Fitz leaned forward. “Aren’t the guards treating you well?”
“As far as it goes. I get my meals, but other than that, they pretty much ignore me. Protocol, I suppose. A cup of tea occasionally would be nice.”
“I’ll be sure to mention that to them. And explain how you take your tea.” She wrapped her fingers around the cup, feeling the heat bleed through the paper.
“How many?” she asked. “Augies?”
He looked away, his gaze on the graffiti covered wall. “Five. Four. One died. I tried to stress to him that he had to tell me if he had been cut by or even handled a Tzraka blade; if there was any possibility he’d been infected with the organism they carry. I guess the prospect of invulnerability overrode his judgment. It wasn’t a pretty death.”
Fitz hissed a breath through her teeth. Four augies against their two. The prospect of a few days alone with Wolf seemed to be slipping through her fingers.
“With his access to blood, from himself or the others, and the knowledge of how easy the procedure is, Tritico can create all the unstoppable augies he desires,” Von Drager said. “If he loses one or two along the way, I’m sure he won’t fret over it.”
“I’ll speak to Wolf about this in the morning.” Maybe they could have one night before all hell rolled over them. She drained her cup and started to get up.
“Wait.” Von Drager grabbed her wrist, but at her glare released it. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“If you cooperate, tell us what you know about Tritico’s plans, and if your story about being an unwilling participant checks out…”
“It will.”
“…then we have no reason to keep you. You’ll be free to walk out of here.”
Von Drager closed his eyes and nodded. “Thank you.”
“There is one thing you might want to consider.”
“And that is?” Wariness colored his words.
“One of those augies might come back to finish the job we interrupted.”
“I’ll fake my death, disappear, change my identity, and start over somewhere a long way from here. I’ve done it before.”
“But these guys are augmented assassins; the best the Empire could build. They’re trained to hunt down people who don’t want to be found. And remember, they know how to kill you now. A dart from one of those modified needlers fired from the shadows… You’ll never see it coming.”
He crushed the cup in his hand, the last of the tea splattering on the table. “And I take it you’re going to offer me an alternative.”
Fitz tapped a finger against her chest. “You know more about this thing inside us than anyone else. Come work with us. Doctor Rauschtonkowski could use that expertise.”
“Cheril? I’m probably the last person she wants to see.”
“Ski did seem a bit angry when she found out you were working for the Empire. She thought you might have been using her only to gain information on the symbiont.”
“What? No, I’d never do that.” He fidgeted. “Well, maybe at first. I arranged to attend that conference because I wanted to know what she had discovered, particularly after I learned she worked for Youngblood. But not for the Empire. For me. Then we met and I realized what she’d done; that she was one of us, like me. And she was so smart and funny.”
“And you fell in love with her.”
“Yes. I thought that would never happen again.” He turned away, but not before Fitz noticed tears in his eyes.
Fitz rose and asked Costos for more tea, then returned to her chair, sliding one cup in front of Von Drager. She waited, drinking her own. He would continue when ready.
Eventually he grasped the paper cup in both hands and took a drink. “When I received the symbiont I was an old man. Dying, in fact. Bad heart. I’d seen the woman I loved for fifty-three years die, so I was a lousy candidate for immortality and all the loss it brings. Seeing the people you love grow old and leave you, over and over, but with Cheril, it could have been different. We could be together, forever…but she must hate me now.”
Only a few months ago Wolf had told her he’d cheated death to keep her at his side. Fitz flexed her fingers against the warm paper cup, feeling the old familiar achiness in the joints. Perhaps death would not relinquish its prize so easily, but as she’d always done in her career, she pushed thoughts of her mortality aside and concentrated on her job.
“Any idea what Tritico might be up to?”
Von Drager shook his head. “He didn’t trust me, kept me isolated. The augies who guarded me were my only contact, but I picked up a few things listening to their chatter. Just after we returned from Baldark, Tritico and Chorickus disappeared for several weeks. Rumor had it that they were looking for something; something that worried the guards.”
“There’s not much that scares augies.”
“Tzrakas do,” he said, his voice quiet.
Cold rippled down Fitz’s spine. “No. Before we left Baldark we razed that breeding facility, wiped out every bug, nymph, and egg we found. Ari insisted on that. And we left a detachment of marines to track down any whisper of the creatures left alive and eradicate them as well. Tritico won’t be finding any minions there.”
“But those aren’t the only Tzrakas.”
Fitz’s eyes narrowed. “You’re talking about the remnants of the bug fleet that escaped Lockmea Rho and scattered. There’s been only rumors about them for half a century, nothing substantial.”
To end the Tzraka War, Ari Ransahov had lured the bug fleet into the Lockmea Rho star system, then destroyed its sun with a new, experimental nova bomb. A handful of the outlying hive ships managed to flee, never to be seen or heard from again.
“There’s been theories,” Fitz said, “from the plausible to the crackpot, as to why the bugs stopped fighting. They were winning. For decades we watched and worried, waiting for their return. Waiting for the next shoe to drop, but it never came.”
Even the kind of fear the Tzraka generated couldn’t be sustained forever. Eventually an entirely new set of terrors replaced them, and the bugs slipped into history.
