Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

drooped in death, making it easier to access the tiny metallic pinlinks just behind them.

He gritted his teeth and attached a pair of data probes. “These will let me interface with the pinplants.” He closed his eyes, and the nearby slate lit up and began scrolling data at a blinding rate. After a long time, he spoke. “Damn, there isn’t much here. Even critically injured, they managed to initiate a wiping program.”

“Can you get anything from the head?”

Sato gave another little shudder and he looked away from it. “Yes, there are some residual pieces of data in here.” He closed his eyes again; Rick could see them darting behind their eyelids. “Three series of numbers.”

“Do you know what they’re for?”

“Not a clue,” Sato said. He took the folded fabric bundle from his pocket and sat it next to the end, unfolding it to reveal a metallic cube about 15 centimeters on a side. He slowly examined it, turning it over and over like it was a puzzle to solve, which Rick guessed it was, of a sort.

“What is it?”

“This,” he said, holding up the cube by steepling the middle three fingers on each hand and balancing it on their tips. “This is an Enigma.”

“I’d say more of a mystery than an enigma.”

Sato laughed and shook his head. “No, I mean it’s called an Enigma. It’s a device for…” His eyebrows crunched together. “It has something to do with being a Proctor.”

“A proctor is a teacher,” Rick said. “You were a teacher?”

“I don’t think so.” Sato kept turning the cube over and over again. “Teachers can’t kick people’s asses and shoot lasers.”

“Merc teachers can,” Rick replied. Sato looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Okay, I get you.” He gestured at the Enigma. “That thing make some connections?”

“Maybe starting? Not sure.” Sato gestured at the head lying nearby. “Wish I had more from that…” He stopped, his eyes going wide. “Oh, fucking hell.”

Rick turned and saw the opSha’s head had opened its eyes and was looking around.

“Oh, that’s not right!”

“Dakkar!” Sato moaned.

A pair of tentacles emerged from the back of the head and disappeared over the edge of the table. Rick bent over and looked underneath. Dakkar was lying in a puddle of water, pulsing in incredibly intricate patterns as he did whatever he was doing.

“What happened to me?” the opSha—or rather its head—demanded. Its eyes looked around, then down at the table it was sitting upon.

“Fuck me!” Rick yelped and jumped back halfway across the room. “How is it talking?”

“They use an ultrasonic pulsing,” Sato explained with a sigh. “They don’t need airflow to work the organ.” He glanced under the table at Dakkar. “Dakkar, why?”

“You said you wanted information,” the Wrogul said. “I admit, I’m curious, never having examined an opSha. Add that I was curious if I could reanimate a severed head, if even for a short time…it was impossible to resist.”

“Not that you tried very hard,” Sato countered. The Wrogul pulsed contentedly.

“Let me die!” the opSha wailed.

Rick swallowed and looked away. This was a little too close to his own situation. He’d once been dead, as well, and was alive now thanks to a curious Wrogul. That was Dakkar, too, though an earlier version. It seemed the buds were indeed identical to the original.

“I thought you were making progress,” Sato said.

“Progress? What do you mean?”

Sato sighed again.

“The head function will not last long.”

 Sato forced himself to look at the head. “What are the numbers?”

“Let me die!” the head begged.

Sato’s mouth became a tight line. “Tell me what the number series mean.” Sato spoke the three numerical sequences. “Tell me what they mean, and I’ll end this.”

The head’s ears quivered, and the eyes moved for a moment.

“I can induce pain,” Dakkar said.

“No, please,” the head said a split second before Rick would have spoken the same. “The first is my Himitsu division’s field funds code. The second is the authentication for the code. The third is planetary coordinates for us to report after our mission.”

“Anything else?”  Dakkar asked.

“No, end it,” Sato replied. The tentacles withdrew, the head jerked, then it sagged and became mercifully still. “Please return to your support module.”

The Wrogul gyrated and slithered across the floor and up the side of its module. As it crossed the threshold, it flashed back at them. “You do not have to thank me,” he said and fell into the water with a plop.

“Sato,” Rick said in a breathless voice.

“I know,” Sato replied. “Remember what I said about the Wrogul?”

“Yeah, but…” he pointed to the head.

“No but about it. To Dakkar, or Nemo before him, that’s just a pile of cells to be manipulated, explored, exploited.”

“He brought it back from the fucking dead.”

“As he did with you.”

“You don’t think I know that?”

“I interfered with Nemo’s little science experiment to stop what he was doing. The Wrogul’s word is solid; if they say they’ll do something, or won’t do it, as long as you’re damned sure to be exacting in the details, they’ll keep their word. I put a stop to his Rick Culper manufacturing line.”

“And the others he’d already made?”

“He wouldn’t give them up,” Sato admitted. “I did get him to promise not to awaken them, like you. You’re the only one who was conscious when I found out what he was doing.”

“I don’t remember.”

“No, he was holding you in a form of coma to work on you.”

Rick made a face inside the armor that Sato wouldn’t be able to see. “He promised to stop messing with my…my bodies?”

“He agreed not to bring any of them to consciousness.” Sato shrugged. “That was the best I could do.”

“How many of those monsters are out in the galaxy?”

“I have no