Angels of Eternity Read online

  This all ended with the coming of the star drive.

  Suddenly it was possible to fold space around a vessel that wanted to travel from one solar system to another. The fundamental laws of physics remained intact and star ships, which once needed years to travel between systems, could accomplish the same trip in fifteen standard days.

  War broke out with new and terrifying weapons that could destroy entire planets. In the first ten years after the discovery and introduction of the star drive, five different conflicts broke out across the know worlds. Ten years afterwards, the survival of human life in the universe was close to extinction.

  The first empire brought a halt to everything. The largest and best-organized force with the quickest reaction time consolidated the regional governments around it. The emperors of humanity made no excuse for their brutality, but promised peace where none existed.

  The peace had lasted a thousand years. It was a rough peace, as there was always a rebellion in progress somewhere or a famine to prevent.

  Shakti and her companions were born into the long imperial peace.

  The judge at the Hall of Imperial Justice was very busy the next day. He looked at his screen and smiled as the next ingrate was brought before him. By the end of the day, a message would be sent to every woman on the planet who had the audacity to sell her body outside a regulated pleasure house. He smiled at the dark woman was brought before him.

  “Selling narcotics to your customers, Mangi?” he asked her. “I am so glad I will never have to look at your tiny little ass in this courtroom again.”

  “Five minutes, Judge, and I’ll show you some new tricks,” she sneered at him. “I’ve got a good line on something to take away your mood if it helps.” She was wearing the prison tunic, but everyone in the courtroom could see the fine curves of what lay under it.

  “Not interested, dear,” he said back to her. “Bad after effects from those flowers, this is why our emperor has banned them. Twenty-five years! On Trazalk!” It took three court bailiffs to haul her screaming mouth out of the courtroom where she was deposited into the same holding cell as the others.

  “I see we have a party in progress,” Mangi snickered when the door slammed behind her. “You have anything to keep it going? They took all my stuff when I was arrested.”

  “The real party starts when they dump us on Trazalk,” Shakti told her.

  Chapter 3

  Once the transport ship moved out of Harmony’s gravitation field, it folded space. They were moved to that part of the known universe where Trazalk rested in its own gravity well. Ten standard days later, they were on the prison planet. The picket ship dropped them off, and then boosted itself back to orbit for another allotment of prisoners. Shakti and her companions were part of a group of fifty shoved out of the shuttle and left on the surface. Each was handed a set of identification papers and a small amount of imperial cash. While they gazed about at the rock cliffs surrounding the landing field, a group of security guards came over and pushed them it the direction of the processing center.

  “Get moving!” the captain of the guards called out. “There’s another load on its way down. Get out of here unless you want to be incinerated. And don’t try and sneak back on board, we have shoot-to-kill orders on anyone who’s that stupid.” Shakti found Durga. She then located the two other women who shared the prison cell with them before they were moved to the transport hulk.

  All of the prison staff were inmates. The empire maintained a brigade of soldiers on the surface in case any riots broke out, but the planet maintained itself. It lacked a need for outside help.

  The empire built the first penal colonies in the deadly forests that ringed the planet. The major cities and penal colonies were guarded by large mammals, which devoured anything trying to get in or out of the cities and settlements. The first few nights they were on the surface, the screams of prisoners trying to escape to the forests echoed across the dormitories where they were housed.

  “Never fails,” Shakti heard one guard with a telescope comment. “And that one was a good runner. Too bad he didn’t watch where he was headed.”

  “Any of you find work?” Shakti asked her companions after a few days on the surface. They were sitting on a street corner in the clothes assigned to them after they were processed at the intake center. Since they came in as a group, the woman in administrations sent them to the same room in a dormitory until they were given permanent work.

  “I hope they don’t expect me to earn money on my back again,” Durga said. “I had my fill of that where I came from.” They were given medical exams the same day the picket ship left them on the surface. Due to the environment, they were all given long-term contraceptives.

  “Nothing you can lift off the marks around here,” Chimata commented. “Everyone’s a prisoner; no one has a thing worth stealing. I suppose there’s a way you can do it, but I hear they send the problem cases outside the wall.”

  The next wave of prisoners on their way to the surface consisted of a few more women the watch commanders rounded up as an example. Salina was among those. She was a tall and thin woman with purple eyes who earned her living in the pleasure houses in the day. However, she wanted to make art in the evening. One of her day clients showed her how it was possible to duplicate signatures of prominent military officers and soon she had a thriving forgery business. Eventually the imperial law caught up with her and she was before the same judge who sent the others to Trazalk. When she arrived, Salina was sent to the dormitory where the last group of women stayed.

  “I may have to start giving it away for some decent clothes,” Mangi said to her comrades as they watched a surface transport vehicle roll down the street. It was part of a project to increase the area behind the wall. The tunics they wore were basic, but better ones could be made from cloth imported to the planet. Other than food crops, little of the native plants were useful to humans.

