by Rick Partlow
"If they know about the ship," Kah-Rint spat, feeling a surge of panic, "then they know about the Emperor-cursed safe-house, you simpleton!" He reached deep into a pouch at his side and yanked out his own compact pistol, holding it a bit shakily down at his side. "We have to get out of this city, get to our fallback position in the maintenance sheds for the harvesters. Then we can get assistance arranging transportation offplanet from our contacts among the males."
He could see the bodyguard's anger at the insult, but the male was a professional and was already nodding curtly at the words. "I know where we can procure a vehicle," the bodyguard said. He turned to call back his two remaining team-members...and stopped, going stock-still.
"What?" Kah-Rint asked, cursing the fear he could hear in his own voice. He brought the weapon up to shoulder level, head swiveling around like a turret. "What is it?"
"They are gone," J'tan-Kin said softly, in a tone full of wonder and despair. "Both of them...they were there a moment ago and now gone as if they'd never been."
Kah-Rint swallowed hard. The two other bodyguards had been in place across the street, positioned in alcoves at either end of a storage building. Now those alcoves were empty, with no indication they'd ever been occupied. Around them, nothing stirred and the night was as silent as death.
"Back to back," J'tan-Kin snapped, grabbing Kah-Rint by the arm and pulling him closer.
Every nerve in his body screamed at him to run, but Kah-Rint pressed his back against J'tan-Kin's, feeling the body armor beneath the male's tunic as he did. He raised his gun, tracking it furtively back and forth, trying to find a target somewhere in the darkness. He remembered after a moment to remove the safety, hoping J'tan-Kin hadn't noticed he'd left it on. He was ready to shoot anything that moved, but nothing moved.
There was a blur that was far too fast to be anything that lived and breathed, and suddenly J'tan-Kin wasn't against his back anymore. Kah-Rint spun around, feeling the pistol kick in his hand and hearing a sharp report as he fired it by accident, fear touching his finger to the trigger. The round soared off into the night like a lost soul, hitting nothing, and something caught his wrist in an iron grip. There was a dark, indistinct figure standing in front of him, as if it had materialized out of the night mists, massive and powerful yet indistinct at the edges and with a face of shifting nothingness. His wrist was caught in the grip of one of the monster's broad hands, while the other grasped his throat and squeezed tightly, cutting off his breath.
Kah-Rint tried to struggle, tried to punch at the thing with his free hand, but it was as if he fought a tower of living metal. His blows grew weaker and then the blackness of the night descended over him and he felt nothing.
Chapter Seventeen
"Well, now we've got the fucker," Deke said quietly, adjusting the neurolink halo on Kah-Rint's newly-shaven head, "let's see if he's good for anything."
"Is it smart doing this here, onplanet?" Cal asked him. His voice was soft and quiet, not the commanding, take-no-shit tone he got in combat situations, so Deke figured the question was out of curiosity rather than a strong objection. Cal was sitting in one of the fold-out chairs against the hull of the cargo shuttle's utility bay, his wife next to him, their hands intertwined.
Rachel looked much better than she had when they'd first seen here after meeting up with Savage the night of the attack on the Tahni Female Holdings. A little medical nano had taken care of the flash burns and fragment wounds she'd suffered during the fight, though the hair at the back of her head would take a few days to grow back even with help from the nanites.
"If you're worried about trouble with the Tahni," Rachel said to him, "don't be. The Matriarch has made sure they know it was humans that saved her, and that they also know who was to blame for the attack."
"It's the least she could do," Pete Mitchell muttered from where he leaned against the wall next to Keller Savage. Pete was affecting a cool disinterest, but Deke had a sense that the fight had shaken him even more than it had Rachel.
Deke had expected Cal to be furious with his wife and brother when he'd finally met up with them at Savage's cargo shuttle, but instead Caleb Mitchell had hugged his brother long and hard, then kissed his wife passionately before apologizing for getting her into the situation. Unexpected depths his old friend had.
"I'm more worried," Cal clarified, "about the local authorities sticking their noses into this shuttle while we're in mid-interrogation." He shrugged. "Kel's people disposed of the bodies, but those Tahni might still be missed by Port Security. Wouldn't it be safer to take him back to your ship, Kel, and wring him out there?"
