Enemy Within (17 page)

A single tear escaped down his cheek. She choked on the tears she couldn’t shed and pulled the trigger.

Ari shook at the rage and hatred coursing through her. Rational thought retreated. She ached to destroy Chekydran. Any Chekydran. Her vision hazed. She heard her breath coming in ragged rasps as she struggled to remember where she was, who she was.

“Ari?”

She knew that voice trying to reach her from so far away, but then one of them touched her. Growling in outrage, she struck center mass, hard. It fell away, crying out in pain when it fetched up hard against a solid surface. She sprang to her feet, crouching, waiting. Where there was one, there were more.

“Back away.” Another voice. It, too, felt familiar.

“What is it?” the first voice wheezed. “What’s happening to her?”

“A flashback. She is very dangerous.”

“Want help, Captain?”

“No,” a sharp retort. “Back off.”

Chekydran talking strategy. Her lip curled. Did they care that she’d learned to understand them? Leaves rustled. She lashed out again to have her blow blocked and her wrist wrapped in a hard grip. Fury, sharpened by an edge of panic, took possession of her. She exploded, biting, kicking, hitting, and shrieking.

“Damn it, Ari! Stop it before I put you over my knee!”

Something, the desperation, the anguish in that voice, pierced the primitive flood of fight-or-flight chemicals fogging her brain and she knew him. Seaghdh. She slumped and uttered the filthiest single word she knew.

Gingerly, arms closed around her. She felt him nod.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sorry,” she rasped.

“I’ll live.”

Her eyesight cleared and she found herself looking at Tommy Heisen’s body. She shuddered. Seaghdh’s grasp tightened. How could she have recovered so quickly? It couldn’t be Cullin Seaghdh. She wouldn’t let it be. If she became dependent on his presence, on him, she’d be as much a prisoner as she had been aboard the Chekydran cruiser.

“Ari,” he rumbled, resting his forehead against her hair. “I’m sorry. If you’d given me a few seconds more, I would have spared you . . .”

Ari twisted out of his arms, shoved herself to her feet, and plastered a thoroughly regulation expression on her face. “Don’t coddle me, Captain,” she said. “He was my crewman and therefore my duty. No one else had the right.”

Blotting blood from his mouth with the back of one hand, Seaghdh nodded.

She’d done that to him. Guilt raked her.

“At least you didn’t break his nose, Alexandria,” a familiar male voice said from behind her.

She turned, hardly daring to believe she’d heard right. “Augustus.” A sore spot in her heart eased.

The man who’d once tempted her to stay on Kebgra grinned at her. The memory felt old, like it had happened a very long time ago.

“I am relieved to see you safe,” he said. “You will want to bury your crewman, I take it? Shall I take the rest of your men below? Or do you wish to tend to your Chosen’s injuries yourself?”

“He . . .” She stopped short and glanced at Seaghdh as he climbed to his feet, shooting a speculative look first at Augie, then at her. Was that jealousy in his eye?

Seaghdh. Her Chosen. Honest mistake. One she’d have to let stand while they were on Kebgra because Seaghdh wasn’t going to let her out of his sight regardless of cultural mores.

“Thank you, Augie,” she said. “I would like to bury Tommy, but shouldn’t we get shielded? I can’t risk exposing you or the other survivors.”

“My people engaged the mother ship and are in pursuit,” Seaghdh said. “They have other things to worry about than sending in more soldiers.”

She nodded and slid a glance at Seaghdh. She owed the man an apology at the very least for injuring him. He couldn’t help it that she responded to him. Or could he? Just how far could he imbed compulsion when he used his vocal talent on someone? Did she care? For the first time in six months, she felt as if she’d reclaimed a lost part of her. Damn if she wasn’t starting to crave his brand of therapy.

Ari put a hand on Seaghdh’s arm. “I’d like help burying him. Would you be willing? I’ll patch you up when we’re done.”

His expression lit from within as he closed warm fingers over hers and she realized what she’d done. For the first time, she’d reached for him of her own volition. The golden fire in his eyes and the tantalizing caress of his thumb on the back of her hand drove fierce, pointed want straight through her core.

