Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (6 page)

“With his access to
blood, from himself or the others, and the knowledge of how easy the procedure
is, Tritico can create all the unstoppable augies he desires,” Von Drager said.
“If he loses one or two along the way, I’m sure he won’t fret over it.”

“I’ll speak to Wolf
about this in the morning.” Maybe they could have one night before all hell
rolled over them. She drained her cup and started to get up.

“Wait.” Von Drager
grabbed her wrist, but at her glare released it. “What’s going to happen to
me?”

“If you cooperate, tell
us what you know about Tritico’s plans, and if your story about being an
unwilling participant checks out…”

“It will.”

“…then we have no
reason to keep you. You’ll be free to walk out of here.”

Von Drager closed his
eyes and nodded. “Thank you.”

“There is one thing you
might want to consider.”

“And that is?” Wariness
colored his words.

“One of those augies
might come back to finish the job we interrupted.”

“I’ll fake my death,
disappear, change my identity, and start over somewhere a long way from here.
I’ve done it before.”

“But these guys are
augmented assassins; the best the Empire could build. They’re trained to hunt
down people who don’t want to be found. And remember, they know how to kill you
now. A dart from one of those modified needlers fired from the shadows… You’ll
never see it coming.”

He crushed the cup in
his hand, the last of the tea splattering on the table. “And I take it you’re
going to offer me an alternative.”

Fitz tapped a finger
against her chest. “You know more about this thing inside us than anyone else.
Come work with us. Doctor Rauschtonkowski could use that expertise.”

“Cheril? I’m probably
the last person she wants to see.”

“Ski did seem a bit
angry when she found out you were working for the Empire. She thought you might
have been using her only to gain information on the symbiont.”

“What? No, I’d never do
that.” He fidgeted. “Well, maybe at first. I arranged to attend that conference
because I wanted to know what she had discovered, particularly after I learned
she worked for Youngblood. But not for the Empire. For me. Then we met and I
realized what she’d done; that she was one of us, like me. And she was so smart
and funny.”

“And you fell in love
with her.”

“Yes. I thought that
would never happen again.” He turned away, but not before Fitz noticed tears in
his eyes.

Fitz rose and asked
Costos for more tea, then returned to her chair, sliding one cup in front of
Von Drager. She waited, drinking her own. He would continue when ready.

Eventually he grasped
the paper cup in both hands and took a drink. “When I received the symbiont I
was an old man. Dying, in fact. Bad heart. I’d seen the woman I loved for
fifty-three years die, so I was a lousy candidate for immortality and all the
loss it brings. Seeing the people you love grow old and leave you, over and
over, but with Cheril, it could have been different. We could be together,
forever…but she must hate me now.”

Only a few months ago
Wolf had told her he’d cheated death to keep her at his side. Fitz flexed her
fingers against the warm paper cup, feeling the old familiar achiness in the
joints. Perhaps death would not relinquish its prize so easily, but as she’d
always done in her career, she pushed thoughts of her mortality aside and
concentrated on her job.

“Any idea what Tritico
might be up to?”

Von Drager shook his
head. “He didn’t trust me, kept me isolated. The augies who guarded me were my
only contact, but I picked up a few things listening to their chatter. Just
after we returned from Baldark, Tritico and Chorickus disappeared for several
weeks. Rumor had it that they were looking for something; something that
worried the guards.”

“There’s not much that
scares augies.”

“Tzrakas do,” he said,
his voice quiet.

Cold rippled down
Fitz’s spine. “No. Before we left Baldark we razed that breeding facility,
wiped out every bug, nymph, and egg we found. Ari insisted on that. And we left
a detachment of marines to track down any whisper of the creatures left alive
and eradicate them as well. Tritico won’t be finding any minions there.”

“But those aren’t the
only Tzrakas.”

Fitz’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re talking about the remnants of the bug fleet that escaped Lockmea Rho
and scattered. There’s been only rumors about them for half a century, nothing
substantial.”

To end the Tzraka War,
Ari Ransahov had lured the bug fleet into the Lockmea Rho star system, then
destroyed its sun with a new, experimental nova bomb. A handful of the outlying
hive ships managed to flee, never to be seen or heard from again.

“There’s been
theories,” Fitz said, “from the plausible to the crackpot, as to why the bugs
stopped fighting. They were winning. For decades we watched and worried,
waiting for their return. Waiting for the next shoe to drop, but it never
came.”

Even the kind of fear
the Tzraka generated couldn’t be sustained forever. Eventually an entirely new
set of terrors replaced them, and the bugs slipped into history.

