CHAPTER THREE
Jei—Four Months Ago
I didn’t have a problem schmoozing the magistrate about my outdated Growen ID; I’d become separated from my platoon, you see, abandoned for dead in these snowy wastelands, living for months on pegasus flesh and frozen smungworms, and finally when I’d found this spider-faced Baricella slave I’d forced it to tell me the way to civilization. Oh, and my transmitter broke so I couldn’t call home. If I could borrow one and get passage, please—?
I spent most of the day faking complicated arrangements to get home and keeping Growen soldiers distracted; meanwhile Lem rallied the slaves, analyzed weak points, and picked an assault plan from the templates Command had suggested before plausible deniability required cutting off communication with us.
Now, starlight glinted off my helmet, sparkling on the tin shed behind me and washing the white crest of feathers on Lem’s head with a soft glow as she emerged from the narrow shadows of the fur-covered slave-huts clustered in the dirty snow. I stamped my feet and rubbed my gloved hands together as she neared the fence.
“Thirty-two women in an unmarked grave,” I said.
“Never forget, and never lose hope,” she said back, identifying herself with our password answer for the evening. I turned to pace outside the perimeter of the fence, and she, inside, followed me trailing a spindly, fuzzy fingernail along the rusted metal barbs.
“Are they ready?” I asked.
“Almost. They’re rounding up their kids near the back gate right now.”
“Good.” Once we broke into the weapons storehouse under the weapons factory, we’d arm the adults and start a skirmish to draw the blitzers to the front gate. The kids would escape out the back and hide in the woods until the fighting stopped, and I hoped in this twilight the naturally nocturnal spider-face people—the Baricellas—would have an advantage against their day-hungry human overlords. Easy freedom for them, and one less Growen-controlled weapons complex for us. Even if the Growen tried to come back, as long as the Baricellas technically owned this place the Frelsi could defend them. Maybe we’d even negotiate a new arms contract for ourselves with the slaves-turned-owners.
The steel of my heated knife glowed orange-red and sizzled through the wire fence; Lem squeezed out and trotted ahead of me with a soft cr-crun-cr-crun-cr-crun on the old snow. My boots thudded behind her, slow and heavy and armored, and I couldn’t wait to get out of this thing. The slave-captor dynamic turned my stomach.
No blitzers yet. Most of the guards would stay away from the slave compounds and cluster around the factory. We’d fight them there.
Cr-crun-cr-crun-cr-crun …
The shadow of a wide, tapered tower stretched toward us across snow that otherwise sparkled in the yellow glow from the light over the metal shed at the tower base. The weapons storehouse. There was another, smaller shadow, in front of the door.
A single slave.
“Ambush,” Lem whispered, reaching behind her back for the short staff wrapped under the sash around her waist. “He’s bait.” Like her, I armed myself and checked my peripherals as we slowed our approach.
“What do you want here, human?” announced the slave as loudly as possible.
“Shhh!” Lem lowered her palms as if waving down his volume dial. “He’s with us!”
“Not him, you!”
Lem kept advancing, looking around for the inevitable trap. “Wow, good call. Yeah, I’m wearing something like a hologram projector.”
“I can’t even tell,” he scoffed. “We can’t see in that light frequency. If you wanted to fool us you should’ve altered your heat signature.”
“Well, I’m not trying to fool you, I’m trying to fool the humans. Enter the code and open the door, let’s get this revolution started.”
The slave’s face appendages crossed. “No.”
Lem looked around again. I raised my weapon, watching behind us. “Are you kidding me?” Lem whispered.
“Just because you would not choose this way of life does not give you the right to come in here and overthrow our government.”
“Government? These guys kidnapped your parents and forced them to work for free! That’s not government we’re down with.” We were close enough for Lem to check the guy for wires, chains, some kind of explosive device holding him hostage; I hung back and watched our six, wondering why it was taking her so long to find the trigger point. She looked back at me and shook her head in confused near-panic. I approached to check for her—he couldn’t actually mean what he said.
“You underestimate my age, human. I remember what it was like before the Growen. I remember crawling through the underbrush of the orange leaves, licking the dirt for the husks of dead grubs to soothe my aching belly. Now I eat meat every day.”
The X-ray pointing at him from my Growen helmet came back negative. No explosives, not even inside him. The hell?
I started to stammer, caught myself, and said: “We’re just trying to give you some agency here, sir.”
