CHAPTER ELEVEN
Diebol
So Jei had demolished the Transport Center near Fort Jehu.
The up-and-coming Growen leader strode through the hallway, multitasking like a master. Lights bloomed by his feet as the floors recognized the unique leadership RFID on his passing pendant. He scribbled electronic orders into the air with his transmitter pen as he marched: with one stroke, he sent two Stygge trainees to Frank Zej’s room to catch the undercover impostor, and with the butt of his blaster across the walls he rattled the doors of the upper officer quarters.
“All officers to the conference room,” he sang.
It was at once utterly delicious and horrible news—the enemy had awakened in full-force at last, and Diebol licked his lips at the chance now to crush him at his strongest. Diebol had pestered his technicians non-stop around the clock to salvage some kind of workable Frelsi computing equipment from the Fort Jehu siege; now, one of the air-riders Jei had flung into the supply depot finally gave them a repairable computer. And that computer had just arrived safe and secure at the hidden space station.
She was awakening.
Jei
I was naked when the world went insane.
Four hours. That’s how long it took Diebol to respond to what I did. Enough time to get back to base, tear off my sweaty uniform, and hit the showers. I was sore everywhere. I had a headache, and I still needed to process what had brought Njande so close to me that we could work in tandem like that; my mind felt so full, and I needed the hot steam against my skin and some quality wet alone time to evaporate away all the tension.
Someone yelled at my mind.
I ignored it.
Something sunk in the pit of my stomach.
Oh no.
My eyes closed against the spray from the showerhead; I trotted down the white hallway in my mind to the cage Diebol and I shared.
There, casting amber shadows along the mottled wooden bars, my mace lay, still burning through the ground.
Beside it, seared into the floor on my side, was the riddle I’d written.
Out of the eater, something to eat
Out of the strong came something sweet.
What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?
I stooped and rubbed my finger over the blackened wood.
“Classy,” Diebol’s voice echoed around me. I looked up, around—it was an essence, a voice mail in the mind. He wasn’t here. “From the old histories, before the Great Migration. I believe I tried to stop you from gathering some of those records. Of course I read every word myself.”
A knife appeared over the wooden floor, scratching a pattern under my words. A whisper surrounded me. “You can’t just throw a fit and break the world, you know, Jei.”
My eyes widened as I saw the response he’d carved to mine.
Busy “plowing with your heifer.” Remember the next part of the old story?
Hint: it involves fire.
Then my shower shut off, drawing me back into the real world with a rush of cold.
“What the—”
The lights flickered out.
Darkness brought silence, a weird silence without the humming of the polymerwalls or the constant high-pitched singing hiss of electricity, or the trickling of water. Utter silence.
Then the screaming began.
My adrenaline spiked, my every hair on end as I dove to the rescue into the shower’s polymerwall—
And fell back, head throbbing, to slip almost comically on the ground. Bloodseas, it wouldn’t let me through? How had the polymerwall locked? I palmed the wall in the darkness for the emergency release that could liquefy the wall. I heard the cries of little kids above the din, terrifyingly easy to recognize when you grow up in the glorified refugee camps we call bases—shyte, I had to get out to the kids! My fingers grazed the emergency release—
And then everything turned on again, and the wall slurped the release away from me. The lights seared brighter than interrogation flashlights, and boiling water plunged over me. The drain at the bottom of the shower tube sealed. The locked stall was already filled to my knees and rising, as if the room itself wanted to drown me in scalding water.
I always took my weapon into the shower with me. Two cuts from my mace tore open the wall. I stumbled out into the main restroom, sputtering.
Then I felt the burns.
I bit back a scream and cringed, limping as I ran from stall to stall, slicing each one open with the laser-staff end of my neodymium mace. Water spilled across the floor as I checked the bodies tumbling out behind me. Living kid with too many questions. Dead guy with several burnt holes through his chest.
“Bloodseas, what the shyte happened to him?” the kid asked, grabbing his glasses as I put on my pants.
“Claustrophobia,” I answered. Looked like the man freaked out and fired at the wall over and over and over—and the walls deflected gunshots. “No burns on you?”
“I climbed the walls as soon as the water got hot. I’m so light I’m filking effervescent.” The scrawny younger teen human fumbled for his pants and yanked back the slide on his assault rifle, cursing like his older sister—
I shook her out of my head; we ran into the hallway, Reise Benzaran’s bare feet platt-plopping behind me. A thunderous crackle sounded outside as alarms wooo’d over ground-rocking explosions.
“You got my six, Benzaran?” I asked-slash-ordered.
“Yessir,” said Reise. He better. He was what, fourteen, if I remembered right? Old enough to go out on offensives. So he knew the emergency protocol like he knew how to count. The kid’s hunched shadow fell before me in the dimly lit hallway as he backed after me, weapon raised, swiveling right and left.
Sight did nothing in this mole tunnel, and the sounds were horrible. Crunching? Thumping like giant footsteps, like the water pumps and fuel machinery at the center of the base had turned on for some reason? The screech of drones whistling through the air, the rat-tat-tat of turrets, some kind of—of squelching?
“Um um—um my wristband isn’t getting any orders, sir …” I could barely hear Reise’s awkward half-question as we rounded the corner. Damn this screaming.
