Enemy Within (21 page)

THE
queen’s bodyguards flanked the door emblazoned with the emerald, silver, and black standard of the royal house. Both men saluted as Seaghdh approached.

“Her Majesty awaits, Auhrnok Riorchjan,” one man said as his companion opened and held the door.

Eilod Saoyrse turned from staring out the viewport, her green eyes flashing. “Auhrnok? What the hell happened out there?”

Seaghdh crossed the gold carpet and tried not to grin. Clever. She gave the court gossip mill grist by taking him to task in front of her bodyguard. He folded Her Majesty’s right hand in both of his, knelt, and touched his forehead to their clasped hands.

“Gentlemen,” Eilod said. “Secure these chambers.”

“By your will, Your Majesty,” the men replied in unison.

Seaghdh heard them leave the room, close the door, and lock it behind them. A few moments later, the subtle, low-level hum of a sonic shield rose.

“You can get up. They’re gone,” his cousin said, curling her fingers around his and lifting.

Suddenly aching and weary, Seaghdh accepted the assistance.

“Are you all right? Cullin, you look awful.”

He rubbed a grimy hand over scratchy eyes and relaxed completely for the first time since accepting his mission to find one Captain Alexandria Rose Idylle. “I’ll be fine, but I think the sonic shield blew the regen unit.”

“Regen?” Eilod frowned, taking a seat at her desk. “You’re injured? You should have gone to medical.”

“I will,” he promised. “This is important.”

“What happened, Cullin, that eight of our best are dead and you come to me when you should be in treatment?”

“We hit a nerve.” Seaghdh sighed and dropped into an armchair, resting his head against the padding. Leather creaked. He rolled his head to one side to look at Eilod, her hands folded, her face lined with concern.

“Go on,” she said.

“The Chekydran were waiting for us. Great, big battleship. No hail. No warn off. They opened fire, punched a hole in our shields with three shots and finished us in six.”

“Do we have a leak?”

“Not necessarily,” Seaghdh said. “Ar—Captain Idylle’s whereabouts weren’t classified. We went in knowing we weren’t the only ones looking for her. There’s no reason to believe the Chekydran weren’t expecting us.”

“Or were they counting on us?” Eilod mused. She shook her head. “Enough. I’ll review your report and we’ll address it in debriefing. Tell me about Captain Idylle.”

“She’s IntCom.”

“What?” Eilod sat bolt upright.

Seaghdh straightened, nodding. “She is either the best spy TFC has ever trained or the luckiest spacer since Ormynd Mbumbakii stumbled on supralight.”

“She was captured and held by the Chekydran.”

“I know. Not my definition of lucky, either.” Seaghdh sighed. “On the other hand, I sense no duplicity in her. I’m beginning to believe it’s because she doesn’t say anything.”

Eilod grinned, abruptly looking much younger. “On the contrary, my dear, I gather you and she have traded more than a few words.”

Seaghdh drew breath to protest, then deflated. He should have known his sharp-eyed cousin would catch a hint of what he’d hoped burned between Ari and himself. “You know what I mean,” he grumbled. “She does not trust. Not me. Not herself. Not anyone.”

“So I gathered,” she replied. “I’m sorry. We’ve done the bad Claugh/good Claugh so often, it never occurred to me that you had made yourself into the good one.”

“I didn’t. She saw through it.”

“Did we recruit a mole, Cullin?”

“No.”

She looked at him for a moment, then sat back in her chair. “The evidence that makes you so certain?”

“Gut,” he admitted.

“Gut? Or something significantly lower? Auhrnok Captain Cullin Seaghdh nib Riorchjan,” the queen said, her voice ringing. “You have ten seconds to explain before I have that woman confined to one cell and you to another.”

“Her involvement with TFC Intelligence Command is off record.”

Eilod frowned and relaxed. “Off record? Tagreth Federated doesn’t do anything unless it’s in triplicate. That is, in part, why you are valuable to me. You have an uncanny knack for wading through their landslide of data. Are you certain she’s IntCom? Could it have been bravado? Meant to impress an attractive captor?”

