Xandra's Legacy

Xandra's Legacy

Peter Salisbury

Xandra's Legacy

Copyright Peter Salisbury

Smashwords Edition October 03 2016

No part of this document in any form, whether paper, digital or electronic may be reproduced without the prior written permission of the author. Characters and locations in this document are entirely fictitious, any resemblance to actual persons or places is coincidental.

Xandra's Legacy

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: Mutual Strangers

Chapter 2: The Memory Clinic

Chapter 3: An Assassin's Breakfast

Chapter 4: Emerald

Chapter 5: More Questions

Chapter 6: Trouble At The Gate

Chapter 7: Primitive Life

Chapter 8: Decoy Shuttle

Chapter 9: Raiders' Retreat

Chapter 10: Pendleton's Paradise

Chapter 11: Tracking Daisy

Chapter 12: A Chance Of Reconciliation

Chapter 13: Nowhere

Chapter 14: Planet Sawnar

Chapter 15: Palaeon

Chapter 16: Pandemica

Chapter 17: Knights Castle

Chapter 18: After The Theatre

Chapter 19: The Old Leaf Inn

Chapter 20: Nowhere Again

Chapter 21: ZiP

Chapter 22: The Battle For Arthur's Point

Chapter 23: Optimista

More stories by Peter Salisbury

Xandra's Legacy

Introduction

What makes an elderly but incredibly rich widow fight to her last breath in a personal vendetta against The Association, the most powerful commercial empire in the galaxy? The wily senior, with more years behind her than ahead, warned her assistants that Association assassins are only minutes away, but they chose to ignore her, with disastrous consequences.

That same day Johann had left his home planet to travel the Pan-Orion Spaceway in search of new challenges. He was young, newly qualified and full of shiny expectations, so his chance meeting with the eccentric and evasive Xandra was a bit of a shock. The promise of adventure, however, was irresistible.

Prologue: Previously in Xandra's World

Xandra had a number of scores to settle. The first two were against the deaths of her parents, and the second two were against those of her brothers, all of her family dead at the hands of The Association. The bosses never got directly involved, they hired agents to do their dirty work. There had been other deaths, too, as one after another of her own business associates had been killed in combat against the commercial dreadnought. It was a massive conglomeration of companies each run by men greedy for power and vying with each other to reach the next tier of the organisation. The greatest financial rewards went to the group of utterly ruthless individuals at the highest level of the pyramid, where their only rule was that anyone could be bought. They believed that their incredible wealth gave them absolute power and with it the right to operate by their own code of conduct, which was to completely ignore any impediment of law. When it came to maximising profit, they would use whatever means it took to succeed. The one thorn in their side was Xandra. She made it her sole purpose in life to root out The Association wherever she could, while staying clear of its clutches.

From the earliest days of her crusade, Xandra had evaded the assassins as much by luck as cunning, but the Association's agents were getting increasingly well informed. Landfall was where she had concealed herself in a maze of tunnels beneath the planet's oldest hostelry, but after months of operating undetected, her time had run out. She had warned Kable and Zane as she ran past them that they had less than ten minutes to get out, but they had stayed at their computers, convinced that they could disorientate the assassins by disrupting their communications systems. After a long run of successful campaigns, Landfall was the planet where Xandra's operations against The Association was to fail most spectacularly. She had employed two extremely able assistants, Kable and Zane. The men were full of zeal but, being top of their classes had made them feel invincible. A mere sense of invincibility was not enough when death was only minutes away. Her two protégés were destined to ignore her warnings and be slain by Association assassins in the cellars of the Cave Inn which Xandra had used as a base.

The landlord claimed that the Cave Inn was not only the oldest tavern on Landfall, it was the oldest inn of the many scattered across several nearby planets. It derived its name from the fact that the beer cellar occupied one of several natural caves in the limestone rock upon which the inn was built. The earliest settlers had used the caves for brewing purposes because of the constant temperature within their depths, and because the labyrinthine tunnels provided ample opportunities for concealment from the excise authorities. Cave Inn's appeal to Xandra was that it no longer drew crowds eager to sample its home brewed beers. Its decline was a result of The Association having lured the public away from the real ale produced by independent breweries in favour of their own high margin, industrially produced, bottled brands. In recent times the Cave Inn had been relegated to the very bottom of the list of tourist attractions on Landfall.

