Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (13 page)

One last glance over
his shoulder at the monitor brought him to a stumbling halt as the blurred
image of his alter ego dissolved into another face, one he had seen only once
before, reflected in the polished metal of a lift door. Cold blue eyes stared
at him from an aristocratic countenance, framed by dozens of thin ceremonial
flaxen braids.

“…wondering if the
absence of the Emperor’s new military Triumvir had any significance,” the
voice-over intoned.

The Nameless Man
lurched for the exit, forgetting his disguise in his terror. That had been The
Other.

He wandered with the
aimlessness of a drunk to foil any tails, but a wirehead didn’t need to be in
sight to follow him. Eventually, he arrived back at the entrance to his
hidey-hole, checked it in all the spectrums his new abilities gave him, then
slipped into the narrow alleyway.

His den appeared
undisturbed, so he crawled into the comforting darkness. With food in his
belly, all he wanted now was sleep—if The Other would let him. He moved the
crates by the entrance so they partially blocked the opening, leaving him only
a slender strip to see out through, then rolled into a ball and closed his
eyes.

In that hypnagogic
territory between awakening and dreams, he made love to a woman. He sensed her
flesh warm beneath his body, felt his palms stroke soft skin underlain with
firm muscle. He buried himself inside her moist heat, felt her legs wrap around
his hips, pulling him deeper inside. They moved together. Her tongue invaded
his mouth with all the sweet fire his body experienced occupying hers. He
lifted his mouth and whispered against her lips, “I love you.”

He felt her smile, and
she gazed up at him with so much promise in those silver gray eyes.

Gray Eyes.

He slammed out of the
dream, still hard and aching with need. His breath came in short hard pants,
and tears mingled with the sweat on his face. He wasn’t sure how long he lay
there shaking, his arms locked around his chest in a poor substitute for her
embrace. Would there ever be sleep for him again? Eventually he rolled over and
stared through the narrow opening into the alley’s gloom.

A clot of shadow flowed
across the dirty pavement. In a panic, he fought to remember how to engage his
night vision to see what that darkness hid.

“Meow?” the shadow
called.

A cat. Just a cat.
Hundreds of the scrawny animals haunted the back alleys of the Warren. His
jacked-up senses picked up the scent of spices and grease from the meat pie in
his pocket. The creature must have smelled it and come to investigate. It crept
closer, belly low to the pavement. The white paws it slowly eased forward were
gritty and gray with filth.

He pulled the pastry
from his pocket and discovered he must have rolled on it during the passion of
the dream. It was little more than crust and grease ground into the paper, but
he unfolded it and reached through the narrow opening to splay it out for the
cat.

“Come on, kitty. It’s
not much, but probably more that you’ll find around here.”

The cat studied him
with wide green eyes, then rushed forward and began to bolt down the offering.

He nudged the crate
aside, widening the opening to reach out and scratch the cat behind the ears.
It squeezed its eyes shut and wrinkled its nose in pleasure, purring.

“Oh, you like that,
don’t you, kitty?” He felt himself smile, a foreign sensation.

Meal finish, the cat pushed
its substantial bulk through the door of his sanctuary and curled beside him.
Stroking the cat created a strange sensation in his body that might have been
pleasure. He rolled onto his back and his newfound friend crawled onto his
chest, stuck its head up under the Nameless Man’s chin, and purred louder. The
sound soothed his body, quieted his mind. Reassured by the buzzing lullaby, he
drifted into sleep.

This time he didn’t
dream.

Fitz raised her face
from her hands as Doc Ski strode into her office. Arching an eyebrow, the
doctor asked. “The day’s going that well, uh?”

“You have no idea.”
Fitz gestured toward a computer display. “This is a bill from the Imperial
Horticultural Society for a hundred and fifty thousand credits. Seems that foul
smelling monstrosity I blew away last night—or murdered, as they put it—is one
of only three specimens on the entire planet.”

