Though it must have been well past dawn by the time the plane touched down, Alex spent the next several hours hidden away from sunlight. The jet was taxied into a windowless hangar just big enough for the aircraft. It was nearly pitch black inside. A couple other soldiers accompanied Alex and the Queen through a labyrinth of underground passageways out of the airport to Goddess knew where. The blind stumble through the labyrinth dragged on for what must have been hours.
The meeting room was utterly barren in terms of decor. The polished white walls were devoid of any painting, decoration, or deviation from its sterile color. A single round table with four white chairs was the only furnishing to be found in the entire windowless chamber. Queen Victoria sat down at the featureless white table, while Alex and her other guards stood vigil just behind her. For several minutes, the group sat in silence. Then, through the same hidden door through which they had come, another entourage came to join them.
Two Dannic soldiers armed with assault rifles accompanied the aging ambassador of Dan. Alex twitched a hand toward his sword before he forced it back down. The silver glint of their ammunition clips told him the soldiers had brought runesteel tipped armor piercing rounds. Such expensive weaponry was not wasted on grunts. The two women guarding the ambassador would be more than a match for him if things escalated. Alex hoped the two other Knights the Queen had brought would prove useful in such a fight. He looked back down at his Queen. If she was nervous, her expression betrayed none of it. In comparison, Alex could only wonder how tense he must have looked right now.
"Miss Hauser," Victoria said, extending a hand to the ambassador with a pleasant smile on her face. The woman in turn accepted the handshake and gave her own toothy smile. The expression revealed the dentures of a woman well past her prime. The gesture disappeared soon enough. Half of the Dannic woman's once coal black hair was white, leaving her head an uneven smattering of grey.
"Your Majesty." There was an iciness in Hauser's voice. The Dans never masked their contempt for Angley, for royalty, or for energycasters in general. Their people's revolution had utterly destroyed any trace of such aberrants against nature in their borders, the Dans would constantly brag. Once again, Alex's eyes were drawn to the silver-lined clips on the Dannic soldiers' rifles. "Make no mistake, I have no love for you or your people, and if I could I'd gladly see them wiped out at no cost to my people. But that's not possible."
"I've missed you too, Ana," Victoria deadpanned.
There was an awkward silence. Then the two women burst into laughter.
"I still can't keep a straight face while saying that," Ana said with a hearty chuckle. She and Victoria both got up and approached each other. Then, to Alex's utter bafflement, the two embraced like long lost sisters. "Damn, you got older. Any more stress and you'll look worse than me."
"Says you," Victoria replied with a smirk.
"Hey, you just wait a few decades. You'll wish you were as pretty as me now."
"Sure I will." They sat back down.
Ana's cheery face turned grim. "I wish we could just sit here chatting like aimless schoolgirls all day."
"I wish I wasn't Queen." The older woman hummed in agreement. "Care to tell me why you have so many troops near our border?" Ana closed her eyes and nodded.
"More than a few of the President's top advisers are whispering in his ear for war and the dumbass is actually listening. Probably because arms manufacturers helped fund his election campaign. That and there's also the fact that the Dannic people don't exactly take you at your word when you say you want peace. Some even go so far as to say you're not Angley's true ruler. That even if you were sincere, the fact remains you can't do anything without your Priestesses' permission. Remember that whole fiasco with the racial slavery ban in the South Sea Isles?"
The Queen hissed and twisted her face into an ugly, angry scowl.
Alex wondered then if perhaps her and Ana Hauser's amicability had been an act as well. He looked down at his right hand, keeping it clenched in a fist and ready to crystallize should a fight break out.
Victoria's expression softened and a sigh escaped her lips. "I know what you're going to ask me to do. Trust me, I've schemed and dreamed it over a thousand times. I would gladly put all those hyper conservative, xenophobic bitches' heads on spikes if I could. But I can't afford to. At least a third of the population would side with them and the whole Empire would be in a civil war."
"I'm not asking you to arrest or overthrow those zealots, nice as that would be," Ana said, shaking her head. "You'll have to act smarter, get the Dannic public to at least believe you've got a handle on things. The Jinguo Games are this year. The whole world is going to be watching what happens in Hanjing six months from now."
"You mean watching which delegation will spend the most of their people's money on gaudy clothes and cars?"
Ana blinked away a flash of annoyance from her face and cleared her throat. "It's customary for leaders of participating nations to address the audience. I can pull a few strings in the diplomatic community and make it you this time."
"You want me to go in front of an international audience and babble on like a common jester? You just told me no one thinks I'm a real Queen." Victoria shook her head and blew a puff of air into her loose silver hair.
