Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (4 page)

The augie pulled a
combat knife and slashed for the gap between Pike’s helmet and plastron. Fitz brought
her slug thrower to bear on the attacker, but Bartonelli moved in front of her,
seeming to drift in slow motion.

The sergeant loosed a
burst from her pulse rifle, time distortion shifting the weapon’s bark down to
a series of deep coughs. One of the bolts caught the augie on the shoulder,
spinning him around and slowing him long enough for Bartonelli to get a clear
shot. She took it. The force of the blow slammed him back into the wall, a dark
stain blooming on his chest. He slid to the floor, leaving a red smear on the
once elegant wall covering.

Fitz’s consciousness
shifted back into the normal flow of time as the diminutive merc offered Pike a
hand and pulled him to his feet. He hunched forward, massaging his chest and
coughing.

“Damn, that hurts,” he
managed between gasps.

“It’ll hurt worse
tomorrow.” Bartonelli punched his shoulder. “But at least you’ll get a
tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Bart. I owe
you.”

“No, thank you for
keeping such a good eye on me.” The merc winked as she popped out her rifle’s
power pack and checked the charge. She pocketed the cell and slapped in a fresh
one.

Sixty-four augies to
go.

Fitz crouched by the
body of the ginger-haired man. “Ian Chorickus. My files say he was fond of
using that knife, and he’s reputed to be Tritico’s chief enforcer.”

“And his new
bodyguard,” Pike said. “If he’s here, you can bet his boss isn’t far away.”

A scream chopped off
with the buzz of a pistol.

“Came from that hall.”
Pike nodded toward the body. “Same place he came from.”

“Let’s see what our friend’s
been up to.” Fitz rose and commed Costos. “You and Chin hold that door and
don’t let anyone past. Keep an eye out for Major Baltasar. Sergeant
Bartonelli…”

Behind her helmet’s
faceplate, the merc’s scowl showed entirely too many teeth for Fitz’s liking.

“…you’re with us.”

“Good call, Chima.”

A series of exits led
off the hall. They had to clear each opening as they leap-frogged their way
toward the source of weapons fire and breaking glass. At the end of the hall,
Fitz stepped into a medical bay, and slaughter. A weapon in each hand, a man
methodically stalked the screaming med-techs, kicking over tables and desks to
drive them from cover. He moved with a jerky stop-start motion that wasn’t
quite hyperkinetic, but too quick to be a Normal. A woman broke from cover and
ran for the door at the rear of the room. He put a single shot into her back,
then kicked an overturned table aside, targeting the white-coated man behind
it. The tech pleaded, sobbing.

Fitz leveled the slug
thrower at the augie. “Put the gun down.”

The shooter blurred
around, a needler in his right hand spat, and tiny projectiles whined past Fitz’s
helmet and snicked into the wall.

The slug thrower barked
twice.

Sixty-three augies.

The tech uncoiled and
lurched to his feet. His curly hair and dark eyes prodded a memory of their
hyperkinetic flight through the underground imperial base, dragging the
feckless doctor.

“Von Drager?” she
asked. Or should she call him August Lazzinair—the man who introduced the
symbiont to humanity; their Doctor Frankenstein, as it were.

He studied her for
several heartbeats. “Oh, I remember you…you’re Youngblood’s woman friend. The
last time I saw you…”

Fitz interrupted.
“Where’s Tritico?”

“Left a couple of hours
ago. In a big hurry.” Logan Von Drager wrung his hands as he looked at the
carnage around him. “He left his augies to, ah…clean up the loose ends.
Apparently that included me.”

Fitz cursed under her
breath. Tritico was one step ahead of her, as if he knew her plans. She’d been
careful to limit the number of people aware of this raid, and had thought they
all could be trusted. Obviously not.

She bent to roll the
augie’s body over, and the needler dropped from his fingers. Odd that he’d
tried to kill Von Drager with what normally wasn’t a lethal weapon. Needlers
were usually for delivering a knock-out drug. Unless he planned on taking the
doctor with him. She reached to pick it up.

