Incursion (10 page)

"We don't regenerate like that."

"I assumed it would save lives. Among other things." Grimm shook his head. "What a madcap plan. Your thoughts and feelings and memories are vibrations that I can feel. You never stood a chance, not against me, not against anybody else. Who sent you on this suicide mission?"

"Fuck you."

"The Sector Commissar then. Same bitch who wanted to splice my DNA to create human hybrid super-soldiers. Nice friends you have." Grimm glared at him. "The data I supposedly stole? It's my own genetic code. Sorry, but not handing that over for her to fuck with."

"Wait. What? Vibrations? You can read—" Kyle recoiled, wished again he could reach some kind of weapon. Being naked and having this conversation (
just after he fucked you, Kyle, don't forget that part
) set him on edge. A weapon would have made him feel much better. For self-defense, if nothing else.

Grimm glanced down at Kyle's duffel. "Anything you want?"

Vibrations. Memories. Thoughts.
Mother of Light.

"You were reading me the whole fucking time?"

"And lucky I did. If I didn't like you, I'd have killed you." Grimm drew his shoulders up in an oddly apologetic gesture. He looked almost
hurt
.

Kyle stared, because that was all he could do while everything fell into place. The memories. The weird encounter in the operating theater. If his thoughts and memories were vibrations to this Glyrinny, could he have manipulated it all? Maybe even his emotions?

"I can't mess with your hormones, that was all you."

"Will you
stop doing
that!" Kyle pressed a fist against his forehead, like it could block the transmission of those vibrations. How did he do that? Through the fucking floors? Must have been easy, skin to skin. Yes, the disorientation had been strongest whenever Grimm had been touching him. "So, why didn't you? Kill me, that is?"

"Because you're beautiful. So much potential." Grimm spread his hands, like a painter describing a vast landscape. "Humans are patterns to me. You are intricate, twisted, hidden. But there are clean lines and bold colors underneath the grit. There's a taste of you I like."

"What, I'm a flavor now?"

"Translating my senses into yours is not as easy as you'd think."

Kyle breathed out laughter at Grimm's tone of indignation. Just because Grimm was a brain-sucking, vibration-manipulating, self-righteous morph didn't make him any less funny or attractive. "Well, I was pretty sure you wouldn't replace me."

"Why not?"

"Those prosthetics
suck
."

Grimm smirked and opened his mouth to say something, then he stopped abruptly to listen. Or
sense
. "You didn't alert the security forces, did you?"

"No. I don't get officials in when I hunt somebody. They tend to mess things up."

Grimm stepped to the door, listened again, then looked at Kyle, calculation making his face cold and hard. Kyle felt his body respond with dread. Grimm looked at the window, touched the wall opposite, then came around the bed. "You still going to sell me for a pair of cyberlegs?"

Kyle stared at him. He had to clear his throat. "What's the alternative?"

"Trust me. I'll give you your legs back. I'll make it right."

A fucking morph. Glyrinny bastard. But those phrases were empty. He felt no ire. That leaden helplessness and resentment. Gone. "Don't you dare—"

"I can read you, but that's all, Kyle. I can confuse your pattern, but I can't make you feel things that aren't real."

"This mind-reading thing is getting old very fast."

Grimm smiled. "It will. Trust me." He placed a hand on Kyle's neck, his body flowing like liquid rather than following the logic of bones and joints. "Yes. I'm getting ready to
become
." He placed his lips to Kyle's and the electric current closed. It was like kissing a solid sheet of water. Waterfall. Thunderstorm. A static tornado, wind so strong and steady it felt like a solid body. Like he'd gotten a glimpse of Grimm's real nature. Vibration and resistance and focus rather than flesh.

Grimm smiled. "I'm taking your pattern. I
become
." He said the last word and Kyle was kissing himself.

