-22-

  In the dream, there was a shift in time and space for Valerie. She did not realize that she was asleep in an infirmary aboard the Patrol Scout Kit Carson.

  The strange ray from the alien buoy still beamed power to the forehead-embedded device. The Patrol scout’s medic had suggested they remove the device or block the powering beam. They’d tried both, and Valerie had immediately gone into cardiac arrest. Thus, they stopped the blockage and quit trying to remove the device.

  Valerie continued to dream, but it wasn’t a personal thing that she’d felt as Diana Varus. This new dream was impersonal as she saw life through and could read the thoughts of the former Praetor and now Consul Titus Flavius Arrius.

  ***

  Time had passed, and he was no longer the Praetor of the Agrippa but Consul Titus Flavius Arrius of the AirSpace Service. He rubbed his face as he sat in his quarters in Sabine Hill. He was so damned tired all the time, trying to put out one fire after another. It had become truly exhausting.

  For four years now, he’d felt as if the world would explode any minute. He’d always been ambitious. After the Fusion ship had showed up, he realized he had a heavenly mandate for his actions. Who else but he had enough foresight to save his people from the aliens?

  After sending the representatives, with the Secret Service clone Valerie Varus hidden among them, he’d grasped one rung of power after another to heave himself that much closer to supreme power. He didn’t rule the Senate yet. He wasn’t close to becoming the Imperator of all Remus System. But he did command the space fleet. He’d also accelerated the number of SSM sites on Remus.

  SSM was an acronym for Surface to Space Missile. They were gigantic boosters with Electronic Countermeasure Warfare pods on each. Contrary to custom after the terrible nuclear war that had scarred Remus, each SSM had a thermonuclear warhead.

  Arrius pressed his blunt fingers against the skin of his face. After four frightening years of waiting, of wondering, of expecting the worst, the clone had returned. The consul couldn’t believe it. The rest of the representatives were dead in the tiny spaceship that had made it home, but the clone had survived the journey through the dense gas cloud that surrounded the Remus System. She’d survived in what seemed to be a jury-rigged life support system. Even more fantastically, she had returned with a genuine hyperdrive in her possession, one that only worked in the dense gas cloud, somehow using the gas for the hyperdrive.

  Arrius lurched to his feet. The Deity had given him the brains to see beyond surface values, to logically pierce the future even when only given a few facts.

  The consul began to pace in his quarters. He wore a brown tunic. His once-brown mop of hair had begun turning gray. It made him seem more distinguished, he knew.

  The buzzer sounded.

  “Enter,” Arrius snapped.

  The door opened and Praetor Livia stood there. She was older than he was, but had aged better. She had red hair piled on her head and regarded him with shrewd eyes.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “She’s been talking,” Livia said in a hoarse voice.

  “And, and?” he said. “What did she find? Why was she in that pumpkin of a spaceship? What happened in the New Trotsky System? Where are the Fusion ships?”

  “Peace,” Livia said, holding up her hands.

  “No!” Arrius shouted. “No peace until I know the facts.”

  “May I enter?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, almost shouting. “Sit down. Talk. Tell me what you’ve learned.”

  “Our knowledge is sketchy,” Livia said, entering the room.

  “Praetor, I’m warning you.”

  Livia sat, picking up a flagon. “Do you mind?”

  Arrius slid a tumbler across the table, dropping onto a chair to glare at her.

  Livia poured herself a generous portion of red wine, sipping it, smacking her lips. “Good stuff.”

  “Yes, of course, it is. It comes from my private vineyard in Gentile.”

  “I see.”

  “No, Praetor, you don’t. I’m about to order my security team—”

  “They reached New Trotsky,” Livia said.

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know about that, but I’d argue the three other bodies in the lifeboat prove they did.”

  “What lifeboat? What are you talking about?”

  “The tiny ship with the hyperdrive was a broken-down lifeboat they purchased from former, get this, former space pirates.”

