Enemy Within

by Marcella Burnard

  Sindrivik choked on a sharp inhalation, then managed to exclaim between coughing spasms, “They set you up? Because of us? They won’t really give you a Kessola, will they?”

  “You’re Murbaasch Tu, Lieutenant, but you think like a man accustomed to telepaths in the ranks,” she said. “What would you do with the first telepath ever in the history of your people? Someone with proven efficacy against targets halfway across a galaxy?”

  “I’d bury her in the deepest, most secretive, bomb- and assassin-proof shelter I could find and work her to death,” V’kyrri said. His tone led Ari to believe she’d just heard a part of his race’s early history.

  He shifted and she could tell his eyes saw her again. “They do know that you were only able to do what you did because you knew Angelou?”

  “Like I know the Auhrnok Riorchjan?” she responded.

  “I hope not,” she heard Seaghdh grumble and had to suppress a grin.

  “I cannot allow them to use you,” Eilod said. She met Ari’s eye, her expression troubled but resolute. They both knew she wasn’t talking about Ari’s happiness or safety. She couldn’t compromise Claugh security interests by allowing Ari to return to any kind of position at IntCom.

  “I didn’t risk my life or anyone else’s to preserve your people and mine just to walk into another prison,” Ari replied. “Not to mention some unresolved accusations against the Council regarding the genocide at Shlovkora.”

  “You have a lead?” Turrel demanded, his smile gone.

  She nodded. “Partial. I’ll get you a full report before I go.”

  “Go?” Seaghdh echoed. “Go where?”

  “Far and fast from TFC,” she replied. “Director Durante offered the Kessola as a warning.”

  “You got someone inside IntCom?” Turrel marveled, admiration in his voice.

  “Jayleia does,” she said. “Director Durante is her father.”

  Turrel grunted, subsided against the wall, and crossed his arms. “Here’s where we handle you, Captain,” he said.

  “I’m not a captain anymore,” Ari countered. “I resigned my commission.”

  They stared at her.

  “So no one could order you back home,” Eilod surmised.

  “There’s more. When I went after Angelou, I thought we were after one misguided, power-hungry man. I may have miscalculated.”

  Eilod’s expression sharpened. “He wasn’t acting alone?”

  “The director hinted at indications of a larger network. We may never know, however,” Ari replied, pressing her tone flat. “Angelou’s sanity appears to be in question.”

  V’kyrri paled and closed his eyes.

  Just as she’d feared. Her doing. Ari nodded, accepting the guilt.

  “Unless he recovers from what I did, we’ll never know if we had everything reversed,” she said. “We assumed the Chekydran were using Armada. What if it was Armada using the Chekydran?”

  “To build an army?” Turrel mused.

  “With soldiers that never question a command,” Seaghdh said.

  “Are we looking at an attempted overthrow of the Council?” Eilod asked.

  “Possibly.” Ari stared at her pale hands, gripped together atop her green blanket. “Regardless, we’d better ask ourselves what Armada offered the Chekydran that induced them to cooperate within some kind of marginal alliance.”

  “Right,” Turrel said, sounding resolute.

  She looked at him.

  “I’m recruiting you, Captain,” he said. “You keep your rank. You report to me.”

  Ari blinked. “The Shlovkur Armed Forces?”

  “Yep.”

  “Comprised of just you and me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Got a ship?”

  “Nope.”

  “He doesn’t,” Eilod said, voice ringing, “but I do. Captain Alexandria Idylle, upon the authority and trust vested in me by the Peoples Voice Council and the Nobles Council, I hereby extend to you the rank of captain in the Claugh nib Dovvyth Diplomatic Service. Your command is to be the royal flagship, the Dagger.”

  Elation fired through Ari and she breathed a laugh. “Just before he signed off, Durante said something about how nice it would be to have someone in the Claugh ranks who understands the TFC mind-set.”

  It didn’t matter. Too much stood in the way, yet. She’d only be a danger to everyone and everything she’d come to care about. Ari held perfectly still until the longing raking her insides died down. How could she still want so badly to belong?

  She stared at Seaghdh. He wouldn’t meet her eye. She hesitated. He hadn’t said he loved her, had he? The words to beg for a reason to stay died in her mouth. If Seaghdh was done with her, Ari refused to pressure him. He had to want her, and not because she’d helped preserve his government or because they’d traded off saving one another’s lives.

  Eilod straightened and glared at her cousin. “Cullin Seaghdh, you are a brave man who has never cowered or hesitated in the face of the enemy. If you do not speak in the next several seconds, my estimation of your character will be forever damaged.”

