Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 Read online

  The tango evolved into a French-style apache dance, but with a unique twist. It was Eva who assumed the traditional male role of the aggressor, flinging Judah over her shoulder or dragging him along the ground. Despite her apparent diminutive stature, she had no trouble carrying and flinging her partner’s slightly larger frame through the acrobatic maneuvers the dance required.

  For a full ten minutes they held the stage alone. The audience’s attention never wavered, and they broke into applause over and over again at each new and sometimes seemingly impossible move the dancers made. Some members of the audience were flabbergasted that any human bodies could do the feats they’d seen here today. The more knowledgeable of the spectators knew the truth, for Le Vaudeville Galactique, while never hiding the fact, made no attempt to advertise that all its members were Zionians.

  The settlement of New Zion arose out of the darkest chapter in Imperial history. One of only a small handful of high gravity worlds that could even remotely be called habitable, the planet possessed a wealth of heavy elements in high demand throughout the Empire. But mining these assets was a near impossible task. Human beings were not adapted to the two point six gee gravitational field the world—called Goliath at the time—had to offer. Lungs strained at the higher atmospheric pressure; hearts and other muscles aged rapidly fighting against the gravity. Because objects fell faster, even a slight stumble could be fatal, and human reflexes could not compensate adequately.

  Other methods were tried. Heavy machinery was sent down to the planet’s surface, to be guided by telepresence—remote controlled instruments—from people in satellites orbiting the world. But there were problems making the machines flexible enough to perform the necessary tasks yet sturdy enough to withstand Goliath’s harsh conditions. Equipment was constantly breaking down, and the crews who manned the satellites were in a perpetual state of discouragement.

  This was the unhappy state of affairs when Kyril II came to the throne, and he promptly proceeded to make it unhappier. In the checkered history of the Empire, replete with examples of harsh despots interspersed among the truly great rulers, Kyril stood out as being by far the most cruel, the most vicious, the most heartless. He hated everyone and everything, and his mind was ruled by paranoia—justifiably so, for after only a short while into his reign of terror there really were people out to get him. Despite being hated by his people, he was so ruthless that he managed to remain in power for eighteen years and cause untold grief and hardship for all but the privileged few.

  When confronted by the problems of mining the planet Goliath, Kyril’s twisted mind—abetted by his equally demented boyare—hatched a cruel and oppressive scheme. Hating and distrusting anything that was too different from the norm, Kyril decided that Goliath would be the perfect place to dispose of people and groups he disliked. Principal among these were Jews, Romany and members of a radical and rapidly growing Christian fundamentalist sect called God’s Purgers. Within the space of a month, virtually all members of these groups were rounded up and shipped off to serve in Goliath’s deadly mines.

  These new slaves began dying from the harsh conditions just as quickly as the previous miners had—faster, in fact, because few concessions were made to alleviate their situation. In itself this caused Kyril little concern, since he didn’t care for these people anyway—but there was still the problem of who would do the mining once these groups were all gone. The solution the Emperor’s boyare came up with was to genetically engineer human beings adapted specifically to the high-gee environment.

  The slaves were subjected to long and involved series of “experiments”—most of them little more than pseudo-scientific excuses for torture—to determine the specific characteristics the new breed would need for survival. Genetic material from the different groups was used, and a race of heavy-gravity natives was bred. These new humans were stronger and had greater physical stamina to withstand the high gee forces. They were slightly shorter and had a lower center of gravity, to keep them stable and help them avoid stumbling. They had quicker reflexes to deal with a world where objects fell at a much faster rate. They had denser bones and stronger hearts and lungs. In an attempt to breed better slaves, Kyril had unwittingly bred a new subgroup of super humans.

  The problem with breeding humans, of course, was the long maturation period. Virtually all the unmodified slaves had died and the oldest members of the new breed—who’d been started in the mines as six- and seven-year-old children—were barely fourteen when Kyril was finally assassinated. The program continued for a couple more years under Kyril’s successor, Nikolai IV, largely through inertia and because the program had remained strictly secret.

  Once the facts became public knowledge, there was an Empire-wide backlash against the horrors. The slavery was immediately ended, and Nikolai proclaimed an immediate and permanent ban on all human genetic manipulation. That left the Emperor with two major problems: reparations to the survivors of the period that the Jews were already starting to call (with barely concealed cynicism) “the Metamorphosis,” and the ongoing problem of how to mine the metal-rich high-gee planets. There were long and spirited debates, and for one of the few times in history the oppressed peoples themselves were actually given a voice in the decision.

  The former slaves who traced their heritage back to the Romany were the most bitter about what had been done to them. Their people had always been clannish and independent, and they followed in that tradition. They asked for and were given a small fleet of ships so they could leave the confines of the Empire and seek their own world elsewhere among the stars. For over eighty years nothing more was heard of them—until an explorer ship for the ever-expanding Empire stumbled across the heavy-grav planet Newforest and its Romany inhabitants. The imperial feelings of guilt had cooled considerably by this time, however, and the world of Newforest was absorbed into the Empire—though not with the entirely willing consent of the planet’s citizens.