Seaghdh laughed. “No. Bravado she has, I admit. But no. She’d kept her status secret her entire career, even from her family. She would have kept it to her grave, I think, had we not run into our soldier friends on Kebgra. In fact, Lieutenant Sindrivik is still aboard the
Sen Ekir
, trapped by IntCom’s systems’ lockdown.”

Awareness dawned in Eilod’s face. She chuckled. “She initiated a lockout of her father’s ship? Perhaps I’ll offer Captain Idylle asylum in exchange for her cooperation.”

“She’ll cooperate, regardless,” Seaghdh said. “It’s personal.”

“Her crewman. Yes.” Eilod sighed, drummed her fingers on the tabletop for a moment, then said, “Speak plainly to me, kinsman. What did I bring aboard this ship?”

Seaghdh should have known Eilod would invoke bloodbond. She didn’t often remind him that he was as bound to the throne and its duties as she. Doubtless, she envied him the luxury of being able to forget that particular burden. Eilod Saoyrse never disregarded the yoke of her station.

“My assessment,” he said, “is incomplete. Captain Idylle suffered considerable mental and emotional damage while a captive of the Chekydran, but her sanity and morality seem intact.”

“I require more assurance than ‘seem,’ Seaghdh.”

He shrugged. “I have yet to discern whether she is under Chekydran control, either via brainwashing, implants, or some other device. My initial impression is that she is not, though why she was released if she wasn’t under their control, I can’t say. The Chekydran do nothing that does not benefit them directly.”

“Your initial impression is tempered by that fact,” his cousin guessed.

“Yes.”

“What do I do with her, Cullin?”

“I need time, Eilod,” he said, fighting the urge to lean forward, to give away just how important this was to him. “I need her with me in close quarters where I have access to her fears, her memories.”

A troubled light fired in Her Majesty’s eyes. “For whose benefit?”

He hesitated. “I don’t deny I will help her if I can. If she will let me. The safety of the Empire, however, comes first. If she is a threat, I will neutralize her.”

Grim-faced, the woman behind the desk held his eye for several seconds, then inclined her head. “What are you not telling me?”

Damn it. Growing up as Eilod’s foster brother made her far too familiar with what did and didn’t show on his face. “I’m missing something.”

She looked startled. “Missing? You?”

“You’ve seen her file.”

“Very thorough,” his cousin said, her tone cautious.

“One might say clinical,” he mused.

“Cullin . . .”

Seaghdh leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and peered hard at the queen. “Files are a starting place, a basis, if you will, for interaction with a subject. In this case, I believe Captain Idylle’s file uses detail to hide the fact that her file is omitting something vital.”

Eilod frowned. “What?”

“I don’t know, yet. It’s damned frustrating.”

“You have a distinct talent for identifying information patterns, or you wouldn’t be my Riorchjan.”

“Review her brother’s and sister’s files. Compare them to hers.”

His cousin shot him a sharp glance. “Tell me.”

“Brother, Hieronomus, firstborn. Sister, Isolde, second-born. Hieronomus’s file is typical firstborn data. Details of the pregnancy, journal entries, DNA scans, lock of hair, first steps, very detailed until the birth of the second child. Hieronomus’s third through eighth years are sketchy. Isolde’s file doesn’t begin, save for date, time, place of birth, and her weight, until she’s five years old. I gather Miss Isolde Idylle was a handful.”

Eilod frowned. “Yet Captain Idylle’s file is exactingly detailed, virtually from the moment of conception.”

“Yes. And the tone is markedly different,” he said.

Nodding, she murmured, “Detached.”

“Captain Idylle’s file reads like a report,” Seaghdh said.

“She is significantly younger than her siblings, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Her brother was at university when she was born.”

“A midlife accident, then?”

“When everything else in the file is so deliberate?” Seaghdh mused. He shifted, listening to the faint breath of instinct. “We may have to bring in the
Sen Ekir
.”

