Enemy Games (39 page)

“Oh, Hells.”

“Speaking of secrets,” a male voice Jay recognized as Admiral Cullin Seaghdh cut in, “where is your father?”

His voice rolled around the tiny cockpit, echoing within the confines of her head.

“I don’t know,” Jayleia replied without consciously choosing to answer the question.

She straightened, frowning. He was Okkarian, a race rumored to possess a voice talent that allowed them to compel other humanoids to do their bidding.

And she’d just had a firsthand demonstration. She didn’t know whether to be outraged or captivated.

“That’s enough,” Ari commanded.

“No!” Jayleia countered, deciding on captivated since Ari seemed to have outrage covered. “That’s amazing. Is the ability innate or can it be learned? If it’s physiologically based, do you know what that means?”

Jay heard the grin in Ari’s voice when she replied, “Anyone who hears and reacts has a physiological basis for responding to compulsion, which indicates an adaptation on the part of the Okkarian race to take advantage of primal brain constructs present throughout a number of species.”

“Exactly! Would you be willing to try it again, Admiral? With a different question?”

“Where is Major Sindrivik?” Seaghdh demanded, his voice powered down.

Irked by the suspicion in his tone, Jayleia shot, “I’m a scientist, Admiral. I don’t have the time or the inclination to seduce your friend into an allegiance change the way you did mine. I found it more expedient to tie your agent to the bed.”

Ari choked on a laugh.

Jayleia cringed and buried her face in her hands, torn between mortification and laughter.

“Congratulations, Admiral,” Ari said. She sounded incongruously placid. “You’ve managed to piss off the most even-tempered person I know. Stellar people skills, Seaghdh. Really.”

The tension ran out of Jayleia’s taut muscles. She should have known Ari wouldn’t blindly pick a side. Not his. Not Jay’s.

Where did that leave them?

She heard and recognized Damen’s footfalls on the deck plating a moment before he settled a hand on her shoulder.

Tied to the bed, indeed. Jayleia’s pulse jumped, but she shot him a frown over her shoulder. He’d been injured. Why was he up? “Shouldn’t . . .”

“I’m here, Admiral,” Damen said. The laughter in his tone crushed Jayleia’s fervent hope that he hadn’t heard her sarcastic response to his boss.

Electricity radiated from his touch, catalyzing a potent, debilitating flood of chemicals into her blood.

“Mission objectives, Major?” Admiral Seaghdh rumbled.

Damen slanted an unreadable glance at her, then faced the com panel. He pushed buttons. Verifying a secure line, Jay assumed.

“Two out of three, sir,” he said. “Though we have recent data suggesting that Zain Durante has taken refuge with the Citizen’s Rights Uprising.”

Jayleia pressed her lips tight. The Murbaasch Tu had a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness, something she’d seen firsthand when Seaghdh had hijacked the
Sen Ekir
and its entire crew a year ago merely to get at Ari. She imagined she knew what Damen’s mission objectives read. The Silver City data store, the crystal, and her father.

Where did that leave the daughter of TFC’s missing director of Intelligence Command?

“
W
ITHOUT the information Director Durante attempted to share with us, we are at an impasse,” a melodic, cultured voice observed.

Jayleia opened her eyes. Eilod Saoyrse, the queen of the Claugh nib Dovvyth Empire, would be listening in.

Jay knew she had to represent a political time bomb and, after Silver City and Swovjiti, not just because of her father. Unless being a TFC traitor meant her father was no longer classified as an enemy of the Claugh Empire. How many enemies of their enemies did Jay have to be in order to be counted a friend?

“Are we at the point of no return?” Eilod asked, her tone making Jay’s blood run cold. “Have our options dwindled to the point of eliminating the Tagreth Federated Council?”

Shock and dismay rippled through Jay.

“Absolutely not!” She was on her feet, her hands flat on her panel. She clenched her teeth to keep from speaking before she could think, but they had her backed into a corner, whether they realized it or not.

