The Spider and the Fly Read online

  ***

  Minister Tsarl Drathir scowled down at the viewscreen as the captain of the Argaz delivered his report, and with each passing second he found it more and more difficult to resist the temptation to belch fire onto the console and reduce it to a pile of molten slag.

  “Destroyed?” he hissed. “You are absolutely certain?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” the captain replied. To his credit, he wasn’t wilting beneath the glare of his superior…or at least, not much. It wasn’t often that the Intelligence Ministry hijacked military ships on such short notice, after all, and this was probably the first time in the captain’s career that he’d ever had to speak directly with any of the actual ministers. “The debris is consistent with Dominion-era technology, but the computer is having trouble identifying the particular design. Its best estimate is a Koralis-class science vessel.”

  “The Damadus was a variant of that design,” the Widow said from the other side of the circular com terminal. After another full day of lurking inside her private den, she’d finally decided to join him in the command center. “It would seem the Dowd got what they wanted.”

  Drathir scowled at her. The com system was set up to filter out extraneous noise so she could talk without the captain hearing her, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. There was something peculiar in the tone of her voice. Given how desperately she’d wanted to take the Damadus intact, she should have been as livid as he was. Instead she seemed…distracted.

  “There were two other ships in the wreckage, Your Excellency,” the captain added. “One was a smaller vessel several thousand kilometers away from the bulk of the debris. There’s not much left of it, but its design is consistent with any number of conventional light freighters.”

  Drathir nodded. That was obviously Vale’s ship, meaning she and Coveri were almost certainly dead, and that all their precious intelligence on the Mire—not to mention anything they’d found on the Damadus—had died with them. This was turning out to be quite the catastrophe.

  “And the other?” he asked softly.

  “The other was a Dowd ship, destroyer-class. I’m sending you the sensor logs now.”

  “The Dowd ship was destroyed? How?”

  The captain’s tail flicked back and forth behind him. “It’s impossible to say for certain, but the residual energy signatures around the wreckage suggest plasma weaponry, likely a Mark VI or Mark VII heavy cannon. If I didn’t know better, I would say that one of our ships was responsible.”

  Drathir growled as the readings scrolled across the screen in front of him. Yes, those were definitely Convectorate weapon’s signatures. The same kind, he noted darkly, as those stolen from their weapons depots on Regdar about six months ago.

  He knew exactly who had done this. The question was how.

  “Is there anything else, captain?” Drathir asked as his claws sunk farther into the console.

  “No, sir. Our analysts are working to assemble the most likely scenarios—”

  “Don’t bother,” he interrupted. “Just continue your scans and send me all the data you have. Then you can return to your previous assignment.”

  The man stuttered briefly before nodding. He was probably just happy to be let free. “As you wish, Your Excellency.”

  Drathir closed the connection with a smack of his hand and then glared over towards the woman on the other side of the room. “The Mire.”

  “So it would seem,” the Widow agreed, pacing over to the galactic holomap on the western wall of the command room. “This confirms the reports that they’ve managed to assemble a new fleet. They must have arrived mid-battle and destroyed the Dowd.”

  “Yes, and now we’ve lost everything,” Drathir spat. “Your agent failed, Widow. We’re just lucky the Damadus was destroyed before the Mire could salvage it.”

  “Vale is still alive,” Ralon Sisk said from his perch in the corner of the room. He’d been so quiet during the entire report that Drathir had forgotten his former aide was even there.

  “How can you possibly know that? The Tartarus Expanse is hundreds of light years away.”

  “Agent Sisk trained with Vale and Coveri,” the Widow told him. “It is not uncommon for telepaths who spend time together to form lasting bonds.”

  “I see,” Drathir murmured. He’d known that all Spiders were supposed to be able to converse with their mistress anywhere in the Convectorate, but had no idea how strong that link could become. He filed the tidbit away for later use.

  “Even if I couldn’t sense her, we have to assume that she was captured,” Sisk added. “The security risk is too high to ignore.”

  “If you can sense them like you say, can you track them? Can you tell us where the Mire is taking them?”

