by Greg Keyes
He accepted that with a nod. He wondered where Lena was and wished that she were with him. But he stopped short of trying to find her and went to bed instead.
Chances were very good that she didn’t want to see him anyway.
* * *
Amar had been asleep for about two hours when one of Valodi’s people—Miriam, he thought her name was—shook him awake.
“There’s an ADVENT patrol coming,” she said. “A big one. Valodi thinks they may be heading toward the infirmary.”
Amar rubbed the sleep from his eyes and reached for his weapon; he’d fallen asleep in his armor.
The infirmary? It made sense. ADVENT had to know that some of them had escaped, despite the sacrifice of Abraham and his squad. It wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out that some of them were injured; Nishimura and Chakyar had left plenty of blood in the processing center and probably a trail of it on the street. Any sort of medical facility in the settlement would naturally be the starting place for a search.
“Can you lead me there?” he asked Miriam.
“Yes,” she said. “Quickly. The rest of your people are being gathered.”
“Infirmary” was probably too fancy a word for the place, just a few beds and an operating table. Nishimura was still on the table, and a man in an off-white apron was fussing over her. Valodi was there, shouting orders to his men and women. Amar didn’t see Chakyar anywhere.
“How is she?” he asked the doctor.
He shook his head. “She shouldn’t be moved,” he said.
Amar examined her. She had been stripped of her armor, and bandages were wrapped around her belly, where some blood was leaking through. Her face was still, but he could see that her eyeballs were darting about beneath her lids. He shuddered to think what she might be dreaming about.
“Gut shot,” the doctor said. “She’s lucky it was a bullet rather than a mag round, but the damage was pretty extensive. I think I sewed everything up, but I can’t be sure. If there’s even a nick in anything, she’ll get peritonitis or worse.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Amar said. “I won’t let the jabbers have her. Have you got a stretcher?”
“There’s the one she came on,” he said.
The stretcher was bloody but serviceable. They loaded her on it, and Valodi ushered them out the back door. Amar could already hear the approaching troopers, prattling in their outlandish language.
Nishimura groaned as he and Dux carried her through the winding alleys of the settlement. Behind him he heard shouts of outrage and screams of pain, but thankfully the jabbers’ magnetic rifles remained silent. That would probably change if they caught sight of Amar and his companions.
Valodi led them to an old canal where three small boats awaited them. Amar and Dux laid Nishimura flat in one of them, but with her stretched out in it, there was no way to use the oars. He motioned Dux into one of the other boats and then eased himself into the water, hoping it wasn’t too deep.
It came up to his shoulders, so he took the mooring line and began to tow the small craft in the direction Valodi indicated. Everyone else piled into the other boats and began to row.
There was no current. The water was warm, often thick with weeds, and smelled distinctly of sewage. He didn’t even try to imagine what might be living in it, instead just concentrating on putting one foot ahead of the other. Behind him, Nishimura cried out. Not loudly, but it wasn’t a whisper, either. A few minutes passed, and he thought everything was fine.
Then she screamed.
The jabber must have already been following the canal, maybe having heard her first cry. Amar hadn’t seen her, but he did now as she stepped through a beam of moonlight striking the bank. He froze, hoping against hope the trooper wouldn’t see them in the darkness, wouldn’t think to look down into the canal.
She almost didn’t, but then Nishimura whimpered. The shadowy figure stopped and raised its gun. Amar let go the line and sloshed toward the berm. He didn’t have a chance, but he wasn’t just going to stand there and take it.
Then a second shadow appeared behind the jabber. He heard a sort of choking gasp before the ADVENT soldier toppled into the canal. Amar saw moonlight flash on steel. Then whoever it was blended back into the shadows.
It could almost have been Nishimura herself, but she was still in the boat, breathing hard.
A little after midnight they made it to the river, which proved too deep for him to walk in, so he had to go around to the back and push the boat by swimming. Dux joined him, and together they made enough of an outboard motor to keep up with those rowing.
After about another hour, Valodi led them to one of the kettuvallam, the big houseboats, where his men helped him and his people aboard, Nishimura included. The doctor from the settlement checked her vital signs.
“Hard to tell,” he said.
* * *
Amar dozed again and woke to Nishimura screaming something in Spanish. He groped his way to where she lay and took her hand.
“Nishimura,” he said, “it’s okay.”
She gripped him back with her calloused fingers and gasped.
“KB?” she said weakly. Her hair was free of her bandana and looked like an oil slick on the white pillow. The hollows of her eyes were dark.
“Yeah, Alejandra,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Mi bróder,” she gasped. “Estamos in el infierno?”
“I don’t understand you,” he said softly. “You’re speaking Spanish.”
“Are we in hell?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he told her. “Although I don’t blame you for thinking so.”
She grunted.
“It feels like we’re in hell,” she said. “I thought I saw Toby. He was …” She stopped.
“Something happened,” she wailed. “What happened?”
