Zero's Heart (Lathar Mercenaries: Warborne Book 1) Read online

  Beauty blinked, looking up. “You take candy from babies?”

  She sighed. Lathar were so literal at times.

  “They don’t. It’s just a saying. Means we had no problems,” Zero said before she could and then took the message strip from her fingers.

  She was about to complain, reaching to take it back, when he said, “But I do want to check this before you play it. Just in case…”

  Huh. That made sense. She’d already put him in danger once and look what had happened. SO13 had chased them through an asteroid belt. She didn’t want to put the rest of the Warborne in danger. That would be a terrible way to pay them back for everything they’d done for her.

  “Okay. We’ll put it down to homicidal humans—”

  “Hey!” Sparky protested. “I resemble that remark!”

  T’Raal sighed, ignoring him as he continued talking. “—we’ll put it down to homicidal locals. Put Praxis-Four down on the no-go list… and would someone please get that bloody shuttle back up from the surface! I don’t want to leave anything for the locals to use to kill someone else.”

  The group went their separate ways down the corridors, Zero and Eris heading, not for his quarters as she expected, but to the lower deck. They passed the cargo bay and another door. The sound of raised voices emanated from inside, both male and female. Zero grunted.

  “Engine core. That’ll be Fin and Red. They have a thing not-thing going,” he said as they walked past. “They argue a lot.”

  “Ah… yeah, I thought that might be the case. Where are we going?”

  “Computer core.”

  He stopped by a door just as it opened and motioned her to go ahead of him. She blinked as she stepped into the room, having to duck her head. With a low ceiling and metal walls, it was less of a computer core and more a computer closet. A single console was set into the wall over a metal desk bolted to the wall. One seat swung out from the wall and folded down. It was the sparsest, most utilitarian space and she turned. Yeah, a cleaning cabinet occupied the area behind the door. All in all, she’d seen more impressive coffee machines.

  “This is it?” She motioned to the console on the wall. “I assumed it would be bigger.”

  He raised an eyebrow and then smiled.

  “That...” he motioned to the screen, “is just the access point. Technically… all this is the core.” He waved his hands around them. “We’re sitting in the middle of it.”

  She blinked and put her hand out to place it against the wall. A soft hum prickled against her palm, working its way up her arm like a gentle welcome.

  “Say hello to the Sprite.” Zero smiled. “She’s a Tlerian-Seven enhanced computer core. Capable of running an imperial destroyer or housing a miisan-level AI. We… err liberated her from a storage facility deep in the heart of the empire. They weren’t using her, and that’s just criminal for a beauty like this.”

  He stroked the wall soothingly as he spoke. Eris’s eyes widened as the hum under her palm changed, becoming more like a contented purr.

  “It knows you’re here?” It had to. There was no other reason for the reaction.

  Zero’s lips quirked and he tapped his temple with a metal finger. “Direct uplink. One of the perks of my non-organic nature. Okay… let’s take a look at this message of yours. Shall we?”

  She nodded, sitting down as the big cyborg held the seat out for her. “I doubt it’s anything important. He... I…”

  She sighed. “My brother and I don’t get along well. I don’t know why he’s contacted me. Probably just to be an asshole and shout at me.”

  The console flared to life in front of her although this time instead of Latharian script, code was filling the screen. Okay, so the UI wasn’t as friendly down here. Good thing she had Zero with her. She wouldn’t have been able to make heads nor tails of it otherwise.

  “That’s what worries me. Not him shouting at you. Although, if he did and he wasn’t your brother, I’d be forced to rip him a new asshole.” He slid her a sideways look as he fed the message strip into a data port just under the screen. “That is… unless you want me to?”

  She snorted. “I’ve been dealing with my brother since we were in the womb. If there are any new assholes to be ripped, I’m more than capable of doing it myself, but thank you for the offer.”

  “Okay. Just checking. Offer’s there anyhow.”