Von Drager leaned
forward. “The Tzraka are a weapon, a tool for war. Without a hand to wield them,
they are aimless, without a purpose; little more than the creatures they were
genengineered from. Take a pistol, place it on a table in a locked room, and
it’s only an inert lump of metal and plastic. It’s no less deadly, but all its
danger is potential, waiting for you to pick it up and use it. Just like the
Tzraka.”

“Wolf told me that
during the War, Fleet speculated that the bugs were controlled by something
intelligent,” Fitz said. “Something our forces never saw.”

“Yes, their masters,
the Arkainsahaar.

That rang a bell. “That
ancient race you told Wolf about? I thought they were extinct.”

Von Drager’s eyes grew
haunted. “Perhaps, but unfortunately their weapons are still scattered across
the galaxy, waiting for the unwary or the uncaring to discover.”

“And you think if he
finds the remnants of the Tzraka fleet, Tritico will be able to command it?”

“He controlled the
Tzraka on Baldark, didn’t he?”

The hair on Fitz’s arms
crept up as she remembered Tritico and that bug as they discussed feeding her
to hundreds of voracious Tzraka nymphs.

Von Drager steepled his
fingers in front of his lips, almost in a gesture of prayer. “Tritico kept me
isolated. No tri-Ds, no newsies. I really haven’t heard much of what has
happened in the Empire since Ransahov arrived, but I did overhear two of my
guards talking. Is it true that Youngblood will be Triumvir?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s in command of
the Fleet; of all the military?”

“That’s what a Triumvir
does.”

“Good. We are going to
need him and anyone else who has fought the bugs. He knows Tritico and
understands how he thinks. We’ll need every advantage we can scrape together if
that madman manages to bring back the Tzraka, because this time they won’t stop
until they’ve destroyed all of us.”

Fitz clamped her bottom
lip between her teeth, while in the back of her mind, she imagined the sound of
that long-awaited shoe dropping.

Arianne Ransahov,
Dragon Emperor of Scyr, Protector of the Realm and Hero of the Empire, wore her
exhaustion like a heavy cloak.

Fitz studied the tall
woman who slouched against the heavily-shielded window of her office, watching
the strings of air traffic weave through the rainy evening sky. Below her,
Striefbourne City’s ten million inhabitants scurried about their lives,
oblivious to their sovereign’s scrutiny. Beneath the armored fabric of her
purple uniform jacket, Ari’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

“Bugs.” She traced the
path of a raindrop down the window. “For my entire career the Tzraka have been
there, overshadowing my life and dictating my every move. Even when I ran away
to Baldark, I couldn’t escape them.”

“We know now that wasn’t
a coincidence,” Fitz said. “When your mother petitioned the crown to quarantine
Baldark, to give its culture the chance to progress at its own pace, she
inadvertently handed DIS exactly what they were looking for—a human population
on a world so isolated that no one would discover what they were doing. Do you
recall hearing about a project called Dark Harvest?”

Ari turned and leaned
against the window, arms crossed over her chest. “It was one of a handful of
crazy schemes instigated by Security to develop a strategy—any strategy—to use
against the bugs. After downing a couple of beers, we’d refer to it as Project
Bug Birth Control. They were harvesting unhatched Tzraka eggs in an attempt to
find a way to break the reproductive cycle. As I recall, the results were not
very promising, so after the bugs broke and ran at Lockmea Rho, I ordered all
the experiments abandoned and the biological samples destroyed.”

Fitz leaned her head
back against the chair and closed her eyes. Braylin Pike had spent most of the
day digging through old DIS records, and even older files from the now defunct
Internal Security. “Instead, on the off-chance it might be needed in the
future, they shoved everything into a stasis chamber—adults, nymphs, larva, and
even the infected women.” Her throat tightened on the final phrase.

Ari kicked her chair
back and dropped into it. Her string of profanity could have blistered the
smart paint off one of her battleships.

Fitz continued, “And
there it sat, forgotten until, under Ashcraft’s rule, Internal Security was
perverted into DIS and they revived the experiments, looking to forge the
Tzraka into some kind of super-boogieman. As if terrorizing the population with
augies wasn’t enough. At first the project proved to be as fruitless as all the
others. The bugs were uncontrollable, as apt to turn on their handlers as go
after their targets. That was, until a mid-level operative was assigned to the
project, one who had the inexplicable ability to communicate with the bugs.”

“Tritico.” Ari spit the
name like an obscenity. “Have we learned anything more about how he does it?”

“Nothing, but I suspect
it’s all tied together—the bugs, the symbiont, and that ancient race Von Drager
calls the Arkainsahaar.”

