The illusionary haze of the smart mirror cleared as she approached. Mirah placed her hands on the edge of the marble sink, studying her reflection to ensure she looked the part. The long grey robes of a palace servant cloaked her form, the hood casting shadows over her green eyes and concealing the sharp angles of her black wolf-cut. She adjusted the folds of the fabric and flicked her wrist. A black blade, its surface dull and unreflective, slid out from under her forearm. She flicked again, and the blade retreated back into her sleeve.
"You ready?" Martin asked over her earpiece. "The ball is about to begin, the consul will be addressing his guests in the foyer, so most of the palace guards will be focused there for at least a few minutes."
Martin transmitted the layout and plans of Styne Palace directly to her neural processor.
<
A faint warmth spread filled her eye sockets as her ocular implants activated. The HUD came to life, sharp and unobtrusive, displaying the palace layout in the top-right corner of her vision, ready for reference. "How many men will be on guard tonight?" Mirah asked. "The HUD doesn't show anyone but me."
"This is House Styne, Mirah—the fiercest anti-netspace nutjobs on the planet," Martin said. "All their men have been vetted, free of cybernetic implants. We can't mark them like we do our enemies in the badlands."
Mirah frowned, scanning the empty HUD. "So I'm on my own with the guards."
"We can follow you, but you'll have to stay sharp. You proved yourself in Operation Blackcliff. That's why command gave you this mission."
"You've sent me into the deep end," she replied. But no point complaining now, should have asked for more details when they offered me this job… She rubbed her eyes and shook her head. "No matter," she said. "I'll make do."
"We know you will," Martin reassured. "Remember, avoid conversation, and try your best not to kill anyone if you can. If the Patricii Party realizes what we're doing, they may act as cornered dogs do. Whilst we have been gaining traction in the senate houses across Arcadia, we aren't in full control, and the last thing we need is a civil war across the planet."
Mirah stared into her own eyes, determined. "What else do I need to know?"
"The serving staff is well logged and notarized, if they realize you aren't on any of their lists your cover will be blown. Just slip in and out of the consul's apartments, collect the data, and leave. We'll be with you every step of the way."
"I won't fail."
"We know. May the sacred falange guide your steps. Long live Arcadia."
She inhaled deeply, then exhaled. "Long live Arcadia." Mirah backed away from the smart mirror and its illusionary haze returned, obscuring her reflection. She pushed open the washroom doors and emerged into the marble gallery overlooking the main foyer. Nobles in vibrant silks and elaborate masks glided past her, their whispers and muted laughter blending into a symphony of intrigue. Below, scores of guests crowded around the twin curved stairways leading to the upper levels of the palace, their movements a blur of finery and luxury under the chandelier's soft glow.
Men in elaborate dress coats decorated in sashes, military honors and aiguillettes laughed and supped on fine wines and champagnes. Their wives and mistresses picking olives from toothpicks and feeding their lords and masters with wry and seductive smiles. Masks of all shapes and make glittered across the vast chamber, the faces of foxes, eagles, lions, animals long extinct from a time when distant Terra still bore green pastures and clear skies.
"They feast and oink like pigs whilst half the planet starves," she whispered softly. "How does anyone still support this wretched side of our society?"
"Glory and tradition," replied Martin. "You forget that whilst the southern hemisphere of Arcadia starves, much of the wealth in agriculture and industry lies in the north. Not to mention House Styne is the reason why the Eryndor System is independent."
Mirah rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, I've heard this tale. But the great shattering was nearly a century ago, why does anyone still worship a deed so long gone?"
"For all our desire for the welfare of the people, Mirah, you must remember that the people are not always hungry to be cleansed of dogmatic ignorance. So long as their basic needs are met, tyranny is not so unacceptable by some. The pigs continue to suckle the teat of the common man's labor, and the common man is none the wiser."
"Simpletons," she shot back. "Blinded by a cowl."
"Regardless, it doesn't matter now. We're not here to debate, and try not to speak to me so much. Arcadia's fate hangs on your performance tonight."
The lights in the foyer dimmed, and a spotlight shot down from the ceiling, shining the top of the central mezzanine overlooking the guests. Mirah rested her arms on the railing guarding the side gallery as a fanfare of horns burst from every direction heralding the emergence of the Executive Consul of the Arcadian Republic.
"Esteemed guests," resonated a soft, feminine voice over the palace's PA system. "Your most serene host, His Excellency, Charles Octavian Styne, the second of his name in the line of House Styne, Paterfamilias of the Styne Family, and Primer Inter Pares of the Grand Senate of Arcadia!" The foyer instantly drowned in applause.