  “Somebody has to provide those men with comfort,” Chimata observed as the truck vanished into the distance. “We could start up our own house.”

  They sat on the steps of the dormitory and watched the traffic on the street. Security patrols mixed with group of new inmates and excavation equipment. The roads were dusty as it was the regulated dry season, which would come to an end in a few days. Several of the women made eye contact with the men who the guards led down the street, as old habits were hard to break. The guards would push anyone who slowed down and looked back. They had a consignment to deliver to a dormitory and didn’t want to slow down.

  Shakti ignored all of them. Moments ago, she found an interesting poster on the side of a building. It was for The Games. The Games were the annual gladiator competition held each year on the planet for the amusement of the prisoners. The winner received a special commendation from the emperor. Also, on occasion, he was freed. Shakti had been in plenty of street battles with rival gangs as a kid and still had the scars to show it. She turned and looked back at her companions. None of them had it easy while they were growing up.

  “Girls,” she announced to her friends. “I think there is a way out of this place in a lot less than twenty-five years. Have anyone of you ever fought in the streets? Any of you ever swung a club? I’m guessing all of you learned to carry a knife.”

  “I have killed someone, does it count?” The women turned around to face a new comer.

  Kamala was dark. She was easily the darkest woman Shakti had ever seen. She stood there in the street, not caring if a truck or transporter rolled over her. As the others, she wore the plain gray tunic issued to every other prisoner the day they were released on the surface. But she was heavier than most of them and, at six feet in height, she weighed a good two hundred pounds. She grinned at Shakti who noted the new woman had a few teeth missing in the front.

  “Did you just arrive?” Shakti asked her.

  Shakti noted the woman had a way to present herself that struck her as familiar. Years of being around imperial troops cre
ated a way everyone on Harmony carried themselves. Shakti noticed the difference on the streets and even in the homes of the people who weren’t military. Combined with a direct pattern of speech, it was easy to spot a prisoner who came from Harmony.

  “Two days ago,” Kamala told them. “I was told I might find some people sent here for the same reason. I guess they’re can’t be too many of us or they wouldn’t want a group to form.”

  Kamala told them her story. She was also a product of one of the pleasure houses on Harmony. Kamala was a foundling who didn’t know her parents. Sent to an orphanage, she escaped when she was old enough to climb the walls. As she grew to be bigger and stronger than most women were, she tried earning a living as a petty thief on the streets, but her size made it easy for a witness to pick her out. When she was far younger than allowed by imperial edict, Kamala took a job at one of the houses. The administrator found a use for her because a certain type of man enjoyed the company of a tall and intimidating woman. She worked at her house for years. She would still be there if it wasn’t for a problem client.

  “He wanted me to choke him,” she explained. “Guess I did my job too good because he died. I was unable to get him help. He was also married to a princess who had me arrested. All my money was impounded and the some magistrate sent me here.”

  “Twenty-five year sentence?” Durga asked her. “It was his favorite one.”

  “Life,” Kamala told her. “No chance of parole. I think him and the colonel I strangled by accident had something going on while his wife was off-world.”

  “As long as you can move fast enough,” Shakti told the new woman, “we can use you. Now I just have to find out where we sign up.”

  It was two days later, while Shakti was attempting to get her team registered, that the scout probe crashed on the prison planet. An orbital sentry picked it up on an erratic path when the probe came out of the jump. It made its way to the nearest inhabited planet, which happened to be Trazalk. The scout was small and only had room for two pilots. It was on its way back from the frontier, but only had one onboard.

  The sentries picked it up as the probe attempted to make it to the surface. The sentries, designed to locate escapees, were focused inward on the planet, but they scanned the near part of the space around Trazalk from time to time. Every now and then, someone would try to spring a prisoner off the surface. They never got far since the orbital lasers fried any craft that approached Trazalk outside the path taken by the picket shuttles.

  The guidance computers locked on the descending probe and almost vaporized it before the human watch commander told them to hold their fire. He was a veteran of several imperial campaigns and recognized a reconnaissance scout when he saw the profile. These were fast little units which were expensive to deploy and not likely to end up in the hands of someone who wanted to help a prisoner escape. If it was being used in an escape attempt, he wanted to find out how they’d obtained one. The energy requirements to fold space were enormous and, although a scout ship could do it, this was not easy to do. So he allowed the scout to land near one of the walled cites and sent out a detachment of guards to investigate.

  The scout almost exploded when it landed. It was a hard landing, which burnt a section of a dry forest, but this made it easy to locate from the air. The guards spent several hours cutting the scout vehicle open while the watch commander supervised from a remote installation. The remaining pilot of the scout was almost dead when they took him out. The guards brought him back to the infirmary.

  Twelve hours later, he regained consciousness. The doctors contacted the watch commander right away. The man, a seasoned reconnaissance pilot, screamed about demons from the sky who wanted human flesh.

