The Domino Pattern (30 page)

“He is dead?” Sarge asked into the silence.

“He’d damned well better be,” I said. Angling in cautiously from the side, just in case, I went up to Muzzfor to check.

The examination didn’t take long. Filly genetic engineers could do a lot of strange and interesting things to their clients, as Muzzfor himself had more than proved. But there were only so many places you could put the heart and lungs. “Yes, he’s dead,” I confirmed, stepping thankfully away from the dangling corpse. “Almost no thanks to you, I might add. What were you doing, waiting for scorecards to be passed out?”

“No,” Sarge said, an odd tone to his voice. “I could not… it is difficult to explain. I could not think, nor could I properly react to the threat facing me.”

“Compton,” a voice whispered.

I swore as I stepped past Sarge and Muzzfor and hurried toward the three bodies lying crumpled on the floor. In those last tense minutes, I’d completely forgotten about the Modhri.

Prapp and Vevri weren’t moving, but Qiddicoj was still breathing weakly. “Defender, get the doctors up here,” I snapped as I dropped to my knees beside the wounded Filly. “
Now
. And get me that LifeGuard,” I added, pointing to the orange case on the wall.

“No use,” Qiddicoj murmured. Or rather, the Modhri within him murmured. “I’m sorry, Compton. Please believe this was not my doing.”

“I know it wasn’t,” I assured him. “Lie still, now—the doctors are on their way.”

The Modhri shook his head. “No use,” he said again. “The other Eyes are already dead, and this one will soon join them. When that happens, I too will die.”

He looked down at his blood-soaked midsection, then up at me again. “It was a call in my mind and my ears,” he said. “The same as I heard two nights ago. Only this time, I was not ordered to lie, but to kill.” He coughed, bringing specks of blood to his lips. The blaze on his long face, I noted, had gone deathly pale. “Even knowing it ordered me to evil, I had no power to resist.”

Abruptly, a piece fell into place. “Was the compulsion tied to that high-pitched sound I kept hearing?” I asked.

“Yes,” Qiddicoj confirmed. “When it ceased… the orders were still there, but I no longer had to obey.”

And the sound had ceased right after I’d punched Muzzfor in his genetically modified throat. The damn thing hadn’t been created so that he could sing high opera. It had been created as a weapon.

But a weapon against whom? The Spiders? The Modhri?

A metal leg appeared in my peripheral vision, and I looked up as Sarge handed me the LifeGuard. I set it down beside
Osantra
Qiddicoj, keying the selector for Filiaelian, and started connecting the arm cuff.

“Compton.”

“Lie still,” I said. I finished the cuff and leaned over him with the breather mask.

His hand lifted, brushing weakly against the mask. “No use,” he said. “Compton. Remember our bargain.”

“I will,” I said, moving the mask around his flailing arm and pressing it over his nostrils.

“A shame it must end now,” the Modhri said as I keyed the LifeGuard. His voice was so weak I could barely hear it. “We worked… well… together.”

“Yes, we did,” I agreed, an odd feeling trickling through me. The Modhri was my enemy… and yet, this particular mind segment and I had somehow been able to unite against a common threat.

There was a lesson in there somewhere, but at the moment I couldn’t be bothered. The Modhri could have run away when I’d wrecked Muzzfor’s Pied Piper whistle, but instead he’d sacrificed his life to protect mine. I was
not
going to just sit back and let him die.

I was still talking soothingly to him when the LifeGuard’s lights went red. I punched the start button again, but it was pure, useless reflex. Qiddicoj was dead.

And then his eyelids fluttered. “Compton,” he whispered.

“I’m here, Modhri,” I said.

“A new bargain,” he whispered. “In return for saving your life. Learn the truth of what happened here.”

I nodded. “Bet on it,” I said grimly.

The eyelids fluttered again and went still.

For a minute I continued to kneel over the body, until the LifeGuard’s lights again went red. Taking a deep breath, wincing at the ache in my throat, I got tiredly to my feet. “You have made yet another bargain with the Modhri,” Sarge said.

“Doesn’t count as a bargain,” I said, crossing to where Bayta was still lying unconscious. “I’d already promised that to myself.”

I lowered myself to the floor beside Bayta, carefully touching the side of her neck. Her pulse was slow but strong, and her chest was moving up and down with steady breathing. There was an ugly handprint on the side of her face where Prapp had slapped her, but it didn’t look like anything was broken.

