Read Ronan: Ziva Payvan Book 3 Online
Authors: EJ Fisch
Sadey tapped out a quick
message received
code and picked up the comm receiver, opening a direct line to the ship’s navigator. “We’re a go.”
“Rotera,” Jada Jaroon said after pausing for a moment to consider the question. “The different minerals in the soil there make it turn all sorts of colors. There’s an overlook where you can stand and see out over these rolling hills, and it looks like the ground has been painted in shades of red and purple. Gorgeous.” She nodded to herself and took a bite of the shredded warco meat that had been stuffed into a piece of folded flatbread. “What about you? Where’s your favorite view away from home?”
Vonn, head chef for the Jaroon household, folded his thick arms across his chest and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “I’d have to go with Osari,” he answered. “What can I say? I can’t get enough of the ocean. Osari has some of the most breathtaking coastlines I’ve ever seen, maybe even better than ours.”
That was quite the declaration coming from him, considering he hailed from the Mairo Region that bordered the Sea of Haphez on the opposite side of the planet. These late-night conversations always somehow gravitated toward the subject of travel. Vonn had done a lot of exploring before being employed by the Jaroons. He’d been to every civilized Fringe world and even to some of the Core worlds, picking up various ethnic recipes and cooking tips along the way. He always laughed when Jada asked for a simple warco wrap.
As a member of the Royal House she rarely got the chance to travel for leisure, so she enjoyed listening to his stories as much as he enjoyed telling them. She wasn’t sure when the man ever slept; he was always working in the kitchen, at the beck and call of anyone who ever needed anything regardless of the time of day. He was probably lonely, and she guessed he liked having someone to talk to, someone who actually listened. Jaril and Jazel were always so rude to him during meals.
This routine of coming to the kitchen for a midnight snack had become the norm over the past month or so. Jada never had been able to successfully adapt to the Haphezian custom of only eating every other day. Her puny single stomach craved nourishment more often, especially since she’d started working through a new nighttime exercise routine. One of Vonn’s warco wraps – with some secret ingredient he refused to tell her about – made the perfect snack before calling it a night.
“Never been to Osari,” she said with a smile. “I’ll have to put it on my list.”
“Be sure to send a holo when you get there.”
“Will do.” Jada swallowed the last bite of her wrap and stood up, insisting she be allowed to put the plate through the washing system herself. Vonn did enough work as it was, and she was already encroaching in his supposed off-duty time by being there. “Thanks, Vonn. You’re the best. Good night!”
The man beamed. “No problem, my lady. Good ni—”
Jada paused, disconcerted by the look that had come over his face in just a fraction of a second. Nothing else about him or their surroundings seemed to have changed. She opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, but he held up a hand and stopped her cold. Judging by the tilt of his head, he was listening to something.
The urgency with which he moved compelled her to comply. There were times when she’d been tempted to have some sort of hearing aid implanted so she could be on par with her Haphezian counterparts. Not being able to hear everything they could drove her mad, especially in situations where her safety was potentially at stake…like now. She glanced around, unable to pinpoint the sound Vonn was hearing and unsure where it could even be coming from.
She didn’t need a sensitive Haphezian nose to pick up the scent that suddenly wafted into the kitchen. It was something she’d only smelled on a few occasions, but it had been quite unforgettable: cha’sen.
The stench sent a wave of nausea rolling through her stomach and the warco wrap threatened to come back up. She and Vonn both turned toward the small service hallway that led to a door off the back patio. The scent seemed to be coming from just beyond that door, and the intensity was enough to make her wonder if someone had died.
Vonn’s reaction confirmed that theory. “Stay back, Jada,” he said, stepping between her and the hallway. She couldn’t bring herself to care that he hadn’t called her by a proper title. At the moment she could only be envious of the fact that the cha’sen was nothing more than a musty body odor to him.
Unsure if it would be a help or a hindrance, Jada reached to the nearest wall panel and shut off the lights. An emergency light remained on at the end of the hallway; if anyone tried to come through the door, they’d have ample warning. That exit would be locked at this time of night, but if someone had managed to kill a guard, Jada didn’t doubt their ability to break through a locked kitchen door.
“We need to move,” he whispered. His large hand wrapped cleanly around her entire upper arm and he nudged her toward the door into the dining room.
Jada needed no persuasion. There’d be a guard stationed in the foyer for the night and they needed to get to him, warn him about what was happening.
They broke into the dining area and found the man already headed their way, wide-eyed. “Lady Jada, you need to come with me. There’s been a breach in security.”