“Agency? Do you really think we need two humans to save us? Do you really think we can’t rescue ourselves? It’s not our freedom if you give it to us.”
“We’re working with over a hundred of your own leaders to make this happen!”
“They are fools. Young fools.” The slave backed up to where we couldn’t touch him, still blocking the entrance to the weapons depot with his body. Lem looked at me as if asking for permission to knock him out. I waved her down—two humans attacking a Baricella could look like betrayal to the others hiding in the shadows. He went on: “Our free healthcare, our safety, our food supplies all come to us from the Growen. There was a revolt here twenty years ago and within a month of that anarchy everyone almost starved to death.”
“So you leave, and move back to your homeland—where they stole your parents from, if you remember,” Lem gritted her teeth.
“Our homeland? Our homeland?” The slave burst into loud, boisterous laughter that made me raise my weapon. We needed to get into the weapons depot before the blitzers poured down on us. “Most of the people in this camp grew up here,” the slave said. “The homeland they imagine is a polluted forest of fools in constant war with nature. If you want to send us back to the darkness, you shall have to go through me.”
Lem and I stared at each other at a loss. She looked terrified in her perplexity, but I put on a knowing face, as if I had an answer to his every claim. He was out-voted by his peers, and vote or not the Frelsi needed this weapons depot out of Growen hands. Saving my home planet mattered, too.
So I waved Lem to the side, to block the view with her body, and I stepped up and shot him myself.
He collapsed as the stun cartridge delivered a sudden exhaustive blast to the sarcoplasmic reticulum in his muscles, draining them of the calcium he needed to move; I propped up his falling body to use his claw to buzz us into the weapons depot.
But his claw didn’t have access to the building. He smiled, and opened his palm as he went limp.
A silent alarm trigger clattered to the ground.
“We have a problem,” Lem and I both said at the same time as a mob of blitzers approached from beyond the wire fence.
Shyte.
I tried the stunned Baricella’s claw on the sensor again as hurried Growen footfalls crunched in the crispy snow. Blitzers shouted from the shadows of the squat, fur-roofed concrete buildings around the fenced-in factory field—
With no answer from us, they opened fire. Lem squeezed against me and the doorjamb for cover as she fired back; colorful, oxidizing kill cartridges pinged and zapped around us. The blitzers couldn’t cross the empty lot without leaving cover, but we weren’t in a great position ourselves—“Try it my way!” Lem shouted.
Ugh, fine. With a long sigh I fired my weapon into the door—it blasted open around me with such suddenness, the stunned Baricella and I fell on top of each other through the entrance.
Icy concrete floor slammed against me. Above towered conical walls honeycomb’d with weapons shelves … all empty.
The weapons depot was empty?
Shyte. Lem slipped into the tower after me; a blitzer charged behind her. I rolled off the Baricella, flattened my belly against the cold floor, and steadied my aim with my elbows.
“Looks like we’ve been played,” I said as I fired.
“Someone has,” Lem said.
The blitzer fell forward, and behind him—
“Oh, that’s why it’s empty in here.” I laughed in relief, flopping over onto my back. “Whew.”
The blitzers were surrounded by Baricella armed with enormous, glowing blue tentacled cannons.
“We figured Major would betray us, so as soon as you brought us your promise of alliance we set him up,” the youngest Baricella rebel called out to us with the biggest, twitchiest spider-face grin as the blitzers raised their hands. “I mean, come on, he took a human name.”
“He had a choice of names, and he chose that one?” I shouted back.
The rebel let out a joyful whoop—more of a stinging creak, like fingernails on steel, to human ears. I winced, laughed, and threw up my hand for a high five to Lem, job well done.
She did nothing.
“Lem?”
Lem looked at the Baricellas rounding up the blitzers, at the occasional execution shot, and at the unconscious body lying on the ground beside me.
“Hey. Lem.”
She shook her head. “Yeah. It’s all good. I just realized something, is all.”
“Hey, we liberated the camp. We can contact Command to get resources to the freed Baricella. We saved the day.” I whacked her boot with the back of my hand. “Lem, you can take off the spider-face disguise.”
She touched behind her ear, and the tentacle-face appendages faded away, leaving the mahogany, small-chinned, wide-eyed fighter, staring down at the unconscious traitor.
“What do you do when they don’t want to be saved?” she wondered aloud.
I didn’t answer. I knew she wasn’t asking me.