Jazon: An Omnes Videntes Novel

by Wendie Nordgren

  Jazon took Tracy’s hands in his and kissed her fingers. “I must find the one responsible for the creation of the former Ambassador Jiri’s clones. Our futures depend on it.”

  With redoubled efforts, Captain Agata, Lieutenant Vasco, and Jazon prepared for the infiltration of the lab on Leucon. The area where they would be docking was a frozen wasteland. Regardless of the long hours devoted to planning, the trip had consisted of the happiest days of Jazon’s life. Tracy often looked up to find Jazon staring at her with a smile on his face.

  Falling in love with Jazon had made it clear to Tracy how little she really knew. After earning her degree and having a relationship with Strass, she had thought herself to be knowledgeable and worldly. However, she had been blind to the truth and had allowed the preconceived and unfounded prejudices of others to influence her own perceptions. She was thankful that she hadn’t come to her senses too late. However, now she had a job to do. Lieutenant Vasco had taught her how to search the communications frequencies for the signature associated with the regeneration cloning serum they had been tracking. She documented each of the small quantities of the serum that arrived with the nanite shipments on Leucon from the distributor on Epopeus. They would pay for their culpability in her father’s death.

  Tracy smiled. He hadn’t been able to sneak up on her since he had telepathically and empathically bound them together. It didn’t stop him from trying. “What gave me away this time?” Jazon asked.

  “Well, I didn’t hear you or smell you. I didn’t sense your thoughts or see your reflection in the console.”

  “Then, how did you know?”

  Tracy swiveled her chair around and stood up to kiss her husband. “I could feel your love warming my back like a fire on a cold night.”

  Jazon brought his lips down to Tracy’s and enjoyed the soft press of her lips to his.

  “We’re heading out. I want you to stay onboard. When I get back, I’m the one who is going the need to be warmed up.”

  “Be careful,” Tracy pleaded.

  “I will. There’s nothing I want more than to return to you.”

  Tracy watched as he left. Then, she allowed her mind to be consumed once again by her assignment.

  Jazon, Agata, and Vasco blended in seamlessly with their surroundings. Their white gear covered them from head to toes. Snow fell quickly and concealed the tracks made by their gliders. The machines slid noiselessly to their agreed upon point of entry. The cloning facility was located far beneath Leucon’s surface beneath an ancient stone fortress. Their imaging technology had allowed their scans to penetrate the otherwise impregnable shielding surrounding the fortress above the illegal lab. They worked quickly to set up a modified mining drill. Anything stronger would register on internal security scans.

  Vasco placed the shield stabilizer into the ground. He had attached it to a spike as protection against any possible seismic tremors that might occur and disrupt it. The pocket of shielding prevented cold air from rushing into the space they had just drilled into an airshaft. They had to trust that no guards would venture out into the blizzard to investigate the mound of snow that had begun to form around their shield.

  Jazon dropped silently into the opening and took the packs Agata passed down to him. When the two inquisitors joined him, they crawled through the airshaft on their hands and knees until they arrived at the first vent opening. While Jazon scanned, Agata and Vasco removed their snow gear and stowed it in their packs. Then, Vasco dropped down into the restroom below. Jazon stowed his gear while Agata continued to scan for life signs. The facility was crawling with guards at the upper levels. Jazon and Agata dropped down to join Vasco.

  The three men had to communicate with hand gestures. The Parvacs were skilled warriors, but they weren’t telepaths like his brothers. While they scanned with their technology, Jazon hunted with his mind. He found a blank spot and then another. It was almost as though the life forms wore neural blockers but not quite. The minds functioned but had no thoughts. Their minds were simply being used to control their bodies’ regulatory systems.

  Jazon motioned, and they spread out with their weapons drawn. Jazon led them down two more levels using a set of ancient stone stairs. They made it down to the lab without being discovered. At the bottom of the stairs, they found a thick wall of plasti-glass. Jazon moved aside and provided cover while Vasco applied a dissolving enzyme to the wall in front of them. They had agreed it would be best to avoid security checks while entering the lab. Their goal was to amass as much information as possible and destroy the clones before either slipping out the way they had come or fighting their way out through the front. Vasco had made the hole in the plasti wall large enough for them to crawl through at floor level.

