Chapter Twenty
Soren Foln cracked an eye open and shot an angry glare at the warbling door chime on the opposite side of the room. New Keledon might not have had conventional day/night cycles, but even without glancing at the chrono he knew it was ridiculously early. He’d spent the entire previous evening playing damage control with the Council, and there was no way he’d gotten more than a few hours of sleep.
Still, his father had always taught him the importance of never sounding overly emotional, tired, or weak unless the situation demanded it, and so he cleared his throat and licked at his parched lips before leaning up.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Soren,” Henri said through the door com. “We have a serious problem.”
“What is it now?”
“Tayla’s been injured. Evidently Markus decided to shoot his way across the docks and steal a shuttle.”
Foln’s sleepy haze vanished in a sudden burst of adrenaline, and he swung his legs off the bed and keyed for the door lock. The moment it opened Henri burst into the room looking as disheveled as Foln felt.
“Is he gone?”
“Yes,” Henri said, “and he took Vale and her Kali pet with him.”
“I see,” Foln managed. The Council would be furious, of course, but it wasn’t as if this was unexpected. He had known Markus wouldn’t accept their decision to keep Vale in stasis. “What about the data crystals?”
“I spoke to Selaris a few minutes ago. She stopped by his apartment, and apparently he left most of them behind. He did take that violet one he’d grown obsessed with, though.”
“Naturally,” Foln muttered. “What about Tayla?”
“She has a broken arm and a few bruised ribs, but she’ll be all right,” Henri said. “I’m more worried about how the Council’s going to react—and the giant horde of aliens filling the Agora. They’re going to demand blood.”
Foln nodded to himself and walked over to his window. A significant portion of the alien mob had bled over into the human district, it seemed, and he could hear their inane chants echoing off the other buildings from here. He might not have been able to understand the language they were speaking, but he knew exactly what they were saying. Cries for vengeance didn’t require a universal translator.
“They’re already demanding it,” Foln said. “And it will only get worse.”
“You would think we’d burned down their homes from all the ruckus,” Henri muttered. “What I wouldn’t give to toss these idiots onto Pragia or Zultar for a day. They have no concept of what life is like for our people out there.”
“They’re spoiled children who’ve been coddled for far too long,” Foln agreed. “Thankfully, that’s about to change.”
He glanced over at the wall chrono and noted the time. Fifteen minutes after five, still almost four hours before the Golem was scheduled to arrive. He had hoped the situation would remain stable a bit longer, but it didn’t really matter. This would allow him to easily confront the entire Council in person.
“I’ll send a message to Zalix letting him know that we’ll meet him at the Ecclesia at nine,” Foln said.
“Things might unravel before then,” Henri warned. “You know Revask will keep them riled up as long as possible. Rakashi are notoriously sore losers. I’m also not sure how Selaris is going to react. If the other humans start resisting us…”
“Selaris will do what she’s told. Just like she always does.”
“One of these days that’s going to change. Sooner rather later if you keep treating her like a child. She’s a smart girl, Soren. She deserves better.”
Foln grunted. “Feeling guilty today, are we?”
“That’s what being old is all about, isn’t it?” the doctor replied dryly. “But you know I’m right.”
“Maybe, but for now we have other concerns. I want you to prepare me an injection with the latest version of your serum.”
Henri sighed. “I’m not sure how many times I have to tell you that this is a terrible idea before you believe me. This isn’t a cure, Soren. I’d barely even call it a stopgap measure.”
“You can call it whatever you want. The point is that it worked, and we need it now more than ever. Since Markus refused to access the data crystals, the task turns to me.”
“If Tayla weren’t doped up on pain killers, she’d be telling you the same thing.”
“She would also obey me,” Foln replied tartly. “And so will you.”
Henri snorted but didn’t reply. They had known each other for almost fifty years now, all the way back to when Henri had just finished his medical apprenticeship and Foln was still serving as an aide to his father in the Nomari Assembly. Together they’d witnessed the continued erosion of their once great civilization beneath Convectorate rule, and they’d watched nearly all their friends die in this war for freedom that never seemed to end.
