The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

what she overlooked. To know how gullible she was to think Pynn and her allies would fall in line. She streamed a warning to Supreme Admiral Bastian Grandover and opened the drawer of her vanity.

The case was long, slim, and red. She flipped open the lid and admired the six-inch blade, ornate and serrated. Her favorite since the beginning of her ascendancy. She did some of her best work with this blade.

In close, without warning, driven upward at a precise target.

This would provide a new experience. She’d never taken this step before breakfast. And never inside the house.

Celia slipped the knife into a stealth pouch beneath her right sleeve and contemplated her strategy. The tone, she determined, should be soft and reassuring. Hopeful as a new day rises. Appreciative of his company at the edge of history. Perhaps she might look into his dying eyes and tell him the truth before his last, treacherous breath. But first, dismiss Ester. The handmaid couldn’t be anyway near. She’d never seen anything like this before.

Celia returned to the kitchen ninety minutes after she last saw him. And there Finnegan was still, but this time through the glass door, on the balcony, absorbing the sunrise as he vowed. A beautiful vision to be one’s last.

Did he deserve such a graceful end? Shouldn’t traitors suffer the indignity of animals led to slaughter?

That’s when she noticed he opened a holocube. He wasn’t streaming live, or she’d know it. Her security protocols would have alerted her at once. Perhaps he was capturing the moment, as if he knew he’d never see another Scandinavian sunrise.

Ester wasn’t here, although breakfast had been set out. Everything made sense to Celia. Over the balcony, down the ridge, and into the deep forest. Not the first, not the last.

She reached the glass doors and stopped, horrified.

No. He didn’t.

She almost walked past it. Celia turned and spied the breakfast table. At the center, all by itself, she saw the egg. The binary communicator. Her link to Brother James.

No. He couldn’t have.

She retraced her steps. Out of bed, down to the gallery, where James demanded she stop Sam Pynn from entering the battle. When she returned, Finnegan was exactly where she left him …

But awake. You bastard.

Celia did not reach for the egg. She wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of her desperation. Yet when she turned back to the glass doors, their eyes met. He leaned against the balcony railing, hands beckoning her to join him.

You don’t know what you’ve done, Finnegan Moss.

But as Celia stepped out onto the balcony, her live-in guest proved her wrong. He expanded the cube to deliver a visual that tempted her to lunge and stab in one dramatic blow. The vid offered no sound.

Rather, she stood in the gallery, in her robe, talking to a floating, geodesic jewel.

“When I was growing up,” Finnegan said, “I admired you from afar. You made such a splash in the world’s most powerful family. But after a few years killing indigos, I lost interest in the Chancellor mystique. I wondered what drove our collective madness. And then, when I studied you, Celia, and heard all the rumors about your ascendancy, I latched upon the obvious answer.

“We’ve been done in by centuries of brontinium extract in our blood. Our price for glory is literal insanity. It is a strange psychosis that leads us to murder and steal from those not of our caste. To kill each other by hiring assassins not of our caste. And to consort with a monster whose goal is to destroy our caste.

“What do you think, Celia? Does any of this sound plausible?”

He leaned against the railing, as if he were in the midst of an ordinary chat. Finnegan posed neither a satisfied smile nor angry demeanor. In fact, he took a pipe out of a shirt pocket, tapped it against the railing, and consumed a puff of poltash.

“Oh, you sweet nothing,” she said. “Others have tried to push back against me. They’re all dead. Why do you expect to be different, Finnegan?”

“I’m not sure I won’t be the next. But I will be the last.”

“That vid proves nothing.”

“Actually, I’d say it’s damning. And that communicator,” he nodded toward the kitchen, “is unprecedented tech. Celia, let’s come to it. You do not have a single friend on this planet. No one will come to your aid on this matter. You overplayed this time.”

She laughed. These fools always think they’ve outsmarted me.

“I don’t need friends. Never wanted them, truth be told. Emotional detriments. The Admiralty is mine, Finnegan. The cities will be mine when the Guard secures them. As for brontinium extract, I’ll soon have an alternative that will extend the Chancellors another three thousand years. I won’t need friends, only supplicants.”

Finnegan took another puff. A soft morning breeze rose up the mountainside and kicked his smoke into her face.

“Then you won’t mind if I transmit this face-to-face with James Bouchet, the deadliest terrorist in three thousand years?”

“By all means. It can’t hurt me.”

She saw the hesitation in his eyes, as if he wasn’t expecting such a conciliatory response. But it was the instant of indecision she needed. Celia approached him as if to console him in defeat. Rather, she released the knife from its secret pouch and lunged off her back feet, the blade swinging upward to its target.

Did he forget they were both Guard-trained, former masters of kwin-sho? Did he not expect her to flex with such deadly aplomb?

Celia didn’t care if he transmitted the vid before she fell upon him. Before her blade steered its way into his abdomen, just below the ribs. Was a man so profoundly clever as equally naïve?

He dropped the pipe and gasped, reaching for his chest. All she needed was to turn