She nodded as she and Vonn fell into stride behind him and made their way out into the foyer and sitting area. Njo and Namani Jaroon were being hustled down the massive spiral staircase by another member of the security detail, and Jada rushed toward them as they reached the bottom. Her mother looked her up and down and placed an arm around her shoulder, and her father gave her a reassuring pat on the head before moving forward to address the guards.
“What’s the situation?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly calm, but his furrowed eyebrows and steely features spoke of confusion and concern.
“Man down outside the kitchen access door,” the head of security replied, finger pressed to his ear as he listened to the reports flooding his earpiece. “Repeat last transmission.” He nodded and beckoned for them to follow him toward the front door, where two more of the guards were covering the entrance. “We have someone in custody, but we need to get you all somewhere safe—”
They hadn’t made it three steps before a cloud of greenish-gray smoke erupted from the nearest air duct. The man spun around and herded them back in the opposite direction, only to lead them straight into another cloud billowing from the vent above the dining room doorway.
“Get down!”
Jada was already in the process of diving to the floor. She kept her face as near to the ground as possible and tugged the collar of her shirt up over her nose and mouth, though she doubted it would do much good – she could already feel a tickle in her throat and had to resist the urge to cough for fear of inhaling more gas. It had an odd smell to it, some quality that seemed almost metallic. She crawled forward a few meters, holding her breath as best she could, then paused when she realized no one seemed to be following. She could hear them coughing and sputtering, but the sounds all remained in one place and carried an unnatural, desperate tone that compelled her to look back.
The sight behind her rendered her completely numb and her hand fell away from her face. She’d been walking past her father’s office a couple of days earlier and had stolen a peek through the open door just in time to catch a glimpse of some footage the Grand Army had sent him from their med centers. It had showed one of the soldiers from the attack, strapped to his bed, eyes crazed but vacant. The man’s body had been overtaken by spasms and the medical staff had been attempting to hold him down and insert something into his mouth that would prevent him from biting his own tongue. This was, apparently, what was happening to all the soldiers who had been exposed to the gas after the fighter crashed. As much as the sight had disturbed her, she hadn’t been able to look away, and the memory of it had kept her awake later that night.
Now here, in her own home, with her own family, she was seeing the same thing again.
The corridors of the HSP med center’s neuroscience wing were eerily quiet at this hour. It was late at night – no, the timestamp on the nearby monitor showed it was actually early morning – and all the medical personnel had gone home, leaving only a skeleton staff to govern the building. They were all in their offices, making rounds, or tending to patients, and the labs and exam rooms were left alone. Emeri had insisted they wait until now to bring her in, partially from a privacy standpoint and partially because Baez had been tied down helping with the situation on Na and hadn’t been able to get free any earlier.
The chair Ziva sat in was designed to tip backward until she was flat on her back. It would then slide on smooth rails until her head passed under a translucent, semi-circular band. She couldn’t fathom how that fragile band could actually be the scanner, but it seemed non-threatening and it appeared she’d actually be able to see through it during the test. Regardless, she had no desire to lie back and stick her head under it until it was time.
“Are you going to tell Skeet?”
She looked up from staring at the floor and found Aroska still leaning against the wall near the doorway. They had two members of Emeri’s personal security detail standing guard outside but he’d remained nearby as well, adding one more layer of protection if any nosy hospital staff came around. He hadn’t actually asked to accompany her into the room, but neither had she asked him to leave.
“I don’t know. He’s pretty pissed at me.”
“If I were him, I’d probably be more pissed the longer you made me wait.”
She shrugged and returned her gaze to the floor. “He’ll find out sooner or later. A lot of people probably will.”
“If he’s as angry as you think, it would be best if he heard it straight from you.”
“
Sheyss
, what are you? My therapist?”
He held his hands up in mock surrender. “Just saying.”
“I think he’s been angry for quite a while. He knows something happened at Dakiti and it bothers him that I won’t tell him and Zinni what it was. I think he also wished I would have put more confidence in them when I was in trouble with Dasaro. It’s not that I didn’t trust them – I just couldn’t get to them without exposing myself. Now there’s this.” She sighed and looked back up at him, shaking her head. “And I don’t think he likes the fact that
you’ve
been the common factor in all of these situations.”
Aroska scoffed. “What, is he jealous?”
His tone made Ziva bristle and she stood up. “Possibly, because I’ve known him for almost ten years and I should be able to trust him wholeheartedly. Instead, I’m putting my full confidence in a man I’ve only known for four months, one who wanted nothing more than to kill me for the past two years.”
