The Spider and the Fly Page 5

  ***

  “Can you hear me, my lord?”

  “Yes,” Foln said softly as his eyes fluttered back open. He squinted against the all-too-familiar lighting of the Golem’s infirmary. “What happened?”

  “The fail-safe measures kicked in and disconnected you from the shuttle,” Grier told him, her face pale with concern.

  “What?” Foln snapped. “Why?”

  “Because your heart was going to explode, that’s why,” Henri scolded from the other side. “It nearly did anyway. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Foln growled and tried to sit up, but the bed’s restraints held him firmly in place. “I was fine. I was trying to fire the weapons.”

  “You did,” Grier said.

  Foln blinked. “And what happened?”

  She grinned down at him. “You pierced the shields.”

  “With one shot?”

  Grier nodded. “The projector was completely destroyed. Even the forward cannons on the Golem couldn’t manage that in one hit.”

  A wide smile drew across Foln’s parched lips. “So it worked.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Henri muttered. “I realize no one here actually listens to me, but you have to remember that this isn’t a cure, Soren—I still can’t identify the Pandrophage pathogen, let alone attack it with anything. This is a booster shot, nothing more…and unfortunately, the side effects are getting worse.”

  “It’s worth it,” Foln coughed. “And you know it.”

  The doctor sighed and squeezed at the bridge of his nose. “Look, your immune system is going crazy attacking itself right now, and your white blood cell count is critically low. I have you so pumped full of drugs that you’d fetch a nice ransom on the black market, and I’m not sure when or if that’s going to change.”

  “But you learned something useful from the test, right?” Foln asked pointedly between coughs. “You can improve the serum?”

  “Probably. It’s more data than we’ve ever had before. I just need to sit down and start analyzing it.”

  “Then get started, Henri—we’ll perform another test as soon as you’re ready.”

  Grier placed a hand on his shoulder. “Right now you need to rest, sir. We’ve already jumped away in case the Spiders come looking.”

  “Good,” he rasped as a sudden wave of nausea passed over him. His eyelids were already growing heavy again, and he knew he wouldn’t be conscious much longer. The last time he’d used the serum he’d been mostly useless for days, and this time it would probably be even worse. “Do you have anything else to report?”

  The two others shared a brief glance, and something odd flickered across Grier’s face. “Nothing that can’t wait, my lord. You should rest.”

  “Tell me,” Foln ordered. “Now.”

  She sighed. “While you were unconscious we received an encoded message from Coveri.”

  “Markus? I assume he finished his meeting with Pasek by now.”

  Grier glanced to Henri again, then back to Foln. “I don’t know, sir. The message was short and text only.”

  “What did it say?”

  She tapped the screen on her holopad and tilted it so Foln could read it.

  Pasek found the Seraph’s Blade. Meeting on Tafrinar. Will need rescue.

  Foln pushed against the restraints again as an excited tingle worked its way down his spine. No, it couldn’t be, after all these years…

  “Do you know what it means, my lord?” Grier asked.

  “Yes,” he croaked. “He’s found…he’s found the Damadus.”

  Henri coughed. “What?”

  “But that’s….” Grier shook her head. “That’s impossible, isn’t it? I thought that ship was a myth.”

  “The ship was very real,” Foln insisted. “My great grandfather Krucius was the one who designed it—he put together the entire Damadus Project in the hopes of curing the Pandrophage. Pasek or one of his people must have somehow stumbled upon it…”

  “Or he’s just full of shit,” Henri grumbled. “He’s a Claggoth—he’d do anything to try and swindle us out of more credits.”

  Foln shook his head. “He’s been reasonably honest with us in the past, and Markus would know if he were lying.”

  “Assuming he was willing to use his telepathy. It’s not exactly safe for him to do that in the open, you know.”

  “He would have for something this important,” Foln said. “What I don’t understand is why he’d be going to Tafrinar.”

  Grier tapped a few buttons on her holopad. “It’s the only legitimate spaceport on Kalifax. Maybe Pasek wanted him to do something first.”

  “Or maybe he hasn’t actually found the ship—maybe he was just relaying a rumor and Markus got overly excited,” Henri suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time the kid’s idealism got the better of him.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” Foln said. “He wouldn’t have signaled otherwise.”

  Grier frowned down at the screen. “What do think about this last part? Why would he need a rescue?”

  “Someone else must know about the ship, probably the Convectorate,” Foln reasoned. “And I can only assume he was in danger and thus had to settle for a short message.”

  “Do you think he’s been captured?”