Deke chuckled, patting Kah-Rint's slack cheek. The Tahni was strapped into a padded seat and the restraints around his forehead were the only thing keeping him upright: he was pumped full of sedatives. "You're too used to being on the outside looking in," he said. "We're DSI and this asshole is an enemy of the Commonwealth. All I gotta' do is flash my credentials and the local cops will polish my brass."
"I think time's a wasting," Savage put in, his accent pronounced. "And I got an itch in my gut that says we ain't got the time to waste."
Cal shrugged and waved a hand for Deke to continue. "May as well get it over with."
Deke made a final adjustment to the neurolink halo, then checked its connection to the neural probe he'd carried over from his ship. "This'd be easier if the Tahni weren't so damned uptight about body mods," he grumbled quietly. "I could just plug into his 'face jack and it'd be a nice, solid connection; not like these stupid halos all buggy and shit."
"I thought you didn't like 'face jacks," Cal said, cocking an eyebrow at him.
"Oh I don't," Deke admitted readily, his grin lopsided. "I'd never have one of those damn things. But it'd be easier if he had 'em." One last adjustment to the settings of the probe and he straightened up. "Okay, we're set."
"How specific can you get with this setup?" Pete Mitchell wondered. "I mean, can it make him answer specific questions or are you just like..." He shrugged. "...reading his thoughts or something?"
"It's kind of an art form," Deke explained to the younger man. "You lead his thoughts to where you want to go through verbal questioning, then you pick up on the stuff he's trying not to say." He pulled an injector from a kit spread out on the bench next to him and pressed it to Kah-Rint's neck. "So let's get this started."
The stimulant worked quickly and some color returned to the Tahni's gaunt face, his eyes fluttering open, then widening as he saw where he was and who had captured him. His mouth had dropped open, but he closed it with a snap, tightening his jaw as if to force himself to say nothing. He looked, Deke thought, like a constipated turtle.
"You're the one they call Kah-Rint," Deke said in Tahni. The captive's eyes flitted his way, but he said nothing. "It's not a question," he went on. "He," Deke gestured to Cal, "knows you. He's seen you on Canaan, when you used to work for Cutter."
Deke blinked as his neurolink received a squirt of data from the neural probe, images of Cutter, conversations about shipments of black-market organs and ViR. Then fuzzy static as the Tahni tried to blank his thoughts. Nothing useful.
"We also know you're fomenting the Tahni insurgency," Deke went on. "You've been transporting weapons to Tahn-Skyyiah, you hired the mercenaries to attack the Female Holding here." A look that could have been a sneer, more thoughts converted to words and fed to his neurolink: meetings with the Sung Brothers rep on Kanesh, meetings with Tahni back on their homeworld. He recognized some of the names from files he'd audited back on Tahn-Skyyiah and he mentally compartmentalized those for his next report to Kara.
"What we still want to know is who's calling the shots?" Deke leaned in towards the Tahni, smelling the faint whiff of the crushed flower that the males used as a cologne. "Who's pulling your strings? Who wants the Tahni and the humans at war again?"
This time...there was nothing. Nothing to read, no thoughts and no indication Kah-Rint was actively repressing them. Deke tried not to sho
w his consternation on his face. He didn't say a word, just stepped over to the interrogation kit and picked up another injector, this one filled with psychoactives tailored to Tahni physiology that would loosen Kah-Rint's internal filters. The Tahni tried to jerk away as the injector came closer, but the restraint straps held him tightly in place and Deke heard a pneumatic hiss as the drug went through the skin of the humanoid's neck.
Kah-Rint jerked against his restraints, teeth clenching against the feeling of the psychoactives taking effect. Deke watched him let out a breath, then settle back in the padded chair, muscles relaxing. This would be harder, because although the psychoactives would make it harder for Kah-Rint to control his thoughts, it would also make them less coherent and harder to translate into speech.
"Who's giving you orders, Kah-Rint?" Deke repeated. "Who gains from setting the Tahni against the Commonwealth?"
