She closed her eyes, recalling the terrible vision she had of a shadow thing consuming Jetta upon their descent to Algar.
Maybe I’m wrong about her—
And then she remembered Jetta’s aura, more brilliant than a star, shining forth as she rode the wolf.
—I love her.
She thought again of her homeworld, and the last of her people, her very blood, stolen away in a Deadwalker ship, ruining the last worlds of the Starways.
(Father, I’m so sorry.)
As she opened her eyes, she remembered her own creed, the promise she had made to herself before she ran away from Algar, and realized what she had to do.
JETTA HAD JUST KISSED Triel goodbye and showed her out when her terminal alerted her to an incoming priority message. Not expecting any callers, Jetta came to the dreaded conclusion before his face even appeared on the display.
“Still wondering how I can let myself in?” Victor asked, the gold rims of his glasses glinting as he tilted his head.
“The only thing I wonder is how no one else can see the devil inside you.”
“Ah, what an excellent point you make, Warchild. But you already know the answer, don’t you?”
Indeed she did. She had come to the conclusion when she was very little, maybe two, no older than three, mistakenly stealing knowledge from junkies and drunks just to understand the world she lived in. Through their eyes she saw their need for direction, their hunger for a higher authority to whom they could relinquish their responsibility and with it the pain of their hollow existence. To find purpose, meaning, in a life fraught with misery and suffering, even if the purpose given to them served a darker ambition. She understood desperation, and she understood the power of a man with golden promises.
“What do you want?” Jetta asked. She considered running a trace, but for Victor to break through their defense and communication systems once again, she guessed it would be a fruitless endeavor.
“I offer you redemption. I offer you command of my fleet.”
Jetta scoffed. “You insult me.”
“On the contrary, I’m banking on your superior intelligence. I know everything about you, Jetta Kyron, perhaps more than any other person in this galaxy. I know you’re better than your weak-minded sister. I know the beast that grows inside you, and I know how to help you harness its powers.”
Though Triel had mended the wounds, the gashes Jetta had recently inflicted in her thighs flared to life, as if someone had poured kerosene over them and lit a match. The wound in her abdomen followed suit, exploding with white fire, streaking up her chest and crisping her insides. She gripped the lip of the desk with all her might, cracking the trim.
“I will show you the purpose of your power. You will take the reins of my army and rule this galaxy with a swift and definite hand. You will have control over those that are so willing to persecute you, despite how many times you have saved them. You will become more than their pet, Warchild—you will become their God.”
His words felt like hot oil in her ears, and she fell to the ground, mouth open for the scream that caught in the middle of her chest. She felt herself unspooling, falling away from her body, away from the Starbase, until she came to a halt in a dark, muggy place that carried an air of familiar dread.
“Come with me,” Victor said, his voice a garble of rusted gears. She looked up to see him standing on a mound of human skulls, red, deathly light bleeding from his sockets. “And I will show you the awful truth of what we really are.”
WREN WAS DISCUSSING the latest Intelligence Report with the senior command council when Jaeia screamed. Something bit into the back of her skull and yanked her down with all its might, trying to fold her into its maw. Jaeia smacked her hands on the desk and bucked out of her seat, oblivious to the flurry of staff trying to hold her down as she thrashed about.
Jetta—
“Get him out of my head!” she shrieked.
“Get a med team up here, now!” someone shouted.
More shouting, a frenzy of hands, gritted teeth. Jaeia didn’t see the commotion about her, only the shadow closing in on her.
Falling fast, she slipped and slid down the throat of the beast. As she tried to slow her wild descent by spreading out her arms and legs, she craned her head back, keeping sight of the fading light that tethered her to her body. My only way back—
Then she heard her sister cry out. Jaeia twisted around to see Jetta being swallowed by a tangle of spidery fingers farther down the black gullet.
What the hell is that?
Connected through their bond, Jaeia couldn’t break herself or her sister free of the thing consuming her.
Jaeia wedged herself in place with all of her strength. Jetta, you have to fight it! she pleaded with the last of her psionic hold. Please, Jetta—PLEASE!
She came to on the floor of the conference room with pieces of broken datapads and parts of a chair strewn around her. With perplexed expressions and nervous murmurs, the entire senior council stood around the medical team as they analyzed her vital signs.
“Captain, are you okay?” Wren asked.
“Sir, she’s still emerging,” the med tech responded.
“I’m fine,” Jaeia said, pushing the bioscanner out of her face. “Find Jetta.”
Wren had given the go-ahead to the team when a guard came on over the com. “Excuse me, Chief, but Commander Kyron is asking permission to join the meeting.”
Before answering, Wren looked to her for confirmation. “Permission granted.”
Jetta stumbled inside the conference room, disheveled and pale, uniform pulled apart.
“He’s planning something terrible,” she said breathlessly.
“Who?” Wren asked.
“Victor. We have to act now.”
Dr. DeAnders helped Jetta to her seat as the medics gave Jaeia a hand.
“Please explain to me what just happened,” Wren said, standing at the head of the table.
Jetta gave her a glance, and Jaeia nodded for her to continue.