For a moment, he almost looked remorseful. “Okay, okay,” he said, shuffling his feet and folding his arms across his chest. “Why
did
you trust me, anyway? You’re always going on about not getting close to any more people than you have to, so it seems like you’ve been breaking your own rule.”
“I told you before, I
didn’t
trust you. You were just one of the only people HSP didn’t already have eyes on.”
“Don’t give me that, Ziva. When you came to my house, the first thing you did was go take a shower. You can’t get much more vulnerable than that. What if I’d called HSP while you were in there? After all, I didn’t really have a solid grasp on my mental faculties at the time. Couldn’t really reason, right? Calling the police is the logical thing to do when there’s a wanted criminal in your house. They would have come and you would have had nowhere to run.”
“I knew you wouldn’t turn me in. I wouldn’t have even come to you in the first place if I thought you would.”
“And there you have it.”
Okay, so maybe there
had
been a small element of trust involved. But there was also a big difference between trusting someone to do the right thing and knowing they were likely to do the right thing based on past experiences and behaviors.
“Well,” Ziva said, “don’t think ‘trust’ had anything to do with it at Dakiti. I saved you on that landing pad because I’d just busted my own ass trying to get you out of that place and I wasn’t going to let it all be for nothing.”
He only laughed. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Do you remember when you came in and got me out of the harvesting room? I’d expected you and the others to be long gone, but you just said—”
“Of course I came back, you idiot,” she muttered in perfect synchronization with him as he completed the phrase himself.
“I was completely shocked you had even bothered to come back for me. Like I said before, it would have been so much easier for you to just let me die. But you said that like I should have expected you to come, and it has taken me a long time to understand why. You came back for me because it was the right thing to do, and that’s also exactly why you saved me out on the landing pad.”
Ziva crossed her arms, unsure how to argue. Her previous explanation had merit – she hadn’t wanted to let all her hard work go to waste – but he also had a point. She wasn’t one to stand by and let a fellow agent get crushed by a toppling pillar, especially when said agent had kept her from plunging over a cliff to her death. Her Nostia had simply been a tool, a quick fix for a rapidly deteriorating situation. It had just seemed like the most efficient thing to do, and there were times when she’d wondered if there might have been a way to save him without revealing her secret. Dwelling on it was pointless, though. She’d rescued him, he knew about the nostium, and now they were both caught up in a much bigger mess neither of them had seen coming.
It was almost as if he were reading her thoughts. “You’re doing the right thing now, too. We’ll try to keep this all under wraps as long as possible, of course, but you’re potentially sacrificing your secret in order to give future victims a chance to live.”
“I just want to know how to defend ourselves against Ronan,” she said. “The Resistance picked the wrong people to screw with.”
“I got to thinking – if you hadn’t been on Na, we would never have known the gas affected you differently and we may have never figured out what it was. I mean, it’s awful that you had to be involved in the attack, but I’m still glad you got to go there after Argall and regain your strength.” He hesitated a moment, and unless it was Ziva’s imagination, his cheeks flushed ever so slightly. “You look good.”
To her chagrin, she felt her own cheeks flush a bit in return. Emeri hadn’t been kidding when he’d said they’d vetted Aroska thoroughly before bumping him to full-time spec ops. Part of that process included intensive physical conditioning and fitness testing. He’d managed to gain back much of the muscle mass he’d lost during his funk, and he no longer had the stench of govino and alcohol hanging about him. Modern rehab techniques were as effective as they were fast, a good thing considering he’d probably have been fired if the agency ever caught on. Keeping the short haircut had effectively turned him into a new and improved version of his old self.
Aroska Tarbic 2.0
.
“You too,” she admitted with a shrug.
In the silence that followed, Ziva picked up the sound of approaching footsteps echoing in the hallway. Aroska turned toward the door as well, moving aside to allow Doctor Anson Baez to enter. The man looked frazzled and his lab coat and military uniform were both missing, leaving him in a simple set of dark blue medical scrubs. He perked up when he saw her standing there alive and well.
“No offense, Baez,” Ziva said, “but I had kind of hoped to never see you again.”
“Likewise, Lieu—
Captain
. And I mean that in the best possible way. But with the circumstances as they are, perhaps it is, in fact, a good thing that we have to meet again.”
She knew exactly what he meant. She could be dead or dying like all those other soldiers on Na. Instead, she was alive and even thriving, all thanks to a life-threatening secret she held, one he’d helped keep.
