“Have you done something so you’re not tracked?” he asked. “The system says you’re in your room.”
She squirmed. “I have.”
He stared down at her for a long moment. “I’d love to know how you did that.”
“Just a bit of software engineering. That’s what I do.”
“Tell me, what exactly have they asked you to do?”
“Hide subsets of the system so an InfoDroid won’t find the data.”
He nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “I can’t stay here too long. Can I meet you later? To talk? I’m off duty in an hour.”
“Okay. Come to my room. It’s private there.” As soon as she’d said it, she regretted the words. Maybe he’d see it as a come-on? “Or… or somewhere else.”
“An hour, your room.”
He walked away, tall and confident. Her heart thudded dully in her chest. She hoped she hadn’t done
something stupid.
Chapter Eleven
Saahren checked his chrono again. Another ten minutes and he could go and meet her. He couldn’t get
her out of his head. He felt like a love-struck kid. But it wasn’t just her slim body, her creamy skin and those incredible eyes. What a find; what a remarkable find. She’d altered the security system in the mine, she could speak Ptorix, she could work on ptorix systems and she could fool a military-grade InfoDroid.
He wanted her for himself, and her abilities for his fleets. Assuming he was reinstated, of course.
How she felt about all of that might be a different issue. She certainly didn’t like Admiral Saahren.
Perhaps Brad Stone could change her perception.
Duval, his replacement, came into the control room still yawning. “Everything quiet?”
“Of course. Nothing much happens here. Have a good time.”
Saahren vacated the chair and strode down the main drive to the side tunnel. His heart pounding, he
almost ran up the stairs and knocked. The door slid aside and she stepped away to let him in. He gazed around the room, all curved walls and arches covered in whitewash. A sofa and two single chairs stood around a low table and a holovid cube occupied a corner.
“Ptorix,” he said.
“Yes. If you look carefully, you can see hints of the design under the paint.” She huffed a sigh. “Vandals.
But at least you can get whitewash off. They scraped the walls of the main tunnel. Priceless artifacts, destroyed.” She shook her head.
“Typical GPR. They don’t like us, but they like the ptorix even less. As you say, vandalism.”
“Where are my manners?” She waved a hand at a chair. “Sit down. Can I make you some tea?”
He sank down onto a chair and shook his head. “No, thank you.” He rummaged for words, staring at
her. The top button of her shirt had come undone and he caught a tantalizing glimpse of breast.
She tilted her head to one side. “What did you want to know?”
When you’ll marry me. He hadn’t even realized he’d thought the words.Pull yourself together. “What do you know about this place?”
“Not much. I’ve only been here a few weeks. You know about the warehouse.”
“I do now.”
She gave a little shrug. “I guess that’s the idea. It’s hidden, the exit to the hangar is hidden. You can only see that place on the graphic if you’re authorized. And they wanted me to make sure not even a military InfoDroid could penetrate the security.”
“And you’ve done that.” He felt faint at the thought. But he’d seen the demonstration.
“Yes.”
“How?”
She flapped her hands in a circular motion. “It’s what I do. Engineer software.”
Good God. She said it as though it was nothing. You could count the number of people in Fleet who
could do that on one hand and have fingers left over. The InfoDroids maintained themselves. They were virtually impenetrable.
“Do you know what they’re using that medical research center for?”
She stared at him with those wonderful green eyes. “Just testing toxins, aren’t they? That’s what I was told, to develop drugs.”
“What security is there?”
“Only to get in there. You need a special pass which has only been issued to the researchers. That’s six people.” She shrugged. “If they have sensors or a computer system in there, it’s kept separate from the main system. Shielded, I guess.”
“That’s a bit odd in itself, isn’t it?’
“Is it? I wouldn’t know.”
Weapons smuggling and a laboratory to research drugs? Not comfortable bed fellows in his opinion.
What were they really doing in there?
“Who are these researchers?” he said.
“I can show you the personnel files.”
She unclipped the oblong device from her belt and pressed a button to project a keyboard. She
frowned, concentrating. A few key presses and a list of names appeared above the device with a face
next to each.
He moved to stand behind her, reading the list. Most of them meant nothing to him. Except Rostich.
Where had he heard that name? He wished he had access to his good friend, Admiral Vlad Leonov,
head of Fleet intelligence. “Can you do me a search on Rostich?”
“Sure. Come and sit next to me.” She moved to the sofa, rotated the device and bent over the table,
dark hair hanging around her face.
He swallowed. What he’d give to put his arm around her, kiss her. But he sat down beside her, the
subtle scent of her filling his nostrils, the very thought of her stimulating his groin. She ignored him, pressing keys, filtering data.
“There are quite a lot of entries here. Toxicologist, won a prize for research. But they’re all fairly old.”
He leant toward her, reading over her shoulder. What had it been? Unethical? Drummed out? “See if
you can find anything about unethical research.”
She altered the search criteria. A list of articles appeared, all with variations on a theme. ‘Rostich exposed’, ‘Rostich to be charged’, ‘Rostich dubbed murderer’.