She leaned her chair
back and sighed. “We were incredibly lucky. The emergency rooms were clogged
with injuries—mainly broken bones, cuts and scrapes—but surprisingly few
serious wounds. With all the bolts and needles flying around that room last
night, it’s a wonder no one but Pettigrew was killed.” Fitz scrubbed her face,
her eyes empty with exhaustion. “And I still haven’t found the slightest trace
of Jumper.”

“Food makes it better.
Eat. Doctor’s orders.” Ski placed a tray on the desk, pushing aside the welter
of tablets and data chips cluttering the work space.

The sandwich Fitz
recognized, a thick slice of steak coated with melted cheese, but the pale
frothy fluid in the glass stumped her. She sniffed it. “What’s this?”

“A protein shake. It’s
good. Drink it. I want, no, I’m
ordering
you, as your physician, to eat
three meals a day, plus snacks—high calorie and protein. And sleep in your own
bed tonight, instead of crashing on your office couch like an unwelcome house
guest.”

“Not going to happen.”
Fitz took an experimental sip of the shake and found it quite good. When she
tried to lift the corner of the bread to peer at the slab of steak, her hand
locked up, fingers refusing to obey her. The doctor noticed.

“You need to get your
shoulder fixed. The symbiont can handle the damage to your cells, but can’t do
squat about repairing the mangled hardware inside you.”

“No one’s going into
the tank until the techs have gone through it piece by piece to make sure
DeWitt hasn’t left us any more nasty surprises. The last thing we need now is
for me to go in for a minor repair and wake up a homicidal maniac. As I recall,
in her freighter incarnation Lizzy’s medical bay had a program in the auto-doc
that could repair minor hardware damage. I’m sure they have something similar
over in Cyber-Ops.”

“If that’s all I’m
going to get, I’ll have it set up for you by this evening.” Ski dropped into
the chair across the desk from Fitz. “I’m sure you didn’t ask me over here so I
could nag you, though. What do you need?”

“Have you learned
anything useful from Von Drager?”

Ski shook her head. “No.
If I try to maneuver him around to talking about his past, he shuts down faster
than an emergency airlock. That boy is carrying around some serious guilt about
something.”

“A lot of innocent
people died in his original experiment.”

“True, but I’ll tell
you one thing about him. He’s not a doctor. Well, not a physician anyway. He’s
a xenoarchaeologist; he studies dead alien races.”

Fitz paused, the
sandwich halfway to her mouth. “What? He worked for Special Operations, and
then DIS, as a medical researcher. In all that time, someone must have done a
background check on him to see what credentials he had.”

“Remember, he’s had
years since he killed off his original identity as August Lazzinair to build a
new history, and I don’t think they were as interested in his medical
qualifications as what he claimed to know about the Lazzinair Procedure. I’m
not saying he hadn’t had some training. He knows as much as your average field
medic. He can treat a wound, set a bone or put in an IV, but most of those just
require shoving the patient into an auto-doc. Hell, I could name you a dozen
merc units whose med-techs don’t have half as much training.” Ski thought for
several seconds before continuing.

“According to what he
told Wolf back on Baldark, both the symbiont and the Tzraka are relics from
some ancient super race. As a xenoarcheologist, he must have come across the
symbiont on an expedition and, like a rank amateur, ran with it, never thinking
it would require years of medical trials and tests. We know nothing about the
long-term consequences of living with this entity. Hell, for all we know, in a
couple of centuries it could turn us all into two-headed, flesh-eating
monsters.”

Ski shook her head and
forced a laugh. “I first heard about Lazzinair’s experiments in medical school,
and found them fascinating. Supposedly he’d committed suicide by then, and I
felt heartbroken that I’d never get the chance to discuss his findings with
him. Now I’ve met him, and it’s a hell of a disappointment to learn I know more
about the symbiont than he ever did.”

A crash from the outer
office interrupted them, followed by shouting and running footsteps. The door
flew open as a black streak tore across the floor and vaulted to the top of the
desk, scattering tablets and data chips. Jumper collapsed on his side, flanks
heaving.

