Enemy Within (41 page)

Concentrating so hard on handing Hicci a memory of her choosing, she didn’t quite catch the shift in the Chekydran aural net. She only noticed when Hicci wrenched free of her mind.

Ari cried out.

Hicci rushed from the room as the shipboard hum amped up in frequency and volume.

Her head reeled at the sudden emptiness. She lay dazed, unable to focus her eyes or control her shivering body.

“Captain?”

She whimpered.

“Something has happened. What is it?”

She tried to form a response and couldn’t. Words and language seemed to have been misplaced. Or maybe it was motor skills that had been lost. She moaned.

Ari heard Angelou shove himself out of his chair, swear, and begin pacing. She could almost see him. He’d done the exact same thing when she’d reported for duty a month ago and he’d sent her on sabbatical. He folded his hands behind him, crossed back and forth in front of his prized window, head down, brows drawn together, and a scowl tightening his features. Despite the distance separating them, she felt like she was in his office with him.

“It’s the drug,” he said.

In her mental image, he didn’t even stop pacing. He simply tossed the words out for her to catch as she could.

“Aphasia is a common side effect.”

Terrific, but what was the drug supposed to do?

“It’s designed to open certain pathways,” Angelou answered her mental question as if he’d heard it. “In test cases, it allowed a telepathic species, the Chekydran, more reliable access to the thoughts and feelings of non-telepathic species.”

Startled, Ari tried to frown. It felt like she still could. Had Angelou really heard her? Did he not realize she wasn’t physically speaking? If the drug did what he said it could do, maybe he had heard her and simply assumed she spoke via com. The drug. It had to be new or the Chekydran would have tried using it while she’d been a prisoner.

“You weren’t a prisoner,” Angelou countered.

Ari froze, not even breathing. Twelve Gods. He could hear her. Mentally. How? They were sectors apart. How could she be both places at once? She consciously focused on listening to the Chekydran aural net, hoping it would mask the thoughts and questions racing through her head. If she’d managed to reach him telepathically, could she put herself in his office? Influence him and his actions?

“And yes. The compound is something we’ve had in development concurrent with your modification. The Chekydran wanted to introduce it into your program much earlier, but it wasn’t safe and we couldn’t afford to risk you.”

Filling her mind with the vision of Angelou and his office, Ari concentrated on being there, on moving closer to Angelou, on not just imagining him, but on
seeing
him, being in the same place with him. He still paced, though more slowly, impatience lining his face. Closer. She remembered how she’d hurt V’kyrri. He’d been open, reading her, trying to make contact. That had been frighteningly easy, but she didn’t want to hurt Angelou. Not yet. She didn’t know if what she wanted was even possible.

The bastard had handed her over to the Chekydran. She’d damned well make it possible.

She reached for him mentally.

And
felt
him flinch.

“Stop,” Ari commanded, picturing him standing still.

It took a moment to register with her physical ears, so far away, but the sounds of his boots on military-issue black-and-white tile stilled.

Grim satisfaction spread over her like a warm blanket. She had him. For the moment.

“Desk. Sit,” she ordered.

He returned to his desk and sat. His movements sounded jerky and awkward, judging by the scraping and thumps she heard over the com. The sight of him in her mind’s eye showed his face looking pinched and curiously blank. She wondered briefly if he was in pain, then decided she didn’t care. A single drop of blood trickled from his nose.

Ari issued commands, controlling his moves and listening to the shrill of protest and distress rising in his head. Through Angelou, she found and bundled up his files and sent them to IntCom. He had no defense against her intrusion, no weapon to combat her presence. It was so easy. It scared her. Something flashed through his thoughts. She caught only a glimpse. It was enough.

Horror rocked her and she nearly lost her grip on him. How could she have overlooked something so obvious? Hicci knew about her transponder. Angelou had told him.

Ari gasped and had to still her shaking. The strike team. Seaghdh. They were flying straight into a trap.

Snarling, she wrapped a mental hand around her admiral’s neck and watched his face turn purple. “This is what you get when you drug open a telepath.”

