Page 40 of Her Alien Mercenaries
“He’s in there?” Zanyr asked.
“He is,” Skye confirmed. “It looks like he put himself into cold storage after the attack on Jenna.”
“Wake him up. I want to have a word with thebakaffa.” Zanyr curled his hands into fists and stomped toward the pod.
Skye intercepted him, using her body to block his path. “Whoa. You’re in no state to interrogate anyone.”
He briefly contemplated pushing past her, but he’d gone up against enough cyborgs in the practice arena to know the odds were not in his favor. He was a warrior. Skye was a living weapon. He stopped in front of her and growled.
The cyborg’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “I know you’re pissed, Zan. But growling at me won’t help the situation.”
She was right. He blew out a breath and bowed his head to her. “Sorry.”
“I get it. If someone went after Yardan, I’d want to tear open that pod and get some answers.”
Torren joined them. “How long until we can get him out of there?”
“That depends on what I see on the scanner.” A massive male entered the room, forcing several of the guards to flatten themselves against the walls to make room. Zanyr didn’t need to see his face to know who it was. Only one being in the colony was that size. Denz, the half-Torski who sat on the leadership council with him. Why were they all showing up today? Had he missed a memo or something?
“Denz,” he greeted the male.
He got a nod in return, but nothing more. Instead, Denz raised his voice. “Everyone not on the leadership council needs to clear the area. Now. And no talking to anyone about this until you’ve been debriefed.”
“Come on, let’s go find Yardan. He’ll want to talk to all of you.” Skye led the others out of the room.
Torren made to follow, but Denz stopped him. “Not you. You might as well hear it now instead of Zan telling you later.”
“I don’t tell him everything,” Zanyr protested.
Despite the circumstances, Denz looked at him with amusement. “This involves yourmahaya. If you withheld information from Torren, we’d be investigating another violent crime.”
“True,” Torren said.
They waited until the house was clear before anyone spoke again. In the meantime, Denz used a medical scanner to gather data from the pod and its occupant. His expression, already serious, grew increasingly grim as he read the results.
“Fraxx. I didn’t want to be right about this,” Denz said.
“What is going on?” Zanyr asked.
Denz sighed. “Zan, you already know some of this. Do you remember when the Shadow Men infiltrated the orbital platform?”
Zanyr nodded. “One of our shuttle pilots was offering information in exchange for a narcotic capable of affecting someone with Vardarian nanotech. His contact was hiding in plain sight on the platform.”
“The suspect was actually a digitized consciousness in a cloned body,” Denz said.
Torren jerked and stared at the cryo-pod. “Are you saying this is another clone being driven around by a digital ghost? So what? Right now we have the body, but whoever is operating it is not home right now?”
“That’s one way to put it.” Denz tried to smile, but it faded quickly. “At least this time there’s no micro-explosives. Sanjin, or whoever is controlling this body, has no means to destroy the evidence.”
Zanyr stood in silence as his mind worked to put the pieces together. Sanjin’s sudden change in personality. The way he’d retreated from Tani. Even the fact he’d moved to be closer to what would be Jenna’s new home. “We need to find out how he knew where Jenna would be living.”
“We will. It will take time, but we’ll figure out every place he went and everyone he spoke to.”
Something else clicked for Zanyr. “The produce he’s selling. Get someone to test it all. I bet you’ll find he’s been using banned products and techniques to grow everything.”
Torren shot him a quizzical look. “Are you still thinking about fruits right now?”
“I am. Because I think it might help us confirm when Sanjin stopped being Sanjin. The original was a gardener. I bet whoever was driving him didn’t know anything about agriculture, so they used shortcuts and cheats to make it look like he knew what he was doing.”