  She nodded, watching what he was doing with fascination. What she assumed was the message strip appeared on screen, in wireframe format. Zero moved his hands and the model moved around, spinning so they could look at it from every angle.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have it set up in a virtual container within the computer core.”

  His voice was distracted, with that mechanical inflection that told her his attention was somewhere else. It was the smallest change, so small she doubted many people would pick it up, but… yeah, for some reason she was hypersensitive about anything to do with the big cyborg.

  “It’s completely self-contained. No way out of the container, and no way off the ship.”

  “Okay…”

  “Which means if opening the message does something it shouldn’t—like ping our location, or worse, try and upload an overload sequence to our engine core—we’ll see it within the container.”

  Ah. That made sense. “And it won’t be able to actually do those things? It’ll just think it has?”

  “Bingo.” He shot a finger gun at her. “And that will mean it’s not a message at all, but a trap. Which means we’ll really need to go have a chat with your brother, and I am calling dibs on new asshole ripping.”

  She chuckled. “If that happens, he’s all yours. When do we find out?”

  “Now.”

  Zero moved his hands, and the diagram of the message strip glowed on the screen. It turned around and up and over and then moved to the side, a small screen emerging like a speech bubble. The logo of the comms-service rotated slowly.

  “Okay. No pings, no viruses.” He frowned. “There’s something called a ‘read receipt’ that wants to send a message back to the stream server?”

  “Yeah, that’s normal. Ignore it.” So her brother really had sent her a message. She wondered what he wanted. “How do I play the message?”

  “Just tap the screen. You can play it right there in the container just the same as normal.”

  Reaching out, she tapped the screen and opened the message. The view changed, the logo dissolving to be replaced by her brother’s face.

  She was used to seeing a smug, arrogant expression on Eric’s face but instead, he looked… scared? His gaze darted around him as he spoke, the screen shaking as though he was walking.

  “Eris… I don’t know if this will get to you,” he said, slightly out of breath. That was normal. Eric had never been one for exercising anything other than his brain.

  “I don’t know who else to turn to. There’s… shit, hold on…” He turned the screen, and they had a brief view of a corridor wall and a door. Then they were plunged into darkness. The sounds of a muffled conversation reached them and then heavy footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing.

  “Fuck... that was close.” Eric’s face reappeared on screen, pinched and worried. He looked exhausted like he hadn’t slept properly in weeks. The room was dark around him but she could make enough out to recognize a lab.

  “Eris, this project I’m on… It’s not what they said it was. We made a breakthrough and… and… shit. They have a person here, Eris. An alien, I think anyway. She’s…” He swallowed, looking like he was about to throw up. “They’re experimenting on her. I have to help her. Do something, but people who ask questions here disappear and I think they’re onto me.”

  He stopped talking for a second, looking up toward where the door must be. “Shit. They’re coming. Please, Eris, you have to help. You have to stop them. I’ve sent you an encrypted data-pack buried in this message… enough evidence to bury these assholes fo
r good.”

  The screen flickered as a sequence of numbers overlaid across Eric’s face for a second.

  “I gotta go. I’m gonna try and get out of this place and go underground. If I don’t make it…” His expression altered, self-recrimination in his eyes. “I’m sorry for being a shit brother and an even shittier twin. I should have been there for you. I love you. Okay?”

  She sat in stunned silence as the screen went blank, eyes wide as she stared at the screen. The revolving logo returned but she didn’t see it. Then her chin lifted.

  Never mind about the attempt on her life, her brother was in trouble.

  And nothing in creation would stop her from helping him.

  14

  “Yes… Humans are pricks, what do you think I’ve been telling you?” Sparky demanded, his arms folded across his chest as he glared around the briefing room.

  It was actually the back part of the Sprite’s bridge, behind the command and station console. The space allowed just enough room for them all around the holo-table if they didn’t mind getting cozy.

