew, to make sure they’d made it through.  She even checked on Lady Astrid, who escaped the bombing mostly unharmed other than having a large portion of her hair on the left side burnt away.  Zara tried to take her complaints about it seriously, and not slide into raucous laughter.  

But, she couldn’t find Tython anywhere.  He’d been sitting incredibly close to the area where the bomb had gone off, and Zara worried that he might have been one of the critically wounded.  She didn’t want to consider that he might be among the dead.  Nobody she spoke with could give her any information about his condition, and one gold Adjudicant even demanded her name and designation after she asked about Tython.  

That afternoon, a number of armored shuttlecraft landed near the War Garden’s impromptu camp.  The Korkudai who disembarked carried guns and laser pistols, as well as riot shields made from a dark material Zara couldn’t identify.   Their commander announced that everyone present would be questioned before being released, and proceeded to read off a list of names for the first group slated for interrogation.  Zara’s name was the third one read off by the Korkudai.  

Being so high on the list of people to be questioned, she knew, did not bode well.

 

-*-*-*-*-

 

Although the House Kalimat bunker contained only the leaders of Ankali, their close relatives, and a number of servants, it was connected to a whole labyrinth of underground stations across the capital city of Ankorna.  Her family was subjected to frequent lockdowns, where they couldn’t move around for weeks or months due to security threats.  But, when they could, Zara had explored the labyrinth of bunkers extensively.  The nearby clinic readily accepted her help whenever available, and she often worked in the clothing warehouse as well.  Her elder sister, Thalia, was an incredible speaker and had a wonderfully enthusiastic voice.  Thalia spent most of her time working for the resistance radio station and had become a darling of the Ankalians for her cheerful personality and her nightly bedtime stories for children.  Together, they occasionally explored off-limits parts of the underground complex, with Thalia never letting her blindness hold her back from adventure.  

On those adventures, the pair occasionally found mysterious rooms that smelled of sweat, blood, and bleach.  Some of them contained a single chair, and nothing else.  Others were decidedly more sinister, containing items that didn’t bode well for the previous occupants.  At first, Zara had thought the power tools and electrical wire just meant someone was doing some maintenance in that area.  A tray of dental tools on an otherwise empty counter just meant that someone needed emergency dental work during a war.  It wasn’t like you could make an appointment with a dentist, after all.

It took Thalia explaining it to her before Zara understood the true meaning of these rooms.  After that, they attempted to avoid areas they thought might be off-limits for more sinister reasons.  But, Zara thought about those rooms often and wondered if her parents had sanctioned such cruelties to the enemy, or if they occurred simply as a byproduct of any war.  Either way, Zara hoped to never see such a room again.

Unfortunately, she now found herself in a similar place.  The room had that same scent, the sourness of bodily fluids mixed with the acridity of high-powered cleaning agents.  And, even though she couldn’t make out any implements of torture within the room, Zara assumed that they’d be kept nearby.  Instead, the windowless room contained one chair for the person being interrogated, a metal table with more than a few dents in the top, and several additional chairs on the opposing side of the table.  It also contained a robot, one that Zara knew would record the proceedings, and might even shoot a tranq dart at her if she became too rowdy.  She had no intention of becoming disorderly, but…  She also knew that the last day, as well as the bombing, had frayed her patience and loosened her tongue.

Commandant Moira Reyphine sat in the chair directly across from Zara.  She’d changed out of her fancy uniform and now wore one more suited to daily use.  It did not make her appear any less intimidating, in Zara’s estimation.  The displeased look on her face was understandable considering what happened to her wife.  Zara wanted to ask about Princess Narisa, but supposed it might not be the right time for small talk.  Instead, she quietly watched the Commandant.  The woman had high, arching eyebrows and some of the most perfect skin Zara had ever seen.  She also had the sort of face which, at rest, looked like she was contemplating the best way to kill you and secretly dispose of your body.

The other person in the room was more of an unknown.  Although he was one of the Noble Ministers, Zara couldn’t figure out which one he might be.  She wasn’t even completely sure it was a man.  The voluminous robes of their office made chest size difficult to discern, and the veiled hat covered the entirety of their face.  

Two extremely important people.  Zara couldn’t imagine that these two in particular intended to interview all of the hundreds of concubines and guests.  So, she assumed they must just be interviewing the ones of particular interest.  Why would she be of particular interest?  Was it just because she was one of the newest concubines?  Or was there another reason?

“You are Lady Zarathenia of House Kalimat, second in line to the throne of the planet Ankali, designated Hostage Concubine Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine?” Commandant Reyphine asked as she read from an intellipad that must have had information about Zara on it.

“Yes.  Well, no.   Um…”  Zara winced.  This was off to a bad start. “We don’t actually have a throne.  It’s…not that kind of planet.”

“Do you have a problem with thrones?” Commandant Reyphine asked, looking up from the intellipad.

“No.  I…  I just…”  Zara could feel her nerves affecting her ability to think straight.  Would they torture her?  If they did torture her, what would it be?  Electricity?  Blades?  Impromptu dentistry?  “Sorry, I’m just nervous.”  