A red-faced guardsman
followed him through the door. “Sorry, ma’am. This mangy stray blew through the
security check point…”

“Mangy stray? You can
just kiss my fuzzy buns.”

“That quite all right,
Sergeant. He’s mine,” Fitz said. With his dirty white paws and matted fur,
Jumper did look like a stray—albeit a slightly overweight one—and he emitted a
particularly pungent odor.

With one last glare at
the cat, the soldier withdrew.

Jumper struggled to his
feet.
“I found him, Boss Lady. I found Wolf, or that other guy. Maybe he’s
not as bad as I first thought. He likes to feed homeless kitties.”

“Where?” Fitz asked.

“The Warren. But we
have to go now. I caught a thought about him going somewhere else this evening…
Oh, what’s this?”
He stuck his head in the glass and
began lapping up the protein shake.
“This helps get rid of the taste of that
nasty gerbat I put in my mouth as part of my cover.”

“Fitz, you need to get
your shoulder taken care of before you go up against him again,” Ski said.

“No time.” She
thought-clicked her comm, connecting to Lieutenant Pike. “Has Cyber-Ops brought
by the new prototype for the shut-down module?”

“They did, but I
haven’t finished testing it. There seems to be a few bugs.”

“Doesn’t matter. I need
it now. Bring it up to my office immediately.” Fitz rose and peeled off her
jacket as she headed for her quarters to find other clothes. A uniform,
any
uniform, but particularly a black one, would raise too many questions in the
Warren. She scrounged through the closet and eventually found a bag of
forgotten work-out clothes—sweat pants and a tee-shirt sporting a large rip
from an enthusiastic game of zero-g handball. They’d let her pass unnoticed in
the Warren, plus they already smelled a bit gamey. By the time she returned to
her office, Pike had arrived with Bartonelli in tow.

The lieutenant passed
her the module, but she nearly dropped it as the fingers of her damaged arm
locked up.

“Damn it,” Ski said.
“You’ve no business going after him in less than top shape. The auto-doc would
only take an hour or so.”

“You found Youngblood?”
Pike asked. “Give me a minute to change and we’ll come with you.”

“No. Leading a raiding
party into the Warren would only scare him off. Just me. And Jumper.” Fitz
strapped a miniature surveillance package to her wrist and slipped the shut-down
module into one pocket. “I don’t plan on getting close to him. I’ll just shut
down his spike as soon as I get into range.”

“About that…” Pike
scowled. “I mentioned some bugs? Seems there’s a problem with blow-back. It
takes down every augie in a three-meter radius, user included, unless you’re
shielded.”

“If I shut him down,
he’ll return to being Wolf and I won’t have to fight him, so that’s not a
problem. You ready to go, Jumper?”

The cat pulled his head
out of the glass, white droplets clinging to his whiskers.
“Someone call
Momma Dragon and have her tell Faydra her Big Tom is okay. My telepathy won’t
reach that far.”
He pawed the bread off the half-eaten sandwich and
snatched the cheese-coated meat.
“This would be a whole lot easier if I had
those hands I asked you about.”

Fitz tucked the cat
under her arm and charged out the door.

___________

The Warren hadn’t
changed in the decades since Fitz left it. The narrow alleys still smelled of
stale beer and staler bodies, of urine and the tang of burnt hydrocarbons. She
could taste its acrid bite in the air. A smattering of rain seeped between the
buildings and washed the oily residue into black puddles. Discarded food
wrappers, broken beer bottles, and the bloated bodies of dead gerbats littered
the pavement.

It seemed
incomprehensible that she could step to the end of the alley and see the golden
domes of the government complex and airy spires of the palace wrapped in the
multicolored holograms of the imperial dragon. The opulence and technology of
Striefbourne City jutted into the sky only five kilometers from here, but an
unobtainable world away for most people of the Warren.

