Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  No. Wind. Wind now.

  On her brittle knees, clenching her teeth through the pain, Nikaya hauled the wounded bat toward the front of the bus. The wood chips littering the floor stuck to his fur. Outside, the screaming continued as the bats tried to break through the net. Nikaya kept moving. Nothing else mattered. If this bat was lying about the bus, she would snap her teeth around his neck while his hot blood spurted into her mouth.

  Outside, the wolves marched through the camp. After spending so many months with scrawny bats and wiry badgers, the towering wolves looked like massive, unnatural beasts to Nikaya. Some of them carried bows and arrows; others sported rifles. One of them walked by Geller and yanked the arrow from his neck. The wolf popped the arrowhead into his mouth, slurped the blood, and then clipped it to his belt.

  At her feet, Gaunt tore out the wiring beneath the steering wheel. For what felt like forever, the bat fiddled with the wires, baring his teeth when they failed to cooperate.

  Something slammed against the rear door. Gaunt tried to crawl under the dashboard while Nikaya scrambled to the first seat. She poked her head into the aisle to see one of the wolves sniffing at the entrance. He barked, summoning the others. Then he walked along the side of the bus. He wore a hood made of animal skin. His muscular arms were shaved bare, covered in tattoos. In his thick hands, he carried an assault rifle, laced with leaves for camouflage. In a few seconds, he would reach the side door.

  Nikaya reached to the floor and grasped one of the branches she had left there, for all the good it would do.

  With a loud belching noise, the bus engine turned over. The wolf froze. The camp fell silent. Nikaya turned to Gaunt. With his slender, pincerlike fingers, he tapped the wires together again. The engine roared to life. A plume of smoke shot from the tailpipe. Gaunt slid into the seat. No point in hiding now.

  The barking started. Voices shouted. Magazines reloaded, metal clinking against metal. Nikaya lunged for the steering wheel. She grabbed the gear shift, wrenched it into the drive position, and then stomped on the gas pedal. The wheels rolled over the logs that kept them in place. The rocking motion nearly knocked her over.

  It took both of them to spin the wheel—it must have run out of steering fluid long ago. “Take that path!” she said.

  Bullets and arrows pinged off the steel plating on the front, popping through the metal, each hole bursting open like a bright new star. Several wolves jumped out of the way as the bus lumbered onto the dirt road, passing the inferno engulfing the barracks.

  The wolf on the side of the bus latched onto the door. For once, Nikaya was grateful for the door being rusted shut. But then, the wolf gripped the handle and tore out the top hinge, creating an opening that was large enough to reach inside.

  A bullet punctured the rear tire, making the vehicle fishtail into a tree. Pine needles showered the roof.

  Gripping the tree branch, Nikaya bit into it and spit out the wood. Beside her, Gaunt struggled to maintain control of the wheel. Another tire went out. Other wolves raced alongside, aiming into the windows.

  Nikaya whittled the branch into a smooth spike and lifted it like a spear. The wolf’s furry head leaned inside the bus. He would squeeze his way through.

  His eyes met hers. This was no wolf. It was a human. He wore the pelt of a wolf wrapped around his head so that his face appeared in its gaping mouth.

  Nikaya drove the spear toward his chest. He twisted his body to avoid it, but was too late. The spike sank into his shoulder. The man grunted and fell away.

  The bus jolted on the uneven road, toward the river. Gaunt turned the wheel to the right. The vehicle spun out of control. Nikaya felt her stomach go weightless as the bus lifted and then tipped over. She fell on top of the bat, who squealed under her weight.

  She felt the wolves’ feet slamming the dirt, getting closer.

  And she smelled the water.

  Shoving Gaunt away from her, Nikaya headed for the doorway. But the bat hooked its wings around her like a hideous leather vest.

  “Get off me!”

  Wind, he screeched. Wind now.

  She did not have the time to fight him off. Instead, she climbed out the door, noting the enormous claw marks scraped into the bare metal. Impossible, she thought. An arrow clattered against the bus. She spilled out with the bat gripping her, screeching in her ear about wind.