“You can’t invade TFC without compromising over a decade spent unraveling and isolating the network of traitors at the heart of TFC’s government,” she said.

Damen turned to stare at her. He closed his eye, but that didn’t hide the hurt in the white line around his lips or the anger in the set of his jaw.

“Yes, I sent the message to CRU that should have triggered a series of quiet arrests, but I am not a spy,” Jay snapped. She needed to make Damen understand she hadn’t willfully misled him. “Entirely. If you attack TFC, you’ll sacrifice millions of innocent lives on both sides to take out a few hundred corrupt and power-mad individuals. IntCom, in the form of my father, and a few, trusted agents, has known about the network inside TFC’s government since the pandemic on Shlovkura.”

“You knew?” Damen demanded.

“No one knew for certain, Major,” Jay replied. “My father and his people suspected, in part, I think, because of the work done unraveling the epidemic on Ioccal. The crew of the
Sen Ekir
spoke freely about the investigations we conducted. Our science, by its very nature, could not ethically be held in confidence.”

“And ideas that aren’t aired and given room to breathe and grow are usually bad ones,” Ari concluded for her in a muted, rebuilding-my-data-matrix tone of voice.

“The Shlovkura disaster unfolded in too predictable, too encompassing a fashion,” Jayleia said. “Pandemics leave refugees, survivors. Yet on Shlovkura, there were neither. Precious few Shlovkurs survived off planet unless they were also outside TFC controlled space.”

“It wasn’t until long after Shlovkura had been locked and tagged as a plague world that Dad came to believe the people had been the victims of genocide at the hands of traitors within the ranks of the TFC government itself.”

“Who ordered it?” Seaghdh demanded, every fiber of his voice vibrating with tension.

“President Durgot,” Jayleia said.

“How do you know any of this?” Damen demanded, his expression and his tone cuttingly neutral.

Jayleia shrugged. Should she be pleased or cautioned by the fact that he’d left off the implied “if you aren’t a spy”?

“When I was seventeen, my parents made me my father’s data backup. At that point, I became an ancillary member of IntCom, under my father’s command.”

“Jayleia! What the Three Hells are you saying?” Raj grated from behind her.

Jay glanced over her shoulder. “Raj. Dr. Idylle. We have the
Dagger
on the line. I’m confiding TFC state secrets to the enemy. Come on in.”

“You’re implying your parents implanted something that’s gone undetected all this time? For the love of the Gods, it’s not possible,” her cousin said.

“Assume that it is,” Dr. Idylle countered, concern in his voice. “How would it be possible?”

“It isn’t!” Raj insisted. “It would have to be a device, wouldn’t it? Minds cannot function like computers. One cannot simply upload data to them.”

“I’d implant a shielded medical chip,” Damen said. From the considering, slow cadence of his words, Jay suspected he was developing his thoughts as he went, reverse-engineering the possibilities in his head.

“The challenge would be anticipating changes in medical technology which might prematurely expose the hiding place, but if you’ve already programmed the device to receive regular data burst updates, modifying the shield coding as necessary would be a minor inconvenience. You should know, Admiral, that the guild indicated they’d implanted some kind of listening device in me.”

“Yes,” his commander said. “We removed that when you first joined us so we could feed the guild information we wanted them to have.”

Relief stood out in the stark shadows beneath Damen’s eyes.

Raj shook his head. “Governments are so twisted. Even if Jay had some kind of shielded device, I’d have seen indications of the energy signature. The shield itself would have shown up on scans as—” He stopped short. Awareness burst over his expression and darkened to anger.

“I take it something has been showing up on your cousin’s medical scans?” Admiral Seaghdh ventured into the silence.

“A calcification on a collarbone,” Raj said, his tone weary, defeated. He glanced at her. “Your parents said it was surgery to repair the break in your collarbone.”