Von Drager leaned forward. “The Tzraka are a weapon, a tool for war. Without a hand to wield them, they are aimless, without a purpose; little more than the creatures they were genengineered from. Take a pistol, place it on a table in a locked room, and it’s only an inert lump of metal and plastic. It’s no less deadly, but all its danger is potential, waiting for you to pick it up and use it. Just like the Tzraka.”
“Wolf told me that during the War, Fleet speculated that the bugs were controlled by something intelligent,” Fitz said. “Something our forces never saw.”
“Yes, their masters, the Arkainsahaar.
That rang a bell. “That ancient race you told Wolf about? I thought they were extinct.”
Von Drager’s eyes grew haunted. “Perhaps, but unfortunately their weapons are still scattered across the galaxy, waiting for the unwary or the uncaring to discover.”
“And you think if he finds the remnants of the Tzraka fleet, Tritico will be able to command it?”
“He controlled the Tzraka on Baldark, didn’t he?”
The hair on Fitz’s arms crept up as she remembered Tritico and that bug as they discussed feeding her to hundreds of voracious Tzraka nymphs.
Von Drager steepled his fingers in front of his lips, almost in a gesture of prayer. “Tritico kept me isolated. No tri-Ds, no newsies. I really haven’t heard much of what has happened in the Empire since Ransahov arrived, but I did overhear two of my guards talking. Is it true that Youngblood will be Triumvir?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s in command of the Fleet; of all the military?”
“That’s what a Triumvir does.”
“Good. We are going to need him and anyone else who has fought the bugs. He knows Tritico and understands how he thinks. We’ll need every advantage we can scrape together if that madman manages to bring back the Tzraka, because this time they won’t stop until they’ve de
stroyed all of us.”
Fitz clamped her bottom lip between her teeth, while in the back of her mind, she imagined the sound of that long-awaited shoe dropping.
CHAPTER FOUR
Arianne Ransahov, Dragon Emperor of Scyr, Protector of the Realm and Hero of the Empire, wore her exhaustion like a heavy cloak.
Fitz studied the tall woman who slouched against the heavily-shielded window of her office, watching the strings of air traffic weave through the rainy evening sky. Below her, Striefbourne City’s ten million inhabitants scurried about their lives, oblivious to their sovereign’s scrutiny. Beneath the armored fabric of her purple uniform jacket, Ari’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Bugs.” She traced the path of a raindrop down the window. “For my entire career the Tzraka have been there, overshadowing my life and dictating my every move. Even when I ran away to Baldark, I couldn’t escape them.”
“We know now that wasn’t a coincidence,” Fitz said. “When your mother petitioned the crown to quarantine Baldark, to give its culture the chance to progress at its own pace, she inadvertently handed DIS exactly what they were looking for—a human population on a world so isolated that no one would discover what they were doing. Do you recall hearing about a project called Dark Harvest?”
Ari turned and leaned against the window, arms crossed over her chest. “It was one of a handful of crazy schemes instigated by Security to develop a strategy—any strategy—to use against the bugs. After downing a couple of beers, we’d refer to it as Project Bug Birth Control. They were harvesting unhatched Tzraka eggs in an attempt to find a way to break the reproductive cycle. As I recall, the results were not very promising, so after the bugs broke and ran at Lockmea Rho, I ordered all the experiments abandoned and the biological samples destroyed.”
Fitz leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes. Braylin Pike had spent most of the day digging through old DIS records, and even older files from the now defunct Internal Security. “Instead, on the off-chance it might be needed in the future, they shoved everything into a stasis chamber—adults, nymphs, larva, and even the infected women.” Her throat tightened on the final phrase.
Ari kicked her chair back and dropped into it. Her string of profanity could have blistered the smart paint off one of her battleships.
Fitz continued, “And there it sat, forgotten until, under Ashcraft’s rule, Internal Security was perverted into DIS and they revived the experiments, looking to forge the Tzraka into some kind of super-boogieman. As if terrorizing the population with augies wasn’t enough. At first the project proved to be as fruitless as all the others. The bugs were uncontrollable, as apt to turn on their handlers as go after their targets. That was, until a mid-level operative was assigned to the project, one who had the inexplicable ability to communicate with the bugs.”
“Tritico.” Ari spit the name like an obscenity. “Have we learned anything more about how he does it?”
“Nothing, but I suspect it’s all tied together—the bugs, the symbiont, and that ancient race Von Drager calls the Arkainsahaar.”
Ari’s mouth tightened. “You’re not suggesting that anyone who carries the symbiont can talk to Tzraka?”
“It’s possible, but that’s not an experiment I’m in a hurry to try.” Fitz frowned. “Von Drager’s the only one with that kind of information, and he’s careful about what he doles out. Can’t say as I blame him. He doesn’t expect us to treat him any better than his previous boss. As soon as Tritico had the ability to create his own Lazzinairs, Von Drager became expendable. That augie had orders to execute him rather than let him fall into our hands. He’s scared, and figures if he tells us everything, we’ll kill him or leave him in that hellhole to go insane. Information is his only leverage.”
Fitz’s nerves still twitched from that morning’s trip to his maximum security cell.