  “I hope to hell not,” Henri said. “With as much as he knows about our operations, the Hierarchy could crush us. They might even come after New Keledon—”

  Foln waved a hand. “As long as we reach him first, it won’t matter. If he was able to send the message, he must have had a plan. We just have to get there in time to help him. Set a course for Kalifax.”

  Grier’s face scrunched as she ran the calculations. “It will take us almost a week to get there, but assuming Markus left Briton Chalo shortly after he sent this message—and assuming standard delays from passing through at least four com relays to reach us—he could arrive inside forty hours.”

  “Then we only have option,” Foln said. “Power up the astral drive.”

  Her dark eyes flicked up in surprise, and for a moment it seemed like she might protest. Foln sympathized—even under the best of circumstances they had to be careful about tapping into their psionic energy reserves. The astral drive was one of the few pieces of genuine Dominion technology they’d been able to salvage over the years, and it allowed them to travel at nearly ten times the speed of the fastest conventional drive on the market, not to mention avoid the hassles of dealing with all-too-finicky jump corridors. The problem was that like all psi-tech, the astral drive relied upon psychic energy for power—psychic energy that the Pandrophage had transformed into a rare and vital resource. They had a newly acquired stockpile of charged psionic capacitors on board, but they were rare, expensive, and virtually impossible to replace.

  Given what was at stake, however, they didn’t have a choice. And by Grier’s resigned expression, Foln could tell she’d come to the same conclusion.

  “Yes, my lord,” she said. “Now please, get some rest.”

  Foln nodded, and she slipped out of the infirmary. Henri stood there staring at the doorway, his head shaking.

  “I’ll eat a bowlful of fried chibberlings if that fat alien actually found this thing,” he said. “We’ve barked up this tree before.”

  “He might not have found the Damadus, but even if it’s just another Dominion ship it’s still worth pursuing. The salvage alone could be worth trillions.”

  “I suppose,” the doctor murmured. “Either way, the girl’s right: you need some sleep. And I need to figure how the fix the damage I’ve done to you.”

  “You’ll find a way somehow,” Foln told him. “You always do. And keep working on the serum—that’s still your number one priority.”

  “Right.”

  Henri stepped away, and Foln let out a deep breath and closed his eyes. The Damadus…it was almost impossible to believe. The legend of the lost ship had sustained human children for generations now. He could still remember his mot
her reading him stories about it when he was only five. To him it was more than just a myth; it was family history. Krucius Foln had been the most accomplished psychogeneticist in the old Dominion, and he’d arranged the Damadus Project as a last-ditch effort to save the Sarafan from the invading Tarreen. In many ways, he’d been carrying the hopes of the entire human race in his hands as he’d shifted away into astral space.

  Except he’d never returned, and in his absence humanity had wasted away into obscurity. No one knew for certain if the research team had ever succeeded in its mission or not, and speculation about the ship’s ultimate fate had become something of a pastime for drunkards and fools. Many believed the crew had eventually been claimed by the Koro Effect, a severe degenerative neural condition brought about from overexposure to astral energies. The Sarafan aboard the ship would have been forced to stay in astral space for extended periods of time lest the Tarreen track them down, and it seemed as likely an explanation as any.

  Idle conjecture aside, though, Foln did know one thing for certain: his grandfather hadn’t been one to leave a job unfinished. He’d been a brilliant, ambitious, and sometimes even ruthless man, and if there were a way to cure the Pandrophage, he would have found it. The only question now was whether or not the Mire could beat the Convectorate to the prize.

  On impulse, Foln reached a hand up to the crimson pendant hanging around his neck. Inside was a psionic data crystal, the archival storage device of choice for the ancient Sarafan. Ostensibly it was an educational tool designed by his grandfather to quickly impart his knowledge to family members who linked with it, but no Foln born in the last century had ever been able to test that theory. One of these days when Henri finally perfected the serum, though, Soren Foln might finally get that chance.

  He sighed and stretched out his aching muscles. His body felt more drained than when he’d fought off the Talamegian flu twenty years back, but his mind was still racing at a million kilometers a second. His memory looped through the moment when he’d finally taken control of the shuttle, and he could almost feel its power coursing through him even now. For one, brief moment, he had finally known what it meant to be a human…and what it meant to be a Foln.

  Even if the Damadus wasn’t real, Henri would find a cure to the Pandrophage eventually. The only question was whether or not Foln’s withering body would be around to see it. Each of these trials took more and more out of him, and soon he might have to accept the fact that someone else was going to have to test them in his stead.

  But that was all right. No matter what happened, he would find a way to lead them to victory somehow. He always did. It was what made him a leader. It was what made him a Foln. Once, not so long ago, the citizens of the galaxy had come to fear and respect that name, and he had promised himself many times that they would yet again.

  He would make certain of it.