“That’s it. Open the third one.”
Doctor Leon Rostich had been drummed out of the Confederacy Institute for Medical Research two
years ago for unethical behavior to do with testing drugs. He’d paid impoverished people to act as guinea pigs without telling them the risks of the drug he was developing. Ten died and as many as fifty suffered disfiguring illnesses.
“That’s awful,” she said.
She’d turned her body so she could look at his face. Her knee touched his, sending a shiver of heat
through him. He hoped she couldn’t see the naked lust he was feeling right now.
“He got away with it, too. He left the Confederacy just before he was charged. Looks like we know
where he went.”
“What are you thinking?” Two lines had appeared between her eyebrows and her lips were parted, just
a little.
“You know the ptorix abandoned this planet thirty years ago?”
She nodded. “Yes. I was told silly stories about karteks getting everybody and some sort of jewel deep in the mine that irradiated everyone. I also heard the mine was just not economically viable. And that’s actually true. But it was a virus.”
“You know that? How?”
His contact on Chollarc had mentioned in passing that the Confederacy believed that a disease wiped
out the population on Tisyphor but no proof had ever been found.
She sighed and her chest heaved in a too-interesting way. “When van Tongeren brought me to this
apartment and I saw what they’d done, I thought I’d take a look around, see if there was anything in the ptorix cupboards and things. They’d been emptied but I found a hidden compartment in the closet.”
She went into t
he bedroom and returned carrying a small, square book, its covers decorated in swirls of red and gold.
“I found this in the closet, along with a couple of books and aghabra ; it’s a musical instrument. They must have been there since the day the place was abandoned.” She licked her lips, eyes glistening. “Only the planet wasn’t abandoned. They all died. This is the last mine manager’s diary. It’s all there. When they first noticed the illness, what happened. Doctors came from the Khophirate but they died, too.”
Saahren felt cold. It made sense. An unstoppable virus that killed ptorix. The ptorix isolated the place and kept the disease secret, no doubt fearing that someone might come and seek the virus out. And now someone was possibly doing just that.
A resurrected biological weapon that could devastate any ptorix planet. He could say honestly that he wouldn’t use anything like that. Although he wasn’t so certain about a few of the other admirals.
Indiscriminate, devastating, uncontrollable. The nutters of the GPR… oh, yes, he could see them using something like this in a heartbeat. If these people were to find that virus, the business on Brjyl would become a playground spat in comparison.
Sure, maybe it would work for a time. Until the ptorix realized what they were up against and used
environmental suits, or found a way of killing the disease. The story of Tisyphor would be somewhere in the Khophirate’s archives. They’d soon realize. And even with the superior Confederacy Starfleet, what hope would they have? The Khophirate was just too vast, too many planets over too much distance and
the survivors would come roaring back, hell-bent on vengeance, no doubt led by the human-hating ptorix fundamentalists. The human race would be lucky to survive.
“Does it say where the virus originated?”
She shook her head. “Just that the first person to die was stung by a thranx. I showed this to Jarrad. This is how Fyysor describes the disease.”
She flicked through the pages, from the back, as he saw it, from bottom to top, and found a page
covered in ornate ptorix script.
She read, slowly, translating as she went.‘The first sign of the illness seems to be a cough. About three days later, the soreness begins and with it, the pain. Breathing is difficult, the patient vomits ichor. It is as if they dissolve from within. From that time, death comes quickly.’
“Jarrad said it made sense, that it could have been a cross-over from a thranx to the ptorix.”
“Jarrad?” A boyfriend? He had competition?
“Jarrad Korns. He was a researcher here. We got friendly but he left a little while ago.”
Good. The twinge of jealousy settled.
“I was told in the orientation that thranxes kill with their sting, which injects a solvent into the victim’s body. They suck the dissolved liquid with a proboscis, leaving an empty husk.”
She shuddered. “It’s revolting, isn’t it? But I suppose that’s how the Tors eat. They sort of suck up mush through their eating mouths. Jarrad said they were experimenting, trying to find helpful drugs based on the venom. It’s hard to imagine, really.”
She was so naive. It was almost a shame to destroy her illusion. “Allysha, I think these people are trying to find the virus.”
She stared up at him, worried, unhappy and so very vulnerable. He wanted to kiss her, comfort her.
“But why? Why would you want to find something like that?”
“To use it as a biological weapon.”
Her jaw dropped, lips parted, eyes widened. “Oh… no. That’s…”
“Terrible. Yes.”
She was silent for a moment, unmoving. “Would they really, actually use something like that?”
“Some people would. Extremists who hate the ptorix.”
Her face clouded. “Like van Tongeren.”
“Yes. Will you help me to get into the medical center?” he said.
“Of course. I hate this place. I hate these people.” She rubbed a hand over her mouth. She looked like a hunted animal, wary, skittish, ready to run. “I feel so… like I’m being used.”
