The way she said it, the desolate gravity in her tone…
“What the hell’s going on with you?” he asked before his better mind had time to massage the words into something softer. “What did…”
No. Probably better not to mention Alton specifically and launch her into the defensive stratosphere.
He softened his tone. “Did something happen?”
The stiffening of her posture and the edge that crept into her eyes told him his caution had been insufficient.
Defenses fully engaged.
“We need to go,” was all she said as she pushed past him for the door.
“Rachel.”
She paused in the doorway but didn’t look back.
“Thank you,” he said. “For saving me back there.”
“You shouldn’t have needed saving—shouldn’t have…”
Tension built in her shoulders and flooded out in a heavy sigh. Finally, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Come on. They’re probably starting.”
She set off into the hallway without waiting for his response.
Jarek watched her go with an unpleasant swirling of frustration, failure, and flabbergast.
“Man,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“Chin up, sir,” Al said in his earpiece. “It’s only the end of the world.”
Resistance HQ’s council room was about as impressive in its grandeur as your average basement, but Rachel supposed they weren’t there to admire the decor. They were, as far as she could tell, there to talk Furor 101 with Professor Alton Parker and to generally go weak in the knees at just how screwed they seemed to be right now.
“You’re telling us that the rakul could use these messengers to drive an entire damn planet insane if they wanted to?” asked a hard-faced Commander Nelken, still sporting the leg brace the doctor had put him in after a hefty hunk of the common room ceiling had come down on him in Zar’Golga’s attack.
Rachel watched Alton exchange an uncertain look with Drogan and Lietha, who’d come either at Krogoth’s behest to learn what they knew or maybe just to hold their sad little human hands through the scare.
She waited for an answer, knowing damn well she wouldn’t be able to believe any of it for the absolute truth.
It wasn’t just that she couldn’t trust a word out of any of their mouths. Sure, despite everything else, she couldn’t ignore that Alton and the others had never seemed to intentionally lie (as far as she knew, at least). But the problem was more that she wasn’t so sure any of them could be considered credible sources after Alton had fallen prey to the furor himself—a detail that hadn’t yet been brought to the council’s attention.
“The entire planet would be a stretch,” Alton finally said. “But something on the scale of a city is possible.”
“This is not standard practice for the rakul,” Drogan added. He looked irritated to be wasting his time listening to the humans dither, and Lietha even more so. “Perhaps they suspect humans are more easily swayed by such tactics than the species they’ve preyed upon in the past.”
That started a round of murmurs from the attending council members.
“Helpful, Stumpy,” Jarek murmured in his seat next to Rachel.
No one else in the room could have heard him—except for a raknoth.
Lietha frowned in Jarek’s direction, but Drogan’s lips twitched upward in mild amusement.
To his credit, Alaric didn’t seem the least bit perturbed as he replied from the commanders’ table. “Well, seeing as they may decide to make it standard practice against our people, what is there to be done about it, aside from cloaking everyone we can?”
Lietha showed teeth that looked just a little too sharp to be human. “Humans cannot rampage if they are dead.”
The murmurs caught fire.
At least until Rachel called, “And we could say the same thing for the raknoth, couldn’t we?”
That shut everyone up nice and quick.
“Are you implying the raknoth could experience similar… symptoms in future events?” Commander Daniels asked from the head table.
Rachel half-expected Jarek to give her a little leg kick or otherwise tell her to shush up until they had a proper handle on this thing, but he was too busy looking at her like he’d only just seen her for the first time.
“Careful, Rachel,” a voice murmured in her mind. Haldin. “I know you’re angry, but think what this could do to the alliance.”
“Any sentient mind could theoretically fall prey to telepathic attack,” someone was saying out loud. Haldin again, she realized.
Jesus, how much control did he have?
“Hound, human, raknoth,” Haldin continued, “all technically fair game, except—”
“Except that raknoth are not so easily overwhelmed as humans,” Lietha said. “Telepathically or otherwise.”
That started another round of conversation—this one much less murmured and much more inflammatory. Rachel couldn’t say she blamed the council for getting irritated with this shit.
Haldin shot Lietha his own irritated look then glanced back to Rachel, probably wondering if she was about to blow the lid on Alton’s slip-up.
She thought about it. They probably deserved it, and she wasn’t sure she was doing anyone any favors keeping it quiet for now.
But something about the way Jarek was looking at her gave her pause.
“Enough,” Nelken’s voice boomed through the room, restoring some order before she could further stir the pot. Nelken joined Haldin in scowling at Lietha. “Need I remind you that your continued existence is contingent upon ours?”
Drogan shot a warning look at Lietha. “We do not forget so easily.”
“On the bright side,” Haldin said into the tense silence, “our cloaking fields do seem to dull the effects to some extent. It wasn’t a surefire switch out there today, but most of the people near us eventually regained their senses once we had them covered.”
Alton bobbed his head, latching onto Haldin’s lifeline. “The messengers could feasibly penetrate the cloaks to some degree, depending on the quality of the work and the individuals they’re protecting, but I imagine they’d offer sufficient protection in many cases. That said, those already affected by the furor may not simply recover once they’ve been cut off from the signal, so to speak.”
