Death Drop by Sean Allen

Tell us what happened on that ridge.”
    Malo took a deep breath, his large torso expanding as his lungs filled, and Bertie shook his hand in exasperation while adjusting for the movement in Malo’s arm with the inter-scanner.
    “Try not to move please, Malo,” the doctor said firmly.
    “Malo sorry.”
    “It’s quite all right,” he said in a gentler tone. “You can answer the colonel’s questions, but try to be as still as possible, okay?”
    “Malo and Talfus report plateau entrance three—wait for Mewlatai.”
    “Excuse me,” Otto interrupted, “I thought transfers of the Serum were done anonymously by runners through the civilian black market with the cargo disguised as something else.”
    “That’s true, Otto,” said Abalias. “Usually, I’m contacted on a secure channel reserved by this Mewlatai, or at least that’s what he said he is. He gives me a code indicating a batch of Serum is ready and then allows me to select a drop site as a safety measure.”
    “And you picked a plateau entrance to our entire operation as the meeting point?” Otto asked disbelievingly, as though the colonel had just announced that he was a Durax spy.
    Colonel Abalias shot him an acid look, and Otto realized that his comment and his tone would certainly have landed him in the brig if it hadn’t already been dismantled for the evacuation.
    “Sorry, Colonel.”
    “I’m not a damn fool, Major!” Abalias growled and Otto thought he felt the air temperature in the room drop by at least ten degrees. “I had no choice! The Mewlatai contacted me on the correct channel, and he had all the right password encryptions. We’ve done this at least fifty times over and…he said…something else. Something that I couldn’t ignore.” The colonel paused with an introspective look on his perfectly white face as Otto and Malo both looked on curiously. “He told me that the current strain of the Serum was weakening under the increasing mind powers of the Durax. He said he had a new strain that would keep our soldiers immune and allow us to continue the fight.”
    A look of comprehension flashed across Otto’s streamlined face. “That’s why you sent another man onto the ridge—when one would have sufficed: as a test subject for the previous strain. You needed to test the two strains and compare them to each other.” Otto was nodding his head, but he stopped as consternation wrinkled his features. “I still don’t understand why the Serum couldn’t have been delivered in the usual fashion. Why the urgency to meet this Mewlatai on our front door step?”
    “He said that there was a new way to create the latest strain, and to keep it safe, he locked the information in the only place that was still unreachable to even the most powerful of the Durax: his Mewlatai mind. He said he had all the plans and formulas necessary to reproduce the new strain in mass quantity. We could manufacture on site and distribute it to our people without depending on the seedy underbelly of the universe and its slimy network of runners and ringers.
    “He also told me that this would be our last meeting. After passing along the secrets of the new Serum, he would return to the front lines and battle the Durax in the way of a true Mewlatai warrior: with his sword. I needed him to inject Talfus with the original strain as proof that he was who he said he was. If the brain scan checked out, then the Mewlatai would check out too. Getting Malo injected with the new strain would have been a bonus—in case anything went wrong on the ridge, we would have the new strain in Malo, and maybe our biologists could reconstruct the formula. He had all the damn passwords!” He shouted and everyone in the room, including Bertie the medical machine, jumped at his sudden outburst.
    A pang of uncontrollable guilt ran unchecked across his ashen face and the colonel looked down, disgusted with himself. “I was too busy worrying about an attack from outside; I never