The copy was perfect. Like kissing a mirror. It should have freaked him out. Just an hour ago it would have, but he felt strangely detached, looking at his doppelganger. If anything, he felt an odd but intense pity for the lines around his eyes from the mistrustful squint, the evasive glance, and that permanent slight frown, like he was in pain. A dull, constant, low-level pain. The kind of face you wanted to smile at just to release its expression, try for a smile in return.

"That's me," he said, not sure if he meant it as a question.

Kshar half-smirked. "It doesn't rule who you are, just what you were."

Well, jumping bodies and identities and patterns all the time, no wonder Glyrinny had no concept of identity.

Kshar gave him a long look. "Trust me. Time's running out."

I don't. I really, really don't.
"Okay."

"Hah. You liar." Kshar stepped around him in a swift motion and placed his arm around Kyle's neck, then the flat of his hand against Kyle's temple, and pressed. Kyle tried to wrench the arm away; if the pressure persisted, Kshar would knock him out. He gave a strangled sound, fought silently, but Kshar was good at this, evading any attempt to get a grip on him.

His vision grayed, his heart pounded up into his brain, and disorientation robbed him of focus. It was just about staying conscious, trying to fight off this morph who might knock him out before breaking his neck. He felt breath and lips on his ear as he was slowly lowered down, and that was the last thing.

Vibration woke him. An insistent, high-frequency buzz that felt strong enough to shake his teeth loose. He groaned, managed to open his eyes when his hand didn't obey him. His back hurt. His shoulders hurt. And his neck.

"He's coming round," a voice barked.

Maybe I should stay down a bit longer.
Kyle blinked his surroundings into focus. Oh. Chair. Naked cell, and four soldiers surrounding him. And an officer from Sector Sec. Or Double-Sec, as they were commonly known.

The officer stopped playing with his comm and lifted his head. He looked like a bureaucrat, brown hair thinning on top, eyes sunken. He had an intelligent face with a pale, cynical mouth.

"Good morning," the Double-Sec guy said.

Kyle nodded. His head hurt, probably dehydration. He was hot and sweaty, somehow, but he shivered. It wasn't cold in the room, not by Tamenean standards. Half the year, the jungle was shrouded in half-frozen mist. But then, he wasn't wearing a scrap of clothes. "Morning."

"Do you know why you're here?" The Sec guy asked.

"I didn't take a bar apart while drunk. I'd remember that."

"Oh, please. You can't mistake me for military police?"

"No." Kyle ran his fingers along the restraints that locked his wrists to the back of the metal chair he was sitting on. His legs—without prosthetics—were tied to the chair's legs. Had they dragged him all the way? Was he injured without knowing it? They could quite easily have messed up his knees. Without the prosthetics, he felt naked and helpless.

"In the absence of memories of drunken violence, why is an ex-Hunter here?"

"Somebody rat me out?" It was worrying that the man had the clearance to look beyond the layer of the faked persona. That Sec guy had access to his real file.

The man shook his head. "I know you're a morph."

Kyle laughed. "I'm fucking not."

The man nodded to one of the soldiers, who handed him some kind of electronic device. The Sec guy switched it on and touched it to Kyle's face, then down his neck and to his chest. A row of LEDs began to blink. "You are."

"I'm fucking not!" Kyle jerked against the restraints.

"Then why do you test positive for Glyrinny DNA?"

Oh, that one's easy. A Glyrinny deposited some of that in my ass.
"I guess I was contaminated."

The Sec officer tapped something on the scanner's screen.
I could have used one of those,
Kyle thought. It looked clunky; maybe a prototype. Way too expensive and experimental to foist onto a bounty hunter.  "So you're saying that after a deep cleaning, you would register as human?"

Kyle blew out an impatient breath. "Maybe your shiny new toy doesn't work as it should. Prototypes can have bugs."

The Sec officer smiled at him. "I like my theory better. Sergeant, the subject requires a chemical deep clean to preclude the contamination theory."