“As in, they may be psychologically damaged by these attacks?” Commander Daniels asked.
“It’s entirely possible,” Alton said. “And those who aren’t may still take some time to calm down.”
That might have explained Rachel’s experience with the lone berserker who’d charged into Michael’s room early on in the chaos. It was hard to say for sure, as she’d pinned him to the wall and forced his mind into unconsciousness before he could hurt anyone, but she’d thought she’d glimpsed a hint of sanity just before she’d taken him down.
Jarek’s ruckus with Alton had started down the hall before she’d had much chance to think about it.
“Outside of somehow mass producing and distributing glyph stamps,” Nelken said, looking between her and Haldin, “is there anything we can do to protect people on a large scale in the event of another attack?”
Protect entire cities of scattered people from unbelievably powerful telepaths? No problem, right?
At least Nelken seemed to have taken it to heart when she’d told him a week earlier that she wasn’t even sure how their old glyph stamp device would have worked, much less how to make one. Of course, Nelken hadn’t been able to offer much in the way of explanation either, other than that theirs had passed through several different hands prior to reaching them—several hands who apparently knew little more than that the thing had been crafted by a man named Ren.
Luckily—or not—Haldin looked less dubious at Nelken’s question than Rachel felt. “We could make bigger versions of our cloaking pendants to cover, say, a building at a time,” he said. “Maybe even entire
blocks.”
Yeah. Of course they could. Except that powering such a monstrosity would require more energy than—
“It’s mostly a matter of how much power we can feed them,” Haldin continued. “The demands get pretty high pretty fast.” He turned to Rachel. “How many arcanists do you know?”
“None that are still alive, as far as I know.”
“Guess we have some work to do, then,” Haldin said.
“And little time in which to do it,” Alton added.
That started a slow wave of uneasy murmurs until Nelken called the room back to order and turned the discussion to the matters of non-lethal options for dealing with future furors and lethal ones for dealing with the rakul.
For the latter, Drogan finally saw fit to fill the council in on limited details of their forces’ preparations. Krogoth had his men building a variety of traps in the old central park across the river, where Krogoth was hoping to force the confrontation. Only a quarter of the roughly eighty raknoth on Earth had given any promise, however tenuous, of standing beside them in battle. Of particularly concerning absence from that list were Zar’Taga, with his clan of ten raknoth, and that prick Nan’Ashida, who had no raknoth with him but controlled a considerable army of humans.
Rachel had begun to tune out when, midway through Drogan’s report, Lietha glanced down at his comm and hurriedly left the council room. That alone didn’t seem so weird, but when Drogan hastened to conclude his spiel and promptly marched through the double doors after his companion, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder what was going on.
She leaned closer to Jarek. “Do you think—”
“We should follow them? Methinks yes.”
Not exactly what she’d been about to say, but she didn’t disagree, either. If something was up again this soon…
She ignored the look of irritation from Nelken as well as the looks of suspicious curiosity from the gathered council members and followed Jarek to the back. The double doors closed behind them to cut off what sounded to be a fascinating discussion of the Resistance armory’s current non-lethal inventory.
Hell, maybe the two raknoth had just been supremely bored.
But the tense look Drogan and Lietha were exchanging just down the hallway didn’t look like a case of the post-meeting yawns. Their eyes were both emitting soft crimson. Something had them agitated.
Drogan caught sight of them and turned without a word to shuffle Lietha along toward the exit.
“What gives, Stumpy?” Jarek asked, speaking at normal volume though Drogan and Lietha were well down the hallway. “Don’t pretend like you can’t hear me. You’re gonna frighten the children walking around like that, man.”
Fela’s sensors must’ve picked up some reply from Drogan, because Jarek chuckled. “Tell me how you really feel, buddy.”
He made a micro-flinch as he said the last word and shot her a surreptitious glance. She was too focused on the questions in her head to understand why at first.
Buddy. There it was again.
Whatever. She sure as hell didn’t want to restart that conversation anytime soon. And in the meanwhile, she wasn’t cool with being left out of this one.
She cleared her throat and reached out to unceremoniously swat at the two raknoth minds with her own.
Both raknoth frowned back at her.
“We can talk in the ship,” Jarek said. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Drogan and Lietha paused and shared a glance that made her think they were communicating telepathically, probably so Jarek wouldn’t overhear.
What the hell had them so wound up?
Lietha looked supremely irritated as Jarek and Rachel caught up to them and the raknoth broke off from whatever private conversation they were having.
“Very well,” Drogan said to Jarek. “We will talk. But it must be quick. And discreet.”
“Stumpy”—Jarek clapped a shoulder to Drogan’s hand, drawing an immediate scowl from the raknoth—“that’s the only way I know how to do things.”
8
“Okay,” Jarek said when the ramp of his ship had sealed behind them with the odd groan-clack one-two it had adopted since he and Pryce had resurrected the craft from its unfortunate tumble with Zar’Golga. “Just us now, Stumpy. So, again, what gives?”
Drogan and Lietha traded a look, and Lietha answered instead. “My Zar has made contact with Kul’Gada.”