The biggest swine of them all, Mirah thought bitterly as she watched him stride forward, flanked by two guards clad in white and gold Kevlar. Their full helms were etched with intricate ivory scrollwork, gleaming in the spotlight. As for Charles himself, the consul was garbed in a fine black military dress coat, the left side of his chest adorned in a dozen honors at least. Badges to various knightly orders or rewards for civic duty. Doesn't deserve any of them. The badge of the consul's office sat above the other decorations—a sword piercing Eryndor, Arcadia's star, wrought in silver and gold and encircled by a wreath of oak leaves. Multiple aiguillettes hung from his left shoulder, pinned to the center of his buttoned-up coat. Across his chest, a silken sash of bright vermillion rippled and blinked under the light. Crowning his blonde curls was a wreath of gold, gleaming like a halo.
"He looks old for someone in his fifties," she whispered to Martin.
"They don't use cyber implants, remember? They age like the Terrans of old."
Mirah found that ironic. "For men so intent on immortalizing their name, they seem to have little regard for their lifespans."
Charles raised a gloved hand to his guests, calming the applause. "Esteemed senators, noble men and women, and those not of noble birth but who proved their merit so they might stand amongst us." The crowd laughed heartily at that last remark. "I bid you all welcome."
"Go now," Martin urged. Mirah slipped into the crowd, her grey robes blending with the shadows of the darkened gallery.
"I hope you will all enjoy your time here tonight," Charles went on. Mirah slipped through the crowd, her movements fluid and deliberate. Gossip and murmurs and quiet giggles dancing all around her as she made it to the end of the gallery. She stopped by a fluted black pillar as an armed palace guardsmen marched by. "And consider the circumstances we find ourselves, three weeks out from the consular election." When the guard passed on, Mirah crossed past the corridor, leaving the foyer and into the upper levels. "Of course, I will not let politics depress the festivities to come, but I would like you all to remember tonight, the fortune and bounty provided to you by the Patricii Party, and the great houses of Arcadia. Under our leadership, Arcadia shook off the shackles of megacorp rule, and the plague of netspace and AI tyranny. Under our leadership, Arcadia will continue its legacy of greatness and flourish into the new century, and the rabble in the south will prove to have been of little consequence in the end."
"Okay, I see you," Martin said. "Continue along the way you're going, there will be another gallery overlooking the main hall beyond the foyer. At the end of that gallery, there will be a few doors, go to the one on the far end on the right side. It will lead you to the palace apartments. You see it on the display, I'm sending the path now."
The HUD showed the way and Mirah nodded. "I see it." She followed the path Martin showed her, keeping her gaze down as she went by a few other similarly garbed servants. In the Main Hall a few of the guests had already begun to flow in, they picked at the feast table stacked with exotic meats and dishes from across the planet gorging themselves. She clenched her fist at the sight and tried to keep her eyes ahead.
She heard their laughter and felt as though they were laughing at her. They laughed at her sisters, her mother and father. They were laughing at the beggars on the side of muddy unpaved roads with extended hands and bloated bellies. They laughed at the old and the sick and the young and those dying in the millions in the barren south. Laughing at those who fought like mangy mongrels over a single dusty protein block.
"They will have their day," her man told her. "A reckoning will storm across Arcadia, and the people will take their home back from the oppressors."
She pushed past the door Martin had directed her to and stepped into a corridor flanked by rows of glass panes. Beyond them, the vast cityscape of Starfall stretched out below. Colored fireworks filled the night sky, their light shimmering against the panes. A sea of slated roofs and aristocratic estates glittered under the pale glow of Arcadia's three moons. Towering domed palaces loomed above a chaotic sprawl of residential blocks, piled haphazardly like thousands of disordered bricks extending endlessly into the horizon.
It was the first time Mirah had ever seen Starfall. She paused on the trail, for just a moment. Her eyes reflected the fireworks, and the glow of the moons. When she'd received this mission, she was unsure how to feel. To be sent to the very heart of Arcadia, a place mired in legend. The great polis of Starfall, a city of promise long ago, turned now to an insulated bubble of excess, corruption and oppression.
Mirah's father told her and her sisters stories of Starfall when she was a little girl starving in the badlands. Even before the famine, food still rarely made its way to the distant south. Whatever did make it to their bellies, father always said it was from the gilded capital in the north. A place where it was said milk and honey flowed from fountains, the same sort which had once been abundant in the core systems of the galaxy.
