Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance Read online

  Kaya’s breath caught in her throat, but her mind refused to grasp what she was seeing. For what felt like an eternity, she stood, staring at the room as it had been when she had left it. The flowered wallpaper, her mother sitting in front of the unlit fire, her sister playing on the floor. Anna was nine and had not entirely figured out that her big sister was going away to another world. Her father and her brother, Brava, were outside in the fields, and Kaya was going out to call them in. They would all go through to the kitchen soon and partake of their evening meal, and…

  ‘The s-skeleton,’ Kaya said, her voice barely a whisper. ‘That bracelet was my mother’s.’ She turned, found Thea standing behind her, and lurched forward. Thea caught her and Kaya pressed her face against Thea’s shoulder. Thea held the back of Kaya’s head and put an arm around her waist, and waited for the tears…

  But there were none. ‘I c-can’t,’ Kaya whispered. ‘Not yet. Not until we’ve found them all.’

  ‘All right,’ Thea said. ‘We’ll find them.’

  Sadrine’s Landing.

  ‘This was not a filarax raid,’ Fay said, her eyes scanning over the body of the man in the apartment.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Jinny asked. ‘I mean, bladed weapons, a lot of violence, a dead filarax…’

  ‘A dead filarax left where he fell. He died in combat and should have received a proper funeral. They would not have left him.’

  ‘Unless they were disturbed?’

  ‘By whom? There is not a human alive on this planet. These wounds are wrong. Filarax favour light, fast blades, weapons of skill, precision. Filarax like to think themselves strong, powerful warriors, but our home world’s gravity is not high, our muscle mass generally no more than that of a human. These were made by chopping weapons, heavy bladed.’

  ‘And,’ Geogracus said from behind Jinny, ‘that human was shot before he was cut up. The trauma is consistent with multiple bullet wounds, though they are well hidden by the cuts. It would take a thorough autopsy, or me, to determine how he actually died. All the victims I have examined have been shot prior to the post-mortem cutting.’

  Jinny nodded. ‘Thea said there was something weird about this. Neither of us thought it felt right for a filarax raid.’

  ‘It is entirely wrong,’ Fay said. ‘The entire population has been wiped out. Our sensors have detected no one alive on the planet.’

  ‘Yes… so?’

  ‘So where are the filarax? A raid would not kill so many. An attack which wiped out all the inhabitants would be a territorial claim. We would be fighting an army of filarax intent on holding that claim.’

  ‘Okay, so someone dressed this up as a filarax raid. Why?’

  ‘That is a very good question, I’m sure,’ Geogracus said. ‘I would like to further my research into the matter by taking several bodies back for a full examination. The filarax included. There’s something distinctly wrong with that body.’

  Jinny turned to look at the obese man, floating just off the ground behind her. He had dressed in a grey smock for the occasion, but his flab still made itself known through the cloth. Both flab and facial jowls suggested Geogracus was not enjoying the high gravity. ‘You just want to get back into your low-gravity field.’

  ‘That is, most assuredly, a considerable benefit of my desire to further examine the bodies.’

  ‘All right. Contact Cassy and get her to take you up with the filarax corpse. Fay and I will get you some more samples.’

  Geogracus twisted in the air and floated back toward the door. ‘Four of them. The more intact the better. Try to get both genders and a range of ages.’

  ‘Oh, our wish is your command, great floating master.’

  The big man heaved a sigh. ‘Would that that were true, sweet little Jinny. Would that that were true.’

  Trevorny Farm.

  Braven Trevorny had died in the kitchen. Kaya’s father had the ruins of an old hunting rifle beside his charred skeleton. It had belonged to Kaya’s great-grandfather, kept in the family as an heirloom more than a functional weapon. It did fire; there was a sort of Trevorny rite of passage when you turned sixteen and Braven would teach you to shoot. Brava had been quite keen to learn, Kaya less so, but she was an adequate shot. Braven had been quite good, but it was doubtful that he had got to use his old rifle before he died.

