Jaeia let her fingertips graze the smooth, cold surface of the wall. Victor was playing this perfectly. He was attacking the Starways on every possible front—politically, economically, militarily, and socially. Some he attacked insidiously, some outright, but all with such precision and guile that she couldn’t predict his next move. But every counter-maneuver or offensive of her own was met with an effective response.
His latest move was to play to the sympathies of the Human Rights movement while placating the Freedom Libertariats by promising both sides that he would end the human–Sentient conflict that had been raging since first contact centuries ago. If he was successful, that would mean the end of the Alliance and the totalitarian reign of his new Republic.
For reasons she couldn’t rationalize but felt deep within her bones, she knew that he had waited for this moment for years. Maybe even orchestrated it over the centuries. He had destroyed the Alliance’s defenses in seconds, all but stripped the General Assembly, and somehow stopped the Motti in their tracks. If he could do those things, he could do anything.
But unlike any other enemy she had faced, Victor was nearly impregnable, hiding behind the wall of people he had erected around himself. Li ran his army, and he was quickly appointing delegates from the most wealthy and influential worlds to his court. He wasn’t the prominent face of the Republic—at least not yet—but he certainly held all the strings.
For some reason it reminded her of Yahmen, how he had set up her uncle to take the fall when he ran into debt. With Galm taking his beatings, he had weaseled his way out of trouble, even nabbing Lohien for himself along the way.
“Mugarruthepeta,” she mumbled in her native tongue.
She looked up and saw that she had somehow wandered into the restricted area of the security and interrogation wing. She stood only meters away from the room where she had confronted Razar about what he was doing to Reht and the crew of the Wraith.
She had the clearance to be there, but every security guard within range asked if she required assistance, which she thought was odd, but when she checked the time on her sleeve she knew she would have to investigate the matter later.
Jaeia was about to leave when she heard someone call her name. “Captain Kyron?”
She turned in time to see a young male human being escorted into a holding cell. He was no older than his late teens, with sandy-blonde hair and fair skin. For a moment she lost herself in the deep violet of his eyes.
“Keep moving,” the guard said, shoving him inside the cell.
“Wait,” Jaeia said, catching up to them. There was something about the way he looked at her, the way his eyes were too old to belong to a young man. “Who are you—what do you want?”
“Sir, you should go now. We’re about to start the interview,” the guard insisted.
Jaeia knew right then who he was. He wasn’t human at all. His DNA read human—even his telepathic signature was human—but inside him was a little green worm that had spun his body to resemble the young man she saw before her. And it wasn’t an interview. They were using the Spinner’s replicated body as a weapon against whatever prisoner they were holding in that cell. They would mangle, torture, and even kill the Spinner’s body if it meant extracting the information they needed. She had witnessed it before, most recently when they had tortured Reht.
Jaeia was furious. She had petitioned the military council to put an end to the abuse of the Spinners, but despite their reassurances and promises, it was still going on.
She pulled the guard aside. “Who gave you these orders?”
“Minister Razar, Captain.”
Jaeia grabbed the guard’s sleeve and scrolled through his orders. The tactics he was cleared to use made her sick to her stomach.
“Who’s the prisoner?”
The guard was careful with his words so they would betray no emotion. “That is classified, Sir.”
Jaeia was about to press her authority when her uniform sleeve beeped, alerting her to the meeting.
“Soldier, I’m ordering you to delay your interview until I return from my meeting. One hour.”
“But Sir, I was given explicit orders from the Minister before he—”
Jaeia was tempted to use her second voice, but not now, not when she was this emotional. Not when there was a chance she might go farther than making the guard delay his interview.
“My name is Aesis,” the young man said, “and I’m tired of dying.”
Jaeia took his hand and pushed the guard away. “He’s coming with me.”
“But Sir, I—”
Jaeia summoned a lift and led Aesis onto it, ignoring the warnings of the guard.
“Sir, I must insist. I was given strict orders by the Minister.”
“Last I checked it was Wren who was custodian of that title,” Jaeia replied coolly. “Stand down or I’ll have you arrested.”
The guard was one of the better-trained practitioners of Rai Shar, as all of the personnel in interrogations were, but snippets of his thoughts seeped through his frustration. This was a classified mission known only to the Minister, a last resort, something he had authorized before falling into a coma.
“Thank you,” Aesis said as they cruised down the corridors.
“Do you know who were you impersonating?” Jaeia asked.
Aesis looked at his feet, his shoulders hunched forward like a whipped dog. “They say you’re different from the other officers, Captain. They say you can bring peace to this galaxy. I hope they’re right.”
The way he said it made her blush, but she was quick to compose herself. “Aesis, please, tell me. I want to help you.”
He lifted his head, his gaze meeting hers, his warm violet eyes somehow penetrating her guard.
“I’m not sure. I’m never told. They just give me a strand of hair or a few flecks of skin, and then that’s it. I just wait to...”
Aesis pressed his lips together, his eyes finishing the sentence. Die.
“I have no idea what you’ve been through,” Jaeia began stupidly. She wrestled with what to say next, but Aesis diffused the tension. He smiled shyly, his violet eyes connecting again with hers.
