Enemy Games Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  THE TAKING OF JAYLEIA . . .

  Alarms wailed.

  Jayleia made it to the cockpit as another jolt rocked the little vessel.

  Damen sat strapped in at piloting in the U-shaped cockpit. V’kyrri, at navigation, sat beside him. Weapons panel on V’kyrri’s right, what looked like a communications panel on Damen’s left.

  “Are you all right?” Damen asked, tossing a glance at her.

  “I won’t know that until you return me to the Sen Ekir,” she said, “which you have no intention of doing, have you?”

  The muscles in Damen’s jaw bunched.

  V’kyrri leaned across the cockpit, reached under the communications panel next to her, pulled out a seat and unfolded it.

  “Strap in!” Damen ordered.

  Jayleia gaped at him. “You’re kidnapping me?”

  Berkley Sensation titles by Marcella Burnard

  ENEMY WITHIN

  ENEMY GAMES

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Marcella Burnard.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® SENSATION and the “B” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / May 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burnard, Marcella.

  Enemy games / Marcella Burnard.—Berkley Sensation trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51441-2

  I. Title.

  PS3602.U759E6 2011

  813'.6—dc22

  2010053559

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks:

  To my beloved husband, Keith, whose patience, faith, and support know no bounds.

  To the FF&P members who hang out at the watercooler offering sage advice, strange and wonderful ideas, and good company.

  To Jeffe Kennedy for stepping in on an emergency basis to critique what was broken.

  To my family for rooting for me, for talking up my book at every turn, and for not disowning me over that faraway look I’d get in my eye whenever a story started playing in my head.

  To my longtime friend and cohort, Dr. Kurt “Spuds” Vogel, Lt Col, USAF (ret.) for keeping me rooted if not in the probable then at least in the outer reaches of the vaguely possible.

  To Dawn Calvert, Darcy Carson, Carol Dunford, DeeAnna Galbraith, Melinda Rucker Haynes, and Lisa Wanttaja—a great group of writers, mentors and, best of all, friends.

  To my editor, Leis Pederson, and to my agent, Emmanuelle Alspaugh, for helping me tell a better story.

  To the members of Feline-L whose wide-ranging backgrounds and interests allowed me to ask the most obscure questions and receive cogent answers.

  Last but certainly not least, my sincere thanks to Eratosthenes, Autolycus, Cuillean, and Hatshepsut, my feline snoopervisors, lap warmers, keyboard walkers, and reminders that no matter how large looms the deadline, there’s always time to play.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE communications panel trilled, echoing the call in the confines of the tiny cockpit. Damen entered the unlock code.

  “Kawl Fergus,” he said, answering with the name of his fast, little reconnaissance ship.

  “Change in plans, Major,” his commander’s voice rumbled over the com, rolling around and around the cockpit. “Your mission’s been shot to the lowest level of Hell.”

  Damen’s chest tightened. “Situation, Admiral?”

  “Tagreth Federated accused the director of Intelligence Command of collaborating with the Chekydran,” the man said. “He’s vanished.”

  “Spawn of a Myallki bitch,” Damen gritted. “Zain Durante isn’t a colluder. His cover must have been blown. If there’s an extraction plan for him, sir, I’d like to be a part of it.”

  “He is a colluder, Major. With us. He wasn’t providing tactical information to Her Majesty’s government with the approval of the Tagreth Federated Council. As for an extraction plan? That presumes we know where he is,” his commander replied. “We found out he’d gone underground when the TFC media outlets ran the news bulletin posting the reward for information leading to his arrest.”

  “We’ve lost our chance to take down the network of traitors inside TFC, then. Every mercenary in the lanes will be looking for . . .”

  “Him, his wife, and his daughter,” his commander finished.

  Alarm singed the breath in Damen’s lungs.

  Durante’s daughter. Jayleia. Delicate features. Shining black hair. A shy smile and serious brown eyes.

  They’d met. He’d helped hijack her science ship. Then the Chekydran had forced them into alliance. She’d barely sai
d two words to him, but he couldn’t shake the memory of her gaze on him when she’d believed he wouldn’t notice. He could swear he’d seen admiration in the charmed twist of her faint smile.

  He’d sensed a wall around the beautiful, dark-eyed xenobiologist, as if she feared what he’d see in her if she dropped her guard. He hoped she still had her defenses online.

