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  "My point exactly. How do you expect me to pass the time of day?"

  "Shut up, Queen of Whores! The king may still find some worth in you, but the rest of us certainly do not. Your life hangs in the balance."

  Drewcila took a good long look at the man's face, but said nothing.

  "What?" he demanded.

  "Oh, excuse me. Was I staring? I never actually saw a being talk with his sphincter before."

  "Why, you!" he rushed forward, but the other guard grabbed his arm.

  "Come on, she's purposely trying to make you mad. It's some trick."

  The other guard grumbled, but they both left.

  "I shall never forgive you for this, Drewcila," Stasha screamed at her."Never!"

  "For what? Trying to piss the guards off?"

  "You know for what! I swear you are the biggest harlot in the universe." Stasha turned on her heel and walked away, moving to stand in the corner so that she wouldn't have to see her sister.

  "It's nice to see you again, too, sis," Drew spat back. She looked at Jurak and shrugged."A clear cut case of sibling rivalry. You have to forgive her. It couldn't be easy to be the younger sister of an overachiever."

  They all went about the day's work, seeming to hardly notice the landing of the craft or the arrival of new brothers and sisters as they toiled in the fields moving their loads of rocks. The ship would stay for only a few short hours, then after it had cooled down and re-powered to optimum, it would launch. Except this time it wouldn't be carrying a load of worthless rocks, and it would have a different Captain and crew.

  After much thought, they had decided against rushing the ship shortly after landfall, which had been their initial plan. Van Gar had instead decided on a more subtle approach. One with the element of surprise and a lot less risk. They would wait until they were supposed to load the ship. At this point the pilot and crew usually left the ship to stretch their legs and go to the pilots' lounge which was stocked with actual real food and drinks. They knew this because about two days ago they had broken in there and eaten and drunk it all.

  Twenty Chitzskies followed the ten man flight crew to the lounge as Van Gar and those who would be going with him made their way to the ship. The twenty Chitzskies descended on the flight crew just as they learned the place had been cleaned out, and before the fighting had stopped Van Gar and the others had boarded the ship.

  Van Gar quickly closed the hatches. They all got as secure as the ship would allow them to get, and then without so much as a glance out the port at the planet they were leaving, they lifted off.

  As always, reaching escape velocity was less than pleasant, but not any more so than the thought of having to swill down even one more bowl of glop.

  As they broke from the planet's gravitational pull, Van Gar felt reborn. He was in space again, piloting a ship. This was where he belonged. Step one of his plan was complete, and they were well on their way to implementing step two. Or would be as soon as he knew what that was.

  Chapter 6

  "You don't understand, Stasha," Drew cried in anguish."My life has been left in tattered ruins. When Van Gar left me . . . he took a little piece of my soul." She covered her face with her hands and just sobbed.

  "So . . . are you really upset, or just putting on a show so that I will forgive your atrocious behavior?" Stasha asked without emotion.

  "What? What's atrocious mean?" Drew sniffed.

  "Very bad," Stasha answered.

  "All right, you caught me." Drew removed her hands from her face and straightened herself."Damn! I used to be so good at this shit, too."

  "I will never forgive you for this, Drew. Do you hear me? Never!" Stasha hissed at her sister, and through both sets of bars and across the hallway that divided them, Drew still got slapped with little bits of spittle.

  She made a great show of wiping the spit from her face."All right, that's like the fifteenth time you've said it, so I'm guessing that you're never going to forgive me . . . So, now it's your turn to listen to me. All this 'Drew-bad-for-sleeping-with-Zarco,' is really not the big issue here. The entire castle has been taken over by the nobility, who, by the way, not only hate me, but hate the entire system of government and commerce that I have put into place. They have detonated an anti-communications device and basically blacked us out from the rest of the universe. For how long, I have no idea, but there's basically nothing to stop them from doing it again as soon as the systems fix themselves. Oh, and if that's not bad enough, we are all in jail, and no one but the people who want to keep us here know we're here! So you can quit blowing the whole my-sleeping-with-Zarco thing all out of proportion at any time now. After all, it's not like I'd never screwed him before, and he's possibly the most boring lover I've ever gone to sleep under, so . . ."

  "Drewcila, have you learned nothing from what happened with Van Gar?" Stasha demanded.

  Drew glared back at her sister and thought about it for a second."Yes, I learned that the people you care about will always let you down, but that Salvage won't."

  "There is one man among the guards who says he is loyal to you," Margot said, successfully, if only momentarily, changing the subject.

  "I haven't seen him yet this evening," Facto said with real worry."They might have found him out."

  "Leave it to ol' Fucktoad to point out the negative," Drew said, not without a fond smile.

  "It's good to see you again, too, Drewcila," Facto said.

  Drew laughed."Ah, we'll turn you into a smart ass yet. So how did you all get here anyway?"