"No. I want you to hold your head up high and, on behalf of the Angleyan Empire, offer your own nobility riches even they can't thumb their noses at. Your Priestesses can't stop their Queen from addressing the world at the Games if Angley's chosen and they sure as hell can't risk, say, unrest among their deepest pocketed patrons if you announce in that same speech a far reaching trade deal with the Federation."
"I'm not sure I wouldn't get overthrown by populists if I tried something like that," Victoria muttered.
Ana rolled her eyes and "Look, as someone who lives in a supposedly democratic nation governed by the people, let me tell you: you get the rich in line, you keep everyone in line. Rich Dans will be too busy drooling over this to let the middle class get in their way. Trust me. That's how it always works."
While Victoria and Ana nodded in agreement, Alex felt his jaw tighten and his teeth grind from the clenching. The Dannic woman was right, of course. Who the hell gave a shit if the poor or middling community wanted something? The rich had and always would squash them if they stood in their way. Alex turned his gaze downward to the floor. He didn't want his face provoking the runesteel-armed Dannic soldiers.
"Look," Ana said. "I'll do everything possible to keep my countrywomen calm until the end of the year. Then, once the Dannic people see the Queen of their hated enemies openly proclaim peace and offer riches, it'll be much harder for the government to get away with posturing for war. Our people are strong-willed and proud. If they suspect their government of acting against their best interests, they won't hesitate to rally and demand a snap election. And of course, by people, I mean rich people."
"Must be terrifying, working for a government of such a volatile nation."
"It has its benefits and drawbacks. You could say... it's like clutching the wheel of a plane. One wrong move and you crash and burn." A knowing glint flashed across Ana's eye. "So what will it be? Will you take this chance to stand up and be the woman I've always known you to be? Or is the world right to suspect the Church has successfully usurped you?"
The Queen sat up straight and grinned. "Go ahead and let your people know that Queen Victoria Dartmoore III of Angley, Lady Protector of the Realm has an announcement to make at this year's upcoming Jinguo Games."
A satisfied smile crept across Ana's face, sending shivers down Alex's back. She stood and beckoned her guards to follow her out of the room. As quickly as they had come, Ana's retinue vanished into the wall, leaving the Queen alone with her guards. Alex let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Why was he so worked up? It's not like anything involving the Dans should have concerned him. And rich or poor, Angleyan pure-bloods could all go to hell as far as he cared.
"You're wondering just how in the world the Queen of Angley became friends with a Dannic woman. Aren't you?"
Alex nodded.
Victoria never turned around to meet his perplexed gaze. "I traveled much of the world in my youth, when I was just a second born Princess with no plans to be Queen. That was Charlotte's role. Perhaps it was my youthful arrogance, perhaps it was just plain stupidity, but I, an Angleyan, had the bright idea of visiting the Dannic Capital."
"They let an Angleyan Princess onto their soil?"
"No. I had to disguise myself. I'd been disguising myself for years anyway. I never liked the attention my royal title gave me. But of course, you can guess how successful my attempt at staying incognito was. A Dannic Military Police Colonel found me. She could have made a name for herself. All she would have had to do was pick up the phone once."
"Why didn't she?"
Victoria shrugged. "War. As much as she stood to gain from publicly imprisoning and torturing an Angleyan Princess, it would no doubt have caused a war that would have killed millions. Or so she told me. I'm still not sure if that's the real reason she spared me or if she had another agenda, but it's the story I'll retell."
***
The hallway outside the Queen's hotel suite was dark, not that it would impair Alex in a fight. Still, the dimness surrounding him added to his already mounting unease as he stood guard. While it wasn't uncommon for wealthy Islanders to visit colonial hotels with retinues of armed guards, Knights carrying genuine runesteel blades weren't quite so common or easy to pass off as commoner showmanship. Alex shook the distracting thoughts from his mind and straightened his posture. Acknowledged or not, he was his Queen's Knight, and the last thing he wanted was to be found sloppily holding vigil.
A faint clutter rang in Alex's right ear. He was tempted to ignore it, but anxiety and curiosity got the better of him. Keeping one hand on his sword, he treaded toward the noise, certain it was little more than a momentary distraction. He turned the corner and took a quick peek at where the noise had come from.
The source of the noise, a soldier clad in all black spec ops armor, rushed at his throat with a knife. Alex raised his arm to stop his attacker's blade, hardening his skin to shatter the comparatively fragile steel. He drew a dagger of his own and plunged it into the woman's eye before she even realized what had happened. Kicking the corpse down, Alex turned back toward the door he was supposed to be guarding. To his horror, a second woman had picked the lock to the Royal Suite and slipped inside.
