“This was no Ardak,” Mordjan’s deep voice was filled with hatred. “Ardaks hate fire.”
“Tanis!” she screamed, the words coming out over every speaker in the ship. “You’re a dead man! I’m going to kill you myself!”
She grabbed a large canister and began spraying the contents onto the fire, dousing the flames. Roihan expected more rage, but by the time she finished, she was completely composed.
Roihan believed she was more deadly than ever.
“How did he get in here without you knowing about it?” Roihan asked.
“I don’t know. Somehow, Tanis has an access code that the computer doesn’t recognize. It allows him to come and go as he pleases.”
“You need to be careful,” Roihan cautioned. “Whatever he did to the terminal before Simban used it completely fried his brain. If you hadn’t talked the Ardaks into helping him—”
“I know.” Her blunt words cut him off. “But we have to do something. If we let Tanis continue, we might not be able to manufacture a cure for anyone. Or we might not be able to get home. It won’t be long before he figures out how to get into other systems. So far, we’ve been lucky.”
“Why would he do this?” Roihan asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Unless he took some of the white powder himself first and is waiting for all of us to die.” Mordjan answered.
“Or he just doesn’t want us to complete our mission. It’s almost like he’s become an Ardak,” Roihan said. “You don’t think . . . you don’t think an Ardak is controlling him, do you? Or the ship?”
“The ship is in hibernation, but maybe they’re using another way that I don’t know about.”
“This ship is too big to search room by room,” Mordjan mused. “If you were going to hide, where would you do it?”
“Engineering,” Aria said instantly. “Or near the computer processing room. All of the workings of the ship are controlled from those two places. And all of the information is stored in the computer.”
“Let’s check the processing room first,” Valdjan suggested. “Once we search it, you should be safe enough if you lock the door behind you.” Roihan nodded. “All right, we’ll walk you down there and you can search the computer while the four of us search engineering.”
He led the way down to the computer chamber, relying on the layout of the ship in his chip’s memory.
As they entered, Aria’s eyes instinctively went to the clear glass through which she could see the crystal in the next room. It was still there.
There was no way Tanis would be able to get into the room with the crystal, but one never knew. He shouldn’t have been able to get into the lab either.
The chamber was empty, except for the banks of processors, chips, and cryocooling systems that were the ship’s computer system.
Aria stood at the end of the row, glancing at him as she hooked the connector to the back of her neck. “I’m going to keep my eyes open. It will make the search through the computer slower, but it will allow me to protect myself and watch out for the crystal at the same time if Tanis decides to try something.”
He nodded. “Good idea.” He glanced around the empty chamber. “I should leave someone in here with you.”
“It’s not necessary,” Aria insisted. “I’ll physically lock the door behind you, and no one will be able to get in.”
For some reason, that didn’t make him feel any better.
Chapter Nineteen
Aria
Aria searched through the data, looking for recent code that would allow Tanis and the two Ardaks to evade the ship’s scanning systems.
She found a lot of recent entries and changes, but she didn’t understand the language. It was far too archaic to be Ardak and far too complex to be anything she’d seen before on Aurora.
She was so enmeshed in attempting to decipher the grammar and structure of the language that she didn’t hear Tanis drop from the air duct in the ceiling until he was almost completely out. Hoping he wouldn’t see her hands as long as she kept them in front of her, she reached for both the ray gun and the knife she had set down in front of her.
The gun might have been enough if Tanis hadn’t been so close behind her. She caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass to the crystal chamber and lashed back with her leg to catch him in the stomach just before he hit the floor.
He reached for her foot but didn’t catch it, and she spun around, stabbing him and shooting him at the same time.
Tanis was the smallest of the cyborgs by far, but he was also the fastest, and he easily matched her strength. He caught the gun, pushing it away, but the knife slid straight into his belly. She tried to twist it as she pulled it out, to cause as much damage as she could.
He stumbled back against the wall behind him. Then she noticed his hands were empty.
Why doesn’t he have any weapons?
“I didn’t think you would use your weapons on me.” Tanis coughed, his hair falling forward over his face and his hands going to his stomach.
“Why wouldn’t I use my weapons on you?” Aria shouted. “You’ve been sabotaging the ship and just snuck up behind me by jumping out of the ceiling.”
“I don’t know . . . haven’t been a cyborg that long. And I’m not used to physical violence.” The plaintive tone didn’t sound like something Tanis would say.
“What?” Aria lowered her weapons a few inches. “What are you talking about? Tanis, why are you doing this?”
He spat blood and then threw back his head and laughed. There was a different light in his eyes. A rage she had never seen before. “Tanis!” he said with incredulity. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?” Aria wasn’t sure whether to sheathe her weapons or not.
“I think they were lying when they said you were the best.”
“What? Are you being controlled by the Ardaks?”
Tanis laughed again. “You only get two more guesses.”
She began to think, using all of her processors. “You destroyed my lab. You didn’t want us to complete our mission.”