“Mine neither,” I yelled. “The whole intercom system must be down, too—loudspeaker’s not saying anything.”
Couldn’t see anything outside. I was brushing my hand over every clear-wall or window we passed, trying to get them to turn transparent, but they remained opaque as if my DNA no longer mattered. I wanted to rip the building open, but exposing us to what?
“Sir, what’s your assessment?” Reise asked.
“Bloodseas, Benzaran, you’ve got a lot of questions. You’ll know as soon as I know. Keep your eyes up.” Something moved ahead of us in the shadows as the lights flickered again.
Bloodseas, the flayer cannons! The hallways morphed and splattered as the barracks’ defenses popped out of the walls—and aimed at us!
“Stay close!” I pulled the kid behind me as I spun my mace in a figure eight around my hand. Its neodymium magnetic core created a forcefield that deflected the volley of gunshots that now lit up the hallway.
“Sir, if you raise your shield up higher I can fire underneath!” Reise shouted. I raised it; he dropped to his belly by my ankles and steadied his rifle to take out the cannons one at a time. It took him a while. Let’s speed this up. I raised my right hand and flexed my fingers to rip the cannons out of the wall—
A sharp, tingling pain coursed from my fingertips down to my elbow. “Agh!”
Nothing else happened.
Bloodseas, had I completely destroyed myself taking out that transport center?
“Njande, help me,” I whispered as the kid finally took down another cannon.
Rest.
“Njande,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “I can’t rest now, something’s wrong!”
“Done!” Reise leapt to his feet, grinning wide enough to show off all his braces. I hated when Frelsi kids smiled in combat, but I knew he couldn’t help it. He didn’t know any other life. I nodded and flicked two fingers in the air to signal him to fall back in behind me as we hugged the walls and rounded the next corner. Almost there—almost to the barracks main exit.
“Sir, should we take the side causeway? It should contain less weaponry,” said the kid.
“Good thinking.” Someone’s been studying. Good for him. “Causeway,” though? I glanced back at his “bespectacled” face for a second as we dashed across another hall. I thought he talked like a thesaurus during mass assemblies to sound smart around his friends—no idea that was normal for him.
We finally reached the barracks exit. Silver scratches marred the walls; burnt paw-prints scarred the green on the exit door. Machinery dangled around us like jungle vines and mangled defenses lay scattered across the floor like dead metal limbs. Whispers and hushed gasps echoed around us.
Reise crouched; I raised my mace.
“It’s the desk,” I said. The whispers in the flickering darkness came from the huge jade information desk by the lobby’s back wall, to our right. The desk faced the exit; it was tall, thick, and wrapped around on three sides to almost touch the wall: excellent cover.
A paw waved out from behind one of the compuwalls built into the top of the desk.
Reise raised his rifle—I shoved his muzzle to the floor.
“It’s one of ours,” I said.
“Oh, no, sorry,” Reise cringed so hard it looked like his shirt might eat him.
“Better be.” To the paw’s owner: “We see you. Clear to cross the room?”
The chestnut-brown Biouk space-lemur poked his head out from behind the compuwall.
“Oh, Cinta!” Reise groaned. “I am so stupid, sorry I—”
“It is good, be sorry later,” Cinta shouted over the constant blasts. He held two pistols at the ready as he returned eye contact with me again and nodded his nose toward the desk underneath him.
We stepped closer, following his gesture, to find twenty kids of all species squished against each other under the counter. Two older teens guarded the outer edges of the desk, assault rifles ready, one commando-style on the ground, and the other kneeling to aim over his buddy’s shoulder.
“Holy crap, I’m being outdone by a muskrat,” I muttered. Biouks don’t hit puberty until fifty, so at 27, Cinta was the oldest child out of any of us—but as a newer Frelsi recruit he let my disrespect slide. He scampered to the edge of the desk to stand level with my ears.
“This is everyone alive in this barracks,” he said. It was impossible to whisper over the sounds of the alarms, but he sure was trying. “Five adults dead at the entrance to children’s quarters. Ten fighting age and adult dead in the kitchen.” He lowered his voice further. “The refrigerator killed them.”
“Yeah the shower tried to kill us; it’s a bad day for homemaking,” I said. “Why didn’t the little kids just go further down the children’s quarters into the safes?”
“The safes does not open,” Cinta said, stress, perhaps, melding his Grenblenian grammar with that of his native Biouk language. Alarm had his giant face-sized ears standing straight up on his head, casting shadows over the triangular blaze of black fur streaking down his muzzle.
The safes wouldn’t open?
Oh, shyte.
I looked over the little kids, feeling their panic in my chest. Ears leapt to attention, spines bristled, scales changed color, and little humans trembled. The safes, lock yourselves in the safes, was the rule drilled into us until we became teenagers, and even then it only changed to lock your little siblings in the safes—and now we had none of that? The safes were magnetically sealed: if I tried to break into them they’d shut off my mace’s lasers and deflect weapon shots. So if they wouldn’t open on their own—without my powers? I could do nothing about it.
But all these upturned faces were lower ranked than I was. With no orders on our wristbands, and Cinta still only a year in …
I was now in command.