“He was a good man, Captain,” he said. “Just show me where. Turrel?”

Surprise lit through her. Turrel? He and V’kyrri should still be en route. She realized the big man lounged against a tall, thin standing stone, watching with a neutral eye.

“The boy fought off the Chekydran when the chips were down,” Turrel replied. “He deserves a proper send-off. Count me in.”

She carried the oversized and outdated mobile teleport unit that would dig the hole for them. Seaghdh and Turrel dragged the corpse to the makeshift graveyard Augie and his handful of survivors had been using to inter the few settlers’ bodies they’d been able to recover so far. Once she’d programmed and activated the noisy teleport console, Ari removed her ship’s badge from her pocket and tucked it inside Tommy’s armor.

Seaghdh raised an eyebrow.

“He’s the most intact of the six,” she said.

“You’re going to dissect him?” Turrel boggled.

She sighed. “He can still help us. When your ship returns, we can transport him onboard. I can’t leave him to the scavengers until that time. With a fully equipped research lab, we might be able to tell how he was modified. We’ll then know something about methodology and purpose.”

“I think the purpose is damned clear!”

“Why go to so much trouble for an army?” Ari pressed. “Think of the R and D time alone. The failures. It would be faster and cheaper to conscript, train, and equip a few hundred thousand soldiers or mercenaries.”

“You think they have different intent for this technology,” Seaghdh surmised.

“It might be useful to have a population of biddable slaves modified and enhanced for their tasks.” She shrugged. “Sheer speculation. Without research, we’ll never have anything more.”

Seaghdh blew his breath out in a low whistle.

“Will your ship take the risk?”

“What risk?” Seaghdh demanded, his gaze sharp.

“I can’t guarantee that death deactivates everything. There may be components in the body still broadcasting.”

“We could be tracked,” he said.

She nodded.

“I don’t know,” Seaghdh finally answered. “I can promise I will ask.”

“Think our CO’s pretty hot for everything she can get on these guys,” Turrel said.

Seaghdh’s look turned forbidding. “Let’s get this done.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“One last transport,” she announced. “Go ahead and get him in position.”

They buried Tommy without much ceremony. What could she say? Any praise she might have for his dedication and heroism had played out before witnesses. Tommy’s Pyrrhic victory over the Chekydran would be legend before she left this world.

Turrel gathered up the teleport unit. Seaghdh picked up the shovels and they trudged back the way they’d come.

Maybe she should have been consumed by self-pity, or some sense of loss, but as far as she was concerned, she’d lost Lieutenant Heisen six months ago, the day they’d been captured. If he’d endured three more months of Chekydran captivity than she had, at least in the end she’d helped him gain freedom. After three months in an alien prison, Ari was very clear that death did indeed represent liberation. It might have been less than compassionate, but her brain kept turning away from her dead lieutenant. Instead, it shoved snippets of conversation and flashes of impossible things into her awareness.

One of the impossible things walked beside her carrying a heavy teleport unit as if it were a toy. Turrel finally caught her watching him.

“What?” he demanded.

“Trying to work out your run speed, because that was a mighty quick trip from S-Two.”

He nodded.

“So quick, V’kyrri should still be several minutes out,” she said.

Turrel grinned without humor. “Now you know why someone would exterminate every last member of my race.”

Ari straightened. “What? No! It was a plague . . . Wasn’t it?”

He turned away without answering.

Shlovkora, Turrel’s home world, had been administered by TFC, had, in fact, been a member of the governing council. She remembered the media-casts covering the unfolding disaster on Shlovkora—the illness, the swarm of doctors and researchers sent to help, the quarantine that went into place when most of them died, the staggering numbers of dead. She’d always wondered why TFC hadn’t sent her father. He headed their very best research team. Now, Turrel’s accusation of genocide, combined with her dad’s exclusion from the research teams, made her wonder.

She tossed an uneasy glance at Seaghdh.

