The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1) (6 page)

Oh oh.

“Sweetheart,” Les interrupted as he
stepped up to the woman’s elbow. “I’m sure Cousin…,” He took in the
official’s nametag, “Cousin Bower is just doing his job. Sorry, my
wife gets very emotional.” Les lobbied a conspiratorial “
Help
me! I have to live with her
!” look at the guard. Then, before
anyone could recover from their surprise, he grabbed the woman’s
arm and dragged her away.

“What…what are…” spluttered the
woman.

“Trying to save your life,” replied Les
in an undertone. The woman gave him a wide-eyed look, but allowed
him to maneuver the three of them into the waiting-room.

Les seated the woman on one of the hard
syntha-poly chairs, and sat down beside her.

“Look, sweetheart,” he said, “you can’t
insult the Kova. They’re not…tolerant.”

The woman got his gist. She looked down
at the child in her arms. “I just want to change her name,” she
whispered.

“A bad name on a live baby,” said Les,
“is far better than an excellent name on a dead baby.”

But before he could follow up on that
with an explanation, Royce moved, a flash of dark cloth and limb.
Les found himself pushed back in the chair, Royce interspersed
between him and the baby.

“Oh!” said the mother, startled. “You’re
fast
!”

And then Les saw it – the emerald-green
head of a small snake undulating out of the infant’s sleeve, its
forked tongue flickering to taste the air before it.

“Cousin,” said Royce, “I hate to tell
you this, but there’s a snake in your child’s undergarment.”

“That’s just her pet,” the woman
replied. “Isn’t it, precious? Yes, yes it is!”

“Royce,” Les said, as his ex-husband
shows no inclination to relax his threatening posture, “it’s just a
pet. Not dangerous.”

“Oh, he’s venomous,” said the woman.
“Aren’t you, Slither? That’s right, you are!”

“Oh, who’s a venomous little
snakee-wakee then?” asked Royce, his voice taking on a ridiculous
coo. Then he contorted his face into a wider-than-real smile.

The baby stopped crying in that sudden,
inexplicable way babies have, and returned Royce a toothless
chortle.

“He likes you!” said the woman, a smile
lighting up her face for the first time. “We must be closely
related! I’m third cousins with S—the Princess.”

Royce gave her a brilliant smile, then
gathered the child, snake and all, up into his arms.

“Is it time, Les?” he asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “Three minutes. The
next shift is gearing-up in the back. The Kova have a 15-hour
day-night cycle,” Les explained to the woman. “Can’t sustain a
shift for more than 4 hours. This one’s been on for almost
that.”

Again, the woman gave him a wide-eyed
look, and rose from the seat, arms outstretched, as if to take the
grinning child away from Royce.

“You want your daughter’s name changed?”
Royce asked, holding the baby out of her reach. “
Without
irritating the Kova?”

The woman nodded.

“Alright honey,” said Les, “We’ll help
you. Just follow our lead, okay?”

Without giving her a chance to speak,
Royce entered the lineup area again. The woman gives him a startled
look, and followed immediately. Really, she had no choice – either
she could follow Royce, or she could make a scene, and Les’s
initial words have been sufficient, he judged, to make her wary of
scenes before the Kova.

The hulking guard behind “Cousin” Bower
was gone. Les followed Royce’s gaze to the guard’s back, walking
towards the break-room.

Royce reached the official first.
“Cousin,” he said, “we’ve got a couple of forms for you to
stamp.”

The official looked up, took in the five
creatures before him—Les, smiling pleasantly, the mother, the
worried and nervous, Royce, avec baby. And the snake, blithely
twining itself around Royce’s wrist.

Cousin Bower drew in a shuddering
breath. Then he gave them a terse nod, and reached for the forms.
He, too, was aware he had less than thirty seconds before the new
guard would be out.

He didn’t even look at the papers, just
affixed three of the precious, tamper-proof holo-stickers to
them.

