Enemy Games (35 page)

He evaded her attempt to take the badge from him.

“Here,” he murmured, stepping closer than necessary and brushing his fingers inside her tunic as he put her badge in place. “Allow me to assist.”

Nerve endings lit up all over her body.

Damen grinned and kissed the tip of her nose before spinning away and tossing the bag of chips at Pietre.

“Install them in that array.” He pointed a wrench at the backup computer system tucked into the cramped space beneath the deck plates and up against the cockpit bulkhead.

Jayleia cast a glance at Dr. Idylle and Raj. Both men pointedly examined the containers filled with bloodworms, but she mistrusted the crinkles of humor at the corners of her boss’s eyes.

“They’re from Chemmoxin,” she said, damning the rough edge in her voice.

“How long ago did this first pair begin cocooning?” Raj asked.

Jayleia started.
Cocooning?
“I had no idea bloodworms were a pupae form of anything. What do they change into?”

She looked between Dr. Idylle and Raj.

They gaped back.

“You were in the field,” Dr. Idylle said. “Did you see an insect form we haven’t classified?”

“All kinds!” Jayleia exclaimed. A flash of memory stopped her. The kuorl scout had emerged from the nest tree. He’d snatched something from the trunk and stuffed it in his mouth.

“Beetles!” she gasped. “Itchy, prickly, horrible creatures. They were all over the kuorl trees.”

“These are the bloodworms that gorged on your blood and dropped of their own volition?” Dr. Idylle asked.

Jay glanced at the labels and nodded. “Infected blood. Yes. In fact, when they dropped, they were black and stiff. I thought they were dead. The specimens in the other containment dish also gorged and dropped, but the infection appeared to have been drained by the time they fed. When they dropped, they exhibited normal blood coloration and mobility.”

“So it wasn’t the blood meal that triggered metamorphosis in these specimens,” Raj mused.

“Their near-death experience?” Jayleia grumbled.

Dr. Idylle sucked in an audible breath.

She boggled. “I wasn’t serious!”

“I am,” her boss replied. “Sheer conjecture, but bear with me. Suppose these creatures require a meal of infected blood in order to undergo metamorphosis?”

“They all had infected blood,” Jayleia protested. “I manifested symptoms.”

Raj studied the two creatures busy wrapping themselves in silk. “Maybe it’s a matter of virus load.”

“Is it a virus?” Jayleia asked, sudden interest spiking through her. How had they found time to research the disease while trying to recover her?

“Not precisely,” Raj hedged. “It shares characteristics in common with most viral structures we know, but there are anomalies. I reverted to ‘virus’ so I could talk about the damned thing.”

“Okay,” she said, marshaling her thoughts into order. “If the virus triggers metamorphosis, it would mean that the disease unlocks a chemical cascade inside the bloodworms that initiates chrysalis development. The interesting question would be whether or not the virus itself survives the change and is communicable thereafter.”

“Did the beetles bite?” Dr. Idylle queried, frowning.

“No. The kuorls ate them.”

Excitement lit through her. She saw it reflected in the faces of her colleagues. Had they just closed the life-cycle loop on the necrotic illness plaguing Chemmoxin?

“Ready!” Pietre’s yell sounded hollow coming from beneath the deck plating at the center of the ship. “System off-line?”

“Yes,” Damen said from his spot in front of the engines.

“I think I’d better have a look at a blood sample, Jay,” her cousin said. “We’ll make certain that healing trance completely cleared your system.”

She watched Damen taking apart his handheld as Raj applied the leech to her arm. The device beeped.

“Dr. Faraheed, help me secure these specimens,” Dr. Idylle said, an avid light in his blue eyes. “We have work to do.”

Raj nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Her boss paused in the doorway to smile at her. “I need a complete report. Speculation included. If we can isolate the endocrine key or its analogue, we might be able to interrupt the bloodworm life cycle . . .”

“Endocrine keys,” she interrupted, her brain shoving a vision of the hatching Chekydran before her mental eye. “What else triggers metamorphosis?”

“Light cycles, right?” Raj said.