That was no lie, at least. Just none of it is for us…
As she turned to continue along her way she was startled when she saw a boy looking out the same glass panes as her. He turned to face her, a handsome young man in a white ceremonial dress coat, a blue sash wound across his chest, epaulets on his shoulders, all of it fringed in threads of gold. His blue eyes were piercing in their gaze, and she couldn't mistake the golden curls, just like his father.
She bowed her head deep. "My lord," she whispered, trying her best not to break her composure.
"You were staring out there for quite some time. What were you looking at?" The question caught Mirah off guard. She looked back up, the boy's eyes locked on hers. She half expected Martin to interrupt, to tell her to avoid conversation with any noble let alone the son and heir of Charles Styne, but there was no one on the other side. Instead it had begun to grow staticky, until there was nothing but a faint white noise in her earpiece.
"Ugly isn't it?" The Arcadian prince looked back out. His blue eyes gleamed as another firework ruptured in the night. "Behind the fine facade, all is mildew."
She was unsure what to say. "Yes, my lord."
"My father tells me I shouldn't fraternize with servants," said the prince. "I think he shouldn't fraternize with that mob of leeches he calls friends. They suckle on Arcadia's blood until they're fat and too slow to move."
That final line struck a chord, and a voice called to Mirah which disturbed her train of thought. Speak to him, it said. A feminine voice, unlike any she'd ever heard, dripping in a robotic tone.
"Yet you suckle too," she blurted out. "You and your father, even if you don't personally mean it."
"My my!" Lewis turned back to her with a broad smile. "Bold for a servant aren't you, bolder than any of the others. Are you from the south then? Must be. The whole south hates our guts."
"Yeah, I am."
Lewis nodded, and his smile wilted. "Well," he said solemnly. "I guess you travelled all this way for nothing. They probably spoon fed you stories of the greatness of Starfall, but now you've seen what this place is. A veil of silk over a pile of shit. I don't imagine my father will press his stupidity on all of you for much longer at least. For what it's worth, I'm sorry." He nodded to the cityscape. "For this, and for your lot in life. For my existence. I wasn't born for this, or for anything. I imagine I'd just be another digit on a figure for the casualties from the famine, instead, fate, as my father would say, has determined me to be born to live this life. To determine a destiny of glory for myself amongst the stars."
Whilst a part of her itched to flick her wrist and plunge her blade into his chest, his words were not what Mirah had expected to come from the lips of a swine like this Arcadian lordling. "Then do something about it," she said. "If you hate this pile of shit, as you call it."
Lewis Styne laughed. "Oh yes. That would be quite amusing wouldn't it? Go against the grain, an aristocrat turned revolutionary, become a head on a spike, hated by one side or the other. I don't think I have the fortitude to handle that… I just want to exist, and live out my life in peace without hurting anyone."
"Your existence hurts people," Mirah shot back. "You cannot live as you do without taking from someone else."
The boy rubbed the back of his neck. He was young, only a few years younger than Mirah. "Yeah," he said, defeated. "I know."
The door from which Mirah had emerged to be on this corridor opened, a palace guardsman clattered in and inclined his head. "My lord, your father requests your presence in the ballroom."
"I guess that's it for us." The boy walked past Mirah, a part of Mirah wanted to say more to him to ask him why he thought the way he did, his many contradictions.
He's a hypocrite, she thought as she watched the door shut behind the prince and the guardsman. Yet he is… he doesn't talk like a pig.
"Mirah!" Her earpiece was active again. "Thank God," Martin said. "I thought I lost you."
"Comms went out," she said. "I don't know why."
"You're still in the same corridor? Why haven't you moved?"
"I was impeded," she lied. A part of her wanted to tell Martin the truth, but she held her tongue instead. "Everything is still going well," she said. "I'll make my way to the consul's chambers now."
"Very well. We should have a window of around fifteen minutes, according to the festivities right now all the guests will be in the ballroom."
"This information, what will come of it?" Mirah asked. "What exactly is on these document shards?"
"State secrets," Martin replied. "Proof the Patricii Party has been hoarding supplies in the northern sectors of the planet to maintain stability amongst the provinces that still support them."
"What is command going to do with this information?"
"Release it," Martin said absently. "The Patricii Party will lose all legitimacy, and we will have the mandate to prosecute them when we come into power. House Styne, the other great houses. They will all be destroyed and the people will have justice. We will finally be able to deliver the Neo-Falangist dream of Charles Styne's head on a spike, and his son's beside it."
"The son," she asked. "Is he guilty too?"
