CHAPTER TWELVE
Lem
Midnight commotion echoed through the Growen compound as Lem crept through the barracks hallways on her way to her new identity’s bedroom; suddenly light cascaded down the hall in rapids like a river down a canyon, driving with it a swarm of high-ranking Growen officers—right toward Lem.
Her heart became a pulsating fruit lodged in her throat. If masters of genocide came in playing cards, these were the kings.
And ahead of them strode Diebol, mouth running and leather jacket flapping as the light followed his footsteps.
It’s cool, it’s cool. I’m a land-walrus janitor. I’m invisible. She hunched her shoulders and focused on her waddle, continuing down the hallway toward the closet where they kept the cleaning robots. Besides, these guys aren’t the monsters my parents made them out to b—
“Move, bucktooth.” A heavy palm blew into her chest with the slur. Lem fought the urge to throw the man across the hallway and fell submissively against the wall as the brass breezed past. This was a once in a lifetime chance to touch a general. Her eyes followed the offender’s wrist up his black uniform sleeve to—oh man, basically the most boring human face she’d ever seen. Bland eyes, tiny chin, small bump for a nose, boring.
General Johnson. Unusual name, extremely boring face. I’ll remember you.
And with a touch of her paw behind her ear, as her fingers brushed his disappearing hand for DNA, she guaranteed that memory.
“Bucktooth?” Diebol scoffed. “Gentlemen, I’ve warned you not to use that kind of slur around me.” His singsong voice trailed behind him as he raised his hand, still walking. He drew a subtle finger across his own neck, and Johnson stiffened. “We’re all here for the cause,” Diebol said, as if he hadn’t just threatened one of the most powerful people in the galaxy for a maintenance worker. “Anyway, as I was saying, now that She is activated, you’ll all be pleased with the new state of Fort Jehu.” He whirled ahead of them, turned to face them, and threw out his arms. “Hurry up!”
Lem barely noticed his terrifying energy. Shyte, Her, finally, after all these months?
Her, in Fort Jehu?
Oh no.
The back of Lem’s throat tasted sour. Lem needed in. She had to get in that room. Or, more correctly, she had to replace someone in that room.
She had his DNA, she just needed to get rid of him.
Jei
The chaotic thumps and alarms continued to blare outside the trashed barracks lobby where Cinta and I conferred over sniffling children.
I left Cinta to guard the kids with one of the older cadets, a small, quiet, human by the name of Nathan Horn, about fifteen and clearly Contaminated like I was with Njandejara. He seemed to have his head on straight. For scouting, I took Reise and his friend Gideon, a pale-ass hulk four years younger than me and still larger; thesaurus-boy hadn’t failed me yet, and I figured without powers I couldn’t go wrong with a steroid giant.
Outside the barracks, ashen wind met us with the taste of burnt plastic in the darkness. Everything computerized on our base had gone insane. One of our mechanized small arms towers stalked the street in front of us, firing at random, its three legs spindly like a spider’s and red auto-aim lights glowing like eyes. In the distance I saw a handful of our own sky-ships doing battle with our anti-aircraft lasers. The screaming would not stop. Bodies piled at the entrances of the nearby barracks buildings, limbs thrust through polymerwalls that had opened and shut on the escapees. There were faces stuck in melting walls.
A group of younger girls, pre-fighting age, huddled by the tread of a blasted-out tank. The oldest one, a dark-skinned blonde about ten or eleven, had her hands over the other two girls’ mouths, one a Biouk and one a Wonderfrog, as they sobbed.
The mechanized tower skittered toward them—
Reise rushed forward. “That’s my little sister!” he hissed, firing on the tower.
Yes, I knew that, thanks. You didn’t do fifty-plus missions with someone without meeting their family, and now the arms tower whirled toward us at Reise’s sound.
“Move and fire!” I ordered, blocking the incoming flayer shots with my mace’s spinning forcefield. Gideon and Reise dashed in opposite directions and lit up the night with colorful cartridge fire; I ran across the street for the girls. The heat from my mace drew the tower’s attention—
But so did the heavy storm from my gunners. The tower jittered.
“Those things really aren’t meant to be fully autonomous,” I muttered, sliding to the girls in a splash of mud as the tower’s frenetic fire sprayed over my head.
