***
Markus coughed as his eyes slowly opened, and amidst the obligatory grogginess he decided he’d had quite enough of being knocked unconscious. In the last two weeks alone he’d been shot in the back, overwhelmed by the Damadus engine core, and now nearly killed by one of his own people. It was really getting quite tiresome. Evidently all those years in Spider combat training had never taught him to duck.
Squinting against the bright lights, he tilted up his head and tried to figure out exactly where he was. His vision was still a blurry haze, but he could tell the room was large and exceedingly white, which ruled out the New Keledon prison or infirmary. That was good; it meant that Thexyl must have dragged him aboard the shuttle and escaped. But the shuttle’s infirmary hadn’t been nearly this spacious either, so where…?
“Hello, my friend.”
Markus’s head whipped around to the other side of the table. Standing there was the shadowy silhouette of a human man in dark clothing…a man who, foggy vision or not, Markus recognized immediately.
“Ralon?”
“Welcome home,” the other Spider said. “It’s been a long time.”
Markus’s muscles clenched like someone had just stabbed him with a shock-stick. He wasn’t on New Keledon or the shuttle—he was on the Nidus. And that meant that despite risking his life to get Jen and Thexyl safely out of the city, they had betrayed him.
“She did her duty, just as the Widow knew she would,” Sisk said, the faintest hint of smugness creeping into his otherwise carefully modulated voice. “Did you really believe she would go along with you this time, even after she’d had four years to come to terms with her mistakes?”
A sudden rush of adrenaline swept away the last of the fog from Markus’s vision, and he tried to sit up—only to be immediately pinned back in place by invisible telekinetic restraints. He craned his neck to the side and noticed the trio of Drones staring at him from the other side of the chamber.
“I figured she’d come around once she realized she was on the wrong side,” Markus said, trying futilely to bury his fear and keep his own voice steady. “I guess I was wrong.”
“You really do believe that, don’t you? “ Sisk asked. “You still think Foln and the Mire are innocent victims here?”
“No one’s innocent…but some people are a bit less guilty than others.”
Sisk grunted. “I admit I never thought you’d actually go through with it, no matter how much you used to talk about Mirador. I’m not sure Jen did, either. But here we are.”
Markus tested the restraints again, but they locked him down just as firmly as they had the first time. He then tried to stretch out with his mind instead, to see if he could maybe get a mental grip on them…
Nothing. For some reason he couldn’t seem to concentrate. The moment he tried to summon his powers, it was like he popped a circuit breaker in his mind. He grit his teeth and attempted to reach out to touch Sisk’s mind instead, but still nothing happened.
“It’s a neural inhibitor,” the other man explained. “Nasathine, if you want to get technical. It’s something the Drones concocted a few months ago. It’s far more effective than a standard implant and less harmful to the subject, too.”
“Those clever little automatons,” Markus muttered, struggling to hold back a fresh wave of dread. It didn’t work. “What will they think of next?”
“It has the added benefit of shattering the mind’s ability to erect significant telepathic barriers. Soon enough, we’ll know everything about the Mire and its operations.”
“You could always just ask. As it turns out, I’m a pretty good conversationalist.”
Sisk smiled and turned around to study one of the status monitors on the wall. “There was a time when I was tempted to join you, you know. It was after you’d defected at Typhus and Jen had returned to us. I’m not sure why it took that long for everything to sink in, but eventually I realized why Mirador had bothered you so much.”
“The senseless slaughter of thousands of people didn’t clue you in?” Markus asked snidely as he risked a quick glance over to the closest table. His pistol was there along with the rest of the toys on his belt, tauntingly close to arm’s reach. But the telekinetic vise holding him in place wasn’t moving, and without his powers he was just a normal man. A normal, helpless, terrified man.
“But it wasn’t just the slaughter, even for you,” Sisk said. “It was the fact that we’d turned directly against our own people.”
“We’d been doing that for years. Or did you forget all the times we had to kill the parents of Flies who didn’t want to let their children go?”
