***
The long, twisting corridor leading to the Widow’s parlor could have easily been the set of a low-budget holovid thriller. Between the dim lighting, the bare walls, and the eerie echo of her boots clicking against the cold metal floor, Jenavian felt rather like a ghost on a derelict ship cursed to wander its empty decks for all eternity. The unsettling telepathic whispers occasionally worming their way into her thoughts weren’t helping matters, either.
At least the lights weren’t flickering, though. That had to count for something.
She had only come here a handful of times in her seventeen years living inside this compound, and never without being summoned. The Widow hadn’t forbidden them from entering, exactly, but it wasn’t like any of the Spiders actively sought her out for stimulating conversation. She was their keeper and warden, their teacher and mistress. She was not their friend.
Eventually Jenavian reached the end of the corridor and came to a halt. There was no guard, security panel, or even closed door to block her path; the passage simply opened into a wide, half-spherical chamber whose ceiling was covered in cables, power conduits, and crystalline beams that looked disturbingly similar to a mechanical spider web. Spread throughout the room at roughly equal intervals were eight pod-like cocoons holding hairless Drones—the “larvae,” as Markus had once nicknamed them—and at the center of the chamber was an elevated dais.
On that dais, situated atop a metallic tripod, was the violet data crystal from the Damadus.
The Widow was nowhere to be seen, but perhaps that was for the best. Jenavian had passed up the opportunity to try and link with the crystal when she was back on the shuttle, but maybe now she could finally figure out what it was. Taking a deep breath, she strode forward across the mass of conduits and wires and stepped up onto the dais. She reached out her palm towards the crystal—
“Magnificent, isn’t it?”
Miraculously, Jenavian managed to keep her boots planted on the ground, but she did whip her head around fast enough that a spike of pain lanced down her neck. The Widow was there, dangling down from a dark corner of the ceiling like a shadowy doppelganger of her namesake. A cluster of cables writhed around her like tentacles as they gently lowered her down to the floor.
“Almost a hundred years adrift in space, and yet its power is as strong and vibrant as ever,” the woman said almost wistfully.
Jenavian ordered herself to swallow, and she reinforced her mental barriers as best she could. “You mean the crystal?”
“Of course. Surely you can feel it.”
“I never tried to link with it, but Markus believed it was different than the others we found. He just wasn’t sure how.”
“It’s different because it’s not a storage device,” the Widow replied as if it were obvious. “Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway.”
Jenavian turned back to the crystal and stretched out with her mind. Tendrils of psychic energy were practically radiating off of it, but they were more than just stray wisps of psionic power. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn she could sense actual emotions from them—in fact, if she closed her eyes and forgot that she was staring at a glorified chunk of rock, she might have mistaken the sensations for a…person.
She didn’t gasp or faint or do any of the other things normally associated with an epiphany, but there, in a single moment of clarity, Jenavian finally understood.
“Foln,” she breathed. “Krucius Foln. It’s not his personal log—it’s him, isn’t it? Or some fragment of his psyche.”
“Very good, Agent,” the Widow said. “I always knew you were clever.”
“But how…?” Jenavian licked at her dry lips and cleared her throat. “How is that even possible?”
“You’ve seen and used conventional data crystals. You’ve linked with the Nidus Network. Is this really so different?”
“I suppose not,” Jenavian whispered. “Was he…conscious in there?”
“In a sense. It was how I knew he was still alive after all this time. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite strong enough to track.”
Jenavian nodded absently. “I’ve heard the legends that some of the Sarafan learned to transfer their minds between bodies. Supposedly they were immortal, hopping from one host to the next before age could catch up with them. I never really thought it was possible.”
The Widow stepped forward and held her hand just above the crystal. “With a properly focused mind, anything is possible. I assumed you’d have realized that by now.”
Jenavian turned and studied the other woman—the woman who, as far as anyone knew, had run the Spider Program since its inception eighty years ago. The woman who didn’t look a day over forty.