“Yes,” she murmured, glancing toward the
Sen Ekir
’s open door. “Light, which impacts neurotransmitters.”

“What are you thinking?” Dr. Idylle asked standing very still as if afraid to disrupt her train of thought.

“We spoke of interrupting the life cycle of bloodworms,” she said.

“By switching off the endocrine key, the bloodworms never cocoon, never mature to a reproductive state, and eventually die,” her boss said. His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath. “The Chekydran!”

She nodded, hesitating to condemn the species as a whole, but a good scientist examined every option, whether she liked them or not. “They undergo metamorphosis.”

“If we could isolate the trigger, we could end the war!” Raj said.

“We’d be committing genocide based on the actions of one segment of the population,” Jayleia countered. “And it wouldn’t end the war. Not right away. We have no data on how long the life stages last in this species. We could kill off this population of Chekydran who seem intent on helping us in the war. Could we reverse the trigger?”

Her cousin frowned. “In what way?”

“Forcing metamorphosis?” Dr. Idylle essayed. “Supplementing the chemical that triggers cocooning, thereby forcing the Chekydran into hibernation?”

“What would that accomplish?” Raj asked, shaking his head. “We’d still have a bunch of aggressive, killer Chekydran on the loose once they emerged.”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m still synthesizing data here.”

“Well,” Dr. Idylle said, rubbing his hands together, “we have a theory to investigate and a possible means of protecting Chemmoxin’s colonists. Excellent work.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you . . .” Jay began.

“We’re science ship non grata,” Raj said. “How are we going to help anyone?”

“We submit results to every government and media outlet that remembers our work on Ioccal,” Jay replied. “TFC might refuse the information, but the Claugh and the Citizen’s Rights Uprising will use their resources to make the results public.”

Raj rolled his eyes, the first hint of a smile on his face. “Sensationalism and claims of conspiracies notwithstanding?”

“We are victims of a conspiracy,” Jay protested as her cousin and her boss carried the sample dishes out of the medi-bay, headed for the labs in cargo.

“That’s what concerns me,” Dr. Idylle admitted. “Everyone we contact will risk accusations of treason, too.”

Jayleia stopped short, dismay spilling through her. It hadn’t occurred to her. Of course the CRU would help them; they lived to expose the kinds of accusations Jayleia could make against the TFC government, but at what cost?

She’d left a trail of blood and dead bodies in her wake already. Why? What was she that inspired such determination to destroy her and everyone around her?

“Jay.”

She found Damen watching her, concern lining his face. It eased the rage threatening to boil over inside her. She couldn’t take responsibility for the attack that had injured him. Unless the guild had worked out that Jayleia had both stolen the Silver City data store and been the one to issue the contagion alert for the station. If the guild council had sent the ore scouts after the
Kawl Fergus
, then she was culpable.

Until the thirty-day quarantine period expired or an outbreak-response ship arrived to diagnose and lift the alert, Silver City would be a ghost station. No one would land there. No ships, no customers, no income. How long could Silver City survive that kind of economic siege? Jayleia swallowed a smile of spite-filled glee.

Pietre scooted out from under the deck plates to grab the bag of data chips. “Ready to begin pulling your backup array. How neat a job do you want?”

Damen shook his head. “I don’t. It won’t matter.”

Because they were out of options and wouldn’t likely need the backup systems.

Jayleia scowled, but she went to kneel at the edge of the open compartment to examine his handiwork.

He’d wired his handheld to the glowing crystal fused to the engine feed.

“Why do we still have particle flow? The drive is shut down,” she said.

“Energy production on a ship of this size relies on the main drive reactor.” He crimped another wire to the crystal clamp. “Even with engines off, we need power for ship’s systems.”

“No room for redundancy.” She nodded. “What are you doing, and where did you learn how to redesign handhelds?”

He smiled. “The Ki. This crystal is more than a data store. It’s an entire library, the history, art, and literature of a species, save that it was incomplete. It was still being written when I recovered it.”

Jay listened to a whisper in her head. “Ah. Confirmation that the Chekydran-ki knew you had it.”

“You’re hearing them,” he said.

