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This message Premiere #44: Xanadelle Dies was posted by A final re-evaluation of the Sov-Blok superspy from... the Hooded Hood. on Thursday, January 30, 2003 at 05:43.
Premiere #44: Xanadelle Dies
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Xanadelle was fourteen when the local Party Secretary noticed her and began to visit while her mother worked long shifts at the collective factory and her drunken father snored in his chair. She did what was required of her as a loyal member of the state, or what the Party Secretary told her was required anyway. And when he was tired of her he recommended her on the list of girls who might be suitable for further training as comfort women for elite Sov-Bloc special forces. So the girl who would one day be the best covert agent of her world left home forever and began her training.
The Hospitality Corps were state whores. The basic members in their ranks were rotad to service the special troops and metahuman divisions, a perk to keep essential soldiers contented between missions. The more talented and attractive girls might hope to be assigned to a Party Executive or Senior Officer as concubine – and watchdog spy. Xanadelle, brilliant, beautiful, and ruthless, excelled and was selected for the advanced program that would train her for use against foreign powers for the benefit of her Bloc.
Bedroom technique wasn’t enough. Xanadelle had to sweat through unarmed combat for bodyguard duty, to master half a dozen languages, etiquette, cryptology, psychology. She learned sabotage, and strategy, and blackmail, and how to kill a man with nothing but words. By the time she was eighteen she was already the veteran of twelve successful missions, thrice decorated by the State.
It was natural that so talented an operative would be shortlisted for the metahuman enhancement process. If she could accomplish so much merely with her looks and skills then how much more could she achieve with superhuman powers? Xanadelle was one of the lucky ones that survived the process, but she received only level three agility and endurance abilities after a difficult adaptation that almost killed her. She lost most of her memories from before the age of twelve, and never used anything but the codename her instructors had given her ever after.
It was two years later that Xanadelle was first sent undercover to Technopolis itself where she became mistress to a Junior Nanotech Minister and then to the Science Councilor he worked for. In four months she was able to set up the finest blackmail and sabotage ring Sov-Bloc had ever achieved, and was quietly moving towards the holy grail: the Technopolis datacore containing the codes for all their military communications frequencies and metahuman engineering patterns. These were secrets that could change the balance of power of the planet.
The Science Heroes tried to stop her, of course. Blue Crusader had been easy to deal with. He was a man, after all, and once he let her get near enough to infect him with pheromone obedience fumes he surrendered freely. The female operative with him proved harder to stop, although Xanadelle had been trained in the seduction of women no less than men. In the end Xanadelle had resorted to combat to capture the Science Heroine called Lament.
And that was where the Sov-Bloc agent’s life had begun to change…
“You won’t get away with this,” Lament warned Xanadelle, struggling against the power-sapping restraint harness that shackled her to a support column beneath Datacore Node Epsilon Nineteen. Although the processing center was a minor one and would not usually access the secure information the Sov-Blok agent wanted, judicious use of bribery and blackmail – and a little rough sabotage – had shunted the precious files into back-up here.
“Nothing personal,” Xanadelle assured her captive. “We’re both just doing our jobs. Only I’m doing mine better.”
“You’re very good,” Lament conceded. “But you’re up against the best. Premiere’s going to kick your ass.”
Xanadelle had seen the file on the first generation science hero. “He’s a male, isn’t he? No problem.”
Lament gave a secret little smile. “He’s not like anyone you’ve ever met. He’s not going to succumb to your happy spray like Blue Crusader. He won’t be fooled by the false trails you laid. He won’t be stopped by your henchmen. He won’t take a bribe, credits or sex. He won’t stop until he finds me, and then he won’t stop until he thwarts you.”
Now Xanadelle smiled. “The whole of this computer node is now cloaked with E-M reflector screening. A level two emergency three sectors away is occupying every Science Cop and hero in the City. There are thirty-six atomic ripper drones deployed around this node, all of which are specifically keyed to disrupt high-density metahuman flesh. My pheromone spray contains biosensitive nanotech that actually works better on targets with enhanced senses. Every simulation we’re run shows that if I make it this far I win the game.”
“He’ll come,” Lament assured her. “And he’ll stop you.”
Xanadelle tossed her chestnut hair and turned back to her instrumentaation to download the stolen data. “I hope he does come, your man. I hope he tries. I want you to see that’s he’s just like the rest.”
“And I want you to see that he’s a hero,” Lament replied.
The warning buzzer on the drone control deck began just then, alerting Xanadelle to a perimeter breach. In rapid succession each of the ripper drones went offline. Mildly impressed, Xanadelle released her pheromones.
A wind like the cold breath of God whipped through the room. A black and white blur crumpled sensitive data-extraction equipment into a ball of scrap.
“He’s here,” Lament called out. “My hero!”
Xanadelle breathed deeply and struck a pose.