“That’s what he stayed to do, right?” Jarek asked. The last he’d seen Zar’Kole, the raknoth had looked like he’d been fixing to go ask a lion to stop eating meat. “So what happened?”
“He stayed,” Lietha said.
“Yeah,” Jarek said. “That’s what I—wait, what do you mean?”
“He intends to meet Kul’Gada in peace.”
“Guy stomps out three fleeing raknoth and Kole wants to meet him in person to talk?”
Lietha looked at Drogan instead of answering Jarek. “We cannot allow this to pass. Kul’Gada is impetuous, temperamental. He will cut my Zar down for daring to even suggest a negotiation.”
“Zar’Kole knows the nature of the monster he thinks to face,” Drogan said. “Better than any of us.”
“You will do nothing, then?” Lietha demanded. “You will let the greatest of our Zars die?”
Drogan dropped Lietha’s crimson glare. “I did not say that.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Jarek asked. “Rally the troops. Scramble the squad. Call the guy for Christ’s sake.”
“He will not answer,” Lietha said.
“And Krogoth will not send raknoth to aid a Zar who chooses to risk his life so,” Drogan added.
“Can you blame him?” Rachel asked, speaking for the first time since they’d headed out for the ship.
Jarek considered her, wondering yet again exactly what had transpired between her and Alton.
She stared right back in quiet challenge.
Rachel’s lack of raknoth love aside, Jarek couldn’t really argue that Kole wasn’t acting like a bit of an unreasonable old bastard right now.
“What about the rest of Kole’s guys?” he asked, turning back to Lietha, who was openly glaring at Rachel. “They’re all just twiddling their thumbs while he goes off to tame the big scary monster?”
“The rest of our clan are far more obedient than I,” Lietha said. “They worship our Zar’s wisdom as if it were divine law. They will not stop him. I am surprised the youngest of our Nans even dared to go as far as to inform me of the Zar’s decision.”
“Well… shit!” Jarek said. “When is this going down? How much time do we have?”
“I do not know,” Lietha said. “Nan’Alnar only told me that the Kul draws near.”
“And Krogoth can’t reach out to him?”
“Krogoth is no great admirer of Kole’s,” Drogan said. “I doubt he would greatly lament his loss.”
Great. Clan politics. A bunch of multi-millennia-year-old beings and it all still came down to the same petty crap.
“And you would?” Rachel asked.
Drogan tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Zar’Kole is as honorable and strong as he is cunning and wise.”
“Clearly,” Rachel muttered.
Lietha bristled and took a step toward Rachel. “You dare ques—”
Drogan barred Lietha’s way. “Current decisions aside,” he said, glaring at Rachel, “Zar’Kole is an admirable leader. His loss would do us no favors.”
Jarek didn’t doubt that, but was it worth risking more necks trying to pull his peaceful old ass out of the fire? Objectively, he was pretty sure they should sit back and let Zar’Kole martyr himself to his scaly heart’s content.
Hell, maybe Kole would even get somewhere. Maybe they’d sign the Great Rak-Rak Treaty of 2042 and the rakul would shrug, say, “Hey, not worth the effort,” and stomp away to let their wayward raknoth and their lowly human blood bags sort out their own considerable shit.
But probably not.
And as much as he�
��d like to wash his hands of the situation and focus on preparing to fight the rakul alongside those allies who didn’t appear to have a death wish—not to mention handling the new rage-pocalypse on the home front—he couldn’t quite shut out that damned noisy conscience of his telling him that Kole was worth saving, raknoth or no. And moral dilemmas aside, if Kole was half as strong as Zar’Golga had been, they’d be wanting him on their side.
“We need to go get him,” Jarek said.
The only question was whether he could convince the commanders to see it that way. He was about to voice his concern when Al spoke quietly in his earpiece.
“Commander Weston is coming, sir.”
“Shit,” Jarek mumbled.
The surprised looks trained on him turned to curious ones.
“Our disappearance has not gone unnoticed, methinks,” he said.
Maybe this was a good thing. Alaric had met Kole, had seen that he was strong and reasonable and probably far more likely to win the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the Resistance. If anyone in Resistance command would be willing to lay it on the line to keep the old Zar alive, it would be Alaric, right?
Jarek crossed the cabin and slapped the hatch switch. The ramp gave an indignant pair of clacks and began its mournful descent to reveal Alaric standing at its edge, looking as if he’d been about to reach up and knock on the ship’s hull.
“Howdy there, cowboy,” Jarek called. “Just the man we wanted to see.”
Alaric shifted his suspicious stare from Jarek to the raknoth and back again, jaw steadily chomping on a mouthful of chew all the while. “Somehow I doubt that,” he finally said, plodding up the ramp. “Anyone care to tell me what’s going on?”
“Jarek was about to propose something stupid,” Rachel said.
“I resent that,” Jarek said.
And, joking tone aside, he really did—not so much because of her words as the aggressive tone behind them.
This shit was starting to get old fast.
“We’ve got a Kole problem,” Jarek added to Alaric, trying to keep his head in the game.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 61