Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 (13 page)

“I think I’ve heard that name somewhere,”
Judah said, suddenly scrambling through the mental trash-heap of
his mind. “Sokolov’s the imperial family name, but she wasn’t a
tsaritsa, was she?”

“She very nearly was,” Sadye said, and
proceeded to give him a refresher history lesson.

When the previous tsar, Boris IV, died, he
left three grown sons. The oldest was Kyril; he and his wife
Roxanna had no children. The other two were Nikolai and Vasiliy,
fraternal twins, with Vasiliy the older by twelve minutes. Nikolai
and his wife Anastasia already had a young son named Pyotr;
Vasiliy, who was gay, had already renounced marriage and
children.

Kyril was proclaimed tsar, but five days
before his official coronation he was assassinated. Suspicion
immediately fell on Nikolai and Anastasia, both of whom were well
known to be the plotting sort, but nothing was ever conclusively
proved. Even though Vasiliy was the older twin by a few minutes,
Nikolai argued that, since he had already produced a son and
Vasiliy never would, he was the logical one to be proclaimed the
new tsar to guarantee the continuation of the direct Sokolov line.
Both brothers had strong supporters in the Duma and the subject was
hotly debated for days. Nikolai’s arguments seemed to be winning
over the Duma when a stunning and unexpected announcement was
made.

Exactly one week after Kyril’s assassination,
the palace issued the startling news that Kyril’s widow Roxanna was
pregnant with a boy. There would be a direct heir through Kyril
after all. The entire question of succession was suddenly a deck of
cards thrown up in the air, and no one could even guess how they
would land.

Nikolai and Anastasia, who’d been confident
of their accession to the throne, were furious and suddenly found
themselves scrambling. Organizing their supporters, they tried to
disband the Duma and unilaterally declare Nikolai tsar. Many of the
dvoryane sided with them, and independent fleets of ships began
descending on Earth from all directions.

The Duma, incensed by Nikolai’s high-handed
usurpation, responded by immediately proclaiming Vasiliy tsar and
staging a hastily-arranged coronation. This satisfied enough of the
traditionalists to bring the bulk of the Imperial Navy into the
fray on Vasiliy’s side, and the war was on.

This conflict became known as the Knyazya
Rebellion. Millions of people died on hundreds of worlds. Bloodshed
and cruelty were the order of the day, but the major fighting ended
after fifteen months, when Nikolai himself was captured and
executed in a very public fashion. His wife, Anastasia Alexeyevna,
managed to elude capture with their son, however, and escaped into
anonymity somewhere within the vast empire. Even ISIS’s most
thorough searches couldn’t turn up anything more than wispy leads
that went nowhere.

“And you think the woman who came here thirty
years ago was Anastasia Alexeyevna?” Judah asked.

“Her face was in the news a lot when I was a
girl,” Sadye said with a nod. “She was much aged twenty years after
the rebellion and she disguised herself as well, but I recognized
her.”

“Why didn’t you tell ISIS?”

“Anastasia Alexeyevna was a ruthless woman,
even more than her husband. If I’d even hinted I recognized her,
she’d have killed me.”

Sadye continued her story. After Nikolai’s
death, the rebellion tapered off and the last fighting was over in
another year. Meanwhile the son of Kyril and Roxanna was born and
named Ilya. But he was still a baby, incompetent to rule the
Empire. So, after much deliberation and argument, the Duma devised
what was called the Great Compromise. Vasiliy would continue as
tsar for the remainder of his life, after which the crown would go
to Ilya and his heirs. Other paths to succession, even more distant
from the direct Sokolov bloodline, were established in case of
emergency. Even Ilya, as he grew to manhood, accepted these terms
with equanimity. Of course, no one really foresaw Vasiliy’s reign
lasting fifty years.

Fourteen years ago, Ilya and his wife had a
daughter, Natalia, and a great sigh of relief went up throughout
the Empire. While a son would have been preferred, there was ample
precedent for women inheriting the throne. The direct line of
succession now seemed iron-clad.