There was fuzzy static in his head again as the neural interface again was unable to resolve the surface thoughts as words, and then...Fool. Just the one word, repeating again. Fool.
Deke felt a cold, hard lump deep in his gut and he leaned heavily against the bench behind him as he gave purchase to a terrible realization.
"Kah-Rint," he said aloud, his voice a little shaky, "are you the one who wants to set the humans and Tahni against each other?"
Cal and Rachel both looked at him in surprise, and Kel Savage's eyes narrowed suddenly.
Of course I am, you moron.
"Of course I am, you moron," the Tahni said aloud, making Deke jump. His words were slurred, but they were in English, not Tahni.
"Why?" Rachel blurted. Deke looked at her sharply, but she pressed on. "You have to know the Commonwealth will slaughter your people. Why would you want to start the war again?"
"Because I want the Commonwealth to slaughter my people!" the Tahni bellowed hoarsely, lacking filter or control and not just because of the drugs. To Deke, it seemed as if this were some truth that Kah-Rint had concealed too long, had dared not speak aloud, and now he finally had the chance to put it into words and just couldn't hold back anymore.
"I was someone else," Kah-Rint said, voice lower now but still intense. His eyes were open now, seeing something somewhere years in the past. "I was Colonel K'tann-len-Renn-Tan, an officer of some prominence in the Imperial Marines. But I had the poor fortune to be in command of the Marine detachment on Demeter..."
"Shit," Keller Savage muttered. "I was on that op." He shook his head, and it looked like a shudder went through his big shoulders. "Fuckin' nightmare for both sides. Lotsa' civilian casualties, and we kinda' took it out on the Tahni Marines. Bad. Me and Brian Hammer and there was some DSI cadre onplanet too."
"I was losing dozens of troops a week," Kah-Rint made a Tahni gesture of agreement. "They couldn't travel away from the base in anything less than platoon size elements or they would just...disappear. And when we found them, they would be dismembered, tortured, disemboweled..."
"Jesus Christ," Pete muttered, his face pale.
"At first," the Tahni went on, in a tone that was almost rational and coherent, "we tried reprisals against the civilian population, but that only made it worse. We started to turn on each other. There were fights in the barracks daily, officers had to have men executed... Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I considered suicide, but I found that my time so close to death there on Demeter had left me too afraid to seek it out of my own hand. So, I used a human who was posing as a collaborator, but who I knew was actually with the resistance, to set up a meeting with a DSI cadre agent. And I offered to allow their troops into the base, in exchange for a position of authority back on Tahn-Skyyiah after the war."
"That was you," Savage breathed, disbelief in his voice. "I heard rumors, afterward, but it was all kept quiet."
"When the humans infiltrated the base, they slaughtered my troops." His voice was empty of emotion when he spoke of it. "I didn't care. They all seemed as animals to me, my people and the humans. All I cared about was my own life. Robert Chang put me in a program he called 'Svin'ya.' I allowed them to perform restruct surgery on me, change my face and height and build, in offense to everything I used to believe. I received a new identity and spent the remainder of the war in a secret holding facility far out on some unimportant rock where no one would check." His shoulders tensed. "All I wanted, all that kept me going out there alone but for my guards, was the idea that I would be home again soon, with a position of promise. I could help guide what remained of my people so that this would never happen again."
"So what happened?" Deke asked him, feeling very much as if he'd lost control of this interrogation and wishing that Kara were here. "Obviously it didn't work out."
"They put me back on Tahn-Skyyiah, just as they promised," Kah-Rint replied. "And then someone, I still don't know who or why, let it leak what I was: a traitor, an apostate, a heretic." It was a tribute to how well the Tahni spoke English that he was able to infuse the words with the bitterness of someone who'd grown up speaking the language.
"I barely escaped with my life. The Commonwealth government did nothing to help me, just gave me enough money to get a ship offplanet. The officer in charge of civilian affairs actually laughed at me, said I was a traitor to my own kind and I deserved what was coming to me. I wound up on Kanesh, and that was where Robert Chang found me once more...although by that time, he was no longer Robert Chang. He called himself Cutter, and he had...done things to himself."
