38. Chapter 18
Chapter 18
Zoric pulled out of Angela's mind to see a very angry lizardwoman staring at him.
"Thank you," he started, hoping she could hear him over the noise of the plane.
"I hate you," she told him. "Not only was that rude, you were so fucking lucky you did it, that I can't even be mad at you for it. Though I really, really want to."
"I didn't intend to-"
"Shut. Up." Ae-cha said. Her eyes flashed with anger, hurt, and a little bit of fear. Whatever she'd seen while she was reading the metaphorical snakes entrails had shaken her.
Zoric nodded, and put his arms more securely around Angela. It was awkward in the harnesses but he couldn't bring himself to break contact with her. More than the ache of unfinished business, the attack in the deepest part of her mind, while she was at her most vulnerable had shaken him.
"It was a new intruder," she told him. "Though it has several signature marks from some of the others. It's not the same person who made the death triggers but they learned from the same person. And neither of them match the old ones."
"Old triggers?" Zoric asked.
"Did you not catch the ones in her memory? She couldn't be seen by a doctor until her Uncle got there. Whoever, whatever, he is, he created the first triggers in her brain. I think he was doing it to try and keep her safe but I have no idea what he was protecting her from."
"From discovery, I'd assume," he said.
"Discovery by whom?" she asked. "There's no way to know without asking him. And I get the feeling he's harder to find for anybody who isn't family."
Zoric thought about it and nodded. "What do you want to do?"
"We need to get as many of the triggers out of her as we can. That's going to require being a little less delicate than we've been."
"No," he said immediately. "Yes, I agree that we need to make removing the triggers a priority, but no, we can't be less delicate than we've been."
"Zoric, I understand she-"
"No, you don't," he interrupted. "You think you do, but your people have been torturing my people's mates for centuries to remove them from us. You've treated the Bond like a coercion to the point that I don't think any of your people have actually formed one in those same centuries. I don't know if the determination to remove them came from jealousy that you stopped having them or if the ability to stop having them came from the torture and, quite frankly, I don't care."
"You abducted them," Ae-cha hissed.
"And how else were we supposed to court them?" Zoric demanded. "When we look like this? When your people have hunted us with the humans, trying to destroy us while all we've done is try to keep our families safe from you and the monster we were cursed to protect."
"Contain," Ae-cha said quietly.
"What?" Zoric demanded.
"I've been reading through some of the records Cooper shared and found a mention of the monster your people were serving. A unit of Elite Guards were sent to capture him and bring him back to the capital for trial and execution. The last message received from the guards was that they had captured him and were responding to a distress signal."
Zoric received the information like a body blow.
"What were his crimes?" Zoric asked.
"Genetic experimentation that resulted in a sullying of the Dragor bloodlines. He was one of a dozen conspirators and the first one to be captured."
"What happened to the rest?"
"I don't know," Ae-cha said, softly. "There's no mentions beyond the fact that they were wanted for the same crimes. It's a fairly minor mention and the only reason I found yours is that it was in a list of units that had gone missing."
His heart hurt. His life, his people's lives, had been built on a lie. Somewhere in the distant past, there had been a horrible accident, and a monster that was supposed to be executed had ended up controlling the soldiers who had been sent to bring him to justice.
And not just them, all of their descendants on an alien planet, where they were forced to live in fear and hiding. He didn't know how Ushu had managed it but he was certain the ancient Dragor had manipulated the situation to his advantage at the first opportunity.
He had no idea when Ushu's ambitions had changed from experimentation to extending his own life but it made certain rumors and stories make more sense. It also explained his constant interest in the human women that the Chelion took as Mates. And their children.
The experiments on the children were the worst.
"Why did you tell me this now?" he asked.
"Because something, somewhere, went horribly wrong and I think your Mate may be part of fixing it," Ae-cha told him.
"How?" Zoric asked. "If her Uncle is like Ushu-"
"I don't think he is," she said. "I've been analyzing the memory and it doesn't feel like he's Dragor."
"What else could he be?"
She shook her head. "I don't know but I think it's important that we find out."
Zoric nodded. "I'm still not going to let you hurt Angela."
"I don't want to hurt her," Ae-cha told him. "I want to help her."
His gut told him she was telling the truth but their long history meant he couldn't trust her easily. She wanted an acknowledgement, some indication that he would help her. Instead, he asked something that had been bothering him for a while.
"Have you discovered what you’re a Remnant of?" he asked. "In all those records, have they talked about your people?"
"We've always been the Remnant of the Court of the Jade Princess," she told him. "We don't need new records to know that."
"I just thought you'd have more insight into why you're the Remnant of the Court of the Jade Princess, that's all. Ushu was fleeing something for the Elite to capture him, then land here. What was the Princess fleeing? How much of what we know is just our version of the story?"
Ae-cha looked uncomfortable. She hadn't enjoyed meeting Cooper or his human Mate. She certainly hadn't appreciated having someone from off the planet 'find' an ancient artifact that put him in the direct lineage of the Jade Princess.
Neither of them liked that their feuds on this planet may have been manufactured centuries ago on a distant planet as part of political games that had never mattered to them. Games that seemed to be continuing and reaching their intrusive tentacles back out to a planet that they'd never realized existed.
"If we find anything that might change what we know about our history, I suppose it will be of interest to both our peoples. I'll be sure to share it."
