“I see. What about the physical attacks? My men have had
no end of trouble just getting close enough to the BRATs to jack in. They’re almost completely inaccessible. We’ve been unable to establish a dirtside base. We can only find out so much using remote monitoring.”
Edie and Finn had been attacked, too, but Edie felt compelled to defend the planet’s innocence. “If Scarabaeus attacked them, it’s because they attacked it first.”
Theron pushed a palmet toward Edie. Above it hovered a holo of a xenocritter, something Edie had never seen before—yet it looked familiar. Flat-bodied with crablike pincers and short thick legs. The scale showed it to be almost a meter long.
“This creature comes from the region where your team landed,” Theron said. “Any idea how something like this could evolve?”
“This is from Scarabaeus? There’s nothing there bigger than a rat.”
“There
was
nothing. Now there’s this. They tell me its lifecycle is five weeks. It evolved before our eyes in only a few generations into a creature that spews toxic mucus. It can crush a man’s leg with those jaws. And it has a taste for human flesh.”
Edie shuddered. Was this really descended from the small slater creature she’d encountered? Small, but deadly even then—dozens of them had stripped the dead bodies of her crewmates in minutes. The massive increase in size seemed impossible in only twelve months. But Scarabaeus was like no other planet. Its BRAT seeds weren’t working toward a Terran ideal. They’d lost that programming years ago. They were doing something else entirely.
“I don’t know what to tell you. Without examining the ecosystem’s specs…” Edie felt sick. She didn’t want to become involved in Scarabaeus again. She’d left that world to rot. But seeing this mysterious creature…Edie felt herself being dragged irresistibly back in.
Theron observed her reaction in silence before he spoke again. “As part of your debriefing, you’ll write a report for
the Weapons Research Division on how you reprogrammed the biocyph so you could
pass through
, as you put it.”
“A report. You guys always want reports. I work for Natesa now. She’ll have enough reports for me to write, thank you.”
“Ultimately we all work for the Crib. You will do whatever the Crib requires of you.”
He made it sound like a threat, and Edie had no response. She was just another good Crib citizen now. Still, he really didn’t have the authority to make her do anything for him. She knew that much about the Crib’s hierarchy.
“Here’s the thing, Edie.” Theron leaned forward for emphasis. “Something is guiding the evolution of increasingly bizarre and aggressive lifeforms on that planet. And we’ve found your signature in the code.”
Edie stopped breathing for a moment, uncomfortably aware of the toms recording her every move, every heartbeat and breath. If Theron found out about her kill-code, which had caused the ecosystem to mutate in the first place, he’d want to duplicate its effects on other worlds. A nightmare vision flashed through her mind—dozens of advanced alien ecosystems under Crib control, mutating according to Theron’s whim, manufacturing bioweapons to satisfy his military ambition.
“Mine and Bethany’s signatures, yes,” she said carefully. “I was her trainee—she let me handle some of the routine stuff.”
From Theron’s unwavering glare, she knew he saw she was hiding something. “Can you replicate it?”
“Replicate what?”
His expression turned hard. “Don’t play games. Your loyalty and integrity are not exactly rock solid, and while you still have defenders at Crai Institute, I personally suspect sabotage. I know you did this.
Somehow
you did this, and it’s created a unique situation we’ve never seen before in over a thousand years of terraforming. VAL-One-Four was an advanced ecosystem, analogous to the Paleozoic—”
“
Late
Paleozoic.” Edie felt her frustration rising as fast as his. “We shouldn’t even have been there!”
“In all other cases, attempting to terraform planets at that advanced level of development has resulted in total ecosystem collapse. Why was this planet different? It’s because you interfered.”
Edie hadn’t even known they’d made other attempts to terraform advanced worlds yet—that was Project Ardra’s objective. But that project was new. As unwelcome as the revelation was, it did not surprise her. She shook her head.
“Let me tell you something, young lady. I have enough information at my disposal to know for certain that you’re lying. Holding back. Rest assured, I will find a way to extract the information I need.”
“
Extract
information?” Edie almost laughed in his face. “Are you going to
torture
me? The Crib doesn’t torture its citizens.”
