Wings of Retribution (6 page)

“Yeah,” Ragnar said.  “No taste buds.”

“A cook without taste buds.”  Athenais would have laughed if the joke hadn’t been on her.  “So what’s your role in this?  You plan to take
Beetle
from me if I don’t help you?”

“
Beetle’s
yours,” Ragnar assured her.  “Just listen to my brother when he comes.  He’ll tell you everything.”

Athenais considered that for some time.  Finally, leveling a sober look on Ragnar, she said, “He older or younger?”

Ragnar frowned.  “What?”

“Just answer the damned question,” she growled.  “Who’s older?”

“It doesn’t make any differen—” Ragnar started, then he saw her dark look and cut off.  “We are the same age.”

She raised a brow.  “Oh yeah?  Who came out first?”

“We hatched at the same time.”

“Hatched?  So you guys lay eggs?”

Ragnar peered at her.  “We’re off subject.”

Athenais laughed.  “That’s what your brother said.”  She eyed him.  “So go on, shift.  Show me something.”

“Shifting is a survival technique, not a freak show.”  Ragnar said. 

Athenais fought a surge of fury.  “You’re asking for my help, so the least you could do is shift for me.”

Ragnar gave a wary glance at the entrance to the mess hall.  “Not here.”

“My room, then.”  She grabbed his elbow and tugged him down the hall.  Ragnar dragged his feet and balked at the entrance.

“Really, Athenais, this isn’t necessary.”

“Get in there,” Athenais told him.  She gave him a shove, then stepped in behind him and shut the door.  She locked it with a few keystrokes, then turned on him.  “There.  Your secret is safe.”

“Attie…” Ragnar began.

“Don’t ‘Attie’ me!”  she snarled, surprising herself at the viciousness that surged up from her stomach.  “
Shift
!”

“You’re angry.”

“
Oh?!” 
she cried.  “My paramour—the only man I’ve gotten into bed in centuries—turns out to be an alien on the Utopia’s Most Wanted list!  Damn it!”  Athenais caught herself on the impact-safe bedroom wall and lowered her forehead to the padding with a laugh of disgust.  “Before I met you, I knew I had man trouble, but Jesus Christ!  You’re not even a man.  You’re a goddamn alien!”

“Yeah,” Ragnar said, “I wanted to tell you.”

“You wanted to
tell
me?!”  She couldn’t stop laughing.  “At what point?  After you learned enough to rat me out to your brother?”

“My brother didn’t even realize I was alive until a few months ago.”

“What about those other two thugs?”  Athenais demanded.  “Those shifters, too?”

“No,” Ragnar said.  “Colonists.”

“So how long you been planning this?” she asked, looking sideways from where her forehead was still pressed to the padded wall.  “Since before you got on my ship?”

Ragnar shook his head, his thick brown locks falling almost to shoulder-length.  Athenais found herself wondering if it was really hair, or something else.  Cilia, maybe? 

“Back then I just needed a way off-planet,” Ragnar said.

“So what do you want from me now?”  she demanded, lifting her head to glare at him.  “You’ve already outed me to your friends. 
Really
outed me, not just ‘oh, that’s the pirate who runs Beetle,’ outed me.  They know about my dad.  That means I’ve either gotta kill ‘em, do what they want, or go back into hiding for another forty years.”

Ragnar sighed.  “I’m not gonna lie to you.  I got on
Beetle
just looking for a chance to escape Millennium.  When I realized who you were, I knew I couldn’t get off or we’d never find you again.”

Athenais felt her skin prickle in irritation.  “Who I ‘was?’”

“One of the first Utopis,” Ragnar said.  “The ones carrying the original technology.”

She scowled at him, wondering what his face would look like when introduced to the side of her nightstand.

Ragnar touched her hand with callused fingers.  In the back of her mind, Athenais wondered if they were really calluses, or something else.  It was all she could do not to yank her hand away in disgust.  She was so upset that she barely heard Ragnar when he said, “The Potion that Marceau gave you was different than the one he gave everyone else.  It was unrefined, strong.  Completely self-sustaining.”

Then Athenais did pull her arm away, glaring.

“Okay, let me put it a different way,” Ragnar said.  “You remember everything that has ever happened to you since getting that injection, right?  Crystal-clear?”

“More or less,” she muttered.  “Unfortunate, that.”  There were plenty of things she wished she could forget.

“Ever wondered why nobody else remembers more than a hundred years back?”

“Of course.” 

“And haven’t you wondered why your body can rebuild itself from scratch, even when you are badly burned?”

“‘Ashes’ is a bit worse than ‘badly burned,’ Ragnar.”  The thought left a bitter taste in her mouth.  She paused to consider.  “So what am I?  A robot?”

“No,” Ragnar said.  “Your consciousness, your brain patterns, your DNA and body structure…  All were imprinted on the Potion as soon as Marceau gave it to you.  You’re still you.”