“Victor isn’t what he seems to be,” Jetta started, smoothing down her uniform as best she could. “He’s got human skin, but his soul is not from the world. It seems like every time I’ve made contact with him I slip into his head whether I want to or not. And I see the most awful things. We can’t just stop his Fleet—we have to stop him.”
Jetta stopped talking for a moment and fidgeted in her seat. As her distress echoed in Jaeia’s mind, she tried to provide her sister as much support as she could, even with the disturbing visions resounding in her own head.
“He’s not like any enemy that anyone here has ever faced. He’s not going to try and kill us or rule us—he wants to eat our souls.”
The room fell silent. Jaeia watched as Unipoesa and Wren exchanged hushed words, and their faces turned stone cold.
The guard rang in again. “Sir, Triel of Algardrien is asking to join the meeting.”
Wren once again turned to Jaeia for guidance. She nodded, anxious to see the Healer. “Show her in.”
Triel came rushing in as fast as the guards would allow. “Jetta—Jaeia—I felt something terrible—”
“We’re okay,” Jetta said, rising to meet her. She spoke into the Healer’s ear, consoling her in private.
Sensing something different between the two of them, Jaeia held her breath, trying to get a better reading. Has the energy between them changed? The way Jetta touched the Healer seemed more intimate, as was the way Triel received her comforts. Jaeia watched closely as Jetta took her hand and led her to an open seat before taking her own again.
Clearing her throat, Jetta continued. “Please include Pancar of Nagoorian on this meeting. He needs to hear what I have to say.”
Wren studied her closely. “We are still under negotiations with his faction. I would not advise divulging any classified information.”
Jetta barely kept the anger out of her words. “We are going to need all the help we can get. Chak politics.”<
br />
Out of the side of his eye, Wren looked again to Jaeia for confirmation.
No one is ready to trust Jetta again, not with her unpredictable behavior, she thought as she glanced around the room. Looking within their bond, she sensed the dark shadow gathering around her sister. And I can’t afford to keep making the same mistakes.
But before she could signal Wren, Unipoesa caught her eye and lifted two of his fingers, indicating his support.
The Admiral is a strong supporter of Pancar, but he still stands for the Alliance, she rationalized.
(Please don’t let me be wrong about him, too...)
Jaeia nodded.
Within seconds, Pancar appeared on the central hologram display. Wren briefed the Nagoorian leader before allowing Jetta to continue.
“I’m sure you have all read my report on my recent travels,” Jetta said, rushing through the secondary projections. “Triel and I found some leads about our past, along with the man claiming to be Kurt Stein.”
“Do we have confirmation on that?” Unipoesa interjected, turning to the chief of military intelligence and the director of research.
DeAnders and Msiasto Mo looked to each other for the best response. “Still pending. Having a hard time locking in on the DNA sequences. Same problem we had with the Kyrons.”
Wren nodded tersely. “Get on that.”
With an irritated look, Jetta resumed. “But the most vital piece of information we obtained is how my siblings and I got our special abilities. Someone told me that it was as a result of an accident.” She removed an ancient-looking datawand from her pocket. “I’m hoping this will confirm that.”
“How will that help us against Victor?” Unipoesa asked.
“Victor thinks that we all somehow got our talents from the same place. That would mean he had some connection to this parallel dimension, and I need to know how that’s possible and why.”
Jetta stared at the datawand. “More importantly, Agracia Waychild stole this from a caretaker of Earth named Jade. I only had time to decode the first few pages of it, but I discovered that she was in contact with Pancar of Nagoorian.”
Pancar agreed. “It’s true. She claimed to have evidence of electronic correspondence between Ramak Yakarvoah and Victor Paulstine, but I lost contact with her. We know so little about Victor. Anything would help.”
“There is a connection between Ramak and Victor,” Jetta said, closing her fist around the datawand. “And I believe that if we are able to understand their relationship, then we can possibly understand more about Victor’s motivations, and how I can effectively get in his head.”
“But even if we are able to dismantle Victor from the inside out,” Jaeia said as Jetta offered the datawand to Wren, “he still has a lock on our defense systems, and an entire Fleet poised to destroy us. And we still have no indications as to how he’s keeping the Motti at bay.”
Unipoesa chimed in. “We would have to launch a threefold attack: on Victor, his Fleet, and the Motti.”
As the admiral’s idea settled over the group, the air in the room grew noticeably heavier. Jaeia tried to get her sister’s attention, but she trained her focus elsewhere.
The Healer, quiet until then, finally spoke. “I can stop the Motti.”
All eyes turned to her, particularly Jetta’s. She nearly came out of her seat.
“My father is one of the Dissemblers. I can connect to him, and through him I can try to heal the entire tribe.”
“How?” Jetta exclaimed. “It takes an entire tribe to heal one Dissembler.”
Triel hid her shaking hands in her lap. “There is a way...”
But at a grave cost, Jaeia gleaned from the nature of the Healer’s thoughts. One that she has yet to fully accept...
“We will take a break to analyze this information,” Wren interjected, scrolling through the downloading information off of Jetta’s stolen datawand. “Meet back here at 2100 hours.”
