In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (41 page)

I pumped my threading’s thermal sensor to max,
confirmed the tamph wasn’t already waiting in the shadows, then crept along the
corridor to the first junction. My instinct was to move toward the tamph, to
hunt the hunter, but Vrate’s words sent me down the opposite corridor away from
the vehicle passageway. At the first open pressure door, I felt my way into a
darkened compartment with a cold metal table, bench seats and food dispensers.
After confirming there was only one way into the crew mess, I waited in the
shadows inside the entrance, not daring to look out, relying solely on my listener
to detect approaching footsteps.

Tamph eyesight was superior to human vision, especially
in low light, and was augmented by their biosonar which doubled as sonic vision.
If I stuck my head into the corridor too soon, the amphibian traitor would see
me sonically and I would never know what hit me. I had to hide until he found
his ambush position and was facing away from me, toward the wormhole control
room.

Hearing the tamph approach was complicated by the
shockwaves vibrating through the ship as the
Vigilant
continued to blast
away. With my listener on high gain, every creak in the ship was a clash of
symbols, every blast from the Earth Navy battlecruiser a pounding of drums. Nervous
seconds passed with no sign of the tamph, making me wonder if he’d outsmarted
me, if he’d gone into the siphon chamber and killed Vrate and Izin, leaving me hiding
like a fool in the dark, squandering my last chance to avert a disaster mankind
would never recover from.

Anxiety was driving me to move, then a threaded
warning appeared in my mind:

INTERMITTENT, NON-MECHANICAL AUDIO CONTACT.

Amplify contact
, I thought
, block other
audio.

Silence descended over me as my threading
suppressed every distracting sound except one. It wasn’t footsteps or rustling clothes
but shallow breathing, steady and slow, the way I’d seen Izin breathe when he turned
to stone before firing his sniper rifle. It told me the tamph was close, waiting
for me to show myself.

I leaned toward the open hatch and the sound of faint,
rhythmic breathing, then I spotted a thermal apparition crouched close to the
bulkhead outside. The tamph’s weapon was aimed at the corridor intersection,
perfectly positioned to ambush anyone circling around to the vehicle passage.

With painstaking slowness, I brought my P-50 up,
knowing if the tamph heard me, he would attack with lightning speed. When my
gun was aimed at the back of his head, I hesitated. If Izin couldn’t figure out
how to shut down the wormhole, this tamph traitor was our only hope. He’d been
trained by Inok a’Rtor to operate the Hrane tunneler, and while the Black
Sauria agent would never talk, Izin would know how to break one of his own kind.

I switched my aim to the tamph’s weapon and fired.
The P-50 sang as it magnetically accelerated an armor piercing slug past his
head, through his hand, into the pistol. The energy weapon exploded in the
tamph’s hand, hurling him backwards, past the hatchway. I leapt forward, aiming
my pistol at his head, ready to finish him if he resisted, but he lay on his
back, badly burned with a rasping breath and a right hand missing its fingers.

“Any sudden movements and you’re dead.”

The tamph made no effort to resist, so I pulled
him off the deck by his undamaged arm and half carried, half dragged him back
to the control room. Vrate had crawled on his back to his gun and lay with one
hand on it as phosphorescence glowed brightly across his chest, regenerating
his body at an incredible rate.

“Thought it … killed you,” Vrate wheezed as I
threw the tamph onto the deck.

I aimed my P-50 aimed at the amphibian’s head
while he pressed his finger stumps into his side to reduce the blood flow. “Tamphs
are tough, not invincible,”

Vrate dragged his gun across his body to cover the
prisoner. “Is that what you think it is? … A tamph? … Look again.”

The diminutive amphibian wore a dark, skin tight jumpsuit
with a metallic finish, a black belt covered with thin rectangular attachments
and short black ankle-high boots. A thin metal strip laden with
ultra-miniaturized technology ran from above the biosonar lobe on his forehead
over the top of his bulging head halfway to the base of his long, streamlined
skull.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s not a tamph…” Vrate said.

My prisoner turned toward me with a penetrating
stare that sent a chill down my spine. Even though he was helpless and
crippled, I felt a sudden pang of fear as I realized this creature was unlike
any tamph I’d ever seen.