“Injuries?” I asked.
Juju pointed with her chin to the Biouk, not daring to relinquish control of either child’s mouth. “Her head’s bleeding,” she said, wide-eyed. I tapped, and felt sticky ooze matting the cub’s fur.
It wasn’t flowing, and the cub followed my face with her eyes—looked stable enough to move.
“You can run?” I asked the human.
Juju nodded, eyes wide.
But—
“Let go of their faces, soldier.”
She shook her head, eyes still very, very wide.
Her arms trembled, stiff. I peeled her sweating fingers off her companions and scooped up the Wonderfrog in one arm. She was so young she still had a tail between her back legs; it whacked me, wet. The Biouk clung to my shirt instinctively, infantile tree-dweller claws raking my skin. And with my other hand I dragged the human after me.
My gunners more than covered our retreat across the street; the tripod tower exploded behind us, toppling like a tree as we dodged back into the building.
“Hon, I’m home,” I quipped, practically throwing the three girls at Cinta. “Something’s happened to everything that’s got a computer in it out there.” I turned as Reise and Gideon re-entered. “We’ve got to kill the wireless router in the central communications tower so our wristbands fall back on the satellite network and everyone can actually talk to each other.”
“Is there perchance a possibility of similarly eliminating the generator to this building, so the safehouse doors will unseal?” Reise asked, actually raising his hand.
The hand-raising seriously stopped my train of thought. “This isn’t a schoolroom, Professor Wordsworth. And no, the power source for the safehouse doors is inside the safe itself.”
“Reise? Reise, it is dangerous back there,” Cinta said, apparently much more afraid of Reise having ideas than I was. “This is not like your thing last year. Every person in there is dead who is bigger than this tiny runt-man,” Cinta pointed at Nathan, who winced, then shrugged. “We?” Cinta waved his palm over everyone behind him. “We all got out through the cooling system in the floor. Your brother almost did not fit. Your Gideon? Big monster boy? If he did not get stuck out here before it happened? Dead.”
“Never been so glad to show up late to curfew,” Gideon whistled, cocking and checking his weapon. It really was weird for me how coldly he and Reise took this compared to Cinta and me. Would I have turned out like that if not for the kidnapping at eight? Just another simulation, just another video game, another schoolhouse drill forced on them by the jerk teacher called life?
“So right now it’s a bigger payload for us to risk our butts out there than in here,” I said. “If everyone can start communicating we can start coordinating evac. Let’s move out.”
“Evac?” A human boy cried. It was a stockier, twelve-year-old double of Reise, and wide-eyed and bushy-haired he was straight up panicking. “What about Mom? Reise, don’t let him leave Mom!”
“Jake, shhh!” Reise waved his hand, looking at me with full, teeth-clenched embarrassment.
“Reise!” the boy cried.
“Cinta’s got it,” I said, waving my gunners after me, although it looked like actually Nathan had it. Not a great day for Jake—he’d probably get held back a year before he joined the fighting ranks, if we all lived. Cinta stuffed Jake back under the counter while Nathan consoled him, and I’d normally scold the kid for failure to act like a Frelsi trainee, but at this point I couldn’t really blame him.
The burnt plastic and ashen air met us outside once again as we took off toward the communication tower, hunched shadows in the grass of a now mechanical world.
Lem
Wandla the janitor was not like Frank Zej. She was neither a war-hero nor a scoundrel like the presumed-dead Growen prisoner Lem had interviewed back at Fort Jehu; Wandla required no glorious come-back and escape story concocted in her honor like Zej had when Lem assumed his face.
No, Wandla just earned civilian worker money doing civilian worker things, like maintaining the Growen sanitation equipment and occasionally helping out with extremely mindless administrative tasks. A Luna-Guetala Bichank from Lem’s jungles, lonely Wandla had moved to Alpino because she liked cool weather, and because at her advanced age, with most of her people owned by Growen scientists anyway, she wanted adventure.
So when Frank Zej offered her a paid vacation, she took it. The day Zej returned from his failed offensive on Fort Jehu, instead of keeping his legal appointments he spent hours getting to know the pudgy land-walrus. Holding her giant paw, listening to her jokes, complimenting her enormous tusks … she had no reason to believe the handsome, authoritative human hadn’t actually spoken to her aloof supervisor about a paid vacation, and he helped her on a sky-bus bound for the city that same day.