“Shall I move her to one of the seats?” Sarge asked.

“I’ll do it,” I told him. Getting an arm under her neck, I carefully lifted her head and shoulders up off the floor.

For a long moment I gazed into her face, my eyes tracing all those familiar features. My partner, my ally, my friend… and I’d nearly lost her.

Thought virus
, the warning whispered through my mind. Too close, and we would both be dangerously vulnerable if one of us was ever infected with a Modhran colony.

I felt my lip twist. The hell with thought viruses.

Leaning close, I kissed her.

Her lips were softer than I’d imagined they would be, probably because I’d so often seen them pursed or stiff with disapproval over something I’d said or done. Her scent was subtle and exotic, with an equally subtle taste to her lips. I got my arm around behind her and held her close, savoring the kiss even as I shivered with what had almost happened to take her away from me.

And then, suddenly, I felt a slight change in the feel of her muscles. I opened my eyes.

To find her eyes were also open. Looking straight back into mine.

I jerked back, a sudden flush of embarrassment and guilt heating my face and neck. “Uh…” I floundered.

“Yes,” she said, and I could sense some of the same embarrassment in her own voice. “Uh… I think I’m all right.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to shift my hands to a more professional grip on her arms. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Especially since neither of us wanted it to.

“I think so,” she said. For another moment, her eyes held mine. Then, she tore her gaze away.

And I felt her stiffen. “Frank,” she gasped.

“Yeah,” I said grimly, following her stricken eyes to the four bloodied bodies scattered around the car. “Not a pretty sight, is it?”

“What hap—?” She broke off, and I had the impression Sarge was feeding her the entire blow-by-blow.

I looked at the bodies again, perversely glad for the distraction they provided, and wondered if Bayta would want to talk later about that impulsive kiss. Part of me hoped she would. Most of me hoped she wouldn’t.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” she said into my thoughts. “Why did
Asantra
Muzzfor do that?
How
did he do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know where to start looking. You up to a little walk?”

“Of course,” she said. She got a grip on my arms, which were somehow still wrapped around her, and together we got her to her feet. “Where are we going?”

“Kennrick’s compartment,” I said. “From the way Muzzfor was talking, I think there’s something in there he assumed we’d already found. Something he thought was worth killing us for.”

“Something in Mr. Kennrick’s lockbox?” she suggested.

“That’s the logical place to start,” I agreed, tightening my grip on her arm as she wavered a bit. “Can you make it, or do you want to wait here?”

“I can make it,” she said grimly. “You think we’ll be able to open it?”

“Depends on how good Emikai’s bypass mimic really is,” I told her. “Easy, now—let’s go.”

Prapp’s attack, plus the ordeal that had preceded it, had apparently taken more out of Bayta than she’d realized. Emikai’s mimic was still only midway through its work on Kennrick’s portable lockbox when she went over to the bed to lie down. By the time I pulled the lockbox lid open, she was fast asleep.

The box was well stocked, mostly with papers but also with a couple of collections of data chips. Some of the papers had belonged to Givvrac, the ones I skimmed consisting of notes and observations from the contract team’s time on Earth. Other papers were Kennrick’s, and I made a point of putting those aside for later study. Each of the other members of the contract team had also made donations to the stack, and I was nearly to the bottom before I found a small, sealed folder with Muzzfor’s name on it.

I opened it up and carefully read through the contents. Twice. Then, sitting down on the curve couch, I stared at the bloodstained carpet and waited for Bayta to wake up.

And as I sat there, I thought distantly about the many phrases and similes and mental images we used every day without really thinking about them. Never again. Not me. I’d seen the contents of
Asantra
Muzzfor’s folder.

I knew now what the Gates of Hell truly looked like.

I’d fallen into a light doze when I was jolted awake by a soft moan. I tensed; but it was only Bayta, stretching carefully on the bed across the compartment from me. “Sorry,” she apologized, gingerly touching her face where Prapp had hit her. “I guess I was more tired—”

“We’ve got trouble,” I interrupted her.

Her hand froze against her skin. “I’m listening,” she said, her voice back to its usual calm.

I took a deep breath. “We were wrong,” I said. “Or at least, I was. Tell me, what do the Chahwyn know about the Shonkla-raa?”

“You know most of it,” Bayta said, frowning. “They were a slaver race who conquered most of the galaxy’s sentient peoples almost three thousand years ago. They held that power for a thousand years, at which point their subjects staged a coordinated revolt and destroyed them.”