She dialed her
olfactory augmentations to their lowest setting and fought her stomach’s queasy
protest. Her auditory systems ran at their most sensitive, allowing her to hear
the hum of flyers slicing through the air meters above her, and the sounds of
screams and laughter drifting through the walls of the tenements on either
side. A drawn out rumble of thunder announced a military shuttle climbing out
of the port and heading toward orbit. The perpetual twilight this far below the
city resounded with the clicks and buzzes and crashes of a hive full of human
beings, but nowhere could she tease out the single sound of one man’s
breathing.

She eased each foot
forward, placing them with delicate care to avoid the slightest sound. If her
augmented hearing could pick up the faint scrape of her shirt’s fabric against
the plastcrete blocks of the wall, so could his.

A few meters ahead, a
dead-end alley jinked to the left, leading back to a hidey-hole she remembered
from another age, when a ragged child needed a sanctuary. At the end of the
narrow passage, a slap-dash bridge had been cobbled together to join the
windows of the facing apartments, no doubt to provide the occupants a quick
escape route. Back then, the darkness beneath it had seemed a comforting
retreat for a frightened child.

Behind her, a shard of
glass clinked against masonry, sounding as loud as an explosion to her keyed up
senses. She whirled.

Jumper stood, one paw
raised and a guilty look on his face. His ears flattened against his head.
“Sorry, Boss Lady.”

She wanted to yell at
him, but because of his one-way communication, she couldn’t even do that now,
not without giving her position away. On the way here, she’d argued with him,
warning he should remain in the aircar, but she’d learned the hopelessness of
ordering the cat to stay behind long ago, and he had as much riding on the
success of this hunt as she did.

Jumper hissed, green
eyes squeezing shut. His whiskers twitched as his black nose sampled the
night’s scents.
“He’s still there. Down that little alley. I can smell him.”

Fitz sorted through all
the information her olfactory augs supplied, her computers rushing to catalog
everything—cheap perfume from a nearby brothel, a whiff of RTZ, and the stink
of multiple unwashed bodies. As sensitive as her augs were, she wasn’t able to
identify an individual by scent alone, like the cat.

It put her at a
disadvantage not to be able to question Jumper. When they returned home, when
this mess was all over, she’d talk to Doc Ski about finding a cybernetic
veterinarian, if only to implant a transceiver in the cat’s skull so they could
converse silently.

The Empire’s first
augie cat. Jumper would love it.

She thought-clicked on
the program for the spy-flies. The box on her wrist popped open, allowing three
tiny metallic insects to buzz free, whirling around her head as she adjusted
their telemetry. Three windows opened on her inhead display, three views of her
face as the minions watched her, awaiting their directions. She sent them into
the dead end alley, only three more insects buzzing around the foul passageway.

Since she’d left the
Warren, more escape routes, secret rooms and hideouts had been built over the
ones she remembered, making the alley look like a new building had sprung up in
the cramped space. The opening at the bottom remained; a manmade cave that
appeared too small to host even a child. Cases, cans and boxes stood in front
of the opening, disguising it.

She guided one of the
spy-flies low, trying to get a look back into the darkness, but without luck.
Thermal revealed only a warm-blooded creature, big enough to be a man, curled
into a tight knot. If she moved the bot in too close to him, his enhanced
senses might hear the whine of its drives, or feel the backwash of the
anti-grav unit.

Movement in one of the
inhead windows caught her attention. A small black shadow drifted down the
alley. She glanced behind her and cursed. Jumper wasn’t there. He’d slipped
past her while she’d programmed the bots. He must have rolled in one of the
noxious puddles, as filth caked his fur. He began scratching vigorously, let
out a series of piteous meows, and checked out each disgusting lump and piece
of garbage in the alley. His disguise of a starving Warren cat might have
worked better if he hadn’t been carrying several kilos of extra weight. He
stood on his hind legs to nose into a barrel, tipping it over and spilling its
contents in a clatter of metal and breaking glass.