Deep Penetration; Alien Breeders I (35 page)

He tipped her chin up.
“You can’t fight us on this, Em. You’ll get me and Tariq killed and
the gods only know what’ll happen to you. What Tariq proposed is
treason. We needed breeders desperately
before
the war.
No matter who wins, Anunnaki will die and when they do, then
our situation becomes more desperate. We’ve … interbred so much we
don’t dare breed without bringing in fresh
contributors.”

Emerald stared at Koryn in horror.
“You can’t do it! I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you or
Tariq because of me! If I can’t stay with you anyway, just send me
with the others. I’ll be good. I understand now and I won’t be any
trouble. And … maybe later you and Tariq could get me
back?”

“
We can do it and we will.
Tariq has a good plan. It’s doable and the best possible solution
for all of us. I’ll admit I get the best part of it,” he said,
smiling faintly. “I get to go with you and take care of you. But
this is what Tariq wants, too. He’ll know that you’re safe and
he’ll know his child is safe. If that wasn’t important to him, he
wouldn’t take the risk.”

He stared at her face for
a moment. “And it isn’t nearly as risky for us as it sounds,” he
added. “They’ll never know Tariq had anything to do with it.
I’ll
be charged with
treason, but I don’t plan on hanging around to be executed, so it
doesn’t matter.”

Emerald didn’t believe him. She wanted
to, but she didn’t. She was too afraid for them, though, to argue
anymore or beg. If they were willing to risk so much for her, then
they might do something even more dangerous and risky if she didn’t
do as she was told.

Chapter Fifteen

Tariq watched grimly as High Councilor
Mylor’s ship settled slowly toward the ground. When the gang plank
began to lower, he approached the vessel, waiting at the foot of
the gangplank until the door opened and Mylor marched down it,
followed by a full platoon of guardsmen. Uneasiness flickered
through him when the guardsmen immediately deployed upon reaching
the ground.

He bowed when Mylor stopped in front
of him. “Lord Mylor,” he acknowledged the man, bowing in accordance
with his station. “It is an honor that you’ve come to inspect our
progress.”

Mylor smiled thinly. “The honor is all
mine, I assure you, Lord Tariq.” He lifted a hand. “Seize
him!”

A jolt went through Tariq, but he
aborted his instinct to lash out at the guardsmen that seized him
by both arms. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he
growled, sending Mylor a deadly look.

“
Arresting a traitor.
Where’s the female?”

Tariq’s jaw tightened. “I’m afraid
you’ll have to enlighten me on that one. There are a lot of females
here. Which one are you referring to?”

“
The one you’ve been
keeping hidden in your quarters,” Mylor responded
smugly.

Tariq felt his heart skip several
beats. “The one named Emerald? I sent her to Niribu.”

“
You sent ‘a’ female of
the general description. You didn’t send the breeder you’d
appropriated for yourself.”

“
I put her on the vessel
myself,” Tariq said through gritted teeth.

“
Debra, you mean? The one
we found when the ship arrived.”

Tariq shrugged easily. “I didn’t know
that was her name. I called her Emerald.”

Mylor’s eyes glittered. “So we won’t
find her in your cabin?”

“
Not unless she was beamed
back.”

“
Hmmm. I think maybe we’ll
just check the ships in the hanger bay.”

Tariq felt a cold wave wash over him
at that. His mind went chaotic with the effort to think of some way
to divert Mylor long enough for the ships to leave. “The only
breeders on my ship are those waiting for transport to Niribu,” he
responded tightly. “I’ll be happy to escort your men to search my
quarters and then we can search the hold.”

“
I’d be wasting my time,
though, wouldn’t I?”

He turned away from Tariq and
instructed the men to go directly to the hanger and board the
transports there. “The transports were about to take off,” he said
tightly. “We’ve worked out a new grid search area that looks
promising for survivors. The council won’t be happy that you’re
disrupting our search.”

“
Oh we won’t delay them
long. Just long enough to remove the geneticist, Koryn, and the
breeder Emerald.”

“
What the fuck does any of
this have to with Koryn? He’s going to collect more DNA samples for
regeneration.”

“
Well, if he isn’t
harboring the breeder we’re looking for, then there won’t be any
problem at all.” He glanced at the men holding Tariq. “Take him
into the hold and lock him up.”

“
I’ll have you on charges
of false imprisonment of a lord of the council!” Tariq
snarled.

“
I don’t think so,” Mylor
said pleasantly.

Tariq considered resisting when they
began pulling him toward the ship, but dismissed it, realizing it
was futile. He might be able to get away, but he had no way to warn
Koryn and no time to reach them. He considered trying to escape
anyway, wondering if there was any possibility, at all, that he
could somehow reach them and free them if he did.

It seemed unlikely to impossible. He
would be trapped on Earth unless he could somehow steal one of his
own ships and they would be on Niribu. It seemed to him that the
only option was to go with them and try to free the three of them
once they were together.

Not that that was much of a fucking
option, but then again, he had friends on Niribu. He had some hope
of getting help there.

Clearly Mylor had been informed of the
entire plot, although how the fuck the son-of-a-bitch had learned
of it he was damned if he knew. No one knew except him and Koryn
and Emerald.

And the androids he’d bribed to take
them.

One of them had to be a fucking
plant!

What were the fucking odds that he
would’ve picked Mylor’s plant, though, out of all the androids
onboard?

It seemed astronomical,
but he couldn’t think of any other way Mylor could’ve found out,
and he wasn’t just fishing. He knew
exactly
what the plan was. If not
for that, he might’ve thought it was someone else that Mylor had
sent to spy on him, but he’d never discussed the plan except in his
own quarters with Koryn and Emerald and in his office with the
androids and he had both of those areas scanned regularly for
surveillance devices.

