“I have a great mission for you, my devotees. The humans have proven . . . troublesome. An infection, a plague that has spread too far and wide. Like a foreign growth that has sent out tendrils in many directions.”
“Tell us what to do,” Farooq said. His voice was almost breathless. “Tell us how to stop this plague.”
The plague, Fontaine realized somewhere deep in his brain, was the human race. Farooq was asking how he could help exterminate humanity. Yet he and Al-Harthi joined voices in begging to be included with Farooq in this holy mission.
“There are two nodes of human strength positioned on opposite ends of the contamination caused by your race. And many other segments that must be sterilized as well, lest they rise into fresh threats. I will send you on a glorious mission of extermination, to introduce the seeds of human destruction. You will die pursuing this goal.”
“Yes!” Fontaine said.
“But first, I need to be sure of certain safeguards,” the Lord of Lords said. “It is possible that you will fall into enemy hands, and I must be sure that you will not betray me.”
The Cavlee finished their work with several final snips of extraneous tissue. The Adjudicator sent them scurrying backward with a glance, and they tucked into corners around the room, folded low and small.
The Adjudicator stepped out of the tank of liquid and toward the humans. Its movements were unsteady at first, as if nerve connections were still being made, motions being mastered. But within seconds it seemed to have gained full control.
It stood over them, looking down, breath warm against their faces. Given its earlier question, Fontaine wondered if the Adjudicator had ever seen a human before. Maybe it had been in stasis, its worn, ancient body awaiting a summons to war. Awake, its fellow creatures had told it about the human pestilence while Cavlee workers manufactured new limbs.
For something that might never have seen humans before and considered them a foul abomination on the universe, the Adjudicator stood awfully close. It studied them in turn, but didn’t touch.
Finally, it took a step back and waved one of its four-fingered hands. And something changed. Fontaine’s mind was free.
He shuddered and took an inadvertent step backward. He looked around in horror as the full weight of his situation sank in, the terror at what had become of him, and a hatred for this thing standing in front of him. One of the architects of the death of millions and a threat to the very existence of human civilization. Al-Harthi muttered something in her Arabic dialect that sounded like a curse. Farooq was shaking violently.
“I have disabled your implants, my devotees. Your minds and bodies are free. This is what may happen if our enemies take you. They have cunning, wicked scientists who might try to remove the implants. But there are secondary protections in place, deep inside your brains. They will prevent you from turning, prevent you from divulging information.”
The so-called Lord of Lords stood close. So close and vulnerable, and naked, too. It wore no mechanized suit. The limbs looked strong, but the torso itself was old and weak. If Fontaine launched himself, he could knock the thing over, and surely the others would help him kill it before the Cavlee could intervene.
Something held him in place. The Adjudicator stepped away and moved down to Al-Harthi, then to Farooq. Neither of the others moved.
“Good,” it said. “Now, to introduce a new element.”
Fontaine’s smoldering anger flared into a blistering, uncontrollable rage. All his fears and angers and frustrations, but with liquid fuel poured on top. He knew it was induced, but couldn’t control it and made to leap at the alien’s throat.
Instantly, his muscles stiffened, and he stumbled forward and fell to the floor. Al-Harthi fell on top of him, her mouth working wordlessly, and her hands curled into fists. Out of the corner of his eye, Fontaine saw Farooq still on his feet. He lunged for the Adjudicator’s throat with an inarticulate cry of rage.
And promptly fell to the ground. Unlike Fontaine and Al-Harthi, however, he didn’t lie motionless, but flopped about as if caught in a seizure. His cries turned to screams, and blood streamed from his ears and nose, followed by his mouth and eyes. He gave a final shudder and stopped.
“To your feet,” the Adjudicator said. There was anger in its tone.
Fontaine and Al-Harthi obeyed and stood nearly frozen while the alien looked down at Farooq, who stared at the ceiling, eyes staring blankly with tears of blood still leaking from the corners. One of the three humans, it seemed, had broken free of whatever safeguards had been put in his head. He’d died for it, of course, but Fontaine ached with envy for what Farooq had achieved in death.
