The Lazarus Particle (22 page)

Yet she was certain her side retained one critical advantage. Morgenthau-Hale may have perfected engine technology, true, but the Tyroshi had perfected sensor and comm technology to a point henceforth unheard of. Now that she understood the context, she could reconstruct the garbled message from Lj Zissidss in her mind.

“My Tj, I am advised you are currently in possession of several nuclear devices and that you are on a collision course with our fleet. Please respond. Please respond.”

Having failed to respond, they were now attempting to blast her into oblivion. They knew it was impossible, yet they gave it their all nonetheless. For that, she felt a great and sudden surge of admiration for her clan-kin. Warriors. They were true warriors, each and every last one of them.

Some were of different varieties than others. Even now, she knew that hundreds of her best communications technicians were feverishly attempting to subvert the encryption frequency that had no doubt locked out not just her own vessel, but communications fleet-wide. Surely one of them would manage to break through and broadcast news of their imminent demise. Eventually Tj Yeleyhi and Clan Kerikeshaala would be avenged. Vindicated. There was some solace in that. Not much, but some.

It was the only hope they had. The Free Planetary Irregulars almost certainly assumed their ambush would go undetected, leaving no trace other than the physical remnants of her fleet and the telling trace signatures of the Morgenthau-Hale vessel. It would still be a killing blow, of that there was no doubt, but not a true ambush. They had not counted on the Tyroshi’s advanced sensor technology. If even just one of her technicians was able to reopen communications long enough to transmit a distress packet, then all was not lost.

She watched her flagship growing larger and larger. The multicolored bursts of light and energy representing the fruitless bombardment of her inevitable approach became increasingly spectacular with each passing moment.

The Morgenthau-Hale engines really were quite magnificent, she mused as the yacht barreled through the blanketing cloud of fire without so much as a glancing blow. She barely felt the movement as the yacht pitched and yawed, deftly executing every daredevil maneuver its remote pilot ordered of it. Truly remarkable.

The yacht smoothed out as it adjusted course slightly. She was through the looking glass, too close for the flagship or any of the other ships to fix a solution without risk of collateral damage. Not that it mattered at this point. Dozens of blips began to emerge from the ships of her fleet, emergency vessels desperately making a last ditch effort at escape, but most if not all were doomed before they had even launched. They had waited too long, gambled too much.

And now all of Clan Kerikeshaala was to pay the price.

The silence was broken when the comm suddenly squawked to life.

“Tj Yeleyhi, please respond, repeat…”

“I am here. Report!” she barked angrily, though she could already anticipate the answer.

“All apologies, Tj!”
the voice of Lj Zissidss wailed through the comm.
“You must understand, we had no choice but to attempt to thwart your approach—”

“Enough sniveling! You must transmit a distress packet to Clan Soliorana immediately! Do you understand?!
Immediately
!”

“Tj, of course we are attempting to communicate our disposition to all loyal clans as we speak, but there is no guarantee our technicians can maintain this break in the encryption indef—”

Tj Yeleyhi felt a tidal surge of rage as the comm went silent again, never to resume. And then, with a closing sigh, she let it all ebb away to nothing. The yacht had nosed within mere kilometers of her flagship’s command module. She was seconds away from transitioning to the Aftermire. She refused to sully the rite by tainting it with her rage.

Calming herself, she prepared for the inevitable.

At last the moment of impact arrived, and for one brief and spectacularly blinding moment, Kerikeshaala: Tj Yeleyhi felt herself at the nucleus of all Creation.

24 • LAZARUS

Alexia concentrated on feeling, not thinking.

The cool, prevailing darkness of the Medical recovery room was good for that.

Torrey by her side was even better.

She could feel his breath whispering against the nape of her neck; the weight of his arm draped around her midriff; the warmth of his well defined body pressed softly against her backside.

For a moment, she could almost imagine herself feeling happy in his arms. But then imagining came dangerously close to thinking…

Behind her, Torrey stirred almost imperceptibly. Only a slight change in the rhythm of his breathing gave her any indication he had awoken.

“Can’t sleep?” he said, his words thick with fatigue.

