Read Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer for Free Online Page A

explore stars, but to defend Earth. To defend our home.”
    “I like it.” Her smile was genuine. “Is that why you called me here?”
    “Yes, actually. I was hoping to get you on board with it. Hoping you will back me up in the meeting.”
    “I am. I will. It’s brilliant, in theory . In practice…good luck.” She raised her cup in toast.
    “Thanks. A moment. Tobias, lock this room down, will you?” Once that was done, and no one but the two of them and Absen’s bodyguard remained, he went on. “So, tell me more about these possible spies.”
    “I have no idea. I haven’t wasted any effort on even finding any out. I just assume that some might be here.”
    “How? As I understand it, the scout ship we beat was the first Meme visitor in four thousand years.”
    “Perhaps. The Empire also sends out tiny seedships, with one individual in each, somnolent between the stars. These auto-land on any world with higher life, and the Meme blends with whoever it can find, usually some kind of creature with sufficient dexterity and brain to make rudimentary tools. Then the Blend begins to build a civilization and advance it rapidly, or take over what is already there. If it finds something it cannot handle, it remains hidden.”
    Absen gently rapped the table with his knuckles in thought. “So we could have some among us – even in positions of power.”
    “Could? Most definitely. Some of my siblings might even have survived the cataclysm that wiped the rest out. Because Blends are long-lived, they may have incorporated themselves into the populace and been here all this time.”
    “Yet you don’t seem worried.”
    Rae smiled. “My research indicates that blended Meme always go native, especially with no contact with the Empire. Life as a Blend is simply too seductive – the pleasures of the senses, the natural desire for power – and within a few hundred years out of contact, beings such as they will not want to return to the fold.”
    “So if there are any, they will long ago have adopted their own agenda.”
    “Correct. And they won’t want the Empire to win any more than we do, for then they would be found out and subjugated. Every one of the pure form Meme, no matter how low, is automatically superior in their hierarchy to any Blend.”
    “So they have a hard class division within the Empire. Pure forms, Blends, and...”
    “And the lower creatures. Masters, overseers, and slaves, in common parlance. Meme that blend step down permanently, and they can never become pure again.”
    Absen stroked his chin. “Yet you chose to do it.”
    She nodded, and smiled wider. “Yes, I did.”
    “I’m finally beginning to see, I think, what that meant. I wondered at first whether you were biding your time, hoping to regain some kind of position within the Empire. Then, when you helped us defeat the scout ship, I changed my mind…and now I realized that to the Meme, you sold out. You’re a traitor, no matter what you do.”
    “I would have thought that was obvious,” she replied a bit testily.
    “Perhaps it is, but I prefer to look beyond the obvious.”
    “In this case, things are just as they seem.”
    Absen stared at her. “No, they never are. But I do trust you, which is a different thing entirely.”
    A chill went through Rae then, and the constant fear returned: fear for her unnatural children and the response they would provoke if they were ever fully understood. A race of superior human beings, a leap forward, not of evolution, but by design – the dream of many, made real not by the race of mankind, but by an alien intelligence. No matter how benevolent, some would fear, and want to destroy what they feared.
    “No one is entirely free of secrets, Admiral. Not me, not you, not the people you work with. Life is full of them. The best we can do is decide to trust each other.” Rae smiled, a heartbreaking sad thing.
    Absen’s eyes veiled, and she knew that his trust extended only so far. Perhaps he