Dominion (15 page)

The Other in Fenuless's head spasmed, and the tendrils in her brain shifted minutely. Fenuless winced in pain, and clutched her temples. Syl made an unintelligible sound—it might have been a cry of effort, or even triumph—and when the
Nomad
crew turned to her, they saw that her face was fixed in concentration. Immediately Paul knew what she was doing; despite what Syl had said, she wanted to know the truth, so she had gone looking for it. But poking around in Fenuless's brain was a risky move because Fenuless's consciousness wasn't alone in there.

“Syl!” he said sharply, but she made no reply. “Stop it!”

He gripped her shoulder, and she spun toward him in a rage, glaring as he shook his head.

“Syl—” he started to say, but then he saw the desolation on her face, and a tear fell from her left eye, and he understood. Fenuless had not been lying: Syl's father had been perfectly happy to condemn her to death.

“What was that?” squawked Fenuless. “
Who
was that?”

Paul was livid. If only Syl could have held back for a while longer. He wanted to find out what Fenuless could tell them of the plans for Earth, of the timeline for its infection. She might well have told him too. She would have enjoyed tormenting him, if she could.

“I haven't finished with
my
questions yet,” he said.

“I don't care about your questions!” said Fenuless. “Someone was in my head. Some—”

She stood up in a rage. Before she could say anything else, Paul spoke.

“But you already have something in your head, don't you, Commander?”

Fenuless stopped moving.

“We can see it,” Paul continued. “The one inside your skull is big. It's like a tumor at the top of your spine, and some of your crew are carrying its little brothers and sisters. Does it have a name, Fenuless? Is it like a pet? Or maybe you're the pet. I bet it's smarter than you, although that wouldn't be hard.”

They could see the Others' reaction to Paul's words. The infected Illyri on the
Varcis
jerked their heads in unison, as though all had been affected by the same jolt of electricity. Immediately, the Others began extending their tendrils not only deeper into their brains but throughout their entire bodies, with the exception only of Fenuless. Syl had seen this before: it was a defense mechanism. The Others were preparing to turn on their hosts. Now that their presence was known, they would destroy themselves and the Illyri rather than risk being captured and examined.

Then Fenuless spoke her final words, but two voices came from her mouth. One was her own, but the other was like a whisper, an echo.

“Tell the Cayth that we are coming,” she said. “The Cayth are lost. Humanity is lost.”

Fenuless smiled.

“All is lost.”

In that instant, Paul knew that he had gone too far. He could see it in Fenuless's eyes. But he still had so many questions . . .

“Commander,” he said. “Wait! We can make a deal.”

But it was too late. Fenuless's mouth remained open, and tendrils emerged from between her lips, flicking at the air, spitting the first of their spores from holes at their tips. In that instant, Fenuless's head exploded, and for a brief moment the Other was visible, an embryonic organism clinging to what was left of her brain at the top of the spinal cord, before it became lost in twists and coils. Fenuless's remains fell to the floor as, behind it, the rest of the infected crew cried out in agony, their bodies turning to flailing masses of filament, and then to blood and clouds of spores. Within seconds the rest of those on board were on the floor too, the infection spreading rapidly through them as they ingested the spores and their bodies swelled and erupted.

Kal opened his mouth to give an order.

“Wait! Don't destroy that ship,” Paul pleaded with him. “Please. We need it. We can't help you without it.”

Kal paused, then said one word: “Decontaminate.”

A curtain of yellow-green light appeared in the center of the
Varcis
's cabin. It separated, one field of light moving toward the bow, the other toward the stern, and as it did so it cleansed the ship of spores and Ilyri remains, like a wall of heat burning them to nothing.

“Damn,” said Thula. “Now
that
was a show.”

P
aul could barely contain his fury. He had pushed Fenuless, goading her, and then Syl had intervened—no, interfered!—and the Other had reacted. As a consequence, they had learned almost nothing of use from the Illyri commander before she died. He left the table and stalked to the observation window. His reflected face hung among the stars. Distant suns burned in his eyes.

Stupid girl, he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was Meia who talked him down, her face joining his in the glass.

“Fenuless would not have told us anything helpful anyway,” she said. “She knew that she was not going to live, and so did the entity she carried. And at least we now have one more ship, although we will require more than that before we're done.”

Paul nodded, still not trusting himself to speak. How many ships, though? With Meia at his side he stared silently through the glass. He felt his heart rate begin to slow, and gradually his anger cooled as his thoughts began turning. They would need entire fleets if they were to wage war on the Illyri and their strange, parasitic allies.

But that was not his plan.

He pointed to the Derith wormhole.

“We have to go back through it. We have no choice.”

“They'll be waiting.”

“Talk to Kal and Fara. I don't believe for one moment that they're sitting out here armed only with defensive weaponry that can't be shared.”

“I will consult with them.”

“My brother wants to return to Earth,” he said.

“And you will let him go.”

It was not a question, but he answered it anyway.

“Yes. Someone must.”

“But not you?”

“I'm staying with Syl.”

“I may have to leave you for a time.”

Paul's stomach lurched. He needed Meia.

“You have somewhere better to be?” he asked.

“I know where to find help,” she said.

Paul thought for a moment.

“The Mechs?”

“If they can be convinced to fight. Their increasing pacifism was one of the reasons why the Corps sought to destroy them.”

“I would have thought that having tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters blown to smithereens might have caused them to reconsider their position since then.”

“The Mechs are not like you, or the Illyri.”

Paul cocked an eyebrow at her, for he knew she had implanted the equivalent of a small automatic weapon in her own arm; he had seen her use it on Erebos to lethal effect.

“Frankly, Meia, you're not like the rest of the Mechs either. You speak of them almost as a different species, and that weapon you added in your body suggests that your feelings about pacifism may be mixed, to say the least.”