“My mother always said to give everything at least one try. But I’d wait on that one a little while.”
The lift slowed and Jaeia lead him to the conference room where she was supposed to debrief the senior council on her peace treaty with the nine original Homeworlds. The horseshoe-shaped conference table, usually occupied by all seventeen members of the senior military council, had been reduced to just seven in the face of the political war that was dividing their ranks: Gaeshin Wren, acting Minister and CCO, Msiasto Mo, Chief of Military Intelligence, Ryeo Kaoto, Chief of Medicine, Trecyn Rook, Acting Commander of the SMT, LuShin DeAnders, the Director of Military Research, Severn Mallok, Chief Officer of the Perimeter Guard and Lory Berrara, Chief Advisor for Sentient Relations.
“Captain, what are you—?” Wren said as she instructed Aesis to take her seat at the table. The other members, who had been talking among themselves, hushed immediately upon seeing her guest.
“I was assigned to debrief you on the recent negotiations with the Nine, but I realized what our real problem is,” Jaeia said, laying a hand on Aesis’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow,” Wren said.
She would have to make her case, fast. “It took a lot of convincing for my sister and me to join the Alliance. After fighting for the Dominion we had a hard time believing that any government or military could be trustworthy in the pursuit of justice and peace. But the Alliance fought for the telepaths, campaigned for human freedom, and stood for the greater good of all Sentient kind. At least that’s what I thought.”
Aesis looked up at her, his eyes strangely calm and steadfast. She couldn’t read Spinner minds, but somehow she felt his silent reassurance.
“This is Aesis, and he is a Spinner. When I look at him, I see that we are no better than our enemies. We torture and kill his kind b
ecause it benefits our interrogations and allows us to stay within legal limits of prisoner rights. Yes, he can replicate hundreds of thousands of bodies, and he is monetarily compensated for his work—but what psychological damage are we doing to him and all the other Spinners, and how do we continue to justify our actions?”
Jaeia rounded the table to stand at the apex of the horseshoe. “How can we say we are any better than our enemies when we employ such barbaric techniques against those we have sworn to protect?”
“I’m sorry, Captain, but I don’t see how this relates to our debriefing,” Wren said.
“It has everything to do with our debriefing,” Jaeia replied, careful to keep her voice from rising. “I just formed a treaty with the original nine Homeworlds, promising our protection and promising our strict adherence to the Basic Rights Tenets of the Starways. I promised them that we would honor and protect every life form, to be guardians of the laws of the Homeworlds. But how can we continue to exploit the Spinners and uphold these oaths?”
Wren broke the silence. “Captain, a word with you?”
Jaeia followed Wren into the private council room adjacent to the conference center.
“Of all the people I have ever served with, surely you understand why we have employed the Spinners. And if you pretend not to, then you choose to deceive yourself.”
Jaeia wasn’t prepared for that to come from Gaeshin Wren. He saw it in her face and explained in his usual calm fashion.
“Democracy, Sentient Rights, freedom, liberty—these are words that politicians use to quell the public. The public—the politicians—they don’t understand war like you and I do. They don’t know that the rules of decency and humanity don’t apply when your enemy is gunning down your friends and family. They don’t understand that sometimes the smart decision has to supersede the right decision in the battle for survival. Sometimes there can be no negotiations, no trials, no rulebooks. Not for the greater good.”
Jaeia struggled with a response. She couldn’t entirely disagree with Wren. There were some people that only understood the language of violence. Even without her thousands of years of gleaned knowledge, her experience on Fiorah had proved that.
In the back of her mind she heard Yahmen’s brutal laugh, and a shiver ran up her spine. Yahmen never understood reason, never listened to any of their pleas or cared about anything but pleasuring himself with their pain. Yahmen would have eventually beaten them to death if they had stayed on Fiorah. She would have had to let Jetta fight back—they would have all had to fight back. They would have had to kill him to survive, breaking all the rules and beliefs she had always stood by.
Jaeia thought of Jahx. “There has to be another way.”
Wren placed a hand on her shoulder. “I admire your conviction, Jaeia, but your first duties are as a soldier of the Alliance. That soldier was given strict orders regarding that Spinner, and I need him returned to duty immediately.”
“I can’t stand idly by while they torture him, Sir.”
Wren stiffened, and Jaeia felt his thoughts immediately retract beyond her senses. “You have your orders, soldier.”
His change in temperament was unexpected and unprecedented, and it alarmed her more than she realized. She let her legs walk her back to her seat at the conference table as her mind tried to assimilate this sudden change in Wren.
“Thanks for trying,” Aesis whispered as an expressionless soldier with silver lenses wrapped his hands around the Spinner’s left wrist.
As Aesis was led out by an escort squad, Jaeia realized that she was more alone than she had originally thought. She had always believed that Wren was on her side, but now she was not so sure.
“Captain, your platform,” Wren said, drawing her back into the meeting.