  “No!” Ari snapped.

  Seaghdh jerked upright to stare at her. His tightly held control fractured and a maelstrom of emotion whirled out from him. Want. Fear. Pain.

  “You do nothing you do not want to do,” she gasped at him.

  Hurt fell out of the mix. Fear spiked and infected Ari so that her heart thumped uneasily against her ribs.

  “Gods, Ari,” Seaghdh burst out in a rush. “I want you to stay.”

  Heat raked the backs of her eyeballs.

  “Here it comes,” Turrel said. “You honor-bound command types are all alike. Too fond of noble gestures and ready to run off to the outer reaches to spare everyone around you. It isn’t going to fly.”

  “Baxt’k, you, Turrel,” Ari growled. “You have no idea what happened . . .”

  “You were wired for more than sound with that transponder,” Turrel interrupted. “So, yeah. After careful analysis, we know exactly what went on in that torture chamber.”

  She leaned back and closed her eyes, nausea surging at the realization that everyone in the room knew what she’d done.

  “The bastard deserved to die,” Turrel said.

  “Three Hells!” she muttered, opening her eyes and pinning him with an annoyed glare. “What he deserved wasn’t my call to make, Colonel. I had a job to do. I couldn’t do it while he lived. Am I sorry the thrice-damned Chekydran is dead? Hell no. I’d happily kill him again, if . . .” She heard what she’d said and broke off. “Happily.”

  “I translated the hum I used to control the ship,” Sindrivik essayed. “At least, I think I did. If I understood it correctly, it’s a hive—er—courtship vocalization.”

  “Sex,” she corrected, watching colorless liquid drip in the tube in her left arm.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Pervasive. It shut down all but life support and passive defense systems on board. It never occurred to me that one Chekydran having a good time would cause the entire ship to participate.”

  “One hell of a sex drive,” Turrel muttered, sounding envious.

  Ari nearly smiled, but she looked at Seaghdh’s wan face and pressed back feeling of any kind. “So you know I killed the Chekydran from within his own head. Did it show up on your damned sensors that I watched while he died? That I got off on his pain the way he’d spent so many months jacking off with my blood after beating me nearly to death?”

  Rage fired in Seaghdh’s gold eyes as he blanched an alarming shade of white.

  “Still want me to stay?”

  “Baxt’k,” he ground out between clenched teeth. He closed the distance and yanked her to his chest so swiftly, she cried out in surprise.

  “Hush,” he commanded, resisting her feeble attempts to disengage his arms. “Yes, I want you to stay.”

  Ari subsided, relaxing into his embrace, frightened by how very badly she needed his arms around her.

  “I don’
t understand,” Sindrivik said. “You know the Chekydran language. Directly, I mean. Yet, you blame yourself for . . .” He broke off and cleared his throat before going on. “. . . Enjoying the death of the thing that tortured you, then tried to kill the Auhrnok?”

  Seaghdh eased his hold to allow her the space to meet Sindrivik’s eye. Her brain rolled, sluggish after so much trauma and so many medications. The pieces of data came together grudgingly. “You’re saying I responded to the hum?”

  “Not until Pietre and I got the playback device positioned correctly, you didn’t. Physical readings remained consistent with shock and pain,” Sindrivik said. “After we switched on playback, your pain reading shot up, but then, over a period of time, it changed.”

  “Pain sensing structures in the humanoid brain are right next to pleasure centers,” Ari murmured and shuddered in distaste. “It might be possible to alter brain wave activity with something like that hum and there’s no reason pain sensing in the brain shouldn’t spread out to encompass pleasure centers.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know enough about that sort of thing. I’d have to ask Raj, and I don’t think I want to explain why I want to know.”

  “It got to me, too,” Seaghdh rumbled in her ear.

  That stopped her. If it wasn’t just her . . . she couldn’t laugh, so she pressed tighter to him and whispered, “Thank you.”

  He shifted. It felt like he looked down at the top of her head. “What else?”

  “What happens next time?” Ari blurted.

  “Next time?”

  “The next time someone presses her too hard or threatens everything she holds dear,” V’kyrri clarified. “I can’t tell you this will be easy, Ari. You have a new weapon in your arsenal. One you’ve always had but didn’t understand. Give me time. I can teach you its uses and its limits.”

  That made sense. Ari comprehended weapons training, both the necessity and the utility. Something else gnawed at the edge of her awareness, and she struggled free of Seaghdh’s grasp to peer at him.