“No, but Mirador was different. We weren’t dealing with a small group of obstinate fools. Our actions allowed the Convectorate to exterminate thousands of humans. We were no longer elite operatives protecting the galaxy from dangerous uncontrolled psychics—we were agents of an ongoing genocide.”
Sisk spun back around, his eyes sparkling in thought. “For our entire lives we’d lived and trained in this place with other humans, other people like us. We served the Widow, and it was easy for us to ignore the fact that we were actually pawns of the Tarreen. We were a conquered people, and not because Keledon had been destroyed or because the Dominion had been dismantled—we were conquered because we’d let them assimilate us. Here we were, the genetic paragons of our race, and we’d been transformed into the weapons of our enemy. We annihilated our own people at their bidding. It made me sick.”
“Then I guess we agree on something,” Markus said, holding back a frown. Ralon, like Jen, had never been the introspective type. When he received an order he followed it, and when the mission was complete he buried the memories of whatever he’d done and moved on. Had that changed somehow? Had he finally broken through all those layers of indoctrination?
“Eventually I spoke to the Widow about it,” Sisk continued. “And she showed me my mistake. She told me to examine our fortress and ask myself if this looked like the den of servants.”
“Gilded chains are still chains,” Markus pointed out.
“But that’s just it: we are not shackled here. The Tarreen may believe they control the galaxy, but the truth of the matter is that without the Spiders, their reign would have ended almost before it began. It isn’t the military that keeps the other races in line; it is their fear of the Spiders—their fear of us. We are the true power in this galaxy, whether the Tarreen choose to acknowledge it or not.”
“Even while the Hierarchy orders us to kill and oppress our own people? How does that make sense?”
Sisk smiled again, but this time there was a dark edge to it. “But we’re not killing our people, don’t you see that? We cull the weak, nothing more—the best and brightest of us end up here. We are strengthening our race, even while the Tarreen believe we are crippling it.”
Markus pressed his tongue hard against his teeth. “I suppose you can’t appreciate how insane that sounds.”
“The truth of the matter is that humanity is a weak and feeble species, easily outmatched by beasts and other sentients alike. There is a reason no one in the galaxy took notice of us until they discovered the hidden power of our minds. Only then did we become something more than a pitiable excuse for a civilization.”
Sisk leaned forward and placed his hands on the edge of the bed-table. “Don’t you understand? It isn’t humanity we should be caring about—it is people like us, the true exemplars of our race. That is exactly what we do here. We collect superior specimens from across the galaxy and bring them together.”
“And turn them into pawns for the Tarreen,” Markus said. “You still haven’t gotten around to that little tidbit.”
“That is what the Tarreen believe,” Sisk replied softly. “But the truth…the truth is that their rule is but a shadow.”
Markus shook his head. “Insane and self-deluded, too. It’s a pity, really. I never figured you’d come around, but I always held out hope.”
The ot
her man held his maniacal gaze for several long, uncomfortable seconds before finally grunting and gesturing to the Drone behind him. “Believe what you wish, but the Widow has not lost faith in you completely. Once we’re finished here, you’ll understand. In the meantime…I suggest you try not to struggle. You know how unpleasant this can be.”
“You can’t intimidate me,” Markus said, wondering if it sounded as meek and helpless to Sisk’s ears as it did to his own. “I know all your tricks.”
“Perhaps…but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to stop them.”
Sisk thrust out with his mind, and Markus yelped as he tried desperately to summon his mental defenses. But no matter how hard he struggled nothing happened, and within seconds Sisk had already plunged inside. After four years of close calls and narrow escapes, Markus was finally out of tricks. The Widow would reforge him into her weapon once more, and he wouldn’t even remember the faces of the friends he would undoubtedly be murdering in the near future.
Distantly, as the last threads of consciousness unraveled around him, Markus wondered if the next version of himself would be as much of a fool as this one.
The Spider and the Fly Page 41