“No. This is nice, though. I needed this. Just to be close to someone. The last few days…” She sighed, searching for the right words to complete her thought.
 

“I know.” Working his fingers between hers, he squeezed her hand. “I know.”

She paused to consider the man sharing the cot with her. The man dispatched to rescue her from the psychotic wrath of a sexual sadist, only to find she’d done as much already herself. The man who put his trust in her so readily, so unflinchingly. The man who had barely left her side in three days’ time.

“Thank you, Torrey. Thank you for being you.”

“You don’t have to keep thanking me, you know. I’m right where I want to be.”

Alexia turned to face him. Her face was a welter of bruises commemorating Vron’s assault, each one a swirling constellation of sickly yellows and swollen purple. Judging by the way he smiled when they locked eyes, he couldn’t have cared less. “So… it’s not just me, then?”

“It’s definitely not just you.”
 

Alexia closed her eyes tightly, grinning broadly against the tears welling in them.

“Is it really so hard to believe?”

“No,” she said softly. Not after the way he had looked at her. Not after the subtle shift of his hands or the way their bodies had gravitated even closer together, virtually eliminating all the space between the thin, thermal body stockings separating them. Not after all they had been through together in such a remarkably short period of time. “No, it’s not.” She laughed cathartically. “I wanted to say something sooner, to see if you felt the same thing. I just thought you would think I was crazy or overwhelmed with grief or PTSD or I don’t know what.” She buried her face in his chest, half laughing, half crying with relief.

“You’re too strong for me to think anything like that.” Holding her close, Torrey lifted a hand to stroke her hair. “Me, though… I didn’t want you to think I was trying to take advantage of the situation just to get closer to you. Especially after the way we met.”

Lifting her head, she quickly dried her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I know you wouldn’t do that. You’re not that kind of man.”

There was a moment of mutual hesitation before they found each other’s lips in the dark. It was a small and glancing thing—a peck, really, if even that—but the kiss that landed next was anything but. Alexia drew in her lips as they separated, savoring the lingering warmth Torrey left upon them. She sighed and settled comfortably into his warm embrace.

Five minutes. All she wanted was five minutes to hold and be held by her new boyfriend/lover/whatever Torrey was. They could work out how to label each other later. With the war over, or at least entering an unprecedented new stage requiring weeks of redeployments, staging, and strategizing, there would be time for these things. Time to get to know each other better, to settle into routines, to figure out if this budding battlefield romance was something that could really last…

For now, though, just five minutes.

She got just shy of three before an urgent knock sounded through the door.

“Specialist DeCoud? You’re going to want to hear this.”

“So unfaaair,” Alexia groaned into Torrey’s shoulder.

“They wouldn’t knock if it wasn’t something important,” he reminded her. He was always doing that, gently fanning the flame of her hope whenever it started to waver. One more thing to appreciate about the man.

They dressed quickly and kissed again—longingly—before meeting Dr. Perry in the hall. “How is he?”

“Dell remains stable but physically unresponsive. This has more to do with a possible… well, I hesitate to call it an actual
treatment
.” Dr. Perry shook her head. “Better you hear it from the source. This kind of thing is
well
outside my wheelhouse.”

‘The source’ proved to be none other than the daring (insane?) souls who had run the Tyroshi blockade and executed what she understood to be the nearly impossible retrieval maneuver that brought Dell back from the clutches of cold infinity. They were the reason she would have a body to bury just as soon as she could bring herself to pull the plug on her baby brother. She hadn’t even met any of them, but she felt an instant emotional connection nonetheless. Like looking upon long-lost family for the first time in so many years.

“Alexia DeCoud,” Commandant Soroya said. “I do not believe you have had the pleasure of meeting our new friends. This is Fenton Wilkes and Roon McNamara. Fenton, Roon, I give you Specialist Alexia DeCoud and Corporal Gennison Torrance, though as I understand it he prefers to be addressed in the casual form by ‘Torrey’ when he is off duty, as he is presently.”

“Thank you both so much for what you did to bring back my brother,” Alexia blurted after the introductions.

