In Her Name: The Last War (150 page)

Ulana-Tath, nude, was leaning back in the basin, which was filled with warm water. One of the healers, her white robes bound close to her body while she was in the water, attended her. Two other healers stood close by, should they be needed, along with the wardress who would be responsible for the child in the creche until she was old enough to enter the
kazha
.

“My love.” Ulana-Tath reached out a hand for him, and he took it. He hadn’t realized it was his left hand, the one that was broken, but ignored the pain as her powerful grip squeezed it. He kissed her briefly, ashamed that he was so filthy from the long, hard ride. His shame quickly receded as he was overwhelmed with her beauty and the miracle of what was taking place before his very eyes.

She cried out again.

“Push, my mistress!” The healer in the basin moved in close between Ulana-Tath’s legs, spread wide and trembling. “She is almost here…”

With one final grunt of effort, Ulana-Tath gasped in relief as the baby was finally released from her mother’s womb into the healer’s gentle hands. 

As the midwife held the child under the water, one of the other healers leaned over the basin and carefully laid on the water what looked like a thin layer of dough, whose surface was swirling with blues and purples. It was living tissue that she held in place as the midwife gently brought the child up underneath it. The tissue, healing gel, wrapped itself around the infant’s body, completely covering it.

The adults watched intently as the gel disappeared, absorbed into the child’s skin as the midwife lowered the child back into the water. Moment’s later, it began to ooze out the nose and mouth, and the healer gently gathered it up as it left the girl’s body. 

The healer closed her eyes as the oozing mass was absorbed into her own skin. With senses developed over thousands of generations, the healer “listened” to what the healing gel, which was in fact a living symbiont, told her of the child’s body. 

The healing gel was not only a diagnostic tool for the healers, but their primary instrument, as well. Through the healing gel, the healer could visualize and repair any injury, even replace lost limbs, and cure any ill. The infant now had full immunity from every strain of disease on the planet, and any errors in her genetic coding that would have posed a threat to her health would have been corrected.

After a moment, the healer smiled and opened her eyes. “The child is perfectly well, mistress.” 

All breathed a sigh of relief. While problems with birthing and newborns were very rare, their health was never taken for granted.

The healer carefully lifted the child from the water, placing her in Ulana-Tath’s waiting arms. After only a few moments, the infant began to cry, her tiny voice echoing through the birthing chamber.

“She is beautiful, my love.” Kunan-Lohr, master of a great city and a veteran of many terrible battles, highest of warriors among those beholden to him, knelt by his consort’s side like a child himself, utterly humbled by the miracle before him. His ears could hear his daughter’s cries of life, but his heart could also feel the tiny voice that had joined the murmur of souls that bound together the descendants of his bloodline.

Looking up at the wardress, he asked, “What is to be her name?”

Tradition held that the wardress who would be responsible for the child from birth until she was ready to enter the
kazha
would also name her. “In honor of the city whose master is her father, and the family bloodline of her mother, the child will henceforth be known as Keel-Tath.”

“An honorable name,” Kunan-Lohr told her, “well-chosen.”

As if sensing that she was the center of the entire city’s attention, Keel-Tath’s tiny hands waved in the air, groping blindly. After one of the healers quickly cleansed his free hand, Kunan-Lohr offered his daughter his little finger, careful that she reached only for the flesh, and not the sharp talon. 

She wrapped her fingers around his, gripping it with surprising strength. Her own nails, which someday would grow long and sharp, glittered in the steady glow of light that fell from the walls.

He frowned. “Her talons…” 

The senior healer bent closer to see, and with a subtle gesture of her hand the light in the room brightened. 

“What is wrong?” Ulana-Tath gasped as she saw her daughter’s fingers. 

Among their race, the nails that grew from their fingers, eventually to form talons, were uniformly black, both on the hands and the shorter nails on the feet. Unlike some of the animal species on the Homeworld, which sported startling degrees of differentiation, there was very little among their race. Black talons, black nails on the toes, cobalt blue skin, and black hair were features of every child born since at least the end of the First Age, four hundred thousand cycles before. 

