She scanned the room again until she found one of the tall, feathered aliens and gestured toward them. “That’s a Taiyok, right?”
“It is. I did promise you that you could meet one, didn’t I? Come on, if you’re feeling up to walking.”
“Are you kidding? I’m practically as good as new.” She pushed herself to standing as a cascade of gentle warnings erupted from her eVi. Yep, there was the dizziness. She inhaled through her nose and swayed back to lean against the cot.
Grant steadied her. “Never mind, we can do introductions later. You ought to lie back down.”
She started to shake her head vehemently, then thought better of it. “No, I’m okay. Just a bit of a head rush is all.” To prove it, she let go of the cot and strode off with minimal grace, leaving Grant to catch up.
He reappeared at her side a second later to shoot her a squirrelly glance as they neared the alien. “Xyche, do you have a minute?”
The Taiyok shifted away from a pile of small weapons he and two Asterions were sorting on a table. “What do you require of me?”
“I want to introduce you. Marlee, this is Xyche’ghael, a longtime ally of Nika and NOIR and now of the Initiative. Xyche, this is Marlee…Marano, right? She’s one of the Human representatives from Concord and was unlucky enough to get trapped here with us.”
“Ah, the laiti’manu arises. Good.”
She laughed, which provoked her cracked ribs into reminding her of their state. “ ‘Little bird’? I guess I can’t argue with that, though I try to be a fierce, um…manu’felelei whenever possible.”
The feathers framing the Taiyok’s beak-like mouth fluttered. “You understood me?”
Oh, dear. She hoped she wasn’t blushing. “I studied the files the Asterions provided to us on your species—especially your language—before I came to the Dominion. Alien languages are kind of my ‘thing.’ I’m not proficient yet, but let’s see…ou te tauma’fai.”
“And to you, laiti’manu.”
“Thank you. I no longer have access to the files due to the quantum block, so perhaps you can teach me more of your language? When there’s time.”
“Perhaps. But first, we have many tasks to perform. Grant, we need to retrieve more weapons from the DAF Command armory or from other bunkers. This supply is not sufficient to enable us to mount a defense should the Rasu arrive here.”
“I know it isn’t. I’ll talk to Joaquim.” Grant turned to her. “Which presents an opportunity for me to introduce you to Joaquim. I apologize in advance.”
“Whatever for?”
“You’ll see.”
In the far corner, the man Grant had pointed out earlier sat cross-legged on the floor between two women, one with long, flowing emerald hair and the other with shorter blond hair tied back in a tail. In front of them hovered a tetrahedron of slowly rotating…maps?
Joaquim reached up and grasped one of the maps to stop its spin. “We can take the tunnels here to get within eight hundred meters or so, but then we’ll have to go above to reach the building.”
“Which is instant suicide.”
“We don’t know that. What we do know is there are people pinned down in this building, and we need to get to them.”
The blonde woman leveled an impressively steely glare at Joaquim. “No, we know there were people pinned down there ten hours ago. I’m sorry, as I realize these are friends of yours, but the odds of them still being functional are minuscule.”
“Bullshit!” The emerald-haired woman leaned forward, radiating an impression of barely coiled violence. “They’re NOIR, and NOIR people are survivors. I didn’t think Justice Advisors were such cowards.”
The other woman didn’t seem fazed by what had sounded a lot like an insult. “No, Justice Advisors are smart. I can’t authorize an above-ground foray until I learn what the situation is up there.”
Joaquim threw his hands in the air. “You say that like you’re in charge or something.”
“I am in charge.”
“All evidence to the contrary. Come on, Ava. We can rescue Dominic and Josie ourselves.” Joaquim leapt to his feet and stormed off toward the weapons cache where Xyche was working; the woman—Ava, apparently—stood and followed him, which was when Marlee noticed that beneath a series of interlocking synthetic skin flaps that hung open, her left arm was literally a weapon. Wow. Asterions were so cool.