  Finding Brava and Anna proved far harder. There was no sign of their bodies in the house, or any of the outhouses, or in the burned-out barn. It was not until Jay spotted a section of flattened corn, a path trampled into the field, that they found what they were looking for.

  Fifty metres into the field, the corn had been flattened out to five metres or so from the centre where there was a shallow pit blasted into the soil. Brava lay at the edge of the cleared area, his burned body wrapped tightly around a smaller corpse as though he had been trying to keep the fire away from her. It had not worked.

  Kaya stood staring at the bodies for several seconds before she spoke. ‘W-what d-did that? They’re burned, but the field is s-still here.’

  ‘Flamethrower,’ Thea said. ‘Some sort of vortex ring projector firing a high-intensity flammable gas. You can get very tight burns using them. And the filarax wouldn’t touch one for all the territory in the universe.’

  ‘So… So, you’re sure? This was not the filarax.’

  ‘From what Cassandra is telling me the others have found, yes. I’m quite sure this was done by someone who wanted it to look like a filarax raid, but it was something else. Someone else.’

  ‘Mercs,’ Jay said. ‘Mercs love this kind of weapon for hiding the evidence. A high-tech solution for something you could do with a match.’

  ‘I want them,’ Kaya said, her voice so low neither Jay nor Thea heard her properly.

  ‘Sorry, Kaya?’ Jay asked. Then he took a step back as the young girl turned her tawny eyes on him.

  ‘I want them. I want them to… to pay for what they’ve done.’

  Jay was about to say something, suggest the task was impossible, try to talk Kaya down, he was not sure which might work or be true, but Thea spoke before he could.

  ‘We’ll see what we can do,’ Thea said. ‘For right now, I’m going to get a couple of service units down from the Oracle. I think we should at least give your family a proper burial, don’t you?’

  Kaya looked up at her with a smile, if only a weak one. ‘I’d like that. Yes.’

  Oracle of Zanar.

  Geogracus hummed quietly to himself as he hovered over his instruments, periodically checking the four he had working on various different tasks. Things were progressing nicely.

  He had established without much doubt that the ‘filarax raid’ aspect of the attack on Sadrine’s Drift had been staged. The blade wounds did not match any of the normal weapons used by filarax, and every body he had checked had been shot prior to the cuts. That was not to say that some of the bodies in the town had not been cut down with a knife or sword, but no filarax would have preferentially used a gun and then followed that through with mutilation.

  Then there was the filarax corpse. Tissue imaging had shown up clear signs of water crystal formation in the cells, the result of being frozen, and not in a cold-sleep capsule, which the filarax did not use anyway. No, this filarax had been killed an effectively indeterminate period of time prior to his apparent death on Sadrine’s Drift, stuffed into a meat freezer, and thawed out for set dressing. Fay had been furious and she was not exactly the biggest fan her species had.

  Now, Geogracus was running a number of tissue analyses on the human bodies which had been recovered. He had two males and two females, and a range of ages between about twenty and eighty. The oldest one had to have been among the initial batch of colonists, a woman in the prime of life, a mother. Geogracus was not the most sentimental of men, but he had to wonder whether all her children were now lying dead on the world below them. It seemed likely.

  Something trilled at him from one of his machines and he turned to it, revolvin
g on his telekinetic levitation field. He frowned and tapped at a few keys, checking the data.

  ‘That,’ he said to the air, ‘is most interesting.’

  ‘What would that be?’ Cassandra’s voice said from the lab’s speakers.

  ‘I’ll have more information when I have more information.’

  ‘Very useful, Geo.’

  ‘It is. Please would you communicate to Sienna that I have another sample of those odd intron codes for her. Possibly the original.’

  ‘One of the bodies was a zanari?’

  Geogracus shook his head. ‘No, Cassandra. This genome is not that of any form of human. When I’ve properly identified it, I’ll be in touch. I’m sending Sienna the gene sequence now.’

  ‘One day you’ll just give us an answer, Geo.’

  ‘I find that highly unlikely, my dear Cassandra. Highly unlikely.’

  54/1/483.