“I agreed to it,” she said. “I went in fully informed, Raj. I seemed uniquely qualified to serve.”

Her cousin blinked, looking unsettled.

“Now this is interesting,” Ari said.

“What?” Seaghdh’s tone was bland.

“We’re being hailed by Zain Durante,” she said.

The bottom dropped out of Jayleia’s stomach. “What?”

“
Dagger
,” her father’s voice said via the open com channels. “If you will authorize a secure location and path, I will transfer information pertinent to the Empire to your ship.”

“Stand by to receive data,” Ari commanded.

“Standing by. Data received. Flashing files to your specified location,” her father said. “May I speak with my daughter?”

“I’m listening,” Jay said.

“How long?” her father demanded.

She raised her eyebrows. She’d never heard such anger in his voice. “How long, what?”

“How long have you remembered?” her mother’s voice broke in. “You were never meant to recall the implantation.”

“Mother?” Jayleia marveled. “What are you—Raj said you and Bellin had disappeared! We thought you were dead!”

“The deception was necessary,” her mother replied.

“You’re on the same ship as Dad?”

“Yes.”

“And neither of you has injured the other? You aren’t neuro-locked, are you?” she shrilled, her heart slamming against her ribs.

Silence.

The faint clearing of her father’s throat sounded like it covered a chuckle.

Her brain rolled. “Precisely how far does your deception extend?”

“From the moment twenty-two years ago, when your father and I separated,” her mother replied, her voice serene. “Don’t lose focus.”

“Focus?” Jayleia screeched. “You destroyed our family and my childhood! For what?”

“Security,” her father said.

“What security? You had me kidnapped!”

“Jayleia,” her mother said, “it may be difficult for you to understand what a target you became the moment you were born. I was a warrior. I knew what I’d stepped into. Your father and I . . .”

“All this time?” Jayleia gasped and only then felt the tears on her face. “You’ve been working together? You couldn’t do it while we were a family? Or let me in on the secret?”

“We have always been a family, Jayleia!” her mother snapped. “Perhaps not the one you wanted. But we are a family! When did you remember the implantation surgery?”

“When I reacted to the anesthetic and died shortly after the procedure,” Jayleia said, wiping a sleeve across her face. “Didn’t they tell you they had to restart my heart? Or that they had to force me into stasis without sedation to ensure I’d survive?”

“What? No! They told us you’d developed aspiration pneumonia!” Raj gritted. “That’s—Jayleia, they can’t have done what you say. It’s unethical and illegal!”

“It’s torture,” Dr. Idylle said.

“It was necessary,” she countered. Her voice sounded foreign to her ear, hard, dead. “The only lasting side effect is that I now have a raging case of claustrophobia.”

“No,” Raj said, shaking his head. “You’ve always had that. You were so popular for hide-and-seek games when we were kids because you hid in the open. You were easy to find.”

“Raj! That is enough! Why didn’t you tell us you remembered, Jayleia?” her mother demanded. “It put you in grave danger . . .”

Jayleia stared at the com panel in disbelief. “What were you going to do? Wipe my memory so I’d go missing another piece of myself? No thanks.”

Raj had saved her life and her sanity. He’d come to the hospital every day, exhausted from his medical training courses, and implored her not to die.

“You promised me I could be named father to your first child,” he’d finally whispered. “You can’t die, Jayleia. You have promises to keep.”

She met Damen’s eye. He’d wiped his expression clean. The Isarrite mask he’d made of his handsome face chilled her heart. Jayleia saw acceptance in the depth of his eye, but nothing else. He’d closed down and locked her out. Desolation wrung the blood from her head. By doing her duty, she’d shattered his trust.

“Mr. Durante,” Ari said. “Data transfer complete, files verified.”

“The Empire thanks you for your assistance, Mr. Durante,” Eilod said. “Again, we invite you and your family to accept the hospitality of the Claugh nib Dovvyth . . .”