Xandra wished she had been more insistent with her warnings, but she had to make do with alerting local enforcers to the imminent murder of her operatives. The sound of the two echoing shots caused her to stumble, just as she was scrambling out through a brush-covered exit from the caves at the rear of a garden fifty yards from the tavern.

The enforcers burst through the door at the top of the steps leading down to the beer cellar too late. They arrived at the very moment that the assassins stood over the bodies of Kable and Zane, congratulating each other on their success. The enforcers began firing immediately but using assassins' reflexes the two agents dodged between rows of oaken beer barrels and returned fire. A gun-battle raged back and forth. Deadly slivers of wood from the casks flaked from the barrels to lodge in the assassins' body armour, ballistic shots ricocheted, and yet the two murderers fought on beneath the smoke trails above their heads. The assassins were trapped under the fire of superior numbers, and they knew it. Despite the odds, they fought on until they had discharged the last magazines in their weapons. The atmosphere reeked of Zane and Kable's blood, gun smoke and spilt beer, and the assassins knew that they would die as inevitably as the two men they had slain themselves. To the astonishment of the enforcers, they leapt over the banks of electronic equipment and split beer barrels to fight hand-to-hand. Four enforcers fell to the assassins' deadly physical assault, before being brought down by the cold, calculating aim of the lead enforcer.

The attack against the assassins was reported on the enforcers' media feed and was picked up by Xandra's com. With the outcome certain, Xandra had no immediate need to run so she took advantage of the chaos in the cellars to use a remote link. She quickly accessed, then initiated a download of all the computer data-files and specialised software Kable and Zane had been using. While she crouched amongst the weeds behind a derelict garden shed it seemed to take an age for the transfer to run through into the memory implants inside her own head. Her advanced age had required her to expand her own memory with bio-electric augments, but it was going to be a close call if she would have enough space to absorb Kable and Zane's files. A single stray shot could have halted the data transfer at any stage, and Xandra almost hoped that it had as she felt her own memories being overwritten by the data. She accessed the original files in the cellar using her com then deleted them all before the enforcers could impound the equipment as containing evidence. When the data transfer completed, Xandra reached out to the corner of the crumbling shed. She pressed against the rotting timbers but they held fast, allowing her to push herself up to an unsteady standing position. Having no choice but to store Kable and Zane's data in her memory augment left her with barely sufficient capacity to preserve all of the boys' data as well as her personal memories. Her brain and augments combined were overloaded, and the only space she was left with was an unbuffered short term memory. She could recall all of the data in batches, but parts of her recent past had been deleted. The short term memory lasted her a mere five minutes at any given time.

Xandra's body responded to her lack of memory of recent events by pushing her into fight or flight mode. Her breath came in ragged gasps as she listened intently between each gulp of air for any sound of pursuit while she went back into a crouch only yards from the tumble-down shed in the overgrown garden which concealed the exit of her escape tunnel. Xandra's mind lurched from one extreme to another as she felt the abyss of a deep depression opening at her feet. The enforcers' com feed told her that the assassins were now dead, but her mind felt like it would burst with the amount of data it carried. It jockeyed for priority over her personal memories, and she shuddered at the realisation that The Association would rally if she foundered after the deaths of her two brave but foolishly defiant operators. Although it had been weakened by her actions, The Association had not been brought to its knees as she had hoped, and it was nowhere near extinction. Without a robust opposition, The Association would revive the corrupt commercial empire it had created. Bewildered by her overloaded memory, and suffering under a sense of crushing defeat, she staggered from the Cave Inn in the far outskirts of the city, through the back streets in the general direction of the main square. She had much to reflect on during her solitary journey.

In the early days of the war between her family's empire and The Association, Xandra had escaped the assassins sent to finish her off, but she had not been able to protect her family, or those who chose to help her. Finally, as the last of her line and the last person of sufficient individual wealth to stand effectively between The Association and galactic domination, she felt it was her duty to continue the crusade as long as she was physically able to do so. Because of her influence, she was worth more alive than dead to both sides. She had put such tight legal restraints on her commercial empire that it was only through her that it could be dismantled, and so for Xandra it was impossible to be too careful. If The Association got hold of her, they would stop at nothing to coerce her into relinquishing her holdings.