It wasn’t ideal, but hopefully by the time the real Wandla figured anything out and came back, Lem would be someone else, and in the meantime, she had the Bichank’s phone number, so she could call and ask her to stay away longer if needed. Lem didn’t mind doing a sanitation worker’s job for free—she still had Zej’s entire life savings in her bra.
Precious little good any of that did her, stuck outside this meeting room, though, while the Growen leaders conferred inside about the fate of Fort Jehu. Lem paced as two giant trash-bots followed her back and forth like pets. The cool metallic floor tickled her bare toes as her feet plop-plop-plodded like land-walrus paws. Her heart pounded. She didn’t dare think of the reason she needed to get into that room.
“No, I just wish I was at Fort Jehu because I’m so dang loyal to the Growen, and I hate missing the action,” Lem muttered to herself, erasing the word “family” from her consciousness. “Just like I’m disappointed I dropped my helmet and we didn’t wipe everyone out.”
Gah, she hated these fake thoughts right now, she hated them! How could she get into the filking room? The polymerwall had a small, round window in it. Lem had been careful not to pace in front of it, but a quick peep …
Inside, Growen top brass all sat around a smooth, obsidian table. Diebol was angled and pushed back from the table—yup, that was Diebol, Lem smiled: he left plenty of strategic space in case he needed to fight everyone in the room. These armchair bureaucrats had built the Growen forces together, but everyone knew Diebol despised most of them.
Well, Lem would just have to do him the favor of replacing one.
General Johnson was facing the window. He looked up for a second—Lem waved at him, and then ducked away. No matter how big Johnson’s ego, a rude land-walrus wave would not justify a mention to peers in an emergency meeting. If it was rude enough, though, it might justify a quick “excuse me while I literally hit the latrine.” Right? The kind of guy who shoved people and dropped anti-Bichank slurs even in front of known Bichank sympathizer Stygge Diebol—that kind of speciesist would want to come out here and punch her real quick for daring to disrespect him, right?
Lem checked again to see Johnson glaring at the window. She stuck out her tongue and bent down her paw to mimic a human hand in rude, three-fingered salute.
He looked away from her in disgust, but did nothing.
Yeah, you didn’t get rank without learning how to take down names and have someone else do the punishing for you. Come on, she couldn’t wait for this …
Lem looked behind herself at the empty hallway, hunting for the exact location of the surveillance cam. She couldn’t see one … ah, there was one flat, oval imprint of a camera directly above the conference room entrance. If she should get really close to the polymerwall, it wouldn’t see her face.
You know … A terrifying doppelgänger was worth slipping out of an emergency meeting, and insane enough that he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Lem stood by the window, staring at Johnson, and when he was looking up, she lifted the edge of the Wandla sticker behind her ear, defaulting to the newly gathered DNA on the other sticker: the general’s own genetic code. For just a second, the general saw his own face on the land-walrus head, before the land-walrus smirked at him, and disappeared.
At least, Lem hoped. She held her breath …
Oh yes. The polymerwall squished as it started to activate, and Lem scurried away from it toward the supply closet. As the general stomped out of the meeting room through the wall, his wrinkled jaw clenched in seething insult, Lem threw him another rude salute and jumped into the closet.
The general dove after her. “I’ll skin you, Bichank witch—” was cut off by a stun cartridge from Frank Zej’s still very useful gun.
Lem breathed and wiped her brow as the Growen general crumbled at her feet. In the second it took him to fall butt over boots she regretted using a stun cartridge.
Because now she had a living person, completely helpless at her feet, and no way to hide him. Should she kill him? She didn’t know much about the next guy in line for his job—was he worse? And what if she needed this guy to come back to life later so she could switch identities?
“You’re overthinking this,” she muttered. She needed a general. She needed to get in there right now. Why would it ever be a bad thing for one of these guys to be dead?
It felt different when he was totally helpless. Just like someone’s really stupid, clumsy dad on his face.
“Njande, I really wanted to do this awesome Paradox thing where we are so powerful our enemies don’t want to fight us anymore, but I am not there right now,” she whispered.
It didn’t take long to rip out the insides of a cleaning robot to stash the body.