Ari’s mouth tightened.
“You’re not suggesting that anyone who carries the symbiont can talk to
Tzraka?”

“It’s possible, but
that’s not an experiment I’m in a hurry to try.” Fitz frowned. “Von Drager’s
the only one with that kind of information, and he’s careful about what he
doles out. Can’t say as I blame him. He doesn’t expect us to treat him any
better than his previous boss. As soon as Tritico had the ability to create his
own Lazzinairs, Von Drager became expendable. That augie had orders to execute
him rather than let him fall into our hands. He’s scared, and figures if he
tells us everything, we’ll kill him or leave him in that hellhole to go insane.
Information is his only leverage.”

Fitz’s nerves still
twitched from that morning’s trip to his maximum security cell.

“We need to go slow
with him, gain his trust. I’m counting on Doctor Rauschtonkowski’s help in
this. The two of them had an on-again off-again relationship, so if anyone can,
she should be able to convince him to trust us.”

Fitz hesitated for a
few seconds, then said, “One of my people is getting close to the end of his
operational lifespan. He’s already showing signs of late stage TKS. Nick Costos
deserves the same chance at a new life I was given. Any plans on when you’re
going to tackle this bio-immortality problem?”

The door chimed,
interrupting the Emperor’s answer.

“Come,” Ari called.

Her steward entered,
pushing a cart. The two women waited in silence while he poured tea for Ari,
coffee for Fitz, then doctored each with the appropriate amount of milk and
sugar. He placed a tall three-tiered plate piled high with cookies, pastries,
and fruit on the corner of the desk, and withdrew.

The Emperor ground the
heels of her hands against her eyes, her voice leaden. “I’ve commissioned a
string of reports on the effects of introducing longevity to the human
population. For every one that promises a glorious utopia, four others warn
that it’s a trap, a dead end for humanity. They predict over-population,
unemployment, and a depletion of natural resources. The way this thing makes us
eat, how could we manage to feed billions?” She forked a pastry onto her dish.
“I don’t want to be remembered as the person who brought about the downfall of
mankind.”

Fitz frowned at the food,
choosing only coffee. Against her lips, the elegant cup’s rim felt thin and
delicate as an eggshell, but the coffee was bold and astringent, roiling her
stomach. “It doesn’t matter what you want. You’re sitting on a live grenade
with this information. It’s going to explode. All you can do is control the
amount of damage.”

“I’ve thought about
rolling it out slowly, starting with the high ranking members of my government,
moving on to the industrialists, educators, artists, then down through the
social strata.”

“Before you got half
way through that list, the common workers would be howling for your head on a
pike atop the Assembly Chambers—probably all of our heads.”

“Then I’ll give
bio-immortality to the entire population of the Empire.”

“The Landers Federation
would have every battleship they own lined up on our borders within a week,
willing to start a war to gain that secret.”

Ari’s fork clattered to
the plate. “Then what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“I’m afraid there’s no
right solution, only less wrong, but you have to do something soon, or this
secret will leak out. When it was only the six, seven if you count Von Drager,
it was easy to blend in among the billions of people in the Human Sector. We’ve
added two with Ski and I, but who knows how many Lazzinairs Tritico has
produced. Four that we know of, but I have sixty-four augies unaccounted for,
agents who have refused to answer the recall. I’m sure some of them will blend
into the woodwork, maybe end up working for organized crime, but if even half
go with Tritico…”

Fitz let the
implications of that scenario hang in the air between them.

“Colonel, I’m almost
beginning to regret appointing you my conscience. You’re too damn good at it.
I’ll make a decision after the Founder’s Day celebrations are over.”

“Isn’t that when Garion
is arriving?”

Fitz had convinced Ari
to postpone her son’s visit until after the holidays. The last thing she needed
amid the frenetic swirl of holiday parties, speeches, and military functions
was one more high-value target to protect. The Dragon Throne may not be
hereditary, but Garion Ransahov was the closest thing they had to a Crown
Prince, and as the child of a long-ago affair between Wolf and Ari, a tempting
target for Janos Tritico.

“Aw, hell.” Ari
scrubbed her palm across her forehead. “After he leaves then; I promise.
Sometimes I wish I hadn’t let you and Wolf talk me into this. Life was a whole
lot simpler back on Baldark.”

Fitz put down the
delicate china cup. “To make matters worse, I have another problem. You’ll notice,
on the after-action report I sent you on yesterday’s raid, that the jammer
grenade Dr. DeWitt supplied us failed.”

“That’s not unheard of
with an experimental weapon.”

