AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I realized I had started to shake my headno, and my fists had risen into a defensive posture in front of my breasts. At the same time, though, I also felt a horribly unwelcome feeling start to take hold in the same body I had put into that warding-off stance.Fucking assholes.I hated them for being so handsome, and I hated them for awakening the part of me I always tried to push down and away.
Still, even as I set my mouth into an angry scowl I felt how my hands meant not only to keep them out of my apartment—myhome, where I lived proudly and independently—but to keep Major Harrow of the neatly trimmed dark beard and Lieutenant Withers of the red-gold hair and the green eyes specifically from coming anywhere near my little breasts.
For I had become much, much too conscious of my being clad only in my sloppy sweats with no bra, and worse, of the way these Magisterian fucks had set my treasonous nipples tingling.
That didn’t represent the worst part, though. The worst part arrived in the form of the realization that at the same time I had put on my scowl and raised my fists, I had started to back away into my apartment.
I probably meant the movement, somewhere in my subconscious, as an attempt to get away, maybe with the intent of slamming the door in the faces of the Magisterian special officers. I told myself that, anyway. I hadn’t done anything that might help me actually close the door, though. So as I became aware that I had receded a step into the apartment, I understood too that Major Harrow and Lieutenant Withers had taken my backward motion as acceptance—and that, to my horror, itdidconstitute a kind of acceptance.
In the back of my mind, a dismaying, bizarre emotion had awoken, and my cheeks had blazed up in heat to express it in a vexingly vivid way to the Magisterians.
Shame. Modesty.I didn’t want my neighbors to know that I had enemy police at my door. That they had come to take me away.
Ridiculous, but even as I cursed my relatively traditional upbringing for instilling the feeling, and cursed the social norms of my otherwise completely egalitarian world for allowing that upbringing, I couldn’t help myself. I had an important role in the government of the entire planet of Artemisia. My neighbors on this hall in this deluxe apartment building knew that, and though I had always kept a low profile—through, yes, modesty—I had also reveled in knowing that the other wealthy owners on this floor felt a good deal of pride in living near me.
These Magisterian officers belonged to the armed forces that had occupied my planet after the previous administration had so stupidly and vainly joined the Vionian alliance. My boss, the president of Artemisia, Viola Herranofar, had surrendered to the Magisterians. I had beenin the room—the cabinet chamber—when we had made that decision, the day after our election. I hadn’t said anything, but I had voted yes, like all Viola’s other ministers.
We had felt certain that to surrender would spare us the harshest kind of reparation measures—the kind Magisteria had brought to bear on Hippolyta, for example, where professional women like me had found themselves made examples of. Now I understood, watching Major Harrow walk steadily toward me as I continued to back up, that we had thoroughly deceived ourselves.
Before the surrender, the previous administration of Artemisia—one with amanas president, ironically and infuriatingly enough—had gone all in with the Vionian Empire. In exchange for hyperspace access to key shipping lanes, ‘guaranteed’ by Vionian warships, Artemisia had supplied the Vionians with planet-busting weapons. We knew for a horrific fact that the Vionians had used Artemisian bombs to annihilate an entire Magisterian colony.
Still, Viola had told us—and her secretary of state had backed her all the way—that back-channels in the Magisterian Federation had promised to spare Artemisia, if we allowed a quick occupation. The first open peace negotiations—what I had supposed naively theonlypeace negotiations—had seemed very clearly to demonstrate the truth of what they had told the rest of the cabinet.
To say I felt betrayed wouldn’t even have begun to express all the mingled rage and fear coursing through my nervous system at the moment. If I had had to pick one very worst thing about this horrific invasion of my home, though, I would have had to say that my own detestably weak response to the arrival of the Magisterian officers at my door and then inside my apartment—as Lieutenant Withers closed and locked my door behind them—constituted that very worst thing.
That decision, that choice of what made this horror truly unbearable, received an immediate challenge—indeed an insurmountable one. The whole experience entered a completely new dimension with the next words the major spoke, quietly but with a hard edge that made my knees feel loose.
“Thank you, Miss Granzofar. Now please go ahead and take your clothes off for me.”
I had kept myself from giving into my idiotically prurient curiosity. I hadn’t listened to any of my colleagues’ whispers about Hippolyta and the other egalitarian worlds forced to make reparations to the federation—let alone sought out on the infonet the videos I knew must be all too abundant. The Magisterians wanted women to fear the consequences of conflict with the federation; I felt certain that such terror played a key role in their strategy to bring the galaxy to heel. I had proudly refused to give in. Men like Major Harrow and Lieutenant Withers—men of Magisteria and of the other worlds who had adopted so-called traditional gender roles of one form or another as a keystone of their cultures—wanted women to quail before them.
I had felt so sure of that—and I still did. Standing in front of the Magisterians, though, with my mind still processing the words that had brought instant heat to my cheeks, as if my body understood before my brain, I realized how stupid I had been not at least to familiarize myself with what my world’s enemies might have planned for their newly subject planets.
CHAPTER2
Sara
“What?” I gasped, though I knew how silly—how uneducated, even—I sounded.
Major Harrow smiled patiently. Also, so very, very patronizingly that it made my stomach jump. Anger burned in my chest—as much as the stupid butterflies lower down, in my own body, as at the officer’s obvious arrogance.
“We know enough about you, Sara,” he said, “to know that you’re extremely intelligent—but that you’ve decided to keep yourself woefully uninformed about the culture of the federation that’s now in possession of your world.”
I gaped at him. How could they—he—know that? I brought my hands closer to my chest in an unconscious gesture of protection.
“All the infonet records of Artemisia became subject to our examination at an early stage of the negotiations,” the major continued smoothly and deliberately, the smile never changing. He paused to let me absorb this news.
Of course.But my brain still rebelled.
“They promised…” I blurted out. I shook my head. Tears started to form in the corners of my eyes. They spilled out onto my cheeks when I saw Major Harrow’s eyebrows raise just a fraction of an inch, as if to say,You actually believed them?
I looked desperately at Lieutenant Withers, suddenly even more dismayed to find myself blindsided this way in front of a man clearly younger than I was, and yet so obviously, so glaringly privileged. To have his superior officer make an absolute fool of me this way, telling me terrible things about my own government—the government of which I actually represented an important part—seemed to make the whole scene so much worse.
I tried again, desperately seeking to add conviction and fury to my words.
“Shepromised…” My boss, the president. She had promised me and the rest of the planet. I shook my head, and I felt at least a little better when the anger in my chest rose to my throat, and I found I could make the gesture of denial angry and dismissive despite the tears on my cheeks. “She promised that they weren’t retaining that data.”
I remembered the speech. It had practically won her the election. The Magisterian Federation’s demonstrated appetite for turning enemies’ data against them had become a major election issue in the final month of the campaign as it became clear just how terrible a position the Vionian Empire had put us in, now that the empire itself seemed on its last legs.