“No. No, it does not.”
Despite that assurance, his tone filled her with dread. In the silence that followed, Edie struggled to get her thoughts together. Theron’s cryptic intensity was too much. Finally, she managed to speak.
“I’d like to board the
Learo Dochais
and start my work with Natesa.” It galled her that Natesa was now her ally, at least against the military might of the Crib.
“In due course.” Theron considered her gravely for a few more seconds. Then he hit a comm switch on the desk.
The screen drew back and two people entered the area. Edie was relieved at first that one of them was Sergeant West. He held a small unit in his hand, which he placed on the desk out of her reach. The other milit was a young woman and from her hands dangled a pair of restraints.
“Hey—” Edie made to get up. The woman wrestled her back into the seat with West’s help, and cuffed her wrists to the arms of the chair. “What the hell are you doing?” She was too shocked to be scared.
Theron watched impassively. “Jogging your memory.”
Ignoring Edie’s struggles, the woman clamped Edie’s head between her hands and West attached a line to her temple. The other end of the line was attached to the unit. It looked like a simple conduit with few controls and no holo. That meant the control board was somewhere else, remotely jacked into this one. Through the hardlink she explored the unit quickly and found nothing unusual, just a transmitter/receiver.
A flutter in her skull told her someone had jacked into her splinter—the wet-teck interface grafted to her cerebral cortex—via the unit. Edie clamped down on the intrusion. It didn’t take long for the unseen person on the other end to skirt around her security protocols. This was a cypherteck, then, and a good one.
“What do you want?” she demanded of Theron, who had come around the desk to perch on the corner, only a meter away. “There’s nothing in my wet-teck that can help you.”
“I think perhaps there is.”
Theron nodded to the female milit, who lit a large holoviz on the wall before moving behind Edie to join West.
Edie stared at the screen and a chill slid through her veins. It was Finn, very much unfrozen. He paced a small cell in what must be the
Learo Dochais
’s brig. From what she could see, he looked healthy and unharmed. The feed was a high-angle vid only, no audio. Why would they transfer him to the bigger ship, but not her?
“That man has a few interesting things in
his
head,” Theron said. “A Saeth comm chip that the Crib hijacked to create a boundary chip, hooked into a nasty little bomb. The leash that connects his chip to yours. And some kind of…discipline device.”
Edie jerked her gaze away from Finn to glare at Theron. “No…”
But Theron was looking at the screen. Edie turned to watch it again, forgetting for the moment about the other cypherteck’s connection. Before she could register what was happening, the cypherteck had found the trigger in her splinter and jolted Finn.
Finn dropped to his knees, clutching his head, and toppled over.
“No!” Instinctively, Edie tried to stand. The restraints held her and the seat did not budge. The line attached to her temple slapped against her cheek. She shook her head, trying to dislodge it, but it was no use.
Edie clamped down on the connection and forced the cypherteck back. In a matter of seconds, he returned. As fast as she could put up barriers, he tore them down. Edie watched as Finn slowly started moving again. He staggered to his feet—one hand on the wall for support, the other clamped across his forehead.
“We found your code buried deep in the start-up routines on Scarabaeus. Somehow that code has affected the planet’s evolution, and now we can’t control it. Tell me what you did.”
Edie had forgotten Theron was even in the room. She ignored him and put her entire focus on protecting the trigger. But the cypherteck was skilled, in a haphazard sort of way. Brilliant, in fact. He sent seekers through her wet-teck to gnaw at the barriers, breaking them apart until—
The trigger fired again. Edie couldn’t stop herself from
watching. Finn hit the wall as if he’d been punched, then slid down and lay unmoving on the deck.
“Damn you, Theron. Stop it!” Her hands balled into tight fists, her fingernails cutting into her palms, and lines of cold sweat trickled down her face.
Theron came over to the chair, planted his hands on the arms and leaned over her. “You did something. What was it? We found a toxin all over the planet’s ecosystem, a substance my tecks tell me is a derivative of neuroxin. Neuroxin only comes from two places: Talas and your blood. Is that what you did, Edie? Did you poison the planet all those years ago?”
