Omega Games (3 page)

“Everyone but us.”

I quickly changed my gloves and sterilized the outside surfaces to remove any possible trace of my DNA. “I am removing the grenade now.” I cut the stomach in half, and then did the same to the clamped-off section of bowel on the other side of the bulging valve. Once I had resolved the severed vessels on either end, I carefully extracted the vivisected section in which the grenade remained lodged. Dull yellow streaked the entire section, and silver-blue, viscous liquid streaked the green blood dripping from either end. “Specimen container.”

The drone presented the open container to me, and I carefully lowered the section and immersed it in the suspension gel. The smell of the device made my eyes water and sting.

“I’m sending out the drone,” I told the Omorr. “Advise security that the grenade is leaking heavily.”

“Arutanic fluid?”

“Yes. They must take it to be detonated immediately. ” With the drone gone, I had to pick up my own instruments, and I groped for a hemostat. “Can you come and assist me now, Senior Healer?”

The Omorr didn’t reply, but hopped into the suite a few minutes later, properly scrubbed, gowned, and masked. “How is she?” he asked as I momentarily lowered the sterile field for him.

“Young and strong. If there are no complications from the vivisection or the arutanic fluid, and we can grow her another lower stomach chamber, she will survive. Clamp.” I stopped the resection as a muffled blast from outside the facility caused a shimmer in the curtain of energy around us. “Security?”

“Militia.” Squilyp eyed the view panel. “They sent in a combat munitions unit with a blast-absorption dome.”

Since the building still stood, I assumed they had deliberately detonated the grenade. “How often do Jorenians present as living bombs?”

“Never in my experience.” His dark eyes narrowed as he inspected the abdominal cavity for a moment. “Jarn, this was not an accident.”

“I agree,” I said as I began suturing again. “But who would do this, and why?”

“That is what I would like to know,” the cool, unemotional voice of my husband, Duncan Reever, said over my earpiece.

Two

I expected my husband to feel angry over my decision to perform the grenade-removal surgery without his knowledge or consent. I anticipated a lengthy lecture about the risks I had taken and the potential harm that one mistake on my part might have inflicted on me. Reever loved me, and felt very protective of me; he would not accept my decision to operate on a living bomb with equanimity.

I came out of surgery to find Reever waiting by the post-op cleansing unit. My husband wore his usual plain black garments, but had pulled his long golden hair back and folded it in a Jorenian warrior’s knot. His handsome features remained as expressionless as always, but I could feel waves of tension emanating from his lean, battle-hardened frame.

“Duncan.” I considered embracing him, but the patient’s blood was spattered on the front of my surgical shroud. Also, he did not look as if he wished to be hugged.

"Jarn.”

Unlike most of my friends and allies, my husband thought of me as Jarn of Akkabarr, not Cherijo of Terra. He had fallen in love with me, just as he had with the woman who had occupied my body before me. At times I felt I was the better wife, for the Terran doctor had been too devoted to her work to give him the attention and affection he craved.

At other times I wondered if Duncan had settled for me because he knew that he could never have Cherijo again.

Reever’s eyes, which routinely shifted color between blue, green, and gray, now glittered as dark and threatening as snow clouds as he studied me. “What did you think you were doing?”

“The work.” That seemed the safest response.

“You were brought here to tour the medical facility, ” he said, “not defuse a bomb disguised as a patient. ”

I heard no emotion in his voice, but in his eyes I saw something that reminded me of dark ice cracking at the edge of an expanding chasm.

Dævena Yepa. I was
really
in for it.

“I had no choice but to operate,” I said as I removed my bloodied gloves. “There was no one else who knew how to remove the device.”

Reever folded his arms. “Tell me what happened. ”

As I cleansed, I related my discovery of the grenade, my decision to operate, and my reasoning for working alone. “There was no time to do anything but clear the ward and operate,” I added. “I could not risk a detonation while waiting for assistance. Everyone around me would have died.”

I could not be killed, or at least, not easily. My body had been engineered to be impervious to disease and injury by my creator, who had been determined to create the perfect physician.

“As powerful as your physiology is,” my husband said, “you cannot regenerate disintegrated hands or limbs, Jarn. Did you first verify if the grenade possessed an internal timer, or a remote signal link?”

“I did, and it did not.” Did he think me completely ignorant?

He regarded me for a long moment, and then said, “Tell me the rest.”

I had made a bargain with my husband: I would not lie to him, and he would not use his ability to read my mind without my permission. We had both kept our promises, but Reever could also read my expressions and body language. He knew me well enough to know when I was holding back information.

He knew how desperately the Tos had fought in those last weeks; he had been caught and temporarily blinded during one of the worst surface battles. “Why would they use such a trigger, if it does not kill the victim immediately?”

This was the part that I genuinely did
not
wish to relate to him. “To stop the healers who treated injured rebels. To kill the vral.”

Reever’s jaw muscles tightened. “You are the only Iisleg healer in this quadrant, Jarn.”