“No, it isn’t, but I
swung by CyberOps on my way here to talk to him, and he hadn’t shown up for
work. No one has seen him since the planning session for yesterday’s raid, and
Von Drager did say that Tritico lit out of there like he knew we were coming.”

“Perhaps you’re just
being suspicious.”

“Suspicion is part of
my job description.”

“About that job,
Colonel. After you leave here, consider yourself relieved of duty until our
meeting tomorrow afternoon.”

Fitz bolted upright.
“What?”

“Have you forgotten
you’re getting your bond partner back tonight? I can’t imagine your mind is
going to be on security matters. Arrange for Captain Weiland to take over for
you until then. Now get out of here and head over to medical. You don’t want to
be late for Wolf’s decanting.” Ari harrumphed. “That’s the stupidest term I’ve
ever heard to describe taking someone out of a tank. Sounds more like you’re
opening a bottle of wine.”

Even the thought of a
face-to-face with the disagreeable Praetorian captain couldn’t dampen Fitz’s
mood, because tonight she planned on getting well and truly intoxicated on the
man she loved.

__________

Fitz brushed a lock of
damp hair from Wolf’s face, his skin cool and pale beneath her fingers. Under
their lids, his eyes flicked from side to side.

“Rapid eye movement. Is
he dreaming?”

Cheril Rauschtonkowski
didn’t look up from the monitor displaying her patient’s vitals. “Coming back
up from a symbiont-induced coma, there’s always vivid dreams; nightmares
really. Just another thing we don’t understand about this alien creature that
shares our bodies.”

“But shouldn’t he be
awake by now?”

Ski make a final
adjustment to the infuser unit pumping the white nutrient solution into Wolf’s
bloodstream.

“Give it a few more
minutes. Those surgeries were an insult to his system, even for a Lazzinair.
During that last operation, I suppressed the symbiont so far that it’s going to
take a while for it to bounce back, heal everything and then clear the drugs
out of his system. In the meantime, why don’t you grab something to eat? You
look like shit.”

“Nice bedside manner,
Doc.” Fitz rubbed her hands across her face, hissing an exhausted sigh between
her teeth. “I haven’t been sleeping well, and thanks to my little alien buddy
inside, sleep meds don’t last long enough to make it worth the effort of
popping a pill.”

“Even Lazzinairs need
their rest.”

“I know, but it’s odd.
For most of my life I’ve slept alone and preferred it that way. Now Wolf and I
have been together for only a few months, but if I’m not curled against him,
listening to his heartbeat, all I do is lay awake and stare into the darkness.”

“That’s not odd,” said
Bartonelli. “It’s love.” She and Jumper were playing a game of
Nuk’um All
on the sergeant’s tablet. With Wolf’s surgeries over, Ski had relented and
allowed the cat and his hair to enter the room with the cyber-operating tank.

Fitz coiled her fingers
around Wolf’s slack hand and brushed her thumb against his palm. “With
everything going so well, the transfer of power and setting up Ari’s new
government, we thought now would be a good time for him to drop out of sight
and have this work done. And of course,
that’s
when the gods of chance
decide to kick us both in the head.”

Ski checked the monitor
tracking Wolf’s vitals as they climbed toward the normal range. “Yig knows,
that smiling bastard creating his own Lazzinairs is bad enough, but this bug
thing? You don’t think Logan’s jerking you around, do you? Just told you that
to make sure he got to see Wolf?”

“With something as
horrible as a second Bug War hanging over us, I can’t afford to take that
chance. You knew Logan Von Drager better than any of us. You two had a
relationship; what do you think?”

“Relationship?” Ski
snorted. “We met up a time or two at medical conferences, and after the
meetings we…” She searched for the correct word. “…frolicked.”

Fitz sputtered.

“What, you don’t think
this old lady can frolic?”

“I wasn’t thinking
about you. Von Drager seems to be…ah, wound a bit tight.”

“He’s not always like
that. We first met during a conference on Beckswold, and discovered we shared a
mutual interest in the Lazzinair Puzzle. Logan, you may have noticed, is easy
on the eyes, and I wondered why he hooked up with an old broad like me, but the
mercenaries’ third rule is ‘Never turn down a good lay when it’s offered.’ So I
didn’t.” Memory brought a smile to the doctor’s freckled features.

“We would talk
afterward. I’d ask what he’d say to August Lazzinair if we could magically
bring him back from the dead.” Ski picked up a tablet and punched in data a
little too savagely. “He was probably laughing his ass off at me the whole time.”

“I don’t think that’s
the case. He seemed truly concerned about whether you survived the attack at
Ishtok Base.”