“I put Haller out of his misery!” Edie fired back, not caring if he understood what she was talking about. Haller, executive officer of the
Hoi Polloi
, had been captured by the jungle and she’d found him being slowly digested. She’d killed him with her neuroxin implant, but the jungle had sucked the implant dry and left her in neuroshock.
Talking was a mistake. The cypherteck used the momentary lapse in her concentration to break through, and triggered the jolt again.
Edie cried out in anguish as Finn, who had barely begun to rise after the last jolt, collapsed on the deck.
“Get this fucking teck out of my head!” she screamed, her face inches from Theron’s. She kicked out sharply and her boot connected with Theron’s shin. His mouth hardened into a thin line. He grabbed her chin and twisted her face toward the screen. Her breath caught on a sob at the sight of Finn’s unmoving body. Edie willed him to stay down. Perhaps they’d stop if they thought they’d injured him. Perhaps they
had
injured him.
“Tell me what you did, Edie, and this will end.”
“Why are you doing this?”
she yelled. “The deal was you wouldn’t harm him.”
“I’ve made no deals with you. And he’s just a serf.”
Edie kicked out again, repeatedly. This time Theron backed away until he was out of reach.
Finn had pulled himself upright again. For a brief moment he looked directly at the camera in the upper corner of his cell, his face creased in pain and confusion. Blood trickled from his nostrils. Edie wept, ashamed of herself for doing so in front of Theron, even more ashamed that crying took her concentration away from what the cypherteck was doing.
“Stop it!”
She screamed it over and over until her throat was raw and all she could do was whisper. “Please…” She hated how pathetic she sounded. Pleading for mercy wouldn’t have any impact on Theron.
The trigger fired again. Finn crashed against the bulkhead, his mouth open in an unheard scream of pain, and he crumpled into a heap.
Theron’s relentlessly calm voice broke through Edie’s misery and helplessness. “We can keep doing this for as long as it takes. The doc informs me it will knock him out eventually, but there’s always tomorrow. Now, you meddled with Scarabaeus all those years ago. Tell me what you did to that planet. And tell me how I can control it.”
Edie sank back in the chair as defeat rolled over her. She’d spent her life coming to the slow realization that the Crib was using her. She’d prepared herself, over the past two weeks, to return to that life. But that had nothing to do with Finn. He’d been illegally and unfairly incarcerated by the Crib, and now it was torturing him because of
her
.
She closed her ears to Theron’s continued cajoling and increasingly demanding questions. Breathing hard, she stopped screaming and stopped struggling. Instead, she concentrated on the cypherteck. Blocking the next attack wouldn’t be enough. She had to stop
him
. Wipe him out.
He scuttled around her barriers, nudged between the tiers that she’d riveted together, and ripped them apart. Edie had to jump all over the place to fix the gaps. Her brain felt raw, ready to split open as it pounded with every rapid heartbeat. The cypherteck searched for another way in. He’d find it soon enough. Edie had never battled a cypherteck in her head before, but she recognized this as one of the best—as good as
she was, if less rigorously trained. She got the impression he ran more on instinct, which made him unpredictable. Where had Theron found such a naturally skilled teck?
Where had
Natesa
found him? Perhaps the cypherteck was on the
Learo Dochais
, someone working with Natesa on Project Ardra.
Edie sent a trace down the link to assess the box at her side. It had storage capacity she could use. As she formed a plan, her body shivered uncontrollably with the effort. She cut off that awareness. Only two things mattered: stopping the cypherteck from triggering the jolt, and cutting the connection altogether.
There was only one way to do the latter. She needed to catch him off guard, and that meant letting him do it one more time. For a few seconds after each jolt, he’d eased back a little.
Edie sorted through her splinter and gathered together the biggest, fattest chunks of random data she could find. She tagged them and lined them up—and then, with a concerted effort that tore out her soul, she dropped her guard and let the cypherteck have the trigger. He slammed a shrill cacophony into Edie’s splinter that seemed to set it vibrating at a high frequency. Disoriented, she could have done nothing to stop the next jolt even if she’d tried. The cypherteck triggered it.