  The descendants of God’s Purgers continued to adhere to their sect’s fundamentalist beliefs. They spurned as much contact as they could with the material world, and wanted as little to do with temporal authorities as possible. Unlike the Romany, they didn’t want to break away altogether, since part of their duty was to present an example for other people to follow. The imperial government ceded them a different mineral-rich high-grav planet to mine, a world its inhabitants called Purgatory. These people paid nominal homage to the tsar and, as their prime export, traded the valuable ore, but otherwise had little contact with the rest of humanity.

  The Jews were another matter entirely. They had survived so many pogroms and purges over the past several millennia that they were more philosophical about it. While they could neither forgive nor forget the horrors of the Metamorphosis, they could put the past behind them and think about the present and future. There was still life to be lived—and they were in a unique position from which to live it.

  Just as God’s Purgers were ceded the planet of Purgatory, the Jews convinced the tsar to cede them the planet Goliath, which they promptly renamed New Zion. As they proudly said, this was the second time the Children of Israel had defeated Goliath. In return, the Jews agreed to keep the mines open and supply the Empire’s ever-growing need for the heavy metal ores. New Zion became the first undisputed home the Jewish people had had since the days of the ancient Roman Empire.

  But the Zionians realized they had another resource at least as valuable as their planet’s ore—themselves. They were stronger and could react faster than any normal person, giving them an extraordinary advantage in situations that required physical skill. They were barred from competing against unmodified humans in professional sports—although there were some all-Zionian leagues whose games were breathtaking to behold—but that still left them a wide range of possibilities. In the hundred and thirteen years since the end of the Metamorphosis, they’d become very popular—and expensive—as bodyguards and in private security services. And as Le Vaudeville Galactique demons
trated, they made first-rate entertainers.

  Even those spectators who knew the vaudevillians were Zionians didn’t feel cheated. It didn’t matter to them that the entertainers had been genetically modified; they were still extraordinary people performing extraordinary feats. The audience was being treated to a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, and they were duly appreciative.

  As the Dance Masters of Space reached the climax of their act, including leaps through ever-higher spinning rings, the stage seemed to explode with people. Performers dropped from the flies on ropes, bounced up out of trapdoors and somersaulted in from the wings, the pit and the back curtain. All the entertainers who made up this incredible show bounded onto the stage in what could easily have been a chaotic mess, but instead was precisely choreographed to show off each act in turn. Singing, dancing, juggling; fire, lights, miming; acrobatics and prestidigitation; a mind-numbing finale to remind the audience—in the unlikely event that anyone forgot—what a masterful spectacle they had witnessed here today.

  And the audience responded by leaping to its feet with a roar of applause that shook the very walls of the theater, with whistles, with cheers, with the clapping of hands and the stamping of feet, with every conceivable form of enthusiastic appreciation. They had been bedazzled, amused, astonished and, above all, entertained. They had spent an evening in the theater they would never forget, an evening they would brag about to their friends for years to come.

  Curtain calls went on for ten, fifteen minutes. At last the house lights came on again and the stage was as bare as when the show began. The audience, feeling both exhilarated and drained, slowly began shuffling out of the theater with a loud buzz of conversation, each person remarking to his neighbor about his favorite moments in the show.

  Backstage the atmosphere was no less exuberant as the performers reveled in the addictive high from the applause. Drenched in sweat but deliriously happy, Judah and Eva hugged their colleagues and one another, their spat of just a short while before totally forgotten. Yet another audience had been conquered. Was that not cause for celebration?

  Avram Bar Nahum, the Ville’s manager, Judah’s father and Eva’s uncle—though he’d been her de facto father as well for most of her life—came up to them with a broad smile on his face. He was a man near fifty, once as trim as Judah himself but now going ever-so-slightly to a paunch. He waved his left hand at them—the artificial one that replaced the natural one he’d lost years ago. He had a broad smile that even his neatly-trimmed full beard couldn’t conceal.

  “Yet another stunning performance!” Avram exclaimed. “A few hundred more like that and I’ll be forced to consider giving you a raise.”

  “Such compliments will turn a girl’s head,” Eva said with a drawl.

  “I only said I’d consider it,” Avram replied. Then his face turned suddenly serious. Not the serious of discussing the show’s management, which he never took lightly; this was a somber expression that the dancers seldom saw on his features, and it warned them that something unusual was happening. “Could you both come to my office now?”

  “Is there time for a shower first?” Judah asked.

  “No,” the older man said. “There’s someone I want you to meet … and I don’t think she’ll be offended by a bit of shvitzing.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Missions

  Avram Bar Nahum led them back to the room that served as the road manager’s office in this theater. It was comparatively small and sparsely furnished, but the Ville’s manager spent little time in it anyway. There was just a basic desk with data ports, a comfortable swivel chair for the manager and two other less comfortable chairs for visitors.

  One of the chairs was already occupied as they entered. The woman who’d been sitting there automatically rose. “Sit, sit,” Avram said quickly, gesturing for her to return to the chair. “Kinder, I’d like you to meet Lady Hasina Wettig.”