  "I'm not talking to you, Drew," Stasha said, and with a huff walked back to the bed and sat down with her back to Drew.

  "Then I guess I wasn't asking you, tight ass," Drew hissed back."Would someone please tell me why everyone seems to be so completely hell-bent on putting all this importance on sex? It's just a simple exchange of surplus body fluids. Shit you aren't really using and aren't even going to miss in the long run."

  Facto cleared his throat."You wanted to know what caused us to be incarcerated?"

  "Yeah, yeah!" Drew flopped onto the hard wooden bed and glared at her sister's back. She couldn't understand why Stasha was so pissed off, but worse than that, she couldn't understand why it bothered her so much that Stasha was mad at her.

  "Well, Stasha was trying to talk some sense into Zarco's head, and as I'm sure you've seen, he isn't in the mood to hear reason. I wasn't as cunning as I thought I was, and he figured out that I was working more for you than him. And Margot . . . well, if you want to know the truth, as much as anything else I think he threw us all in here because he didn't want you to have even one friend in the castle."

  Drew hated to ask the next question, but she'd looked into all the other cells, and they were nowhere to be seen."Where are Arcadia, Pristin and Dylan?" Drew asked cautiously. Facto was silent."Facto, they're not in here, so where are they?" Drew demanded.

  "Drewcila . . . I'm afraid . . . Zarco had them killed."

  Drew's features crumbled."They're dead?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid so."

  Drew took in a deep breath. It was too much. For the first time in the part of her life that she could remember she felt completely and totally alone. She choked down the ball of tears in her throat, flopped back on the bed, and covered her face with her hands. She didn't know how long she just lay there like that, but it must have been a fairly long time, because the next thing she became aware of was Facto screaming urgently.

  "Drewcila! Are you all right!"

  "No, I'm not all fucking right." She sat up, drying her eyes with her fists, and didn't look at Facto as she hissed through clenched teeth."He's going to pay. The bastard is going to pay with his blood, or my name isn't Drewcila Qwah."

  "Actually, it's not," Stasha said spinning on her sister."Your name is Taralin Zarco, and you're in no position to talk about getting revenge on anyone. Because, as you keep reminding me, we are locked up in jail!"

  Drewcila suddenly lost any cool she might have had le
ft."Why don't you go fuck yourself, you damn self-righteous, tight assed little bitch!" She stood up, looking for something to throw. Finding a small rock on the cell floor, she picked it up and chucked it into her sister's head.

  "Ow!" Stasha yelled. Holding her head, she started sobbing as the blood trickled from under her fingers. Margot tried to move Stasha's hands to look at the wound, but Stasha's hands weren't budging, as if she thought she was holding her head together and if she let go for even a second her brain might unravel.

  "Let that be a lesson to you. Don't ever piss me off, and don't ever, ever count me out of the game." Drew started pacing and mumbling."If only those bastards hadn't gotten my stupid hat, I would have shown them a thing or two."

  General Frater Tryte of the Lockhede Air Force looked at the data rolling in, and his conviction was deepened with each name that rolled across the screen.

  This time the Barions had gone too far. Communications were back up across the world, and he now gleaned as much from what the Barions were saying as what they had learned from the wreckage. It painted a picture he found hard to believe.

  He himself had given the orders that their space fleet was to fire upon any Barion ship which came near their air space. No doubt when the Admiral of the Artvail saw the imperial ship, one that they were more or less sure was carrying the Barion Queen—once transmissions they had intercepted from Barious before the blackout had implied the Queen was on her way—he had crossed the lines and opened fire.

  What happened next was as unforgivable as it was inconceivable. That small and inadequately armed imperial "salvaging" ship had utterly and completely destroyed the Artvail, the largest of their three star class battle cruisers. It was something that could not and would not be forgotten. Eight thousand of their best and their brightest had gone to their deaths, while the Barion Queen had apparently walked away unscathed and triumphant.

  Of course, how bright could they have been, seeing as they had let a relatively small, non-military ship blast them out of the sky? Still, people hadn't been taking the war effort seriously. The people were hungry and unhappy, and as such they didn't feel like going to war yet again. They needed a reason to fight, a good reason. And they needed a villain.

  Now they had a rallying cry. Remember the Artvail! Now they had a villain, and what a villain! A salvaging whore with a taste for Lockhede blood.

  Now this broken, destitute people would come together. The Barions had just given them a good reason to fight, and they would fight to the last man and take no prisoners. They would convince the people that their bad luck and poverty was somehow the fault of the Barion's extreme good fortune and affluence. They were greedy and evil.

  They had started the war, and now they would finish it. They would stomp the Barions back to prehistory. Now there would be no trade agreements, no talk of peace.

  "General," the news woman prompted.

  "I'm sorry. It is so hard to tear myself away . . . the list of names. Our best and our brightest, atomized in the destruction of the jewel of the fleet." He sounded choked up, and it wasn't all an act."What did you ask?"