  “Is this serious data?”

  “Absolutely,” Livia said. “The brain teasers got her to talk with their most powerful drugs. It was a lot of mumbling while her eyes were screwed shut.”

  “Which means she could have been making things up. She could have been dream talking.”

  “Maybe, but none of the specialists think so. What we heard is the truth as she remembers it.”

  “Fine. What happened on New Trotsky?”

  “First, the Fusion is a communist police state with all kinds of controllers and speech codes. They had terrible nuclear wars once, worse than we did. Entire worlds went up in radioactive—”

  “I don’t care why they are like they are,” Arrius said, interrupting. “I just want to know what the Fusion plans to do with us.”

  “Oh.” Livia sipped wine. “That’s easy. The Fusion is sending a flotilla. They’ll claim it’s entirely peaceful. But they’ll have PSA people with them.”

  “Who are these PSA people?”

  “Public Service Assistants,” Livia said.

  “And what do they do?”

  “Help break down a society like ours and turn it into a beehive communist state like theirs.”

  “There is no ‘live and let live’ with the Fusion?”

  “Not unless we’re really strong,” Livia said.

  “Explain that.”

  “I’ll make it simple. A Politburo runs the Fusion. The Politburo is ruled by the Chairman, who is over a hundred years old.”

  “What?”

  “Supposedly, he’s the father of the Fusion, a really important figure. It seems he’d had a heart attack just before the clone arrived.”

  “Let’s call her Valerie Varus. She’s a hero, not merely a clone.”

  Livia took another sip of wine. “That’s fine by me. Whatever they planned for the four never happened because New Trotsky was in an uproar. That gave our representatives time to look around. Even better, it gave them the freedom to do it. The clone—Valerie mumbled about million-person drone-fests where vast crowds swayed together and chanted in unison. Everyone owns everything in common on New Trotsky, which means no one owns anything except for the few politically powerful people who run things.”

  “I get all that. How did they escape New Trotsky? I’m assuming they escaped, right?”

  “They did. Get this. They bought tickets for a starliner.”

  “You mean like an interstellar bus?” Arrius asked.

  “That’s right. The Fusion is just the biggest bully on the block. Actually, we’re part of the Backus Cluster, the grouping of stars that make up this part of the nebula. All of us originally arrived from colony ships from Earth as the ancient legends say.”

  “Go on.”

  “Long story short,” Livia said, “the four reached the Wurzburg System, which was too powerful for the Fusion to want to take on. There, the four worked as assassins, if the clone was telling the truth.”

  “That fits. Valerie Varus is deadly.”

  “Apparently. After gathering enough credits, they bought the old lifeboat and made a run for us. During the journey—”

  “I know that much,” Arrius said. “I’ve read a summary of the ship’s log. They had malfunctions, and the others died. Valerie had bought drugs to put her into an induced coma. It worked. She made it home, and we’re still trying to bring her up all the way.”

  Livia stared at Arrius. “The Fusion is coming. You know that, right?”

  “I know that, and I already have a plan.”

  “Plan?” Livia asked with contempt. “The Fusion is a hundred times stronger than we are. What—”

  “True, all true. The trick, I’m beginning to think, is to make taking us over too big of a mouthful for them to chew.”

  “How can you possibly manage that?”

  Arrius gave her an ugly smile as his eyes gleamed. “My dear Praetor, I plan to trick the flotilla commander, of course. I will disarm their suspicions of us. They want to reshape our society to look just like theirs. That’s what all the indications are, right?”

  “Yes,” Livia said. “It appears they have a slogan. We must all think and act alike so we don’t hate and destroy each other.”

  “Hmm. I forgot what you said before. Do we have any idea when this Fusion flotilla is supposed to show up?”

  “The clone said it could be anytime now.”

  “Right,” Arrius said. “We’d better get everything in order then, hadn’t we?”

  Livia stared at him.

