Moro's Price

by M. Crane Hana

  “You’re giving Rio Sardis to me? Does Dr. Volker know?”

  Lyton smiled. “She knows and understands. I’m giving Rio Sardis to Cama, through you. And I promise not to damage Valier Antonin.”

  Moro looked at Val’s innocent, unconscious face. He took a deep breath. “In return for what?”

  “Your body.”

  Moro stared at the director. “You can’t fuck me anymore, Lyton! I’m infected. And I know you don’t want to chance Cama’s Mercy, yourself—she won’t be too happy with you, no matter how much you try to bribe the Camalians.”

  Lyton shook his head. “I don’t need to flirt with Cama. You’ve already done it for me. Your body has survived conversion remarkably well, according to Terise. But then, it would. You have a very special body, Moro. Do you know why?”

  Moro shrugged, looking down. “No.”

  A little sting jolted through the collar’s clasp, making him yelp and sit up.

  “Don’t lie. By now, you know you’re Sonta. The Camalians must have told you.”

  “Yes,” Moro admitted. “Part Sonta.”

  “And there’s the miracle. You shouldn’t exist. Terise played with your genetic material while you were with Kott. Your father was human, apparently nothing special. Your mother was Sonta but partly engineered with a very particular human bloodline. It proves to Terise and me the Sonta interbred with humans, far back in their history. Their genetic engineering skills match other aspects of their technology—far beyond ours.”

  “So?”

  “If they did it once, they can do it again,” snapped Lyton. “Your mother was a long-range weapon aimed at humanity. We were all lucky she died before she could whelp more like you. Once we guessed what happened on Ventana, we had to find a counteroffensive. You.”

  Moro kept his hands from clenching. “You hate the Camalians and the Sonta as much as Dr. Volker does. Then why give me Rio Sardis?”

  “I don’t hate the Camalians. I admire their tenacity and rationality. I’m not actually giving Rio Sardis to you,” said Lyton. “You’ll wear my collar until we arrive at our destination. You’ll sign the document. You’ll do a few more tests, under my control and not, with the artifact. You’ll submit when Terise puts you out for the last time. Then you will cease to exist, Moro. It’ll be my mind and personality operating your body from then on.”

  Moro could only stare at him. “You can’t!”

  “I’ve been doing it for a hundred and twenty years. Do you think this is the body I was born into? Look at it! You know how strong and healthy it is. But my cloned tissue was taken from my original body when I was sixty years old. I was already suffering from degenerative diseases. Our technology isn’t enough, even now, to permanently cure some genetic defects. This body might last me only another ten years before it begins to fail. At the very least, your Camalian body will give me another two to three hundred years.”

  Moro had heard the ugly rumors. Sometimes, when thinking he was unconscious, Lyton’s servants had let slip a little too much. “You take clones. Boys you claim are lost heirs. Then you and they vanish. They never come back. No one looks for them. Six weeks later you return, supposedly from successful rejuvenation treatments, looking young again. That’s murder, Lyton.”

  “No, my smart, honorable, naive Moro. It’s business,” said Lyton. “Sign the document, do not resist, and I promise you I will cherish your Valier. I will do nothing to him unless he approves or initiates it. I will be his adoring and protective Knife and help him rule the Commonwealth. Together we’ll make new treaties between the Commonwealth and the League to stall the next Sonta advance.”

  “He’ll know it’s not me.”

  “Of course. I won’t lie to him. We’ll wake him and tell him, so he can understand his part as reasonable hostage and political spouse.” Lyton smiled. “He may even find me preferable to you in some ways. According to people who know him from university, he might have some distinctly non-Camalian kinks.”

  “And if I resist you?” asked Moro.

  “You’ll still lose. I’ll control you with the collar and make you sign. I’ll introduce the impressionable Valier a little early to the differences between a man with almost two centuries of sexual skill and a traumatized fighting-whore fresh from the rape pits of Cedar-Saba. I’ll laugh at you when you realize he’s freely chosen me. Do you want to die, Moro, seeing the pity and disappointment in Valier’s eyes when he looks at you?”

