darknadir (8 page)

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Kaid walked down the corridor leading from the bridge to the cabin he and T'Chebbi shared with Giyesh. They'd all found themselves sharing quarters with crew members, undoubtedly so Tirak's people could keep an eye on them. Around him, like a heartbeat, he could hear the ever-present sound of the ship's engines. Another day, Tirak had said, then they'd be at jump point. It was taking them only three days to reach the requisite velocity. They must be traveling faster than the Alliance craft could, but Tirak was keeping those details to himself. Perhaps the Cabbarans had other technology that no one was speaking about.
As Kaid approached the doorway to his assigned cabin, he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and pressed the lock. Giyesh was off at her post and everyone was waiting, crowded into the limited space. He could feel their curiosity as he crossed over to the chair left vacant for him. He let his gaze linger on Kate and Taynar, the young Leska pair. They sat close together, Kate obviously still overwhelmed by recent events.
"I've been speaking to Captain Kishasayzar on Jalna," he said, taking his seat. "The
Rhijissoh
is expected there within the next four days and all is going as planned for the proposed Contact talks. Railin is now firmly entrenched in his position as the new Port Lord."
"What about Killian? Did he cause any trouble over our escape?" asked Jo. "And what about the laser gun we left behind?"
Kaid's mouth opened in a faint grin. "The laser blew the minute Killian's men tried to move it, taking out the whole wall of his barn. He had some idea of using it on the port once he realized Railin had taken you there. It took Ashay showing off his shuttle piloting skills again to make Killian calm down enough to sit at the table with Railin and the others to form a ruling council for Jalna. I think they'll do well."
"What's this meeting all about?" Rezac demanded suddenly. "We've been on board for two days now and you've told us damned little about what's going on here. I think we're due an explanation."
"It's time we had a debriefing," Kaid agreed quietly. "Before I begin, I want to remind you we are guests on this craft. Treaty negotiations have begun, and due to the unique circumstances we all find ourselves in, an interim agreement has been signed. We are allied with both the U'Churians and the Cabbarans. I expect you to behave accordingly." Again, he glanced around the room, ignoring the slightly raised eye ridge from T'Chebbi. She'd understand he couldn't have briefed her sooner.
"I'm assuming no one knows anything here, so I'll start from the beginning. Two Valtegan shuttles landed on Jalna some six or so months ago. One landed outside the Port, then crashed on takeoff, the other touched down to sell the four Sholan prisoners it carried and to buy supplies. Jo's party were sent to Jalna at the request of the Chemerians to find out about the first Valtegan craft, the one that crashed. Since Jalna is in what the Chemerians consider their home territory, until now all other Alliance members have been unaware of its existence." He turned to look at the three rescued Sholans, noting how Tesha and Jeran exchanged glances, keeping their eyes averted from Tallis, who sat slightly apart.
"We were sent by the Alliance to find you three. The Chemerians refused to authorize a rescue mission for you until our team was ready. I won't go into the whys of it...."
"I think you should," interrupted Tallis. "I, for one, want to know why we weren't more important than some damned crashed ship!"
"Yeah, I'm rather curious about that myself," said Rezac from where he sprawled on one of the beds. "Not that I'm complaining, because it meant we were released from the stasis cube...."
"
You
were in that cube?" Jeran's tone was astonished. "
You
were the holy relic they hauled off onto Jalna?"
Tesha's laughter had a note of hysteria to it. "You were what kept us alive! If it hadn't been for that damned cube, the crew would have torn us apart!"
Kaid looked from one to the other. "The Valtegans worshiped the cube?"
Jeran reached for Tesha's arm, shaking it gently. "Tesha, it's over now. We're free." He looked up at Kaid. "Yes. It was the only thing they hated and feared more than us. They chained us in there because only the priest J'koshuk, and their captain, M'ezozakk, dared enter the cargo area they called the shrine room."
A sound from Rezac's direction drew Kaid's attention. Rezac was sitting upright now, all trace of bored indifference gone.
"They were afraid of you?"
"Modern-day Valtegans are afraid of us, Rezac. You know about Keiss from your link with Jo, so you'll know that when we met them there, they'd make suicide attacks rather than face capture by us."
"What's this talk of modern Valtegans?" asked Jeran. "Are there other kinds?"