  Hasina Wettig was a slender black woman, a full head taller than Eva, with short black hair and brown eyes brimming with intelligence. Her lovely face was highlighted by prominent cheekbones and an unlined forehead. Her business suit was stylish and mostly conservative navy blue, though she did have an accent of bright red in her scarf. Her only jewelry was a pair of discreet golden earrings. Her hands had long, narrow fingers with short nails—the hands of someone who didn’t do manual labor but who also didn’t lounge idly about. She looked no older than twenty-one or twenty-two.

  Eva raised an eyebrow. “Daughter of Knyaz Nkosi, one assumes.”

  Hasina gave a bit of a smile as she nodded. “One assumes correctly.”

  “My father’s told us a lot about your father,” Judah said.

  “Indeed? He wasn’t supposed to say anything.” Her voice was coolly neutral, neither angry nor accusatory. But it was also not pleased.

  “Eva, why don’t you sit over there?” Avram said quickly, gesturing to the empty chair beside Lady Hasina. “Judah, you can bring in another chair from outside—”

  “It’s crowded enough in here,” Judah said. “I’m comfortable standing.”

  The young dvoryanka looked over at Judah. “Exactly what did your father tell you?”

  “That he and my mother and my uncles and Aunt Marnina all worked as secret agents while your father was Commissar of ISIS.”

  “Apparently not so secret.” Hasina looked back to Avram. “This was not supposed to be made common knowledge.”

  “It hasn’t been,” the older man said calmly. “You don’t know about show business folk.”

  “Educate me,” Hasina said crisply.

  Eva cut her uncle off before he could say anything further. “We jabber and gossip backstage. We’ll stab our best friends in the back—figuratively—for a better spot on the bill. I’ve never been to the imperial court; I’ve heard the infighting gets pretty ferocious there. They have nothing on us, believe me.

  “But what belongs backstage stays backstage. Period. Nothing goes out front except what we want to show them. And nobody, not even ISIS, controls that more carefully than we do.”

  “Over the years Mikkel and I have told the company just about everything we did,” Avram said. “We had to explain what happened to Eva’s parents and Judah’s mother. I had to explain this.” He held up his artificial left hand. “But you’ll never find a more loyal, more devoted, more patriotic group of people than our company. Any secrets your father and I have between us is safe with them. I stake my life on that.”

  He grinned. “Besides, if I didn’t tell them they’d invent stories even more lurid. That would only have made the situation worse.”

  Lady Hasina didn’t seem entirely convinced, but her expression remained neutral. Apparently she had a lot of practice at that.

  “Be that as it may,” she said, “I didn’t come here to discuss past assignments. My father needs you now, and I still don’t know what these two have to do with it.”

  “Your father wants the young agents Mikkel and I were twenty years ago,” Avram said with a sigh. “I’ve tried to keep myself in shape and I’m pretty good for a man my age, but ….” He let his voice trail off as he patted his stomach, then continued, “Mikkel’s in better shape than I am, but he’s not up to this, either. This is a young person’s game. You need young people to play it.”

  Judah was getting excited. After listening to all his father’s stories, after reading all the Ilya Uzi books over and over, was there a chance he’d be offered a secret mission of his own? His heart started racing. He looked over at Eva, but she was keeping her face as neutral as Lady Hasina’s.

  The dvoryanka pulled a small device out of her pocket. “I’ll have to discuss this with my father,” she said.

  Judah’s eyes went wide. “Is that a Q-line? I’ve heard about them, but never seen one. I guess knyazya can afford things like that.”

  “Particularly knyazya who used to be Commissar of the Imperial Special Information Service,” Eva said dryly. “Why didn’t your father come himself? We’
d have given him the best seats.”

  “His movements are always watched,” Hasina explained. “Even though I’m known as his personal assistant, I have a lot more freedom.” She turned to Avram. “Is there someplace secure around here?”

  “You can use my office,” the older man said. “Nobody bugs a road manager’s office on the random chance a spy might wander in and say something secret. I’d say the entire backstage was pretty secure, but there might just be an entertainment reporter hanging about, looking for a story.”

  He rose and gestured for Eva to do the same. “The kinder and I will leave you alone until you need us.” He shooed Judah and Eva out before him, then closed the door to leave the dvoryanka her privacy.

  Judah looked around to make sure no one else was within earshot. “What’s the story? Do they need people for a secret mission?”

  “Nu, if they did, would you be interested?”

  “You bet!” Judah said enthusiastically.

  “Even if it meant leaving the Ville?”

  Judah hesitated just a fraction of a second. “If the security of the Empire’s at stake,” he said, “that might be more important than the show. If you and Mama could do it—”

  The older man turned to his niece. He knew his son’s interest in the subject—how he’d always hung on every word of Avram’s and Mikkel’s stories about protecting the Empire, how he devoured spy novels and quoted them at length. But Eva was a question mark. While Judah’d lost his mother on that one terrible mission, she’d lost both her parents and had been inconsolable for months. Then, without warning, she’d broken out of the depression and become the exuberant extrovert she was today. He wondered how much of her wild, almost reckless, behavior was in reaction to that traumatic event.