At whim, or the smallest hint of danger, Xandra changed between interplanetary shuttles and the cruise liners plying their trade back and forth along the Pan-Orion Spaceway. On ground transport she never took a full journey, and she never allowed herself to be boxed in by having too few choices of which shuttle, taxi, train or cruiser to take. Her technique was to alight where she could take any one of at least three options to continue her journey. That way, if an Association agent had succeeded in tracking her to a certain location, she had more choices than they had the ability to track further.

There was also a number of relatively safe places she could use to lay low from time to time, so that she was not continuously on the run. These included resort planets and space stations contained in a list known only to her, but it was never wise to stay in any one of them for longer than a few weeks. She had learned to spot the assassins who were paid by The Association to take out anyone working with her and then capture her. There was no doubt in her mind that her subsequent interrogation would be lengthy, thorough and horribly painful.

Xandra knew that she would one day simply disappear if she did not stay one jump ahead of The Association. She positively avoided media attention to the extent that rumours circulated at intervals that she was already dead, like the rest of her family. The stories were always countered by the evidence that her own portfolio of companies was still functioning healthily.

The Association's focus on profit left it vulnerable to the sort of attacks Xandra had become adept at, while giving her the ability to protect her assets and resources. Everything she did was clandestine, compared with The Association's barely concealed methods of bribery and corruption of officials who were co-opted into pushing through legislation which gave their companies trade advantages over legitimate enterprises.

Xandra's com pinged twice, first with a general news item about murders taking place at The Cave Inn.

'Enforcers raided a hostelry known as The Cave Inn today at twelve-fifteen. They found two men already dead and the security squad was immediately fired upon by two more men. After an intense battle, the enforcers prevailed and the bodies of four men have since been recovered and removed from the premises. Subsequently, the landlord of the inn was interviewed and it appeared that he had let out three rooms, one each to the two men who the enforcers found dead when they arrived on the scene, and a third individual, a woman. The landlord's testimony agreed with the forensic evidence, which also showed that the two men living at the inn may have been terrorist hackers attempting to attack the Mutual Benefit Corporation's central computer. When our reporter contacted the Mutual Benefit Corporation, no-one was available to either confirm or deny the report.

The second report was an alert to all citizens from the Enforcers Central Office.

'Our homicide team is looking for a fifth individual who is believed to be an associate of two men killed earlier today while resident at The Cave Inn. This may be the same woman who made an emergency call to the security forces prior to the attack on the first two men. We have so far been unable to identify either the woman or the individuals who fired on our security squad, and who were subsequently killed. Any assistance in identifying the four men would be greatly appreciated. It is possible that the woman we are seeking in connection with this matter may be armed and dangerous. If you see a woman behaving in a suspicious manner in the vicinity of The Cave Inn during the next twenty-four hours, please contact your local enforcer office immediately.'

Xandra scoffed at the idea of her being armed or dangerous, and at the mention of her operatives being hackers. 'Freedom fighters, is what my Kable and Zane were, bless them.'

Xandra took to the back streets in that part of town, avoiding the busy market in the main street, intending to put as much distance between the herself and The Cave Inn as possible. After half an hour she intercepted a message on the enforcers' communications channel saying that she had been spotted outside a shop. She heard sirens wailing and hurried to make herself inconspicuous by tilting her hat down at the front to cover her face. Her coat subtly changed colour to make her appear to blend into the buildings around her.

Landfall was the only habitable planet in a star system far along a quiet backwater of the Pan-Orion Spaceway. It was not far enough, however, to completely evade the revenge of The Association for acts of commercial warfare committed by Xandra and her two assistants. Kable had used his deep understanding of economics, and Zane had used his programming wizardry to attack The Association's computer systems. Both of Xandra's young researchers knew that the men who ran The Association were vengeful, but they believed that they were clever enough to stay out of reach. The Cave Inn had provided them with accommodation, and a virtually undetectable underground lair in which to install the wideband equipment they used to breach multiple Association firewalls simultaneously. At the end of five months of concentrated effort, Kable and Zane had significantly undermined the gigantic conglomerate of companies run by The Association. She and her assistants had drained billions of credits from The Association's own banks, but Xandra knew better than to underestimate them. Now, with her attack on The Association's financial empire brought to an abrupt and violent end, the elderly billionaire had no choice but to flee as far as she could from the tavern. Elimination of her two key agents left the men she fought against with wealth and power enough to rebuild. Pausing for breath in the doorway of a shop, she remembered the blaring alarms and tell-tales flashing red, all linked to her early warning systems. The top-of-the-range computer systems were now in ruins, shot to pieces in the battle between Kable and Zane's assassins and the enforcers.

