Enemy Within (22 page)

She rolled from the scanner bed, eliciting a yelp of protest from the doctor. Turrel straightened. Ari grabbed her handheld, switched it to record, shoved it against her left ear, and collapsed back on the bed.

“Ari, if you’re secure?”

Define “secure.” Two taps.

“Captain, I know these are difficult times,” he said. “You’ve been relieved of duty and sent in pursuit of something I know you don’t want. Alex, believe me, this isn’t my doing. You’re a damned fine officer and I want you back out there on the bridge of a ship.”

A part of her knew Seaghdh was there a moment before he walked in the door. Her heart rate picked up speed. He looked at her quizzically, then traded a confused glance with Turrel who shrugged.

“Ari?” Seaghdh reached for her, concern in his face.

Before Ari could put a finger to her lips, the doctor grabbed Seaghdh’s arm and shook her head, her expression grim. She pointed at instrument readouts. Seaghdh’s confused gaze flicked from Ari to the panel. His eyes widened.

“To that end, Captain,” her CO went on. “I’m putting you on unofficial assignment.”

Interesting. When he hadn’t confirmed her status? Or her location? Was it possible he didn’t know about the attack on Kebgra? She tapped twice.

Seaghdh shoved the doctor, her son, and Turrel out the door. He closed and locked it before turning back to watch with apprehension in his face.

“Boundary beacons indicate a Claugh nib Dovvyth Stalker has crossed into TFC space near Kebgra. I have a ship on intercept. Captain, this is vital. You must not allow yourself to fall into Claugh hands. I should have warned you before we sent you on this expedition with your father,” he said, then sighed. “My fault, I suppose. Armada Command wanted to assign you to a desk where they could keep an eye on you. I argued against it, and in doing so, sent you out there into danger. Alex, we’ve had word that agents from the Claugh are after you.”

Two taps.

“What I am about to tell you is highly classified, Captain.”

Two more taps.

“After you disappeared, the Council initiated a mission of discovery based on rumors coming across the Zone. We don’t have anything concrete, Captain, but we do have enough evidence to begin to make out a sinister pattern. The Claugh nib Dovvyth is working with the Chekydran. Over the years, they’ve taken hundreds of TFC personnel captive. We believed our people dead. We were wrong.”

Ari sucked in a sharp breath.

“They’ve created an army of mutated soldiers. I have reason to believe, Captain, that the Claugh intend to do the same to you.”

“
YOU
be very careful out there, Captain,” Ari’s CO ordered before signing off.

Sage advice. Several days too late.

She lowered the handheld, tabbed it off, and stared at the ceiling.

Seaghdh shifted.

She glanced at him and tried to imagine him wanting to turn her into something like Tommy. She couldn’t. He’d been genuinely horrified both by the efficient carnage on Kebgra and by the soldiers themselves. Further, he’d helped her destroy them. If she was slated to become one at Cullin Seaghdh’s hand, why sacrifice six undoubtedly very expensive prototypes? He’d already had her firmly within his grasp.

“Clear?” he asked.

“No, Auhrnok,” Ari said.

He flinched.

“But my CO signed off and I made damned sure the transponder is off. I take it the transmission showed up on instruments?”

Seaghdh unlocked the door. “Only because we were running a medical diagnostic. You and I both know that transmission should have tripped unauthorized com alarms. It didn’t. How the hell did TFC manage that?”

“They didn’t, as far as I know,” she replied. “This is Armada tech and applied only within the ranks.”

He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at her. All business. “When?”

“The command went out after I was captured,” she replied. “Mine went in shortly after my release.”

“Kept secret?”

Ari nodded. “Supposed to be only Armada Command that knows, but . . .”

“You suspected something and told your father.” Grim satisfaction showed in his tight smile.