Maybe Koryn hadn’t been as
careful?

He shook the thought. Who would Koryn
have discussed it with?

He’d been pacing his cell for nearly
thirty minutes when they brought Koryn in. They shoved him through
the door and he promptly collapsed. Tariq went to him, turning him
over. “Gods! You fool! What did you fight them for?”

Koryn roused enough to open the only
eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “Seemed like a good idea at the
time.” He swallowed a little sickly. “They got Em. I couldn’t stop
them.”

Tariq helped him to his feet and
walked him to one of the bunks. When he’d helped him settle, he
strode to the door. “He’s needs a medic!” he growled at the guards
he could see.

“
They’re going to execute
him for treason when we get to Niribu. I don’t see the
point.”

“
The point is he hasn’t
been tried or convicted, you son-of-a-bitch!” Tariq bellowed. “Get
him a gods damn medic!”

“’
S alright,” Koryn
muttered. “Juz bruised and banged a lit’le. Think I might’a loss a
toof.”

Tariq struck the wall with his fist
angrily and moved away from the door. There was nothing in the
fucking cell but the two bare cots. After considering it a moment,
he reached up to grab the sleeve of his uniform near the seam and
jerked at it until he’d managed to separate a small section.
Wedging his fingers in the hole, he tore the rest of the seam and
then took his sleeve to the tiny fountain basin that supplied the
water to the cell.

Koryn complained the entire time he
bathed his wounds.

“
Shut up!” Tariq growled.
“I need to see if any of these need attention. There’s too much
blood to tell.”

“
What the fuck you gon do
if they do?”

“
Bind you up the best I
can with
your
uniform.”

Koryn uttered a half hearted chuckle
but broke off in the middle of it. “Think my ribs’z
cracked.”

Tariq was relieved to see that the
battering seemed to be from fists, not that those weren’t hard
enough but they could’ve been worse, and that there was little more
than broken skin—no deep cuts he needed to worry about closing. He
didn’t know if there were broken bones or not, but he couldn’t do
anything about it if there were. His main focus was to make sure he
didn’t bleed to death. He examined his mouth and saw two teeth were
bleeding but they were still in the sockets.

His ribs looked as if he’d been
stomped. Fury washed through Tariq. He’d been down already or they
couldn’t have stomped him, the cowardly bastards!

He tore one of Koryn’s pant legs off
to bind his ribs. “Better?”

Koryn grunted. “A little.
Thanks.”

Tariq patted his shoulder lightly.
Getting up, he moved to the other bunk and sprawled on
it.

“
You din ask about
Em.”

Tariq lifted an arm and draped it
across his eyes. “I can’t … think about that right now.”

“
She did good. She’s ok,
Tariq. ”

Tariq swallowed audibly. “Not if Mylor
has her.”

* * * *

Tariq’s face hardened when he read the
message he’d been given. Uttering a string of curses, he wadded it
and stalked back and forth across the cell several times like a
caged animal. It was a far larger cell than the one they’d been
confined in on the trip from Earth, but Tariq was angry enough it
still took little more than a half a dozen strides to pace from one
side to the other.

“
I guess that means Biccel
isn’t here either?” Koryn asked glumly.

“
He’s with the fleet,”
Tariq said tightly.

“
Well—now we know why
Mylor was so hot to get us back and start the trial. Everyone you
know that might have any influence is with the fleet. We’re running
out of time. They’ll have closing arguments tomorrow or the next
for sure and it isn’t going to take the jury long to come back with
a guilty verdict. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect every
fucking one of them was on the bastard’s payroll.”

Tariq sent him a pitying
glance. “All of them
are
on his payroll or they wouldn’t be sitting there.
Mylor doesn’t like to leave things to chance.”

Koryn stared at him hard for several
moments. “This isn’t a joking matter, Tariq! We’re in a hell of a
mess here. We’re going to fry—literally.”

“
I wasn’t fucking joking!
Do I look amused to you?”

“
I was actually hoping it
was graveyard humor since that’s going to be our next fucking
address. You can’t think of anybody else to contact?”

Tariq uttered a disgusted huff and
flung himself down on his cot. “I already contacted everybody I
could think of. They either ignored my plea or they’re gone. That
was the last of them.”

Koryn was silent for a while,
digesting that, trying to come to come to terms with their
situation. He discovered he couldn’t. Everything that had happened
since they’d been seized seemed unreal, more like a nightmare than
reality. Even their location in Traitors Gate seemed too surreal to
fully grasp. They were the only prisoners—the only two men the
ancient prison had held in his lifetime. “How do you suppose they
managed to get the vids?”

“
I don’t know,” Tariq said
tiredly. “Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it
out. I had the cleaning droids set to sweep for surveillance vids
every day. The only thing I can think is that they developed some
new technology that the droid couldn’t detect. They couldn’t have
used anything long range. I had the entire room
shielded.”

“
Unless they came up with
something that could penetrate the shielding. It was damned poor
quality. I don’t know how the fuck anybody could recognize any of
us from it.”

“
They didn’t have to. He
could’ve made anything up at all and they would’ve sworn they
recognized us from the vids.”

“
But he didn’t and that’s
what bothers me. He wouldn’t have known what we were doing and been
able to get there before we could pull it off.”

“
I think that was where we
ran out of luck and he ran in to it. I know somebody on the ship
has been giving him regular reports. They wouldn’t have known
anything about Emerald at all if that wasn’t the case, but none of
the vids are more than a few days prior to when we set the plan up.
Like you said, Mylor couldn’t have gotten there between the time he
would’ve received that particular report and the time he did. It
isn’t possible. He had to have been on the way already and gotten
that in route.”