“No one has ever recovered a Chekydran body?” Ari marveled.
“Let me check some files,” Seaghdh said. He opened a channel to Sindrivik and began issuing rapid-fire instructions.
“We’ve assumed,” her father said, drawing her attention away from Seaghdh, “given the structure of plagues and delivery mechanisms, that the Chekydran must have a DNA structure similar to our own. It is another assumption based on no hard evidence.”
“Then how does a non-humanoid species know so much about the DNA structures of humanoids?” Ari finished for him. A fleeting suspicion made her turn to Seaghdh. “Do you have records of known instances of the Chekydran taking prisoners?”
“I’ll find out.”
“What are you thinking?” her father demanded.
Ari turned back to meet his gaze. “What if the research we’re doing, tracing back through layers of plague, represents the Chekydran’s learning curve?”
“They didn’t know our DNA but over the centuries learned it?” Her father surmised. “You think Ioccal is a Chekydran petri dish?”
Ari shrugged. “It is close to the border. We have direct evidence of generation after generation of disease, all related. It’s almost like the plagues were timed and their results observed. Just like an experiment. How else do we account for the older illnesses that had such limited impact on the citizens of Ioccal?”
“Your PhD samples?” Seaghdh said, returning to her side and glancing between them. “You had them in containment. If they weren’t harmful . . .”
Her father cut him off. “You don’t gamble with engineered plagues. We have no way of knowing how many generations occupied Ioccal, nor what had changed in the germ line.”
“In the what?”
“Changes to the base genetic coding of the species,” Ari clarified. “Planets force humanoids to adapt. When enough adaptations occur we talk about species differentiation. Because we had no surviving examples of the Ioccal citizens, we can’t say whether their resistance to the samples I brought aboard was related to specific adaptations inspired by the planet.”
“You never recovered DNA from the remains?”
“Of course we did,” her dad said, “from only a few individuals, however. Certainly not enough for a statistically significant sampling.”
“Can we use any of these samples to find out what the Chekydran did to Ari?” Seaghdh asked.
Dad shook his head. “We’re working on that. It takes time.”
Ari blew out a breath. Not good news. “That’s going to cost lives.”
“Yes, it is,” Dad said, his voice muted.
The medi-bay com pinged. Seaghdh opened the channel.
“No first-contact record, Auhrnok. And no genetic files on this first pass,” Sindrivik said. “However, I pulled and compiled all known captures of humanoids by Chekydran. It validates the impression that Chekydran activity has been increasing.”
“Details,” Seaghdh said.
“Several centuries ago, the fledgling mining guilds began sending prospectors into Chekydran space,” he said. “No one knew it was anyone’s space at the time, obviously, but significant numbers of those ships never returned. I’m counting them as Chekydran kills.”
“Go on.”
“Capture numbers remain steady for centuries, though I had to factor in aggression by the various humanoid factions. If TFC colonization or military activity increased near the border, so did the capture rates. Same pattern among the Claugh and the UMOPG.”
Ari frowned. “That doesn’t . . .”
“Until forty years ago,” Sindrivik said. “There is a sharp uptick in the number of captures, regardless of colony or military actions.”
“Define sharp,” her father instructed.
“Twenty-seven percent, Dr. Idylle.”
“Give me an analysis on . . .”
Sensor alarms erupted both in the background of the open com channel and aboard the Sen Ekir.
“Captain Seaghdh!” Peitre’s voice rang over ship-wide. “The Dagger is taking fire from a pair of Chekydran cruisers!”
Ari gasped. “Chekydran?”
“Where the Three Hells are we?” Seaghdh demanded.
“Claugh space,” Pietre replied.
“You’re sure?” Dad barked.
“Gods damn it, Linnaeus!” Pietre said. “We left the border six hours ago! It never occurred to me to scan for Chekydran particle trails here!”
