“I know. You always get justice for the . . . victims.” Her bruised eyes slipped closed.
“Dona!” Stiffening in alarm, Alerio ordered another scan.
She has a concussion, his neurocomp reported. There is swelling in a bruised area of her cerebral cortex that must be addressed before it becomes serious. Fortunately, her neural computer is compensating, and her other injuries are not life-threatening. She will heal quickly once in regeneration.
Alerio sighed in relief and sat back on his heels, studying Astryr’s battered face. Like most Enforcers—and the Warlord himself—she was a cyborg. A network of biocrystal grew through her brain like a second nervous system, feeding her brain sensor data even as it gave her control of most bodily functions. A lacy sensor network lay beneath her skin, designed to detect everything from the DNA of a murder victim to the temporal warp fields produced by T-suits during a Jump.
The tech didn’t stop there. Nanotech filaments reinforced her bones and strengthened her muscles, making her far stronger than any ordinary human, male or female. Yet even given all that, Dona was no match for a battleborg like Ivar Terje. His implants were even more extensive, and his muscles were reinforced with nanofibers three times as thick as hers, giving him far greater strength. She’d known that, yet she’d still gone after Terje, determined to save a dying woman even if it meant her own life.
“Chogan!” he bellowed.
“Gods, Alerio, I’m here already.” Dr. Sakari Chogan stalked into the room, trailed by a seven-foot regeneration tube that wafted like a leaf on a streaming blue anti-grav field. The doctor looked pale and grim despite her ethereal good looks, and she’d gathered her iridescent green hair into an untidy topknot that looked as if she’d been dragging her hands through it. As usual during temporal missions, she wore a bright red T-suit marked with a prominent white M for “Medical.” To most opposing forces, no matter how brutal, that would have made her a noncombatant.
The Xerans had proven time and again that they didn’t give a damn whether medical personnel were off-limits or not. If they’d gotten their hands on the doctor, they’d have shown her no more mercy than they had Lolai Hardin. Yet that hadn’t stopped Chogan from doing her best to save the injured and obtain justice for the dead.
“How’s Riane?” Alerio rose to help the doctor with the regenerator.
“Better. Going to be in regen awhile, though.”
When they had it positioned to her satisfaction, the doctor flicked her fingers over a series of controls. The device obediently lowered to engulf the injured Enforcer. Seconds later, a pink healing mist flooded the tube, obscuring Dona’s unconscious face.
Chogan leaned over the huge device, her hands sweeping through its control field in graceful arcs that triggered a series of medical scans. Within seconds, the results flashed into view, scrolling over the three-dimensional schematic of Dona’s body. Heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, cerebral activity, others Dyami didn’t recognize. Some readings appeared in shades of healthy green, but others pulsed a warning crimson.
“Looks like the botfucker banged her brain around pretty hard,” Chogan told Alerio, a frown forming between her swooping green brows as she studied the readouts. “I never did like that bastard. There was just something so bloody mean about him. He hurt people and enjoyed it. Including Dona, lover or not.”
“Yeah, he’s a bastard.” Brooding, Alerio gazed through the tube’s transparent lid, studying Dona’s unconscious face. Her battered features were already healing, bruises fading, cuts vanishing under a tide of pink, healthy skin.
Alerio felt knotted muscles begin to relax between his shoulders. “Terje needs a fatal ass-kicking,” he told the doctor absently as he braced his palms on the regenerator’s lid and stared into Dona’s sleeping face. Her closed eyelashes looked incredibly thick and dark as they fanned over her cheeks. “Too bad he got away before I could give it to him.”
Chogan sighed. “At least now we know what lies under that slick smile. That’s preferable to being blindsided.”
None of them had known Terje was a hornhead double agent until the Enforcer had damn near strangled Jessica Kelly to death. The pretty redhead’s only crime had been her choice of roommate, a woman named Charlotte Holt, who turned out to be Xeran herself. Charlotte had managed to piss off the Xerans’ so-called “god,” the Victor, by trying to protect an alien race he wanted dead. The Victor had apparently decided to have her killed, along with anyone she might have talked to. Including Jessica.
So what the hell did Holt know that the Victor wanted squashed?
Then there were Holt’s alien friends, the Sela. Big-eyed, six-legged, cuddly little creatures—with one fuck of a lot of power. The Victor considered them abominations, and he intended to exterminate every damned one of them. Now the Xeran “god” had apparently decided to expand his hit list to include every temporal tourist he could get his hands on, along with Alerio and his Enforcers.
Question is, how the hell do I stop him?
Minutes later, Dr. Chogan, Lolai Hardin’s body tube, and the regenerator containing Dona made the Jump back to the Outpost infirmary in the usual showy explosion of light and sound. With them safely away, Alerio rolled his knotted shoulders and headed back downstairs to check on the rest of his team.
He found the nine of them hard at work bustling around the bloody murder scene. To his relief, no one else had been as badly injured as Riane Wyatt, who was already in the infirmary.
We got lucky.
When he was satisfied they’d gathered all the evidence they’d need if this mess ever went to trial, Alerio gave the order to begin the Jump for home. His eight remaining agents began warping out from the wrecked parlor in teams of two, accompanied by evidence bots and body tubes loaded with the tourists they’d failed to save.
As was his habit, Alerio was the last to leave in order to cover his team’s retreat. Which, as usual, left him half-blind and completely deafened from the flash and boom of temporal warps. Luckily the T-suits’ dampening field kept anyone more than ten meters away from sensing the effects. No Philadelphia natives would wonder why there was a thunderstorm raging inside the house next door.
By the time it was his turn to Jump, the chief’s ears were ringing so loudly, it was all he could hear. Until the androgynous mental voice of his neurocomp began reciting the familiar string of coordinates that was the Outpost’s space-time address. Outpost coordinates confirmed, he told the implant. Engage temporal warp.
Engaging temporal warp in three . . . two . . . one . . .
It felt like being hit by lightning, a teeth-rattling electrical assault that shook his body until his consciousness blinked out . . .
. . . And . . . he was back again.
Temporal warp to the Outpost successful, the neurocomp announced.
Alerio made no answer, blind, deaf, stomach knotting in violent rebellion, muscles jerking from the electrical assault that was a side effect of the Jump. Bracing his knees, he stayed upright by will alone and waited for his implant to compensate. My team?
All members of the investigation team present and accounted for.
The chief breathed a silent prayer of thanks to whatever Vardonese goddess happened to be listening.
He’d lost a Jumper once. Riane Arvid’s sabotaged T-suit had bounced her back and forth across Terran temporal space before finally dumping her in the twentieth century. Her suit was dead as a stone by then, unable to generate even the weakest warp field.