Keel-Tath’s tiny nails, both on her hands and feet, were a bright scarlet.

“And her hair!” Ulana-Tath’s view was closer than that of the others, and her eyes widened as she looked closer at the wisps of hair on her daughter’s head, clear now in the brighter light. She had seen enough newborns to know what she should be seeing. And what she should not. “It is white!”

Without a word, the senior healer held out her hand, and the healing gel materialized out of the skin on the arm of the healer who had wrapped it around Keel-Tath. She wrapped it around the forearm of the senior healer, and the mass sank into her flesh. Closing her eyes, the senior healer focused on the story the symbiont had to tell. 

After a long breathless moment, she opened her eyes, focusing on the squirming child. “She is healthy, my lord. Extraordinarily so.” She reached out a hand and gently brushed the snow-white wisps on the child’s blue-skinned crown. “I have no explanation, but there is nothing amiss. Of that there is no doubt.” She paused. “As with your difficulties in conceiving a child before this, I have no explanation.”

Ulana-Tath exchanged a look with Kunan-Lohr. Among all else that had ever been accomplished in the ebb and flow of their civilization over the long ages, the art of the healers was without doubt the most advanced. If the healers said the child was healthy, then she was. Clearly different, perhaps, but healthy.

Breathing out a sigh of relief, Ulana-Tath kissed her daughter on the head, gently nuzzling the white hair.

Kunan-Lohr set aside his apprehensions as he gazed with rapt love at his daughter, who still clutched his finger. “A child unlike any other, born under a Great Eclipse, can only be destined for greatness,” he said softly. “May Thy Way be long and glorious, my daughter.”

SEASON OF THE HARVEST

What if the genetically engineered crops that we increasingly depend on for food weren’t really created by man? What if they brought a new, terrifying meaning to the old saying that "you are what you eat"?

In the bestselling thriller
Season Of The Harvest
, FBI Special Agent Jack Dawson investigates the gruesome murder of his best friend and fellow agent who had been pursuing a group of eco-terrorists. The group’s leader, Naomi Perrault, is a beautiful geneticist who Jack believes conspired to kill his friend, and is claiming that a major international conglomerate developing genetically engineered crops is plotting a sinister transformation of our world that will lead humanity to extinction. 

As Jack is drawn into a quietly raging war that suddenly explodes onto the front pages of the news, he discovers that her claims may not be so outrageous after all. Together, the two of them must face a horror Jack could never have imagined, with the fate of all life on Earth hanging in the balance…

Interested? Then read on and enjoy the prologue and first chapter of
Season Of The Harvest
. And always remember:
you are what you eat!

* * *

PROLOGUE

Sheldon Crane ran for his life. Panting from exhaustion and the agony of the deep stab wound in his side, he darted into the deep shadows of an alcove in the underground service tunnel. Holding his pistol in unsteady hands, he peered around the corner, past the condensation-covered pipes, looking back in the direction from which he’d come.

Nothing. All he could hear was the deep hum of the electric service box that filled most of the alcove, punctuated by the
drip-drip-drip
of water from a small leak in one of the water pipes a few yards down the tunnel. Only a third of the ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights were lit, a cost-saving measure by the university that left long stretches of paralyzing darkness between the islands of greenish-tinged light. He could smell wet concrete and the tang of ozone, along with a faint trace of lubricating oil. And over it all was the scent of blood. In the pools of light stretching back down the tunnel, all the way back to the intersection where he had turned into this part of the underground labyrinth, he could see the glint of blood on the floor, a trail his pursuer could easily follow.

He knew that no one could save him: he had come here tonight precisely because he expected the building to be empty. It had been. Almost. But there was no one to hear his shouts for help, and he had dropped his cell phone during the unexpected confrontation in the lab upstairs. 

He was totally on his own.