  Nikaya crawled to the scent of water, toward a ravine that dipped into the river valley. So close. It called to her. Here, she could fly. She was young again. No ratwings here, no politics, no humans, no wolves. Only the sound of the water, the light on the surface. The water flows. The water flows.

  She tumbled down the hill, feeling twigs breaking against her hide. A rock poked her ribs as she landed hard on a muddy bank. The water rushed so loud she thought it was coming from inside of her skull. With the bat still clinging to her, she rolled in with a splash. A cold shock braced her. She kicked her feet, flicked her tail. She became part of the river once more.

  Chapter 5

  Echo

  Falkirk knelt in the last row of the chapel, his elbows propped on the pew in front of him. The engines hummed through the floor. Near the front of the room, a human crew member in an aquamarine jumpsuit prostrated himself before an oil painting of the Prophet Michael, surrounded by a garish gold-plated frame adorned with flowers. The image depicted the Prophet in a white robe, reaching out his arms, thin rather than frail. A dark smudge stained the Prophet’s chest where all the worshippers would touch the painting on their way out. It allowed them to connect with Michael and to remind themselves that although the spirit had left his body, his soul was free. The Prophet would remain with them even here, onboard the airship Vesuvius, nearly ten thousand feet above the ground.

  The man got to his feet, wiped his eyes. He kissed his forefingers and then pressed them to the Prophet’s heart. After whispering a few words, he headed for the door. Falkirk suddenly remembered the man’s name: LeClerq, a Canadian who worked in engineering. A replacement for one of the people lost in the battle. The man nodded at Falkirk on his way out. There was no saluting in the chapel, not even for the captain.

  Once the door closed, the humming grew louder. Falkirk’s knees ached, so he shifted to the pew. His blue jacket crinkled over his fur. The uniform had never fit him. It was meant for a human, much like his rank.

  He began his prayer as he always did, by giving thanks to God and by promising to live by the example of the Prophet. And then he spoke to his family. Amelia and Yeager, his two pups. Sierra, his mate. He would see them again someday. For now, he could only speak to them. And he could try to listen for a response.

  “Sierra, Amelia, Yeager—watch over me,” he whispered. “I have not forgotten you.”

  He immediately felt guilty for saying that. Of course he had not forgotten them. He spoke their names every day. And yet he had lived without them almost as long as he had lived with them. Their presence dimmed over time. He could not stop it. Coming here, speaking their names, merely delayed the inevitable.

  “I know you needed me and I wasn’t there,” he said. “And now I need you.” He let out a tiny whimper, like a husky pup unable to find his mother after waking from a long sleep. It sounded so pathetic he almost expected the Prophet to roll his eyes in his painting.

  “I’m still here,” he said. “I’m still living this life without you. I didn’t ask for it. But it’s happening. It’s pulling me away from you. I’ll be a different person when we meet again. I’m so sorry for that. There are so many things I wish I could undo. And then—”

  The door to the chapel opened. Harris, the petty officer from the bridge, stepped inside. He found Falkirk and nodded. Falkirk composed himself. His tail settled into place. He perked up his ears to show that he was a happy dog, a good boy. These humans liked that. It made them feel safe.

  He turned to the painting and
mouthed the words, “Watch over me.” Then he stood, straightened his jacket, and headed for the door.

  Harris waited until Falkirk reached the hallway before saluting. A bead of sweat rolled along his freckled temple.

  “We’re in range, sir,” Harris said.

  “Ahead of schedule,” Falkirk said, without hiding his disappointment.

  Moments later, Falkirk entered the sliding door to the bridge, where the enormous crescent-shaped window provided a view of the countryside at dawn. The ship faced west, away from the rising sun. The evergreens below took on a grayish color in the winter, with their crowns dabbed in snow. Near the window, on the lower tier of the bridge, Ensign Unoka gripped the wheel while his copilot marked the coordinates on a tablet.

