Page 51 of A Delicate Conquest

He was meticulous.

The deeper he went, the more he was able to put his thoughts ofherto one side, just for the time being. As the details came together, as a picture began to emerge, he focused even harder.

Time became irrelevant. He was immune to hunger, thirst, and fatigue.

He just wanted to crack this code.

This biological puzzle.

Forhe,Zharek, the one who knew everything about everything and everyone, would never intentionally piece such a thing together.

He’d probably taken measures to obscure it.

But whether he liked it or not, Zharek al Sirian was a son of the old empire, and even he had left traces of his imprint all over the ships he’d traveled on and the labs and bases he’d worked in. At one point, he’d signed his life over to the empire.

The records were still there. They couldn’t be erased, no matter how hard one tried.

It helped that Zharek had been born into a rather infamous Noble House. He shared genetic material with the deceased rulers of House Sirian, and the nobility had never had any incentive to conceal records of their reproductive potential.

As he worked, Mavrel slid deeper into a state of intense focus. He’d sealed the door to his office, preventing outsiders from interrupting.

Nobody knew what he was up to.

Zharek might be clever, but Mavrel had been around for long enough to learn a few tricks. He was probably only one of a handful in Darkstar who could do this.

It might have been easier to just get a sample of Zharek’s biological material to begin with, but Mavrel didn’t want to arouse the medic’s suspicion.

Zharek was notoriously paranoid.

This way was safer, quieter.

Nobody would notice. Mavrel disappearing into his office to work on some project or other was nothing out of the ordinary.

He sat before his many holoscreens and threaded together the scattershot data until he got the answer he was looking for.

A stream of glowing text flew past, and Mavrel quickly scanned it all until he found it.

There.

Zharek’s precise biological signature.

Hisreproductivesignature.

His pheromonal profile.

His perfect genetic match.

Human, of course.

Who was she?Wherewas she?

One of the first tasks Tarak had assigned him when they’d arrived in Earth’s orbit was cracking Earth’s databases and transferring anything of significance to a secure location within theSylth.

The human tech had been easy enough to figure out. There wasn’t that much information to contain, especially when it came to biological data.

Human records weren’t very complicated.

So, Mavrel had diligently sourced and transferred the lot. It was part of theSylthnow, easily accessible to those who knew what to look for—especially him.

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