He lifted an eyebrow.

“The outbreak happened while we were on our third mission to Ioccal. We were too far away. Dad was so frustrated. He wanted so badly to help.” She shook her head. “Do you know, even after it was over, no one would give him access to the samples or the data? Said there had been some kind of containment accident and all the samples and data were useless.”

Turrel growled but said nothing.

“I’ve mounted run-of-the-mill offensives before,” she groused. “I can’t imagine the logistical nightmare and expense of genocide. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Since the Shlovkur opened their world to the rest of the galaxy a couple of generations ago,” Seaghdh said, “there have been outcrosses with a few startling results.”

Staring at him, she found herself shaking her head. “Meaning my government feared the natural development of some kind of super warrior race?” Only fear forced a government to overcome inertia and coordinate the kind of attack Turrel and Seaghdh wanted her to believe had been committed.

“Who the hell cares why they did it?” Turrel demanded, hefting the teleport unit to one shoulder.

“Trying to figure out how deep this goes, Turrel,” she replied.

The big man grunted. Seaghdh looked vaguely like a man who had just dodged an energy bolt. Mentally, Ari checked off impossible thing number one and moved on to impossible thing number two on her list, Seaghdh’s engineer, V’kyrri. While she’d been running for her life, she hadn’t taken the time to analyze the bits of orders and explanations that had come across the com channel. She did now. V’kyrri had said he couldn’t get a grip on the soldiers. He’d said that while he’d been kilometers away. A chill walked down her spine.

“Do you want to explain V’kyrri?” she asked. “Or did you want me to guess?”

Turrel laughed.

The relieved expression on Seaghdh’s face evaporated. He shook his head. “He deserves the chance to explain it himself,” he said. He activated his com. “V’kyrri?”

“Captain?” The engineer sounded breathless but cheerful.

“You blew your cover trying to get a grip on the soldiers, V’k.”

“I warned you it wouldn’t take long,” V’kyrri replied. Good humor drained from his tone. He sounded almost resigned. “She’s a smart gal.”

“A smart gal.” Ari sighed. The brightest thing she could think to say was, “Telepath, huh?”

“Aye, Captain,” V’kyrri answered. She hardly recognized his voice, made tinny by the com and so serious.

“Would I know if you’d been rummaging around in my head?” she asked, looking straight at Seaghdh. Why else would you bring a telepath on a find and retrieve mission unless you intended to use him to read your retrieval subject?

Damn Seaghdh’s hide, he didn’t look the least discomfited by the question.

“I don’t know,” V’kyrri said. “Any training in your background?”

She blinked. “For what? Telepathy? No. TFC member races don’t produce telepaths even as mutations. Interesting. Do you suppose that means the mutation on the genome renders the gamete nonviable?”

“No amount of telepathy on my part could possibly answer that question,” V’kyrri said, his tone droll.

Heat flushed her face. “Sorry.”

“I can give you a demo if you want,” he offered. “In the meantime, I can swear that I haven’t read you.”

“Beyond knowing where I was in relation to Augie and the other survivors,” she corrected.

“That’s not reading, per se.” V’kyrri sounded embarrassed and she spent a moment wondering what color his copper skin turned when the blood rushed to his face. “I can’t turn that off, it’s another sense, an awareness.”

She nodded and wondered if she’d lost her mind. She believed him. “Okay. Thanks.”

“My pleasure, Captain.” The cheer, and a note of pleased surprise, returned to his voice.

“Do I need to come find you?” Turrel grumbled.

“Find yourself, slowpoke,” V’kyrri said. “I’m in the caverns. And Captain Idylle? Thanks.”

“What for?”

“You haven’t developed a sudden case of fear and loathing for me,” he said. Despite the habitual note of good spirits in his tone, she heard the hurt beneath it.

What kind of person would she be to suddenly dislike someone because of some aspect of his genetic profile? It would be like hating Seaghdh for his golden eyes. “I’m saving all that up for the Chekydran,” she managed.

The men laughed.

She couldn’t.