  "Rumor has it that the vessel which actually took us down was that of the Barion's Queen, and that we fired on her ship first."

  "Scandalous lies," the general declared, pounding his fist into his console. Then he told not only a 'scandalous lie,' but a really well-rehearsed one as well."As you know, our enemies detonated an anti-communications device. Our ship was on patrol. We saw the ship marked with the imperial seal of Barious in our air space, but disregarded it, assuming it was harmless. We, of course, had no way of hailing the ship since all communications had been knocked out: in fact, only minimum communications have been restored at this time. Our brave fighters had no reason to believe that they were in any danger, or that this small ship was in fact any threat at all. Of course, that's exactly what the Barions wanted us to think. This ship only looked like a simple imperial "salvaging" vessel. It was in fact a mach fifty-seven class frigate with a full cache of weapons. The Barion Queen is indeed a very devious, and dangerous woman.

  "By the time our people realized the danger they were in, it was too late. She had fired her large cache of weapons and run away like the coward that she is. This is what we are fighting. A cold, calculating people who want to starve us out economically. A filthy rich populace that wants to be rid of us so that they can have the entire planet to themselves. They are selfish, greedy, dangerous, and they won't rest until they have killed us down to the last child."

  No one seemed too worried about the fact that with communications between the destroyed battle cruiser and the planet's surface completely blocked out, and with the remains of the ship still on fire and sinking ever steadily into the Galdart Desert, there was no way he could know what actually happened.

  That just flat wouldn't have been newsworthy.

  "Pisst! Hey, pisst!" a voice whispered.

  Stasha quietly climbed out of bed and made her way in a sleep filled daze through the dark to crouch by the bars. It took a second for her eyes to adjust, and then she saw him.

  "Where did you go?" she asked quietly as she rubbed her eyes.

  "I thought someone was wise to me, so I ducked out for awhile. You sure are hot. What's your sign?"

  "Excuse me?" Stasha was sure he was talking in some sort of secret code.

  "Dylan?" A whispered question from the cell across the hall.

  Dylan left Stasha quickly and crawled across the space."Drew!" He hugged her through the cell bars."Damn! Word had it that you were with the king, not that you'd been locked up."

  "Dylan, what the hell? They told me you were dead."

  "No. Just hiding. My coloring's close enough I can pass for a Barion if they don't look real good . . ."

  "Arcadia?"

  "This was all Arcadia's plan. I thought we were going to get out . . . See, we created this big diversion, and then we killed the guard at the back gate, but instead of leaving we stayed inside. But just like she said, they quit looking for us inside because they figured we got away. We knew you'd come here, see? And . . ."

  "She's all right then?"

  "Yeah, she's fine." Dylan laughed and punched her on the shoulder."Well, you old dog, you! You do care."

  "Pris?" Drew asked.

  Dylan's face dropped, and Drew had her answer before he said, "He didn't make it. They just killed him. Would have killed us, too. They changed the palace guard."

  "So I have noticed. I'm so sorry, man. I had no idea any of you were in danger. That he'd do something that bum-fuck crazy."

  "It's not your fault. None of us knew he was that bent, and we've been right here watching him." He lowered his voice even more."I mean, he's been ballin' your sister for what? Like years? And he just had her locked up. That's pretty fucking cold. Hey, you think I got a chance with her?"

  "Go for it, dude. She could use a really good fuck."

  "So . . . what's the plan, boss?"

  "Here's what I want you to do . . ."

  "Her tongue is covered in blue and yellow spots," the guard said in a panic.

  "She did that to herself," Zarco said. He was exhausted. He'd had trouble going to sleep after all that had happened, and had hoped for a few hours of blissful oblivion. Now he was being awakened far too early on the morning after. He could still smell her on his bed and still feel her touch, and all his convictions to deal with her as she should be dealt with were washed away by the thought of holding her in his arms again.

  And he just didn't want to be feeling any of this. Certainly not when he hadn't had enough sleep.

  "There is nothing wrong with her. She is faking it so that I will let her go," Zarco said, and no doubt if he saw her he would.

  "The doctor has said that she may have been hurt in the crash. She threw up her breakfast and is complaining of abdominal cramps."

  "Tell them that no one is to open the cell till I get down there. Grab Atario. Tell him to meet me here. We will go down together."


  His servant started to dress him even as the page left his presence. Atario met him in the hallway still pulling on his clothes.

  "Do you believe that she's ill?" Atario asked.

  "Not for one minute," Zarco said.

  "Yet you rush to her side. Sire, surely after last night there can be no doubt . . ."

  "She is my wife. Your Queen. I have to be sure."

  When they arrived in the dungeon, Drew was lying on the floor. Her color was bad, and there was vomit all over her cell. She seemed to be unconscious.

  "You! You have to do something, Zarco!" Stasha cried. She was mad at her sister, but she certainly didn't want her dead.