"I told you, but you didn't listen to me," said Taynar. "They— Kaid and the two in cryo— went back in time to the Fire Margins. They must have met Valtegans back then." His voice was hushed as he said the last few words. "You did, didn't you? Oh, Gods! There were Valtegans back on Shola then! That's why Vartra's a God! He saved us from them!"
Kaid briefly shut his eyes, then opened them to catch T'Chebbi's gaze across the room. Now what did he tell them?
"Damned right there were!" said Rezac forcefully. "That's my time, my world! We were Vartra's first enhanced telepaths. We led the rebellion against them, and won!"
As conversations spontaneously broke out, Kaid could feel the group beginning to fragment into its different factions of loyalties. He needed to bring them together now, once and for all.
"Enough!" he said, raising his voice to a command pitch. All conversation stopped, and eyes turned again to him. "There are no Valtegans on Shola now," he said. "Rezac's right. They're gone, and it was the telepaths who did it." Having gotten their attention, he moderated his tone a little. "The first team were sent to find out what they could from the crashed ship, because we still don't know where their home world is. The Chemerians controlled access to this sector, we couldn't come without their consent and they only consented because they wanted the Valtegan craft investigated. Once the first trip was made, matters changed."
He grinned, a toothy, Human grin that made even Jo shiver, he noticed. "With our visit, we now hold the upper hand. The Chemerians' duplicity has been proved beyond doubt. They were playing the Free Traders off against the Alliance, keeping knowledge of them and the trading world of Jalna to themselves. Even those Sumaan employed by them were prohibited from talking about Jalna. No longer."
"I can tell you why they were afraid of you," said Rezac, sitting back against the bed head. "Racial memory. The survivors would have programmed their descendants to respond to us as a threat."
"Racial memory?" T'Chebbi spoke for the first time.
"Yes. They never forget anything of importance. They pass it down from generation to generation."
"How?" asked Kaid. Such unilateral species fear of an enemy such as the Military Forces on Keiss had met in the Valtegans could only really be accounted for by just such a system.
"The females and the drones. They croon over their eggs, licking and handling them until they're ready to hatch, then they go feral again. If they aren't separated in time, they'll destroy the hatchlings as they emerge. I saw it happen once."
Even with his shields up, Kaid could feel the horror of the memory that Rezac still carried. He glanced at Jo, seeing her get up and move over to the youth's side, reaching out to touch him comfortingly. Rezac accepted her gesture gratefully, taking hold of her hand. For all his brashness, it seemed his father was learning to cope with needing a female better than he was.
"How?" he asked again.
"In their saliva or something," Rezac said. "I don't know for sure, but it's a fair guess."
"How do the females get the memories in the first place if they're kept in breeding areas?" asked Tesha.
"The drones look after them. I presume they're given the memories by the warrior caste to pass on to the females." "Drones? What drones?" asked T'Chebbi before he could.
"They have three sexes. The androgynous drones are the most passive and they fulfill the domestic roles our females do in Sholan society. They're a light brown, not green like the other two sexes."
T'Chebbi gave a snort of amusement from her position opposite the door. "You got surprise coming when we get home if females in your time like that!"
Kaid frowned at her before returning his attention to Rezac. "We know nothing of the drones. Tell us more."
"They were unimportant," said Rezac with a shrug of indifference. "Asexual servants, general domestics, they looked after the females and were used by the males for sex, not reproduction. They went in with the guards to retrieve the eggs before they hatched." His ears visibly lowered as he shuddered.
"Why were you shown a hatching?" asked Kaid. He had to probe the memory now, had to learn what he could about their enemy.
Rezac looked up at him, catching his gaze. "They showed us what would happen to us if Zashou ever turned down the Emperor's advances again," he said bleakly. "Food for the hatchlings."
Bright and clear, the scene burned itself into Kaid's mind, merging with what he'd seen so long ago when under the influence of the Valtegan drug la'quo that Ghezu had given him. Images of ravenous young, clawing and snapping at each other in their desperate hunger, filled his mind. Shutting his eyes, he shook his head to dispel them.
"Enough! I've seen them for myself!" he said, his voice raw. "Tell me how you came to be in the cube."
"Once the rebellion in the palace had begun, they forgot us. We ran, heading for the breeding room to release the females to cause even more confusion, but we took a wrong turn and met a patrol. They chased us into a lab area, and we knew nothing more until Jo, Kris, and Davies awakened us on Jalna."
"It was a weapons lab. They must have been testing a containment unit or something," said Zashou.