Jaeia numbly walked to the front and began her debriefing. It took everything she had to concentrate as she called up the video reels of her negotiations and scrolled through the list of planetary demands on the holographic projectors.
But the words rapidly left her. It seemed meaningless to review the latest peace treaty knowing they were going to violently kill Aesis.
An urgent call from the Alliance flagship interrupted her unraveling speech.
“Chief Wren—I have a relay message from Jue Hexron. Privatized and prioritized from Victor Paulstine, addressed to the military council,” the ship’s captain said over the intercom.
Wren nodded to her and she switched over to the channels.
It was one of the prerecorded messages Victor seemed to enjoy sending them about once a day through various channels within their communications network. It was just another way to show them that he had ways inside their defenses that they weren’t even aware of.
But this one was different, she realized as his image materialized on their projectors.
“Good afternoon, officers of the Alliance. I bid you ketamei from the Holy Cities.”
Jaeia’s stomach turned to ice. Maybe it was the way his cheeks creased with his savage smile, or the way his words dripped with arrogance. He was going to make his move.
“I have come across classified files on both Jetta and Jaeia Kyron, including some rare footage of their time with the Dominion Core, and I must say that I find it very disheartening and deeply disturbing that the Alliance would continue to keep such unstable individuals in service. Admiral Unipoesa himself has submitted numerous concerns to the war council, and Jetta’s postwar breakdown should have been proof enough of their liability.”
Jaeia’s eyes immediately went to Wren. The soft-spoken Chief never took his gaze off of Victor, but he was maintaining intense focus on shielding his thoughts.
Victor held up a datawand in his hand. “Assault, perjury, larceny, murder—genocide—the charges against them are lengthy. But neither the public nor the courts know the extent of it. The military has kept many incidents classified. I am here to unveil the truth. The public needs to know who is really at the helm of the Alliance military.”
Jaeia vaguely heard Wren’s command to terminate the message. Her face was centimeters from the projector field, and it blurred the rest of the room in its blue nimbus of light.
The videos played. “I don’t remember,” she whispered.
But she did. Somewhere tucked away in the deepest, darkest corners of mind lurked the terrible knowledge of what Victor was showing. It could have been the Dominion’s drugs or some innate self-preservation mechanism that had kept her from remembering what had happened, even after the Grand Oblin had helped them on Tralora.
Jetta was shown first, her eyes unseeing as she writhed and screamed under heavy five-point restraint, her body hooked up to a confusing mess of intravenous tubing and monitors while medical staff ducked in and out of camera range. A staff psychiatrist was trying to ask her questions, but even after sedation she continued to scream. When his hand approached her shoulder, she somehow managed to break her right arm restraint and grab him by the neck. There was a crunching sound, and the doctor’s head rolled bonelessly onto his shoulder as Jetta dropped him to the ground. The camera crashed to the floor as soldiers and medical staff rushed in, showing only the scuffle of feet and empty medication vials dropping to the floor.
Another clip. In this one Jetta was catatonic, her mouth frozen open in a silent scream. A neurologist checking her readings bent toward her a little too closely, his lab coat brushing her cheek. After a moment, his face warped oddly as if he was stuck in a vacuum. He dropped his clipboard and backed against the wall, shielding himself from an invisible attacker. Moments later he was ripping out his throat with his fingernails, his screams garbled by his own blood. Medical staff poured in, trying to remove him from the scene, but his legs seemed impossibly rooted to the ground. He was dead within seconds.
Jaeia identified the time period. It was right after they defeated the Motti. Jetta had gone insane after killing Jahx. She had known of incidents during Jetta’s recovery, but not deaths.
It could have been doctored�
�reimaged—Jaeia tried to rationalize.
It got worse.
Jaeia hadn’t been allowed to see Jetta for several days after their victory over the Deadwalkers, and during that time she had only vague recollections of the intense preparations she had undergone to help her sister. She could recall being advised by several therapists and conferring with Triel about how to heal Jetta’s trauma, but she didn’t remember this frightened, out-of control young woman that needed psychological intervention herself.
“Jaeia, what do you see?” the doctor on film asked her.
Jaeia saw herself huddled in the corner of a padded room, her hair in greasy knots, fingernails ragged and chewed to the quick. Her red-rimmed eyes stared blankly at the camera as she rocked back and forth on her knees.
“He’s coming for me—Jetta, where are you? HE’S COMING FOR ME!” she cried.
“Who, Jaeia? Who do you see?”
“HIM!” Jaeia screamed. She broke from her cradled position and lunged for the doctor, screaming unintelligibly as she clawed at his face. The doctor hit the emergency alert right before Jaeia broke his hand.
From a distance one of the three orderlies shot her full of theralol, but it did little to calm her.
This time she used her talent. “Get away from me!”
The three orderlies ran for the exit. The doctor, a mangled lump of flesh, somehow managed to break free of her grip and limped to the exit, leaving a trail of blood.
Victor narrated over the video. “One orderly ejected himself into outer space. The other two were found in the incinerators—at least what was left of them. The doctor recovered but was deemed unfit for duty after suffering severe psychological trauma.”
Triorion Omnibus Page 99