Satisfied that his pursuer was not right on his heels, he slid deeper into the alcove, into the dark recess between the warm metal of the electric service box and the cold concrete wall. He gently probed the wound in his side, gasping as his fingertips brushed against the blood-wet, swollen flesh just above his left hip. It was a long moment before he was sure he wouldn’t scream from the pain. It wasn’t merely a stab wound. He had been stabbed and cut before. That had been incredibly painful. This, however, was far worse. His insides were on fire, the pain having spread quickly from his belly to upper chest. And the pain was accompanied by paralysis. He had lost control of his abdominal muscles, and the sensation was spreading. There was a sudden gush of warmth down his legs as his bladder suddenly let go, and he groaned in agony as his internal organs began to burn.

Poison, he knew. 

He leaned over, fighting against the light-headedness that threatened to bear him mercifully into unconsciousness.

“No,” he panted to himself. “No.” He knew he didn’t have much time left. He had to act.

Wiping the blood from his left hand on his shirt, cleaning it as best he could, he reached under his right arm and withdrew both of the extra magazines he carried for his weapon, a 10mm Glock 22 that was standard issue for FBI special agents. He ejected the empty magazine from the gun, cursing himself as his shaking hands lost their grip and it clattered to the floor.

It won’t matter soon
, he thought giddily as he slumped against the wall, sliding down the rough concrete to the floor as his upper thighs succumbed to the spreading paralysis, then began to burn.

Desperately racing against the poison in his system, he withdrew a small plastic bag from a pocket inside his jacket and set it carefully next to him. He patted it with his fingertips several times to reassure himself that he knew exactly where it was in the dark. His fingers felt the shapes of a dozen lumps inside the bag: kernels of corn.

Then he picked up one of the spare magazines and shucked out all the bullets with his thumb into a pocket in his jacket so he wouldn’t lose them. Setting down the now-empty magazine, he picked up the tiny bag and carefully opened the seal, praying he wouldn’t accidentally send the precious lumps flying into the darkness. For the first time that night, Fate favored him, and the bag opened easily.

Picking up the empty magazine from his lap, he tapped a few of the kernels onto the magazine’s follower, the piece of metal that the bottom bullet rested on. He managed to squeeze a bullet into the magazine on top of the corn kernels. Once that was done, he slid the other bullets into place, then clumsily slammed the magazine into the weapon and chambered a round.

He took the bag and its remaining tiny, precious cargo and resealed it. Then he stuffed it into his mouth. The knowledge of the nature of the corn made him want to gag, but he managed to force it down, swallowing the bag. Crane suspected his body would be searched thoroughly, inside and out, for what he had stolen, and his mind shied away from how that search would probably be conducted. His only hope now was that his pursuer would be content to find the bag, and not think to check Crane’s weapon. He prayed that his body and the priceless contents of his gun’s magazine would be found by the right people. It was a terrible long-shot, but he was out of options.

His nose was suddenly assaulted by the smell of Death coming for him, a nauseating mix of pungent ammonia laced with the reek of burning hemp.

Barely able to lift his arms, his torso nearly paralyzed and aflame with agonizing pain, Crane brought up his pistol just as his pursuer whirled around the corner. He fired at the hideous abomination that was revealed in the flashes from the muzzle of his gun, and managed to get off three shots before the weapon was batted from his faltering grip. He screamed in terror as his pursuer closed in, blocking out the light.

The screams didn’t stop for a long time.

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

Jack Dawson stood in his supervisor’s office and stared out the window, his bright gray eyes watching the rain fall from the brooding summer sky over Washington, D.C. The wind was blowing just hard enough for the rain to strike the glass, leaving behind wet streaks that ran down the panes like tears. The face he saw reflected there was cast in shadow by the overhead fluorescent lights. The square jaw and high cheekbones gave him a predatory look, while his full lips promised a smile, but were drawn downward now into a frown. The deeply tanned skin, framed by lush black hair that was neatly combed back and held with just the right amount of styling gel, looked sickly and pale in the glass, as if it belonged on the face of a ghost. He knew that it was the same face he saw every morning. But it was different now. An important part of his world had been killed, murdered, the night before.