In the face of it, the jealousy I’d felt when I’d first learned about her seemed stupid. Dragan had cared for her. He cared for her son, who had to watch her die in such a horrible way. He’d tried to save them, the way he’d saved me.
I stepped over the remains and through the doorway, squinting through salty sweat as we entered a large, open space where hanging lamps glowed from the bowed ductwork exposed high above. It looked like it might have been a storage warehouse at one point, broken boxes piled between rows of metal shelving and a grimy forklift lying on its side. Ahead, a space had been cleared and I could make out flashing lights and their reflections that shimmered on the ceiling above.
As we crept down the row, toward the source of the light, I saw the movement of little haan constructs, hundreds of them skittering along the shelves and the cracked concrete floor.
“Look,” Vamp breathed.
Rows of shelving had been cleared and in their place six large, circular vats formed from thick plastic sat arranged in a hexagon. Each vat contained a single haan female, steeping in some kind of chemical stew while tubes dangled down around them from a cluster of electronics above. Their faces were all identical, saucer eyes glowing coal red and ringed with blue coronas. They floated there, just beneath the liquid whose surface rippled with the underground vibrations. They looked dead at first, but as I pointed the flashlight beam and moved closer, I could see their hearts pulsing slowly and a nervous jittering inside each skull.
“Nix, what is this?” I whispered. “Who are they?”
“They are clones of Sillith.”
“What are they doing?”
“She is using them to develop and grow genetic samples.”
Vamp stepped closer, shining his light into the face of one. The clone didn’t seem to notice him as he moved the beam down into the liquid where what looked like little worms were wriggling around.
“This goes far beyond a simulated pandemic,” Nix said in my ear. “Whatever she is attempting to create, you carry a prototype inside you. This place has to be destroyed before—”
He broke off, cocking his head, and a moment later I felt her. The mites jumped alive and sent a jolt of signal into my brain. The force of it made me stumble a little, and I grabbed on to Nix for support.
“Sam, what’s wrong?” Vamp asked. He stepped in to get an arm around me, but I got my footing back and squirmed away. Sillith had tapped into the mites and I could feel her in there, worming into my mind. Her voice whispered from inside my head.
You shouldn’t have come here.
“She’s here,” I said.
A lithe figure dropped into view from somewhere up above, seeming to pour down onto the floor, where she landed on the balls of her feet without a sound.
The hatred she felt bored into my mind, and the sheer intensity of it made me feel physically sick. Acid crept up my throat as she stepped closer, her molten red eyes staring through coronas of blue flame. She’d dropped the masquerade of the combat armor, and appeared as a nude haan female, an exact duplicate of the six in the vats. Her face was severe but beautiful in its haan way, an oversized, flawless mask with a stiff expression, and the two coiled shapes beneath her translucent skull flexed, causing the network of tissue around it to ripple in response. She had a long, slender neck and strong square shoulders, her chest sloping down to a pair of breasts that hung above her rib cage. Inside each I could make out a network of squiggling veins branching from the nipple and ending in a series of shadowy nodes behind them. Something was moving inside her belly, and a smaller, more subtle movement slithered beneath the skin above her crotch.
“You’re too late,” she said.
“Sillith,” Nix said, stepping forward. “Reconsider this.”
I felt another surge of anger and contempt as the smaller brain fluttered beneath the mass of the larger.
“Reconsider?” she asked. She took a few slow steps toward him.
“It’s their world,” he said.
“They had their chance. This planet has already been pushed past the point of sustainability. That wasn’t my doing.”
“It doesn’t have to—”
“Here!” a voice barked from behind us, and I felt a vague skip through the mites, anticipation interrupted by annoyance and then anger as she looked over my shoulder. The pupils in each did a slow revolution, as anger grew into fury.
I turned and saw soldiers streaming in through the doorway, armed with assault rifles. They immediately-dispersed, breaking into formations and taking aim at Sillith as Ligong moved in behind them, carrying a Gauss rifle in one hand. Translucent red beams flickered pencil-thin through the fog, their points clustering over the throbbing mass inside Sillith’s chest.
“Clear!” Ligong snapped back through the doorway, and unhurried footsteps rapped sharply in the sudden silence as Governor Jianguo Hwong came through the doorway.
A low, almost inaudible purr or growl began to emanate from deep in Sillith’s chest as she watched the soldiers part for him. He marched between them, and as he moved past the metal drums, he glanced back and forth at the clones there like he was performing a military inspection.
“Go back with the others,” he said without looking at me. “All three of you. Now.”
His neck was still bruised from where I’d choked him, and the tone of his voice didn’t do anything to suggest he was there to help us, but none of us were about to get between him and Sillith. I followed Vamp and Nix back, past Ligong, whose eyes promised death, until we reached the formation of soldiers and moved behind them.
“Didn’t expect to see me here, did you?” Hwong taunted, facing Sillith. He stood tall, fearless, as he addressed her like one of his lowest grunts. Without the surrogate mites he couldn’t directly experience her intent, but I could, and I felt all of her anger and all of her hatred as it focused on him like a laser.
“Yes,” she said, her voice low and smooth. “I did.”
Hwong drew a heavy rail pistol from his holster and pointed it at the nearest clone’s head. I heard it charge, and then emit a flat boom. There was a brief flash of light as a sizzling hole appeared in the side of the clone’s skull. Fluid began to jet from holes in either side of the vat; then a shock wave thumped under the liquid’s surface as the skull shattered like an eggshell around a murky cloud of black blood and brains.
“If you so much as twitch,” Hwong said, jabbing his index finger at her, “my men will open fire on you and we’ll just see what’s left when the dust settles.”
That actually made her pause. Her eyes moved from Hwong to the soldiers, scanning slowly down the length of the formation. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It became more subservient, and softer. A husky, even sexy quality had crept in, but through our connection I could tell it was a lie. Ligong picked up on it too.
“I have honored my part of the deal,” she said.
“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Hwong countered. “I saw Specialist Shao’s wet drive footage. Whatever you were planning ends right now. Hand over the boy.”
“And then what?”
“My men will destroy him and bury him along with everything else down here under a ton of rubble.”
She hesitated. “Your enemies will eventually—”
“Maybe so, Sillith, but our deal is off. Hand him over.”
A surge of hostility flooded from Sillith, and her posture changed subtly as she took two steps toward him.
“And if I don’t?” she asked. The voice that issued through her voice box had grown dangerous, rising in pitch and taking on a piercing, dissonant tone. Hwong almost took a step back but held his ground.