Grant held out a hand to halt her progress toward the group. “Or maybe we should do introductions later.”
The second woman, the one Joaquim had called a ‘Justice Advisor,’ scratched at her nose, sighed and stood as well, then spotted them and came over. “If your friend wants to get himself sliced up good and proper, I won’t get in his way, but I will not let him lead everyone else to the same fate.”
“I never said he was my friend.” Grant adopted a pained expression. “Though he kind of is. Anyway, good luck trying to stop him once he gets a mind to do something, even something stupid.”
“I’m picking up on that.” The woman pivoted to her and donned a perfunctory smile. “You’re awake. I’m glad. I’m Selene Panetier, Namino Justice Advisor.”
“Hi. You were at DAF Command, but we didn’t get a chance to speak. I’m Marlee Marano, Research Assistant for the Concord Consulate.”
“Selene’s most of the reason why you’re up and walking around.”
The woman shrugged. “Eh, it turns out we have most of the same body parts. I’m serious about Lacese, Grant. If he starts kicking up trouble here, we’ll have to deal with him.”
“I don’t disagree. But you need to realize, he’s a great fighter and a great leader…of fights.” He turned to Marlee. “You must be famished. We have a refrigeration unit stocked full of terrible food down the narrow hallway on the left back there.”
She was being excused from the conversation. But at the promise of food, her stomach grumbled. “I’ll get some, then. Thank you both again for rescuing me.”
She wandered off toward the hall Grant had indicated. The cramped, low-ceiling corridor led to several small rooms: a storage space, a working lavatory—thank goodness—and a kitchen.
She found the fridge and opened it, scowling as she surveyed its contents. She was indeed super grateful to Grant, Selene and anyone else who played a role in her rescue, but she hated needing to be rescued. Even from something as formidable as the Rasu. Her whole body hurt when she moved and hurt worse when she didn’t, but she hated being weak and damaged, especially in front of all these amazing aliens.
Her memory of the last few minutes of the attack started returning in muddled flashes of fire and smoke and giant ships darkening the sky. Lumbering metal beasts tearing through the streets with her in their sights.
She shivered involuntarily, though the bunker was stiflingly warm.
Well, Marlee, you wanted an adventure.
5
* * *
MIRAI
Omoikane Initiative
A frigid pall had settled over the Omoikane Initiative. Oh, people scrambled here and there, working diligently to track and manage evacuations, monitor deep space scanners across Dominion territory for further Rasu incursions and, more solemnly, begin a tally of the losses and what resources remained at their disposal.
You never knew how strong a person was going to prove to be until disaster struck, and most of the individuals in the room were proving themselves strong indeed. It was enough to make any self-respecting Asterion proud.
Nika Kirumase, however, felt as if she was cracking apart from the inside out. In her mind she kept seeing Joaquim and Ava disappear through the d-gate. She’d taken Dashiel’s hand and strode forward—and the passage vanished. She’d willed her feet to move faster, to sprint ahead and tumble through the d-gate and onto Namino soil. Two more seconds was all she’d needed!
Now the Rasu were rampaging across Namino and she was stuck here on Mirai, with the greater weight of the Advisors sitting here at the conference table looking desperat
ely to her for guidance. What was she supposed to say? Any of them were capable of running the government as well as she, but few if any were capable of fighting the Rasu. She was.
Two more seconds….
“Nika?”
She noted the faces of the other Advisors, alternately forlorn and shocked into an almost fugue state, then directed her attention to the highest-ranking military officer not dead or trapped on Namino, a Brigadier Johansson. “How many flight-worthy ships do we have remaining?”
The brigadier’s jaw twitched. “Eight, ma’am.”
“Eight…hundred?”
“No. Eight ships.”
She dropped her head into her hands atop the table. “Eight.”
“Yes, ma’am. And the only reason we have those eight is because Concord Commandant Solovy ordered our surviving ships to retreat.”