“Simply a matter of right place, right time,” Roon said. “And to be fair, Ensign Cassel did the hard part. I just called it in.”

“Still, thank you.”

“It means a lot,” Torrey added. “To both of us.”

“So,” Alexia said after the moment cleared. “What exactly are we talking about here? Dr. Perry mentioned something about some sort of non-treatment?”

Fenton and Roon exchanged glances. Roon nodded. “Okay,” Fenton started. “I was part of a top secret section of Morgenthau-Hale called the Biotech Development Initiative. I worked for the Applied Sciences Division. We used to call ourselves the ‘Dirty Secrets Brigade.’ The things we worked on…”

“Fenton,” Roon prodded gently.

“Right, right. Anyway, I was the head of a team working on a project called the Lazarus Particle. What we called it, anyway.”

Roon cut in, rolling her eyes. “Forgive him. Scientists have a tendency to over explain, I’ve recently discovered. His team—him, really—created an electromechanical nanite capable of symbiotically assimilating with the host’s most complex biological functions.” Roon took a breath as she finished, looking from Fenton to Alexia and back again. “Did I get all that right?”

Fenton practically gaped. “I—yes. You did. I’m impressed.”

Roon beamed even as the others stared.

“I’m sorry,” Alexia said, “I’m not sure I understand. How will any of that help with Dell?”

Fenton winced almost imperceptibly. “Well, when I was being interrogated by Morgenthau-Hale, they drugged my food with triggerfly venom to get me to reveal what my discovery was and what I had done with it before going on the run. Only they got a little overzealous, and I overdosed. Violently.”

“Then you should be dead,” Commander Harm said flatly.

“No kidding. I felt like I was dying. But, next morning, there I was. Granted, I was in a bad way—”

“I can attest to that,” Roon offered.

“—but I was alive.”

Commander Harm narrowed his eyes, grinning just so. “I think I get it. The nanites were
in you.
You injected yourself with them before you went on the run.
That’s how you kept them close without anyone ever thinking to scan you. And then—”

“And then they repaired the damage inflicted by the triggerfly venom,” Fenton confirmed. “Kept my central nervous system humming and my vital organs from dissolving.”

“At least, that’s the working theory,” Roon added.

“As for Dell, they just might be able to repair the parts of his brain that shut down. How that affects anything else—memories, motor function, what have you—we have absolutely no idea. This is all theoretical, after all; pure conjecture. Nothing more. No promises.”

“We have to try,” Alexia said immediately, full of determination, then seemed to waver. “Right?” she asked, looking up at Torrey.

“I think it’s worth a shot,” he said solemnly. “If this triggerfly venom is half as bad as they say it is, they can’t do him much worse, can they?”

Alexia spent several agonizing seconds worrying her bottom lip with her teeth before the answer finally came to her. “Okay. What do we have to do?”

“Nothing except give your consent as next of kin,” Fenton said, rolling up his sleeve. “He just needs some of my blood and the nans should do the rest.”

“Are you even his blood type?”

“I’m a universal donor. Though I suspect the nans could probably handle that, too, if it really came down to it.”

“Okay,” Alexia said to Dr. Perry. She felt Torrey squeeze his hand around hers, offering his unwavering support as always. “Do it.”

Dr. Perry stepped up, hypo at the ready. “You’ll feel a slight pinch.”

Fenton just smirked. “I’ve felt a lot worse.”

Less than a second later, Dr. Perry had extracted ten milliliters of Fenton’s nanite-saturated blood. It looked like any blood sample Alexia had ever seen or given.

Dr. Perry was about to apply it to Dell’s arm when she looked back at Alexia. “You’re positive?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay. Here goes nothing.” She thumbed the injector and there went Fenton’s blood into Dell’s body. Somehow she half expected the effect to be immediate, for him to open his eyes with a gasp and sit bolt upright, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

But no. Dell didn’t so much as stir. He was as dead as they’d found him. At least to the naked eye.

“How long before it takes effect?” Torrey asked, practically reading her mind.

“Well, to be honest, I have no idea. I was on the run from Morgenthau-Hale for six months before Xenecia caught me, and then—”