Why couldn’t it have been me? Why couldn’t I have been the one to die instead of going home as a traitor?
Chapter Eight
Fontaine woke up struggling. For a moment he didn’t realize where he was, thought he was still on the Adjudicator base. Strong hands held him down, lending their strength to the straps that kept him in place. Human hands.
He stopped struggling and opened his eyes. The horror of his memories, so fresh moments earlier, dissolved into the shadows, much like how the mind shook off a nightmare.
Two nurses checked his vitals and adjusted an IV while a third, a tall, purple-skinned Hroom, unclipped a brace from Fontaine’s neck. Because the creature was behind him, their gazes met upside down, and Fontaine had to look away from the large, liquid-like eyes.
While the others held Fontaine in place, Dr. Willis teased out a pair of wires inserted through tiny holes in his scalp. There was a sensation like a relieving of pressure, and then it was gone. Almost at once, Fontaine felt himself slipping beneath a weight of exhaustion.
He might have been unconscious for an extended period of time while they induced old memories, but it hadn’t left him well rested. On the contrary, he felt wrung out all over, as if he’d been on his feet all day, repeating the same physically and mentally demanding task for hour after hour.
Dr. Willis was a middle-aged woman with steel-gray hair pulled into a bun and a serious expression on her face of the kind that would brook no arguments from her underlings. She turned that expression toward Catarina Vargus. The captain stood to one side, feet spread at shoulder width, arms crossed.
“That’s all you can manage?” Vargus asked.
“That’s all he can stand for now,” Willis said. “Any more and the risks of intracranial bleeding increase exponentially.”
From the little Fontaine had seen, Vargus had a warm rapport with those who served beneath her, and was not only respected, but liked. It was not a homogeneous crew—he’d heard several languages already, and there were even Hroom on the battle cruiser—but although many of them seemed to have come from unorthodox backgrounds, neither was this a sloppy, careless organization.
These were serious times, and Vargus was a serious commander. Fontaine had little doubt she’d open his skull and scoop out his brains with a spoon if she thought it would give her an advantage in the war. She looked ready to do that now.
“I . . .” he began. His tongue was thick, could not form the words that came to his mind.
She looked down at him. “So you went over to the other side.”
“No, I . . . it wasn’t . . .”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t bother denying it—you were a slave, mind and body. It’s all there in the memories Willis dredged up. This Lord Ghoul or whatever he called himself sent you back, and you traveled willingly. He gave you a test, in fact, to prove your loyalty. You and Al-Harthi. She’s the one who died on Black Widow before we could save her, wasn’t she? Was that part of some trick? The whole thing designed to get a mole into our fleet?”
He couldn’t talk about the Adjudicators, but he was desperate to prove his loyalty, and changed the subject to something he could speak about.
“My ship needs to get back in the fight. I need the cataclysm machine charged with fresh bursts, and ammo for the railguns.”
; “You want me to rearm you and put you back at the helm of a warship? Please, after what you just showed us? Maybe things work like that on Earth, but around here, traitors get a quick court-martial and then dumped out the airlock.”
“We have no confirmation he’s a traitor,” the doctor said.
“You saw what I saw,” Vargus told her. “He’s complying with the enemy.”
“I saw that he was complying with the enemy. But what happened afterward?” Willis drew her brows together. “You can’t dump him out the airlock for that. He’s my patient—I won’t let it happen.”
Vargus sighed. “I’m not going to dump him out the airlock, Willis. Treason implies intent, and Fontaine clearly doesn’t intend to harm us. But I’d be an idiot to put him back at the helm and set him loose in our fleet. We’ll drop him into stasis and let Brockett have a go at him in the labs once we rendezvous with Blackbeard.”
“I don’t want to go down,” Fontaine said.
Vargus ignored him and continued speaking to the doctor. “Unless you think his brain can hold up to another go at it.”