She opened her mouth to protest, then feeling resentful, closed it. He’d lied to her and used her. Why the hell was she answering him? How could one notoriously devious and manipulative man elicit information from her when three months of torture hadn’t? Of course she had suspected something when Armada Command put the transponder in her head. She’d just been freed from a Chekydran prison. Distrust had kept her alive and maybe, just maybe, sane. She’d not only told her father about the transponder, she’d given him the code. Look where that had gotten her.

“Quick thinking, Ari,” he said, his tone far too warm for her comfort, “recording what you could. Are you okay? I should bring Dr. Annantra back.”

She nodded and wondered why he’d jettisoned everyone in the first place. Dr. Annantra had known she was receiving. What had Seaghdh feared? That she’d be teleported out? She doubted the
Balykkal
could get a lock through the Stalker’s shields, even with her transponder code programmed into the computers. Unless the crew of the
Balykkal
had orders to retrieve her at any cost. She knew perfectly well that translated to dead and ’porting through shields, dead she’d be.

Seaghdh opened the door. “My apologies, Doctor. We are secure.” Secure? Was that what this was about? He suspected that Armada Command had built a destruct function into the transponder? Ari choked back a curse. It made sense. If Admiral Angelou decided she’d been irrevocably compromised, he could just blow her fool head off from the comfort of his padded leather chair. Maybe it was time for an extraction.

“Very good,” the woman said, returning to Ari’s side and tweaking instruments. “You took no tissue damage from that transmission, Captain. Mmm. I see a spike in stress hormone levels. I’d like to keep an eye on that. Have they run abnormally high since your release?”

“Some days are worse than others,” Ari said.

The doctor peered hard at her and finally nodded. “I imagine.”

Dr. Annantra turned to Seaghdh. “Auhrnok, Her Majesty advised me that you took injury planetside. Will you permit me?”

“I’m fine, thanks to Captain Idylle,” he replied.

Ari risked pulling away from the scan bed. “Done with me?”

“Yes, Captain,” the doctor replied. “I will require several minutes more to analyze and review the data. Would you care to shower?” She opened a door to a tiny closet. “Take your time. I will have clean clothes waiting.”

Ari shrugged out of her filthy jacket and unstrapped her empty holster. Upon Turrel’s advice, she’d left the Autolyte on the shuttle. Seaghdh still had her pistol. The only thing that made her feel better was that he, too, went unarmed aboard ship.

“Captain Seaghdh took a dose of poison on Kebgra,” Ari said. “And had two shots of antivenin to counter it.”

The doctor’s genial expression died. “On the scan bed, if you will, Auhrnok. The nature of the toxin?”

Seaghdh grimaced at Ari and sauntered to take her place.

“You might as well take off your shirt and jacket, Auhrnok Riorchjan,” she said, stressing the title. “I am going to tell her about the hole in your side.”

“Damn it, Ari, is this your notion of revenge?”

“You have no idea,” she countered before looking at the doctor. “Deaccolo tree venom, species unique to Kebgra. It’s a paralytic neuro-toxin. Plant based but with an enzyme set that can induce time-delayed reactions.”

She turned on her handheld, called up the Kebgra data, and handed it to the doctor.

The woman scanned the information and scowled.“How long ago?”

“Two, three hours?” Ari glanced at Seaghdh for confirmation.

He sat, bare-chested, watching the back and forth, a smirk on his handsome face. He nodded.

She flushed, remembering her lips pressed against the warm, taut skin of that torso, and the reaction that had blazed through him. Could he possibly be that good an actor?

“A neural scan, then,” the doctor said.

Ari jerked her attention back to the doctor. “Permanent muscular damage is possible with this venom in advanced stages of poisoning, but I think we got to Captain Seaghdh long before that became a risk. He did have a brief episode of hypoxia before the antivenin took hold.”

“Yes, I see,” she said, studying readouts for a moment. “Minimal cellular destruction. Good.”

The woman zeroed in on the regeneration unit Ari had applied to Seaghdh’s side. The lights had died on the control panel. Doctor Annantra eased the dead instrument from Seaghdh’s skin. “Puncture wound. Very clean.”