“That is a complication I would like to avoid, Cullin. Why?”

“I need Sindrivik to steal another file for me.”

His cousin raised an eyebrow at him. “Her mother’s?”

Seaghdh nodded. “I’d like to know what would cause a mother’s love to change so radically between children.”

“Didn’t she die shortly after Captain Idylle’s birth?”

“Two years.”

“Could it have been illness?”

“I don’t know, Eilod. Until I do know, there’s too much I can’t know about Captain Idylle. I don’t think we want her out of my sight.”

Her Majesty rose. “Report to medical. I’d like to relieve you of duty, but you’ve forced me to trust your instincts over the years. Your mission remains unchanged. Find out what that woman is.”

“By your will.” Seaghdh stood and flinched as newly healing flesh pulled in his side.

“I will alert Dr. Annantra to prepare for your arrival and your injury,” she said.

“Eilod.”

“Don’t argue with your sovereign.”

“Or what? You’ll tell Aunt Kys?”

Her Majesty stuck her tongue out at him and lowered the sonic shield with the click of a button. “Or I’ll relieve you of duty and assign V’kyrri to keep a close personal eye on Captain Idylle.” She smiled sweetly and unlocked the door from the panel embedded in her desk.

Seaghdh ignored the spike of alarm that drove through his gut. Pasting a thoughtful expression to his face, he shrugged. “That might not be a bad idea.”

“Get out of my sight, you intolerable faker,” his cousin ordered, laughing.

ARI
had always said the irony of a medical scan is that it bores you to death. Claugh medi-tech was similar enough to hers that she could follow the procedures even if she couldn’t follow the language. The doctor, a solid, older woman with salt-and-pepper hair, greeted her in her own language and ushered her into a tiny private exam room with pale green walls. She’d scowled when Turrel followed. He crossed his arms and slouched against the wall.

Ari expected questions. She didn’t get any. The doctor directed Ari to the scan bed and after a flurry of instructions to a teenaged male nurse, initiated the scan.

“My son,” she confided when she saw Ari watching the boy.

Ari nodded.

A com buzzed nearby. The doctor answered.

Ari listened and was rewarded this time, catching Seaghdh’s title, Auhrnok, and her name. As she became accustomed to hearing the language, she seemed to get better at distinguishing the words. It wasn’t just a jumble of sounds all run together. But she still didn’t understand it. She’d need to change that, without fanfare, if she could. People who believe you don’t speak their language are far more willing to speak freely in your company. She felt like she needed every advantage she could garner.

“Stay still if you can,” the doctor instructed. “Not long.”

Long enough to wonder if she’d been nothing more than a conquest, no more than a game to Cullin Seaghdh. Ari closed her eyes trying to sift Seaghdh’s lies from the bits of truth he’d fed her.

“Captain Idylle. Captain Idylle, can you hear me?”

She flinched in surprise at hearing someone else’s voice resounding in her head. Her eyes opened.

“Easy,” the doctor said.

Ari blinked. Not the same voice and it hadn’t come from inside her skull. It dawned on her, then. The damned transponder embedded in the skin behind her left ear.

“Captain Idylle, come in.”

She tapped her tongue against the activation switch and recognized the voice. Admiral Jecaldo Angelou. His office had issued the decree requiring that transponders be implanted in all senior personnel. He’d done it right after she’d been taken by the Chekydran. He’d said, when she’d asked following her release, that he never again wanted to sit by while one of his officers rotted in a Chekydran prison. Then he’d ordered the device implanted in her head. She hadn’t mentioned that she’d kill herself before willingly becoming a Chekydran prisoner again.

“Ari?” he asked. “Tap twice for yes, once for no.”

She hit the switch twice.

“Are you alone?”

One tap.

“Understood. Are you all right?”

Suspicion fired through her and she damned Cullin Seaghdh for making her doubt the man who had spent the better part of his career nurturing hers. She tapped twice. Still. Why would he ask that question now? For that matter, why contact her this way? Had IntCom already advised him that the
Sen Ekir
had taken off without her?