“You’re almost right,” I said. “But there’s one small detail you and everyone else has gotten wrong.
Shonkla-raa
isn’t a race. It’s a title. Specifically, an old
Filiaelian
title.”

Her eyes widened. “The Shonkla-raa were
Filiaelians
? But then—?”

“But then why haven’t they conquered everyone again?” I finished for her. “Simple. Because the Shonkla-raa was a specific Filly genetic line, and that line
was
destroyed in the revolt.”

“The Filiaelian obsession with genetic engineering,” Bayta said, nodding slowly. “They’ve been trying to re-create the Shonkla-raa.”

“
Some
group of them has been, anyway,” I agreed. “Only they’re not trying anymore.” I held up Muzzfor’s folder. “They’ve done it.”

Bayta stared at me, the blood draining from her face. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” I confirmed. “But it gets worse. Remember why the Modhri was created in the first place?”

“He was a weapon,” Bayta said, the words coining out mechanically, her eyes staring out at a horrifying future. “A last-ditch infiltrator and saboteur.”

“Which was also designed to be under Shonkla-raa control.” I nodded back toward the coach car two cars behind us. “What did you think of the demo?”

She shivered. “All that because he couldn’t get
Logra
Emikai to kill you earlier?”

“All that because he had to deflect me away from Kennrick,” I corrected. “So that he and the others could get off the Quadrail without me ever seeing these papers.” I shrugged. “And probably also because he’d figured out Kennrick was the killer and wanted to get the murder technique for himself and his buddies.” I grimaced. “Remember, a few days ago, when you pointed out that the Modhri hasn’t got any purpose? Well, he’s got one now. The sword’s on the shelf, and the swordsman’s all set to pick it up again.”

For a long minute neither of us spoke. “What are we going to do?” Bayta asked at last.

“I don’t see that we’ve got much choice,” I told her. “We have to take them down.”

Bayta stared at me in disbelief. “Frank, it took the whole galaxy to stop the Shonkla-raa the last time. And they didn’t have the Modhri to help them then.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy,” I conceded. “But we have a couple of advantages they don’t know about.”

She barked out a sound that was midway between a chuckle and a sob. “Like what?”

“One: we don’t have a whole galaxy’s worth of them to deal with this time,” I said. “With luck, they’ve only got a few thousand up and running.”

“
Only
a few thousand?”

“
And
they don’t have all the warships and weapons they had back then, either,” I said. “Number two: they may be really good fighters—and they are,” I added, rubbing my ribs. “But they don’t know about the new defender-class Spiders. As much as you and I may disagree with the whole defender concept, it’s a wild card we ultimately may be glad we’ve got.”

Bayta shivered. “If they don’t save the Quadrail only to destroy it,” she murmured.

“We’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen, either,” I said grimly. “And finally—” I lifted the folder again. “We know where they are.”

Bayta sat up a little straighter. “Their location’s in there?”

“I think so,” I said. “It’s clear now that it wasn’t a coincidence that Aronobal and Emikai were on Earth at the same time that Givvrac’s contract team was at Pellorian Medical. My guess is that the attack on Terese German and her subsequent pregnancy were already planned, and that whoever’s in charge of the Shonkla-raa decided the Pellorian Medical thing would be good cover. They then maneuvered Muzzfor onto the team so that he could monitor the others while they brought Terese German to Filly space.”

“But why?” Bayta asked. “What do they want with her?”

“Something disgusting, I have no doubt,” I said. “But whatever the
why
, the
where
is a space station called Proteus.”

Bayta frowned. “That doesn’t sound like a Filiaelian name.”

“It isn’t,” I agreed. “The station actually has thirty different names, one corresponding to each of the Twelve Empires’ official languages. Apparently, it was designed to be the jewel of Filiaelian diplomatic glory and finesse.” I tilted my head. “Want to take a guess as to where this multispecies crown jewel is?”

She frowned; and then, her face cleared. “The Ilat Dumar Covrey system,” she said. “Where those six Modhran Filiaelians we ran into on New Tigris had come from.”

“Bingo,” I said. “Muzzfor had a new set of tickets and passes made out for himself, Aronobal, Emikai, and Terese. I assume he was planning to spring the package on them at Venidra Carvo.”

“And we’re going to follow them there?”

I turned the folder over in my hand. “Actually,” I told her, “I had something a bit different in mind.”