After picking up the alert about her having been seen, Xandra became desperately fearful of backup assassination attempts ordered by The Association. If she was to stay alive long enough to do something with the priceless data she held inside her own memories, she had to ignore the physical pain of hunger and thirst and rely on will-power and the electrical energy stored in her power cells.

She had too many narrow escapes in that first day, bumping into local residents and traders, despite keeping to the smallest alleyways. Although those who saw her in passing paid the shadowy, shambling creature she portrayed no attention, she forced herself to be more vigilant and to make use of the cover of darkness. When the light failed, she quickened her pace, though still keeping to the back streets. Without pause, she struggled on past daybreak, until the streets towards the city centre became too busy to risk. During working hours she concealed herself in the occasional disused warehouse, derelict lot or vacant property. All the time she kept her eyes open for assassins while snatching at fading memories of the most important features of her mission. There was so little storage left and she had to juggle constantly between her short term augment and the mass of data on The Association.

She had estimated that it would take her two days to make the journey from the Cave Inn without sleep, which was something her power cells could achieve for her. Every few minutes she lost sight of her goal, but she simply aimed her feet at the end of the street she was in, hoping that when her consciousness returned, she would recall her purpose. Late on the second day Xandra saw the street signs indicating that it was a further five miles to the city centre. Her will to fight on was practically exhausted and her bio-electrical muscle augments were only a few hours off failing altogether from lack of charge.

An hour before twilight was due to descend she collapsed onto a bench thirty feet from the ornamental water fountain at the city centre. Her plan had been to replenish her reserves anonymously amidst the mid-afternoon throng in the city's central plaza, but her journey had taken too long. She did not have even the strength to reach the charging station on the far side of the square, and as the power ebbed from her cells, her will to do anything about it dissolved at the same rate. Xandra could go no further and she was certain that The Association had won, just as surely as if she had been struck by one of their assassins' blades, because within minutes her bio-electric heart would beat for the last time. Early next morning her lifeless body would be discovered by the city garbage collectors, her identity would be discovered and the news media would fill with speculation about the nature of her demise, just as surely as the leaders of The Association would rush to confirm that the woman who had battled against them for so long was actually dead.

Chapter 1: Mutual Strangers

Johann's body tensed when the steel gates to the Landfall transit station banged shut behind him, but he didn't look back. The sound echoed through the exit tunnel and was joined a moment later by the clank of the security guard shooting the locking bolts. Barred from returning to the empty station, Johann walked down the street in the direction signposted for the city's main plaza. At the corner, he stopped. The square had a fountain at its centre where street birds hopped and pecked at the stone paving. The birds dodged the idling spray and scavenged, sharp-eyed, through a thin scatter of husks for the infrequent reward of a seed. The square was bordered by imposing municipal buildings, and there were benches for travellers and passers-by to rest. Half a dozen individuals and two small groups passed through while Johann watched. No-one stopped, and no more came.

Johann had travelled far along the Pan-Orion Spaceway that day and he had spoken no more than was necessary to purchase his ticket, so rather than go and sit on an empty bench, he headed for the one on which a lone figure sat at one end. Taking the other end of the bench, Johann sat down, exchanging as he did so a polite greeting with the stranger, a woman. She looked youthful, although it was practically impossible to tell anyone's age these days by the face alone. Her hair was covered by a stylish, but dilapidated, black felt hat, from under which a few dark brown strands had escaped at the side. A long, black trench coat which was wrapped untidily around her added a sombre cast because it was as dusty as her boots. The impression of an age of neglect was completed by the way the figure listed towards the open end of the bench. Everything about the scene had an eerie peacefulness about it, but if Johann had been able to anticipate the chain of events he was in the process of initiating, he might have taken a bench on the far side of the square, and gone uninterrupted about the business of using his coms device to discover potential places to stay.

