Enemy Within (35 page)

Four hours later, Seaghdh had a fever and V’kyrri had reported to the
Dagger
medi-bay. Eilod relayed the news, her expression defeated. She slumped in her chair, her face flushed. She looked ill.

Ari’s heart ached. It was a clean sweep. She’d destroyed the Claugh nib Dovvyth’s royal family because she’d desperately wanted to belong, to matter. To trust. She closed the com line and cursed. What she wanted no longer mattered. It was time to think and to act. She started with her DNA. If something had been seeded, nestled dormant, into the cells of her body, she should be able to see indications of it. Dad and Raj were attacking the bug head-on, sequencing it and hoping they could formulate a cure. She’d come through the back door, tracing how it had slumbered undetected all this time.

The first victim died when her lungs filled with bloody mucous. Annantra declared the delicate Mannuvian dead at hour ten. Ari closed the channel and rested painfully, scratchy, dry eyes against her forearms. A slow count to fifty and she shook off sorrow and self-pity. They didn’t have the time.

Seated at Raj’s tiny desk in the
Sen Ekir
’s medi-bay, she pulled a blue gray blanket tighter around her shoulders and glanced at Seaghdh. He slept on the single diagnostic bed, not three feet away. The silent display of vital sign readouts assured her he lived still. Rubbing her tired eyes, she felt the weight of futility dragging at her as she scanned the endless lines of DNA on the screen in front of her.

That’s when she saw it.

She leaned forward, froze the screen, and flogged her memory for the source of the discrepancy she saw in her own genome. She pulled up her dad’s file, scrolled to the identical markers, and overlaid the codes. No match. So little match that her heart faltered. Was her dad not really her father? Swiftly, she retrieved the copy of her mother’s file. The overlay flashed “no match.” She stared, uncomprehending.

No genetic overlay, unless it was a self overlay, ever matched completely. Comparing her code to her parents’, she should statistically see more matches on the genome than if she had compared her DNA to a complete stranger’s. The matches on the genome between her parents’ files and hers were significantly low, as if she and her parents were, in fact, unrelated.

Something made Ari pull up Hieronomus’s and Isolde’s medical files. She ran an overlay of her sister’s file with their dad’s. Match. As expected. Isolde had his pale blue eyes and their mother’s light brown hair. An overlay with their mom’s file brought another match, though one lower than their dad’s. No surprise. Isolde was exactly like their father and just as hard to get along with.

Hieronomus’s file matched both parents almost evenly. It startled her. Her older brother was a prig. She’d have bet money he matched their father. An unfair assumption on her part, perhaps, given that their mother had died when Ari had been two. The few memories she had of her mother didn’t include a stick up her backside like Hieronomus had.

Ari was guiltily relieved when neither her sister’s nor her brother’s files matched hers.

Because she couldn’t think of anything else to do, and because she knew she’d never sleep despite the weariness plaguing her, she combined all four files and ran the aggregate against her file. This time the system hesitated, then flashed “inconclusive.”

Interesting.

Ari wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She only knew that her DNA had a story to tell about who she was and about what had happened to her. She had to decrypt the message if she wanted to defeat whatever the Chekydran had done. She tiled the screen and brought up the single family file next to her own. And saw immediately why the computer had returned an inconclusive result.

Most of the code in her file
nearly
matched her family’s. When parents mingled DNA to create a child, recombination took place, producing a few brand-new expressions of old codes. It produced the odd dark-haired child in a family full of blonds. Even with recombination accounted for, the genetic files of child and parent should make it plain each parent provided half of the child’s genetic material.

Comparing the code representing her and her family, she could see indications of that relation. Her parents really were her parents, but something had altered her DNA, modifying this bit here and flipping that protein switch there. So many changes. Suspicion knocked at the back of her brain. How could she have forgotten that her mom had been an ambitious and driven geneticist?

Ari hadn’t been a late-life accident. She’d been planned for. Exactingly. Huddling in her blanket, she shivered. She wasn’t a difficult daughter. She was an experiment. The question was whose? How much of what she saw before her had her mother done? How much represented what the Chekydran had altered? Did her father carry the records of her DNA sequence at birth?

