Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (28 page)

Messiah users
, Raena thought.
Returning from their dreams? She didn’t know enough about the drug to understand the connection, but it
felt
important
. The realization jerked her awake.

She curled up on her bunk with the coverlet clenched in one fist. She felt rested now, not crazed from disgust and worry and lack of sleep. Perhaps the anesthetic had actually done the trick. As amazed as she was to admit it, Raena felt normal. Better than normal. She wondered how many nights she could drug herself to sleep before that too became a problem. She hoped one more wouldn’t hurt.

For now, however, she intended to ride this rush of energy for as long as it lasted.

Questions swirled around in her head as she got out of bed. She was seated before the terminal and had opened her journal to begin taking notes on her dream before she realized that nothing weird had happened this time. The memory spooled out just as she remembered it—the despair she’d felt, the exhaustion, the rescue, Gavin’s side trip—all of those had really happened in the way she remembered. No unusually aged Gavin had intruded on this dream. Nobody even got killed this time.

Curiosity got the better of her. She keyed in a question to the universal encyclopedia: What happened on Nizarrh after she left?

The answer only raised more questions. Not long after Sloane took her off-world, Nizarrh’s Prime Minister went on a killing spree in the planetary parliament. The Empire took control, the Coalition attacked, and millions of people—human and other—were killed in the crossfire.

According to the official record, the Prime Minister had been driven mad by a small group of addicts found dead in a filthy basement. Without exception, the terrorists were elderly, decayed, lifeless husks. All human. The record identified them as young idealists who sold their youth to depose their own government. They’d been labeled Messiah addicts.

She followed that lead, but the information she turned up was more unsettling. Messiah was the common name of a poison that forced users to metabolize at an incredible rate, burning away their youth and wasting away their bodies. It was blamed for the dissolution of more than a dozen non-aligned human-friendly planetary governments during the War. What she’d seen on Nizarrh had been no fluke. Those husks were really believed to be young revolutionaries eaten alive by the Messiah drug. She wondered if they’d ever known what kind of chaos and death their addictions had rained down on their homeworlds.

Banned throughout the galaxy, the Messiah drug seemed to have disappeared after—if not at the same time as—the fall of the human Empire. Because of that, the Empire had been accused of being the drug’s manufacturer. There was no proof either way, but for many of the sources she read, it didn’t matter.

Unquestionably, the galaxy seemed much more stable of late, its modern representative government gliding happily along, at least until the tesseract flaw had been revealed. Up until that point, no one seemed to be trying to overthrow anyone—well, there must be discontent somewhere, she was certain—but the civil wars, if they existed, had not become galactic concerns.

Had the Messiah drug really vanished? Raena doubted that any drug could be wiped out, as long as there were people vicious or foolhardy or desperate enough to use it. An addict was born every minute, as a friend of Ariel’s used to say. He’d dealt Velocity to a string of rich girls just like Ariel Shaad, leaving a trail of addicts in his wake.

So what happened to Messiah after the War? Raena pursued that line of questioning.

Answers were surprisingly difficult to pin down. While the drug had been universally banned, there didn’t seem to have been any overarching strategy to wipe it out. There was never a wave of arrests, or a drug war, or any sort of real concerted legal attack. There also hadn’t seemed to have been a huge supply network distributing the drug.

For the most part, the drug seemed to exist as a media bogeyman, except that Raena had ostensibly seen its victims. Why would Gavin have lied to her about it? Raena remembered the grim lines etched around his mouth. She wondered how he had gotten mixed up with the Messiah drug, where he had been going with the pouches he’d hidden in his coat.

She decided to take a different tack. What could she find out about Outrider, the smooth-talking pusher?

She closed her eyes and pictured him. Outrider had appeared human, except that he had been exceptionally strong. He would have been in his forties back then, lines creasing his forehead and carved around his eyes. Or he’d seemed to be in his forties, but if he used his own product, he might have actually been younger. In that case, she would never find him. He would have aged into a husk, killed by his own drug use while she’d been in prison.

She remembered the color of his hair, a foxy red that made her think of crusted blood. His hairline had receded on either side of his forehead, leaving a scraggly patch in the middle. His moon-shaped face had an unusual nose with a rounded tip. He was medium height for a human male, with his gut creeping over his belt. She decided she had a pretty good image in her head.

She wondered if he had been profiting for himself or if he had served an alien master. Had someone encouraged him to go destabilize planetary governments or was that something he did to entertain himself?

She keyed in Outrider and Messiah, but didn’t come up with any information. Probably Outrider was just the alias he had used on Nizarrh. That was going to make finding him that much harder, if she needed to know his legal name.

She wondered, though, if the lack of response she found meant that he hadn’t been arrested. Surely, if he’d gone to trial, his alias would have been a matter of record.

Maybe, she realized, there wasn’t any record in the human-based grid because—if he’d worked for the Coalition—they had hidden his identity. She would have to ask Coni to look in the broader news grid, to see if there was information about him that the humans didn’t know.

CHAPTER 13

R
aena smiled to herself and raised her head. To the empty air, she said, “Coni, can I come out now? I have a question for the crew.”

She fluffed up her hair, then turned her chair to face the door. Before long, Coni unlocked it and stood in doorway.

“You could just comm me,” the blue girl said. “You made me jump.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t certain you were listening.”

Coni gazed at her, inscrutable, and then said, “I’ll try not to abuse the privilege.”

“Thank you.”

Coni led her down the passage. The crew—without Mellix—had gathered in the lounge. Raena sat on the floor with her back to the viewscreen, where they could all see her and no one would feel threatened.