As soon as the CCO dismissed them, Jetta tried to go straight to Triel, but the Healer slipped away before her sister had a chance.
Jaeia caught her arm as Jetta tried to run after her. “Don’t. Not right now. I know you can feel it too.”
“I don’t know what the hell she’s thinking she can do.”
Despite the serious expression on her sister’s face, Jaeia sensed the fragile surface tension of her emotions. Not that she would ever cry in front of other people.
“She’d kill herself trying to save her people,” Jetta added under her breath.
Jaeia held on tight. “You have to trust her, Jetta. She’s your friend, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” she said, avoiding her gaze.
“And you don’t have many friends, do you?”
Jetta’s eyes flashed with anger, but Jaeia hadn’t meant it as a jab. She changed her tone to reflect her thought. “I mean that you don’t give yourself away lightly. So realize that and give her some credit.”
“I don’t want her to get hurt,” Jetta whispered.
Jaeia put a hand on her shoulder and changed the subject. “Hey—we have some time before we reconvene.”
Reading her thoughts, Jetta’s pupils dilated and her muscles tensed before Jaeia said the words out loud.
“Let’s go see Jahx.”
PANCAR OF NAGOORIAN mulled over the recent interconference with the Alliance as he made his way to medical, the contents of the plastic container rattling in his arms. He hoped that Jetta would keep her word and relay the information on the datawand to him. After months of establishing private bank accounts and safe contacts for her, as well as secretly collaborating with her on several of her SMT operations, he hoped he’d given her enough treason to trust him.
I know you better than most of your fellow Alliance officers, he thought. Ever since the rumors started about the telepathic triplets of unknown origins, he’d studied the three of them, absorbing everything he could about the mysterious Kyrons, fascinated by their potential and empathetic with their struggles. But he had invested his trust unwisely before and almost got himself killed.
“Let’s hope I’m right this time,” he muttered to himself. His thoughts briefly lingered on Tighsen, his nephew, until he forced them elsewhere.
He checked in at the medic station with the on-call doctor.
“How is Tech?”
The doctor removed his mask and put down his work. “Still in critical, but woke up this morning. He asked for the Deadwalker, so we brought it to him,” he said, pointing to the closest bay.
I’ve done all I can, he reminded himself as he walked to the engineer’s bedside. Aside from ordering his chief of surgery back from the warfront to patch up the dog-soldier, he authorized the use of all resources, even with the medical supply shortages plaguing his army.
It took him a moment to absorb the awful sight of the crippled engineer. Despite the efforts of his team, his body remained tethered to a rainbow of intravenous fluids and vital signs monitors. Pancar didn’t like the look of his eyes, or rather the purple lumps disfiguring his ashen face. Pink reparative surgical skins covered the rest of his body, contrasting the surviving patches of beige fur.
After taking in the shock of Tech’s appearance, Pancar noticed Billy Don’t idling quietly by his friend’s side, as if waiting for him to wake up.
“Ugly little bugger,” he heard one of the guards comment to another. He caught them looking contemptuously at the little Liiker and made a mental note to personally escort the Liiker back to his quarters. With the Motti ship carving up worlds and eradicating Sentient life by the billions, even the twisted, cherubic Billy Don’t, a victim of the Deadwalkers, would find no sympathizers.
“Can you revive him?” Pancar asked.
The on-call doctor wiped his tired eyes and gave him an equally weary response, as if he expected him to override him anyway. “Inadvisable. He’s still touch and go.”
“Revive him,” Pancar ordered quietly. “This can’t wait.”
“Yes, Sir
,” the on-call doctor said, nodding to a medic.
Pancar approached the bedside, keeping his eye on Billy as the medic typed in codes to the machines hooked up to the patient. The half-boy/half-machine ignored him, his focus unwavering on the dog-soldier engineer. Pancar wasn’t sure what the Alliance Sleeper Program had done to the little Liiker, but it didn’t seem to affect his loyalties to his friend.
“He can’t stay awake longer than about five or six minutes at a time, Sir,” the medic advised as he pumped the engineer full of a viscous yellow medication.
With a gasp, Tech’s eyes popped open, and he immediately grabbed at the wires and tubes. Billy Don’t squealed and squeaked as two other medics joined the fray in their attempt to settle the engineer.
“You’re safe now,” one of the medics said.
“Femi—the crew—” he croaked.
“Tech, it’s me, Pancar,” he said, stepping around Billy. The little Liiker stuck out his tongue and ran over his foot, but he stayed at the head of the bed with him. “How are you feeling?”
Tech’s tongue, dry and cracked, tried in vain to lick parched lips. “Thirsty.”
Pancar gave a slight nod. The medic gave him a sip of water and laid his head back down carefully.
“Tech, I need your help,” Pancar said gently, squeezing his hand to keep him awake. “You are the only one who really understands Motti technology after working all these years with Billy. I’m hoping you can shed some light on some implants we found inside a cadaver’s head.”
Pancar grazed past an important detail, worried it would upset the engineer. Now is not the time to tell him these are the cranial implants we found in Shandin’s head after Mom tried to take it as a trophy.
Triorion Omnibus Page 140