  “Yeah, well… we didn’t think you meant actual pricks,” T’Raal muttered in self-defense, rubbing at the back of his neck. He still wore a stunned expression after Zero had shown them the data Eric had sent over. Proof of a secret government project, experimenting on an unknown woman.

  An unknown alien woman.

  “Nope. We are, in fact, actual pricks.” Sparky barked a hard laugh. “We’ve been killing each other for thousands of years before we decided strapping ourselves to rockets to go look at the stars was a good idea. And then we just brought all that shittiness with us. How else do you explain that lot on Praxis? Or places like Mirax? If you ask me, the first thing some of us were going to do when we saw an alien was take it apart to see how it worked.”

  Eris folded her arms, not arguing with Sparky as the two humans looked around the stunned faces of the Warborne. She had nothing to add. Humans as a species were pretty shitty. Usually to each other since the rest of the galaxy seemed to have bigger balls or guns.

  “Yeah, but we’re not any better. Are we?” Beauty commented. “Look at the oonat. We use them as servants or species like the Ovverta or the Seratovians.”

  Those were names Eris wasn’t familiar with, but the rest of the group reacted with outrage.

  “The Ovverta were barbarians!”

  “Deserved everything they got!”

  “The Seratovians? You’ll start talking about the human’s Easter hippo next.”

  “Bunny,” she corrected quietly, but it went unheard as everyone looked at Beauty.

  He looked back, his arms folded over his chest. As tall as the other Warborne, he was more slender in build, but he had a dangerous edge around him that warned against underestimating him.

  His pale blue eyes held a look she’d seen before, on soldiers coming back from war and people who’d survived disasters. The look said he’d seen and done terrible things to survive. She suppressed a shiver. She would never want to cross this man, not unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.

  “Regardless, the fact stands. This...” He jabbed long fingers at the tabletop to emphasize his point. “Is no worse than shit the Lathar have done. Just take people like Red, for example. It’s not her fault her mother was raped by a clutch of Krynassis. Now was it? And did her family support her through it? No, they expected her to get rid of Red when she was born and forget it ever happened. Sorry, Red.”

  Eris’s eyes widened. Shit. She’d had no idea of the woman’s history, but that was…

  “Crap. Doll, I’m sorry that happened to you.” Sparky took the words out of her mouth, his expression unusually serious as he looked over at the Amazonian alien.

  “Don’t be.” Red’s reply was brusque and no-nonsense. “And not all Lathar are dicks. Just that group of assholes. Fucking clans, it’s all about their name and bloodlines. My mom… was made of stronger stuff. She taught me everything I know.”

  T’Raal reached out, covering her hand on the side of the tabletop. “She was an amazing woman, Red. Truly missed.”

  There was definitely history there, but unlike with Fin, Red’s relationship with T’Raal seemed more familial in nature.

  “So… now we’ve established we’re all as shitty as each other,” Beauty pressed on, rubbing at the stubble on his jaw. “What are we going to do about this group of assholes and the woman they’re experimenting on. Do we know what species she is, or what condition she’s in?”

  “Nope. This is all we have from Dr. Archer.”

  Zero flicked up the data-stream again. It was mostly reports and analysis from Eric’s work. She didn’t understand most of it. Eric had always been the more cerebral of the two of them. Still, from his spidery notes dotted throughout the data she followed his suspicions about the data source from idle musings through to full-on panic.

  “It appears his project is a cover for another one, the Chimera Project. They’ve been feeding information to several different research projects, but Eric couldn’t get information on all of them. Just enough to paint a very unpleasant picture. It looks like they are experimenting on other species to apply genetic advantages to their own DNA.”

  Red frowned. “That’s nothing new. The Lathar have been doing that for countless generations.” She nodded toward Fin. “Adaptations like the Navarr have, or stronger bones like Skinny’s for heavy-gravity planets. If gossip is right and humanity are a version of Lathar, their DNA is easily alterable. They don’t need to experiment on other species for that, just themselves.”

