Enemy Games (38 page)

But still she lived.

“My handheld,” Jayleia breathed, rushing to her side, cold tears sliding unbidden down her face. “Where is it? I need to understand Chekydran biology . . .”

The queen wheezed.

It registered in Jayleia’s head as amusement tinged by warmth, as if her desire to treat the queen, despite everything that had happened on the nest plain, had reached past the barriers of their separate species.

“I don’t know what I can do, Jay,” Raj said, his voice shaking, “but I’ll try.”

“Field stasis?” she breathed.

“I don’t even know that it would work,” Raj protested.

“Can we please try?”

She felt her cousin’s stare.

When he answered, the sharp edge of tension had left his voice. “I’ll get it set up.”

She wondered what had shown in her blood-and-gore-smeared face to make him sound like that.

“Major Sindrivik’s bleeding has stopped!” Dr. Idylle called, striding to join them. “We need more of that gel they used on him, assuming it’s designed for Chekydran physiology rather than humanoid.”

“Good. Jay,” Raj prodded. “Ask them.”

The queen convulsed.

Jay choked on futility. The creature was Chekydran. Even with the
Sen Ekir
, Dr. Idylle, Raj, and equipment in a language Jay could read, their medical gear was calibrated for humanoid biology. Everything she knew—everything she was—wouldn’t be enough to save the queen.

“Show me how to help you,” Jayleia said.

The creature grunted and, with a trembling foreleg, pressed something into Jay’s filthy hand.

She staggered. Images, memories not her own, lineage, and history whirled through her head, seeking to burrow into brain tissue already too crowded. She sucked in a ragged breath and the impression broke apart.

“Queen,” the Chekydran queen whistled.

Damen gasped.

Everything but Raj and Dr. Idylle, busy setting up the mobile stasis field, froze.

J
AYLEIA’S pulse thundered in her ears as she stared at the wounded matriarch.

A sweet scent filled her head. Jayleia blinked. Her stomach rumbled. She looked at what the queen had given her and frowned, unable to identify the white substance. A sheen moved over the surface of the glob in her hand. The smell emanated from it.

As Jay glanced at the Chekydran queen, then around the group of stock-still Chekydran, awareness burst through her.

Royal jelly, the substance only the queen of a hive could produce that turned a developing larva from worker into a queen.

She’d offered Jayleia the rule of this portion of the Chekydran race. After the complete hash she’d made of trying to protect the hive?

Jay shook her head. Pride had led her to believe she could pick up the mantle of a warrior without consequence. As a result, Vala was dead. The Temple had been attacked and her family shattered. Damen had been injured again, and Jay had cost a species the life of its matriarch.

No. She couldn’t lead these beleaguered creatures. They couldn’t even understand one another. They needed a queen who shared their biology and their way of life.

Of course they did. And maybe, if she’d checked her ego before coming to this planet, Jay would have seen that she wasn’t being offered the rulership of the race, only the opportunity to declare the new ruler because the old one lacked the strength to do so.

She stalked five or six paces away to the nest chamber she’d shown Dr. Idylle. Jay held out the royal jelly to the nearest attendant and pointed at the infant Chekydran.

“Her,” she said.

The attendant’s momentary hesitation made Jayleia wonder if she’d committed another grave error in information processing.

Then the creature leaped forward, scooped the precious jelly from her grasp, and began feeding it into the chosen nest chamber. Two more attendants rushed to assist. They rubbed their back legs together, scraping their wings in the process. A weird, churring song rose over the plain and Jay realized they were spinning webs. They were enlarging the new queen’s chamber.

The old queen’s shallow, broken hum of approval caressed her. Jayleia turned to aid Raj and Dr. Idylle.

The shimmering, midnight blue drone intercepted her. He trilled a note that sounded familiar. Bending, so that his face was even with hers, he studied her a moment, or so it seemed to her, as if seeking permission for something. Then he swept delicate, silky-fine antennae over her dirty face.

A flutter of unfamiliar emotion tickled through her body. Hers? Or his? Jay frowned, trying to attach a name to it. Acceptance? Welcome? It felt more complex than that.

A bare thread of sound reached her, charged her with a task.

She nodded. “I’ll do all I can.”

The sound of her own voice jolted her. Twelve Gods. She was making promises to aliens who’d sliced her open in order to steal genetic material.

“They’re cocooning the queen,” Damen rasped.

She turned.

Nursery attendants, soldiers, a few workers, and even the drone, began spinning web. A symphony arose from the music of legs rubbing wings.

Longing tugged at Jayleia. Once upon a time, the entire world had resonated with the sound of spinning, humming, and with the song of flight. Now the Chekydran were too few to sustain more than a few trembling strains at a time.

Raj and Dr. Idylle retrieved the stasis equipment, doing their best to give the Chekydran a wide berth.

Jayleia picked up her handheld from beside the two nursery attendants who were still enlarging the new queen’s nest.

The device sported a crusting of crystals along the top and back of the unit. Two of the stones were milky, the rest were shades of indigo.

Weary and stiff with blood and gore, she tottered to Damen’s side and fell to her knees.

Sweat still beaded Damen’s face, but his color looked better. His gaze, dark with pain, met hers.

“What are we?” she whispered.

He frowned. “I don’t . . .”

“We hate the Chekydran, with good reason. They’re killing us. Our friends, our families,” she said. “We’ve spent the past year working on any means to destroy them as a species. Yet you and I just threw ourselves into harm’s way on their behalf.”

His eye closed. “I don’t know.”

“They modified us.”

“Yes.”

“Did they control us? Make us . . .”