“Who would try to kill me here?” I asked him as I tossed aside the linen and stripped out of my surgical shroud. “The Toskald have been disarmed and exiled to the surface of Akkabarr. I cured the Hsktskt plague on their homeworld, and helped to end the war between them and the Allied League of Worlds. The Jorenians adopted me long ago and, in theory at least, I am one of their Rulers. Who else have I pissed off?”

“I will find out,” he advised me.

“That will not be easy.” The choice of weapon troubled me as much as who had implanted it. “The Toskald had many allies. Perhaps one of them seeks revenge for the outcome of the rebellion.”

Reever glanced at the unconscious female. “She may know who did this to her.”

“Or she may not.” I shrugged into my Jorenian healer’s tunic and began fumbling with the unfamiliar fasteners. “If the goal was to assassinate me, they should have chosen other means. There was no guarantee that I would come anywhere near this patient. ” I shook my head. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I didn’t decide to come here until this morning. No one could have known.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.” Reever brushed aside my fingers, fastening my tunic as if I were no older than our daughter, Marel. Then he rested his hands on my shoulders. “The trigger was specific. You, Marel, and I are the only Terrans on Joren. This bomb was meant for one of us.”

“It was meant for the one most likely to reach inside the female’s body and remove it,” I pointed out. “That would be me.”

“Assassinating you would create worldwide outrage. ” Reever’s fingers tucked a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Every HouseClan on Joren would wish to retaliate.”

Jorenians were a peaceful, happy species, until someone threatened a member of their HouseClans, the enormous familial collectives in which their society organized themselves and their kin. It was said that they would not rest until they captured and punished whoever had made the threat. The only punishment Jorenians dealt out for such transgressions was immediate execution.

If one person had been behind this attempted murder, they would be found, declared ClanKill, and eviscerated alive.

“We will not tell them about the trigger,” I decided. “They will not recognize it.”

“It is not that simple. You are not only an adopted ClanDaughter of HouseClan Torin; you are Clan-Joren, ” my husband reminded me. “A member of Joren’s Ruling Council, and every Jorenian “No,” I said, shaking my head as the possibilities whirled in my mind. “If what you say is true, and the Jorenians discover that the League or another government is behind this attack—”

“It could start a new war.” Reever rubbed his eyes, the way he did whenever he remembered the long months of searching for me on Akkabarr. He had joined the rebels, and had been temporarily blinded during one of the battles. That battle had brought us back together, although I had had no memory of him.

I had seen too many battlefields myself. Thousands of faces from those ghastly places swarmed behind my eyes. Stiff, lifeless. Coated with white ice, blue ice, red ice. Torn, smashed, burned. Men and women. Children.

So many had died. Too many.

“No,” I said again, the word hurting my throat as it came out.

My husband glanced through the view panel. “It may already be too late.”

I looked past him to see Xonea Torin, captain of the
Sunlace
, leading a detachment of heavily armed Jorenian militia into the ward.

“What say you, Duncan?” Xonea Torin asked after the militia had inspected every inch of the ward. Taller and broader than Healer Tarveka, Xonea had the same solid white Jorenian eyes, with which he could intimidate with a glance. “Was this female sent to kill Cherijo?”

“She was admitted two days ago,” Reever said. “The
Sunlace
did not enter orbit until this morning. She could not have known Jarn was going to come here. No one did.”

“Then she came here to kill another.” Xonea’s dark brows lowered. “Who?”

“Her wounds prove that she did not implant the grenade in her own body,” I told him. “Nor did she have any external means of triggering the device. She is a victim, Captain, not an assassin.”

Xonea didn’t appear convinced. “She must have been aware of what had been put inside her body. She could have warned the healers.”

I detailed the patient’s incoherent condition at the time she had been admitted, and added, “Blood scans still must be performed, but it is likely that they drugged her. They would not want their bomb to talk.”

Light from the overhead emitters caught a strand of purple in Xonea’s black hair as he turned to eye my patient. “She could have easily given herself the drugs.”

“A suicide assassin would never have used a damaged grenade,” Reever countered. “They are too unstable and apt to detonate at any moment. The one Jarn removed was leaking arutanic fluid.”

Duncan Reever was biologically Terran and, like me, had little notion of what that meant. Reever’s xenobiologist parents had abandoned him as a child to the care of the alien natives of the many worlds they had visited. A born telepathic linguist, Reever could absorb most alien languages through mind linking, so perhaps they felt he would be safe. Years of full immersion in alien cultures and societies had instead destroyed his humanity. Eventually Reever’s parents had retrieved him and brought him back to Terra to be educated, but it had been too late. Duncan had never learned things like human emotions and My ClanBrother was not a stupid man, and he had seen much of battle and warfare. He knew the tactics of terrorism. Without careful handling, it would not take long for him to come to the conclusions that Reever and I had.

There was one benefit to my husband’s emotional handicaps, however. Reever could misdirect and deceive anyone, even a veteran soldier like Xonea.