“That’s a heady scent,” Premier acknowledged, breathing deeply as he stood before her.
“Would you like a more intimate sniff?” Xanadelle purred.
“Yes,” Premiere admitted. “However, you are under arrest, by the authority vested in me by the Science Council.”
Lament smirked. Xanadelle frowned. “Don’t you want me?”
Premiere nodded, then gestured to Lament. “But I love her. And I have a duty to the people of Technopolis. Game over, Xanadelle.”
That had only been the first meeting, of course. Xanadelle escaped from Science Police custody less than two hours after Premiere turned her over. She returned again and again with increasingly convoluted and dangerous plots; and every time she came across Premiere he thwarted her.
He was just a man, she told herself. An enemy. Just one incorruptible, honest, brave, noble man. But when she measured those around her with that one man she found them small and seedy. Dissatisfied with the Sov-Blok she served she took an active role in shaping its future, even arranging the downfall of certain corrupt party members. As she grew in power she paid off scores from her younger years, starting with the Party Secretary who had first seduced her.
Still she was first and foremost a loyal Sov-Blok agent, and that pitted her against Technopolis and its Science Heroes. But there was that one occasion, when Technopolis and Sov Blok worked together against the invading Mynadrine Host; and what came after…
“I was sorry to hear about Lament,” Xanadelle told Victor Brooke. After nursing his brain-dead girlfriend for fourteen years, Premiere had finally seen her body catch up with her mind that fall.
“Thanks,” the science hero answered gruffly, and no weapon Xanadelle had ever used on him had brought that much pain to his eyes.
“She was a good woman… before…”
“Yes.”
“I suppose… well, I admire the way you kept faith with her. I’ve never known anybody like that. Never had anybody care about me that way.”
Premiere turned suddenly, surprised at the tone of voice that accompanied the confession. This wasn’t the confident, seductive Soc-Agent. This was real.
Xanadelle rubbed her aching arms where the Hive Mother had tried to rip her apart. “Victor, do you suppose if things had been different, if you hadn’t met Lament and I hadn’t been a Sov-Bloc whore, then we might have… been close?”
“Possibly,” Premiere agreed. “You’re not really a science villain, are you? You don’t murder people, you don’t harm civilians. You’re just a soldier on the other side. A soldier of many admirable accomplishments, brave, skilful, intelligent, intuitive…”
“That makes me a good comrade-in-arms,” Xanadelle shrugged. “I guess I’m asking whether in a different life in another world I could have been a comrade in your arms.”
“Oh,” Victor said, suddenly understanding. “Yes. Absolutely yes.”
Xanadelle was suddenly aware of how close Premiere was to her. She could feel the heat radiating from his skin. Already the wounds on his flesh were closing up, leaving smooth skin beneath the torn costume. As they stood amidst the burning wreckage of the Mynadrine Hiveship Xanadelle found herself blushing as she hadn’t done since she was fourteen.
“You know, all these years I’ve played the game of trying to seduce you knowing I never really had a chance,” she confessed. “Why am I suddenly frightened?”
“Post combat stress,” Premiere suggested. “Adrenaline surge. A biological need to affirm survival against all hope and expectation.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “And also because this time I think it you who are about to launch the attack?”
Premiere took her in his arms, smoothing her hair and gently touching her muscles where they knotted. “It’s not an attack,” he told her. “Love isn’t combat. It’s truce. We are currently at truce, aren’t we?”
Her lips turned upwards knowing that his kiss was coming. After that it was just a matter of détente.
“My hero,” she whispered as they came together; and she meant it.
The Red Watchman had demanded all the details of that encounter, and of the brief moments that Xanadelle and Premiere had been able to snatch before the Science Council had sent the science hero to kill the Sov-Blok agent. What Assak Malevi brought back from brain-death using his energy-mutation powers wasn’t quite Xanadelle, but it had her memories and most of her feelings. It was so easy for him to twist her love for Premiere to hate.
“Once before I took what was his,” he gloated as he rose from the sweaty bed where he had enjoyed the expertise of the masterspy. “I never tire of it.”
“But you killed Lament when she wanted to go back to him,” Xanadelle noted.
“That won’t happen to you,” the Red Watchman assured her. “I haven’t left you that choice.”
And now Xanadelle fell to the floor, her neck twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, her spine severed. Her beautiful face bounced off the White Room floor and the light in her eyes dimmed. The last man to use and abuse her laughed as she died.
The rear wall of the chamber, reinforced as it was against multi-nuclear attack, shattered under three irresistible blows.
“He’s here,” she thought in the darkening shadow of her mind. “My hero.” She wanted to touch him, to tell him what he’s meant to her, how he’d changed her and her life. She wanted to tell him why she’d betrayed him, and how Malevi had made her hate him, and how she had fallen in love all over again. She wanted to tell him that some things were stronger than the power of the Red Watchman.
And then Xanadelle died.
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