“It’s a question of rest,” Willis said. “And even then . . . I need to do more scans. Whatever is down there doesn’t want to come out, and triggering those memories might very well kick off a land mine.”
“Land mine?” Fontaine managed. “In my brain?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” she said. “A structural weakness induced into a critical blood vessel that causes a subarachnoid hemorrhage.”
He fought a rising tide of alarm. “Can’t you do something about it?”
“Sure, if we can find it,” the doctor said. “Hence the caution.” Willis nodded to one of the nurses. “Put him under.”
Fontaine wanted to make a final protest to Captain Vargus, but the nurse was already dialing up the dosage of whatever they were putting into his IV, and he was exhausted. A dark hand reached up and pulled him down to unconsciousness.
#
Catarina no longer had the luxury of considering Pierre Fontaine and his warship. Two others from Scorpion’s crew had similar evidence of brain implants—a man in engineering and another who’d previously been on the bridge, but was currently working in the gunnery—and she had them put in stasis, as well.
There was no evidence the trio were working together on some master plan of the Adjudicator lord’s, but she would take no chances, all the same. Still, it would be nice to have another warship, and her glimpse of Scorpion in combat had left her intrigued.
She put eight of her own crew on the Terran ship, plus a dozen armed marines, then kept it tethered to Void Queen as they crossed the system for the jump. She sent specs of its weapon systems to engineering so they could manufacture railgun ammo, but left the ship unarmed for now.
Captain Fox had sent a subspace from outside Nebuchadnezzar, where he held position with Citadel and eighteen other ships while waiting for the leviathan to jump after him. He’d face the leviathan and hold it briefly if he could. She didn’t envy him. It must feel like staring down a stampeding elephant, armed with nothing but a sharpened stick.
No doubt Tolvern had the same information about the enemy’s movement, and would be maneuvering the main fleet to support Fox’s retreat. After that, what the devil was their plan? How would they keep the leviathan from ravaging Persia, then thrusting deeper into Alliance-held systems?
She didn’t know, but unlike Fox’s forces, her own squadron was unburdened by evacuees from Castillo. With Void Queen’s assortment of star wolves, corvettes, and light cruisers, she had the ability to outrun the leviathan, and she hoped to join Fox before he was overwhelmed or forced through the jump. A more orderly retreat into Nebuchadnezzar might be possible.
And there, hopefully, Blackbeard and a larger fleet would lend support. But after that, Catarina had no idea what Tolvern intended to do.
She kept Dr. Willis and Void Queen’s science officer on the problem of securing Fontaine’s brain against enemy booby traps, or whatever it was that they thought might kill the man, and set all of her attention to getting her task force back across the Inner Frontier as fast as she could manage.
Chapter Nine
A week after receiving confirmation that Wang had jumped into I.F.-IV to give Vargus her marching orders, Tolvern was in Nebuchadnezzar with a powerful fleet when the first of Captain Fox’s ships jumped in. It was a war junk, followed by a corvette that had lost its cannon and was leaking atmosphere from wounds behind the bridge. Next, a refugee ship, followed by two torpedo boats. The jump point was soon disgorging a stream of Fox’s star wolves, light cruisers, and other craft. Some wounded, others not.
Most were packed with evacuees from Fort Mathilde, to the point where the ships couldn’t hold them all in stasis, but had hundreds stuffed into cargo holds. Tolvern didn’t envy the captains who had to fight under those conditions.
Tolvern held about a third of her entire fleet—nearly fifty warships in all—in a triangular series of patrols between Nebuchadnezzar’s star, the jump leading back toward Scandian-held systems, and the jump into Persia. As reports came of Citadel and Void Queen fighting a desperate struggle on the other side in an attempt to hold it long enough for their squadrons to withdraw, she could do nothing to help the evacuation. Instead, she gathered her forces from across the system.
She turned away from the viewscreen, which had been focused on a pair of Captain Fox’s destroyers that had nearly collided after jumping too close to each other and were now maneuvering to join Tolvern’s fleet.