  Arrius lurched to his feet. “Come. I’m going to need your help for this…”

  -23-

  The dream changed once more, and Valerie in the infirmary of the Kit Carson slipped back into the memories of Diana Varus, becoming the clone once more.

  Diana—Valerie shivered in the warm room with a thick woolen shawl around her shoulders. She’d woken from her induced coma in a weakened state. It had been two and a half months already, and she still had trouble keeping warm.

  The doctors told it would pass as she became stronger. Some days, she didn’t know what to believe. The ordeal she’d been through these past four years… She tightened her grip of the shawl, shivering uncontrollably.

  New Trotsky had been a nightmare. The staring eyes, the watching, the dreadful sameness—

  The door opened, causing her to look up in alarm. Instead of a nurse, two security honchos walked through. They went to the windows, taking up station to the sides, each drawing a gun and looking outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Valerie whispered.

  “Nothing, dear Valerie, nothing at all,” Consul T.F. Arrius said.

  Valerie stared at him in shock as the thickset man entered the room. Arrius had aged worse than she had these past four years. His hair was graying and there were lines in his face.

  “I returned,” she whispered. “Now, what’s my prize?”

  “More work,” Arrius said, pulling up a chair.

  “You were going to revoke my clone status, remember?”

  One of the security men glanced at Valerie before resuming his vigil out the window.

  Arrius gave her the slightest of frowns and shook his head. “Everything in good time,” he said low under his breath.

  “Am I under arrest?” Valerie asked.

  “You’re under my personal protection,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Coming where?” she asked in alarm.

  Instead of answering, he opened a folder, pushing forward a space shot of a huge starship.

  “Do you know what this is?” Arrius asked.

  “A Lenin-class battlewagon,” Valerie said. “It’s their biggest warship. It has collapsium hull armor. That’s—”

  “I know what collapsium is. It’s in the oldest records. Collapsed molecules shoved side-by-side, making the metal incredibly dense. One of our heavy lasers would take an hour or more to burn through such armor.”

  “Where did you get a picture of a battlewagon?” Valerie asked.

  Arrius gave her a significant look.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “The Fusion flotilla—”

  “Has arrived in our star system,” Arrius finished for her. “They’re several weeks out from Remus, decelerating hard. Hyperdrive is interesting strategically and tactically. While a starship can travel between stars through the dense gas cloud, the vessel will implode if traveling too near a deep gravity well like our star. Thus, they have to drop out of hyperdrive fifty or so AUs outside the orbital path of our last planet and head the rest of the way using fusion drive.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Arrius smiled. “That’s why I’m here, my dear. You’re going to help me give them the perfect answers.”

  “I told the shrinks everything I know. The Fusion is going to start slow, demanding a few political changes. If you resist, the battlewagons will—”

  “I know all that, my dear,” Arrius said, interrupting. “They’ll unload their ordnance against us, obliterating our means of resistance. But you hinted they’re militarily stretched.”

  “That’s right. They have heavy commitments all over the place. I suspect they want to fit us into their Fusion as fast as possible and—”

  “Stop,” Arrius said, leaning forward, patting one of her knees. “You’re turning pale. I want you strong, Valerie. You have a lot of work to do.”

  “My status…” she said in a low voice.

  “I’m working on it.”

  Valerie didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  He glanced at the security men.

  “A few people believe you’ve brought us bad luck,” Arrius said quietly. “They think you brought the Fusion ships back to Remus. They want to give you to—”

  Valerie moaned, knifing forward and clutching one of the consul’s wrists. “Please, no,” she whispered, fiercely.

  The older man frowned.

  Valerie gathered her resolve, releasing her hold. “They’re a brutal people with harsh ways.”

  “We’re playing for the highest stakes, is that what you’re saying?”

  Valerie nodded.

  A loud report sounded somewhere on the grounds. A window shattered as a bullet smashed into a wall. Another bullet catapulted a security man backward as blood spurted from his throat. He collapsed.