“Why are you nervous?  Do you have something to hide?”

“I’m nervous because you’re very intimidating.  This room is intimidating.  This situation is, on the whole, intimidating.  I don’t have anything to hide, but I’m pretty sure you torture people in here, so that’s exceptionally nerve-wracking.”

Commandant Reyphine tilted her head slightly and didn’t dispute the assertion.  “Fair enough.”  Looking back down, she continued to scroll through the intellipad, occasionally making noises such as ‘hm’ or ‘ah’.  Once or twice, she even grunted slightly.  After a good three minutes of this, she asked, “How do you know the Hostage Concubine known as Tython?”  

“Tython?”  Zara leaned forward, “Is he alright?  Nobody will tell me what happened to him.”

“Just answer the question.”

“I don’t really know him.  We met when the concubines were boarding the hoverbarge to head into the Forbidden City.  I mended his pants for him.  They were far too long.”  

Commandant Reyphine eyed Zara in a way that bordered on incredulous.  “That didn’t strike you as strange?  That his pants were made for someone much taller than him?”  

Zara leaned back and blinked repeatedly.  Should she have thought something amiss when she found that Tython’s pants didn’t fit him?  “No, because I had to perform some small alterations on my own dress, I just assumed…”  But, her dress wasn’t fundamentally the wrong size for her.  She’d simply made it fit a little better.  The Adjudicants had her measurements, so if they’d sent her such a completely ill-fitting dress, it’d be strange.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t think about it.  At the time, it just seemed like an oversight.”  

“Hm.”  Commandant Reyphine continued her questioning.  “He appeared to stick close to you during the ride to the Outer Court, and even within the dance courtyard.  Do you know how he managed to change seats in order to sit next to you?  Or why?”

Zara shook her head.

“Alright, how about this?  Observers said you two spoke quite a bit during the trip and even during the dance.  What did you speak about?”

“He mostly just…  It was my first time dancing at the Night Blossom Festival, so he explained what I was seeing.  He told me about the War Garden, and pointed out the various important personages in attendance at the event.”

Commandant Reyphine put her intellipad face-down on the table and leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms.  “And I suppose that didn’t strike you as odd, either?  That someone who has been a hostage concubine for just four years knew all these things?”  

Zara threw her hands in the air in exasperation, “I thought someone else had perhaps done the same for him!  That it was just information passed between concubines over time!”  

“Combative.”  The single word was pronounced by the Noble Minister in the corner, who Zara now assumed to be male, due to the deep voice.  

“I’m not…”  Zara immediately closed her mouth.  Loudly protesting that you’re not combative, she knew, would likely be the quickest way to be deemed combative.  She tried instead to change the topic.  “Was…  Was Tython involved in the bombing?”  

“Yes.  If by ‘involved’ one considers the bomb itself as being involved.  The person you knew as ‘Tython’ exploded.  He was one of two infiltrators who made it past all of our security checks.”

Zara’s shock had her bringing her hands to her mouth.  She didn’t want to believe such a thing to be true.  “But, how…?”

Commandant Reyphine shook her head.  “We’re not sure.  New technology, perhaps.  A merging of biotech and genetic manipulation.  Something that can fool even the Adjudicants.  What do you know about the Spiral Alliance?”  

“Not much.  They are fighting against the Galactic Empire?”  She also knew that they’d kidnapped the Emperor’s sister, but she decided to leave that part out.  “Are they the ones who did this?”

“It seems likely.”  Commandant Reyphine’s dry voice rarely changed away from an irritated monotone.  She struck Zara as the type of woman Zara’s mother used to call, ‘No nonsense’.  “Look, I believe you.  Mostly.  I can’t imagine an actual conspirator would be so obvious about their association with the enemy.  However, I will need to keep you here another day or two, just in case we have any questions.  In the meantime, I want you to write down every single thing you remember about this ‘Tython’.  Every detail, no matter how small.  You understand?”

Zara nodded several times.  She understood the gravity of the situation, and how anything but complete cooperation might make her look guilty.

“Good.  Now I’m afraid I’m not the only one who wants to question you.  The Royal Physicians wish to have a word about your unlicensed practice of medicine following the bombing.”

Zara opened her mouth to protest, but before she could, Commandant Reyphine held up her hand.  

“Don’t worry, Lady Zara.  I’ve seen to it that you won’t be charged.  After all, Princess Narisa survived due to your efforts.  That doesn’t mean you aren’t about to sit through a rather lengthy berating by those who would have preferred to be the ones to save her.”  

“Oh, I’m so glad!  I’m so glad she’s alright.”

“Well,” Commandant Reyphine murmured as she got to her feet, “You should be.  If anything had happened to the Princess…”

She didn’t finish the statement.  She didn’t need to.  Zara knew exactly what she meant.  If anything happened to Princess Narisa, if she’d died due to Zara’s botched attempts to save her, Zara’s life would have been forfeit.