Warrior (18 page)

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Authors: Angela Knight

BOOK: Warrior
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Tarik studied him, light glinting on his horn implants. Marcin bowed from the waist, lowering his head to the depth required by Tarik's rank, then a little deeper to indicate his personal respect.
Tarik inclined his head slightly in return. “Thou hast left the blood of thy repentance on the stone.” His voice was beautiful, giving the lyrical words of the priestly language a kind of dark music.
“I have not yet killed the heretic. My failure shames me.” He lifted his head and met Tarik's eyes with his best calm and level stare. “But I shall succeed.”
“It is as well.” Tarik sank gracefully to his knees on the other side of the fire bowl. “We have decided we wish to execute the apostate publicly.”
The tensed muscles in Marcin's back relaxed fractionally. He might yet get out of this interview with his life, though he knew better than to hope he would not bleed. “As thou will.” He inclined his head.
“Of more importance is the location of the Abominations, that they may be destroyed and the T'lir obtained. That must be thy priority.” He began to take pinches of herbs from each of the silver boxes, each gesture smooth, graceful, an act of ritual. “If the heretic does not survive thy questioning, do not concern thyself. The Abominations must be eliminated before they spread their poison. And the T'lir— it's the key to the Fatherland's victory over our enemies.” He lifted a sparker next, flicking the metal device in the fire bowl to produce a tongue of flame and a curl of glowing green smoke.
Marcin closed his eyes and breathed deeply, drawing the smoke into his lungs. In seconds, he felt his senses sharpening. Beneath his knees, the prickle of his rough robe began to feel like tiny shards of glass digging into his skin. He managed not to grind his teeth or shift his weight.
Opening his eyes, he met Tarik's cool gaze. The pain of the robe's fibers intensified, but he didn't allow himself to blink. Sweat rolled down the small of his back, a silent testimony to his misery.
I am the master of my body,
Marcin chanted to himself.
My body does not master me.
Another agonizing minute ticked by. Then two. Then three. Then ten, every second bringing more and more pain as his overstimulated nerves reacted to the drug. He never moved.
Until Tarik drew the knife from his sleeve and put it down before him. A faint smile curved the warrior priest's mouth.
Marcin knew that if he'd failed the test, Tarik would have slit his throat with that blade. He didn't allow his triumph to show on his serene face.
Tarik snapped his fingers. A panel opened, and a courier ball flew into his hand. “Here are thy new orders. A trap has been prepared for the other heretic, the primitive Jessica Kelly. You will lend thy assistance before returning to thy hunt for the apostate.”
Though a thousand questions flooded his mind, Marcin merely inclined his head. “As thou will.”
Tarik paused and lifted a coal black brow. He said nothing, but he didn't need to. Marcin knew what he expected.
He flipped his robe open, baring his groin. Then he picked up the thorned silver wire and began to wrap it around his penis as his sensitized nerves howled in agony.
Approval lit Tarik's icy red eyes.
The alien ship
was dark and strange, a warren of snaking corridors, oddly-shaped rooms, and bizarre equipment that was obviously not designed for the use of anyone with two legs and ten fingers.
First Scientist Chara va Hol moved cautiously down one of the ship's dim corridors, fascinated and wary as she examined the curving bulkheads. It was more like walking around inside a living creature than a vessel.
Which was actually an apt comparison, since sensor
readings suggested the material around her was organic, similar to a neuronet computer. Was this entire vessel a comp?
Humming in interest, Chara contemplated data from the small flotilla of sensor globes that orbited her like floating silver apples. Her headset projected the information into her mind in a gentle shower of data.
“Any sign of the T'lir?” Warrior Monk Decarro ge Ralit demanded, his armored boots scraping on the deck as he trailed her.
“Not so far.”
He grunted. His body thin and hard as a sword blade, his features narrow and pinched, Ralit reminded Chara far too much of her father. Something in his fanatic's eyes made the flesh of her shoulders jerk with the memory of childhood scourgings. She fought to ignore the sensation. She could not afford the distraction.
She had to make the most of this opportunity.
Chara had already scored quite a coup in being the one to discover that the Sela ship had Jumped into Earth's distant past. Which should have been impossible. No one had ever managed to Jump an entire ship.
How had the Sela done it? The Empire would give much for such technology.
If Chara capped that discovery by being the first to learn where the aliens had hidden the T'lir, her future as a temporal anthropologist would be assured.
Unfortunately, there were ten other teams searching the alien ship. Beating them to the prize would not be easy, but achieving victory would be more than worth the effort.
Encouraged by that enticing vision, Chara went back to dictating notes into her headset log. “This ship is ancient. At least a thousand years old, according to my scans. If the Sela were capable of such advanced tech a thousand years ago, why were they living like agrarian primitives when we discovered them last year?”
“Because they are Abominations,” Ralit growled in the priest tongue. “And mad. Mind their heresy does not infect thee as it did the expeditionary force.” His hand fell to the shard pistol at his hip, fondling its silver butt.
Her shoulders twitched again, but she made no answer. Ralit would not have welcomed comment, for he was of the same sect as her father. He, too, believed that women were by nature weak and lacking in warrior virtues.
Though Javor va Hol had done his best to score those virtues into Chara's flesh with the whip and the wire. . . .
Chara came to an abrupt halt, her attention captured by a discrepancy in the data. “Huh.”
“What goes?” the monk demanded.
She lifted a gloved hand to run it across the wall to her left. The sensor globes orbited faster, as if excited. “According to my sensors, this section of bulkhead is five hundred meters thick.”
“Shielding for the T'lir?” Ralit asked eagerly before frowning in sudden unease. “Or some weapon?”