Five years after Natalia’s birth, Ilya and
his wife were both killed in a tragic spaceship mishap that may or
may not have been an assassination, and suddenly there were exactly
two members of the imperial Sokolov family left—one old and frail,
the other a five-year-old girl. People started getting nervous
again about more wars of succession, so the Duma invoked the Sovyet
Knyazey, a council of regents drawn from the ranks of the knyazya
and empowered to act if the tsar was somehow unable to govern. Such
a council had historically been convened at times of instability or
crisis.

That step proved more than prudent when, four
years after Ilya’s death, Tsar Vasiliy suffered a stroke. For the
past five years, he’d lain in a permanent vegetative state. The
Sovyet Knyazey ran the day-to-day affairs of the Empire and
everybody held their breath, hoping Natalia could attain her
majority at age twenty before Vasiliy at last expired.

Meanwhile, back on Kyrby in comparative
obscurity, the mysterious woman had met with the knyaz and made a
deal for her son Yevgheniy to marry his daughter Teodora. It was a
bit abrupt, for Teodora had already had several suitors among the
dvoryane and Yevgheniy was a kupets with a relatively obscure
background; but it was neither illegal nor unusual for commoners to
marry dvoryane and—after some strong initial doubts by Teodora—she
acceded to her father’s demands and married the mysterious young
man.

From the very start, Yevgheniy had undermined
Teodora’s well-being. He encouraged her to drink way too much and
he had her doctors dope her up with medications until she became
addicted. Sadye was disgusted to watch what was happening to the
once-vivacious lady she cared for, but she was powerless to stand
up to Kuznyetz—and she refused to abandon her mistress. She could
only do what little she could to mitigate the damage and grow
sadder as she watched Teodora’s mind slip away.

After Yevgheniy married Teodora, his mother
disappeared again and Sadye had never seen her since. There was no
telling whether she’d had any later contact with her son. She might
even be dead by now; Sadye guessed the woman would be in her late
eighties, at least.

“And you suspect Yevgheniy is really Pyotr
Nikolayevich?” Judah asked her.

“I’m positive,” Sadye confirmed. “He has all
the cruelty both his parents were famous for.”

Judah’s brain was racing as he left Sadye’s
room a short while later. This was it, the missing piece of the
puzzle! He’d wondered how Yevgheniy expected to be declared tsar;
the dvoryane would never crown an upstart kupets, no matter how
strong his forces were. But as someone with an indisputable
bloodline—backed by DNA evidence—his claim stood an excellent
chance of moving him to the front of the line. This must have been
his plan all along, a plan he’d patiently waited thirty years to
bring to fruition.

Judah was so lost in thought that he barely
noticed the commotion in the halls all around him, until a
colleague from the B.O.Q. bumped into him and said, “Have you heard
the news? Tsar Vasiliy just died!”

Judah’s blood ran cold.
It’s starting,
he thought.
This must be the trigger to action. Everything
changes from now on.

He had to find some way to reach Wettig at
once. The former commissar had to know this important information,
or he’d be completely blindsided from a direction he didn’t even
suspect!

Eva and Natalia lay in the tubeway as though
swaddled in thick wool. They could see and hear nothing. They could
feel the trickling of dust like a fine mist from the ceiling and
the rough surface of the conveyor belt beneath them, but that was
all.

After a long moment, Natalia managed to say,
“Wh-what was that?”

“That, my dear, was the
Argosy
, if I’m
not mistaken. The late
Argosy
, to be more precise. It’s now
just heaps of debris scattered all over Languor Field.”

“What happened?”

“The rebels used some kind of cannon to blow
it up. It was just standing in the middle of the field screaming,
‘Shoot me, shoot me!’“

“But why would they do that?”

Eva began to seriously question the
intelligence of the Empire’s future ruler and was about to make a
sharp retort, but stopped herself. This is a very sheltered
fourteen-year-old girl in a deep state of shock. “My best guess?”
she said more gently. “They were trying to kill you.”

“Why—?”

“Why does anyone kill a tsaritsa? Someone
else wants the throne and you’re in the way.”

“But who—?”

“Look, can you move and talk at the same
time? The sooner we’re out of this narrow little tube and free to
move around, the safer I’ll feel.”

Eva could feel the young girl stiffen. “Who
are you to be giving me orders?”

“I’m the woman who got you out of an
exploding spaceship, and your best chance of staying alive more
than another hour or two.”