Before she knew what she’d done, Ari keyed her father’s com code.

“Alex?” her dad’s sleep-roughened voice asked after a few seconds. “Are you all right?”

“What am I?” she rasped.

Seaghdh stirred at the sound of her voice.

“I don’t understand,” her father said.

“Me, either,” she answered. “Whose idea was it to engineer a human experiment?”

Her father sucked in an audible breath. The com switched off.

“Ari?” Seaghdh rose and stumbled to her side. He put a hand on her shoulder. He had a fever. “What is it?”

Her heart faltered as she glanced at him. Despair clutched at her throat. She was killing him. “You shouldn’t be up,” Ari said.

“We both know it won’t make a bit of difference,” he replied. “Talk to me.”

“I wish I could. I don’t have any answers,” she said.

“And I have far too few,” her father said from the doorway. The shimmer of the containment field blurred his face. “You are a creative thinker, Alexandria. I should have realized you would begin comparing your DNA to mine and to your mother’s.”

She scooted her chair closer to the doorway.

Seaghdh trailed as if drawn.

“You knew,” she said.

“Not until after you’d been born,” her father replied. “Your mother didn’t tell me what she’d done until you were kicking and screaming in my arms. I suspect she feared that you wouldn’t be viable.”

Something about hearing those words spoken in relation to her clamped down on her ability to breathe freely.

“What?” Seaghdh growled. His fingers closed on her shoulders, massaging, warming.

“I was genetically engineered and implanted,” Ari said.

Seaghdh stilled.

Her father nodded. “You were.”

“I assume that’s as illegal on your side of the zone as on mine?” Seaghdh said.

“After a few brushes with extinction due to lack of diversity? Absolutely,” her dad replied. He sighed, retreated, found a chair, and hauled it back to the doorway. He settled into it as if he hurt.

Ari forced the pain welling up in her chest to one side. The fog cleared from her brain a little and she nudged the fuzzy gray matter into action. “From everything I’ve read and heard about her, Mom didn’t tinker,” she said. “She had something specific in mind when she designed me. What?”

“Immunity, a resilient, adaptive immune system designed specifically to tag and combat engineered infections,” her father said. “When she began working on you, your mother was already ill. She told no one. Not even me. She kept so many secrets those final three years. I didn’t know the woman who died in our bed. She’d become a stranger to me.”

The knot of anger roiling in her middle eased. “She wanted to design someone who could keep you company,” she guessed.

Her father looked at her, furrows in his brow and the shine of hard memory in his eyes. “Possibly,” he whispered. Clearing his throat, he sat up straighter. “I could not countenance what had been done to you. After your mother’s death, I determined that you would be allowed to choose your own way, to become whatever you wished.”

Her mother had bequeathed her a destiny. Her father had countered it with freedom. “Did Mom’s notes say anything about side effects?”

Her father raised his eyebrows. “What side effects?”

“Telepathy.”

Her father blinked, then stared at her as if waiting for the word to penetrate his brain and make some kind of sense.

“Perhaps you are aware, Dr. Idylle,” Seaghdh said, “that the Claugh nib Dovvyth includes one or two naturally occurring telepathic races.”

Her father nodded.

“My engineer, V’kyrri, is a telepath.”

“Engineer?” her father echoed, a knowing smirk on his face.

“As your wife may have proved, Doctor,” Seaghdh replied, “there are all kinds of engineers. Among Ari’s reports, V’kyrri noted several telltale signs of latent telepathic ability. He tested her.”

The older man leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “And?”

Ari disliked his intrigued tone. It sounded too much like the one he used when a pathology sample turned up unexpected results.

“He confirmed it,” she said, leaving off “high level.” She hoped Seaghdh would do the same.

Her father looked at her.

She saw the speculation in his eyes and dropped her gaze.

“Now, that is interesting,” he murmured. “I wonder if it’s heritable.”