  “If I could do that, we would have found Coveri years ago,” Sisk pointed out. “I know they are alive, nothing more. I can’t find them unless they use their powers again.”

  “And unfortunately, we have every reason to believe the Mire has a base somewhere beyond our threshold of detection,” the Widow added. “That is where they will take Vale.”

  Drathir growled under his breath. Whether they actually knew if Vale was alive or not almost didn’t matter; Sisk was right about that. Protocol dictated they proceed as if their asset had been captured until they had evidence to the contrary.

  “So the Mire has not only recaptured their lost agent, but taken one of ours,” he said gravely. “And we have no way to track either of them.”

  The Widow nodded. “Correct.”

  Drathir glanced back down to the Argaz’s sensor reports as they scrolled across the terminal in front of him. “We also can’t rule out the possibility that they were able to salvage the Damadus before it was destroyed. If they got ahold of the ship’s data crystals, they might already be sitting on the cure to the Pandrophage…”

  “It’s certainly possible.”

  His eyes flicked back up and locked onto her. “And yet you don’t seem the least bit concerned by this. Do you not realize the implications? If the Mire finds the cure, they’ll be able to—”

  “I understand the situation completely, Your Excellency,” the Widow assured him. “I simply don’t believe that brooding over it will get us anywhere. Besides, even if the Damadus was successful in its mission—and even if the Mire was able to get ahold of that data—it will still take them days or even weeks to sift through the crystals and find what they want. Then they’ll have to figure out a way to synthesize and distribute the cure.” She shrugged fractionally. “We have time.”

  Drathir took a menacing step forward. “I doubt the Hierarchy will see it that way. This is an even greater disgrace than Coveri’s defection—it may be the most grievous intelligence disaster since the founding of the Convectorate! And your agents are the ones to blame!”

  “You really should calm yourself, Minister,” the Widow replied. “This is a setback, yes, but we still have options.”

  It was tempting to pounce across the room and claw the condescension from her fleshy face. It was even more tempting to spit a ball of flame and reduce her to a seared, blackened lump. The Hierarchy might be upset with him, but then again they might not. Once they heard the news of this disaster, it was possible they’d thank him for cleaning up their mess instead.

  But no, Drathir was going to do this the right way. He was going to bide his time and prove to the Ministers and the Hierarchs that leaving a human in charge of anything—especially a sensitive black ops program like this—was a grave mistake. The Convectorate could survive just fine without the Spiders, and if anything this disaster would only help his case.

  “I will order my people to redouble their efforts in tracking down this new base of theirs,” Drathir said as he turned back to the holomap, “but it’s unlikely we will locate it in time. The Mire will undoubtedly implement even tighter security measures now.”

  “They will, but it won’t matter,” the Widow said, glancing over her shoulder to
Sisk. “If you provide Agent Sisk all the information you currently have on likely base locations, he will take it from there.”

  Drathir snorted. “Just like that? Your little pawn waggles his finger and suddenly the Mire falls right into our lap?”

  She smiled faintly. “It won’t be quite that easy, but he will find them. And if it makes you feel any better, you’re certainly welcome to deploy more of your own agents as well.”

  “I intend to,” he said. “But for your own sake, you had best hope your man finds a way to redeem your program. The Hierarchy does not tolerate failure.”

  “Nor do I, Minister,” she replied coolly. “You’ll soon see that for yourself.”

  Drathir snorted and snatched his datapad from the top of the console. “I will contact the Ministry and review these sensor logs. Let me know the moment you learn anything else.”

  By the time he reached his quarters, he’d already mentally rehearsed the entire opening to his speech before the Minister’s Conclave. On one hand, he really couldn’t complain about any of this—the Widow was doing an excellent job of making all of his arguments for him. On the other, of course, was the fact that if her blunders resulted in the Mire getting a legitimate cure for the Pandrophage, the Convectorate might collapse around them before he ever had the chance to bring her down.