“Of course not,” Ari said. “Their being here is a declaration of war! None of our intelligence suggests they would initiate this kind of aggression. They’ve preferred indirect methods up to now . . .” She trailed off, shuffled data in her head, and swore. “If we’re guessing correctly and they’re swarming, we have to treat this as an all-out power grab. Get us video to the Dagger, Pietre! Intraship stays open.”
“All personnel, report to duty stations,” her father commanded.
Hicci was out there. Ari’s blood ran cold. She swore under her breath, trying to control her suddenly racing heart rate.
Video lit up the desktop behind her. She and Seaghdh spun. Ari had never seen the bridge of the Dagger. Eilod, flushed, ill, harried, and pissed as all Three Hells, sat strapped into the command chair. Turrel manned a station on her right. Ari flipped the channel open.
“You’re on,” she said to Seaghdh.
He demanded status in Claughwyth. A curl of blue electrical smoke rose from a panel behind Eilod’s head.
Ari waited, braced against the desk for the jolt that would accompany another shot hitting the Dagger. It didn’t come.
“They aren’t firing,” she said, frowning. “They want something.” She swallowed hard, fear turning her innards to water.
Seaghdh straightened. He met her gaze with a grim eye. “You.”
CHAPTER 25
ARI sat staring at her handheld, her mind spurred into overdrive, by the tactical data Turrel shunted to the unit.
Two Chekydran cruisers. Fully staffed, the Dagger would have given them a serious run for their money. But the list of the sick and dying aboard the Claugh nib Dovvyth royal flagship left half of the great ship’s stations unmanned.
Eilod brought Ari’s father and his crew into her conference room via holograph emitters. Ari knew the queen didn’t like it, but she’d left Seaghdh and Ari on video, since Raj’s tiny medi-bay couldn’t support holographic projections. It was bad enough, Ari discovered, because Seaghdh, feverish and coughing, needed to pace.
Ari had to find a way to turn this group baxt’k to their advantage.
“They have declared war upon the empire of the Claugh nib Dovvyth,” Eilod said. “Let us declare war upon them. I want proof of a Chekydran-Armada alliance. Captain Idylle. Can I put a strike team aboard one of those ships?”
Ari stared at Eilod’s angry face. A strike team? Comprised of coughing, dying soldiers? Sitting upright, she grabbed fiercely at the thought dashing through her head. Strike teams ran risks, dying among them. If they could strike a solid blow before death came calling, so much the better.
“You need a diversion,” she said. “Something that will let your team board and move about the ship without being murdered instantly.” If most of them didn’t drop dead from the plague on the way in.
Ari sucked in a short breath and bit her lip. She couldn’t believe she was going to say the words. “You need me on board that ship.”
Eilod frowned. “I don’t believe that would be in anyone’s best interests.”
“Especially not mine,” she agreed. “However, the Chekydran use a low-level aural hum as a sort of neural network.”
Seaghdh nodded. “You once mentioned creating a sonic disrupter.”
“Exactly. If it’s going to have a chance at working, I have to be there.”
“I don’t see why,” he argued.
“We need their computers,” Eilod said, cutting off Seaghdh’s willingness to quarrel. “Intact.”
“They aren’t computers,” Ari rep
lied.
Every face in the Dagger’s conference room, including the holograms of Ari’s father and his crew, swiveled to look at her. In that moment, she realized how much information she had about the Chekydran that no one else knew. No wonder her life had been worth so much on the open market.
“They are a stunted larval form of the Chekydran soldiers you are familiar with,” she said. “They are kept in the most protected portion of the ship in a climate- and nutrient-controlled crèche. Pull one out of its bed and it dies.”
“They’re alive?”
“Yes. Aware and part of the neural net of the ship. The hum that deep is mind and body numbing.”
Seaghdh exchanged a calculating glance with his cousin.
Turrel, looking faintly distressed, rubbed his chin.
V’kyrri scowled, staring at a spot on the table. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and he frequently shook his head as if to clear his eyesight.
Sindrivik leaned forward, hands folded, gaze and curiosity intense. He and Turrel remained symptom free.