If anyone would understand the necessity of taking control of the situation, it was Henri Varm. And yet for some reason Foln couldn’t fathom, his oldest friend seemed unable to accept it.
“Think of it this way, Henri,” Foln said, forcing a smile. “If I die, you get to take over.”
“Wonderful,” the doctor grumbled. “You know how much I’ve always wanted to be a politician.”
Foln shrugged. “Thirty years ago you seemed quite fond of the idea of being a revolutionary hero who’d inevitably go down in a blaze of glory.”
“That’s because it got women to sleep with me. At this point, it will take a lot more than false bravado to get one into my bed.”
“Assuming the serum works well enough, I should finally be able to link with my grandfather’s archive,” Fol said, idly twirling the crimson pendant around his neck. “If the Sarafan really did find a way to transfer a living psyche to another host, perhaps we can find ourselves a pair of fresh young bodies to carry us into the next century.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t hold my breath. You sure you don’t want to wait for Tayla to wake up?”
“I’d rather not have to repeat the same arguments with her, so no,” Foln said. “Now get the serum. I’ll be waiting.”
“Fine. I’ll be back.”
Henri slipped out of the room, and Foln took the opportunity to shower and get dressed. By the time he’d finished and ordered breakfast from the food processor, the crowds had swelled another thirty meters into the district. Henri might have been right—the situation was deteriorating rapidly, and soon everything would spiral out of control. News that the Mire’s captive Spider had murdered aliens on the concourse was bad enough, but once the crowds heard that she’d escaped—and been helped by Markus, no less—fear would quickly conquer whatever semblance of reason the mob had left. They would turn their anger on the Mire, fully believing that Foln had betrayed them.
Had he been one of them, Foln might have felt the same way. Their lives were about to fundamentally change, and just like humans, every sentient species in the galaxy feared the unknown. It was one of many reasons why they needed a firm hand to guide them.
A firm hand…and a strong mind.
Henri returned with his equipment a half hour later, and he set them out on the kitchen table and prepped the injector. “I’ve done everything I could to stabilize the formula after the data we collected from the last trial,” he said. “But I can’t make any promises.”
“I know,” Foln replied. “I’m ready.”
“All right. Try not to give yourself a heart attack.”
The injector hissed as it pumped the serum into Foln’s arm, and he closed his eyes in anticipation. During their earlier trials a few months ago, it had taken several minutes for him to feel anything, but a week and half ago on their hybrid psi-tech shuttle, the Phoenix, the results had been almost immediate.
This time the results were somewhere in between. For the first thirty seconds he didn’t notice any difference, but then abruptly the familiar tingle at the edge of his consciousness returned. His liberate
d psyche stretched out across the whole city, and instead of feeling just the small crew of the Phoenix or even the larger one of the Golem, he could suddenly touch hundreds of thousands of sentient minds…
And then, just as the cacophony threatened to overwhelm him, came a moment of perfect clarity. In every previous trial he’d felt like he was walking through a hurricane, barely able to think or breathe lest he be swept away…but this time everything was different. He was standing calmly at the eye of the storm, able to witness the raw fury of the tempest without being sucked up in its winds. The whirlwind of emotion and thought became a source of power rather than a distraction, and once again he knew what it was to be fully human.
“Soren,” Henri’s voice was saying. “Soren, can you hear me?”
Yes, he replied, smiling as he opened his eyes and looked out upon New Keledon as if for the first time. I can hear everything.
Henri stuttered as he tried to process the telepathic voice in his head. “Your vitals, they’re….stable. Your blood pressure is a bit high, but otherwise…
“You’ve done it, my friend,” Foln told him. “You’ve finally done it.”
“I don’t know about that, but this is definitely progress. I need you to lie down so I can take some readings—”
“There will be time for that later,” Foln said as he clasped the crimson pendant. Just as before, he could feel the ancient secrets of the Sarafan pouring over him, but this time they were sharper, more refined. “Right now I have some catching up to do…
“And a city to conquer.”
The Spider and the Fly Page 36