She sat very close to him, her thigh almost touching his. Could he risk a kiss? Would that be too
forward? He touched her shoulder. “We’ll do something about it. I need to think about this, consider the outcomes. But I’m pleased to know I have an ally.”
She smiled at him and warmth stole back into his heart. He checked his tablet. “There’s nobody on duty at the medical center now. Can you get me into the lab?”
“Yes. I suppose I’d better ‘disappear’ you first. I’ll set your status to being here.” She giggled. “That’ll keep them guessing. If anybody notices at this hour of the night.”
He watched her work, half an eye on his own status on the tablet, registered as here.
“Okay, done,” she said.
He walked to the door and down the stairs to the corridor and checked his own whereabouts again. Up
there. Amazing. Down here the mine slept. No movement, no sound. The guard who had taken over
from him sat in the control room. He and Allysha slipped through the deserted passages to the medical center. The lights flashed on in an empty room.
She sat down at the reception desk and activated her device. Her eyes seemed almost to glaze over.
Her whole body froze; no, froze was wrong; became still, as if she wasn’t there. Like that time when
Emment had asked her a question in the control room. Minutes passed and then she came back. He
couldn’t think of any other word for it.
“Okay. We can go in.”
“There’s nobody there?”
She shook her head.
The door slid aside. Pistol in hand, he eased himself into the next room.
Lights had come on. White benches on two walls reflected in the gleaming tiles of the floor. Above them, glass cabinets held dishes and test tubes, labeled bottles and packages. A large microscope stood on a stand. A holovid unit hung on the wall between the benches. Clean, antiseptic, neat.
“Close the door, Allysha.”
She activated the mechanism. The door slid silently into place.
“Something smells,” she said, sniffing. “Something putrid. Just a little bit of a whiff.”
Saahren moved to his left toward another closed door. He opened it gingerly, keeping himself out of the entrance. Lights came on. His nostrils twitched. That smell again, a little stronger, a little more fetid. The room was like a holding cell for animals. A central corridor ending in a very solid door separated two lines of cages, all empty. Where might the door lead? And what had been in the cages, assuming they
were part of the laboratory? Karteks? Thranxes?
A strangled cry from Allysha jolted him. His heart thudding, he returned to the lab. She stared at the holovid’s screen, her face contorted in horror and disgust.
“Look at this. They did experiments.”
She jumped back to an earlier point in the images.
The cages he’d just seen had held ptorix. The data were collected in a series of case studies with daily recordings. Eighty-seven case studies, all with a different victim. Each ptorix had been injected with something and then monitored daily for any changes. Most were unaffected. He wondered what Rostich
and his people had done with them after the experiment finished. They’d be dead, of course, no doubt
dumped in the jungle.
The last case study was longer than the others. The ptorix, a well-built male with the dark blue fur of the lower classes, seemed well enough. He stood, moved around, ate in their disgusting way, sucking up
mush through his proboscis, slept. Then on the third day the ptorix began to cough, a harsh, wheezing sound coming from his speaking mouth. A day later the ptorix’s fur darkened, his eyes dimmed and he
seeped ichor from his mouth and proboscis, seeming to shrink in his robe. His screams of agony set
Saahren’s teeth on edge. The victim lay on the g
round, blackened tentacles twitching. Finally, even they were still.
Allysha stood beside him, her arms wrapped around herself.
“This is awful,” she whispered. Her body shook.
He slid an arm around her shoulders, holding her tightly against him. “Turn it off.”
She flung her arms around him and sobbed into his chest.
“Looks like they found the virus,” he said into her hair.
“Yes. Because of me.”
Chapter Twelve
“What do you mean, because of you?” Brad said.
She wiped her face with her sleeve. Her fault, she’d handed it to them. She pushed the words out,
forced them out of her mouth. “The experimenter’s name was Korns. The notes say he developed a
culture from saliva. He and I were… friends. The only person here I could talk to at all. I showed him the last mine manager’sghabra and he took it away to sterilize it.” Tears welled again. “He said it might contain the virus. Looks like it did.”
She struggled against the tears but it was too awful. In her mind’s eye she could see the scenes as
Fyysor painted them; the images from the experiments gave them three dimensional color. Her fault.
She’d been too trusting, so naive. She flung her arms around Brad and sobbed into his shirt. He stroked her hair and let her cry. She straightened up. This wasn’t helping.
He pushed her gently away so he could see her face. “All cried out?”
She nodded.
“We need to think, decide how best to act. Come on, I’ll take you back to your room.”
One arm around her waist, he led her back to the main drive. His warm fingers held her close to his side, a pillar of sanity. She felt protected, secure with him. She went up the stairs in front of him and into her room.
“Will you be all right?” he said.
“Yes. I’m sorry to be such a girl. I’m glad to have a friend.” She put a hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek.
The look in his eyes was unmistakable.Not now, Brad; not yet . She stepped away from him and he
swallowed. She wasn’t doing this very well, not very well at all. “I feel so bad about this. If somebody uses that virus…”
The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy Page 6