She breathed in through her nose, but it didn’t ease the throb from her pulse pounding angrily against her temples. “Eight.”
Dashiel’s hand landed gently on her knee. “Nika….”
“Don’t,” she growled through gritted teeth.
“I think I will. I understand that you’re upset, but how do you think I feel? Everything I’ve spent the last two months building is gone. Everything.”
She peered at him from behind splayed fingers. “Everything except eight warships.”
His eyes narrowed, and he jerked away from her.
Because he was hurting as much as she was. Dammit. “I’m sorry.” She reached out and touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
He finally shifted back to face her, giving her the poorest attempt at a smile she’d ever seen cross his features.
She had to pull herself together. For him. For Perrin and Adlai and Maris and Spencer and all the other important people in her life who were still here on this side of the broken d-gates with her. She had to trust in Joaquim to lead and protect those stranded on the other side until she could get to them.
She lifted her shoulders and clasped her hands properly atop the table. “I apologize to everyone. I realize we’re all hurting, but we have to find a way to move forward—to do everything we can to defend the people on the rest of our worlds. Dashiel, when will we have eight hundred ships?”
He sank lower in his chair. “All our existing military shipyards were destroyed in the attack. We were, however, in the process of building two additional shipyards here on Mirai, and they will be operational in two days.”
“Two days? That’s good news. By then Lance will be back up and with us, and we can…” the darkening expression on his face suggested it wasn’t such good news after all “…what?”
“Ninety percent of our component assembly facilities were also located on or above Namino. I know, Lance was right, and we should have diversified to make the supply chain more resilient. We will learn from our mistakes—from my mistakes—and do a better job of it this time.”
“How long?”
“I’ve already issued the instructions for recreating the assembly facilities here and on Synra. Once they’re up and running, we’ll add redundancies on Kiyora and Ebisu.”
“How long?”
“Ten days.”
She inhaled deeply, struggling to fill her lungs; there wasn’t sufficient oxygen in the damn room. “All right. Ten days until we have more ships. Brigadier Johansson, please send one of our…eight surviving ships to Namino under full stealth. We know the Rasu’s quantum blocking field prevents communications and supradimensional disruptions, but we need to find out if it also blocks physical intrusions. Have the ship try to reach the atmosphere, then reach the surface if it can, survey the situation as much as is feasible and escape alive to report back to us.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll see to it.”
“Adlai, how many people are trapped on Namino?”
The Justice Advisor had propped his still-healing leg on a second chair, and he was pale enough that if this were anything less than the end of the world, she’d have ordered him back to the clinic for another few hours in a tank. “We evacuated 6.5 million before the d-gates went down.”
“That not what I asked.”
“I know it isn’t. Our best guess? Around eight million.”
Her eyes closed. Her chest felt constricted; she genuinely couldn’t breathe in this suffocating air. How was Joaquim supposed to protect eight million people? How many would soon find themselves strapped to a torture table in a lab like the one she’d destroyed at the stronghold?
Shadows of myself flit in and out of my peripheral vision, but I can only focus on my own. I search for an opening cut into a wall of the expansive lab, because the Rasu don’t use doors.
A hulking, multi-limbed Rasu steps into my path. My legs are no more. I fall.
The violet flame of a weapon firing sears through me. My chest explodes. I fall.
Blinding light from nowhere and everywhere consumes me. I fall.
Rasu orbs flood the lab with their beams crisscrossing the room in a macabre dance of death. Slicing into flesh. I fall. I’m falling for so long.
“Hey, are you okay?”
She opened her eyes to find Dashiel’s hand had returned to her knee. She nodded tightly and cleared her throat. “Maris, how are we planning to spin this for the public? What smashing ideas do you have on how to boost morale?”
Her oldest friend stared at her with wide, frozen orchid irises. “I…do not know.”
“Fair enough. Here’s what we’re going to do. I want one d-gate on each Axis World set to constantly ping Namino. The blocking field might fluctuate, or cycle, or randomly go down, and we need to be ready.”