“That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?” Jenavian asked softly. “You’ve transferred between bodies to stay alive.”
The Widow remained silent, her hand hovering over the crystal. The faintest trace of a smile tugged at her lips.
Jenavian braced herself against one of the mechanical pods, her mind flicking back to her earlier conversation with Thexyl and all the little clues they’d missed over the years…
“You were one of the renegade Sarafan that reached out to the Tarreen before the war,” she murmured, as much to herself as anyone else. “You forged an alliance with them, and you disabled the rest of the Sarafan with some type of telepathic attack. The Tarreen swept in and crushed the Dominion, and all the while you waited here in the shadows.”
“As I said,” the Widow whispered. “You are quite clever.”
“But why?” Jenavian asked. “Why would you hand the galaxy over to the Tarreen?”
“She didn’t,” a deep voice called from the corridor. An instant later, Minister Drathir and his two red-scaled Baalir-caste honor guards appeared in the doorway. The former was brandishing a slender pulse pistol, while the latter two carried high-powered plasma rifles. All of them were pointed squarely at the Widow. “She never handed over control of anything.”
Jenavian spun to face him. “Your Excellency?”
“The Sarafan never ceded control because they didn’t need to,” Drathir explained, his glowing yellow eyes flickering wildly. “Tell me, Widow, when exactly did you murder the Hierarchy?”
For several impossibly long moments the Widow remained silent, her eyes locked on the group of Tarreen intruders, and Jenavian started to wonder if her mistress had been paralyzed in fear by the minister’s unannounced arrival. But then the woman’s ghostly smile returned, and this time it was laced with a darkness that sent a shiver down Jenavian’s spine.
“Hello, Your Excellency,” the Widow said. “I’d wondered when you would finally decide to pay me another visit.”
Drathir hissed between his fangs and made a show of flicking up the power setting on his pistol. “I asked you a question, and from now on I expect you to answer.”
The Widow shrugged, clearly unimpressed. “The Hierarchs were perfectly willing to accept the terms of our arrangement. And why wouldn’t they? We were offering them the galaxy they’d lost centuries earlier.”
“Except you betrayed them.”
“Hardly,” she scoffed. “They turned on us the moment the Dominion shattered, just as we knew they would. Your people may be quite skilled, Minister, but they have less honor than the Claggoth. I’m sure they believed that with our numbers diminished, we would be easy prey.”
“But you killed them,” Jenavian reasoned. “And since not even the members of the Conclave know the Hierarch’s true identities, no one knew they were gone.”
The Widow nodded. “It is one of the great ironies of our time, though I doubt His Excellency can appreciate it as we do. The Tarreen are a culture so obsessed with rank and caste, so consumed by secrets and deception, that their own leaders were forced to hide their identities from their peers just to survive.”
“So you’ve been giving the ministers orders for a hundred years…and they had no idea.”
“Until today,�
�� Drathir declared. “The Conclave will not stand for this. And neither will I.”
The tac-holo on the far side of the room beeped a warning, and a Convectorate battleship suddenly appeared on the projection. A half dozen smaller support ships winked into existence a moment later.
The Widow didn’t even glance at the holo. “So proud, so arrogant. Do you see, Agent Vale? Despite their impressive physical stature and keen intellects, the Tarreen are driven almost exclusively by an overinflated sense of self-superiority. It made them excellent candidates for administrators and stewards, but sadly that is the limit of their usefulness.”
Drathir snarled. “The Conclave will wish to interrogate you—thoroughly—but I doubt they’ll be overly upset if I simply kill you where you stand.”
“My dear Minister, do you truly believe you’re the first of your kind to learn the truth? Do you really think that over the course of a hundred years, you are the only one of your kin sharp enough to put it all together?” The Widow snorted derisively. “Your predecessor, Kirask, figured it all out within three weeks of taking office. He embarked on a similar ‘inspection’ of the Nidus, in fact. His efforts were incredibly useful in allowing me to identify potential traitors and swiftly eliminate them.”