“Collect the injured ships into a single force as they come through,” she told Capp. “We’ll hold the stronger elements here, but I want the most damaged ships to make an orderly retreat toward the Persia jump point.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
“But they won’t be in a hurry—they need to dangle for a while. Smythe, find me a ship with heavily damaged engines. Shouldn’t be hard, from the looks of it.”
Capp looked puzzled. “Why go slow? We do that, and they’ll still be here when the monster jumps through.”
“Exactly. We’re in a tricky spot at the moment. If the leviathan muscles through Nebuchadnezzar and continues toward Odense, we’re in serious trouble. What we want is for the ghouls to spot those wounded ships and chase them all the way to the Persia jump point.”
“Ain’t they gonna go into Persia anyhow? They been here before—gotta know it’s a bottled-up system. Once we go down and they follow, we can’t get out again. They see us retreating in, they’ll figure we’re goners.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Tolvern said. “Good news-bad news sort of thing.”
“Don’t you worry, Cap’n. They’ll be trapped down there too, yeah?” The first mate scrunched her face into a particular expression that Tolvern had come to recognize over the years. “You know, I been thinking . . .”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Me and Carvalho been training with them Viking mech suits. What if we went down with the marines? Did some fighting on the leviathan?”
Tolvern gave Capp a look. “You and Brockett, both?”
“So that’s a no?”
“You think first mate on the fleet flagship is a kick back and relax sort of position?” Tolvern asked. “That when we’re in the thick of battle you won’t be doing ten things at once? For starters, get those newcomers organized, like I told you.”
“Aye, Cap’n. Already working on it.”
“I found our slowest ship,” Smythe announced from the tech console. “Look at Fervent.”
HMS Fervent was an older, Aggressor-class cruiser that had seen upgrades to her engines and aft armor until she was a hybrid of the Aggressor- and newer Punisher-class models. A good fighter, ably commanded. But she’d suffered abuse before coming through the jump.
The most visible was a gaping wound that stretched the length of Fervent’s port side where dragoons appeared to have struck her with their guns. Her main battery was down, and there was another w
ound over her torpedo bays that had bent and twisted the launch shafts. Most seriously, significant engine damage limited her acceleration.
“That’s Maxwell’s ship, right?” Tolvern asked. One of the first ships to have come through, he was limping toward her position, roughly a million miles away and closing slowly. “Put him on the main screen.”
Captain Montgomery Maxwell appeared a few moments later. His bridge was hazy with smoke, and voices shouted behind him, but the captain looked surprisingly calm given the circumstances. He was middle-aged, with a high widower’s peak and a thick black mustache that contrasted with his graying hair.
“Good to see you again, Maxwell,” she said.
“Tolvern,” he acknowledged with a firm nod. “I wish it were under less . . . stressful circumstances.”
“Looks like you’ve been hit pretty hard. But from reports, it seems that others had it worse.”
A cloud passed over his face. “Yes, quite. And more losses will be suffered before this is over, I dare say. As you can see, Fervent is in rough shape at the moment. We’re still running a damage assessment, but at the least I’m going to need—”
“I’m going to cut you off there,” Tolvern said, to a slight frown from her counterpart. “With apologies, Captain, but time is short. I’ve decided to scuttle Fervent.”
“Scuttle?” Anger flashed in his eyes. “What the devil for? Jump capability is intact. The main engines are at less than optimal condition, admittedly, but by the time we cross to either the Persia or Xerxes jumps—whichever direction you’re sending us—I should be able to get enough speed to bring the warp point engines online.”
“At which point you’ll only be good for an extended stay in the yards. Weeks, probably, until you can return to battle.”
“I’m well aware of my vessel’s shortcomings at the moment,” he said, tone acidic. “But that hardly merits scuttling her . . . sir.”
Maxwell sounded just short of insubordinate, but Tolvern was inclined to forgive him under the circumstances. She also wasn’t the sort of officer who would give a man brutal orders without explanation.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 58