Her father and Raj watched her, concern lining their faces.
“We tried to capture a ship once,” Turrel said. “Got some good shots in. Disabled propulsion and knocked out a communications array so they couldn’t call for help.”
“And it self-destructed before you could lock a tow on it,” Ari surmised.
He nodded as if he’d known she’d be able to finish the story for him.
She offered him a lopsided smile. “From what I managed to overhear, there’s a double feedback mechanism. Kill enough Chekydran soldiers and the aural net changes to such an extent that the brain array initiates an auto-destruct. Disable the brain array and that kicks off auto-destruct.”
“Then a sonic disrupter will just blow the ship,” Raj protested.
“Not necessarily,” Sindrivik replied. He turned to her. “I take it the hum you describe is variable? Pitches, tones, volumes, and amplitudes all change, thereby differentiating meanings?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the hum when the ship entered a down cycle?”
Ari turned inward, searching for the memory, shoving aside the remembered pain and fear. “Pitch lowered. Tone . . . I can’t describe it. Amplitude lengthened, I think. If that makes any sense.”
“If we can override the natural hum with something of our own, use the entire ship’s hull as a resonator,” Sindrivik said, his voice rising in excitement, “we might disable the crew and the brain array.”
“It isn’t a sure thing,” she cautioned. “I can’t be certain there’s not a fail-safe for that as well, but I think the key is making our hum so pervasive that it disrupts the entire network. It’s the only shot. Leave even one soldier or one larva functional and all you’ll have is space debris.”
Sindrivik cast a sidelong look at her. “It can’t be an approximation.”
“I know.”
“What?” Seaghdh growled.
“We have to record the real thing, bring it back here, modify it to spec, then find a way to embed a playback device in just the right location on the hull of the target ship,” Ari said. “And the only way to do that is to put me on board that ship, tie into my transponder, and record everything around me.”
“They’ll kill you!” her father protested.
“I don’t think so. They want something or I’d be dead already. The mercenaries must have been Armada sent. My commanders seem to think I’m a security risk. The Chekydran have the firepower to destroy both the Dagger and the Sen Ekir, yet they haven’t. It follows, then, that they need something. Thing is, if they don’t kill me, I may have to.”
Silence.
Seaghdh slanted her a searching glance.
“They made you into a carrier,” Raj finally surmised. “You’re asymptomatic. The illness won’t kill you, but it will infect everyone you come in contact with.”
“Want to find out the hard way whether or not you’re part of the immune thirty percent?” she asked.
The holographic projection of her father pounded the table in his office with a fist. “There has to be a way!”
“Ari,” Seaghdh rumbled, “you can’t . . .”
“There is a way,” she replied. “Trade me for the structure and delivery mechanism of the plague.”
Seaghdh dropped a tight grip on her shoulder.
A light fired in her father’s eye, then he shook his head. “No. This is unacceptable.”
Seaghdh spun Ari’s chair to face him. He stared, disbelief and anguish stark in his face. “Don’t make me give you to them.”
Her heartbeat faltered. Hard. She gasped for air.
“Cullin. Dr. Idylle, I sympathize,” Eilod said. She sounded weary, beaten down. “I do not, cannot, countenance the sacrifice of a woman’s life for a sequence of code our own medical staff could uncover, given time. The loss of life might be significant before that happened, but it would be limited to these two ships. The Empire would endure without me if it comes to that. However. Other concerns take precedence.”
“The soldiers, like Tommy,” Ari’s father murmured.
“Yes. And the alliance we believe has been made between the Chekydran and someone in your government,” Eilod said. “We are duty bound to uncover the identities of those involved. If we don’t . . .”
“The entirety of Tagreth Federated Command could fall to the Chekydran,” Linnaeus finished.
“Yes, sir.”
He sighed.
The resignation in the sound made Ari’s heart hurt.
“No,” Seaghdh ground out. “We make our own family, Eilod, you said that. I can’t do this again.”