“We should get started,” the doctor said, shooting a nervous glance toward Aroska.
“He’s okay,” Ziva said. “He knows why we’re here.”
Aroska nodded and stepped forward, offering his hand. “Sergeant Aroska Tarbic.”
“Ah, Sergeant Tarbic,” Baez said, giving his hand a quick squeeze before turning to Ziva and motioning for her to take a seat. He tilted the chair back and began to slide her toward the scanner. “Ziva told me all about you.”
In her peripherals, Ziva could see the mischievous glimmer flash across Aroska’s eyes. “Oh she did, did she?” he said, addressing her rather than Baez.
“I may have mentioned how you pulled me up off of that cliff and how you saved my life in Argall,” she said, studying the inside of the scanner as the chair came to a stop.
Baez adjusted the width of the band until it shielded her entire face. “Sergeant, if you could please come over here with me,” he said, leading Aroska toward the control board behind a glass wall on the far side of the room. “This won’t hurt a bit, Captain Payvan. Just try to remain as still as possible.”
Something clicked behind her and the chair’s headrest folded down, leaving her head to balance on a narrow, cushioned bar. The band was, in fact, a full circle, and she watched it light up as the scan commenced. She could see the three-dimensional model of her head being rendered on the control panel where Baez and Aroska stood.
“Won’t someone recognize my face?” she murmured, unsure exactly how still she was supposed to remain.
“The faces on these busts are all generic,” Baez answered. “The size and relative shape of the head can vary by patient, but the image of the cranial cavity is the only thing that’s truly unique.” He was quiet for a moment, and Ziva could see him staring intently at the model as he captured individual images every few seconds. “I’m no neurologist, but this looks very similar to what we were seeing in the other patients. If you could perhaps use your…ah…”
“Nostia,” Ziva sighed.
“Yes,” he said, sounding almost embarrassed. “If you would.”
Other than the bulky, expensive medical equipment, the room was virtually empty. Not wishing to look around and ruin the scan, Ziva focused on the first small object she could think of: Aroska’s sidearm. She closed her eyes and stretched out her hand as the flood of energy coursed through her. The gun slipped out of its holster, summoned by her thoughts, and before she knew it, it was in her grasp.
“Oh
sheyss
.”
She honestly wasn’t sure which one of them had spoken – Aroska in response to the theft or Baez in response to the sudden burst of activity the scanner picked up. She could hear the doctor tapping furiously at the controls, capturing images as fast as he could. Aroska only stared at her in disbelief, just as he had when she’d snatched her kytara out of his hand that night in his kitchen. She released her grip on the pistol and left it suspended in mid air for a moment before pushing it back toward him. For a while he regarded it like it was a thermal grenade with a flipped primer switch, but he finally took it and slid it back into the holster.
“That should be enough, thank you,” Baez said, just as unnerved by her display. “You can go ahead and come out now.”
Ziva slid the chair out from under the scanner and sat up, remaining motionless for a moment as she waited for a bout of lightheadedness to pass. From an upright position she had a much better view of the model and was impressed by what she saw. A holographic head floated above the small projection pad, rotating in a slow circle as Baez flipped back through the captures he’d taken. The face was nondescript, just as he’d said, with a generic nose and mouth and small indentations for the eyes. Any viewer’s attention was automatically drawn to the colored patches inside the hologram that represented each lobe of the brain and any corresponding activity.
“Let me just get this data sent back to the GA’s neuroscience division,” Baez said, bundling the images into a single file and marking them for transmission. “Here’s to hoping they can use it to make some sense out of what’s going on.”
“Indeed,” Ziva muttered.
She wanted to ask about the status of the other victims, particularly Major Sheen, but the sharp chirp of her communicator interrupted her train of thought. She glanced down at the device, unnerved by the red light that indicated a priority message from Emeri’s office.
“Yeah,” she answered, leaving the transmission open so Aroska and Baez could hear.
Rather than the director, she found herself listening to Aura Stannist’s abrasive voice. “Captain, please report to Headquarters at once. The Royal House is requesting your immediate presence in Haphor.”
Damn it
. This had to be about her undermining Aura’s authority by leaving the planet. Or worse yet, maybe the Royal Officer was already wanting an explanation as to why she hadn’t gotten sick yet. Surely the entire Royal House had been made privy to the fact that she’d been involved in the attack. Still, why call for her in the middle of the night?
“What the hell for?” she demanded.
“The order came from your mother, Captain. There’s been another attack on the Royal General’s estate. Your family has been exposed, and they’re already showing symptoms.”