  With Harris beside him, Falkirk entered at the top tier, where the crew’s stations formed a half circle along the walls. Ruiz, his first officer, leaned over the communications panel, pointing to something on the screen. The orangutan Bulan read out a series of numbers to him while she fiddled with her headset. Beside her, O’Neill signed an order on a clipboard and handed it to one of the crew members, who then returned to his engineering post. There, a schematic of the airship rotated on the monitor, its two balloons resembling a giant double-barrel shotgun. O’Neill swiveled in her chair toward her own computer. The screen lit her pale face, making her appear like a ghost lingering over the console.

  Harris cleared his throat to get the attention of the young enlisted man near the door. The man flinched when he saw Falkirk. “Captain on the bridge!” he said.

  Upon hearing this, Ruiz swiped a binder from one of the stations and rushed over to Falkirk. A gold oak leaf on the breast of his jacket indicated his recent promotion to lieutenant commander. At the ceremony, Ruiz had shared some of his father’s homemade rum, brewed before the war. He did not have any himself, choosing instead to share the last of it with his new family. For all the difficulties of this assignment, moments like that reminded Falkirk that he could belong here if he stuck with it long enough.

  “Good morning, sir,” Ruiz said. “How did you sleep?”

  “Better,” Falkirk lied.

  Ruiz led him to O’Neill’s console, where the screen displayed an overhead view of the area. For the first time since the tentative peace talks with the Lupine Confederacy, the Vesuvius was flying over wolf country. Even stranger, the wolves themselves requested it, something that must have mystified the politicians in Hosanna. The clans wanted to track a separatist group, the Mudfoot, that was trying to undermine the peace deal. In the last month alone, the separatists had overrun two wolf dens and a garrison controlled by the bats. Only an eye in the sky could do the job. Falkirk could imagine the bitter argument that must have ensued before the pack elders decided to ask Hosanna for help.

  Thousands of feet below stood the border village of Cadejo, a colony of dogs founded a few years earlier. The high-powered cameras zoomed in on the hovels and shacks constructed from shaved logs and pine branches. The screen briefly switched to an infrared image.

  “No heat signatures detected,” O’Neill said. “The town’s empty.”

  “All right,” Falkirk said. “That’s what we expected. New heading. Sixteen degrees.”

  “Aye, sir,” Ruiz said. He relayed the command to Unoka. The engines hummed in a new pitch as the ship spun slightly north to the outpost in the hills.

  “We should arrive at Camp Echo in eight minutes,” O’Neill said.

  On the screen, Cadejo rotated as the ship changed course. Soon, the town slid offscreen, sinking into the endless forest.

  “No bodies,” Ruiz whispered to Falkirk.

  Falkirk stopped himself from saying, “Not yet.” Ruiz had served in the failed occupation of this territory. The day before, he had briefed the senior staff about his experience in Cadejo years ago, when the occupation collapsed. To provide cover for the retreat, Ruiz was part of an interspecies unit that spent several nights there fending off the enemy. Holding Cadejo was one of the few victories in the entire campaign, but it came at a heavy cost. The villagers blamed Hosanna for not responding sooner. During the withdrawal near the end of the conflict, an old sheepdog hurled a rock at Ruiz’s unit, not even caring if they turned around and shot her.

  “I’m going pull up some more of the town’s records on my com,” Falkirk said. “Keep me informed.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Falkirk took his seat in the middle of the bridge. A hot mug of tea waited for him in the cupholder. Ignoring it, he tapped the tablet on the arm of his chair, and the screen glowed white. He scrolled through a menu to get to the Sanctuary Union archives. A search window appeared. Falkirk made it halfway through the word Cadejo before he stopped. All around him, the bridge grew quiet, save for a few mumbled orders and the thrum of the engines. He glanced at the crew members. They went about their tasks: typing on keyboards, plotting courses, tweaking dials, and pulling levers.

  No one was watching.

  Falkirk exited the archive screen and tapped the icon for the network—the crude newsfeed for the Sanctuary Union military. Three bulleted items appeared, the same ones from the previous few days. They were, in order, a vague report on the peace negotiations with the wolves, a story about an ongoing food riot in one of the canine neighborhoods, and a brief sentence about the progress of the maritime expedition.

  al-rihla reported missing northwest of golgotha.