“Do any of you know anything about the Messiah drug?” No one answered, so Raena continued, “During the War, a rash of planetary governments suddenly collapsed, to be replaced by the Empire. On the rare occasions the provocateurs were captured, they were publicly identified as addicts of Messiah. The galactic government, the Coalition, the Empire, and the greater majority of planets all unanimously condemned Messiah. As soon as the War was over, the drug seemed to vanish. Because of that, humanity—and the Empire—have been blamed for its manufacture and dissemination.”

“Ancient history,” Haoun said.

“Granted.”

“What’s your interest?” Coni asked.

“I met one of the pushers, while I was on the run. He appeared to be human. I can’t find any record that he was ever captured or stopped. I think he may still be out there.”

“What?” Vezali asked, but Coni spoke over her: “Why?”

“Because the only pusher whose name was attached to this drug was never captured. This drug was widespread during the War, at least across the Border Worlds. Governments around the galaxy condemned it and its users in the strongest terms. They were afraid of it. Then suddenly, conveniently, it was gone—without any publicly announced arrests, without any trials, without bringing down the distributors or manufacturers or rounding up more than a handful of users. It vanished, at least from human historical records.”

Raena accepted the bottle of cider Mykah offered her, but didn’t crack its seal yet. “If Messiah had been human-made, it must have been distributed by the Coalition, since it was primarily non-aligned governments that fell because of it. The Empire was always the first on the scene to pick up the pieces, but they were always eventually driven out by the Coalition. If the broader membership of the Coalition was involved …”

“There’s a conspiracy,” Mykah supplied for her. Raena saw a sparkle in his eye that indicated he was intrigued.

“I can’t believe it just vanished,” Raena said. “And humans were so ready to betray each other to annihilate the last traces of the Empire, if they had been able to hunt down the manufacturers of the Messiah drug, they would have thrown them on the fire as well.”

“You want to exonerate humanity?” Coni asked.

“For a change. Can you find anything in the historical records that explains what happened to the drug?”

“I’ll take a look,” Coni promised.

Vezali asked, “But you don’t really think a drug caused governments to crumble?”

“I don’t know what the Messiah drug did, except to shrivel up its users, literally aging them to death. When I saw them, they were lying motionless on bunks in a fetid basement. It smelled like they had been there a long time. I didn’t know what happened on Nizarrh after I left—Thallian captured me not long after that and I had other things to worry about—but now, looking back, the planet exploded into all-out chaos. Millions of people were killed in the crossfire between the Empire and the Coalition. I don’t know that the Messiah drug was responsible for the bloodshed, but someone needs to avenge those deaths.”

“This is all too theoretical for me,” Haoun said. “You’ll excuse me.” He pushed himself back from the table and went off in the direction of the cockpit.

“Seems like a fair question to me,” Coni said. “I’m off to investigate.”

“I’m going to tinker,” Vezali said.

Mellix came in as everyone was leaving. Mykah asked, “Have you ever heard of the Messiah drug?”

A strange expression drew his eyebrows together. “Yes, I remember it.”

Raena jerked in surprise. “You do?”

Mellix chuckled, pleased at having startled her. “I’m older than I look.”

That was more than a simple statement of fact. Raena wondered if he’d been in the passage, eavesdropping. If so, he knew a whole lot more about her true age than she was comfortable with.

Mellix continued, “During the Human-Templar War, Messiah was quite a source of concern across the galaxy, even though its use never spread beyond what you call the Border Worlds.”

“What I don’t understand,” Raena said, “is how anyone connected a bunch of elderly addicts to the collapse of planetary governments.”

“It’s been a long time,” Mellix answered. “I’m not sure I remember very clearly. But the Messiah drug was one of the things to first interest me in Templar tech.”

Oh, he was full of surprises. “Why is that?” Raena asked.

“One of the few texts of theirs that has been translated into Standard is about moving through time with chemical help. The book is read as a novel—but some historians put it forth as an explanation of how the Messiah drug worked.”

Raena stared at him, wondering if she’d fallen into a dream and no one had noticed. Maybe, she thought blearily, what was happening to her dreams wasn’t a problem caused by a glitch in her own wiring—and that was why drugging herself hadn’t fixed it. Maybe her dreams were being hijacked. Maybe they were vestiges of an attack on time.

And maybe all the hours of interrupted sleep had finally destroyed her ability to understand what he was saying to her. She wished Coni hadn’t left, so she could ask for a translation and be sure she was jumping to the right conclusions.

“Raena,” Mykah asked cautiously, “are you all right?”

She wasn’t sure what her face was doing, but she did not feel the least bit all right. “Either I’ve lost my mind, or what’s happening to me is starting to make sense. Would you walk me back to my cabin?”

“Sure.”

Mellix watched them go without comment. Before long, Raena knew, she was going to have to decide how badly she wanted to discuss her past with the journalist.

Mykah escorted Raena back into her cabin, then said, “No points for subtlety, Raena.”

She sank onto her bed. “I know. Mellix deserves better. But something he said … What if these aren’t just nightmares I’m having? What if someone has gotten hold of the Messiah drug and is using it to change my past?”

Mykah didn’t respond.

“See, it does sound crazy,” Raena admitted. “That’s why I didn’t want to say it in front of Mellix.”

“Yes,” Mykah agreed carefully, “it does sound crazy.”

“Gavin Sloane was smuggling Messiah when I met him, just before I got captured the final time,” Raena said. “Gavin was also the dealer in Templar artifacts who funded Kavanaugh’s team and got me out of my tomb. Gavin has been in almost all of my dreams. What if he’s somehow using the Messiah drug against me?”