  A new nightmare: what if Moro wasn’t enough for Val’s needs? “Val’s an innocent,” he began.

  Lyton shook his head. “Hardly. And certainly won’t be after I’m done with him.”

  “N-no,” said Moro. “Cama will k-kill my body the moment she knows I’m not in it. You can’t fool the Ksala Aksenna, either.”

  “Cama will do what her empress tells her to do. Cama’s afraid of the Sonta, and with good reason. What makes you think the Ksala cares about what happens to you? She abandoned your parents to their fate. She never came looking for you.”

  “Why are you really doing this, Lyton?” Moro asked, shoving his doubts away. He wanted to look at Val again but didn’t. At Lyton’s silent, considering stare, he pressed, “I know you. You have reasons within reasons for everything you do. I’m caught. I’m trapped. I can’t contact Cama, and you have Val. If I’m going to die soon, let me die knowing why. Why do this? Why endanger Rio Sardis for just another two hundred years?”

  “You haven’t been old yet, Moro,” said Lyton, glancing down at his strong, unlined hands. “It changes a man’s perspective. I don’t want just two hundred years. If I’m right about how your mother was engineered to mingle Sonta and human genetics, about what you really are, I may have thousands of years in a Sonta body.” Lyton looked up then, gray eyes narrowed at Moro. “I’d be the weapon to drive the Sonta back into the intergalactic void. Or kill them all before they annihilate humanity!”

  Fifty-Five

  “REPORT, RADU,” SAID the Ksala Aiyon to his spymaster. The spymaster edged away, not looking at the tall Sonta male with short jet-black hair and glowing purple eyes. The Ksala’s long, slender fingers played with coin-shaped counters on a black-and-white game board.

  “My lord, the Ksala Aksenna has made planetfall on Cedar. Not only is the planet still there, but Aksenna is apparently making alliances with the Camali in order to find her descendant.”

  “Poor Tena. She told them to run and got a whipping for her favorite Vessel in return.”

  “The Camali didn’t listen.”

  “What of my operative from the Danil Sonta tribe?”

  “In deep cover, proceeding as planned.”

  The Ksala moved two black pieces. “The boy and Sardis? I’ve lost track of them.”

  The spymaster said, “They’ve vanished, probably behind some form of cloaking device.”

  Aiyon chuckled. “I rather like this Sardis dawnfly. A pity he’s human and rabid. There are skilled people searching for him. Follow them. They will lead us to Sardis in the end.”

  “As you command, my lord Ksala.” The spymaster turned to leave.

  “Radu, there are questions behind your eyes,” said the Ksala. “Ask them of me before you ask them of anyone else. You are my proxy among the other Sonta tribes. I will not keep you in unnecessary ignorance.”

  “You began this, my lord, aiming the Ksaloni at each other. The Banner Queens’ edict of exile calls for our tribes to either ally or remain neutral. Why?”

  Aiyon picked up one of the white game counters. “Danil is young, silly, and predictably restless. In the old days, I would have devoured him. Now he is a tool. My two sisters have become soft in their captivity. They are forgetting what they truly are, Queens’ Law or not. And I? I am lonely for my brother, my only match among the Ksaloni.”

  “But he is not—”

  “Among us anymore? He is exalted, a ghostly god pulling strings among the dawnflies? Let him play. I used Aksenna to craft the perfect bait for him.” Aiyon
dropped the white game piece, scattering the rest. “When my brother comes out of hiding, I will be there to rip out his throat and drink his soul.”

  The spymaster shrank away from the beautiful calm face, its eyes alight with deep purple fires.

  “He chained us in this slow-rotting flesh,” said Aiyon. “Not our Sonta pets, not the Banner Queens. He did it first, teaching us what it was to live and love as mortals. And I will never forgive him for it!”

  Fifty-Six

  IN ANOTHER SONTA ship far away, a nude Vessel went limp in his black-glass chair.

  After only a few moments, his eyes snapped open, pupils glowing turquoise. His hair was long and silvery, his face a sculpted dream marred by the sour grimace on his lips. He felt the bizarre dual sensation of being both a mortal bag of meat and bone, and a sleek, half-dozing Ksala several light-minutes distant from the ship. Then the transfer smoothed. The Ksala reveled in the near overload of exquisite sensations from Sonta flesh.