Once inside, Alex saw that five black clad hostiles had forced their way into the Royal Suite's living room, a neat circle of cut window glass and six dead guards under their feet. They all turned to face Alex, while one continued on to the Queen's bedroom. Against Charlotte's earlier advice, he hardened his entire front into diamond and charged against them, sword in hand. A storm of bullets smashed into him, but he was ready. Or so he thought.
He'd already cut the first two women down before he noticed he was bleeding from his shoulder. Another pistol round smashed into his belly, producing an audible crack as his armor broke and shards of diamond fell on the ground, leaving raw and exposed flesh where his crystallized skin had peeled. Runesteel bullets. The pain began spreading from his many wounds. Though none of the rounds had so far gotten penetrated his flesh, Alex knew if he was hit anymore his armor would crumble and the next hits wouldn't be superficial. He hastened and used the flat of his blade to block an incoming bullet and cut the shooter in half. That left two more heavily armed, skilled attackers. The element of surprise, however, was gone, and with a single heft of his sword, he sent it spinning like a propeller into their midst. No amount of Dannic armor, however advanced, would withstand a spinning blade of runesteel.
Their flesh split open much easier than the wooden dummies Alex used to practice on. The resulting spill of blood, guts, and brains was much messier too. The sword embedded itself in the opposite wall after it had shredded through its targets. Alex then knelt down and touched the ground, rearranging the molecules between him and his weapon to summon it back to him while seamlessly mending the hole.
Victoria was a disheveled mess with white hair flying in all directions. She stumbled out of her room, flustered by all the loud noise just outside. At the same time, a squad of armed security guards rushed inside, clutching submachine guns and shouting so much over each other it all came out as inaudible babble. Alex dropped his sword and raised his empty hands. The last thing he wanted was to be mistaken as the perpetrator.
***
The paramedic assigned to examine Alex's wounds was a little too pleased to be fondling his shirtless body. He ignored the discomfort. Starting a fuss now would only pull more attention to him. It always did.
"You're lucky you only got shot with 9 mm pistol rounds. Rifles or even a large enough revolver would have ripped through you, armor or not," she said. She ran a hand over a bruise on his belly. She was middle aged and somewhat plump from a combination of years and poor habits. Alex lost count of how many women like her had taken such a shameless interest in him. His only lament at this point was that those who accosted him were rarely attractive enough to make the feeling mutual.
"I know. Thank you." As politely as he could, Alex waved the woman away and fastened his tunic over his torso, as well as his black armband. Though a few holes had been punched through the leather and the armband was frayed and unraveling in several spots. They would nonetheless have to do until he could find a change of clothes. It wouldn't have been good for a black-haired boy like him to be caught so far inland without proper authorization.
Returning to his Queen proved more arduous than killing the assassins sent after her. Almost as soon as the security guards had realized who she was, Victoria had been whisked away by a small army of police officers and locally garrisoned soldiers, all eager to protect their Queen. Even when he presented his black armband and ID to the police officers, they looked at his mixed racial features with disdain and skepticism. Nonetheless, they allowed him to pass the outer perimeter of the impromptu camp, though with no small amounts of grumbling.
"Ah, Alex. They told me you'd been shot. I'm glad you're still standing." Queen Victoria, who less than half an hour ago had been a flustered and pale wreck, was now her usual cool and steely self. She'd tied her hair back and somehow made her bathrobe look like a regal dress. She shooed the rest of her guards away, leaving her and Alex well out of earshot.
"It didn't go through. My armor stopped it."
The Queen nodded, but with grimness in her eyes. "It cracked though. There's only one material that could do that."
"Runesteel," Alex said.
"I already know what you're thinking."
"They came just hours after we saw the Dannic ambassador."
Victoria shook her head. "Ana would never resort to such an amateur trick."
"With all due respect, Your Majesty, you just told me you still have no idea why she decided to spare you when you were young. You were just a second born Princess then. Now you're Queen. Maybe she saw you and regretted that decision." It shocked Alex just how easily such frank and disagreeable the words popped out of his mouth. He should have been cowering after mouthing off so much. And yet he felt calm. By this point, he knew Victoria wasn't that kind of Queen.
"Then why would she even bother showing herself? Why wait until after our meeting?" Sure enough, Victoria continued speaking with a soft, even toned voice.
"It might not have been premeditated Your Majesty. Like I said. She could have seen you, then regretted her decision to spare you."
A troubled grimace fell over Victoria's face. "Dammit. First her, now you. Everyone wants the impossible from me."
"Your Majesty," a police officer said. She was sheepish, but nonetheless insisted on approaching her and Alex. "We identified the bodies."
"And?"
"All of them are known Dannic Black Ops soldiers."
"Damn," Victoria mumbled.