When Tracy and Melinda regained their cognizance, they were in Duran’s home on Aurilius. Tracy had no recollection of the days of space travel it would have taken to make the return trip to her home planet. The last thing she remembered was being injected with something in her mother’s hospital room on Sinope. Whoever had taken them didn’t want Jazon to know his plans. Tracy sat up from where she had been draped across the couch. Her mother began to stir beside her.
“How did we get here?” Tracy groggily asked. “What happened?”
Her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her against her and partially behind her. “What do you want? Why have you brought us all of the way home?” Melinda tried to sound sure of herself, but after being a helpless prisoner and held in stasis for days her tone had a hysterical quality to it that she couldn’t disguise.
“You are a lovely female. You and your children have nothing to fear from me, as long as I get the information for which I have come.” He had tortured all of the information he could out of Duran and had learned that Melinda Jarreau didn’t possess the knowledge he had been sent to retrieve. “What I require is on this planet, and your daughter will help me find it. Duran was close to a scientific breakthrough. I have been sent to acquire the serum my employer was promised.”
The assassin got up from the chair across from them and walked toward the couch. Melinda trembled as she looked into his cold brown eyes. He observed her with the same dispassion with which a person might observe a pillow. Telepathically, Melinda did her best to warn her children of danger.
The assassin said, “To deliberately injure a female does trouble me to an extent. However, hacking males to pieces does not.” He pointed across the room. Angelica did her best to keep Tracy’s little brothers behind her.
All of their eyes went to the door when someone signaled for entry.
“Get rid of whoever that is if you want your brothers to live,” he said to Tracy. He strode over to the side of the living room and roughly grabbed Toby, her youngest brother. The man had a knife to Toby’s throat.
Toby cried out at the rough treatment. The boy’s eyes had grown round and solid black in his fear. Tracy watched as her brother futilely looked around the room for father or Duran, neither of whom would ever again offer him any protection.
“No, my baby! Please!” Melinda cried.
With her heart pounding in fear, Tracy ran to the front door. She opened the door a crack before it was yanked all of the way open.
“I thought I saw the arrival of a shuttle. We need to have a talk. At least you came to your senses and came home,” Strass said in a haughty and arrogant tone.
For a moment, Tracy stood there with her mouth as open as the door. “Strass, now isn’t a good time. Go home. I’ll call you later.”
Strass’ eyes turned blacker. He wasn’t a strong telepath, but he was strong enough to know that something was very wrong within the Jarreau home. He projected his awareness and sensed the fear in the house.
“Go, Strass,” Tracy pleaded.
“I’ll go for now, but this isn’t over.” Strass made a show of storming off. At his transport, he called his father before sneaking into the backyard.
The assassin removed the blade from Toby’s throat and shoved him away. “Where is Dr. Heintz’s regeneration research?” he demanded.
Tracy knew she had to get the man out of her house and away from her family. “It isn’t here. Duran didn’t want us to learn what he was doing.”
“Quit stalling, and tell me where it is.” He grabbed at Toby again, but the boy darted away and close to their brother Tam.
“Leave him alone! I’m the only one who knows where it is or how to interpret it.” She realized that the man in front of her was a Parvac and assumed his employer was the man most wanted by the Parvac Empire, the original upon whom the clones had been created.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said as he lunged for Tracy.
At that moment, the pool door flew open, and Strass entered with his sonic blaster aimed at the intruder. The assassin drew his own blaster and fired at Strass. The shot went wild hitting the ceiling. Angelica had kicked the assassin’s arm, but he retained his hold on his weapon.
“Go to your mother! Now!” Angelica ordered in a voice none of them recognized.
Toby and Tam ran to Melinda.
Strass had his blaster aimed at the intruder, but didn’t have a clear shot. “Take the boys and go to the front yard! I called Father before I came inside,” Strass said.
The man had grabbed a handful of Tracy’s hair. She was bent over and trying to get away from him.