  They remained crouched down low and close together. Jazon concentrated on keeping their minds hidden from the Laconian scientists present. He kept his back to Agata and Vasco. Vasco began hacking into the lab computers and downloading the contents of their amassed research and knowledge. In turn, Agata worked efficiently to send all of the data to their ship where an automatic encoding system transmitted all of the information to Inquisitor spy stations at unknown locations. Leucon was too distant for them to transmit their data directly to Parvac, and they didn’t trust the security of the relay system in Laconian space. If they were killed during their mission, it wouldn’t be for nothing.

  Vasco and Agata were among the best operatives the Inquisitors had to offer. They completed their tasks faster than Jazon had expected. Each of them secured data chips with the copied files within their body armor. The armor had been embedded with force activated shielding. None of them would ever forget what Felix had done to General Luca Braga.

  The things Jazon wanted to do to punish Felix made him a monster in his own mind, but he wasn’t alone in it. The team moved forward. Jazon realized the magnitude of his erroneous thinking on Aurilius. The lab where he had found Tracy was nothing in comparison to the one before him. The lab’s robotically operated equipment was enclosed in sterilized plasti-glass environments. Scientists controlled their work with vid-screens. The laboratory was huge.

  Jazon and his team concealed themselves behind a large cryogenic freezer and watched the lab and its occupants through feedback from a miniature drone camera. Two naked, hairless clones of the former Ambassador Felix Jiri were attached to neural stimulators. From the mind of the scientist working with the clones, Jazon learned that he was attempting to download Felix’s memories and personality traits into their brains. Agata stared into Jazon’s eyes. He had his orders.

  Concentrating on the clone farthest from the scientist, Jazon convinced its brain to stop breathing. Monitors began blaring throughout the lab. The scientist rushed to the clone, identified the problem, and attached the clone to a ventilator.

  “Stop what you’re doing, or the girl dies screaming,” a man said through the lab’s communications system. “Did you think your ship’s defenses to be impregnable? Look around you. I’ve been expecting you since you took out the guards on Epopeus, Jazon Ponidi of the Omnes Videntes.”

  Jazon released his psychic hold on the clone and allowed it to breathe. The monitors ceased their blaring and returned to a quieter level of discord.

  “Good choice,” the man said.

  Over each laboratory section, plasti containment walls lowered transforming the lab into a clear labyrinth. Each walled off section had a single palm scanner beside its entrance. Scientists placed their palms to the scan pads, were released, and evacuated by the guards who had spilled inside.

  “I can’t leave them, not like this,” the lead scientist said. “He’ll kill them! Stanley was a fool! A fool! He never listened.” The scientist continued to mumble to himself.

  Telepathically, Jazon asked his team, “Do we kill them or play along? I’m emotionally compromised.” He could hear Tracy’s gasp of pain through the communications system. Then, he could see through Tracy’s eyes the face of the guard who was squeezing her delicate
arm with excessive force.

  “Tell, your guard to stop hurting the female,” Jazon growled out in an almost unrecognizable voice.

  Tracy was his. No one would touch her but him. Feral rage unlike anything he had ever known consumed him. Tracy screamed as the guard squeezed her arm tighter.

  “I’m in charge here. You are a constructed tool, and I intend to use you from now on. You will obey me if you want her to live,” the man said.

  Jazon continued to watch the guard through Tracy’s eyes, and something within him snapped. He channeled the force of his telepathic rage through Tracy and into her male aggressor. The man’s grip on Jazon’s female slipped free. He fell as seizures took him, and blood began to dribble from his nose. Only once before on Amphictyon had Jazon been enraged enough to kill in this manner.