  He tapped it. A new window opened, yet it repeated the same sentence, with a warning in all caps that the information was classified. When Falkirk first saw it earlier that week, he immediately tried to contact someone at Tranquility who would know something. He still had friends in the mechanic’s shop at headquarters—two rat brothers who saw everything, knew everyone. According to them, the al-Rihla had docked at Golgotha as scheduled. It maintained contact for a day or two. Then it sent a distress call and vanished. Falkirk did the math. The al-Rihla disappeared during the same unseasonable storm that grounded the Vesuvius. He remembered watching the airship from his apartment as it swayed in its dock at Liberty One Tower, resembling a kite ready to blow away in the wind. At that very moment, the more powerful end of the storm had swallowed the al-Rihla.

  And with it, D’Arc. And now he wondered if she would hear him if he prayed to a painting of a dead prophet.

  Despite an acute case of insomnia, Falkirk had kept his cool, even as Liberty One ordered them to stake out a position at the border. As usual, he embraced routine, diving into the tedium of inventory reports and briefing notes. He focused his mind. He gave thanks for what he had. No one suspected a thing.

  Falkirk hunched over the tablet and tapped the refresh button. The page reloaded with no new information. He tapped it again. Same result. It might stay that way forever. This one sentence could be the final word for these people.

  “Captain, we’ve located the refugees,” Ruiz said behind him.

  Falkirk closed out of the screen and stood. “Coordinates?”

  “North thirty-nine point eleven, west zero seventy-five point forty-three,” O’Neill said. “Logging it into the record.”

  At the console, Ruiz pointed to a trail cutting through the woods. A cluster of objects moved forward on it, each casting a small shadow.

  “About seventy people,” Ruiz said. “They’re retreating to Camp Echo.”

  “Finally,” Falkirk said.

  When the latest insurrection broke out in wolf country, Hosanna openly admitted that they could not guarantee the town’s safety. The dogs of Cadejo lived too close to the border, where the wolves often made runs into Sanctuary Union territory and then blamed a rival clan. The peace process depended on all of that coming to a halt. It required the clans to unite under a single banner. But without a formal agreement, a pack like the Mudfoot could simply cause trouble on a whim, and Cadejo would get caught in the middle. Better to hide them at the Camp Echo wh
ile the diplomats finished the job.

  “We detected some other movement,” Ruiz said. His finger brushed along the lower corner of the screen, where the forest grew thick. Falkirk leaned closer. A blurry object moved from one tree to another, taking cover behind the trunks.

  “Did you see it?” Ruiz asked.

  Another blur streaked through the trees before winking out. “Yes.”

  “Someone’s definitely stalking them,” Ruiz said.

  “They’re getting out just in time.”

  “Or they’re headed for an ambush,” Ruiz said. “That’s how these bastards do it.”

  Falkirk glanced at him.

  “Sorry, sir,” Ruiz said. “It’s just . . . I’ve seen it before.”

  “It’s fine. Go on.”

  Ruiz placed his hands over the screen in a V shape. “The wolves are trying to flush them out. This cone will get tighter and tighter.” As he took his hands away, two more yellow dots blinked on either side of the refugees. “See? The Mudfoot’s been waiting for this.”

  Falkirk exhaled through his snout, almost as loud as a horse. He pictured the gruesome images Ruiz described in his reports. Known as the most arrogant and vicious clan, the Mudfoot often tormented their prey. They ran their enemy through the forest in circles, letting them believe they could still escape. Prisoners would watch while the wolves ate their comrades. The males would paint themselves in blood while the females wore the bones as jewels.

  “Sir, we have established contact with Camp Echo,” Bulan said. She motioned to the microphone.

  “Camp Echo, this is Captain Falkirk of the Vesuvius. We’ve been ordered to monitor your position.”

  “Vesuvius, this is Major Quince,” a voice growled. An old cat. Female. He imagined her with an eyepatch, or only one ear.

  “Echo, do you have visual contact with the refugees?” Falkirk asked.

  “Visual contact made. We have scouts escorting them to the gates.”

  “There are Mudfoot in the area. Hiding in the trees.”