Johann took out the communicator but stopped, with his finger poised over the search box, to look up at the evening sun which glowed behind the crenelated ridge tiles of the Hotel de Ville. In his home town it would have been nine-thirty, in the square where he sat it was an hour later. The vapour trail of the last launch vehicle to blast off from the transit station still lingered, its parabolic path fading to nothing where the craft left the atmosphere behind. If Johann had known when and where to look, he may have caught the brief violet flash as the ship joined the Pan-Orion Spaceway.

Allowing his eyes to adjust to the brightness had been a mistake, because when Johann looked down it was hard to pick out the details of the statuary deep in the shadow of the city hall's façade, although its magnificent portico was still defined by the light reflected from windows in the buildings behind him. The sky above the glow was clear and blue although, in another hour or so, stars would show as the blue turned inky. Johann had chosen a time of year to visit when the days stayed warm late into the evening, so he was in no great rush to do anything other than enjoy the sunset and soak up the atmosphere. Out of the corner of his eye, Johann noticed that the figure to his right had lapsed further into inactivity.

While his mind was occupied with what little transpired around him, Johann's finger curled slowly of its own volition, until it made contact with the communicator's screen. As it did so, the com responded with an audible gesture reminding him that to discover something about anything, he must first enter search criteria. Johann glanced to his right, ready to apologise, but the stranger showed no sign of having been disturbed. Johann felt that she was unnaturally still, even for someone who had fallen asleep, and yet moments earlier he had succeeded in exchanging a greeting with her. Turning back to his screen, Johann tapped through to Hotels, and entered a price range. While he was engrossed in the list of inviting hostelries, a curious sound roused him, at first only just above the level of inaudibility. If the square had not become silent, apart from the faint trickle of water, Johann would not have heard it. He raised the com to his ear in case it was a connection gesture from the local network. But it was not. The sound appeared to be coming from, or at least from the direction of, the woman slumped on the bench four feet to his right. Johann turned, his mind alert, but there was nothing which might make a sound behind her. As he listened intently, the sound, this time recognisable as a chime, repeated.

'T'chaw-t'chee.'

It was a thin, reedy, other-worldly sound, and there was a curiously insistent and unsettling quality to it.

'T'chaw-t'chee,' came the sound a third time.

The woman remained unmoved and unmoving but over the following two minutes the chime repeated unabated. It would not have been possible to hear the sound at all without augmented hearing further away than half a dozen yards, and no-one else remained in the square. As the chime continued, at what could only be described as an apologetically quiet level, the more certain Johann was that it was coming from the woman herself. Unable to concentrate any longer on finding accommodation, he turned and stared at the woman for several seconds. Her hands were deep in the pockets of her trench coat, which was made of a synthetic woven material. Johann could see her chest move slowly up and down, although the single, long black feather stuck into the band of her hat showed more movement in the light breeze, than did her eyes. In fact the woman's eyes blinked only once while Johann stared at her, remaining fixed on some indeterminate spot on the façade of the Hotel de Ville. The woman's legs, where they showed beneath her coat, were covered in breeches and what had once been shiny leather boots, now dulled under the evidence of much recent travel on foot. Johann glanced at his own boots and estimated that the woman must have walked for at least two days, going by the condition of her lower extremities.

Johann was surprised that the woman did not interrupt his impertinent scrutiny with a rebuke, but she continued to stare straight ahead. After another minute, he felt compelled to speak.

'Excuse me,' Johann said, 'Is that your communicator chiming?'

For at least twenty seconds there was no response of any kind, other than the chime which sounded once in the interval. Without warning, the woman's chest rose fully as she inhaled deeply, and her head turned slowly in Johann's direction. That initial reaction was followed by a stiff movement of her shoulders, until she was looking straight at him. Her face, Johann realised, despite the glow from the setting sun behind the Hotel de Ville, was unexpectedly pale.

The woman said in a clipped and synthetic voice, 'I don't know what part of the sticks you're from, sonny, but are you actually as young as you look?'

'Yup,' Johann said, smiling proudly, 'I have not yet required a single augment.'

The quiet voice continued while the body appeared to freeze, as if the woman had only energy enough to do either one thing or the other. 'Enjoy your youth while you have it.'