“What?” Drathir croaked. “Kirask was a fool. He never investigated anything—he did everything he could to bury this entire project!”
“After I spoke with him, yes,” the Widow said calmly. “He was quite…receptive to my point of view, given time. We both agreed it would be best for him to leave only the faintest scraps of information behind, just enough to attract a few overly zealous investigators in the future.” She smiled again. “Incidentally, you’ve been very helpful in allowing us to root out a new generation of inquisitive minds within the Ministry, Your Excellency. My people have already seen fit to deal with them appropriately.”
The Tarreen’s glowing eyes flickered like a starship’s drive flare. “No, no that’s not possible…”
“Gral Visek and his team have already been taken into custody, but you don’t need to worry. He’s far too useful of an asset to be killed. After a few minor adjustments, we’ll be able to apply his talents elsewhere.”
As a species, the Tarreen weren’t prone to showing fear. They were the privileged overlords of the Convectorate, after all, and they rarely had anything to be afraid of. But right now the desperation in the minster’s widening eyes and fully retracted claws was readily apparent.
“The Unifier will bombard this compound into oblivion,” Drathir growled. “The last of the Sarafan will die right here!”
The Widow grunted softly and turned towards the tac-holo. “Admiral Mothaal, can you hear me?”
“Yes, mistress,” another Tarreen voice came back over the com. “We await your command.”
“Excellent. Several of my Drones will be bringing you equipment to upgrade the Unifier’s engines. Our quarry has taken shelter in astral space, and I will be sending you to greet them.”
“We are honored, mistress. We shall not fail you.”
“I know you won’t, Admiral,” the Widow said softly. “Nidus out.”
“Impossible,” Drathir stammered, recoiling backwards. “How could you have…?”
“There is no need to be afraid, Your Excellency. I have no interest in grooming another Intelligence Minister so soon. As with Kirask, I’m sure the two of us can eventually come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“No!” the man shrieked. “Kill her!”
Jenavian dove out of the way as the guards lifted their weapons, but they never had the chance to pull the trigger. Without warning, the rifles shattered into pieces in their grip, and the two men stared down in shock at their empty hands. Before they could recover, a low tremor rumbled in the air, and suddenly they were soaring across the chamber. They crashed hard into the walls, and the thatch of cables and conduits lining the room wrapped around their heavily-armored frames and pinned them in place.
Drathir, seeing two of his fearsome commandoes neutralized in a matter of seconds, panicked. He tried to fire, but his pistol crumbled in his hand just as theirs had. When that failed, he reared back on his haunches and prepared to belch a mighty gout of flame—
And hen toppled over helplessly onto his back. The burst of fire splattered harmlessly against the ceiling, and it was obvious by the man’s frantic groans and snorts that a telekinetic hand was pinning him in place.
“Take him to the infirmary,” the Widow ordered, gesturing to a pair of Drones that had materialized from the darkness of the corridor. “Begin his reconditioning as soon as possible. I want him on the Unifier before the drive is installed.”
“No!” Drathir shrieked. “I am the Minister of Intelligence! I am your master! Obey me!”
The Widow sighed. “Calm down, Your Excellency. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
She reached out her hand, and the decorative golden amulet that had been hanging around Drathir’s neck snapped free and flew into her palm. The moment it did so Jenavian could finally sense the minister’s thoughts, and for the first time in her life she knew what Tarreen fear felt like.
Drathir started to scream again, but his mouth clamped shut before he could release more than a stifled yelp. A few seconds later he stopped struggling entirely, and his eyes fixed blankly upon the ceiling.
“Take him,” the Widow said.
The Drones swept forward in near unison. They telekinetically hoisted the massive Tarreen body onto a repulsor-bed before disappearing out into the corridor.
Jenavian knew her mouth was hanging open, but she couldn’t find the strength to close it or words to fill it. She didn’t know what to say or do or even think. The Pandrophage, the disease that had ostensibly held humanity in check for the past century, was a lie. The Hierarchy, the universally feared collective of Tarreen overlords, didn’t exist. And the woman standing next to her, the woman she had long ago learned to fear and respect in roughly equal measure, was the last of the Sarafan…and the true power behind the Convectorate.