  The accusation against her father made Jayleia a target for every single one of her father’s enemies.

  His heart thudded into uneasy rhythm.

  “Your orders, sir?” he asked, his tone dead.

  “Divert to TFC space. Your objective is Jayleia Durante. She either has the information we need or she is the fulcrum we’ll require to pry her father out of hiding,” the admiral said.

  “Jayleia is still aboard the Sen Ekir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Location of the Sen Ekir?” Damen asked.

  “The ship is on Chemmoxin, where they are responding to an outbreak,” the admiral replied. “Captain Idylle tells me the disease isn’t airborne, but I expect you to take all reasonable precaution against infection.”

  “This will end her career as far as TFC is concerned, sir,” Damen noted.

  “Captain Ari Idylle here, Major,” a feminine voice interjected. “I suspect your concern for Jay’s loyalties comes a day too late. You’re closest, in the ship best equipped to get Jay out of what could turn into a bloodbath. The traitors have put a price on her capture. Four known mercenaries have mobilized. You and I want Jayleia alive more than we want her to like us. Get there first, Sindrivik.”

  Breath hissed in between his clenched teeth. “Diverting. Top speed.”

  CHAPTER 2

  JAYLEIA checked her sensor boosters, her holo-image generators, and her live traps.

  “Temperature forty-point-three degrees and falling at your location,” Pietre, several kilometers away on board their space science ship Sen Ekir, said.

  “It isn’t falling fast enough,” she replied, panting in the oppressive, dank heat of Chemmoxin’s infamous swamps. She’d given up trying to keep sweat out of her stinging, watering eyes about the same time she’d stopped trying to pluck every last hungry bloodworm from her skin.

  They’d come to Chemmoxin in response to a flesh-necrotizing illness afflicting the humanoid colonists. The Sen Ekir’s crew had traced the infection to the fluffy, arboreal kuorls, which meant observing the creatures and sampling out tissue and blood.

  “Signals read green across the board,” Pietre replied over the open com line. Sympathy mingled with amusement in his voice. “Your last booster install did the trick. We’re recording.”

  “Get to your blind, Jay, and send me a physical scan,” her cousin, Raj, ordered. “You sound squashed.”

  “Imagine,” she retorted, shaking her head. He was right, of course. Most humanoid biology simply hadn’t been designed to work for long periods in this combination of excessive heat and humidity. Add a few parasites sucking blood and things turned dangerous fast as the body struggled to maintain a safe internal temperature.

  Deep in the bowels of the biggest gnarled, moss-draped, and lichen-deformed qwarfoi tree in the stand, a kuorl coughed and then growled.

  Jayleia started. The final trap she’d been setting snapped shut on her hand. “What the Three Hells was that?” she breathed. “Temp reading?”

  “Thirty-nine-point-eight.”

  “Report,” their boss, Dr. Linnaeus Idylle, demanded.

  Fumbling to free her scraped-up hand from the trap’s force fields, she said, “I heard something. Or thought I did.”

  “Confirm Pietre’s temperature reading,” he said.

  The trap let go. She grabbed her handheld and backed a step away from the moss-shrouded branch holding the kuorl trap.

  “Thirty-nine-point-seven,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Return to your blind,” Dr. Idylle suggested. “Let’s get that physical scan. You’ve been out there in miserable conditions for several hours.”

  Miserable conditions? He didn’t know the half of it. She was drenched with sweat, smeared with stinking mud, kuorl scat, lichen, moss, and assorted creepy, crawly life-forms she doubted anyone had identified, much less quantified the risks of. Jayleia sighed. “My last trap . . .”

  “Leave it,” Dr. Idylle interrupted. “We’ll have plenty of kuorls to study without it.”

  “You’re okay, Jay,” Pietre said. “Confirm thirty-nine-point-seven, your location. The kuorls will hibernate until the temperature hits thirty-eight. Even then, you’ll have a half an hour or more . . .”

  She wouldn’t.

  Once again, in the primary nest tree, something stirred. She gasped, tabbed her handheld to read bio-signs, and backpedaled. The screen showed knots of bright heat signatures all around her indicative of hibernating kuorls.

  Except that the knots were shifting. Moving. Breaking apart. She was in the center of a nest site filled with newly awakened, hungry, cranky, potentially infected kuorls who shouldn’t have stirred for another hour at least.

  “They’re waking,” she said.

