The Spider and the Fly

by C.E. Stalbaum

  ***

  Just like the first time Jenavian landed on New Keledon, a greeting party was already waiting on the docks. Unlike the last time, today it didn’t look particularly friendly. A row of red-armored Mire soldiers fanned out in a wide semi-circle as she and Markus walked down the landing ramp. Grier was standing right at the center of their formation, one hand gripping tightly onto her pulse pistol and the other slung into a flexifoam cast.

  “I knew you’d bring her back,” the woman bit out. “And without the collar, too.”

  “She’s not going to hurt anyone,” Markus promised, though Jenavian wasn’t sure if he really believed it or not at this point. “And right now we have much bigger problems to deal with.”

  Grier’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “Lord Foln is waiting for you in the Ecclesia.”

  “What about those medics you promised?” Jenavian asked as Thexyl’s repulsor-bed floated down behind her.

  “I didn’t promise anything. They have a lot on their hands right now, and I’m not sure when they’ll be free.”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of time, Tayla,” Markus said. “Surely you can get someone.”

  Grier glanced over to the body. Given that Thexyl had been the one who’d put her arm in that cast and allowed them to escape in the first place, she probably wasn’t overly motivated to help him. But to Jenavian’s not-so-mild surprise, she didn’t sense a great deal of malice in the other woman’s thoughts. Grier mostly just seemed…depressed. Depressed and more than a little confused.

  “I sent the request. Hopefully they’ll respond soon, but there’s nothing else I can do.”

  “What about the rest of the Council?” Jenavian asked, casually sweeping her eyes across the soldiers. There were twelve of them in total, enough to make this interesting if they decided to get nasty, and she was glad she’d strapped her armor back on despite Markus’s concerns. As a precaution, she reached out to brush against the minds of the ones on her right to see if she could identify a potential weak link…

  “The councilors were imprisoned for their own safety. Lord Foln intends to keep them there until they come around.”

  “Well, he certainly didn’t waste any time,” Markus muttered. “He better not have hurt them.”

  “He didn’t,” Grier said. “They are alive and well, but he intends to keep them locked up until they agree to work with us.”

  He grunted. “He might be waiting a long time.”

  “He’s waiting at the Ecclesia,” she repeated, gesturing behind her. “This way.”

  Reluctantly, they followed her across the docks, and Jenavian couldn’t help but notice the scorch marks along many of the rocky walls. The Mire obviously hadn’t taken the city without resistance.

  There’s something wrong here, Markus said into her thoughts.

  Really? What was your first hint?

  I don’t mean the pulse burns or the soldiers. I mean there’s something stirring in my web. Can you feel it?

  Jenavian frowned and stretched out with her powers again. Now that he mentioned it, she could feel something. It was hard to filter out all the background vibrations here with so many psionic generators feeding into the city’s power grid, but if she concentrated hard enough she could pick out a faint trace of…something. It was more like an echo than an active psychic. One of the Flies must have used their powers recently, but she was surprised any of them were strong enough to produce a residual signature.

  I feel it, she told him. It must be Selaris or one of the other Flies.

  I don’t think so. I’d recognize her, and none of the others could generate a vibration like this.

  Then what else could it be?

  His brow furrowed in concentration. It has to be another psychic, and it’s coming from the Ecclesia.

  Jenavian concentrated again as they spiraled deeper into the heart of the asteroid, but the vibrations were still faint and indistinct. She had no idea what it meant, but it couldn’t be good.

  They really didn’t have time to deal with any more hiccups, not with the Widow already on her way…

  They were halfway across the docks when a bustle of movement from one of the shield pylons up ahead drew her attention. A section of the front panel popped open, and two figures emerged from inside. The Mire soldiers swiveled their weapons around in surprise—

  “Selaris?” Markus gasped, hopping forward towards her. “What the hell are you doing in there?”

  “Coming to find you.” The girl glanced warily between Jen and the dozen weapons trained upon her as if she couldn’t decide which was the bigger threat. The scraggly, red-haired boy next to her looked like he was about to faint.

  “So that’s where you’ve been hiding,” Grier murmured, gesturing for the men to lower their weapons. “Lord Foln’s been looking for you.”

  “I know,” Selaris whispered, stopping in front of Markus. Externally, she looked nervous but more or less in control; internally, Jenavian could feel a whirlwind of anger, doubt, and guilt that was so volatile it was nothing short of miraculous the girl hadn’t broken into tears.

  “He believes you killed Doctor Varm,” Grier said.

  “What?” Markus stammered.

  “He attacked me,” Selaris said, her voice trembling. “I had no choice. I had to stop him from synthesizing the serum.”

  “So you burned him alive along with it?” Grier asked.

  “No, I—”

  Markus threw up his hands. “Wait a minute, slow down. What the hell is going on? The serum? You mean his soropan stimulant?”

  “Yes,” Selaris said. “Doctor Varm created a new sample, and it seems to have cured Foln.”

  Jenavian shared a quick glance with Markus before turning back to the girl. “Cured him? You mean cured the Pandrophage?”

  Selaris nodded. “Yes. He has powers now…it hardly even seems possible.”