“Strass, my daughter,” Melinda pleaded.
“Go,” Strass ordered as he put himself between Melinda, the boys, and the intruder.
Alerted that the authorities would soon be there, the man jerked Tracy by her hair to the pool door.
“Drop,” Tracy heard clearly in her mind.
Tracy let herself collapse to the floor. Her hair was yanked hard as the man was forced to let go of it. Angelica delivered two quick roundhouse kicks to the man’s head. He caught her ankle after the second impact, dragged her upside down, and flung her across the room. Strass took the opportunity to fire at the man with his sonic blaster. However, his shot didn’t cause any actual damage. It didn’t even make the assassin pause. The assassin aimed his blaster at Strass. Having sensed his intentions, Strass dove behind the couch. Tracy heard his grunt of pain. The man grabbed Tracy and hauled her to her feet. She struggled and clawed at his hands with her fingernails, but he ignored her attempts to cause him pain. He dragged her outside to a shuttle that had landed on and flattened a few of their lounge chairs.
“Get in,” he ordered as he shoved her inside. “Where is the research?” he asked as he aimed the blaster at her.
“It’s in a secret lab in the middle of Fig Forest.” It was a lie, but it was the only thing she could think of to get the dangerous male away from her family.
He took the shuttle up and to the coordinates Tracy had given him. Through the shuttle’s window, she could see Enforcers arriving at their house. A consciousness latched upon her, seemed to hold her still, and then filled her mind. Relieved, Tracy moved aside within her own mind to give Jazon all of the room he needed. Through Tracy’s eyes, Jazon saw the shuttle’s coordinates. He, Agata, and Vasco intended to arrive there first.
“You calmed down rather quickly,” the Parvac assassin observed with calculation.
“My family is no longer in danger. To Laconians, family means everything. You aren’t Laconian. Who are you? For whom are you working?”
He ignored her questions.
Jazon had eased his control of her mind, but continued to make observations through his wife’s eyes. Through the viewport, Tracy saw two fighter ships swooping down from the sky. They appeared to be on a heading for the lab in Fig Forest. Anxiety filled Tracy as the man turned the shuttle and sped to the land port.
“It’s a trap!” Jazon yelled. Blaster fire rocked the underground bunker.
“I have a reading on two fighters. The shuttle has set course for the land port,” Agata reported. Simultaneous blasts had sections of the ceiling crumbling down on top of them.
“Is there another way out?” Vasco asked over the blaring alarms that had begun to sound. Loud grumblings of stone scraping and grinding against each other along with a thin cloud of dust rolled down the stairs.
Jazon said, “The front exit is blocked.”
“There is another way,” Agata said dryly. He led them into the maintenance and power room where he removed an old manhole cover from the stone floor. They dropped down into the tunnel and ran.
Angelica ran from the house and into the backyard. She barely had sufficient time to leap up onto the stone wall and launch herself up close enough to the rising shuttle for her magnetic wrist and ankle cuffs to clamp onto the hull. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had time to grab a breathing mask, but her position on the shuttle’s hull provided her with some protection from the wind. At least she was able to drag in a few quick breaths. If the assassin’s sensor readings alerted him to her presence, one pulse through his shields would be all it would take to send her plummeting to the planet’s surface. Even at the low altitude at which he currently flew, there would be less of her to clean up than there had been of Duran Jarreau. His accomplice, a professor from the academy, had been the luckier of the two, having died a quick death by poison.
Lord Radford had entrusted the surviving members of the Heintz family to her care, and she had no intentions of allowing harm to come to one of her charges at the hands of an alien assassin. Angelica held her breath as the shuttle dropped down to dock at the land port. Disengaging her magnetic cuffs, she dropped from the hull and rolled away to take cover behind the nearest ship. Angelica activated her visual displacement shielding and blocked her thoughts from her opponent. She would strike when he least suspected it.