  At first, they thought he’d gone mad from the enclosure and killed his partner. The planetary security staff was ready to ship him off to a military hospital when someone decided to look at the data recorders on the probe. This was not easy as the information was encoded with a special military encryption. The watch commander needed permission from the imperial staff to look at it. They relented, but demanded a local representative of the emperor be with him. The probe’s original mission was to check out new areas of expansion instead of the usual pirate or smuggler investigations.

  What they saw changed everything the empire believed about humanity’s role in the universe.

  As the women returned to their dormitory, another arrival watched them depart. She followed them. Her name was Bravi and she also hailed from Harmony. The judge, who was in a foul mood that day, added her to the list of prisoners bound for the prison planet. Bravi was short, not quite five feet in height had weighed less than one hundred pounds. Her appearance was gentle and she had long straight black hair. Bravi came from one of the other pleasure houses on Harmony.

  Like many women on the planet, she sought to increase her lot in life by buying real estate on other planets that were opening up for settlement. She became very proficient with her investments. She used her money to open several temples to the Spirit of Divine Harmony, a popular one with the pleasure women. However, all of her investments went bust when it turned out the firm she trusted with her money bought lots on airless moons.

  When this information was made public, she was arrested for fraud and brought before the same magistrate who wanted to rid Harmony of the unsanctioned pleasure trade. He’d invested money with her too, a small fact not brought up in any of the pre-trial hearings. Now she was on Trazalk, trying to figure out what to do. Bravi decided to follow the other women back to the dormitory and see if they knew of any work she could do.

  Two other women would soon join the group at the house from Harmony.

  Tara, dark in complexion and muscular, was a worker at the same house where Bravi plied her trade. Tara spoke up for her friend when the watch came by to pick her up. However, Tara was a compulsive thief who picked something up every day from the market and brought it home without paying. When the watch decided to examine her quarters, they found it filled with stolen merchandise. The judge had no problems sending her along too.

  Dharma was the last women who joined their group. She was a dancer at one of the local taverns and played her confidence game one too many times with the soldiers. She knew how to turn up the sympathy and get men to pay for her services. They would leave her quarters refreshed, but missing some valuable object. Too embarrassed to admit they’d visited the pleasure houses, the men would make up some story as to how they lost whatever she kept.

  The watch picked her up when a pawnbroker remembered she’d sold him a complete set of military uniforms. Only the empire was supposed to own those. The officers were furious when they found out the recruits traded bits of regalia for her favors. She was barely nineteen, but learned at an early age the value of her appearance to patrons.

  A few days later, the women were sitting in the lobby of the dormitory when Shakti came in with forms for the games.

  Shakti sat the forms down on a table and stamped on a damp towel on the floor. They had to wash their feet before entering the dormitory, as the intake center never provided them with shoes. Shakti called everyone together and showed them the brochures she’d found at the sports commission office.

  They all learned the hard way about avoiding strange men at a young age. They knew what to do if caught. Several of the women had stories about revenge taken on rapists and clients who assumed too much. Violence was very much part of their world. They were intrigued at a public game, which would allow them to punch back.

  “So what do we get if we win?” asked Kamala. “I’m not doing this unless there is something in it for me.”

  “Last year the winner of the tournament was granted a full pardon by the emperor,” Shakti explained. “Each year they field a ten-man team against all challengers. There have been a few women each year on the teams, but never a team consisting of just women. If we go out there and beat everyone, the emperor will have no other choice but to pardon us.”

 
“I don’t have a problem beating up one of those convict boys,” Durga told her. “I’m sick and tired of the way they stare at us every time the trucks role by.”

  Shakti went over the rules of the games. Each team was allowed to go in with a choice of weapons. The games commission would provide helmets for any team that qualified, but the contestants needed to have their own body armor. Weapons were made from dull metal and could not have a sharp edge. A win took place when three limbs were on the ground. She spent the afternoon showing the women in the house the various techniques used by teams in the past to win. By evening, they were all interested enough to try out.

  “So who supplies the weapons?” Lashmi asked. Everyone turned and looked at her since she hadn’t spoken much since arriving on the planet. “We don’t have any money.”

  “I’ll find a sponsor,” Shakti told the group. “Someone out there would like to see a group of men get the stuffing beat out of them by women.”

  “That assumes we can pull it off,” Chimata commented. “We can’t get a pair of shoes, how are you supposed to find someone who will outfit us with armor?”

  “Just give me a chance,” Shakti snapped and glared at her. She cut an impressive figure in the middle of the room.

  Two days later, she returned with the sponsor: the owner of a sanctioned house of pleasure. There were enough pleasure workers sent to the planet to justify the warden’s creation of a chain of houses. Profits were split between the imperial government and the women who ran it, with a large donation going to their living expenses. The house had plenty of money to spend and felt an all-women team in The Games was just the thing everyone would want to see.

  The intake office still hadn’t given them work assignments, but Shakti was able to get the decisions held off until after the games. Since it was only one group of women, the office had no issue with the delay. Besides, they had a backlog of prisoners who needed to be processed into the planetary registration.