“I know you still have questions,” the Widow said into the silence. “But this revelation was long overdue. With the recovery of Lord Foln, the time has come for us to take the next step in our reascension.”
Jenavian blinked, and it took every liter of resolve she could muster to force her brain to start working again. “Reascension?”
“Yes. We must rebuild what we’ve lost,” the Widow explained. “You, Markus, and Ralon were to be the first of a new generation of true Sarafan…but with Markus’s unplanned defection, I decided to wait.”
Jenavian shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
The Widow cocked an eyebrow. “You asked earlier why we turned against our own people, and the answer is that they had become weak. The once glorious Sarafan Brotherhood had devolved into a collection of alien apologists. Misguided sympathy was the disease that destroyed the Sarafan, not the Pandrophage. Year after year they continued to cave to alien demands, and slowly but surely the Dominion began to unravel. There came a point where Krucius and I could no longer tolerate their idiocy. We knew that something had to be done—something drastic—and so we reached out to the Tarreen.”
“And killed billions,” Jenavian rasped, suddenly feeling nauseous. “Did you know that they would destroy Keledon?”
“Of course; it was their primary target,” the woman replied matter-of-factly. “We knew the other Sarafan couldn’t recover from the loss of so many. For all intents and purposes, the Dominion died in a single day—in a single hour, really. The rest of the war was little more than an extended cleanup and search for stragglers.”
Jenavian’s hands balled into fists as she remembered back to the Damadus and the corpses they’d found across the ship… “That’s what the Damadus Project was for, wasn’t it? Foln rallied the best of the remaining Sarafan together under the pretense of a last-ditch mission to cure the Pandrophage…and then he led them out into deep spac
e and murdered them.”
“Murder presumes innocence, and I assure you that none of their hands were clean,” the Widow said. “It was the final stroke, the last purge to cull the weak and begin anew.”
“But something went wrong, didn’t it? That’s why he had to stick himself inside a crystal. We found his body on the ship’s bridge, and it looked like he’d been shot in the back. The crew must have fought back.”
The Widow stepped over to the crystal and held her palm above it again. “His memories of the event are…indistinct, but yes, I believe that is what happened. I heard him cry out in pain from across the galaxy, but I wasn’t sure what had happened. All I knew for certain was that the Damadus never arrived at the rendezvous coordinates. I could feel his presence—I knew he was still alive— but I could never track him down.”
“One of the crew must have shifted into astral space and tried to escape,” Jenavian speculated. “And when the ship finally ran out of power, it just sat there adrift for a hundred years.”
“So it would seem,” the Widow murmured. “Regardless, it doesn’t matter now. Thanks to your efforts, Lord Foln’s psyche has been recovered, and soon he’ll be able to return to us.”
Jenavian glanced over to the crystal. From all she’d ever heard about Krucius Foln, the galaxy was far better off without him. “You’re sure there’s enough left of him?”
“It will take time for him to readjust, naturally, but the crystal is undamaged. His mind and memories should be largely intact, and the Drones will be able to heal the rest. All he requires is a suitable host body.”
“His body was destroyed with the Damadus. Do you have enough records of his DNA to clone a new one?”
“Of course, but traditionally the Sarafan preferred not to be reborn in a younger version of themselves,” the Widow said. “The entire transferal process was already disorienting enough to the individual’s peers, particularly those without significant psionic ability.”
“But hopping into a completely new body wasn’t?”
“You have to understand that precious few of our order ever mastered the technique, and those that did rarely spoke about it. The rebirthing process was not something to be done casually at the first sight of a new wrinkle or age-line. It was more than a mere resurrection—it was the dawn of a new life. Most of the Sarafan adopted fresh identities and often moved away from their old friends and families.”