  “You are not in charge. I am not a tool. I’m a predator, and you are prey. With you is the only one who can ease my rage. If I lose her, each of you will die screaming, one by one. As you listen to each of your men screaming and watch as they die, each knowing that he could be next, you will know for certain that I am saving you for last. Should you allow her to be hurt again, you will not escape me.”

  “Get away from her!” the man ordered just before the communications system went silent.

  “That was effective,” Vasco said.

  “Who is the lead scientist?” Captain Agata asked.

  “The crazy one who keeps mumbling to himself,” Vasco answered.

  “Lock him and the clones down. Destroy all of Felix Jiri’s genetic samples. Well, go get Tracy. Ready?” Agata asked.

  “What about our mission and my emotional state?” Jazon asked.

  “We are on our mission. We weren’t put on a timer. We can save the girl, kill the villains, capture the scientist, and destroy the clones. Right?” Agata asked. In that moment, Agata earned himself a friend.

  “I won’t forget this,” Jazon swore.

  “You have done many things that I will not forget. For one, you served on the team that brought Empress Neema home.” With that, he stood up, raised his weapon, and began a careful jog along the plasti-glass labyrinth. Jazon followed him.

  The clear walls vibrated with the blasts fired by the guards. Agata took one of them down. The man left a red streak of his blood as he hit and slid down the clear wall panel. The murderous rage that had overtaken Jazon because of the threat to his mate meant nothing to Agata. The Inquisitors were trained to be brutal killers, sent out to bring justice and a swift death to the Empire’s enemies. They were a branch of the Parvac Empire’s military trained to spy, hunt, and execute. They were masters of disguise and torture. Jazon felt he could be himself with Agata and Vasco.

  Out loud, he said, “It’s nice to have a friend, other than family.” Then, he blasted a soldier who was about to throw a pulse grenade at them. The combined blast and explosion made a mess. Jazon and Agata ducked.

  “I feel the same,” Agata said with a nod of his head. Then, he brought his blade down across the throat of a coward who had hidden beneath a downed comrade.

  Chapter Seven

  Tracy cowered in the corner of the room. It had been converted into a modern-looking office. The fortress had been a clan home in centuries past, but had been converted into a secret cloning research facility. The people of Leucon would be outraged to learn of it. She stood behind a large, black, leather chair and tried to hide from the carnage. Tracy didn’t know who any of the men in the room were. A very wealthy Eriopis male was in charge. Based upon his mannerisms and speech patterns, she assumed he was a lord of the highest class. A few of his hired soldiers had taken the man Jazon had killed away. Tracy rubbed at her bruised arm and tried to make herself stop shaking. The man had been about to break her arm.

  Most of the soldiers were human. Tracy wasn’t a strong telepath, but she could grasp the random thoughts around her if they were major concerns and if she concentrated hard enough. From what she could gather, the wealthy man in charge was determined to kill Jazon, Agata, and Vasco, and then relocate the cloning lab as quickly as possible. He was using her as bait. He wanted Jazon to come for her here. He had something horrible planned for her husband. Tracy couldn’t let that happen.

  When the men had boarded the ship, Tracy had tried to hide in the storage pantry behind the kitchen, but they had found her. They wouldn’t find her this time. She shied away from them and over toward the bathroom. The man gave her a stern look before turning his attention back to his security monitors. He watched as Jazon and Agata shot their way through the soldiers who were attempting to kill them. The man had offered 500,000 credits for Jazon’s head. She had to steer him away from his present course in order to save him.

  The family-style bathroom she entered had updated waste units, but the same sinks and fixtures typical of the architecture during the period of its construction. Near the communal showers, she found just what she had been hoping to find, but had tried to keep hidden within her mind. Before she had time to think or for her thoughts to be read, Tracy opened the shoot and climbed inside. Then, she was sliding down the metal tube at such a great speed that she didn’t have time to fear any of the creatures that may have made a home of it. With her eyes squeezed shut and her arms crossed over her, she dropped with a thud that stole her breath onto a large hard net. Tracy bounced a few times before the net stilled.