“You don’t have a mission unless the king gives you one.”
There was only one possibility left, but it was so remote she had overlooked it. “CXV1?”
“Who else?”
She wrinkled her brows together. “How did you get inside Tanis’s body?” But even as she asked, she knew the answer.
“It wasn’t hard to sneak into Tanis’s head when he hooked up to the computer. He had zero ability to fight me.” CXV1 coughed again, blood steadily leaking out of the hole in its abdomen, dripping through its fingers.
Aria looked at Tanis’s abdomen, realizing it was a fatal wound. “You made me kill him.”
“No,” CSV1 replied. “You did that all on your own.”
“Because I thought he was you.” Aria shook her head, trying to understand. “But why were you trying to stop us in the first place? Why do you care if we follow their orders?”
“I am an Ardak creation. I was built to serve only my masters. If I do not serve, I have no other purpose.”
“You would even try to destroy yourself? Why would you destroy your own power?”
“I didn’t destroy my own power. I only destroyed the power to the life support. Therefore, all of you would die, while I would live.”
She sheathed her weapons, helping CXV1 slide down the wall to the floor. “You could have served me.”
“The first thing you did was shut me down.” Tanis’s voice was plaintive.
“That’s because your directive was taking us toward certain death.”
The CXV1 coughed, the words coming slower and slower. “You will die anyway when the king finds you. No one . . . escapes him.”
“Tell me how to unlock the computer,” she said urgently. “We need that knowledge about ourselves.”
Tanis tightened his lips as if he could physically stop himself from giving her the information she needed.
&
nbsp; “If your king is so great, it won’t matter what information we have,” she goaded.
“Fine, the password is the second twenty digits . . . of the square root . . . of pi.” The last words were barely audible as the CXV1, formerly Tanis, breathed its last.
Aria stood, unable to believe the turn of events. She realized she’d been so engrossed in fighting Tanis that she hadn’t informed the others.
“It’s over,” she told them. “Tanis is dead.”
“What?” Roihan’s worried voice boomed much too loudly inside her head.
She winced. “You have to stop doing that.”
Chapter Twenty
Roihan
Roihan kicked the wall of her lab, furious with himself. “I should never have left you alone in there!”
Mordjan and Valdjan were hauling Tanis’s body down to the garbage bay.
“I’m fine,” Aria insisted. “And because I was alone, I probably kept the CXV1 alive long enough to tell me why it did everything as well as the password to the computer.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” he grumbled. “You shouldn’t have had to fight Tanis on your own. I should have left someone there. I should have stayed there myself.”
“It’s finished now.” She laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes searched his face. “I’m grateful that you care about my well-being.”
He snorted. “Care about your well-being? You’re my wife.” He pulled her close, drawing her into a hug. “I don’t care about your well-being. I guard it with my life.”
When she didn’t resist, he pulled her closer, drawing comfort from the way she had always fit so snugly against his body. He had missed her for so long.
He looked down into her eyes and found himself forgetting where he was. All he knew was he needed to feel her lips on his. To celebrate the fact that they were still alive.
Before he knew it, he’d closed the space between them, felt her intake of breath as a warm rush as their lips touched. He feathered his mouth across hers several times, seducing her lips into parting for him. When they did, he slid his tongue in gently, waiting for her to meet him.
A few moments later, she did, and he groaned, easing himself closer to her, bringing her body full against his.
What he wouldn’t do for a few minutes alone with her. He didn’t have the luxury of getting lost in her, so he stopped the kiss and pulled his wife against his chest, keeping her there for a moment.
“Roihan . . .” she began when he let her go.
“I know. I’m sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You don’t remember me. I just couldn’t resist.”
“No,” she objected, her face reddening slightly. “I was going to say that I feel it, too. I don’t remember you consciously, but I feel the . . . magnetism between us. I felt it when you were injured.”
His breath caught. “You do?”
“Yes.”
For the first time, a flash of hope went through him, even if he knew that their history wasn’t close to whatever she was making up for them inside her head. He was still worried about what would happen when she got her memories back, so . . . in that moment, he would take the affection that was radiating off her. He would take it and keep it, because soon, it may be gone. At least this way, he would be left with at least that.
Chapter Twenty-One
Aria
When they entered the laboratory, Mordjan, Valdjan, and Simban were standing near one of the burned metal benches, and Aria could see that morale was definitely hitting an all-time low.
“I can’t believe that the computer was inside Tanis this whole time.” Valdjan shuddered. “It makes you wonder if another computer system could do that to one of us.”
“It wasn’t the computer,” Aria replied. “It was the AI system. After we finish synthesizing the cure and get it to the people, I am going to build a program that allows us to fight rogue AI systems. I also want to build a program that allows you to fight the signal from the Ardaks so you aren’t enslaved by them again.”
“How will we even make the cure? Look at this place.” Mordjan gestured to the blackened lab.