With that, she stood up and returned to her seat. Zoric turned to watch her go, only to catch movement from Dr. Torres. Dr. Phillips was reading a book she'd borrowed from one of the soldiers on board; apparently, they had a stash they traded around to get through the long hours between missions. Dr. Torres was laying still, like he'd settled down to sleep the way Angela had, but the movement of his eyes behind his lids gave him away.
With all the noise from the plane, he shouldn't have been able to hear Zoric and Ae-cha talking. They'd spoken so low, that they'd had to strain to hear each other, much less anybody else. Still, Zoric couldn't shake the feeling that he'd been eavesdropping. To what purpose, he didn't know, but the strangely scentless doctor made his hackles rise.
Zoric adjusted his hold on Angela and tried to get comfortable. He was tempted to try and sleep but it didn't feel safe for him to leave Angela unguarded. Instead, he studied what he could see from his seat.
The civilians who had boarded the plane after them were asleep in the same pose Angela had assumed and Zoric decided they had to be former military of some sort. They certainly weren't groomed to what he assumed were a military standard, even if their posture proclaimed they should be.
Colonel Schuh was talking to some of the soldiers that had been helping them board and it looked like a casual conversation. Zoric was learning more about human body language and thought he could see the soldiers relax around the Colonel as the conversation went on. He couldn't hear what they were saying but it didn't seem to be a topic that he had to worry about.
Ae-cha was meditating and he had the feeling he could reach out and talk to her the way he had with his men when he was home. The almost subconscious buzz of a mind open to receiving conversation came from her direction and he was tempted to take the unspoken invitation and continue their conversation. Or maybe start a new one on a different topic. But he didn't. He wasn't sure if she knew she was issuing an invitation or if that was just how her people processed while they meditated.
Dr. Phillips looked like she was engrossed in her book but her thoughts were loud enough that he could tell she wasn't. Instead, she was blaming herself for becoming infected with the snake-thoughts that had pushed her to be less than professional. They'd never pushed her to do anything she hadn't already wanted to do but she usually held herself together better than that.
Zoric wondered if he should tell her she was projecting. Or that it wasn't her fault that she'd been targeted by whoever was infecting people with the brain snake thoughts. And that they actually appeared as snakes in the subconscious.
He didn't, though. He suspected she wouldn't want to hear that he could tell what she was thinking about.
Instead, he let his attention drift to Dr. Torres again. The neurologist was pretending to sleep in Zoric's blind spot. His presence almost unnoticeable except for the strange lack of odor and the low buzz of a thinking brain. Dr. Torres wasn't projecting his thoughts the way Dr. Phillips was. In fact, if Zoric didn't know better, he'd assume Dr. Torres was deliberately shielding his thoughts.
Most humans didn't know how to shield their thoughts like that, though some of them did it naturally. They tended to be people who could hyper focus on a specific subject for years at a time, and who were occasionally considered a little odd. Which, he supposed, described Dr. Torres.
The metallic chamber of the cargo plane was a symphony of mechanical vibrations and sounds. The deep bass rumble of engines resonated through the frame, while the high-pitched whine of hydraulics created an ever-present counterpoint. Each shift in altitude brought a new chorus of creaks and groans from the metal structure. Cold air blasted from the vents overhead, creating pockets of chill that contrasted sharply with the heat radiating from the walls where the sun had been beating on them.
Zoric adjusted his hold on Angela, her steady breathing and warmth against him a comfort in the industrial environment. Through their Bond, he could feel the peaceful rhythm of her dreams, occasionally punctuated by small muscle twitches. Her presence felt like sunlight warming his scales, even as the cargo bay's temperature fluctuated around them.
Closing his eyes to meditate, Zoric let his senses expand outward. The metallic tang in the air separated into distinct notes - the sharp bite of fresh oil, the musty undertone of old grease, the ozone smell of active electronics. Different parts of the aircraft created unique vibration patterns that he could feel through his scales - the steady thrum of engines, the subtle shake of loose panels, the rhythmic pulse of various pumps and motors.
A slow tendril of thought oozed past his subconscious and Zoric reached out to grab it, but it slipped away like smoke through his fingers. The residue it left behind felt wrong - not physically sticky, but a psychic taint that clung to his awareness like oil on water. It left an almost-taste in the back of his throat, acrid and artificial.
The civilians who had boarded last sat unnaturally still, but their scents told a different story. Beneath their casual clothes lingered traces of gun oil and old sweat, the kind that came from long missions rather than civilian work. Even in sleep, their breathing followed the measured patterns of military training, their muscles maintaining a ready tension that civilians rarely achieved.
Dr. Torres remained the most unsettling presence. The space around him felt wrong - not just lacking scent, but actively void of it, as though something was deliberately erasing his presence. Sound seemed to bend around him, and the air currents in the cargo hold moved strangely in his vicinity, as if avoiding him.
Zoric watched them all for the remainder of the flight, his scales tingling with awareness of every subtle shift in the environment. The attempted intrusion into his thoughts had left him on edge, and he wasn't about to let his guard down again - not with Angela sleeping so vulnerably beside him.
It had to have come from someone on the plane. One of the civilians, maybe? They'd boarded with no explanation or introduction. Could they have been following Angela and talked their way onto the transport? They hadn't moved since they'd dropped off to sleep but that didn't mean they weren't capable of the same kind of subterfuge Dr. Torres was trying.
Zoric watched them for the rest of the flight, trying to track down the one responsible for the attempted intrusion in his thoughts.