“I see,” Jenavian whispered, though of course she didn’t. The entire concept of entering a new body was so esoteric that she could hardly wrap her head around it. “Well, considering most of his friends and family were killed a century ago, it doesn’t seem like that would be a problem.”
The Widow smiled. “True enough. I’m certain that right now he would be willing to settle for almost anything, but thankfully there’s no need to grow a new body at all…not when we have a perfectly suitable host right here.”
Jenavian swallowed as a cloak of near-palatable dread draped across her shoulders. “What do you mean?”
The Widow gestured towards one of the wall monitors, and it flashed with a holographic projection of the interrogation lab on the compound’s lower level. There, strapped to a chair and surrounded by a gaggle of Drones, was Markus.
“It’s a pity, really,” the other woman said almost wistfully. “He had extraordinary potential, just like you and Ralon. But unfortunately he also had a rebellious streak to him that never abated as I’d hoped. He always reminded me of some of our ancient peers who seemed more interested in apologizing for their powers rather than using them. They refused to accept the true nature of the horrors lurking in the darkness between the stars, and they couldn’t see how we were the only force in the galaxy keeping them at bay.”
The Widow grunted softly and turned. “Regardless, his body is young and well-formed, as I’m sure you know. Once his scrubbing is complete, he will serve as an excellent host.”
The cloak of dread tangled around Jenavian’s throat and threatened to choke her. “What?”
“I realize it might be a bit difficult for you to adjust to at first, but Krucius enjoyed his brief contact when Markus was attempting to link with the crystal before. It’s amusing, really. If Markus hadn’t stolen the crystal away when he did, Krucius may have been able to implant himself in another on the Mire base. He found a young girl with remarkable potential, and he was on the cusp of pushing his way inside just before you escaped.”
Jenavian clutched onto the nearest railing by one of the larval pods. “Selaris.”
“Yes, a Gantrell of all people. I wonder if the irony of manifesting through a descendant of his ancient familial rivals was lost on him.” The Widow shrugged. “Either way, it is immaterial now. Once the Unifier is ready, Admiral Mothaal will travel to the asteroid and capture any worthwhile Flies. Perhaps some of them will possess sufficient potential to join us.”
“What about the rest?” Jenavian asked softly. “The people living there aren’t criminals. Most of them have never been to the normal galaxy.”
“The Tarreen won’t see it that way. I typically care little for their opinion on such matters, but after what happened to Minister Drathir and his team it may be worth giving the Conclave a victory to celebrate over. They’ll believe their envoy successfully recaptured a dangerous traitor and then helped deal a mortal blow to the Mire. Questions about our program will once again dry up, and we can continue rebuilding in peace.”
“Surely we don’t have to kill them all,” Jenavian whispered, her hands squeezing the railing hard enough she wondered if the metal might snap.
“I will leave that up to the judgment of Minister Drathir—after his reconditioning, of course. It will be amusing to see how he responds.” The Widow shrugged fractionally, as if she were discussing a change in the weather rather than the summary execution of fifty-thousand people. “In any event, I know this is a lot for you to take in at once. I had hoped to be able to tell you the truth under different circumstances, but this will have to do. For now you should return to your quarters and enjoy some well-earned relaxation. I will contact you again shortly.”
Jenavian nodded. At no time in her life here on the Nidus had she even been happier to hear a dismissal. Maintaining her mental barriers as best she could, she slipped out of the chamber and wove through the compound’s long, empty corridors like she was in a trance.
It was too much to take in at once. It was too much to take in at all. But she couldn’t stop and try to process it here, not with the Widow and a hundred other psychics in such close proximity. She could try her best to shield her thoughts and block them all out, but all it would take was one slip, one hiccup, and everything would immediately come crashing down around her.
So instead she concentrated exclusively on moving one foot in front of the other, and a few minutes-that-felt-like-hours later she was back in her quarters. Thexyl glanced up from the computer station, his scales rippling a concerned orange.
“I take it we have a problem.”
“Yes,” Jenavian said softly. “We do.”
The Spider and the Fly Page 44