“Be careful with that,”
Von Drager said.

“Thank you for the
warning, Doctor, but I know how to handle a weapon.”

“Not one like this.”

Puzzled by his
reaction, Fitz picked up the pistol. Von Drager reached out a hand to stop her,
but as she flipped open the cylinder, he snatched his fingers back and
retreated several steps. She examined the canister of close-packed black darts.
The doctor seemed ready to crawl out of his skin. What had him so spooked? Were
they poisoned? It might be worth hanging onto and checking it out when they returned
to Striefbourne City, so they’d know what they were up against.

“Pike, a set of tangle
ties for our new guest.” She gestured toward Von Drager.

“Wait! They held me
prisoner here and tried to kill me. You rescued me. Go ask Youngblood, he knows
I’ve been trying to get away from Tritico since Baldark. He can vouch for me.”
He looked around. “Where is Youngblood?”

“He’s indisposed. Don’t
worry, you’ll get the opportunity to talk to him later. Now let’s go.”

On the way out of the
med-bay, Fitz stopped to examine a dart embedded in the wall.

“Don’t touch that.” Von
Drager’s panicked words stilled her hand. She narrowed her eyes as she followed
him out.

The explosions and
weapons fire from the front of the lodge had quieted by the time they returned
to the dining room. Major Baltasar strode through the stained glass doors.

“Colonel FitzWarren, my
people are mopping up now. Most of the combatants surrendered, but a few made a
run for it. We’re out chasing them down now.” His lips twisted as if he’d
bitten into a rotten fruit. “These guys were Special Forces. I even knew a
couple of them. Not that long ago, I’d have been proud to have any one of them
guarding my back.” He shook his head. “This is a nasty business.”

And Fitz feared that as
long as Tritico was on the loose, it would only get worse. “I understand,
Major. Your people did an exemplary job, as usual.”

“You’ll have my
after-action report on your computer in the morning.”

“Chima, you better come
take a look at this,” Bartonelli called. She stood across the room by the pool
of blood—the empty pool of blood.

Fitz contacted Costos
on her comm. “Did you move the dead augie’s body?”

“No, ma’am. We stayed
out in the lobby, like you ordered.”

Fitz knelt by the red
puddle, reading the signs. A bloody hand print on the wall, smears from a
person struggling to rise and the trail of red footprints leading across the
floor. Once she would have dismissed her conclusion as impossible, but now she
knew better. She thought-clicked on her comm again. “Lizzy, did you see anyone
leave through the back?”

“No, Colonel, but
shortly after your party reached the building, I experienced a disruption to my
systems. It cleared up only a few moments ago.”

The grenade. It hadn’t
taken down the augies, but had it blinded the ship’s sensors? A long talk with
Dr. DeWitt was in order. A failure of an experimental weapon wasn’t that
unusual, but he’d been one of the select few who’d sat in on the planning for
this operation. One more thing added to the list of a thousand other pressing
matters she had to contend with when she returned to Striefbourne City.

“Yig’s balls,” Pike
said. “Even augies don’t get up again with a hole that big in them.”

Fitz’s fingers drummed
on the composite plastron protecting her chest as possibilities whirled through
her mind, and kept coming back to the same conclusion. The symbiont. They had
to know for sure. She extracted a med-case from her belt pouch, uncapped an
empty syringe and filled it from the bloody pool. Doctor Rauschtonkowski would
be interested in this sample.

She stood, cocking an
eyebrow at Von Drager, but the doctor refused to meet her gaze.

Oh, hell. If there was
one…

“Pike, that augie in
the med-bay. Check on him, would you? Bartonelli, go with him.”

The pair returned too
quickly. Fitz already knew the answer.

The lieutenant’s dark
eyes were wide. “He’s gone. I don’t understand.”

Fitz feared she understood
all too well. That explained why Tritico could do away with Von Drager. He no
longer required the doctor.

Tritico had everything
he needed to build his own army of indestructible augies.