Kyle stared at the man as he was freed roughly of the restraints only to be put in handcuffs, and no, the soldiers didn't particular worry about circulation or bruises or how they handled him. But they actually expected him to stand up on his own, or his legs to respond when they dragged him to a tiled cell.

There, they hung him from a hook in the ceiling by his handcuffs, and Kyle just managed to not scream with the pain of that. He wasn't going to give them that satisfaction, not that they seemed a particularly sadistic lot. Just businesslike. Lucky he was already naked; being stripped while hanging from a metal chain in the ceiling would have been bad.

One of them grabbed a hose and pulled it closer. Kyle squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled deeply before the chemical liquid hit him. His skin tingled under the onslaught, and then the chemical bite increased, setting every nick and scratch, every roughened patch of skin on fire. He groaned when the chemical invaded his nose and his whole head blazed with heat and an eye-watering burn. The flow stopped, and the foul-smelling chemical soup dripped from him. They let him hang for a while, allowed him to snort the liquid from his nostrils. The shit was everywhere—dribbling out of his hair, his ears. He drew only shallow breaths.

The soldiers watched him. Then, at a sign, they grabbed another hose, this time pressurized water. Kyle managed not to scream when the powerful jet hit him. Sadistic bastards aimed at his face, his chest, his groin and kept the jet there much longer than necessary. He did his best to keep his muscles hard and tight against that, and he'd never been happier that he couldn't feel a thing on the bottom half of his body. As long as they didn't come up with the brilliant idea to stick that hose up his ass, he'd count his blessings. Of course, that was where the worst of the contamination was. On one hand, he could clue them in and make this much worse for himself. On the other, the wash should have taken care of every other genetic trace Kshar had left on his skin. He'd just have to trust that they'd scan him where they'd cleaned him.

They unhooked him and let him fall to the ground.
Bastards.
He managed to not fall flat on his face, catching the worst with his shoulder, which fucking hurt. While he was gasping from the cleaning, they let him lie for a minute or two on the wet tiles. All he could see was milky foam from the chemicals running toward a drain. "Saves me the shower," he muttered.

"Take him back."

They dragged him back to the chair, still dripping, his legs sliding uselessly behind him. Sat him down so hard he felt the shock through his spine. That would have really hurt after Kshar had put that big dick into him, but he just felt the blunt force.

The Sec officer ran the scanner down his wet chest again. The LEDs blinked. "Still Glyrinny-positive. I guess you wanted that shower badly."

Not possible.
Kyle licked his lips. He knew this officer wouldn't stop at anything; they could get away with anything in pursuit of their objective. And if the objective was to collect Glyrinny heads, he would have to cooperate. Everybody broke in the end, and this guy was a pro. Dragging it out would only annoy him. Time to come clean. In a manner of speaking.

"I've had sex with . . . somebody. Might have been him."

"Who?"

"Pilot of a space ship that got me here. The
Scorpion
. Bunch of soldiers-of-fortune, flying a heavily modified Morning Star–class ship. Berthed yesterday, early evening local time. At least, I assume it was yesterday."

The Sec officer nodded to one of the soldiers. "Verify that." Then looked back at him. "So you claim to actually be Kyle Juenger."

"Yes. I was hunting a Glyrinny double-agent called Kshar. You said it—I'm an ex-Hunter, sir. The Sector Commander put an overlay on my ID for the mission. If you check back with Central, you'll get confirmation. At least if you have the right level of clearance."

The man's eyes flashed with annoyance. "Have you ever collected the bounty on a Glyrinny?"

"No, I specialized in deserters in my time. Then I became a fighter pilot. The Sector Commissar recruited me because Kshar had compromised her network of security forces. I'm not the obvious choice, but the best she had on short notice, I assume, with all due respect, sir." That had to match up with his file in the man's mind. A Glyrinny might not know the whole story, might not have had the chance for a complete impersonation. Surely it took more time to perfect an identity; surely they didn't catch every nuance of a victim's history. He hoped.

"You are positive for Glyrinny DNA."