As Johann was into his early twenties, he guessed that the stranger must be of some considerable antiquity.

'I'm from Arthur's Point,' Johann announced.

'Do they not have terminal alarms there?'

'It's a new colony.'

The voice creaked on. 'Ah, I see. I haven't kept up with all the frontier worlds, they have appeared so fast in the last hundred years.'

'A terminal alarm, you say?'

'You're hearing's still good, sonny.'

'My name is Johann.'

The woman struggled to complete the act of turning her whole body so that she could face Johann without having to twist her neck, but he waited patiently until she appeared to be comfortable with her new position.

'Xandra.'

'Xandra, you used the word terminal, didn't you? Isn't that serious?'

A faint smile flickered on the woman's lips, but it vanished in a second. 'Nothing for you to worry about, young man.'

'But shouldn't you plug in? I mean, recharge, or something.'

Johann wasn't from such a new colony, and his schooling had not been so scant that he wasn't aware that the most radical augments fitted to older people's bodies were necessary to keep them alive. He also knew that there were different stages of low power status alarms, depending upon the urgency for reaching a charging station. In fact he could see the yellow and red slanting stripes of a station next to a bench beyond the fountain, on the far side of the square. Her face may appear to be young, he concluded, but the rest of her very definitely was not.

'There's a charging station over there,' Johann said, pointing.

'It looks like a long way from here,' Xandra said so quietly that Johann barely heard her.

'Not so far really. I can help you reach it.'

'Why would you do that?'

'Well… I… I'm just trying to help.'

'Sonny, you appear to be a genuine sort of chap, if rather naive, but you don't know what you're getting yourself into.'

'That doesn't matter, Johann said, smiling, 'where I come from we help each other, even if no-one asks for it.'

'Then it must be a very new colony, and one where its foolishly generous inhabitants are soon to be robbed wholesale by the first conman to drop into the spaceport.'

'It is new and small, but we have excellent natural resources. In my district alone, there's a particularly rich vein of...'

Xandra interrupted Johann's flow. 'I'm sure that those statistics are important to you, but my mind is so full of facts that I cannot absorb any more. In a minute or two our conversation will have passed out of my short term memory, and will have been lost in the gaps between the circuits and the synapses.'

'It's not so small a colony, either, that I don't know about terminal alarms,' Johann said, 'You have two stages of warnings which are internal and inaudible to anyone else.'

'And those were as infuriating as this one, and as difficult to disconnect.'

'Because you're not supposed to disconnect them. You need help.'

'Don't concern yourself any further, Johann, I shall find the way to shut this one down, just as I did the other two. If you don't wish to hear it, meanwhile, there are several other benches you may occupy.'

'I don't mind, it's very quiet, really.'

'But, as I assume you have recently arrived and need somewhere to stay, you should get on with looking after yourself.'

'I'm more resourceful than I look,' Johann countered. 'And I know that if you manage to silence that alarm, within a pre-determined time, your essential systems will shut down, and unless you are plugged into a Portable Emergency Pod, you will die.'

'You don't have a PEP, do you?' The words were spoken more as a threat than a question.

'I'm not trained for resuscitation so, no, I don't carry a pod.'

'Well at least you have that advantage in your favour.'

Johann's eyes widened as he stared back at the woman's expressionless face. 'I don't see that as an advantage, under the circumstances.'

'But, thankfully, I do. And if I choose to silence my alarm, it is my business.'

In that moment, the expected chime did not come. Johann sat perfectly still, waiting, hoping that he had simply missed it.

'You've already done it, haven't you?' Johann said. 'You have switched it off.'

The woman nodded.

'Xandra, I don't want you to sit here until your heart stops.'

'You don't have to watch.'

'Please, isn't there someone I can call?' Johann said, holding out his coms device.

'There is no-one I can trust.'

'Then let me take you to the charging station, please. I can pay for you to take on at least enough charge to tell me the story of how you came to be here, and why you are letting your last power reserves run down.'

Xandra sighed. 'I have been without friends or family for so long that I had ceased to believe in the offer of simple kindness from a stranger. You have reminded me of it, though I cannot now recall how we met. Take me, if you wish, to the charging station. But I warn you that you may have to carry me, and I am heavier than I look.'

It was the longest speech Johann had heard from the woman and, by the end of