__________

They arrived back at
Lizzy’s berth at the Administration Building long after time for the midday
meal. They’d dropped off Costos and Chin at the Citadel along with Von Drager,
despite the doctor’s protestations that he had been an unwilling participant in
Tritico’s schemes. The maximum security cells beneath the building would be the
safest place to stash him for now. If Tritico sent augies to finish the job, it
was the one place they couldn’t get to him. She hoped.

“Anyone up for lunch at
that new Acinonex restaurant downtown?” Bartonelli asked.

“Count me in,” said
Pike.

“I’ll pass.” Fitz
massaged the back of her neck. Exhaustion dragged at her, and she ached all
over. “I have to write my report on this morning’s operation and prepare for
tomorrow’s meeting with the Emperor.”

“I’ll stay and help,” Pike
said, but looked so crestfallen Fitz found it hard not to laugh.

“No, you go ahead; take
some time off. You earned it. I’ll get something out of the processor in my
office. Just try to run down Dr. DeWitt by tomorrow and get his best guess on
why that grenade didn’t work, and if it interfered with Lizzy’s sensors.”

Fitz trudged to her
office, peeled off her armor, and dropped it in a pile just inside the door.
There’d be time to pick it up later. She pulled out her desk chair and started
to drop into it, stopping at the last second when she realized it wasn’t empty.

“Whoa, Boss Lady, don’t
squash me,”
the black Kaphier cat warned her
telepathically and leapt onto the desk, relinquishing the seat. Jumper
stretched and began washing.
“You look like crap; must not have gone well.”

“Just tired and, yeah,
we missed Tritico.” She scrubbed her hands against her face.

“Are we going home
tonight?”

“No, I’ll sleep here on
the couch again. That place is too big and empty with Wolf gone.”

She thought of the
villa they’d purchased north of the city on the rocky shores of the Hapkean
Sea. Accessible only by air, Sea Spires was to be their sanctuary, a place to
escape their hectic public lives, but the thought of sleeping in their big bed
alone made her throat ache.

“Suit yourself. I can
sleep anywhere.”
He proceeded to prove it by rolling
onto his back amid the tablets, styli and monitors on her desk top and folding
his paws across his chest.

Shakiness and sweat
beading on the back of her neck warned of plummeting blood sugar levels. She
needed food, but felt slightly nauseous. She thought-clicked on her
pharmacopeia for a hit of the elixir, but a message flashed on her inhead,
chiding her for allowing the reservoir to become empty. Again. She’d been
relying on the nutrient solution too much in the past few days, and now she had
to eat, even if her stomach didn’t like the idea.

At the first beep from
the processor, Jumper’s head popped up.
“Could you get me a liver and
creamed gravy while you’re there?”
His pink tongue licked his whisker pads
in anticipation.

“You know, you wouldn’t
have to wait on me all the time if I had hands. Wolf’s getting all those new
augmentations, what about me? Couldn’t you find a cybernetic veterinarian to
give me some hands with super strength. Yeah, and maybe some plexisteel claws
so I can rip open walls…”

“More like so you can
tear open food pouches. You’d cut off your ear the first time you scratched a
flea.” Fitz carried the tray back to the desk, trying to picture how fat Jumper
would be if he could order food from the processor as often as he liked.

The cat attacked his
plate the instant Fitz put it down.
“You can just kiss my whiskers. I’m a
clean cat, I don’t have fleas.”
Getting off his snide comments with his
mouth full was one advantage of communicating telepathically.

“Sorry Jumper, but I
don’t think CyberOps has any veterinarians on staff.”

“Too bad. Now that
you’re in charge, you really ought to look into hiring one. I bet there’s a lot
of Kaphier cats who’d want to become augies.”

Fitz forced down her
vegetables, then started on the neubeast steak. Her knife slipped as she sliced
into it, scoring a shallow cut on the tip of her finger. She wiped the blood on
her napkin, but it continued to bleed. An insignificant wound like this should
have healed so quickly she’d hardly have been aware of it. This wasn’t the
first time one of her injuries hadn’t healed like it should have. Her stomach
churned. She pushed back from the desk and bolted to her feet.