  Kaya stepped out of her cabin to discover that she was not alone in the communal lounge. She almost turned around to leave, but she had spent much of the afternoon and the night either sleeping under a sedative or sitting alone with her thoughts; a little company would not harm her and maybe she was now ready for it. The full impact of her loss had not hit her until the robots from the Oracle had begun filling in the graves they had dug for her family. Then she had all but collapsed and been taken back to the ship to mourn as she chose to. She had a feeling that Cassandra had been keeping an eye on her the whole time, but she had been allowed to grieve in apparent private.

  Now Cassandra was sitting in the lounge beside Thea while Jay sat on another sofa. Nothing was being said, which seemed to confirm that Cassandra had known what Kaya was doing and had noticed that she was about to emerge. Had they been talking about her? Or were they waiting for her?

  ‘Come, Kaya,’ Cassandra said, looking up. ‘Sit down and we’ll go over what we’ve learned. Sienna is on her way with another part of the puzzle, but we can start without her.’

  Kaya walked over, electing to sit on a third sofa. She was ready for company, but not being crowded. ‘Geogracus found more information?’ she asked.

  ‘He has, yes.’

  ‘We’ve confirmed with very little doubt that the attack was not performed by filarax,’ Thea said. ‘That body was not one of the attackers, unless he was killed, frozen for a few decades, and then transported back in time to be left in a corridor. All the bodies Geo examined had been cut post-mortem. He extracted a couple of bullets, all of them from modern weapons favoured by human mercenary units. As Jay suggested, this seems like the work of a mercenary company, and it would have to have been a fairly large one.’

  ‘There are, maybe, three companies in this part of the galaxy who could mount an operation like that,’ Jay said, ‘and one of those wouldn’t. If I had to guess, I’d say it was Monteagle’s unit, the Kraggans. Either them, or they got someone in from out of the area, which wouldn’t go down well with the local units.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the Kraggans,’ Thea acknowledged. ‘Named for a carrion-eating predator. They’ve a less-than-stellar reputation.’

  ‘They give the word “mercenary” an entirely new meaning. Mercs will usually do what you want if you pay them enough. The Kraggans will do anything you want if you pay them enough. Rumour has it that the worse the mess you want to make, the lower their rates get.’

  ‘Probably untrue, but it’s a place to start.’ Thea paused, frowning as though unsure of how to continue. ‘We also have some evidence suggesting a reason for the attack.’

  ‘You do?’ Kaya and Jay spoke over each other; apparently, Jay had not heard this part before, though he seemed to have had a while to think over the mercenary angle.

  ‘Yes. I was hoping Sienna would be here to–’

  ‘Then you need wait no longer,’ a voice said from the entrance corridor. The voice had a soft, purring quality to it, velvet on the ears, and if the voice was attractive, the woman put it in the shade.

  Sienna was dressed in the same outfit as Cassandra: grey-and-metal tunic, open down the front, grey-and-white shorts, and the gloves and strange boots. The outfit showed off a fit body, trim, with wide hips and a fairly expansive chest barely held in place by her tunic. Her skin was smooth milk chocolate, her eyes a golden, tawny brown. She had high cheekbones, hollowed cheeks, and quite a long, pointed jaw. Her nose was long and slightly flattened, and sat above full, bee-stung lips. Her hair was pale blonde with darker hints through the crown. It fell as a curtain to a straight-cut fringe and to the upper slopes of her breasts, where it was also cut straight across, apparently by someone with a spirit level to guide them. She was stunning, and Jay sat up noticeably straighter when he saw her. All she did, however, was wrinkle her nose at him and move to sit down beside Kaya.

  ‘Good evening, Sora Trevorny,’ Sienna said in her velvet voice. ‘I am Sienna, the Oracle’s communications officer.’

  Kaya swallowed the small lump in her throat and nodded. She had a feeling Sienna could get just about anyone to do just about anything she wanted. ‘Uh, I’m Kaya,’ Kaya said.

  Sienna smiled. ‘Thank you, Kaya. I am sorry for your considerable loss.’