  “That’s because it isn’t,” Markus said. “He can’t have cured it.”

  “If you’d seen what he could do, you’d believe it,” Grier said soberly. “He’s been learning everything he can from that old family pendant of his. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s stronger than you by now.”

  Jenavian shared another meaningful glance with Markus. Foln must be the one we’re feeling, she reasoned. But how is that possible? How could he cure something that doesn’t exist?

  The serum was never designed to be a legitimate cure, Markus told her. It just floods the brain with enough soropan to simulate the effects of true telepathy. Varm had been testing and refining it for years, but he never believed it would be more than a temporary solution.

  “He ordered Varm to begin synthesizing more for the troops,” Grier went on, “but when Varm disagreed, Foln…hurt him. When I heard his lab had been destroyed, I assumed he’d killed himself and tried to destroy his work.”

  Markus shook his head. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “You need to talk to him,” Grier said, her voice almost pleading. “You have to convince him that this is a terrible idea. I don’t know if he’ll listen to you, but I know he won’t listen to me.”

  “Well, we don’t have time to stand around,” Jenavian said. “Thexyl needs help, and a Convectorate battleship is already on the way.”

  “A battleship?” the boy next to Selaris gasped, his face draining of color. “Oh, shit…”

  Markus held up a hand. “Look, there’s a lot of explaining to do, but Jen’s right—we don’t have time to stand here deliberating. We need to talk to Foln and have him release the Council.”

  “And what about Thexyl?” Jenavian asked. “I’m not going to let him sit here and rot while you scream at Foln.”

  Selaris stepped over to the repulsor-bed. “What happened to him?”

  “A pulse blast straight to the chest. I did what I could, but his vitals have been steadily diminishing ever since.”

  “Can you help him?” Markus asked. “I don’t know how much time you’ve s
pent studying Kali physiology.”

  “Maybe,” the girl whispered. “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s still better than nothing. Why don’t you take him to the hospital and see what you could do? We need to speak with Foln.”

  Selaris glanced up. “So do I. He has a lot to answer for.”

  “If you really did kill Varm, Foln will tear you apart,” Grier warned.

  “Then you definitely shouldn’t be there,” Markus said. “Come on, you and Thomas head to the hospital. I’ll contact you as soon as I can.”

  For a dozen heartbeats it seemed like the girl might protest. The rage portion of her emotional whirlwind seemed to be winning the battle over her guilt and fear, but eventually she set her jaw and sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Selaris took control of the repulsor-bed, and she and her friend started off in the opposite direction. The Mire soldiers glanced between her and Grier several times as if to be certain they should let her go, but strangely the woman seemed far more concerned with confronting Foln than with obeying him. Apparently the plague of insanity suddenly infecting the galaxy had spread here, too.

  “Come on,” Grier prompted. “This way.”

  Ten minutes later they were in the heart of the Agora staring up at the impressive marble dome dominating its eastern edge. The closer they drew to the Eccelsia, the stronger the vibration in their psychic web became. It seemed impossible that Foln could be generating such an aura given what they knew about the Pandrophage, but the psionic imprint was unmistakable. Unmistakable, and more than a little terrifying. Jenavian hadn’t even felt this much power emanating from the Widow, though she had a sneaking suspicion that a two hundred year-old Sarafan could mask her presence if she really wanted to.

  Grier hustled ahead to open the door, and all twelve Mire soldiers followed them inside—six in front, six in back—and when the inner door slid open they fanned out across the chamber like a parade escort. Soren Foln was seated alone behind the Council bench, his hands visibly quaking on the desk in front of him.

  “So you decided to return after all,” he said, smiling bitterly and he glanced up from whatever he’d been reading. His eyes were completely bloodshot, and his face…it looked like he’d aged a decade in the sixty some hours they’d been gone.

  “And you decided to piss on the alliance and lock up the Council,” Markus replied sharply as he hobbled into the center of the chamber. Between him and Foln, Jenavian wasn’t sure who looked worse at this point.

  “I did what I had to do to clean up the mess you made,” Foln said. “The Council was prepared to punish us all for your idiocy, and so I took the decision out of their hands.”

  “And how many people died in the process?” Markus asked. “Did you even try to reason with them, or did you tell the Golem to come in with guns blazing?”

  “We’ve wasted years attempting to reason with fools. It was time to finally take action. Even now our soldiers are organizing the population for war, and soon we’ll finally be able to initiate our campaign against the Convectorate in full.”

  Markus snorted. “So was it Varm’s serum that made you crazy or did you snap before you shot up?”

  “You have no idea,” Foln hissed, the veins in his neck throbbing. “None whatsoever. While you were off attempting to convert this useless drone, I was able to cure the virus that has crippled our people.”

  Jenavian shook her head. “It’s not a cure. It can’t be.”

  The old man’s eyes swiveled over to her, and the heat in his glare could have easily melted through a zabrium wall. “You know nothing, drone. You and your mistress are finally about to meet your match.”

  “Soren, listen to me,” Markus said, taking a step forward. “It’s not a cure because there’s no disease. The Pandrophage doesn’t exist…and it never did.”

  “What?” Grier rasped from behind them.