“Which makes me ideally suited to convince them to act.”

“It means that we'll need a third ship before long.”

“Well, we probably know where we can find one.”

Now it was Meia's turn to point to the wormhole.

“Through there.”

“Go and have that talk with Kal and Fara,” said Paul.

“And you should talk to Syl.”

Paul looked around, and noticed that Syl was no longer in the room with them.

“Where did she go?”

“Fara showed her to an antechamber. She wanted to be alone, but I think she might make an exception for you.”

•  •  •

Paul found Syl in a small room to the right of the observation deck. It was entirely transparent, like a glass bubble extruding from the hull of the ship, with a small, clear bench at its heart on which Syl was sitting. Entering the room made Paul feel slightly queasy. The glass was so pure, and the lighting so subdued, that it was like walking through space itself.

Syl did not turn around to see who had entered. Maybe she already knew, thought Paul, either because of her abilities or because no one else would have dared to intrude upon her solitude. He reached out to touch her, but saw her tense. It was not what she wanted, and he withdrew his hand.

“He gave them permission to kill me,” she said.

“Oh, Syl. He is no longer himself, and you know that.”

“But Fenuless was both herself and the Other. I felt it. They were two linked beings in one body, yet Fenuless was capable of independent action.”

“Only for as long as the Other permitted it, though,” said Paul. “I think if she'd had a choice, Fenuless would not have elected to have her head torn apart, but the decision was taken out of her hands.”

Syl winced, and Paul realized perhaps he was being too brutal. After all, if the Others could burst Fenuless's head like a balloon pricked from within, then clearly the same could happen to Syl's father.

He tried again.

“The Corps allowed themselves to be infected by these things, and now they're at the mercy of them,” he said. “I'm so sorry, Syl—this may not be what you want to hear, but I think the one that invaded your father probably removed all trace of what he was, all that was good and noble about him, as quickly as it could. Whoever consented to the order to have you killed, it was not Andrus. It might have looked like him, and sounded like him, but it was the Other speaking.”

Now she raised her hand, searching for him, and he took it.

“I hoped that there might be something of him left,” she said. “I still hope so, despite everything.”

“We'll find him,” said Paul.

“Yes, we will. And Paul?”

She stared up at him, and her hand tightened its grip on his.

“If I sense that my father is beyond rescue, I will put him out of his misery.”

•  •  •

Fara and Kal were waiting for them when they returned to the main chamber. Paul was conscious of the moments slipping by. How much time had passed beyond the Derith wormhole just during his minutes with Syl? Hours? If so, how many? He tried not to think about it, just as he tried not to be afraid of what was waiting for them at the other side, or to worry about the prospect of Thula behind the controls of an Illyri ship, like a teenager without a license. Sometimes you just had to make do with what you had.

In a way, he could understand the reasoning of the Cayth. Even if what they were saying about their fear of contagion were not true, it would still have been tempting for them to stay quietly in their corner of the universe rather than risk confronting the Others and the Illyri. Maybe if they stayed silent enough for long enough, they wouldn't be noticed. It was cowardice of a kind, but not unreasonable.

Meia was standing beside Fara, directing her questions quietly at Kal. Paul saw how the Cayth female repeatedly glanced toward Syl, seemingly distracted by her presence. There was pity in her face, and what might almost have been love. Paul wondered if, in building an image based on Syl's emotional attachment to her mother, Fara might not also have picked up some of those actual emotions herself. He hadn't been given a chance to ask Syl about it, to find out how she felt about this alien reconstruction so like a mother she had never known. He figured that she had enough troubles at the moment dealing with her feelings about her father. It didn't seem like a good idea to scratch afresh at the wound of her mother as well.

Yet he saw something else in Fara too, something less noble, less pleasant. Something . . . alien. That was the only word he could think of. Alien. Unknowable. He didn't entirely trust the Cayth—he didn't know much about them, so he would have been a fool to take them at their word—but he needed them, and he had to keep them sweet. Without the Cayth's goodwill, he and the others would not be permitted to leave through the wormhole, and without the Cayth's technology they probably wouldn't last long once they emerged at the other end.

But Fara continued to trouble him.

He had no more time to consider the problem. Meia turned from her conversation with Kal and approached Paul once more.

“The Cayth have weapons,” she said, “versions of what they used to trap both us and the Illyri. They're essentially torpedoes. With a little adaptation, they can be launched from the weapons systems on the
Nomad
and the
Varcis
, but it means that we'll have to come out of the wormhole fighting. We emerge, we fire the torpedoes, and we keep maneuvering fast in the hope that we can avoid being hit while the Cayth weaponry does its work.”

Two ships, thought Paul, which meant that they could fire only four torpedoes. If more than four vessels were waiting for them at the other side of the wormhole, or one of the torpedoes malfunctioned, missed its target, or was destroyed, it would leave a ten-second delay while the tubes automatically reloaded. In a close fight, ten seconds was an eternity. They'd have to rely on the guns alone, and guns would be of minimal use against a cruiser or a destroyer.

And what if the Cayth engaged in an act of sabotage, deliberately supplying them with weapons that didn't work, or self-destructed? After all, those on the
Nomad
were the only beings in the universe who could now say with certainty that the Cayth were hiding behind the Derith wormhole. It might be better for the Cayth if Paul and his little band of fighters died rather than risk their being captured and sharing the truth with the Illyri and the Others.

But Paul brushed that fear away as paranoia. If the Cayth wanted them dead, they could have killed them long before now. The
Nomad
's crew already had enough enemies. He didn't need to add to their number by conjuring up specters from the Cayth.

“How long to make the adaptations?” he asked.