Enemy Within (36 page)

“Angelou,” he said.

Her father frowned. “You cannot seriously believe . . .”

“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “I don’t have hard proof of anything, yet. Just casings.”

Dr. Idylle nodded. “Chekydran plagues, when they die or are destroyed by an immune system cell, leave behind fragments of the molecular sheathes that protected the plague’s genetic material,” he said, Ari assumed for Seaghdh’s benefit. “We can’t tell much about the plague from its sheath, other than it had been present.”

“What amounts to circumstantial evidence?” Seaghdh surmised.

“Evidence that often leads to an inoculation,” Ari said slowly looking at her dad. “Hell of a difference in parsing molecular markers and a lot of coincidental information leading back to Angelou’s office, Dad.”

He nodded. “I know. Why do you think I prefer pathogens to politics?”

“We have to cure whatever this is,” she said. “We’d always believed that the Chekydran worked for decades to create a plague that would wipe out humanoids entirely, but what if they were just poisoning vermin? Trying to keep humanoids from spilling over into their territory?”

Seaghdh straightened. “What?”

“No. You’ve seen the data,” her father said.

“We’ve been assigning human motivation to a non-humanoid species, Dad.”

Her father narrowed his eyes. “Explain.”

“What do we know about the Chekydran? What is their societal structure? We describe them as bugs and assume they’re a hive society. Based on what I observed, that seems to hold. My captor has a queen, but I’m not clear if there’s only one or if every male has a queen or if ‘queen’ means to them what it means to us. We’re limited by the fact that I’m evaluating my observations based on my only frame of reference.”

“Which is defined by tiny insect and insectoid, hive-based creatures with a single queen, few drones, and an almost exclusively female population,” her father mused.

“If the comparison holds,” Ari said, “we could posit that the Chekydran hive had grown too large and that they were swarming in search of new territory to support the population.”

“Something we cannot know for fact,” her dad countered.

“If we can’t know that,” Ari pressed, “how do we define what’s behind the slow but persistent escalation in Chekydran aggression?”

“Is that impression?” her father demanded. “Or do you have data?”

“We have data,” Seaghdh answered in her stead. “Analysis is incomplete.”

Ari blinked. Sindrivik worked fast if he’d already parsed through the data she’d dumped in Seaghdh’s file share.

“The emerging data pattern suggests it’s not just impression,” Seaghdh said.

Her father nodded, disquiet in the lines around his eyes. “Yet we can’t say for certain what drives them.”

“We can’t even say why they capture the ships and people they capture,” Ari said.

“We can in some instances,” Seaghdh countered. “They are damned single-minded about spies. They are quick to accuse and quicker to kill once they’ve accused. Can’t we deduce from that behavior that they’re territorial?”

“Yes,” Ari allowed. She shook her head, frowning. “Or does it go beyond territorial? When a humanoid government is so defensive of its secrets, it’s usually because there’s a secret worth preserving.”

Seaghdh and her father stared at her, no comprehension in their faces.

“Are you suggesting,” her father essayed, “that the Chekydran are protecting a secret that could destroy them?”

“I have no idea how to find out.”

Her father sighed and paced in front of the medi-bay door. He stopped short in the middle of his third pass and blinked at her. “Do you know, we don’t even have a single genetic profile on the species?”

“No one has ever recovered a Chekydran body?” Ari marveled.

“Let me check some files,” Seaghdh said. He opened a channel to Sindrivik and began issuing rapid-fire instructions.

“We’ve assumed,” her father said, drawing her attention away from Seaghdh, “given the structure of plagues and delivery mechanisms, that the Chekydran must have a DNA structure similar to our own. It is another assumption based on no hard evidence.”

“Then how does a non-humanoid species know so much about the DNA structures of humanoids?” Ari finished for him. A fleeting suspicion made her turn to Seaghdh. “Do you have records of known instances of the Chekydran taking prisoners?”

“I’ll find out.”

“What are you thinking?” her father demanded.

Ari turned back to meet his gaze. “What if the research we’re doing, tracing back through layers of plague, represents the Chekydran’s learning curve?”

“They didn’t know our DNA but over the centuries learned it?” Her father surmised. “You think Ioccal is a Chekydran petri dish?”

Ari shrugged. “It is close to the border. We have direct evidence of generation after generation of disease, all related. It’s almost like the plagues were timed and their results observed. Just like an experiment. How else do we account for the older illnesses that had such limited impact on the citizens of Ioccal?”

“Your PhD samples?” Seaghdh said, returning to her side and glancing between them. “You had them in containment. If they weren’t harmful . . .”

Her father cut him off. “You don’t gamble with engineered plagues. We have no way of knowing how many generations occupied Ioccal, nor what had changed in the germ line.”

“In the what?”

“Changes to the base genetic coding of the species,” Ari clarified. “Planets force humanoids to adapt. When enough adaptations occur we talk about species differentiation. Because we had no surviving examples of the Ioccal citizens, we can’t say whether their resistance to the samples I brought aboard was related to specific adaptations inspired by the planet.”

“You never recovered DNA from the remains?”

“Of course we did,” her dad said, “from only a few individuals, however. Certainly not enough for a statistically significant sampling.”

“Can we use any of these samples to find out what the Chekydran did to Ari?” Seaghdh asked.

Dad shook his head. “We’re working on that. It takes time.”

Ari blew out a breath. Not good news. “That’s going to cost lives.”

“Yes, it is,” Dad said, his voice muted.

The medi-bay com pinged. Seaghdh opened the channel.

“No first-contact record, Auhrnok. And no genetic files on this first pass,” Sindrivik said. “However, I pulled and compiled all known captures of humanoids by Chekydran. It validates the impression that Chekydran activity has been increasing.”