  The second security man drew a long-barreled pistol, smashed glass from his window and fired rapidly.

  Valerie moaned once more, trying to dive to the floor. Arrius grabbed her, hauling her upright. Clutching her to his chest, the consul lumbered through the door, bellowing instructions to other waiting security people.

  “You’re coming with me,” Arrius told her. “Once you’re on the Agrippa, no one will be able to lay a finger on you.”

  -24-

  Valerie watched Arrius pace back and forth with a thunderous scowl on his face.

  It had been fifteen months since he’d hauled her from the hospital ward. So much had happened since then. He carried the weight of their world on his shoulders, on his shrewd guesses. The man had an uncanny ability to know what others were thinking and how to outguess them.

  Valerie Varus wore a tight black uniform, part of his personal security team. He said it was to keep her safe. She knew the truth. He wanted her insights regarding the enemy. She’d told him everything that had happened on New Trotsky. He told her that seeing was believing. She knew the enemy, while he and others only guessed at the enemy’s intentions.

  “You should relax,” Valerie told him.

  “Tell me how,” Arrius demanded.

  “First, sit.”

  The short, square man hurled himself into the chair behind his desk.

  Valerie came behind him, rubbing his shoulders. For such an older man, he still had thick muscles.

  “Everything rests on the next few hours,” he said. “If I’ve guessed wrong—”

  “Then you’re wrong,” she said.

  Arrius twisted around in his chair, looking up at her. “You couldn’t say that so easily if you loved your world.”

  “I love Remus,” Valerie said, calmly.

  “Why? Here, you’re a hated clone. If we lose today—”

  “I know what I am.”

  Arrius searched her eyes before sitting forward again. “Have I been too hard on you?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me the truth, Valerie.”

  “I always have.”

  “Yes…you have. That’s true. You’re one of the few people I can trust. Isn’t that odd?”

  “No,” she said.

  Arrius chuckled softly.

  “You can laugh because—” Valerie bit off her words, hating to complain. They had cloned her and therefore she lived. Maybe someday the normal born could accept her as a true person just like them.

  I am a Varus. I have as much right to command as T.F. Arrius has.

  “At least we have a fighting chance,” he said.

  Valerie kneaded his stiff shoulders. She’d seen him do the impossible. Fifteen months ago, he’d toadied to the Fusion flotilla commander. Via screen, he’d begged them to admit Remus at once into the Fusion. The commander had smiled, saying that wasn’t possible. Arrius had implored the commander to tell him what he needed to do. “Clearly,” Arrius had said, “the Fusion is superior to Remus.” The people of Remus were eager to learn Fusion ways. Arrius had begged the commander to leave teachers. He’d wanted the woman’s opinion on everything. It had been a consummate act.

  Two weeks later, three Fusion cruisers had remained while the rest of the flotilla had journeyed out-system. Once they reached far enough away, the rest of the flotilla had gone into hyperdrive elsewhere.

  A month after that, in Remus orbit, elite space-strike legionaries had captured the three Fusion cruisers. It had been touch and go, but the highly skilled legionaries did it. Arrius had gathered all the Fusion military and PSA people, sending them to internment camps in the swampy south.

  After that, Remus began to prepare in frightful earnest. Arrius’s plan was simple. They wanted to become so militarily indigestible that the Fusion would write them off.

  Now, it was fifteen months later. The scientists had reverse-engineered the cruiser hyperdrive engines. Soon, Remus would send scout ships into the nebula, searching for allies against the Fusion.

  As Valerie rubbed his shoulders, two huge Fusion battlewagons neared the planet Vulcan. It was a ringed gas giant in the outer system. Remus’s AirSpace fleet waited behind the gas giant. They had refurbished the cruisers. One of them was in the inner system in orbit around Remus. The fake Fusion crew had spoken with the battlewagon commander, telling him that all was well. The two Fusion ships headed for Vulcan to check a space station there.