Wings of Retribution (24 page)

“Play it again.”

Colonel Tommy Howlen frowned at the infoscreen.  “Stop.”  He drew closer and jammed his finger at the little gray blip on the screen.  “What is that?”

“Maybe a bug in the vid?” Corporal Bushin offered.  She leaned forward and peered intently at the image.  “Coulda been dust, maybe.”

“Bullshit.  Look at the way Koff collapses.  It looks like he wants to scream.”

The N.C.O. gave the fallen corporal a dubious look.  “He mighta hit his tailbone…”

Tommy glared at the corporal.  “Or he might have a mind-controlling parasite burrowing through his ear canal.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t look so shocked,” Howlen sneered.  “The
suzait
weren’t all exterminated.  They couldn’t have been.  We’d have to scan every human and animal within the four quadrants, right down to the chickens and weasels.”

“We had a…parasite…aboard our ship?”  The poor girl looked ill.

“And now he’s somewhere on Terra-9,” Tommy said, slapping the screen off.  “I want the place quarantined immediately.”

The naïve little fool winced.  “Even the docks, sir?”

“The governor wouldn’t allow me to halt trade, but he has to comply with a quarantine.  That’s S.O. business.”  Tommy went to collect his jacket off the captain’s chair.  “In the end, he’ll probably be kissing my boots, thanking God that we found the little worm before he sought out a position of power.”

“But Pete had several
days
to board a ship…”

Rounding on her, Tommy gave her an irritated look.  “That…
thing
…isn’t Pete any more, Corporal.”

She cringed, dropping her head down to peer at her imaging console.  “Yes, sir.  Of course, sir.  But why couldn’t he have sailed out already?”

“He’s a stranger in a strange land,” Tommy snorted.  “Sure, the first thing he’s gonna do is take another host, but it will take him several days to recharge enough stunning power, unless he gets help somehow.  And who’s gonna help him?”

“Terra-9’s got a lot of drunkards, sir.”

Tommy raised a brow.  “So?”

“If I were him, I’d just go to a bar and wait for someone to come out too drunk to stand up.  Maybe wad a rag into his mouth to keep him from screaming.”

Tommy gave the corporal a hard look.  “These things are more intelligent than most humans.  You really think they would insert themselves into a disabled host, allowing their cast-off host the leisure to kill them slowly while they flounder from the alcohol in their system?”

“Sorry, sir.”  She was blushing furiously, her ears redder than beets.  “Just the way I’d do things, sir,” she mumbled.

Leave it to a
woman
to think up something that stupid.  Of course, he couldn’t
say
as much or the Workman’s Rights people would jump up and down and scream for his commission.  Scowling at her, Tommy picked up the com handset.  He dialed the four-digit code for planetary government and waded through the bureaucratic hierarchy until he could speak with the governor personally.

A what, you say?

“It’s a cerebral parasite,” Tommy repeated for the third time.  “It takes over your
brain.”
  That someone could make planetary governor and not have at least
heard
of the suzait was beyond his comprehension.  Politics was going to hell—nowadays it had become all about pretty looks and bank accounts.  Tommy wondered if the governor even had a diploma.

There was a pause, followed by the static of personal conversation on the governor’s side.  That made Tommy’s fists clench.  If the governor was allowing his underlings to listen in on their conversation, soon the whole planet would know and panic would ensue.  Tommy was about to interrupt the governor’s whispers with the threat of martial law when the governor got back to him.

Something like this, Colonel, seems like it would have a reward attached.

Tommy stared at the handset.  The greedy son of a bitch.  He was ordering a planetwide quarantine and the man was completely ignoring him.  He slammed the handset back into the receiver and ended the conversation.

“Was the governor right?” Corporal Bushin asked from beside the vidscreen.

Tommy glowered.  “There’s a thirty-five million reward out for
suzait
.  But, since the buggers are so tricky to track down, it’s only been claimed three or four times in as many centuries.”

“Thirty five million…”  Bushin whistled.

“Over ten times what those three shifters are worth,” Tommy agreed.  “Speaking of which, how are they doing?”

The corporal ran a check of the holding-cell and brought an image of the three stasis shells up on the vidscreen.  The shifters appeared to be asleep.

“Bring up sound,” Tommy ordered.

There was a blip, and then some static.

“Magnify.  They’re whispering.”

The corporal did as she was told.  Immediately, Tommy heard, “…
got away.  They haven’t brought him back yet, have they?”

“
They wouldn’t bring him back here if they caught him. Howlen’d prolly put him in a jar of formaldehyde and leave him on his dresser.”

Tommy felt his hackles rise.  So the three shifters knew that their companion was a parasite.  Aliens banding together to fight the human invaders, was it?  Well, the four quadrants had been exclusively human territory for the last three thousand years.  If they were still pining over lost planets, they were living in the past.

