This should get his curiosity going. He would take the threat against his empire seriously enough to send someone to either assassinate or check me out. I hoped, for his sake, for the latter. While I waited for him to receive and respond to my message, I dug deeper into the archives to find out more about Earth and its human inhabitants and was relieved to see that Daryus had already outmaneuvered the Cryons and put Earth and its humans underPandraxian protection. The male was already rising in my estimation. According to the latest information, the Superior Commander of the Imperial Forces, Xandros, had driven the Cryons off and was in the middle of taking over their pathetic empire after incorporating it into his. Interestingly, he, too, had a human mate by his side, just as the emperor had made a human female his empress.
I sat back in my chair and reflected on these discoveries. After eons of silence, our Aelyth had returned, not only that, but they had also returned for the Pandraxians, a species the Arkhevari had seeded millennia ago in an attempt to find our Aelyth. Something we had done many times over in search of them. Unfortunately, each time we were successful in creating a species with a bond, the bond only applied to that species, never to us.
So why now?
Why Earth?
What was this planet besides the obvious breeding grounds for our missing Aelyth?
Why had I never heard of them before?
I pulled up a starmap to find them.
It looked like Daryus was wilier than I had anticipated. Earth's location was being kept a secret, probably to prevent more unscrupulous species from ransacking it. Even if it was under Pandraxian protection now, there were pirates out there who wouldn't care.
It took me a few heartbeats to get inside the Cryon database, but they, too, were keeping Earth's location secret. It would take a bit of finesse to crack intotheir system. Fine, I had time. And it would stop me from thinking about Ella too much.
In the meantime, I searched through our archives to see when and who had seeded this Earth, which wasn't easy, because they wouldn't have called it that. I could have contacted Selkaris, but instinct advised me to keep this quiet and figure things out first. I wasn't sure why, but the more I dug into this, the less I trusted my brothers.
My comm announced an incoming message. Short and to the point.
Emperor Daryus,
Arkhevari,
If this is a ruse, it is an ambitious one. Few would dare to claim your name; fewer still would think me gullible enough to believe it.
And yet… your message reached me where it should not have. That alone speaks of a dangerous power. I will not summon you to my court on threats. If you want my attention, you will earn it. I will send one of mine to verify you. If she confirms what you are, then perhaps I will grant you an audience. Contact Sloane Storm. If you are who you claim to be, you will figure out who she is and how to get in touch with her.
Until then,
—Daryus, Emperor of the Pandraxian Dominion
I kept my laughter down. Seemed like Daryus wasn't just wily, he was careful, too. A trait I admired. It didn't take long to find out more about thisSloane Storm. My data screen filled with stunning information, and the attached holovid stunned me even more. Sloane Pericolosa Storm was not only a female; she was human! A human who had clawed her way into the Pandraxian circles, so high she was about to become Emperor Daryus’ new Chief Intelligence Officer.
The irony made me laugh once, sharp and bitter. Itwasironic that the Arkhevari and the Pandraxians would both be hunting the same fragile species for their soulmates. Even more so because the Pandraxians—like the rest of the universe—didn’t even know we still existed. To them, the Arkhevari were nothing but legends. Ghost stories of old. The creators of time and space.
The laugh broke from me again, darker this time.Creators of time and space?Perhaps once. Now we were nothing but harbingers of death, wading through the ashes of every world we touched.
It was hard to believe that Daryus would trust another female with the role that whispered in shadows, that bent truth and rumor into weapons, especially after I read whathappened with Lady Madeema. Perhaps he was more desperate than I thought. Or perhaps this female was more dangerous than she appeared.
Her file lingered on the screen, her eyes caught mid-blink in some security capture. Mortal. Breakable. Nothing special. And yet, there was a sharpness in her gaze I did not expect.
Useful. She could be useful.
I stared at the dossier. Human, female, of Earth origin, but with markers in her genome that should not exist. An accident, or a lie? Didn’t matter. She was due to be promoted to Chief Intelligence Officer, the left hand of the emperor, within the next cycle. And she was already in position, running operations from the heart of Pandraxian HQ.
I let the file scroll, sampling the surveillance. Sloane Storm, in every holo, was a contradiction: sharper than any weapon, but with a carelessness that bordered on suicidal. She flouted protocol, cut corners, and made enemies with the ease of someone who’d never met someone who could challenge her. Most of the logs stemmed from her time on Earth. But I also saw entries that she was friends with another human female, who happened to be the Pandraxian High Supreme Commander's mate. The female had friends in high places.
I leaned back, letting the warship glide on autopilot, and thought. I composed the message in my mind, stripping away all identifiers, all traces of origin. A pulse of code, encrypted in three dead languages, buried in adiplomatic packet. By the time it reached her, she would have no idea who had sent it, except for the one signature that mattered: the promise of something she could not ignore.
Me:
Storm. Meet me. Off-record. You will facilitate my audience with your emperor.
The message pulsed out into the void, a dagger wrapped in shadows. I sat back in the pilot’s chair, wondering. What kind of human dared to wear the mask of a spymaster? What kind of female would this Sloane Storm turn out to be? Would she try to outwit me? The return ping came faster than I expected. She was good. Very good. The message was a single line, with no preamble or signature.
Sloane:
