CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jei
I paced in the bombed-out communication tower, my boots clonging on the hollow metal floor as I choked down the instinct to scream at my commanding officer’s boss.
“They thought it would be best for you to hear it from me,” the Admiral said, his grey-blue eyes shimmering with hollow sympathy over the video feed on my wristband.
“Well, sir, they thought wrong,” I spat. “It’s a trap.” I heard my voice rising, and I could not make it stop. “You have to know it’s a trap!”
“Of course it’s a trap, but the risks have been calculated and they are acceptable.”
I nodded, licking my lips. Sure. Maybe this would buy some of the little kids a little more time. I closed my eyes for a second as the whips and the cages came flooding back to my memory. I wanted to hang up, fight, pretend somehow there was some other way, but every second the screams outside grew less and less as our voices were snuffed out …
“Where do I report?” I asked.
“South gate. You can leave now; your scouting soldiers have already received their orders to help with evacuation procedures.”
I stuck my head out the hole in the wall that served as a window, and signaled Reise and Gideon to start making their way back down the hill per their wristband orders; they slunk in sync from bush to bush, covering each other as they moved.
I started down the ladder. “You’ll have safe passage through the whole fort,” the Admiral was saying. “After what you did to the transport center they want you alive.”
“Well yeah, they need the propaganda video for the independent planets,” I said. “I’ll be the biggest hit since they executed Misty Snow.”
“Son, I—”
“Don’t call me that,” I said. “And don’t worry about me. Worry about the fact that they’re going to be tracking the evac transports to the Hiding Place.”
“We’re following that possibility,” the Admiral said. “Not that I need to justify myself to you, but the Burburan elections are tomorrow, and Bricandor may be trying to reverse some of the anti-Growen sentiment vis a vis child-killing. If they can demonstrate that we’re magical terrorists who blow up buildings with our minds, and they’re kindly herding our children off to safe houses, they may win Burbura’s support.”
“But you’re not going to direct the evac platforms straight to the safe house, right?” My boots hit the ground and I took off running down the hill.
“Lieutenant, I’m not going to tell you what we’re going to do,” he said. “We have young ones who need medical attention now, so who knows where I’m sending them.” That irked me, and it shouldn’t have irked me, and I knew that—I knew the Admiral wasn’t stupid, and I knew I shouldn’t know anything now, not right before capture, but—
“This is your fault,” I said. “This has something to do with Lem, and whatever you said to her when you took over the Paradox Project.”
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “She defected over an extremist idea about the thermodynamic collapse of the universe.”
“Are you sure?” I leapt a small bush and dashed through the hollow corpse of a bombed-out tank. “Because when I get out of this—which I will—I’m going to destroy her. This is your chance to tell me if she’s undercover.”
“No, if you escape, you are to return and report immediately to the nearest Frelsi base. You are not to endanger yourself or others by chasing a lost cause.”
I snorted, but said nothing.
He doubled down. “Is that understood?”
“Yes sir, absolutely.” My nonchalant response didn’t have a thread of truth.
“You realize I’m only putting up with this conversation because you’re family.”
“Well don’t, sir,” I said. “I don’t want different treatment, sir, and I’m not known for an attitude. I’m known for winning. If I’m doing something that would keep us from winning, you let me know, sir.”
He didn’t have an answer to that. I knew he didn’t like how much I called him “sir,” but I didn’t know what he did want from me. I didn’t want to think about it. I could see the gate now, a thin outline in the giant outer pearl polymerwall.
“The wall will accept your DNA, and no one else’s,” the Admiral continued. My boots hit the familiar, rubbery pavement of the physical training track; then the strip of dirt where people kept saying we’d eventually build a cultural hall for refugees to sell handmade art; then the long strip of hard cement where I’d once crashed my air-rider. “Both sides have agreed to do the exchange at the exact same time,” his creaky voice droned. “You go through the wall at the same time as our transports escape, not a moment earlier.”
I slowed and looked behind me at the hellscape now visible in the early morning light of the red sun. “Let me help load the transports, then,” I said.
“No. They want eyes on you through the camera at the gate.”
“So I have to wait there on my ass just—”
“Yes.”
I growled and threw up a rude three-fingered insult at the camera on the wall. Within its view, I paced, crushing the grass under my feet, planning …
The admiral didn’t hang up.
“Don’t you have, like, admiral stuff to do,” I said, rather than asked.
“It’s been too long, Jei,” he said. I answered his accusation with silence. “Of course, I understand. I know I haven’t always been there for you. But Jei, I did hope to hear from you more than once in the whole year you’ve been deployed to Luna-Guetala.”
I crouched down in the grass and almost laughed out loud. It wasn’t as if he’d called me, either. “Would that be why you took my Paradox file, sir? You miss me?” I asked.
His voice became a note or two higher and ten times harder as he flipped from the mistreated parent to the famed and hated military leader. “That’s purely strategic. The Paradox Project developed into a resource too powerful to ignore. I wanted to manage those assignments directly.”