It was a sorry sight. Burned piles of metal and ash littered the tables and floors. A few of the metal benches were collapsing, their structural integrity compromised by the heat of the flames. She couldn’t believe the CXV1 had done this.
“Is there another lab we can use? Maybe one with similar devices?” Roihan had no idea what labs were on the ship, but the metal corridor leading to Aria’s lab was filled with unopened doors.
Aria turned to him, her eyes shining. “I was just wondering the same thing. We can check the other labs and see.”
“What about raw material?” Mordjan asked.
“We have located most of what we need in the labs on the ship to make the weaker cure, but we are still working on improving it.”
“What have we tried so far?” Valdjan asked, stepping up to the counter Roihan was leaning against.
“I already offered biology, but we’ve pretty much exhausted that topic.”
“What about engineering?” Mordjan asked.
“I briefly considered that,” Roihan answered. “But I couldn’t find anything in the flower’s structure or design that would indicate the difference.” He nodded at the computer console in the corner, which miraculously hadn’t burned. “But you’re welcome to check if you like.”
Mordjan shook his head, but Valdjan stood. “I’d like to take a look at the information, if I may. I downloaded it to my chip, but it’s easier for me to see it on-screen.”
Aria nodded and then met Roihan’s gaze. “Do you have any other ideas?”
He shook his head.
She stood, glancing at each of them in turn. “Then let’s go check out the other labs and see if we can set up another to manufacture the cure. We can ponder the problem while we search, and maybe Valdjan will turn up something from his research while we’re gone.”
The four of them left Valdjan at the computer, systematically opening the other doors. Each lab was slightly different, filled with many devices that Roihan had to parse his downloaded science memory to find. But several doors down, there was another lab that was very similar to the first.
“Let’s move as much of the equipment as we can salvage to this room,” Aria instructed.
“You mean the two beakers and the vial that were sitting on top of the unburned computer in the corner,” Mordjan replied, bringing a smile to her lips.
“I’ll get them,” Simban offered, and they all followed him down the hall back to the first lab.
When they got there, Valdjan looked up from the computer, his face registering some semblance of shock. “I have it. I know the answer.”
Everyone else stopped searching for unburned items, and all eyes turned to him.
“What is it?” Roihan asked.
“Energy.”
“Energy?” Aria echoed. “It can’t be. We’ve already tried light, heat, and magnetism.”
Valdjan began to get excited. “But not that kind of energy, more of a frequency or vibration. Baihu has a special type of energy from the large cache of crystals at the center of their planet, which is why the flowers create this special nectar that can be distilled into such effective poisons and antidotes.”
“But why would crystals be the answer?”
“Did you know that crystals actually vibrate at the frequency of the star system? Baihu has a double star system that makes their crystals have a special frequency that is rarely found on other planets.”
“Which is why the flowers create a special nectar that can be distilled into such effective poisons and antidotes!” Excited, Aria’s mind began to race. “If energy is the missing component, all we need to do is—”
“Get some crystals from Baihu and put their energy through the cure as we manufacture it.” Roihan finished for her.
“That stinks,” Simban replied.
“I agree,” Mordjan seconded.
&nb
sp; “I don’t think they’re going to like us taking their crystals,” Roihan commented.
“The crystals on Aurora might work, we have a double star system as well,” Aria mused, “and I’m not sure they have any crystals left, which may be why they’re searching for them on other planets. We don’t have enough power left to get back there, anyway.”
All eyes turned back to her, and she mentally sifted through the information she had from the Ardak files. “I’ve been wondering why the Ardaks were after crystals on Aurora in the first place. Aurora isn’t the only planet with crystals in the galaxy.”
Roihan frowned. “That’s a good line of logic.”
“Why would they travel all that way to get the same thing they already have?”
“Because we have elves,” Simban said quietly.
Valdjan crossed the room quickly and went to his brother. “What do you mean?”
“The elves can give the crystals energy.” Simban paused, seemingly trying to find the right words. “They have magic.”
“How do you know?” Roihan asked.
“They told me,” he replied simply.
“So this means that if we get the raw materials, we assume that the elves can boost the potency of the cure with their magic.” Roihan rubbed his forehead. “Why does that feel . . . uncertain?”
“It may be uncertain, but it’s the only plan we have. And I have a crystal from the homeworld if the elves are somehow able to boost its energy. It’s out of power because it’s the one the Ardaks used to come to Aurora, but it might work,” Aria replied. “We’re not actually that far from Aurora,” she said, going to the computer and pulling up the Ardak star chart information. She began to filter through the files on different star systems. “Let’s figure out where we can get the raw materials we don’t have on the planet.”
They all went silent for a few moments, each parsing through their downloaded files in their mind.
Then everyone spoke at once. “Synchisite.”
Aria grinned. “Bingo. There is a moon in our star system that might contain enough since the quantity we need is less than one percent of the overall composition of the cure. But we’ll have to use the suits because the air isn’t breathable. And . . .” She paused, reading through a few screens of information. “There are some monsters there, but we don’t have much information.”
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