His voice became softer, weighed down with bitter memory. "He, at least, honored his word and gave me a job, a place to live if not a home. I did not hold all this against him, but against the Commonwealth, and against my own people. They would have killed me, would have torn me to pieces in the street if your Marines had not intervened, and all because one of your people thought it would be amusing to tell them who I really was." His teeth bared. "I knew from that moment that if I ever had the chance, I would make the humans and the Tahni pay for turning on me. And thanks to Cutter, I had the chance."
"Wait a fucking minute," Cal stood from the jumpseat, hands bunched into fists, shoulders tensed. "This doesn't make any sense! If you're the one behind all this, then who's running the duplicates in the military?"
"I am, obviously," Kah-Rint answered, speaking to Cal as if he were a child. "They were put in place by Cutter to help with his scheme to find the Northwest Passage, but he didn't think it important enough to deactivate them after he departed on his fool's dream." An expression crossed his face that Deke knew was a sneer to the Tahni. "As if things would be different anywhere else than they are here. But he left me the means to achieve my own dream. I would provide the excuse, the provocation, and I would use the creations he'd left in place to make sure that the Commonwealth military overreacted to it."
"He knows who the duplicates are," Kel Savage said with a predatory grin.
"Thank God," Rachel sighed. "Maybe we can finally end this whole thing now, before any more people get killed."
Kah-Rint made a sound not natural to a Tahni voice box, a sound he made in rough, mocking imitation of a human: he laughed. To Deke, it sounded unnatural and grating and it set his teeth on edge.
"What's so fucking funny?" he demanded, resisting an urge to plant his fist right through the Tahni's face. Not into, through. And he knew he could do it.
"She is," Kah-Rint told him, ceasing the braying imitation of a laugh, but letting the Tahni expression of amusement remain on his face. "You are...you all are. You have me, yes...I regret that, as I had designs on continuing my life as I saw fit. But you haven't stopped anything."
The Tahni stopped speaking, with clear effort, but his thoughts were just below the verbal. The war will come, when Earth loses its millions. Nothing will stop them from exterminating every last Tahni then.
Deke's eyes widened and he leaned over the Tahni, grabbing his shoulder and squeezing till he felt the bones grate against each other.
"What the hell do you mean, 'when Earth loses its
millions,' you son of a bitch?" he asked, angry enough to speak in English instead of Tahni.
Kah-Rint spat a curse in Tahni, calling the wrath of the Emperor down on the humans who invented the drugs that wouldn't let him keep his thoughts under control. His subvocal thoughts were curses as well, and Deke knew he was fighting to keep from even thinking about the question, even under the influence of the drugs. Deke grabbed another injector and gave the Tahni another hit of the psychoactive, not caring how dangerous it was at this point.
Kah-Rint went into a momentary seizure, his body jerking against the restraints hard enough to make the frame of the chair creak and shudder, but then he slumped in exhaustion, his breath ragged but regular.
"What did you mean?" Deke repeated. "How are millions of people on Earth going to die? What did you do?" When Kah-Rint said nothing for a moment, Deke slapped him, a bit harder than he intended. Blood flew from a split lip and the Tahni grunted with pain felt even through the drugs. "What did you fucking do?"
"Too late..." Kah-Rint's words came with a spray of blood and spittle and a maniacal expression brought on by the drugs. "You're too late to stop it."
"Stop what?" Deke yelled at him, first in English and then again in Tahni in case the drugs made him forget how to speak the human language.
He tried to fight it still, but Deke could "hear" the words he wasn't vocalizing over the neural interface. Ship in orbit at Tahn-Skyyiah, the unspoken words said. "Thaddeus Moore," the Tahni said aloud, the words dragged out of him by the drugs. "They're going to take it. Change its codes...use it to infiltrate Earth's orbital defenses." That mocking imitation of a laugh again as he realized that he couldn't hold back the truth, so he may as well revel in it. "Destroy your capital city...and everyone in it."
Deke grabbed the Tahni's face in his hand, a hand powerful enough to crush through the cheekbones and pull the male's spine out through his throat, and squeezed ever so slightly.
"When?" he asked simply, in Tahni.