Ari blinked. Again? She took his overly warm hands in hers and half turned so she could address everyone. “I’m sworn to protect the citizens of TFC. This is my job,” she said with a calm she didn’t at all feel inside. She hoped none of the turmoil showed in her face. It might be her job. Everyone knew she didn’t have to like it.
Seaghdh stared as if he didn’t recognize her. It drove a jagged blade of sorrow beneath her sternum. She might die. It was beginning to look like a necessity, but at least now, she’d die for a reason. She’d die protecting millions of lives from the Chekydran. From her.
Gods damn the advances that had been made in holographic and video-display interfaces. She saw tears gather in her father’s blue eyes. His lips trembled, but he pressed them tight and sat up straight, outrage replacing fear.
Ari turned to Seaghdh. “Make the trade.”
He pulled his hands from her grip, leaned across her, and cut all com connections. “No,” he said, his voice cold, hard, and immovable.
She stared at him. Sure, she’d seen him become Her Majesty’s spymaster, the dangerous, impassive statesman so feared by Armada and IntCom personnel alike, but never before had she glimpsed the sharp edge of rage, or was it pain, barely contained by his shuttered expression. Ari discovered she couldn’t read the fever-flushed, Isarrite mask he’d hidden behind.
Uncertain, she retreated. She couldn’t be counted on to sort out her own feelings. How could she hope to pry open the lid to whatever had shut him down so hard? Especially when she had no idea what had triggered him. She needed something to go on, some clue. Her thoughts stopped her. Triggered? Was he, in his own way, having a flashback? She peered harder at him, trying to catch a glimpse what might be going on inside the defenses he’d slammed up.
Her eyesight dimmed and a cutting, ripping sensation grew behind her solar plexus. Loss. She sucked in a breath and realized what she was doing. Cheating, by reading him. Twelve Gods. How long had she been taking advantage of an ability she didn’t even know she’d had?
Stark, echoingly empty pain lay at the center of Seaghdh’s shutdown. She hesitated. It would be kindest to walk away from it rather than probe the wound. She shook off the feelings and waited until her eyesight cleared. She hadn’t the faintest idea how to help him, but his life and the lives of his family and crew depended on nudging
him into action.
That’s when she remembered. He’d said to his cousin, “I can’t do this again.”
“What can’t you do again?” Ari asked, the words out of her mouth before she could debate the wisdom of uttering them.
Agony flared within him, a sensation so overwhelming, she sat back hard in her chair. He started to turn away.
Hurt all her own flared in her heart. She leaped to her feet and reached out but didn’t quite dare touch. “Don’t. Please, don’t pull away.”
They both twitched, hearing the words he’d used on her turned back at him.
He drew a shuddering breath and cast a look over his shoulder at her. The depth of torment in those gold eyes ripped at her gut.
“They massacred my family,” he said.
“Your family?” Ari echoed. “But I thought . . .” Dawning awareness halted the words. Horror exploded through her. “Chekydran.”
“They captured my parents and my sister. Accused them of spying,” he said. “I survived because I wasn’t there.”
She closed her eyes, biting back a groan. She couldn’t begin to comfort that kind of torment. Three Hells. She couldn’t comfort her own. “I’m sorry.”
He didn’t respond.
She opened her eyes, bereft of an appropriate response. How ironic. Now that she gave a damn about someone outside herself and wanted to help, she had no idea of how to go about it. Needing to do something, anything, she set a tentative palm against the rigid muscles of his back.
He didn’t flinch or pull away.
Emboldened, she moved closer and folded her arms around his waist, pressing tight against him and resting her cheek against his shoulder. “I am sorry, Cullin. How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
She bit her lip, saddened for the boy on the threshold of manhood. He’d had his innocence and his loved ones ripped from him just when he’d most needed them.
“From the accumulation of damage in their bodies, our specialist told me it had taken them two weeks to die,” he went on.
Her heart stumbled in her chest.
“I couldn’t even recognize them when the bodies were recovered.”
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