  “Mission objectives?” she muttered, uncertain she was picking up what he seemed to be trying so hard to communicate without saying the words aloud. A picture flashed into her head. She gasped and understood.

  Raj had successfully extracted one of the Chekydran larva. Sindrivik and Pietre had found a way to keep the thing alive. They’d even hooked it into an isolated computer bank on board the Sen Ekir.

  Abruptly sick and shaking, Ari fumbled for a com switch.

  Seaghdh guided her hand.

  “Dad,” she rasped. “Dad?”

  “Alex?” Her father answered, the link went video enabled, and her father’s gaze searched her face. He paled. “Alex, what’s wrong? Why are you awake? Are you . . . ?”

  “Destroy it,” she ordered.

  Silence.

  Then Ari heard someone shift in a chair. Her father looked over his shoulder, then back at her. “Destroy what?”

  “The Chekydran.”

  “What?” Raj protested.

  She must have caught them in the midst of experiments on the . . . Her brain cut off the train of thought.

  Her father widened the video field. He, Raj, Pietre, and Jayleia were in cargo. Every single one of them stared at her.

  “No! The research potential alone . . .” Raj was saying.

  “It is a living, thinking, feeling creature! Don’t do to it what was done to me!” Ari commanded and found her fists were clenched. “We’ve taken it from everything it has ever known, subjected it to tests, study, and our own form of interrogation! We can’t give it back, but we can end its misery.”

  Pain warred with indignation on her father’s face. He glanced at Raj.

  “I can’t believe you’re accusing us of being just like the Chekydran,” Raj said. From the petulant tone of his voice, she could tell she’d won.

  Raj sighed and scrubbed his face with both hands.

  “I had wondered,” he murmured. “Our instruments can’t register things like pain or pleasure in these larval forms, but there’s a reading I’ve never been able to alter.”

  “The one you said looked like a scream?” Jayleia prompted, the edge of tears in her voice.

  Raj and her dad traded a resigned look.

  Her father nodded.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Raj promised. “As humanely as possible, if that isn’t a horrifying oxymoron.”

  “Rest, Alex, please,” her father said. “We’ll make this as right as we can.”

  “Thank you.”

  Looking unsettled, her father signed off.

  Seaghdh, his expression grim but satisfied, said, “You just drew the line.”

  Ari scowled at him. “What?”

  “You could have destroyed that creature,” he said. “You know the Sen Ekir well enough to disrupt nutrient feed. You didn’t.”

  She stared at him and felt some tightly shut place within her break open. Baxt’k you, Hicci. Match to me.

  She felt elation leap within Cullin Seaghdh as if it were her own and wondered how he managed to read so much from her without being a telepath himself.

  “I don’t care what you think you are, Captain Alexandria Rose Idylle,” he said. “I love you. I love your courage and determination, your refusal to sacrifice anyone or anything to expedience. I love the sense of humor everyone told me you didn’t have. Which reminds me.” He released her and straightened, a cocky, promising grin on his face. “I have something for you.”

  Uh-oh.

  Dr. Annantra’s son handed a covered tray through the door. Eilod took it from him and set it before Ari.

  Still grinning like an idiot, Seaghdh removed the cover with a flourish.

  The savory aroma of freshly grilled Wrate Leaf hit her. She burst out laughing but had to stifle the urge when her ribs complained.

  “You are going to explain this at some point,” Eilod commanded with a smile before turning away.

  Seaghdh brushed a curl from Ari’s cheek, his eyes shimmering with mirth, but his expression somber. “I know you think you’re alone in the universe because of what your mother did, but, hwe vaugh, you have always been one of a kind to me, from the moment I saw the media shot of your very first blade win.”

  Ari sighed as she tasted hope again in the swelling of her heart. It wouldn’t be easy. She wasn’t the same person the Chekydran had captured so many months ago. Seaghdh had been right. She had an opportunity and an obligation to rebuild herself and her life. With him. They’d be starting from scratch.

  She looked at the man staring into her face.

  “Tell me you’ll stay,” he urged.

  What had she said to him before flying off to beard the Chekydran in their ship? He was more than worth the risk. Maybe she was, too.

  “What is the final point?” Ari demanded. “The one which binds all points into the Art of the Blade?”

  Seaghdh blinked, hope, and something much warmer, kindling in his eyes. He held out a hand. “Commitment.”

  She put her hand in his. Her heart soared. “Commitment.”