Ari bridled.

“You can hate me, Alexandria, for being what I am,” he said, “a man of science. But I did not do this to you. I cannot change what was done. In honesty, I do not know that I would. You are all that any parent can hope a child will become, competent, accomplished, talented. It’s my fondest wish that you might one day be happy. Until then, I can only do what I have always done. Protect the secret of your origin. I destroyed most of your mother’s records, to make certain no one knew.”

“Someone did know, Dad!” Ari countered. “Why else would I have been sacrificed to the Chekydran?”

“Your capture was an accident,” he said.

“Not according to an encoded file my people intercepted seven months ago,” Seaghdh rumbled. “It contained the
Balykkal
’s coordinates and a flight plan that would be followed by one Captain Alexandria Idylle. It was delivered to the Chekydran along with an order for capture.”

She stared at him. “You knew? You knew I’d been set up by one of my own and you did nothing to warn me? Or to stop it?”

Agony stood out in the haggard lines of Seaghdh’s face. “We knew and every single effort we made to reach you failed or was intercepted.”

She slumped. “You went through Armada.”

“What would have happened if we hadn’t?”

“You’d have destroyed my career a few months early,” she said and sighed. And she would have hated him for it. She could see the awareness in his eyes. They both knew she wouldn’t have believed the queen’s spymaster even if he’d come to her with proof in hand.

Had the Chekydran planned all along to use her as a political assassin? How could they have known she’d end up with the Claugh leadership?

She blinked. They hadn’t. No. What they could know was that she’d end up in a hospital, then once released, that she’d follow protocol—she’d ship out aboard the
Sen Ekir
, collect samples, go back to Tagreth, prep her PhD, and then report to her mentor and CO, Admiral Angelou. Was he the target? Or simply acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of their real target? How could they know he wouldn’t be immune to their plague? Did this mean that whatever alliance had been hammered out between the Admiralty and the Chekydran was in trouble? More important, could she use it?

“I assume you’re tracing the file?” Ari asked.

“We’re working on it,” Seaghdh replied. The ominous tone underlying his words boded ill for whoever had given her up.

She smiled. It felt grim.

“Why would someone do that to you? To anyone?” The tremor of horror in her father’s voice brought Ari upright.

Rage in his clenched fists. Pain in the hard glitter of his eyes and in his tight lips. Grief in the shadowed lines around his mouth. Very suddenly, her father looked startlingly old and Ari realized in a flash that for three months, she’d resisted seeing what her capture and imprisonment had cost him. She remembered some of the horrible things that had passed between them in the three months since she’d come home. Her heart clenched hard and she shuddered.

“Is it possible someone found out about Ari? Could someone have done what she has?” Seaghdh asked, gesturing at the lines still visible on the computer screen.

“We aren’t the only people capable of teasing apart genetic data,” she said, “but anyone not in our family would simply assume I’d been adopted.”

Her father shook his head. “Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of species differentiation would know exactly what they were looking at if they’d run the sort of comparison scan you just ran,” he said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before now, though not carrying sequence files for you would have raised undue suspicion, too.”

Species differentiation. By the Twelve Gods and all Three Hells. She wasn’t even human. Did that mean she could never go home again? Being the sole member of a species, could she claim she’d ever had a home? Rubbing her forehead, she opened dry eyes and wondered why the knife-sharp pain under her breast bone didn’t burst her rib cage. “Our working hypothesis is that I was marked for capture because I’m a genetic experiment. Do we assume the Chekydran were supposed to have killed me? They didn’t and instead turned me into a weapon?”

“I’d say that someone in the Armada Admiralty is learning the hard way that the Chekydran can only be trusted to stab him in the back,” Seaghdh said. He froze, staring at her. “Where were you supposed to be?”

Her father looked between them, understanding dawning in his face.

She nodded. “I’d thought of it. If the mission had gone to spec, Dad would have cleared quarantine yesterday, docked, and unloaded the ship. I might have prepped my samples and then locked them up. Today, I would have reported to my CO.”