“It’s an Intruder?”

“Take a good look, human,” Vrate said. “Pray you never
see its like again!”

“How’d you know?”

“I didn’t, until it shot me,” he said, never
taking his eyes off the Intruder. “What didn’t make sense was Matarons using Hrane
technology. It’s too advanced for them. They couldn’t teach humans to use it
any more than I could, not without help. When it shot me, when I saw that
weapon, I knew.”

“He was teaching the Mataron!” Not the other way
around. I looked down at the Intruder whose cold stare told me he understood
our every word. There was no denial, no fear, only a quiet defiance. Before I
could interrogate my prisoner, Izin approached from the consoles on the far
side of the compartment.

“Captain, there’s a–” He stopped suddenly as his
eyes fell upon the blackened amphibian sitting helpless on the deck. The
Intruder turned toward him, although its bulging right eye was so blackened and
shriveled from plasma burns, he must have been half blind.

Vrate nodded toward Izin. “He knows.”

“Izin?” I said, sensing something strange was
happening to my tamph engineer, now transfixed by the diminutive figure at my
feet. “Is this a tamph?”

“No. She’s not … from Earth,” Izin said slowly,
having trouble speaking.

She?

There was a reason female tamphs weren’t ever
allowed off Earth. It wasn’t just because the Forum insisted on it. It was
because they couldn’t be trusted. With one female for every hundred thousand
males, the female’s biological role was command. Their pheromones gave them the
power to dominate the males. They were the queens, the Matriarchs, while the males
were the obedient drones.

“Careful,” Vrate warned. “They’re communicating!”

“Izin!” I said, my finger hovering over my P-50’s
firing surface.

He ignored me, hypnotized by the female Intruder’s
pheromones as she used her biosonar to bombard him with ultrasonic commands.

“Snap out of it!” I yelled, flashing an order to
my threading.

Expand auditory range to tamph ultrasonics.

My head filled with an incomprehensible melody,
all going one way, from the Intruder Matriarch to Izin. He stood helpless
before her, arms by his side listening to a siren song he could not resist. Suddenly
I realized how dangerous she was to him, so dangerous I couldn’t risk keeping her
alive for the Tau Cetins to interrogate. I swung my gun toward her but she kicked
up at my hand, sending my P-50 flying across the deck. Before I knew what was
happening, she jumped to her feet, kicked me in the stomach with more strength
than I would have thought possible considering her wounds and sent me reeling
backwards. Vrate tried lifting his gun, but Izin trod on the barrel, pinning it
to the deck as it discharged. Vrate was too weak to pull his gun free as the
Intruder Matriarch projected her seductive song at Izin, who lifted his
shredder, aiming at nothing. I expected him to turn and shoot her as she ran toward
him, but he remained in a trancelike state.

She snatched the weapon out of his hand, aiming
back as she ran. I rolled away anticipating a shot, but I wasn’t her target. She
fired once, putting a single shredder round into Inok a’Rtor’s head, ensuring
even the Tau Cetins couldn’t extract what he knew, then I scooped my P-50 off
the deck as she darted behind the exotic matter containment chamber. I started after
her while Izin continued to stand on Vrate’s gun, oblivious to what had just
happened.

I’d expected her to head for the wormhole
controls, knowing Izin’s little shredder couldn’t penetrate the siphon
shielding, but instead, she ran to the nearest cryochamber. I thought she was going
to use it for cover, but she leapt up onto it and aimed down through the
transparent surface at the frozen Kesarn.

“No!” I roared as I realized what she was doing.

She fired once, then blood splattered up onto the
inside of the transparent cover. The dark energy siphon nearby began to spark
with flecks of orange and red lightning, slowly at first, then with growing
strength. Now with its Kesarn symbiote dead, the siphon was doomed. Nothing
could stop it cycling out of control, destroying the
Mavia
and
collapsing the wormhole, ensuring Earth was flung from Sol’s habitable zone.

“Why? Why are you helping the Matarons?” I demanded,
aiming my gun at her. “What have we ever done to you?”