"We were lucky," said Rezac, his hand tightening around Jo's. "Even if we've come forward in time to face them again, we were lucky."
"Jalna and the laalquoi," said Kaid quietly, aware that there would be many more nightmares for Rezac and Zashou to relive before they were done. "What's the connection?"
"They use the plant as a dietary staple, the hardened resin and a narcotic made from the plant to control the females as well as several of the slave races," said Rezac. "They were beginning to farm it on Shola when we were taken. They must have done the same on Jalna."
"For the Jalnians even now to have one stone for each person is massive farming," said T'Chebbi. "More like they used world as farm."
"Jalna is lightly populated when compared to most colony worlds," said Kaid. "Could the plant have been native there?"
"No, it's a Valtegan plant," said Rezac. "About the only vegetation they do eat. It gives them chemicals and stuff they can't produce themselves. They must have introduced it to Jalna. They had four worlds of their own, Kaid, plus the Gods know how many slave worlds. We saw at least two other species on K'oish'ik."
Kaid repeated the word. "K'oish'ik." At last they had a name for the world that had spawned the Valtegans. He caught Rezac's gaze this time. "Any like these?" he asked, visualizing first a Chemerian, then a Touiban. "Or this?" Lastly, a Sumaan.
Rezac blinked and sat back abruptly in shock, banging his head on the wall behind him. Jo gave a small cry of pain and put her hands to her temples.
"You shouldn't be able to do that! No one can get through my shielding!" exclaimed Rezac, shocked.
"Were there any like them?" Kaid wasn't interested in Rezac's bruised ego: the shields had been almost nonexistent as far as he was concerned. He needed to know if the other Alliance species had ever been part of the Valtegans' empire. An ability to force a mental contact had its uses.
"None," Rezac growled angrily. "Nor any like the Jalnians or Humans! But you've no right to force a contact on me like that. Dammit, you could have asked! It affected Jo as well!"
"I hope you don't intend to do the same to the rest of us," said Taynar stiffly. "Brotherhood member or not, you're breaking the laws in violating the mental privacy of another being."
Kaid could hear the quaver of fear in the lad's voice and regretted his hastiness in dealing with Rezac. "You did the same to Tirak," he reminded Taynar.
"War breaks rules," said T'Chebbi. "Know from experience, need to catch you when memory fresh. If asked, you start thinking, memory fades."
As Rezac subsided, Kaid glanced past him at her, twitching the tip of an ear in recognition that he owed her.
"It's not something I do often," said Kaid.
"Four worlds of Valtegans!" said Jeran quietly. "The odds are almost impossible. We saw the fleet that came to our world, Kaid. It was massive. How can we possibly defend ourselves against them even if we have gained another three allies? Rezac and those like him may have done it once, but there's so few high level telepaths, and we've lost all those on Khyaal and Szurtha!"
"They did it with fewer in Rezac's time," said Kaid automatically.
"They weren't afraid of us then," said Zashou, the beads in her many braids chiming as she pushed them back.
Kaid hardly heard her as Vartra's words echoed in his mind.
To beat the Valtegans, you'll need to make a pact with the Liege of Hell Himself.
He looked at T'Chebbi, wondering again if he'd already committed Shola and themselves to just such a pact by signing the interim treaties with Tirak and Annuur. Then he saw her move her hand fractionally, signaling a negative. She might not yet know the details of the treaty, but she knew danger, and was letting him know that she still sensed nothing concrete.
He pushed aside his unease. Hardly begun, this journey was already too full of portents and visions and feelings of danger. The world of awakened psychic senses was still too new to him; he wished he'd had longer to come to terms with it. Suddenly, acutely, he missed Carrie; he longed for the presence of her mind, calming and reassuring. And Kusac, who'd become the brother he'd never had— he, who'd needed no one for so long, felt more isolated than he had in Ghezu's prison. Instinctively, his hand reached for the crystal at his neck as he pushed the loneliness aside. There was work to do, he must focus on that.
Taking a breath to steady himself, he looked at the small group of survivors from the massacre. "Jeran, despite what they did at Khyaal and Szurtha, I believe the Valtegans are not after us," he said. "In the past, they were driven from Shola, as you say. But in our time, they were driven from Keiss by us and the Humans, and with no reprisals. They left Jalna, too, perhaps before they originally came to Shola. Something more important to them than us or empire building seems to have their full attention for the moment."