"What matters if he or isn't? He is a pig with pig's blood in his veins. They all must die so that Arcadia might live."
Mirah made her way to the end of the corridor, trying her best to keep her thoughts away from the face of the boy prince. It must be done, she resolved. As much as it pained her. Guilty or innocent, blood would flow generously before the sacred dream was realized.
"The Galaxy Under One Rule," their leader and master, Antony Bynes had promised them. "Under one promise, one purpose. Prosperity for the helpless, justice to the guilty!"
The doors to the consul's apartments were unguarded, she looked around, right and left, no one.
"Use the forged key," said Martin. "It should open the doors."
She was already ahead of Martin there, she opened the door and pressed into the vast chamber. There was a large central atrium covered in glass, letting in the glow of the moons. A fountain lay at the center, the entire hall sustained in pillars. There were papers, documents and scrolls sprawled about. "Go to the bedchamber, It'll be there," Martin said.
The cavernous bedchamber lay open, its brass doors framing a canopy bed flanked by oaken tables and a modest desk with a computer. "I thought you said the Stynes were against everything to do with netspace."
"Their computers are rudimentary," Martin replied. "There's no servers, no netspace, only the hard drive and its isolated software. If it was on a server we wouldn't be sending anyone to retrieve it physically."
"It's truly poorly guarded if that's the case."
"Charles Styne isn't expecting a stunt like this. This operation was planned for months, your inclusion is the most recent development. Don't worry about the details. All you need to know is that Charles Styne has most of the records detailing actions under his administration locked in the logs on his PC. Now jack in, we have a codebreaker installed into your brainsoft that will break past his password screen. We've been developing it for weeks, it should work like a charm."
Mirah did as she was told, sitting down on the curule chair next to the desk. She reached behind her neck and pulled out a cord, extending it to the USB drive on the computer and jacked in. When she turned it on, the password screen flicked before her for just a moment, but then dissipated to the home screen. She scoured the files, she looked through the transcripts of reports from the south. Her ocular implants fast-read every document, and she saw then the full scale of the horrors Charles Styne had inflicted upon Arcadia.
He knew about it, he could have ended it at any point and yet he maintained this tariff just to save his sense of pride… She clenched her fists. There was more. Military crackdowns in the south she'd never even heard of. Hundreds of recordings of mass executions of her neo-falangist brothers and sisters from sects on the other side of the planet. Beheadings, mutilations, imagery of hover tanks crushing men sentenced to die. Arcadian generals laughing with the heads of rebels in hand. Worse and worse it went, what was done to female agents, to their children, to babies…
"Do you have everything?" Martin asked.
She hesitated, still in disbelief as she downloaded every byte of data into her braindrive. She remembered the young Arcadian prince's eyes. "A veil of silk over a pile of shit," he'd said. "I don't imagine my father will press his stupidity on all of you for much longer at least. For what it's worth, I'm sorry."
"Yes," Mirah said. "I have it all."
"Good," said Martin. "Time's running short. Leave the palace grounds before anyone catches on. Long live Arcadia."
She disconnected and staggered back, her body trembling from the flood of data coursing through her brain. Screams, wails, gunshots—every agonizing second of suffering her people had endured echoed in her mind. Her breaths came fast and shallow, her fists clenching as the weight of the truth pressed down on her.
When she opened the doors to leave the consul's apartment, her heart seized. Charles Styne stood there, his piercing gaze locking onto hers. Behind him, two guards in white and gold dragged a young servant girl, her cries muffled by the gag tied around her mouth. She thrashed and kicked, but their grip was iron.
Time seemed to slow. The world narrowed to Charles's face—his cold indifference, the faint smirk of a man unbothered by the ruin he had wrought. Mirah's concealed blade was in her hand before she even realized it. With one swift motion, she plunged it into his neck.
His eyes widened in shock, hands clawing at the blade as blood gushed forth in rhythm with his heartbeats. He staggered, his body collapsing in a graceless heap.
The guards shouted, releasing the servant girl as they fumbled for their weapons. Over her earpiece, Martin's voice crackled, panicked and desperate. "What are you doing? Oh fuck! Mirah! Get out of there now!"
Mirah's mind was calm. A fiery clarity overtook her. Whether it was impulse or rage, she couldn't say. All she knew was that this—this act—was justice.
She looked to the guards and spared not a moment with them. She flicked her wrists, the blades unsheathed, gleaming under the moonlight, one still dripping with the blood of the chief of swines. She met the guards' eyes. The tension crackled in the air as her HUD flashed.
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Long live Arcadia.