“No.” He opened his eye; a glitter of iron will turned his expression to polished Isarrite. “I don’t know what made me take a shot for a Chekydran, but I know what it feels like to be under their control. This wasn’t it.”

Jayleia released a shuddering breath. He was right. She’d had possession of her body. It hadn’t been the buzz of Chekydran minds in her head. Her indignation and rage had propelled her into battle. What did you call someone fighting for the enemy because it was the right thing to do?

“I can tell you what I see,” he said, “a beautiful, dedicated scientist with a compassionate nature and the soul of a warrior. You don’t need to dissect me. You took my heart already.”

Jayleia’s chest tightened. Longing ripped through her, sending stinging prickles into her eyes.

“Don’t you dare die,” she choked, wiping dirt from his temple. “Or I swear I will dissect you for real. Stay with me. Promise.”

“I promise.” His smile looked wan as his fingers twined through hers. “You love me.”

Her breath caught in her throat.
Damned predator.
She couldn’t hide anything from him. And no longer wanted to. “Yes.”

“I know.”

The familiar shriek of fighters in atmosphere drew her gaze to the sky. Three biomech fighters streaked overhead, climbing. Leaving.

Jay scowled and tensed. If the soldiers had been sent to assassinate the queen, what had those three been doing elsewhere? She traded a glance with Damen.

His frown deepened.

“Were the twelve we faced a distraction? Or the main attack force?” she asked.

“One thing’s for certain,” Damen replied. “They know we’re here.”

Jayleia wiped sweat from her own forehead. “We can expect a visit from the mercenaries Eudal has hired, then.”

“And the UMOPG,” he said.

She smiled, not in the least amused. “After getting three of their ships handed to them in the form of constituent particles, you think they’d come here?”

“They were trying to reduce us to constituent particles,” he protested.

“I didn’t say they didn’t deserve it,” she countered, brushing the hair from Damen’s face.

He closed his eye.

“With any luck, they don’t have any more ships with crystal fully integrated,” she said.

Raj came in behind her and activated his com badge. “Pietre, Major Sindrivik and I need a teleport to the medi-bay. Jayleia and Dr. Idylle will follow.”

“Acknowledged,” Pietre said.

The two men vanished.

“Jayleia,” Dr. Idylle began.

“Linnaeus?” Pietre queried via the open channel. “Ready to initiate teleport.”

“We’re in place,” he said. “Awaiting teleport.”

Teleport distortion grabbed Jayleia, flashing a moment of nausea through her. Then she found herself staring at the same cargo-bay wall she and Damen had faced what seemed like an eternity ago.

“I’ll get cleaned up,” she said, turning and striding for the companionway.

“What happened out there?” Dr. Idylle demanded. “You changed. Someone else looked at me from out of your eyes.”

She stopped short outside of medical, schooled her expression to reveal nothing, and met her boss’s gaze.

His brows lowered. He looked away.

The hurt in her chest expanded.

Raj’s expression clouded when he glanced at her.

“I discovered that it doesn’t matter whether the children being murdered are of my own species. I changed because in the second I realized what the soldiers were doing, I became a killing machine no different than they are,” she said, pressing her tone flat.

“How?” Pietre asked from the cockpit doorway.

“She’s a Swovjiti warrior,” Damen said from the diagnostic bed. The ripple of pride in his voice once again proved a balm for the pain clawing her.

“She’s not,” Raj replied, his tone apologetic as he met her gaze. “You were disavowed by the Temple and sentenced to death for betraying the people to the attackers.”

The accusation slammed through her, amping her pulse. “I didn’t!”

Her cousin shrugged, sorrow lining his features. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Too many people are dead. The cost was too high. The Temple has been disbanded and the training halted.”

Clenching her fists against the sense of betrayal slicing her defenses to ribbons, Jayleia brushed past Dr. Idylle and stomped down the ramp.

She couldn’t stay aboard the
Sen Ekir
. Not when her boss feared what she’d become and her cousin condemned her in the Temple’s voice.

Breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps, she took shelter aboard the
Kawl Fergus
. She went straight to Damen’s cabin, shut herself into the cleansing unit, and paid assiduous attention to scrubbing away dead super-soldier.

When the unit cycled off, she put on her uniform. If the Temple had been disbanded, no one remained to tell her she’d once again lost the right to wear it.

The com panel chimed a tri-tone.

She went to the cockpit and sat in the chair she’d come to think of as hers.

Jayleia activated the channel. V’kyrri? “
Kawl Fergus
.”

A moment of interstellar static.

“Unknown female on this channel,” a young woman’s musical voice said. “Please identify.”

“Jayleia Durante!” a different female’s voice, one Jayleia knew well, shouted. “Where the Three Hells have you been? And what have you done to my officer?”

Not V’kyrri.

Jayleia grinned. “Don’t yell at me, Alexandria Rose Idylle. It’s been a stellar few days. What possessed you to send Damen to kidnap me?”

“I did have some concern for your life,” her friend countered. “I’m heartened to know you’re on a first-name basis with my officer.”

Jay propped her elbows on the panel in front of her and buried her face in her hands.

“Gods, Ari.”

“Jay,” Ari said, the good-natured, we’re-playing-an-old-game tone noticeably absent. “What’s going on? We expected you aboard the
Dagger
days ago. So did my father. He’s been clinging to my ship like a starved bloodworm until you began broadcasting that signal.”

“Yes. He mentioned that he’d decided to adopt me.”
Until I scared him half to death being what I am
.

“It’s not all bad,” Ari said. “You inherit a couple of stuck-up prigs for siblings, but I’m not bad, as sisters go.”

“Yes, but you get my mother’s entire family,” Jayleia countered. “You’ll never have another secret.”