  He growled as he sat down at his desk and pulled out his holopad. In all likelihood, the Mire hadn’t managed to salvage anything, and even if they had, the odds that the Damadus had actually succeeded in its mission in the first place were imperceptibly small. The very thought that a bunch of humans could unravel the greatest biological weapon in history was laughable. The more likely scenario was that they had captured Coveri and Vale which, while certainly bad enough, wasn’t the end of the galaxy as they knew it.

  Unless, of course, his other, much darker suspicions about the Widow were correct. The thought had been gnawing at him since shortly after he’d arrived and witnessed the full extent of her operational independence. Here she was, a powerful human psychic overseeing a program whose primary purpose was to forge more of her people into deadly weapons, and the Hierarchy just assumed she was loyal to the Convectorate?

  She could have easily been a Mire spy for all they knew, a plant who’d somehow wormed her way into the very heart of the Intelligence Ministry. With dozens of Spiders and hundreds of Drones at her command, she could have easily been the greatest threat to Convectorate security outside of the Dowd or Norgon. What if Coveri’s “defection” had been planned all along? What if Vale had now joined him?

  What if they just had gotten their hands on the cure to the Pandrophage and were about to deliver it to the Mire?

  The pad beeped softly as it finally established a secure link, and Gral Visek’s green face once again popped up on his screen. “Your Excellency.”

  “The Damadus is lost,” Drathir told him. “The Dowd reached it before we did.”

  “That is…unfortunate. Though I suppose it’s better than having the Mire capture it. Will you be returning home, then, sir?”

  “No. The Widow believes that Coveri and Vale escaped the destruction. The evidence suggests a Mire vessel arrived on the scene just in time to destroy the Dowd ship and rescue them.”

  Visek glanced down to one of his terminals. “Our projections suggest the Mire lack the infrastructure or resources to build a vessel capable of taking on a Dowd cruiser.”

  “Those projections are wrong,” Drathir said. “And I want that mistake corrected.”

  “Of course, Minister, I apologize. We shall redouble our efforts.”

  Drathir sheathed and unsheathed his claws. “Do that, and run another analysis of everything we have on potential locations of this secret base of theirs. It’s within the realm of possibility that the Mire managed to raid the Damadus’s archives before it was destroyed.”

  Visek hissed. “Which means the humans may have the cure for the Pandrophage.”

  “Assuming the researchers finished their work, yes. I’m not convinced, but it’s a risk we can’t afford to take. Especially not if the situation is as bad here as we fear.”

  The other man’s eyes flickered. “You still believe the Widow is allied with the Mire?”

  “I don’t know, but if she is then this would be the perfect cover. Coveri and his precious information are out of our reach, and the Mire might have access to the cure.” He snarled and waved a claw at the monitor. “Regardless, you were supposed to have some information for me.”

  “Yes, sir. I was able to retrieve the files you requested. It was not an easy task—your predecessor seemed determined to bury them.”

  “Hardly surprising,” Drathir muttered contemptuously. “What did you learn?”

  “I’m sending you the analysis now,” Visek said. “I’m not sure if it will do anything to alleviate your suspicions. It would seem that Vale, Coveri, and your aide, Sisk, are all quite…special.”

  “Is that so?” Drathir mused. “I was just informed that they trained together and may share a unique psychic bond, of sorts.”

  “I’m afraid it goes beyond that, sir.”

  “Explain.”

  “According to this, they were all part of a special training program authorized roughly fifteen years ago. The codename was ‘Project Tarantula.”

  Drathir chortled. “The Widow does love her insipid insect metaphors, doesn’t she?”

  “Evidently,” Visek scoffed. “We weren’t able to find much in the way of specifics, but the basic idea was that the program planned to avoid most of the expedited training techniques used on Flies—techniques like psionic memory imprinting, skill implants, and the like. Instead the so-called Tarantulas were all trained conventionally, by hand, over the course of a decade.”

  “That sounds woefully inefficient. One of the primary advantages of psionic agents was supposed to be the speed with which they could be conditioned—a basic memory imprint from a more experienced psychic could shave years off their education.”