She rummaged around his memories, hurriedly looking for the name of the traitor in Seaghdh’s ranks. Angelou didn’t know his name. He knew only that the agent supplying his information was a telepath close to Seaghdh.

V’kyrri.

Misery clenched a fist around her heart.

V’k. How could you?

She flung Angelou against the far wall.

He flew out of his chair, hit, and slid to the floor in a heap, bleeding and unconscious. Ari scrambled his door codes so he couldn’t get out without some work.

It would have to be enough. Weariness dogged her as she fought her way back into her own head, her own aching body. Her heart bumped against the confines of her chest. She had to warn Seaghdh.

“Sindrivik!” she attempted to say. It came out as a croak. She tried again. If she could control a man two sectors away, surely she could control her own body.

She sounded like a mortally wounded animal. Maybe that’s what she was. Shrieking in frustration, she hazed momentarily. Fear yanked her back. She wasn’t getting enough oxygen. The broken ribs had punctured a lung. Damn. She refused to die while Seaghdh and his team were in danger. She’d have to risk telepathic contact with Seaghdh.

Ari heard the door open.

Hicci.

She recognized the hum and something more than that. Was she getting a sense of Hicci’s mental presence?

He threw something into the room and chortled. “Rescue,” he said, barely able to get the word through his amusement.

She blinked trying to make out both what Hicci was talking about and what he’d dropped. Never before had Ari picked up such a strong sense of emotion from him. Up to this moment, she would have sworn the Chekydran and humanoid feeling systems had no analogue. Could she use her newfound awareness to distract him while she warned the
Dagger
? She sensed something that made her plodding thoughts hiccup.

Ari focused on the jumble of cloth and leather Hicci had tossed into the room. Recognition jolted her.

Seaghdh.

He’d been unconscious when Hicci had dumped him in her line of sight. As he came to, she felt him in the room, in her head, in her heart. Her wide-open telepathic brain lit up and warmed with relieved recognition, even as despair flooded her. She wanted to wail. She’d been too slow, too late to warn him. To save him. The strike team, her only hope of rescue, had been captured.

They’d lost.

He stirred, sorted himself into familiar shape, and rolled toward her. He stared, pain, rage, and horror in his face, but no recognition as he looked at her.

Ari caught a flash from his surface thoughts of twisted, bloody, broken bodies. His strike team. She groaned and realized in a flash that Hicci must have picked up her memories after all. He’d recognized Seaghdh and dragged him here, knowing he could use her feelings for Seaghdh to torture her further. She closed her eyes and thought, “I am so sorry, hwe vaugh.”

She felt his dread for her spike. Ari opened her eyes.

“Twelve Gods. Ari,” he breathed. In an instant, he’d gained his feet and closed the distance between them, crouching before her.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried inside her own head, praying he could hear as he reached for her.

In her haste, she failed to moderate her mental voice. She knocked him on his butt. And tipped off Hicci.

The alien swiveled to peer at her, waving tentacles and spurting short, inquisitive bursts of sound. He plunged into her wide-open mind. The invasion wrung a weak mewl from her hoarse throat.

“Telepath!” Hicci hummed, sounding delighted. He clicked in anticipation and stroked a tentacle lightly over her body, knowing it would cause pain, knowing she’d begged Seaghdh not to hurt her. Knowing it would infuriate Seaghdh.

Hicci ripped through her brain, glee plain in his unguarded mental presence. Ari shrank before the onslaught. Loathing rippled through her along with the fiery torment of freshly disturbed wounds.

“Leave her alone!” Seaghdh growled, wiping blood from his nose. The raw, unmitigated power in his voice took her breath.

It couldn’t work, could it? How could his power translate via a computer program? Or did Nwyth Okkar transcend words?

For two heartbeats, everything froze. A tendril of hope lifted within her. Seaghdh drew a noisy breath.

Then Hicci lashed out.

Seaghdh tried to dodge.

She heard the sickening thud of tentacles connecting with flesh and then Seaghdh hit the floor with a grunt. From the wheeze that followed, Ari gathered the impact had knocked the breath from him.

Hicci, chortling and radiating excited anticipation, closed in and slapped Seaghdh hard enough to split his lip.