“Details,” Seaghdh said.

“Several centuries ago, the fledgling mining guilds began sending prospectors into Chekydran space,” he said. “No one knew it was anyone’s space at the time, obviously, but significant numbers of those ships never returned. I’m counting them as Chekydran kills.”

“Go on.”

“Capture numbers remain steady for centuries, though I had to factor in aggression by the various humanoid factions. If TFC colonization or military activity increased near the border, so did the capture rates. Same pattern among the Claugh and the UMOPG.”

Ari frowned. “That doesn’t . . .”

“Until forty years ago,” Sindrivik said. “There is a sharp uptick in the number of captures, regardless of colony or military actions.”

“Define sharp,” her father instructed.

“Twenty-seven percent, Dr. Idylle.”

“Give me an analysis on . . .”

Sensor alarms erupted both in the background of the open com channel and aboard the
Sen Ekir
.

“Captain Seaghdh!” Peitre’s voice rang over ship-wide. “The
Dagger
is taking fire from a pair of Chekydran cruisers!”

Ari gasped. “Chekydran?”

“Where the Three Hells are we?” Seaghdh demanded.

“Claugh space,” Pietre replied.

“You’re sure?” Dad barked.

“Gods damn it, Linnaeus!” Pietre said. “We left the border six hours ago! It never occurred to me to scan for Chekydran particle trails here!”

“Of course not,” Ari said. “Their being here is a declaration of war! None of our intelligence suggests they would initiate this kind of aggression. They’ve preferred indirect methods up to now . . .” She trailed off, shuffled data in her head, and swore. “If we’re guessing correctly and they’re swarming, we have to treat this as an all-out power grab. Get us video to the
Dagger
, Pietre! Intraship stays open.”

“All personnel, report to duty stations,” her father commanded.

Hicci was out there. Ari’s blood ran cold. She swore under her breath, trying to control her suddenly racing heart rate.

Video lit up the desktop behind her. She and Seaghdh spun. Ari had never seen the bridge of the
Dagger
. Eilod, flushed, ill, harried, and pissed as all Three Hells, sat strapped into the command chair. Turrel manned a station on her right. Ari flipped the channel open.

“You’re on,” she said to Seaghdh.

He demanded status in Claughwyth. A curl of blue electrical smoke rose from a panel behind Eilod’s head.

Ari waited, braced against the desk for the jolt that would accompany another shot hitting the
Dagger
. It didn’t come.

“They aren’t firing,” she said, frowning. “They want something.” She swallowed hard, fear turning her innards to water.

Seaghdh straightened. He met her gaze with a grim eye. “You.”

ARI
sat staring at her handheld, her mind spurred into overdrive, by the tactical data Turrel shunted to the unit.

Two Chekydran cruisers. Fully staffed, the
Dagger
would have given them a serious run for their money. But the list of the sick and dying aboard the Claugh nib Dovvyth royal flagship left half of the great ship’s stations unmanned.

Eilod brought Ari’s father and his crew into her conference room via holograph emitters. Ari knew the queen didn’t like it, but she’d left Seaghdh and Ari on video, since Raj’s tiny medi-bay couldn’t support holographic projections. It was bad enough, Ari discovered, because Seaghdh, feverish and coughing, needed to pace.

Ari had to find a way to turn this group baxt’k to their advantage.

“They have declared war upon the empire of the Claugh nib Dovvyth,” Eilod said. “Let us declare war upon them. I want proof of a Chekydran-Armada alliance. Captain Idylle. Can I put a strike team aboard one of those ships?”

Ari stared at Eilod’s angry face. A strike team? Comprised of coughing, dying soldiers? Sitting upright, she grabbed fiercely at the thought dashing through her head. Strike teams ran risks, dying among them. If they could strike a solid blow before death came calling, so much the better.

“You need a diversion,” she said. “Something that will let your team board and move about the ship without being murdered instantly.” If most of them didn’t drop dead from the plague on the way in.

Ari sucked in a short breath and bit her lip. She couldn’t believe she was going to say the words. “You need me on board that ship.”

Eilod frowned. “I don’t believe that would be in anyone’s best interests.”

“Especially not mine,” she agreed. “However, the Chekydran use a low-level aural hum as a sort of neural network.”

Seaghdh nodded. “You once mentioned creating a sonic disrupter.”

“Exactly. If it’s going to have a chance at working, I have to be there.”

“I don’t see why,” he argued.

“We need their computers,” Eilod said, cutting off Seaghdh’s willingness to quarrel. “Intact.”

“They aren’t computers,” Ari replied.

Every face in the
Dagger
’s conference room, including the holograms of Ari’s father and his crew, swiveled to look at her. In that moment, she realized how much information she had about the Chekydran that no one else knew. No wonder her life had been worth so much on the open market.

“They are a stunted larval form of the Chekydran soldiers you are familiar with,” she said. “They are kept in the most protected portion of the ship in a climate- and nutrient-controlled crèche. Pull one out of its bed and it dies.”

“They’re alive?”

“Yes. Aware and part of the neural net of the ship. The hum that deep is mind and body numbing.”

Seaghdh exchanged a calculating glance with his cousin.

Turrel, looking faintly distressed, rubbed his chin.

V’kyrri scowled, staring at a spot on the table. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and he frequently shook his head as if to clear his eyesight.

Sindrivik leaned forward, hands folded, gaze and curiosity intense. He and Turrel remained symptom free.

Her father and Raj watched her, concern lining their faces.

“We tried to capture a ship once,” Turrel said. “Got some good shots in. Disabled propulsion and knocked out a communications array so they couldn’t call for help.”