  Eris sighed and pushed her bangs back off her face. “Yeah… about that. We’ve got a history of doing that as well.”

  “Savages,” Beauty shook his head. “Well, there’s nothing for it. Whoever this female is, we need to go find her… then nuke this place flat as a warning to these assholes not to do it again.”

  “Shouldn’t we inform the Earth government?” Fin broke in.

  Everyone turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. He lifted his hands in surrender. “Hey, just playing devil’s advocate here. Perhaps we should keep them in the loop, that’s all.”

  “We’re a Latharian crew operating behind enemy lines in an area of space under the emperor’s personal protection,” T’Raal growled. “When would you like your execution scheduled...morning or evening? Because that’s what’s going to happen the instant anyone finds out we’ve been here.”

  Fin shrugged. “Yeah… point taken. Probably best to do this on the down-low.”

  “If that’s the case...” Eris leaned in and altered the holomap in front of them. Turning it on its axis, she highlighted a couple of trade routes. “We can take the Icharus route. When we hit this tri-sun system here, sensors from any other system are compromised. Basically, we can drop off the grid and reappear…” She flipped the map again. “Here. Practically on the doorstep of the moon this lab is supposed to be on. Hopefully, Eric is there and we can nab him at the same time.”

  T’Raal nodded. “It’s further into Terran space than we’ve ever been, so we’ll take your word for it. You and Sparky are familiar with these systems?” He looked up at them.

  They both nodded.

  “Shipped out of Helios here a few times.” She pointed to another system nearby. “Purely military base.”

  “Yeah, I went through Helios station a time or two,” Sparky admitted begrudgingly. “Before they shoved me into Mirax.”

  “Okay, so yeah. This should be a walk in the park. Looks like a small moon base, mostly scientific staff,” she continued, pulling up the plans Eric had included. “Minimal resistance. We should be in and out without too much trouble.”

  “Perfect. Skinny, plot us a course,” T’Raal ordered. “We’ll reconvene an hour out and go over the final battle plan. Until then, get some rack time.”

  He looked up. “That means fuck off out my sight, you ‘orrible lot.”

  There was laughter as the group aroun
d the table split up and went their separate ways. But, Zero was a little quiet as they left, pausing her with a big hand on her arm as soon as they were off the bridge.

  “I don’t want you on the battle team,” he said abruptly, his face hard and expressionless.

  “What? Don’t be daft,” she laughed, expecting him to be joking. But his expression didn’t change.

  “We’re going into an unknown location with dubious intelligence. You’re already on SO13’s watchlist,” he insisted, still holding her arm. “What if they’ve used your brother to draw you out?”

  She yanked her arm free. “What? By making up stories about experimentation on aliens? From a brother it’s known I don’t get along with? In case you hadn’t realized, Zero, I’m not exactly the white sheep in my family.”

  His brows snapped together. “Yeah, well. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense. And you were injured. You could get hurt again.”

  The anger she’d been doing such a good job of keeping under wraps flared, burning the walls she’d kept it contained behind to ashes in the blink of an eye.

  “No. It doesn’t make sense. You know what else doesn’t make sense? Keeping one of the two people who actually have a fucking clue how human security forces work off the team. Yeah, you Warborne are good, but I served for years. I’m not some delicate little flower you need to protect. I’m more than capable of looking after myself… a fact I thought I’d already proven!”

  “Yeah, and in doing so you almost crippled yourself!” he bellowed, the anger in his eyes matching hers. “I will not allow you to put yourself in danger again.”

  Her eyebrows almost disappeared into her hair. “You? You won’t allow it? Tell me, when did what I do become your decision? When we fucked? Sorry, sunshine, but me letting you shove your cock inside me, good as it was, does not mean I cede all life decisions and control to you. Ever. Now, if you’ll get out of my way, I need to speak to Allen about this battle plan.”

  Shaking with pent up rage, she shoved past him and marched away up the corridor before she could do something she regretted.