“There you go,” he said. Then, “good
luck,” he added in an undertone. “You’d better put the pet
away—Kova don’t like pets.”

“Then they’re not going to be happy,”
Les murmured, “when they find yours.”

Cousin Bower’s eyes widened. Sensing
something wrong, a little white rat peeked out of the man’s
sleeve.

“How did…?”

“He pokes his head out every time you
look over your shoulder,” Royce offered. “Do you have
anywhere…safe?”

The man looked around; Les could almost
see the wheels turning in his head.

“Oh, could you
please
help—”

“Here they come,” said Royce, then
without prompting, he reached over the counter and in one smooth
movement, plucked the rat out of the man’s sleeve and slipped it
into Les’s overall pocket.

Just in time, because the new Kova
guard, his physique almost indistinguishable from the last one,
took up station behind Mr. Bower. This guard had just coming off a
sleep-cycle, alert and itching to exert his authority.

“We’re listed under our wife’s address,”
said Les. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Royce giving him a
dirty look. “Please, let us know when—”

“Sir, we’re not a notification service,”
said Cousin Bower. “But I have your address on file.”

Royce and Les nodded in unison, the baby
bobbing along with Royce. Then we turned, quickly, and walked
away.

“Cousins!” called Cousin Bower. He
really had not looked at the forms he stamped, to assume Royce and
Les were Baldasshi. “Cousins!” he called again. “You forgot your
passes.”

Les turned around, raised an
eyebrow.

“The Kova travel passes,” said Cousin
Bower, holo-stamping two additional pieces of paper and holding
them out over the counter. “They’re mandatory.”

“Of course!” said Royce, “how could we
forget?” he reached for the passes with a self-depreciating smile,
and slipped them into his pocket.

As soon as we were out the doors, the
Baldasshi woman made a grab for her baby.

“I don’t know
what
you’re up to,”
she said under her breath. “But—”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,”
replied Royce, just as quietly. “But if you could hold onto our
cousin’s rat for him?”

On cue, Les extracted the rodent from
his overall-pocket. The woman’s expression softened as soon as she
saw the pet.

“Yes, of course,” she said, and held out
her hand. For its part, the rat was happy enough to scamper up her
arm and find a comfortable spot on her shoulder.

“Thank you,” said Royce. “You won’t be
hearing from us again.”

“Just one question,” said Les, as the
woman turned away. “What’s was traitor’s name?”

“Ssessru,” she said, and spit on the
ground before walking away.

The people on the space-station would
have been the first to know about the Kova’s betrayal.

Les closed his eyes for a moment,
breathing deeply to regain his equilibrium. When he opened them,
Royce was looking at him, absolutely expressionless.

“Ready?” asked Les, injecting cheer into
his voice.

Royce gave him a dubious look, before
leading the way out of the Kova-controlled section of the
station.

Les waited till we were at the railcar
stop, well within the less-affluent sector, before speaking.

“That worked out remarkably well,
despite your…deviations…from the plan,” he said. “
I
was
supposed to pick up the baby.”

“The kid had a fucking venomous snake,”
said Royce, as he follows Les towards the railcar stop. “In its
onesie,” he added.

“One little
snakee-wakee
, and
Royce Ree goes off-script?” asked Les. “Why are you classified as a
Super-Agent again?”

Royce gave him a grin, and Les suddenly
found it hard to breathe. “Because, baby,” Royce smirked, “I get
the job done.”

That was the moment the railcar chose to
arrive, the wind of its passage whipping up Royce’s dark hair into
a halo around his head.

With effort, Les rolled his eyes, and
stepped through the railcar’s sliding doors. “
I
spotted the
rat.”

“I figured out the guard-schedule,”
returned Royce.

“You needed me to control the asset.”
The mother, in this case.

Royce nodded, conceding the point. “And
the mandatory passes…if Cousin Bower hadn’t….”

Les realized Royce was still using
‘cousin’. Perhaps Baldessh
was
having an effect on
more-professional-than-thou Royce Ree.
How interesting.