“But the risk of opening a d-gate when Rasu—”
She whipped toward Adlai. “I don’t give a fuck about Firewall!”
“You should.”
She threw her head back to glare at the ceiling. “Guard the relevant d-gates. Guard them with AEVs if it helps you sleep at night. We’ll be able to stop a single Rasu as it comes through—if one tries to come through—then shut the d-gate down. But we have to try to reach the planet.”
Adlai glanced at the remaining Justice Advisors—Spencer, Julien and Harris, as Selene was among those trapped on Namino. “We’ll draw up a plan we can all live with.”
Silence engulfed the table like a smothering fog until Dashiel stepped in again. “We need to decide how to proceed on the planetary shielding project, Project Shirudo. The test results came back good here on Mirai, so we can begin building a network for a second Axis World, but….”
“What’s the cost?”
“Billions. Plus thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dyne-hours.”
Nika shook her head in frustration. “It’s not worth it. If the Rasu don’t yet have the locations of every one of our worlds, they will any hour now. Armed with this knowledge, there’s no reason to hope that a cloaking shield will fool them. We need to spend the money and time where they have a chance of making a difference. Can anyone tell me where that might be?”
Katherine Colson, the Mirai Administration Advisor, spoke up for the first time. “We can always—”
One of the military officers who’d evacuated DAF Command before the quantum block descended jogged up to the table, panting and out of breath. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Advisors, but we are picking up a sudden surge in artificial signals in the Mirai stellar system.”
Her chair clattered to the floor as she shoved it back and leapt up. “Here?”
“Yes. Multiple readings appeared out of nowhere. They’re on a direct course for Mirai.”
She was vaguely aware of Dashiel rushing past her to reach the monitoring station near the front of the room. Her legs shook from the effort of keeping her upright. It had all been for naught. They couldn’t stand up to an enemy such as this one. Her only consolation was that at some point in the future, the Vault could restart Asterion civilization in a distant corner of the universe. Assuming any place was beyond the reach of the Rasu—
/>
“These aren’t Rasu signatures.”
Her gaze shot over to Dashiel, where he, Johansson and several others were crowded around the monitoring station. “Say that again?”
“They’re ships of some kind, but they’re not giving off the Rasu energy signature.”
“Then whose ships are they? Concord?”
“We’ll have a visual in four seconds.”
No one moved.
On a pane above the monitoring station, an image materialized of a long, cylindrical, inky black vessel laced through with vivid crimson fluorescent lines. The cam panned out to reveal dozens, then hundreds of identical vessels. It looked like a fleet risen from Tartarus itself.
“Um…scale?”
“Let’s see…2.4 kilometers in length, four-hundred-ten in width.”
Her hand came to her forehead. “Brigadier, ready the planetary defenses, but don’t fire.”
Dashiel stared at her incredulously. “Are you crazy? We need to respond….” His voice drifted off as his attention shifted to something behind her.
Her hair ruffled, as if caught up in a breeze, when a tsunami of pinprick lights swept in to spin around her before gathering in an undulating pattern near the center of the room.
Apologies if we have unduly frightened you. Please accept this fleet of Katasketousya warships to aid you in your time of need.
Nika blinked. “Mesme?”
It is I.
She motioned toward the pane. “And these are your ships?” The offhand comments Alex and others had made about the terrifying nature of Kat vessels suddenly made a great deal more sense.
They are. They stand ready to defend Asterion worlds.
“Um, thank you. This is most generous of you…” she frowned “…but not timely. Why the hells didn’t they come to Namino’s defense?”
An internal matter prevented us from arriving in time. I regret this was so. As penance, I can only offer them to you now.
“I see.” She glanced at Dashiel, but his attention was fixated on the swirling lights. “Listen, these ships appear to be most impressive and formidable, but I know the Humans defeated an entire armada of ships like these. What makes you think they can withstand a Rasu assault?”
Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two) Page 4