The Intruder Matriarch jumped down from the
cryochamber, then touched the muzzle of Izin’s gun to a control surface on her
belt. “It’s not about you,” she replied in a flat, synthesized voice. “It’s
about us!”

She stepped toward the siphon, watching the brilliant
yellow beam blasting down from the flat cylinder at its base into the dish
shaped receptor in the deck. The beam’s color continued to shift toward the red
as the siphon destabilized.

“That’s far enough!” I said, still hoping to
extract a solution from her.

The Intruder Matriarch turned, studying me through
her one good eye, then dropped Izin’s shredder as if in surrender. “Now I know why
the Matarons hate you.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way with us.”

“You serve our enemy,” the Intruder Matriarch said
with chilling finality, then threw herself onto the deck and rolled beneath the
stasis field into the siphon’s energy stream. She was vaporized in a brilliant
white flash, eliminating all trace of her existence. For a moment, I stared in
disbelief at the energy stream, then turned back to the others. Izin was
holding his head, eyes closed, while Vrate was struggling to his feet, using
his gun as a crutch.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “We’re not their
enemy.”

“You are, if they say you are,” Vrate said, staring
darkly at the blood splattered lid on the cryochamber where one of his people
had just been murdered. “Especially now.”

“Why now?”

He turned to me, hunched over in pain. “They’re
coming again, this time, not alone.”

It took a moment for his words to sink in. My eyes
fell on the dead Mataron, slumped on the deck with his brain shredded, then the
pieces came together in a flash of realization. The Intruder Matriarch was gone
and soon a massive dark energy explosion would rend space where we stood,
annihilating the
Mavia
and her secrets, especially one secret the
Intruder Matriarch had taken to her death.

“The Intruders and the Matarons are allies!” I exclaimed,
shocked by the implications.

The Matriarch was here buying Mataron loyalty by
helping the snakeheads destroy mankind, something they couldn’t do by
themselves, not with the Tau Cetins watching. They needed a partner, an ally
with the power to match the might of the Tau Cetins. In return, the Matarons
had betrayed the Alliance. It was how the Intruders had been able to sabotage
the Alliance’s sensor fields in the Minacious Cluster and how they’d known the
location of the Forum Fleet prior to the attack. The five Mataron ships lost in
the battle had been sacrificed to keep the snakehead treachery hidden from the Allies,
and it had worked! Five ships was a small price to pay for our destruction and
for the defeat of the Tau Cetins.

“The Matarons and the Intruders are very
different,” Vrate said. “The only thing they have in common are their enemies
and that makes them natural allies.”

“The Tau Cetins will crush the Matarons when they
find out!”

“They can’t. No proof. The Matriarch saw to that.”

“When the siphon explodes, the wormhole collapse
will create a black hole. That’s proof!”

“Only of human stupidity. The Forum will believe
you used technology you didn’t understand and paid a heavy price for it. No one
will care.”

“Their fear of the Intruders will make them care.”

Vrate coughed blood and phosphorescence, then
said, “The Alliance is weary. Every year, its fleet grows weaker. The Intruders
know this. Last time, they destroyed all in their path, forcing many
civilizations to unite against them. This time will be different. They will have
allies and knowledge of their enemy. They will not give the Tau Cetins reason to
convince other Observer races to fight. This time, the Intruders will win.”

The dark energy siphon was beginning to emit high
frequency sounds as lightning flecks flashed erratically through the
transmission beam, while the other two siphons continued undisturbed.

“What about Earth?”

“It’s too late.”

“Captain,” Izin said, slowly regaining his senses,
“We don’t … have to shut it off.”

Vrate glanced at him confused. “Nothing can stop
the siphon’s destruction now.”

I ran to Izin, holstering my gun, grabbing him by
the shoulders. “How do we stop it?”

He blinked slowly, clearing his mind. “Retract it.”

“Retract what?” I demanded. “What are you talking about?”

He pointed to the consoles on the far wall. “The
singularity guidance system.”

I lifted him off the deck and carried him to the
console. “Tell me what to do!”

“Pull the singularity back into hyperspace … Break
contact with the Solar System.”

“Will that stop the black hole forming?”

“No,” Izin said, “but it will be a one sided wormhole.
Here only, not in the Solar System.”