Athenais pulled away from the wall and started to pace, because if she didn’t, she was going to pull a gun.  “So what do you want?”

“We want to break into the labs on Millennium and destroy the technology,” Ragnar said.  “Morgan and Paul have gotten the codes to get us all the way to the vault.  All we need to do is blow it to pieces.  Then, after we’ve done that, we need ongoing samples of the old technology to rid the population of any remaining Potion.”

“Is that possible?”  Then she frowned.  “What do you mean by the ‘old technology?’”

Ragnar gestured at her with a big hand.  “The difference between the Potion your father gave to you and the one he now sells by the dose is that yours can survive outside the body whereas the new technology can not.  We need something that can survive without a host in order to create a cure.”

Athenais pressed her lips together, irritation rising once again.  Locking eyes with him, she growled, “Paul told me you already had the cure.”

Ragnar flinched.  “We don’t, but with your help, we will soon.”

So they had lied to her, Athenais decided, fighting the urge to stalk to the door and go find something to put holes in.  Stiffly, she said, “And then what?  What would you do with the cure?”

“Put it in the water supply,” Ragnar said.  “Our guy will make it transmissible, passable from person to person like a DNA-based contaminant.  It would eventually spread like the plague, and with no visible symptoms for a few decades, it should be fully dispersed before Marceau’s monster realizes what hit it.”

“Ideally, he’d be dead,” Athenais said, “But we both know how well that would work.”

“He’s made additional modifications to himself, I’m sure,” Ragnar agreed.  “Improved upon the original technology, instead of dulling it down for the masses.  That’s why we’re going to kill him.”

Athenais snorted.  “You sound like this is a done deal.  In and out.  Easy-peasy.  Hell, how do you even know those access codes still work?”

“Morgan and Paul have been working on this for years.”

“Good for them.”

“Attie…”  Ragnar began.

She flicked an irritated hand at him.  “You’re leaving plenty of room for error, here, and you’re doing it with my ship on the line.  What do you even
have
against the Potion, anyway?  You ask me, you should collect your shifter friends, go find a friendly planet in another galaxy, leave all us humans to our misery.”

Ragnar took a breath, then held it.  He plucked a ball of fluff from her blanket and flicked it to the floor.  Finally, he said, “You ever wondered why you’ve never had to go back to Millennium for repeat injections when everybody else has to go every hundred years?”

“Lucky, I guess,” Athenais said.  “I hate needles.”

“The old technology was a one-shot deal,” Ragnar told her.  “The new stuff requires periodic dosings to keep the body working.”

“So?”  Athenais asked.  “That’s obvious.”

“For every Potion Marceau gives out, he kills a colonist to incubate it.”

Athenais blinked.

“Marceau raids Penoi daily.  The ones he brings back are injected with a replicating form of the Potion.  The next few days are agony for them as the technology spreads and reproduces.  After their flesh becomes mush and their organs stop working, their entire bodies are centrifuged to retrieve the technology.”

“Colonists.”

“Yes.”

“He’s killing colonists.”

“Yes.  That’s why Penoi’s never grown advanced enough to join the Utopia, even though it’s right at its center.”

Athenais’s fingers curled into stiff fists.  “That son of a bitch.”  She slumped to the wall, her head resting against the slats of the closet, her eyes closed.  She knew her father was a twisted plague on society, but this was the last damned straw.  “Get your friends.  I’ll help you.”

Dallas hurriedly moved away from the mess hall entry as the Captain and her First Mate headed for her chambers.  She hid in a supply closet while they passed, then stayed there for long minutes, considering what she had heard.

A shifter.  Ragnar was a
shifter
.

It was so exciting she could hardly breathe.  Her throat all but ached with the need to blurt it to the universe, but she wasn’t that stupid.  Despite what the moody old broad said, she had plenty of good sense.  Still, the knowledge was too exhilarating to keep to herself.  She needed to tell somebody, but who?

Squirrel only cared about her clothes and her books.  Goat was probably already too stoned to talk to her.  Dune was busy with his latest buggy.  That left Smallfoot.  She hated Smallfoot.  He was rude, and always trying to get in her pants.  But she had to tell somebody.  It was going to eat a hole in her brain if she didn’t.

Smallfoot would be easy enough to find, though she’d probably have to wait a while for him to finish with his whores.  That would give her a chance to hang out in The Shop, maybe catch sight of the other shifter.  Two shifters in one place!  This had to be some sort of record.  That she had actually served on a
ship
with one left her all sorts of giddy.  She loved aliens.  She’d read tomes on them, in between missions back in the fleet.  They were just.  So. 
Cool
.  Shifters, especially.  She’d spent hours poring over their breeding habits, absolutely intrigued by the intricate coupling customs, cocking her head at the fascinating—and somewhat grody—pictures.