“I’m hearing something,” she hedged. “I gather the queen is shoving knowledge into my brain but it can’t seem to find anywhere to land or settle. Mostly, my mind is full of buzzing.”

He tipped his head, considering. “Yes.”

“You seem to have an easier time integrating and accessing whatever it is,” she noted. “Do you suppose that’s biologically based? Or does your experience with telepathy provide your brain with pathways mine lacks?”

“Great.”

“What?”

“Now you’re going to want to dissect my brain,” he said.

“I’d give it back when I was done,” she offered.

“You can have it after I’m done using it,” Damen countered.

Pietre barked a laugh from beneath the deck plating. “Ready.”

“Powering up,” Damen said.

The light in the crystal flared, drawing her attention. It changed color from yellow to orange to red, then back again as data flooded the handheld screen.

She gasped. “You’re writing the Silver City data store to the crystal!”

“It’s a much faster process than stealing it. Stand by to swap out the data chips,” he said, satisfaction in his smooth voice.

“Is that safe?” she asked.

He started and stared at her.

“We’ve never found a way to shield the crystal, have we?” she said. “Everything you dump on that rock will be broadcast.”

“The Chekydran will have access to every scrap of data,” he mused.

Pietre emerged from beneath the deck plating and glanced between them. “I, personally, have a problem with giving the Chekydran anything, even these Chekydran, but shouldn’t we be worrying about the UMOPG military? If they’ve been using crystal in their ships, it’s a good bet they’ve got a line on reading it.”

Damen shook his head. “The Chekydran-ki aren’t a danger to us.”

“How do you know that?” Pietre demanded. “Because they say so? Damen, they modified you!”

Jayleia shifted, unsettled by Pietre’s assessment. His argument made sense, but her gut said to trust the aliens who’d altered her and then sliced her open so they could engineer their species. “They did save our lives when they didn’t have to. They healed us and it seems like they’ve tried to give us reason to trust them. The Chekydran that declared war on humanoids certainly never bothered.

“If my sources are correct,” Damen said, “this data directly impacts the war in our favor.”

“It’s a calculated risk, then?” Pietre mused, peering into Damen’s face.

“And the only device with sufficient processing capacity,” Damen replied.

Pietre nodded. “All right. Let’s do it.” He ducked under the deck plating. “Say when.”

“Verifying load,” Damen called. “Looks good. Go.”

“Few minutes!” Pietre replied.

Damen turned and wrapped his warm hands around Jay’s. “When all of this is over, whatever it is we’re wrapped up in, you tell me where. We’ll go. Together.”

He surprised a smile from her as her heart melted. “If anyone will have us, you mean? Our only option may be Kebgra.”

He shrugged. “You’re comfortable with their tradition of taking more than one partner?”

“Depends on the partner,” she said. “If you wanted Pietre, we could negotiate.”

He blinked, looking stunned.

It made her grin.

“At least the citizens of Kebgra have seen biomechs before,” she said.

“They’d know how to handle them,” Damen agreed, still smiling.

Jayleia’s brain stumbled and froze.

“What?”

“My mother said, ‘Seek refuge someplace that knows how to deal with these monsters.’”

“The Citizen’s Rights Uprising? Why?” Damen demanded.

“I am an idiot,” she breathed. “I didn’t put it together until now. Every last one of my bodyguards was CRU. My father is on Kebgra or on a CRU missionary ship.”

“You’re sure?”

“No, but it stands to reason,” she said.

Damen stared at her, his expression unreadable.

“Your father is running the CRU?” He sounded different. Assured. In command.

Shock rippled out from her core slowing both her heart rate and her breath. Her feral Azym, code runner and Silver City sex worker had vanished, transformed into a damnably attractive but far more lethal creature—a Claugh nib Dovvyth spy. In his expression, the predator’s pure, uncomplicated drives had been replaced by lines of astute cunning and by the weight of responsibility.

A thrill of desire ran headlong into a new twinge of fear within her. He’d spent years being groomed by the Empire’s spymaster. How much choice had she had when she’d surrendered to the spymaster’s prodigy? After all, why interrogate when he could seduce her into disclosure?