Tommy’s thoughts drifted back to the statements the three shifters had given under interrogation.  Each was alarmingly similar.  Two had said they had left Penoi because some of their friends had been captured during massive governmental roundups—which supposedly took place weekly for the reproduction of the Millennium Potion—and had searched out the famed pirate captain Athenais because they thought she could help them.  The third said he had boarded Athenais’s ship as a stowaway on Millennium and, once he had realized who she was, had sent for his friends on Penoi.  They thought something about Athenais could provide a ‘cure’ for the Millennium Potion.  They also believed that the fabled space captain would be able to get them onto Millennium, where they would proceed to find their friends and destroy the Potion.

Tommy rubbed his temples and slumped into his chair.  More because he needed the noise than anything else, he said, “Corporal, you were there during the interrogations.  What did you think?”

Corporal Bushin turned away from the vidscreen and frowned.  “I think the whole thing about Marceau Tempest harvesting colonists for the Millennium Potion was a load of crap.”

“Well, of course,” Tommy said.  “What about the rest?”

Corporal Bushin winced.  “I think they might have been telling the truth about that pirate captain.  At least some of the truth.”

Tommy lifted a tired brow.  “Oh?”

“Well, I couldn’t sleep one night so I looked up Athenais Owlborne in the Utopian database.  I had to bypass several security levels, but once I was inside, there was…hundreds…of entries.”

“So she’s a bad pirate and gets caught a lot.  What does that have to do with our prisoners?”

Bushin blushed.  “Uh…  Maybe you should see for yourself, sir.” 

Tommy sat up and watched as she moved to her console and began typing.

“Might take awhile,” she apologized.  Her fingers never missed a beat.  Tommy realized after a moment that she was hacking into the upper tier security levels with the ease of a pro.

“No need for that,” Tommy muttered quickly, embarrassed.  He stood up and entered his twelve digit access code and password, making sure she wasn’t watching as he did it.  Legally, he should send her to the brig and have experts root through her infoscreen to find out what other areas of classified information she had compromised, but he was feeling generous.

“Here,” Bushin said, standing up.  “You might want to sit down.”

Tommy took her chair and began going over the list of records.  His eyes caught when he realized that the archives contained over six thousand entries.  Normal people never had more than fifty to their name by the time they died.  Career criminals usually had a couple hundred.

“She has a huge bounty on her head,” Bushin said from the side.  “One point seven mil.”

Tommy frowned at the screen.  “Why is this all classified?  Why isn’t her picture posted around the four quadrants for law enforcement?”

“Seems her dad’s the Overseer of Penoi,” Bushin whispered.

Tommy turned to stare at Bushin.  “What?  The Overseer’s daughter?  Impossible.”

Bushin pointed at the file.  “It’s all in there.  During several interrogations, she claimed that back when the Overseer was still perfecting the Potion, he made his daughter bring all her school friends to his house for a party.  During the party, he dosed them all with the most primitive form of the Potion.  Twelve of ‘em, in all.  Then he watched them for a few years as they grew.  When he was sure it had no harmful effects, he dosed himself.”

Tommy got a bad taste in his mouth.  “Marceau tested on children?”

“That’s what her affidavits say.  Like, hundreds of them.” 

“So she’s insane,” Tommy growled.  “Nothing new about that.  Every once in awhile, the world gets a rotten apple.”

“Her entries go back all the way to the start of the Utopia.  Have had to be transcribed several different times, from when the systems got changed or upgraded.  That’s what that little timestamp down there means, see?  Someone had to transfer this from an older format, six thousand years ago.”

Tommy narrowed his eyes at the corporal.  “I know what a timestamp is.”

Bushin reddened again.  “Well, if you read the affadavits, when she was twenty-five, Athenais noticed her and her comrades weren’t aging.  When she confronted her father, she denounced him and took the name Athenais Owlborne.  That’s when she tried killing herself for the first time.  Blew her head right off and the medics who arrived watched as it pieced itself back together.  After that, Athenais left Millennium and started pirating.  She openly attacked supply ships to and from Millennium for centuries.  Marceau formed the Utopia, and from then on, Athenais joined every rebellion that sprang up against it.  She’s never been back for another dose, but as you can see, she’s almost as old as her father.”

Tommy stared at the screen, trying to make sense of the entries.  “
If
these entries aren’t just an elaborate hoax, who’s protecting her?”

“Her father, I’d guess.”

“You said she blew her head off?”

“Yeah, one of those old-fashioned projectile weapons.”

“And
lived
?”

Bushin nodded.  “Now here’s the
really
cool part—they didn’t even
have
regen rooms back then.”

Howlen thought back to the ship they had scuttled and the tiny hairs on his neck lifted.  If he had helped kill Marceau Tempest’s daughter…

“What I want to know is how the shifters knew about it,” Bushin said, obviously getting excited, now.  “They knew who she was and that she carried a stronger version of the Potion in her than the rest of the Utopia.”

“They probably have plants in the government,” Howlen said.  He was distracted.  If even part of what the shifters had said was true, why not the rest of it?

“But why didn’t Marceau give the rest of us the same Potion?” Bushin said.  “Why make us come back for periodic doses?”

“Power,” Tommy said automatically.  Then he grimaced.