“Is Lem on assignment?”
The admiral sighed the longest sigh since the invention of windbags. I heard the creak of a chair, and footsteps, as if he’d gotten up to pace. “Enforcer Benzaran told me she had personal matters to attend to,” he said.
“And …”
“And then she told me she had a duty to single-handedly save the whole universe from thermonuclear collapse.” Oh, Lem … “She said to tell you, actually.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” The chair creaked again. “I didn’t get a chance to send her to the infirmary for her crazy-talk before she went AWOL, either. I’m running a force over several planets, you don’t get to decide what you need to know,” he snapped, and then had the unmitigated gall to switch back to the gentle parent, full of remorse: “And it’s not important right now. What’s important is you, and—” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I’m staying on the line until they pick you up. I want to say you don’t have to do this, but—” His voice cracked like he wanted to play some “feel-my-pain” shyte. I bit my teeth and tuned out. Even with parent-mode, I couldn’t hang up on the Admiral over three planets of soldiers. I wasn’t going to let him screw with my perfect record. But that didn’t mean I had to listen to him. I stared out across the base I wasn’t allowed to help, watching the distant explosions in the pink dawn. This was her home, her family. I remembered when the Growen came for mine.
Things seemed to have quieted down—no more tripod or tank battles on the main causeways. I forced myself to turn and look at the wall.
Then: “Jei, I know this is hard for you. I want to—”
“This isn’t hard for me,” I said. “I have one request, though.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I want Frelsi shackles.” I didn’t want the Growen binding me. I didn’t know why. “Our shackles are lower quality,” I quipped. But that wasn’t the reason.
He froze for a few seconds—maybe what he was doing finally hit him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t blame him for this exchange. If he were trading anyone else, I would hate him. But I felt like I’d dug myself into this.
I would hate him if he botched it. The Growen were only allowing a brief cease-fire to load children—and only children—onto the evacuation platforms. Diebol wanted to make an example of me. So maybe, possibly, if they played this absolutely perfectly, Frelsi upper leadership could salvage something.
“I’ll send someone over,” he said.
When I hung up, in the gut-twisting solitary wait, I suddenly realized what he’d actually wanted to say.
Lem
After the other generals left, or signed off the conference call, Lem sat alone in the meeting room staring at the map on the middle of the table. The blue squares and circles weren’t moving anymore. The little green dots had begun to gather into groups and organize.
And beside them, the screen wore the still shot from the video capture of Jei flipping the camera a vicious three-fingered salute.
Lem breathed. And inhaled. And breathed again. What did I do? She ran her hands over her face as the pressure in her stomach threatened to birth tears.
She’d had to stop the slaughter. They’d stopped the slaughter together, kind of. She knew Jei, knew he wouldn’t hesitate to give himself up to save even one other life, and of course Diebol couldn’t resist the idea. It showed dominance, it punished the Frelsi for the transport center, the execution would make fantastic propaganda—and Diebol cared about no one so much as he cared about Jei. She’d actually studied this kind of warrior exchange in human history class.
Jei’s green-blue eyes burned in the still shot, his jaw set. He looked so … determined? Angry? So miserable. She almost reached out to—what, touch the picture’s face?
Lem shook her head, gripping her hair. She’d bought them time, but she’d basically given the Growen the Hiding Place. She had to stop the ambush. That she had caused.
Or rescue Jei?
Oh bloodseas.
She choked, hand over her mouth, and blinked before her eyes could wet. No, Lem needed to find Her before She could act again. If She could control Frelsi technology only one base at a time, She had to be within some kind of standard computing transmission distance from Luna-Guetala. Lem had never been taught in school how transmission technology worked, or how information traveled across the galaxy with only a couple of days’ lag time, but she knew if there was no lag your call came from the same solar system. That meant for right now, She was somewhere between Alpino here, and the neighboring double-planet. Maybe—
Oh gosh brain please shut up. She had to figure out how to mask these thoughts. I only want to save Jei because he would make a great asset to the Growen someday. And it’s not in the cause’s best interest for public affairs to kill off children in the safe house. The United Growen Front will survive better with Diebol in charge, not Her. I’m trying to help. I promise, I’m trying to help.
Lem jumped to her feet as someone splooshed through the polymerwall. Shyte, Diebol, not now.
He was a whirlwind. “Johnson, I don’t have much time, but I just wanted to say I appreciated your input tonight,” he said, just tapping the table. “Thank you for trying to let bygones be bygones and thinking big picture.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
He tilted his head with the same almost quizzical face, tapped the table again and turned to leave.
“Wait, Diebol—”
He turned and paused. “Yes, Johnson?”
Her mouth hung open. She wanted to just ask him what to do. Where She was. How to fix this. But now she knew even the top generals didn’t know Her.
“Is there anyone at the table that you trust?” she asked finally.
“No,” he shrugged. “You?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”