  “What? They can’t be!” Pietre protested. “It’s too hot!”

  “If kuorls can run a fever, would it impact their perception of atmospheric temperatures and thus their hibernation cycle?” she asked, staggering away.

  “Aren’t circadian rhythms typically independent of internal temperature?” Raj asked.

  “No speculation,” Dr. Idylle snapped. “We have evidence that these kuorls are either infected or are carriers for the disease impacting the colonists. I want you out of there, Jayleia. Now.”

  “Acknowledged,” she replied, her heart laboring and her lungs burning as she splashed through shallow, slimy, green water to the observation blind Pietre had helped her build. “Entering the blind. Door closed and locked. I am secure.”

  Unless she counted the new crop of bloodworms crawling up her ankles looking for a relatively clean spot to bite.

  “Medical scan, if you please,” her boss prompted. “Pietre . . .”

  Jay glanced out the leaf-shaded window of her makeshift blind and yelped. “Are we recording? Here they come.”

  “Got it!” Pietre answered. “Would you look at that? I’ll be damned. Their scout’s checking the lay of the land. Unbelievable. Temperature thirty-nine-point-seven and holding.”

  Her blind allowed her to look into the heart of the nest site. The traps were visible where she’d scraped dark lichens from lighter bark so as to firmly seat the equipment. Condensation dotted the window, reducing visibility slightly, but she could still see the opening to the nest through the distortion and the silhouette of the sentry kuorl.

  She squinted. There. Movement in the cavity of the largest tree caught her eye. The scout had plucked one of the ubiquitous beetles from the tree bark and stuffed it in his mouth for a truly repulsive breakfast. The rest of the colony was stirring. It would take another half hour for them to emerge.

  The kuorls didn’t emerge. They erupted, screaming. And began ripping one another to shreds.

  Jayleia gaped in horror.

  The damned rodents were bad-tempered at the best of times, but these creatures were a roiling mass of flashing claws and bloody teeth. Their soft, ticked, gray pelts were slashed and smeared with gore. Blood spattered the moss- and lichen-encrusted branches. They shrieked and growled in what sounded like rage. She heard her crewmates swearing above the din.

  As if the kuorls sensed her equipment didn’t belong, they attacked the traps. One kuorl got caught. It would be restrained harmlessly within the confines of the force and containment fields of the device. Anesthesia dosed for the animal’s mass would be delivered automatically and the kuorl would never know what had happened. It would go to sleep, she’d take blood and tissue samples, deliver a wake-up drug, and then release the kuorl none the wiser.

  Except that it wasn’t working. The trap bucked. Either the anesthesia delivery trigger had broken or the drug was hav
ing no effect.

  The gory mass of enraged kuorls froze for a split second, staring at the moving trap.

  Jayleia reeled, deafened in the abrupt quiet.

  Then their cries redoubled. The rodents turned on the occupied trap in a seething, self-destructing riot. She clamped a hand over her mouth when the first twitching corpse dropped to the ground. They couldn’t have gotten through metal and force fields to the trapped animal. Could they?

  That’s when she noticed that the ravaged, muddy kuorl on the ground wasn’t a corpse. The mangled creature dragged itself back to the tree and up the trunk, then launched from the lowest branch straight at her.

  She staggered back against her tiny worktable and croaked. “Twelve Gods, they’re attacking the blind!”

  It hit the window with a damp-sounding thunk, leaving a smear of rotting flesh and fresh blood in its wake as it slid into the brush below.

  “Infection status verified,” she choked. “They’re necrotic.”

  “Teleport!” Dr. Idylle bellowed. “Now!”

  “We’re not online!” Pietre cried.

  The rest of the kuorls, lathered, lost in bloodlust, flung their bodies, bloodied fangs and claws first, at Jayleia’s hideaway.

  She flinched, sucking in a sobbing breath at each impact.

  The door rattled. Claws scraped and scrabbled at the metal. The scent of putrid, decaying flesh seeped into the blind.

  They uttered none of the short, high-pitched barks she’d come to associate with the once-fluffy arboreal omnivores. The creatures wheezed and moaned.

  The noise of kuorls trying to peel away her alloy shell jabbed icy terror through her bones.

  A pinprick of daylight shone in one corner.

  “They’re breaking through,” she said, sounding as if she hadn’t realized these animals would tear her to shreds once they’d ripped through the structure.

  The door creaked and bowed.