  “That was my first thought as well. The only downside from imprinting or implants is that they have a tendency to stifle the development of advanced creative thought patterns. Our own cyberneticists came to that same conclusion years ago—commandoes with conventional training consumed considerably more resources, but they were much better leaders and tacticians.”

  Drathir idly tapped a claw across his cheek. “Interesting. So you think the Widow was building an elite squad of field commanders?”

  “It’s impossible to say with any certainty, but that’s certainly the most logical conclusion,” Visek said. “Historically speaking, though, Spiders have always worked alone. In fact, they operate almost entirely independently from the others; their only central coordination is the Widow herself.”

  “Vale has a non-human partner, a Kali of all things,” Drathir commented as he studied his datapad. “And she, Coveri, and Sisk all participated in the Mirador operation four years ago.”

  “That would seem to fit, then. Perhaps the Widow felt that this specialized training would benefit them on multi-faceted assignments like that one.”

  “Not that such a thing should be her decision to make,” Drathir grumbled. “And of course, one of her super trio defected, possibly as a result of a less intensified indoctrination process via memory imprinting. Independent thought leads to independent actions—she created better commanders at the cost of creating potential traitors.”

  “I suppose that’s also true, sir.”

  Drathir growled under his breath as his eyes continued to sift across the data. “Who authorized this project in the first place?”

  “That was the other thing I wanted to bring to your attention, Your Excellency,” Visek said. “I couldn’t find any trace of official authorization.”

  The minister paused. “How can that be?”

  “There are no official records of the project being approved at all. I’m inclined to believe even your predecessor didn’t know about it.�
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  “The Widow must have authorized it herself somehow,” Drathir speculated.

  “I’m not so certain about that, sir. Even your security clearance wasn’t high enough to access this information.”

  Drathir started to snap back but stopped himself. He was the Minister of Intelligence, one of the six highest-ranking Tarreen in the entire Convectorate. In principle, there was no higher clearance….except for one.

  “It was authorized directly by the Hierarchy,” he reasoned.

  Visek nodded. “That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

  “Then how were your men able to access it?”

  “I told you before that my people are the best, sir,” Visek said, his voice laced with pride. “I was not exaggerating.”

  “So it would seem,” Drathir rasped. Apparently he’d done an even better job assembling his staff than he’d given himself credit for. That was good; if his suspicions were correct, then he was about to need all the help he could get. “So you weren’t able to find any other mention of this project’s endgame?”

  “No, sir. And to be honest, I’m not sure if any of this is related to the current situation or not.”

  Drathir grunted as he skimmed over the data again. Vale, Coveri, and Sisk, the three Spiders specifically chosen for the Widow’s pet project, all of whom were now intimately wrapped up in current events. It could have been coincidence, perhaps, but every instinct in his body—not to mention his three decades of operational experience—was telling him otherwise.

  “It is related, Gral,” Drathir said. “And it is up to us to figure out how.”

  “Yes, sir. My people will continue their analysis. Is there anything else you would have us do?”

  “Yes, actually.” He tapped the datapad and scrolled down to his list of private notations. “I want you to expand your search to find out anything you can on the original Damadus Project leader, Krucius Foln.”

  Visek’s tail thrashed in thought. “His grandson was leader of the Mire up until he was killed at Mirador.”

  “I’m aware of that, but I wish to know more about his ancestor—something beyond the official records. I wonder if it might give us a fresh perspective on this entire debacle.”

  “As you wish, of course. Anything else?”

  “One last thing,” Drathir said, taking in a deep breath. Having his people dig around the Hierarchy’s private database was dangerous enough, but this…if he was wrong about this, it would be more than a career-ending mistake. It might very well be a life-ending one. “I want you to open my personal files and access a folder called Artarok Prime. Inside you’ll find a brief list of current fleet officers that owe me a favor. Follow the contact protocol in the file, and let me know when you are finished.”

  Visek’s head tilted to the side. “Sir?”

  Drathir glanced over to the door on the other side of the room. “If the Widow has turned against us, then we need to be ready for it. The officers will know what to do.”

  “I see, sir,” the other man replied grimly. “I will contact you again shortly.”

  “Good. Drathir out.”