Into the Unknowable Ch. 20

"Worry about you?" Captain Kerensky exclaimed. "What else have I been doing for the past year?"

"As I say," repeated Beatrice. "The space ship is in your command."

She then dashed past the assembled officers at a rather faster pace than anyone other than the captain would have known she was capable of. Beatrice now knew for sure that Vashti's prisoners had escaped, though they still wouldn't know who their real captor had been. Nadezhda was almost certainly still under the impression that it was Beatrice.

The real Beatrice was at last back in the penultimate level where she'd previously been imprisoned. There was the usual collection of strange apparitions that she'd come to expect. A knight was fighting a fire-breathing dragon beside some startled sheep and a picnic dining table. A pair of two-metre high protractors wearing a head at its peak was walking in a peculiar manner across the lawn. A small green boat holding an owl and a cat was sailing across a lake.

Then Beatrice spotted Vashti in the distance. Bizarrely enough the colonel had returned to the villa that Beatrice had shared with Paul before she'd been imprisoned. She hadn't seen her husband for over a year and yet he wouldn't have noticed that she'd even gone away. Beatrice felt almost bitter about this. There were so many subtle and grotesque ways by which Vashti had humiliated her. Beatrice had made love many times with the facsimile of Beatrice that Paul had been fucking but not at all with the man to whom she was married.

Then she watched Vashti lead Paul into the villa. Perhaps she'd seen Beatrice approach from a distance. However, Beatrice hadn't expected her reappearance to be a surprise. Vashti would still have the advantage. Beatrice would need to act swiftly if she was yet to prevail.

Paul and Vashti were in the living room drinking tea when Beatrice walked into the villa. She'd vaguely speculated that Paul and Vashti might be having sex together on the sofa but she also knew that although Vashti enjoyed fucking men up the arse this was unlikely to hold much appeal to Paul.

Vashti turned her head round as Beatrice entered the living room. She was holding a cup of tea in one hand with her little finger pointing outwards. Although she looked very much the worst for wear, with an eye rolling about in its socket and her hair in disorder, she flaunted a superior and even supercilious smile.

This was the facial expression that most annoyed Beatrice. She grimaced with anger.

"Are you content now, you monster?" she said angrily as she contemplated Vashti's sabotage of her robot civilisation's mission and the predicament that they were subsequently all in. "Look where your foolish interference has taken us."