  “It’s a myth propagated by the Convectorate to maintain control,” Jenavian explained. “The Hierarchy never created any disease. The Tarreen fabricated the whole thing to convince the other races that they could keep humans on a leash.”

  Foln snorted. “If you’re going to lie, you should at least attempt to make sense while doing it. Without a disease, how do you explain the Flies? Or how our species has been rendered powerless?”

  “Because as it turns out, very few humans ever had psionic potential, even during the heyday of the Dominion. We were taught to believe otherwise because it suited the Hierarchy’s purposes…and because we always heard so much about the dangerous powers of the Sarafan.”

  “You’re saying the rest of us can never have this power,” Grier whispered.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Markus said. “It’s genetic, and no miracle cure is going to fix that.”

  “Ridiculous,” Foln scoffed. “My family lineage is one of the strongest in history.”

  “That may be true, but for whatever reason you didn’t inherit the gift. You might have been close—maybe you have some small amount of innate talent—but you will never be a true psychic. Whatever this is…it’s temporary.”

  Foln’s eyes narrowed into two simmering, bloodshot slits. “Temporary. Temporary. Do you have any idea what I’ve already been able to accomplish? What I’m capable of?”

  “I know you’ve assaulted our home and hurt a lot of innocent people doing it,” Markus said. “This is your chance to make up for it. We need to work together—everyone, including the Council—or we’re all dead.”

  Slowly, menacingly, Foln brought himself upright, his entire body quivering with rage. “We don’t need the Council, not anymore. I am the lord of this city now, and I will not run and hide from the Convectorate any longer.”

  Markus sighed and put a hand to his temple. “Look, I’d be perfectly willing to sit here and argue with you under different circumstances, but right now we don’t have the time. There’s a Convectorate warship out there being refitted with an astral drive, and it will be here soon. We have to evacuate the city before it arrives.”

  Foln laughed. It was awkward, humorless, and utterly inappropriate, but he laughed. “Tayla was right about you all along. You were never to be trusted, never to be relied upon. She always insisted that you’d turn against us, that no matter how much you professed to be on our side, eventually all that indoctrination would catch up to you. Tell me: did you even try to convince your woman here to help us, or did she break you immediately?”

  “My lord…I think he’s telling the truth,” Grier said, sliding up next to Markus’s right shoulder. “We should prepare for a Convectorate attack.”

  Foln’s bitter smile vanished. “What did you say?”

  “We have to leave, sir,” she repeated. “We’re not ready to fight—”

  There was no warning. None whatsoever. In one moment Grier was speaking, and in the next she was crashing hard into the western wall. The stone buckled and cracked around her, and her body collapsed to the floor and went limp.

  “No more betrayals!” Foln screamed, his eyes blazing with maniacal fury as they locked onto Markus. “And you—always so smug, so self-righteous. I should have executed you at the first sign of treachery!”

  A deafening screech cut through the air, and for a microsecond Jenavian thought that one of the Mire soldiers had detonated a sonic grenade in the middle of the chamber. Reflexively, she clamped her hands over her ears…only to belatedly realize that the screech wasn’t actually a sound at all—it was blaring from inside her head. She immediately fortified her mental barriers instead, but that proved just as ineffectual. The noise was so loud, so piercing, that it was like trying to dampen the shockwaves of a pulothium detonation with foam earplugs.

  Next to her, Markus was keeled over in virtually the same pose, and it seemed as though the Mire soldiers were being assaulted as well. Foln was unleashing everything he had in a singular telepathic strike, and if she didn’t do something quickly, it was going to overwhelm them all.
<
br />   Gritting her teeth, Jenavian leapt forward onto the podium and tried to tackle the old man, but before she made contact an invisible hand clutched onto her body and flung her in the opposite direction. Somehow she managed to lift her arm and shield her face before she collided with the statue of Queen Anara, and without her psychogenetically augmented bone structure—not to mention the reinforced plating on her armor—her elbow would have surely snapped in half. Instead she plowed through the stone like a wrecking ball, and the bottom half of the statue toppled over and smashed down at the center of the room.

  She twisted about, biting down on her lip in a vain effort to ignore the agony shooting up and down her arm, and as she blinked the dust from her eyes as the screeching in her head intensified.

  “I will suffer no more insolence,” Foln roared. “This city is mine. This power is mine. I am a Foln, and the galaxy will once again tremble before—”

  His voice choked off and he clutched at his chest. The screeching stopped, and it was replaced by the desperate, feeble gurgles of a dying old man. Blood streamed out of one of his nostrils, and he glanced up one last time to Markus before collapsing atop the podium.

  For a long moment Jenavian just stood there in the oppressive silence, clutching at her wounded arm and sweeping her eyes across all the unmoving bodies in the room. Eventually she stumbled over to Markus and helped him to his feet. He still looked like shit, but then again he’d looked like shit when they’d first come in here, too.

  “We have to speak with the Council,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “We’ve already wasted enough time.”

  “I just hope they’re willing to listen,” Jenavian said gravely. “And that they’ll be able to convince the people here to leave.”

  “They will,” Markus told her. “They have to.”