Assassin by Kali Altsoba

Author:Kali Altsoba [Altsoba, Kali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-06T22:00:00+00:00

Neaira

Lasalle Five is so tightly fit inside the elite on Novaya Uda she hears even Resisters whisper to each other at soirées, or talk far too loudly after too much drink at a state dinner. She sleeps with many more than one, listening to angry and boastful pillow talk. About how a general will be the new governor of this system or that one, or how another will rise to the Great General Staff once a coup reveals him for the hidden talent he knows that he is. She purrs and pets them, strokes and prompts, teases and goads. Men will say almost anything once she has them in her black silk bed.

She hears them speak forcefully of replacing Pyotr with martial law, even a full military government. How they’ll purge and ban the Broderbund and disassemble the secret cabal of Sakura-kai. How for the good of the realm they must repress political parties that will form in the vacuum after Pyotr’s death, whatever their ideology may be. “We in the natural elite must rule whatever comes after the fatman, for the good of the Imperium and the common people.” They say that they’ll “make a just peace” with the Alliance, yet still somehow manage to keep all the occupied worlds for the Imperium when it’s signed.

“Will it be a victor’s peace?” she asks, batting faux innocent eyes adoringly at a senior general who just rolled off her, who’s boasting about how he plans to retire to a great estate he’ll carve from occupied Jocasta after the war. It’s a bucolic agrarian world, easily taken in the first wave of invasions that began the Fourth Orion War. It’s already annexed to the Imperium. The land he looked at used to belong to the family of General Gaspard François Marie Leclerc.

“It’s a good phrase! Yes, why not, Neaira?”

That’s her cover name, which she cheekily took to honor the most famous of Greek courtesans. Lasalle Five thinks that’s amusing, given the licentious nature of her covert persona. No one who grew up with her on Helena would recognize the shy, pretty girl she was back then. Not in this raven seductress.

“Is conquest just?”

“If we’re the victors, of course it is!”

“Winning makes it all right, the war and the annexations?”

“My dear! Why of course our might makes us right in this war, as it does in peace and all politics! What else matters in war or life except winning? Really, I thought you were smarter than that, to ask me such a dull question.”

“I’m so sorry, general. Forgive me. I really have no head for these things. More wine? It’s a deep red, from Zug.”

“Women and politics! They just don’t mix. I don’t know how the Alliance survives. Perhaps we should make it a condition of the peace settlement that they revoke female political rights. After all, once we’re in charge we’ll have to make some basic changes when it comes to their women.”

He’s not kidding. Nor is it the first time that she’s heard such misogynist musings from one of her covert marks.

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