“We need to go slow with him, gain his trust. I’m counting on Doctor Rauschtonkowski’s help in this. The two of them had an on-again off-again relationship, so if anyone can, she should be able to convince him to trust us.”
Fitz hesitated for a few seconds, then said, “One of my people is getting close to the end of his operational lifespan. He’s already showing signs of late stage TKS. Nick Costos deserves the same chance at a new life I was given. Any plans on when you’re going to tackle this bio-immortality problem?”
The door chimed, interrupting the Emperor’s answer.
“Come,” Ari called.
Her steward entered, pushing a cart. The two women waited in silence while he poured tea for Ari, coffee for Fitz, then doctored each with the appropriate amount of milk and sugar. He placed a tall three-tiered plate piled high with cookies, pastries, and fruit on the corner of the desk, and withdrew.
The Emperor ground the heels of her hands against her eyes, her voice leaden. “I’ve commissioned a string of reports on the effects of introducing longevity to the human population. For every one that promises a glorious utopia, four others warn that it’s a trap, a dead end for humanity. They predict over-population, unemployment, and a depletion of natural resources. The way this thing makes us eat, how could we manage to feed billions?” She forked a pastry onto her dish. “I don’t want to be remembered as the person who brought about the downfall of mankind.”
Fitz frowned at the food, choosing only coffee. Against her lips, the elegant cup’s rim felt thin and delicate as an eggshell, but the coffee was bold and astringent, roiling her stomach. “It doesn’t matter what you want. You’re sitting on a live grenade with this information. It’s going to explode. All you can do is control the amount of damage.”
“I’ve thought about rolling it out slowly, starting with the high ranking members of my government, moving on to the industrialists, educators, artists, then down through the social strata.”
“Before you got half way through that list, the common workers would be howling for your head on a pike atop the Assembly Chambers—probably all of our heads.”
“Then I’ll give bio-immortality to the entire population of the Empire.”
“The Landers Federation would have every battleship they own lined up on our borders within a week, willing to start a war to gain that secret.”
Ari’s fork clattered to the plate. “Then what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“I’m afraid there’s no right solution, only less wrong, but you have to do something soon, or this secret will leak out. When it was only the six, seven if you count Von Drager, it was easy to blend in among the billions of people in the Human Sector. We’ve added two with Ski and I, but who knows how many Lazzinairs Tritico has produced. Four that we know of, but I have sixty-four augies unaccounted for, agents who have refused to answer the recall. I’m sure some of them will blend into the woodwork, maybe end up working for organized crime, but if even half go with Tritico…”
Fitz let the implications of that scenario hang in the air between them.
“Colonel, I’m almost beginning to regret appointing you my conscience. You’re too damn good at it. I’ll make a decision after the Founder’s Day celebrations are over.”
“Isn’t that when Garion is arriving?”
Fitz had convinced Ari to postpone her son’s visit until after the holidays. The last thing she needed amid the frenetic swirl of holiday parties, speeches, and military functions was one more high-value target to protect. The Dragon Throne may not be hereditary, but Garion Ransahov was the closest thing they had to a Crown Prince, and as the child of a long-ago affair between Wolf and Ari, a tempting target for Janos Tritico.
“Aw, hell.” Ari scrubbed her palm across her forehead. “After he leaves then; I promise. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t let you and Wolf talk me into this. Life was a whole lot simpler back on Baldark.”
Fitz put down the delicate china cup. “To make matters worse, I have another problem. You’ll notice, on the after-action report I sent you on yesterday’s raid, that the jammer grenade Dr. DeWitt suppl
ied us failed.”
“That’s not unheard of with an experimental weapon.”
“No, it isn’t, but I swung by CyberOps on my way here to talk to him, and he hadn’t shown up for work. No one has seen him since the planning session for yesterday’s raid, and Von Drager did say that Tritico lit out of there like he knew we were coming.”
“Perhaps you’re just being suspicious.”
“Suspicion is part of my job description.”
“About that job, Colonel. After you leave here, consider yourself relieved of duty until our meeting tomorrow afternoon.”
Fitz bolted upright. “What?”
“Have you forgotten you’re getting your bond partner back tonight? I can’t imagine your mind is going to be on security matters. Arrange for Captain Weiland to take over for you until then. Now get out of here and head over to medical. You don’t want to be late for Wolf’s decanting.” Ari harrumphed. “That’s the stupidest term I’ve ever heard to describe taking someone out of a tank. Sounds more like you’re opening a bottle of wine.”
Even the thought of a face-to-face with the disagreeable Praetorian captain couldn’t dampen Fitz’s mood, because tonight she planned on getting well and truly intoxicated on the man she loved.
__________
Fitz brushed a lock of damp hair from Wolf’s face, his skin cool and pale beneath her fingers. Under their lids, his eyes flicked from side to side.
“Rapid eye movement. Is he dreaming?”
Cheril Rauschtonkowski didn’t look up from the monitor displaying her patient’s vitals. “Coming back up from a symbiont-induced coma, there’s always vivid dreams; nightmares really. Just another thing we don’t understand about this alien creature that shares our bodies.”
Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) Page 5