  The queen of Danil was obviously too busy at the moment to do her duty as chief Vessel of her Ksala. She’d been too busy for nearly a century. It suited the Ksala. He thought his queen was a little too intelligent for his comfort. This Vessel was much simpler to manipulate.

  “Report!” Danil said to the nervous generals in his dimly lit throne room. Huge shapes, some bipedal, some four-footed, gathered loosely around the throne. His generals and lesser consorts kept their weapons aimed at him. A cordon of jailors. They might be able to contain the tall, strong Vessel if he chose to attack. He’d been well trained in protocol, this Vessel. His clothes, armor, and weapons were scattered out of easy reach from the chair, and rune-inscribed golden chains linked his ankles and wrists to slots within the black chair itself.

  The insult wounded Danil to his core. Aksenna the Mad was allowed to wander free, waking terrifying ghosts from the past. Tena flitted off on frivolous errands at the slightest whim. While he, sane and responsible, was chained down.

  He calmed his anger, asking, “What is happening on Cedar?”

  One elderly Sonta woman knelt in front of the chair, well out of reach. “The Camali did not run as Tena instructed, Ksala Danil. Aksenna has arrived in the Cedar System.”

  “Is our agent still aboard Aksenna’s flagship?”

  “Yes, Ksala Danil. Reporting as planned. The Ksala is enfleshed, agitated, and distracted. She suspects nothing.”

  “Foolish Aksenna. Innocent Alys,” growled Danil, his glowing eyes turning a deeper, colder hue. “Draft my official condolences to Her Majesty Liatana Antonin ne’Cama, and my regret at being unable to prevent such a senseless loss of Camalian lives. And make ready some hunter ships. Before Aksenna guesses the true prize the humans seek, I want it in our hands.”

  “What of the Terran League, Ksala Danil?”

  “Those apes? Tell them I had nothing to do with Aksenna’s regrettable outburst, but I understand it. If they encroach on Sonta territory, Cedar will be only the first planet destroyed.”

  “Aksenna did not destroy the world called Manchester, Ksala Danil. Nor a moon called Ventana RS14,” said the old female.

  “She’ll slip her tethers soon enough,” said Danil. “Her handlers have been as weak and sentimental as the Camali. Truly, I pity none of them.”

  Fifty-Seven

  A HUNDRED FEET below the surface of Cedar, Jata Fletch felt cool water droplets on his forehead. A trained explosives specialist, he slowly tilted his head to the side and let the water drip past his eyes. No sudden moves. Fletch looked up just as a six-inch dark hole appeared in the concrete tunnel roof. A little more water trickled down, catching the yellow glow from the squad’s work lanterns and pattering on the tunnel floor near the bomb pallet. The pallet’s old, weak wood was already slumping under the bomb’s weight.

  Fletch held his hands under the hole, trying to break up the larger water drops before they fell like hammers against the unstable bomb. The trickle stopped.

  “Fall back!” crackled the dispatcher through the man’s headset com. Other members of the team got the same message and began easing away. Fletch wore the squad’s recorder strapped to his chest, so he brought up the rear and walked backward. Another team member held his shoulder, guiding his blind retreat. The Camalians were trying something, Dispatch had said earlier.

  The little dark hole bulged out of itself and distended downward, a pointed matte-black tentacle uncoiling from the tunnel it had eaten through earth, steel, and concrete. Two feet from the top of the ancient bomb, the extrusion stopped. It pulled up in a serpentine curve and swayed from side to side as if considering the bomb from several angles. Pinpricks of light became orange-pink dots glowing along its flanks. One larger light glowed at the very tip of the tentacle.

  Fletch shivered. The tentacle seemed to look at him, with a thousand orange eyes that were also mouths. He had the sense it was smiling at him, the way a predator might grin.