“Thorn,” Seaghdh said.

“Some thorn.” Annantra glanced at Ari. “You removed it?”

“Yes,” Ari said, pulling her shirt off over her head.

“You did good work, Captain. Thank you.”

Ari tried to smile at the doctor but ducked into the shower, still confused over what she felt toward Seaghdh. The attraction was intact, damn it all, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that he’d lied to her. Was still lying to her, for all she knew. And then there was the admiral’s accusation and the question of whether Ari should trust Dr. Annantra enough to ask her to remove the transponder from her head. Was there anyone she could trust?

Angelou had said “unofficial” assignment, yet other than staying away from the Claugh, he hadn’t laid out a mission or parameters. Reviewing the one-sided conversation, she paused. He hadn’t given her any detail regarding the evidence he said had been gathered regarding a Claugh/Chekydran alliance. Had he done that on purpose? Trying to give her something to believe but nothing to follow up on?

Surely, he hadn’t learned to so underestimate her in six short months. Granted, he did not seem to know she wasn’t aboard the
Sen Ekir
with her father. An interesting development, since it meant IntCom wasn’t confiding in her commanding officer and that he did not want anyone to know about this “assignment.” Why not?

Seaghdh had accused Armada Command of a treasonous Chekydran alliance. Question now was whether Seaghdh differentiated between Armada Command and IntCom as two distinct entities the way Ari did. If he didn’t, she could have just made a fatal-for-her-father assumption. What if it wasn’t Armada Command colluding with the Chekydran? What if, in fact, it was IntCom? It made twisted sense. Intelligence Command, operating in the vein of anything for information, resorted to all sorts of nonstandard methodologies. She could see rationalizing a marginal alliance as an infiltration bid. Except that every single previous attempt to breach Chekydran defenses had an extreme body count.

Ari shook her head and turned on the water in the little shower room. Funny. Miniscule though the alcove was, it didn’t trigger a flashback. She smelled the water and the faint scent of antimicrobial cleaners, not the musty, dry odor that permeated the Chekydran ship. Regardless, she did not linger. She shut off the water, dried, and peeked around the door.

Doctor Annantra was still repairing the wound in Seaghdh’s side. Ari had to smile. He didn’t look like he appreciated the doctor’s medical technique quite the way he had hers.

As if he’d heard the thought in her head, Seaghdh opened his eyes and met her gaze. Something searing reached across the exam room. Her pulse pounded in her ears and heat flooded her. She spotted a stack of neatly folded khakis. Snatching them, she retreated to dress.

One good thing came from the revelation that Seaghdh was the Queen’s Blade. With rank came responsibility. He wouldn’t have time to go on tormenting her. She’d be able to stay far away from him. At least until she’d managed to armor herself against feeling anything.

Ari put on the pale khaki uniform and choked back a humorless laugh. No one had stripped the knots and wings that marked rank among the Claugh. They’d given her a captain’s uniform.

She slipped back into the exam room. Seaghdh was alone and up, buttoning his shirt. He eyed her, his look unreadable. Abruptly self-conscious, she fingered the too-loose waistband of her trousers and studied the instrument panel beside his right elbow. “You’re all patched up?” she asked in a rush.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Ari.”

“Be straight with me for a second,” she commanded. “Why am I here? You didn’t get shot down by Chekydran and lose eight crew just to hear me tell you what you’ve already read in my debriefing file. And a captain’s uniform, S—Auhrnok? You do nothing you don’t mean to do. Is this your way of telling me I’m never going home again?”

“Ari, stop and listen to me for a moment!”

The ripple of power in his voice silenced her. Anger rocketed through her. “Damn it, Seaghdh! If you want me to listen, stop manipulating me!”

He flushed. Rage or shame?

Somewhere in the last six months, she’d lost her ability to read faces. Was it simply because she had so little access to her own emotions?