Antagonist (PAPERBACK)

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“WELL, THAT WAS two-and-a-half cycles of my life I’ll never get back,” Kade said, fussing with the fastenings at the collar of his formal gray suit jacket.

Ambassador Isadora Martinez of the planet Terra Nova walked next to her alien companion as they made their way down a nondescript corridor inside the Vitharan government complex, lengthening her strides to keep pace with his longer legs. She shot the Vithii a sidelong glance, privately enjoying the way the severely tailored lines of his suit accentuated his angular build. Despite her best efforts, she seemed to be doing a lot of that sort of thing in the weeks since they’d started working together—though none of it changed the fact that the man beneath the suit was a crusty, bitter old asshole most of the time.

He finally got the triangular lapel of the jacket unfastened and started in on the top buttons of the shirt beneath.

“You’re fidgeting,” she observed.

The look he gave her was jaded. “I’ve also got a freshly implanted neurotonin pump stitched into the skin above my collarbone. What’s your point?”

Shirt and jacket loosened, Kade tugged the fabric away from his neck and stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets. Away from the meeting room full of Vitharan government officials, his shoulders curved into a comfortable slouch as they walked, making his two-meter-plus frame into something a bit less intimidating than it might otherwise have been. His gray eyes still snapped with the frightening intelligence he kept hidden behind a shell of sarcasm and grouchiness, though—their color accentuated by the nearly identical shade of the suit he was wearing. Dark brown hair stood up in the rough spikes common to his race, shot through with an occasional strand of gray here and there.

“If the pump’s still bothering you, maybe you should visit the clinic and have them check it out,” Martinez said mildly. “You could have taken another couple of days for the incisions to heal before jumping straight back into meetings, you know.”

One of the first things she’d learned about Kade was that he was a long-term neurotonin addict. Without an injection every few cycles, his brain chemistry would fall hopelessly out of balance, with fatal effects if the withdrawal symptoms were left untreated for too long.

It had taken considerably more digging—including a candid conversation with one of his comrades from Ilarius—to learn that he’d gained the aforementioned addiction at the hands of the prison system on his home planet of Ilarius. There, the guards had apparently preferred to keep him drugged into compliance with neurotransmitter antagonists during his stay as a political prisoner. After the first few months, they’d grown tired of his continual legal challenges regarding the statutory basis of his incarceration, and decided he would be easier to deal with as a mental vegetable.

Frankly, it was rather amazing that he’d recovered to the degree he had.

Upon their arrival on Vithara—with its advanced medical technology—she’d managed to sell him on the idea of undergoing surgery to install a pump. The state-of-the-art Vitharan medical device was capable of delivering measured dosages of neurotonin as needed to keep his levels stable. She’d argued that, if nothing else, the pump would free him from the necessity of stopping whatever he was doing every few cycles to get an injection, thereby reducing the amount of time and energy needed to deal with his condition when there were more important things requiring his attention.

The surgery had been scheduled two days ago. He’d been back to work less than a day later, against medical advice.

For this reason, it was no real surprise when he shot her a dark look from beneath heavy brows and echoed, “Another couple of days? Sure, I mean… why not? I expect the humans facing genocide on Ilarius would be happy to wait for help while the redness and swelling around my surgical site go down.”

She met his gaze with one equally as dark. “You’re not the only person in this fight, you know.”

He gave a quick, sharp shake of the head—the gesture replete with disgust. “No? Then why do I feel as though I’m constantly talking to a brick wall during these meetings? We’re wasting time my planet can’t afford.”

She jerked her eyes away from him, facing front. “I warned you at the beginning that Vithara would be a hard sell when it comes to extra-planetary interventionism. At least Terra Nova is on board with us now.”

“True,” Kade allowed gruffly. “On both counts.”

For some time, Martinez had been concerned about the situation on Ilarius. Anytime a hard-line nationalist government rose to power, there was the potential for things to turn ugly. A government like that needed an enemy in order to focus the populace’s frustration outward, away from its leaders—and Ilarius had a human population ready-made for the task.

In fact, the planet had originally been a human colony, founded after the Great Diaspora, when Old Earth became uninhabitable. Ilarius had been settled by a much smaller group of colonists than Martinez’s home planet of Terra Nova, but it had grown steadily over the decades and become relatively prosperous.

The humans already had a solid network of agricultural communities on the water-rich southern continent, and a small spaceport on the dry northern continent, when refugee ships arrived in the system, seeking asylum. The ships, as it turned out, carried thousands of Vitharans fleeing a civil war on their home planet. Vithara had always maintained cordial relations with the Seven Systems’ human colonies, so the colonists on Ilarius were reluctant to turn them away. The fact that the refugees brought more advanced technology with them to offer in exchange for a place on Ilarius sealed the deal.

For nearly a century, the unusual arrangement seemed to work out well enough. There wasn’t a huge degree of intermingling—perhaps not surprising given the rather stark cultural differences between the two races. Nonetheless, Ilarius thrived with its patchwork society of humans and Vithii, who’d altered their collective name to differentiate themselves from their Vitharan cousins.

Some twenty years ago, however, a group of Ilarian malcontents started a Vithii First movement, which had grown with startling rapidity. As more and more Vithii became convinced that they deserved a larger part of the colony’s pie, sporadic violence against humans and those Vithii who were seen as human sympathizers grew increasingly common.

The real tipping point had come in the last election cycle, when all three arms of the Ilarian legislature fell under the control of the so-called Regime—an outgrowth of the Firsters led by a charismatic psychopath named Xandrie Kovak. With Kovak installed as the planet’s Premiere, what had been scattered violence and unrest up to that point became institutionalized terror against half of the planet’s population.

Genocide now appeared to be a real possibility, if Martinez and the handful of Ilarian revolutionaries she was helping couldn’t garner some serious off-world support for the Premiere’s ouster. Unfortunately, convincing Vitharan officials to commit troops and resources to dealing with the descendents of the people who’d instigated a civil war against them was, to put it mildly, an uphill battle.

Kade—real name, Ehkadian Finisterre—had arrived on Terra Nova several weeks ago with two associates; a human, Ashildir Purandhri, and a Vithii called Draven, with no last name. In addition to the mixed human and Vithii crew of the freighter they’d been flying, they’d also brought along the widow of a prominent Regime member… one whom Martinez was reasonably certain they’d kidnapped by force.

Of course, there was no way to prove it, since the kidnapping victim in question maintained vehemently that she’d come along by choice. Add to that the fact that she was also an old friend of Martinez’s from their university days, and Martinez had decided to let it lie.