  He kept recording. The tentacle flattened, becoming a wide ribbon familiar to those who’d just seen the holos from Manchester. The black, fire-edged ribbon carefully wrapped itself around the ancient metal sphere. After another silent minute, the sphere and its flimsy pallet were surrounded. Up near the tunnel roof, the tentacle thickened in a pulse rippling down its length toward the enveloped bomb.

  The squad froze in place. Their radiation monitors displayed increasingly dire warnings.

  The pulse reached the bomb. The black ribbon clenched tight, lifting the bomb free of the sled. Pink-orange sparks flared almost white, splashing the squad’s shadows black on the tunnel walls.

  Fletch’s in-helmet radiation monitor showed rapidly decreasing levels of the really bad emissions.

  Still shedding pink sparks, the black tentacle looped downward, coiled around the sled, and squeezed again.

  The sled vanished. Radiation faded to normal background levels. Fletch gave a long, shaky sigh of pure relief. Until the tentacle showed up, they’d been on a suicide mission. Might still be. He’d take one disaster at a time.

  “Squad, come in? Squad Recorder Jata Fletch—”

  “Yeah, Dispatch, we’re here,” Fletch whispered, bending forward to record the black tentacle now nosing along the tunnel floor around their feet. Nobody moved. “You getting this?” he asked.

  “Yeah. What the hell just happened?”

  I don’t know, he thought. I can’t say a giant black earthworm with orange running lights is sniffing our boots and the floor, and I think it’s eating leftover radiation. “We’re not sure, Dispatch,” he answered. “Bomb’s gone.”

  “Ah, folks, if this is Camalian tech, then what the hell were we doing in this damned tunnel in the first place? Hey!” yelped another team member, leaning backward as the tentacle wrapped itself twice around his legs and reared to investigate his helmet lamp.

  “Not Camalian,” Fletch warned. “It’s Sonta tech.”

  “Sonta, eh? It’s cold. And it tickles. Er, is this thing dangerous?”

  It just ate a bomb. Wonder if it’s still hungry. If this was the same thing as over Manchester, then it was probably always hungry. Fletch fumbled at his belt and gave a low, soft whistle.

  The tentacle uncoiled from its first target and shot along the floor toward him. When it wrapped around his legs and hips, it felt cool and strong through his shock-resistant clothing. It could devour him in a fraction of a second if it wanted. How much energy was contained in a human body?

  Again Fletch felt the amused regard of many eyes and a single intelligence tickling his surface thoughts. Reading them as easily as he’d read a com-screen. The creature knew he’d called it like he’d call a dog or a child, but also knew he meant no insult.

  He’d walked into the tunnel expecting one form of death or another. Not this helpful, curious, and oddly elegant being. He fought a moment of arousal.

  It felt his body’s physical response to the pressure of its coils. The tentacle, suddenly warmer, pressed slightly harder against him. Fletch tried not to groan.
He unclenched his right hand, showing the fully charged power cell he’d just taken from his belt. “This…this is for you. Thank you.”

  Without touching his hand, the tentacle enveloped the fuel cell, scooping it away from him before repeating the crush-and-lightburst display of ingestion. The black coils unwound from him without assaulting him again. The tentacle lifted up through the hole in the roof, neatly sealing the way behind it in a flash of orange fire.

  The squad stood uncertainly for a few seconds. Fletch shook his head, grinning. “Sonta tech. Let’s go topside and see what’s left of Cedar-Saba.”

  THE KSALA’S NARROW black pseudopod pulled out of the ground, leaving only a molten rock plug to mark its passage.

  After a few seconds, it unfurled once more into black mist and a Sonta woman’s shape.

  “Enjoyable, dawnfly,” she said, looking at Hegen with a lazy half smile. “What is the League phrase, ‘dinner and entertainment’? I had not thought I could sample pleasure from other Terrani.” Her face turned toward Shannon. “The weapon is gone. The workers below recorded my actions.” She looked at Ambassador Antonin. “I have kept my part of the bargain. Now keep yours. Help me find my grandson.”

  “Sera Aksenna,” Hegen said. “May we beg your favor once more?” As she looked at him, he pointed up. “It will take time for the news to spread about your efforts to protect us. Meanwhile your ships, your portal, and your person are probably causing widespread fear on this world.”