They stepped onto the railcar, and the
doors closed behind them with a soft chime.

“Yeah,” said Royce, once the vehicle
gained some momentum. “Thank the Baldasshi attachment to their
pets.”

“No,” said Les. “Thank the Kova, for
being such stellar assholes.”

Royce shrugged.

“By the way,” said Les, “We’re getting
off at the next station.”

“Why?”

Les smiled, an evil, mischievous smile.
“We have to go shopping, darling.”

“With
my
credit chips?”

“Of course,” he said. “Master Ter-Versha
can’t show up at court without luggage!”

Royce drew close to Les, his face mere
millimeters away.

“You have fourteen minutes!” he hissed.
“Before your head goes boom!”

“I’ll be quick.”

Parts of this series have been released
as free downloads. I’m hoping to do that with future installments
as well. Please help me make this possible – if you liked (or
hated!) what you read, please leave a review somewhere – amazon, or
goodreads, or wherever. Your criticism is helpful too—it allows me
to become a better writer, and I sincerely appreciate your
corrections and opinions.

Thank you for your time,

Aldous

Excerpt: The Mordred Saga, Book 1

By Aldous Mercer

ONCE UPON A TIME

There lived in Britain a mathematician by the name of Alan
Turing. At the age of 24, he wrote a paper that proved once and for
all that any mathematical calculation that
could
be
performed could be performed by a machine, and laid the foundations
of modern computing.

In 1939, World War II
broke out. Germany used a machine called The Enigma to encrypt its
transmissions with an unbreakable cipher. At Bletchley Park, the
hub of Allied cryptanalysis, the Mathematician designed a counter
to The Enigma, the bombe, and broke the unbreakable. For this he
was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

The Mathematician's
next project was Artificial Intelligence – he designed a test,
later called "the Turing Test", to determine whether a machine
could be considered to think.

But
for all his accomplishments, the Mathematician had a Problem, at
least as far as the British were concerned.
Turing believes machines think, Turing lies with
men, Therefore machines do not think
, he wrote. Convicted of gross indecency for practicing his
sexuality, he accepted chemical castration as an alternative to
prison; despite the fact that many testified to his essential
honesty and integrity, he was stripped of his security clearance,
and placed under surveillance.

The Mathematician
died in 1954, at the age of 42. The cause of death was determined
to be cyanide poisoning, and ruled a suicide; a half-eaten apple
was found near his body. His mother believed the poisoning was
accidental, and some have speculated that in an era of mounting
Cold War paranoia, British Intelligence perceived the Mathematician
to be too high a security risk.

Before his death, he
published a paper on mathematical biology that established a new
field of research: Morphogenesis. In 2006, a group of scientists
found the first direct physical evidence for his theory of pattern
formulation, though the implications of his work on this topic are
still not fully understood. As for the Mathematician's dream of
Artificial Intelligence, it remained the stuff of philosophy and
science fiction.

But then, on the
other side of the Atlantic, something interesting
happened...

CHAPTER ONE

Economy Package

The nature of The
Incident was such that I, who had once made the stars dance to my
magic, was reduced to bargaining with Windows Vista.

"Come on darling, just this once, close your eyes and think
of the King," I pleaded as I tried to slip the install disc inside
her. "Sweetheart, I promise, I
will
restart you
soon."

She was having none
of it.

"An error has
occurred," she said.

The
dialog box hovered right there, waiting to see if I would take the
bait. I did. Google responded coldly to my inquiry.
0xC004C4CE
:
Unable to find a detailed error
description.

Instead of hurling a
flamebolt at the bitch – a misbegotten chimera hatched in some
wunderkind’s garage - I took a deliberate sip of coffee.

It was only 13:01 in
the morning.

Six years, ten
months, three weeks, twelve hours and twenty minutes to
go.

My fingers clicked
through the ritual that had become customary over the past month.
Check job board (no new ads). Check twitter (no new mentions).
Check Gmail-