  ‘Thanks. I… Thanks. Thea was saying you have something to tell us?’

  ‘I’ve decoded the message Geogracus found embedded in Kaya’s introns.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Kaya asked, her eyes widening. ‘What message? What introns?’

  ‘Try not to be alarmed,’ Cassandra said. ‘Introns are part of the genome of more or less every organism. Everything larger than a bacterium has them. Something seemed a little odd about yours, however, and we have been analysing them. Geo also found the same sequences in the remnants of a retrovirus he discovered in some of the other colonists.’

  ‘O-oh,’ Kaya said, still not sure what she was hearing. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Whatever this was, it did not sound good.

  ‘It’s possible to encode messages into intron sequences,’ Sienna went on. ‘Here, we have a genome with the usual two base pairs, T–A and G–C, so we have a simple means of creating a binary code. Say we make T–A zero and G–C one, then we can encode a message in any of a number of binary formats.’

  ‘But that’s not what we had here,’ Thea said. ‘Geo would have decoded them straight away if it had been one of the usual codes.’

  Kaya swallowed. Usual codes? Since when did people have messages in their genes? Since when was it usual to have messages in your genes?

  Sienna just nodded, but she was watching Kaya closely. ‘That is correct. So, I was brought in to examine it. I set my computers to the task of trying all the encoding schemes and encryption systems I have available while I tried a few more esoteric alternatives.’

  ‘And you beat the computer?’ Thea asked, though it sounded more like a statement.

  ‘It’s not a binary scheme. Whoever left this message used Morse code.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  Sienna flashed a smile. ‘You wouldn’t have. It hasn’t been used for thousands of years. It was one of the very first encoding systems, invented for transmission over copper wires. Text only, simple, but quite efficient. It used long and short pulses, with short combinations assigned to the more commonly used letters to reduce transmission times. When I assigned T–A to short and G–C to long, I immediately got the first word out and knew I was on to something.’

  ‘What was the first word?’ Thea asked.

  ‘Zanar.’

  ‘Zanar is a legend,’ Jay said as though it were some sort of reflex action.

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Kaya admitted.

  ‘The zanari were supposed to be an advanced race of humans who lived out on the edge of the Solar Empire. Masters of psi and the greatest psionics engineers ever. But they never existed. Legends like that have been around since Earth. There’s always some advanced civilisation that vanished long ago, and no one knows where to even find the ruins.’

  ‘Convinced of that, are you?
’ Thea asked.

  Jay frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said, but his certainty seemed to be slipping.

  ‘Well, Cassandra and I were both born on Zanar Prime, so I’m going to have to ask that you reassess your conviction.’

  ‘I–’ Jay began, but Kaya cut him off.

  ‘What is the name of your home world doing written in my genes?’ It was snapped out, terse and a little annoyed.

  ‘A very good question,’ Sienna said. ‘The answer is that I’m not sure, but the rest of the message may give some clue. In full it reads: ZANAR, stop. KN, stop. REGENESIS.’

  Thea sat up straighter, her tanned skin paling. Cassandra stiffened and asked, ‘KN? You’re quite sure?’

  ‘The rest of the sequence works. There is no reason to suspect those two characters are incorrect. You recognise that? Someone’s initials?’

  ‘Kadal Narra,’ Thea said. ‘He was a geneticist. A very good geneticist, but he had some… ideas which were considered unsafe.’

  ‘He wanted to advance the evolution of the zanari through massive genetic engineering programmes,’ Cassandra said. ‘We had already altered our baseline genome to increase our talent for psi, but Narra believed we should go far further. Zanari are, essentially, humans, though we cannot interbreed with other races. Of course, modern humans would be unable to breed with the people who walked the Earth long ago, and some of the powerful families alive today have altered their genomes too much to be compatible with the majority of people outside their immediate circle. Narra wanted to take us beyond the confines of humanity, to turn us into something truly alien. His plans were rejected and he left the core worlds to conduct his experiments in seclusion. It was assumed he died when the rest of zanari civilisation was destroyed.’