Chara snorted. “I doubt it. People advanced enough to Jump an entire ship three hundred years into the past would have better means of shielding than simple mass. No, I think these readings are an illusion. According to the expeditionary force's files, the Sela are certainly capable of such.”
He recoiled, his crimson eyes dilating in horror. “They interfere with our minds?”
She made no answer, too busy running her hands over the ridges and swirls of the bulkhead. Just prior to this mission, Chara had downloaded an EDI that contained every bit of data the ill-fated expeditionary force had collected on the Sela before being suborned into heresy.
“I think I recognize this pattern of indentations,” she told the monk as she pressed her fingers into them. Two of the marks, however, remained beyond her reach. She growled in frustration. “Curse it, their anatomy is too different; I can't trigger them by myself. Ralit, put your fingers there and there.”
Reluctantly, the monk placed thumb and pinkie where she indicated and pressed in at her nod.
The bulkhead slid aside, revealing a vast, echoing space filled with row after row of glowing golden eggs, each bigger than a man. Chara smiled in satisfaction. “The crew.”
For a moment, music seemed to fill the air, heard not so much with the ear as in the heart, in the very pump of the blood. Heaven's own aria, sweet and slow and soft. She drew in a breath in pure wonder.
Then the music was gone. Or had she imagined it?
Apparently not. Ralit's hand fell to his shard pistol again, a profound fear in his eyes. “Unnatural!” he hissed.
Chara advanced toward the nearest of the eggs, trailed by her swarm of sensor globes. Through its translucent shell, she could see its occupant, six-legged and richly furred, lying curled and still. She contemplated the data. “They seem to be in some kind of travel sleep.”
“Make one of them tell you where the T'lir is,” the monk growled, following at a cautious distance. “Then we'll blow this whole cursed vessel and everything in it.”
Chara bit back an instinctive protest at the waste. To Ralit, the Sela were not vastly advanced beings, but a proven danger to the faithful. Hadn't they seduced an entire expeditionary force into turning their backs on the Victor? If not for the enticing possibilities offered by the T'lir, the Cathedral Fortress would have ordered the Sela's home world burned to bare rock.
Chara shrugged. Well, waste or not, she had a job to do. The Victor knew this wasn't the first mission to fill her with distaste.
She contemplated the egg, trying to work out how to open it. After a moment, she found the correct position of fingers in indentations, and the whole thing swung open like a clamshell, sighing softly.
The alien within it stirred and lifted its silken head. Enormous eyes blinked open and met hers.
Chara inhaled sharply. She had never met such a gaze in her life, so wise, so compassionate. There was sadness there, and understanding, and
—
Forgiveness?
“Use your probe on it,” Ralit snapped. “The pain will make it spill its secrets quickly enough.”
Chara shot him a revolted glance. He wasn't even looking at her, his gaze instead focused on the alien, his upper lip drawn up in an expression that was half snarl, half grin. A dark, horrific excitement filled his eyes, almost sexual in its anticipation.
He really did remind her of her father.
What am I doing?
The thought stabbed through Chara's heart like a blade. It had the raw force of a question she'd hidden from herself for years. Decades.
Why am I playing any part at all in this perversion?
She looked back at the alien. It lay in its egg, watching her quietly, as if waiting for her decision.
“The probe,” Ralit demanded again, licking his lips. “Use the probe.”
You want it tortured, you torture it.
The words hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she didn't bother to utter them. Ralit would be afraid to touch the alien for fear its heresy would contaminate him.
And because he didn't trust Chara, weak woman that she was, so lacking in Warrior virtues. What would she do while he was . . . distracted?
“Ah, child,” a voice said in her thoughts. To her astonishment, it sounded female, though power rang in every rolling mental syllable. “What have your people done to you?”
“Torn me asunder.” The thought flashed through her, more a product of the heart than the mind. And all the more true for it.
“Yes,” the voice replied. “I see that.”
Chara found herself reaching toward the alien's muzzle, driven to discover if its fur was as soft as it looked.
“No!” Ralit barked. “Do not touch it! It will contaminate thy thoughts with heresy!”
Too late. Her fingers had already met that honey-gold fur, thick and impossibly soft. But there was more in that instant of contact, so much more Chara's mind vibrated like a silver bell.
There was power.
She caught her breath as the creature's consciousness flooded hers. Its mind was unimaginably ancient, radiating peace and understanding. There was no judgment in the Sela's thoughts, no condemnation for Chara's failures, no sense that her softness made her unworthy of life.
Vanja,
Chara thought in wonder.
She calls herself Vanja.
And in a moment, Ralit would force Chara to take the probe off her belt and bury it in this exquisitely soft fur. She'd have to watch the Sela writhe and scream as the air filled with the stench of burning flesh. Until Vanja broke under the pain and betrayed her people and herself
—
and gave the Sela's greatest secret to the Xeran Empire.
Which would use it to plunge the galaxy into war.
But if Chara did not do these things . . .
“Your people will kill you if you try to save us,” Vanja warned in that soft mental voice.
“I will not tell you again, Chara
—
draw your probe.” Ralit stepped closer, his eyes cold, demanding, his hand on his holstered shard pistol. “And do your job.”
Fear shot through Chara under his icy stare. Her father had looked at her the same way before every session of “instruction. ” She reached for the probe.
Instead, her hand found the shard pistol next to it. In one smooth motion, she drew the weapon and shot Ralit in the chest. The spray of metal shards took him full on, echoed in reverse by a spray of bright heart's blood. For one shocked
instant as he fell to the deck, Chara was reminded of a crimson flower.
Her sensor globes scattered like frightened birds. Off to report the murder to her superiors, no doubt.
Coolly, Chara pivoted and shot them out of the air. They hit the deck with a chorus of tiny pings. She turned back to the monk.
Looking down into his astonished, blood-flecked face, she realized it had never occurred to him that she'd find the courage to kill him.

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