That it wasn’t her body absorbing Hicci’s punishment made her heart tremble. She was captive audience to Seaghdh’s death by torture. Ari could feel it in Hicci’s surface thoughts, hear it in the gurgling chur his hum had become.

Helpless and empty, she could only lay on the floor, hardly breathing, eyes achingly dry, heart shrinking and quaking in her chest. Somehow, she’d done something to Angelou, two sectors away. She wasn’t sure what or how, but she did know she was perilously near the end of her strength.

Awareness arrowed into her fuzzy brain as Hicci urged Seaghdh to stand up and fight. Hicci loved that in destroying Seaghdh, he shredded her newborn sense of safety and the first hope she’d known since her capture. He relished knowing that she knew.

Ari choked on a sob. Nothing she could do would save them. But maybe she could afford them both a cleaner death than the one Hicci offered Seaghdh. He wouldn’t kill her. Hicci would keep her, torture her, until he finally realized something had happened to Angelou. And then, without an alliance to keep him in check, if ever it had, she might finally die by his—tentacle.

Assuming IntCom had been paying attention and she’d really exposed Angelou’s data. Please, Twelve Gods, let IntCom be awake at the switch. Something had to go right. She’d done everything she could to neutralize a traitor within the ranks. If IntCom let this slip through the cracks, Seaghdh’s death and hers would be for nothing.

She closed her eyes, her ears, and her heart to the beating Seaghdh tried to fend off. At the first cry of pain ripped from his throat, Ari bit her tongue to keep from shrieking in unison. Pushing past hurt and weariness, she focused on Hicci, the feel of him in the room, his presence in her awareness. She wanted a link so deep he couldn’t possibly escape when she triggered her transponder to blow. She had to get in.

She
would
get in if she edged past that outer shell and turned the corner into his core . . . alien thought patterns erupted around her. Images, emotions, belief structures, and arcs of logic for which she had no analogue clawed at her defenseless mind. Too late, Ari realized that not only did humanoids lack the physical structures to imitate Chekydran speech, they lacked the experiential framework to remotely comprehend what went on inside the heads of a species that had evolved light-years from the cradles of humanoid life.

All sense of her physical self vanished as if a vital cord had been cut. Perception of up, down, depth, breadth, and width morphed into something that bent her sanity. She felt a scream rising in her head and struggled to wrest free. She fought, ripping and tearing the foreign thoughts from her as she fled.

Her awareness slammed back into her body with a shock that drove agony through her like an energy blade. Her physical form lacked the lung capacity to do anything more than whine. Gasping shallow puffs of air into abused lungs, she forced her eyes open.

Seaghdh had given up standing. And defending himself.

Fear and anguish ripped Ari’s gut. A hollow cry broke from her throat.

He twisted away from Hicci, dodging a blow to meet her gaze.

The grim, hopeless light in his bloody, swollen face brought a rush of heat to her eyes. As she stared, helpless, Ari felt tears on her lashes finally spill over. Baxt’k. It took the murder of the man she loved to teach her to cry again.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed.

She heard a pop.

Seaghdh groaned and his expression blanked.

Hicci had broken something.

Ari felt an answering burst inside of her. She’d had enough. That bastard would die if she had to rip him apart with her one good hand. She couldn’t get into the monster’s mind, but she could get into Seaghdh’s.

She shut her eyes tight and concentrated, beating back panic. Nothing happened. Cursing under her breath, she shifted focus. Seaghdh’s entire conscious mind fixated on the blows Hicci inflicted. Ari couldn’t break through that. Praying her gamble would pay off, she retreated down into the watery center of herself, to the place no one else knew existed. Save for Cullin Seaghdh, who had become a permanent part of her.

He was still there.

“Listen, hwe vaugh,” she whispered to his presence inside her. She felt the jolt of recognition go through him. “I have a plan.”

Rather than explain, Ari took a deep mental breath and ignoring fear, opened her psyche and merged with him. She knew his astonishment as if it was her own. He tried to form a thought, to communicate something vitally important to him, but her panic screamed that they didn’t have time for anything but action. He agreed.