“You’re just a freilina!”

Eva forced herself to take a deep breath and
count to five. “That’s not my real job. I’m the woman Nkosi Wettig
trusted to keep you safe. You know him, right?”

“A little,” Natalia admitted grudgingly. “I
know Hasina better. She was my freilina a couple of years ago.”

“You’d trust her, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” The word came hesitantly to Natalia’s
mouth.

“Well, she trusts me,” Eva said, stretching
the truth a little. “She personally brought me to Lady Elena to be
your freilina so I could keep an eye on you.”

The long silence from the tsaritsa seemed to
indicate at least grudging acceptance.

“So if it pleases Your Imperial Majesty,” Eva
continued at last, “would you kindly crawl down the rest of the
tunnel so we can get the drap out of here before the bad guys
decide to search it?”

“It’s filthy!”

“There wasn’t time to send a gornichnaya down
to clean it first. And if you don’t start moving now you’re going
to get your
tuchis
kicked.”

“My what?”

“You’ll find out soon enough if you don’t
start moving.”

After a moment, Eva could hear the rustling
sound of the tsaritsa crawling ahead down the tubeway. Painfully
slowly, but it was still forward motion. At first Natalia was
quiet, but eventually she said, “What happened to all the people on
the ship?”

“I can only assume they’re dead,” Eva
answered. “But there’ll be plenty of time to think about them once
we’re out of this tunnel. Keep moving.”

They crept on in sullen silence until
suddenly Natalia cried, “Ow!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I bumped my head,” the girl whined.

“Great! That means we’re at the end of the
tunnel.”

“It hurts.”

“Can’t be much. You weren’t moving very
fast.”

“I think it may be bleeding.”

“Can you open the hatch?”

“I … I don’t know how.”

“Here, let me squeeze past you.”

There was an awkward moment in the cramped
tube as Eva edged her way alongside Natalia and began feeling
around the hatch for the release mechanism.

“Do you know what’s out there?” Natalia
asked, worried.

“Probably some sort of baggage terminal would
be my guess.”

“But … but what if some of the rioters are
out there?”

“Then they’re smarter than they’ve acted so
far. Quieter, too. Ah, there we are.”

With a slight sigh of air pressure, the door
unlocked and Eva opened it just a crack. Immediately the two women
had to shut their eyes tight. Even though the room beyond was not
too brightly lit, it seemed like searchlights after so long in the
total blackness of the tube.

Eva’d been a little better prepared for the
light, so she recovered a little faster. She opened the door a
sliver wider and looked around. All was quiet out there, with no
signs of anyone waiting for them. Most likely, workers had
scattered at the sound of the explosion and they were all out on
the field, trying to sort out the debris. Baggage would have a very
low priority at a time like this.

Eva squeezed out of the tunnel and got to her
feet beside it. Her legs were a little stiff from their long
confinement in the narrow tube, but a few quick stretches got them
back into shape. She then helped Natalia out of the tubeway and
supported the girl until she could straighten her legs out,
too.

“Come on,” Eva said. “We’ve got to get out of
here before someone spots us.”

“Yes,” Natalia said, more confident now that
she was in the light and open air. “We’ve got to get to an ISIS
office. They’ll protect me.”

“Hold on there, young lady. The universe as
you knew it doesn’t exist any more. You can’t count on ISIS now for
anything.”

“You don’t think they could handle a few
rioters?”

“The rioters were just a smokescreen. This is
an organized and well-planned coup, probably just waiting for the
tsar’s death to set it off. Knyaz Nkosi figured it out; that’s why
he sent me along to protect you.”

“A coup?” She sounded unconvinced. “That’s
impossible!”

“As impossible as blowing up your ship? Trust
me, this is very, very real. That was a deliberate attempt to kill
you.”

Natalia opened her mouth a couple of times
and closed it again as quickly. Finally she said, “Who would dare
do such a thing?”

“Obviously Graf Federico here on Languor.
Wettig suspects Knyaz Yevgheniy of Scorpio sector is the mastermind
behind it all. Probably lots of other dvoryane and boyare involved,
too. And any ISIS agents on Languor who were loyal to the throne
are almost certainly dead by now.”