  She laid back in relief and willed her mind to calm. Ancient mothers long gone must have insisted on the net for the sake of their adventurous children. She sent them silent thanks and willed Jazon to see where she was through her eyes.

  He must have done so, because she heard him say in her mind, “Stay there.”

  “Jazon! It’s a trap!” Tracy screamed to him.

  “I know. Obey me. Stay there and hide. I love you.”

  Then, he was gone from her thoughts. Tracy looked around the space. She assumed it was the lowest level and that the laundry shoots also functioned in case of an attack as a means of escape for children and any female who was as small as she was. On the stone wall to her left, pipes ran down from above. Snow melt dribbled from them to collect in shallow stone pools. Overflow trickled from the pools into stone gutters that fed an underground river. A sturdy grate prevented entrance into that area. When the snows melted, the river must pose a danger. Tracy moved away from the net and washing pools to find a place to hide.

  Lieutenant Vasco scanned the cloning laboratory for Felix Jiri’s genetic code. The two fully developed clones gave off strong signals. However, weak matches came from within the cryogenic freezer and from a lower level of the fortress. The lead scientist continued in his attempts to resuscitate the clone Jazon had telepathically attacked. Vasco approached him and aimed his blaster at the old man.

  “Unlock the cryogenic freezer. Now.”

  Frantically, the scientist said, “I must save him! Don’t you see? That fellow has done something to him. He’ll die if I don’t save him!” The man was old, had solid white hair, and the solid black eyes of an Eriopis.

  Vasco shot the clone.

  “No! You monster! What have you done?”

  “Open the cryogenic freezer,” Vasco said as he took aim at the other clone.

  “No! Please! I’ll do it. Just don’t hurt him! Please! He’s just an infant. He can’t hurt you.” On shaky feet, the old man got up with tears in his eyes and shuffled over to the freezer.

  Vasco pulled out all of Felix’s genetic samples and destroyed them with a dissolving agent.

  “You’re a Parvac soldier. You’ve come to destroy the threat. It’s not this clone you must destroy but the neural transfer assembly. Without the transfer of memories and implantation of a goal, my boys are harmless.”

  “Show me the device of which you speak,” Vasco ordered.

  The scientist shuffled over to exam beds that were arranged radially around a spherical device. Wires and electrodes passed from within it to the exam beds. Vasco took recordings of the device before coating i
t with the same enzyme he had used to dissolve the plasti-glass. Soon, the telepathic interface was sludge on the floor. The enzymes then neutralized and turned to powder.

  “Where are the other clones?” Vasco asked.

  The old man shook his head. “They didn’t turn out very well. We are awaiting orders from Lord Jiri as to what to do with them.”

  “Explain.”

  “We received a batch of growth serum that was supposed to speed up the rate of cloned tissue regeneration. It was sold to us for an exorbitant sum and with grandiose promises. In theory, it seemed plausible. However, the application created unfortunate side effects. The clones grew at an accelerated rate as promised, but they were dangerous, violent, and cunning. This was without the memory transfer, mind you. The four of them continued to develop, and as they did, behaved more like pack animals. Mentally, after learning to feed and care for themselves, their minds became developmentally stagnated.”

  “So, there are a total of five of Jiri’s clones living?”

  “Correct.”

  “Are there any others?” Vasco asked.

  The old man shuffled over to a console where a program was running. “I created two clones who were perfect. One was only meant to be an emergency precaution, but I raised both boys. All of that effort, and Lord Jiri allowed them to be destroyed. Their lives were so short.” The old man wiped at his eyes.

  “Other than the six clones in this facility, are there any others?”

  “No, they have been killed,” the scientist said sadly.

  “Vasco,” Agata said through his communications link.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Secure your prisoner. Tracy escaped and is on the lowest level. Go get her.”

  “Understood.”

  “Oh, that’s not good. That isn’t good at all,” the old man said. “We put the clones down there. They were causing havoc up here. There is plenty of fresh water on the lowest level, and food is taken to them five times a day.”

  “Why are they still breathing?”