“You were shot,” he said. “You’ve got a nice wound in your belly, so don’t move around too much. You’ll start it bleeding again.”
“I don’t remember,” she murmured. “Asu, no me acuerdo …”
“It’s okay,” he said.
She fell silent, and he thought she had drifted off to sleep. But then she stirred again. “It’s not true,” she said. “I do remember. I just wish I didn’t.”
“It got in my brain, too,” he said. “I understand how you feel. There was nothing you could do.”
“Did I kill anyone? Chakyar …”
“No. Chakyar will have sore arms for a while, that’s all.”
“Did anyone get killed?”
“No. None of ours, anyway.” He could tell her about Abraham and the others later.
She took a long breath and winced. “I’m in pretty bad shape, huh?”
“You’ll live,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll live. So I can cut the throats of every last one of those sons of bitches.”
The next day, he sent Nishimura to the Elpis for medical attention. There, she had a chance. Where they were going, she had little to none, despite her attitude.
* * *
The first leg of their trip was in the kettuvallam, following the course of the Muvattupuzha River north and east, then further along on the smaller flow of the Killiyar. The boat was a comfortable fourteen meters long, with bedrooms, toilets, and a small galley. Although the wood-and-wicker houseboats had once served as cargo vessels moving spices through the backwaters, in the last few decades before the invasion they had been redesigned as tourist craft, affording a quiet, comfortable exploration of the area. Now they had been repurposed once more into movable living space and smuggling vessels.
Like the Mississippi Delta where they’d found Lena, much of inland Kerala was returning to an untamed state. What had once been rice paddies were now full-on swamps, complete with mugger crocodiles sunning on muddy banks, pythons, hornbills, and a bewildering variety of plants and animals. It reminded Amar very much of the country of his birth.
Lena had been avoiding him since Lily’s capture a
nd rescue, and he was inclined to give her the space she wanted. Something had gone wrong in Piravom, and it was because both of them had lost focus—because they had been too busy making goo-goo eyes at one another. More rested upon his shoulders now, and he felt it, knew how close he had come to letting it all fall apart.
And she had asked him to have faith in her, and he had shown her that he didn’t. She probably didn’t know how much that had hurt him to do, and he wasn’t going to tell her. If she didn’t want to talk to him, it was better he leave it that way, at least for now, if not forever.
Their boat ride ended in what had once been a small village, but which now served as a hiding place for munitions, fuel, and two all-terrain vehicles. Valodi and two of his men debarked with them. The rest began their voyage back south.
They traveled dirt roads for several kilometers before reaching a narrow blacktop road in surprisingly good condition. From there the country got hillier and drier, but as their elevation increased, the vegetation grew lusher. They returned to dirt roads, and at times Valodi’s man Mitchum had to clear the trail with his sword. Mitchum was a compact, dark-sinned American in his fifties, a bit on the brash side. It was he who had killed the jabber at the canal.
Amar felt safe under the rainforest canopy, safer than he’d felt in a long time, even on the Elpis. He knew it was an illusion but decided to take what little comfort he could get.
On the morning of the third day, as he went down to a nearby spring to wash his face, he saw a lithe form moving through the shadows. He stood very still, watching the tiger pass, with a sense of wonder and no small measure of terror. Even though he knew intellectually it wasn’t likely to attack him, its very shape and the way it moved sent alarms through his primate brain, which had evolved largely to avoid tigers.
He suddenly felt a profound awareness of the world, a connection to it that all of the hiding and fighting and death had pushed deep into his marrow. In that moment, he remembered that the world was beautiful, and that he was a part of it, would always be a part of it. As Rider and Thomas and Toby were still a part of it.
He had grown up with a large menu of things to believe about the afterlife, and he had never subscribed to any of them, not specifically or with any conviction. But it was good to be reminded of the wonder of it all, the dread and ecstasy of existing.
The tiger turned and stopped, its eyes fixed on him, and for what seemed an eon they locked gazes. Then the great cat faded into the jungle. As it went, Amar felt as if the ghosts that he had been carrying were now following the great beast, and he didn’t know whether he felt sadder or more relieved. But he felt he was a little bit lighter.
When he returned to camp, Chitto looked at him strangely.
“What?” he asked.
“You look different, Chief,” she said.
He smiled.
“I saw a tiger,” he told her.
* * *
The ship had flattened a swath of forest when it crashed, but the jungle was doing its best to take it in, as jungles tended to do. It was huge, so huge that at first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It could have been an odd upthrust of stone. But when they were closer, and he could see beyond the climbing vines and dense young growth around it, it became obvious that it was nothing the natural world had produced.
From what little he knew about the aliens, he had been expecting something disc-shaped. He’d been wrong. It was somewhat boxy, longer than it was wide, thickest in the middle and tapering off at either end. Two winglike struts did support large saucer-shaped structures that were almost certainly its engines.
“It seems to be remarkably intact,” Lily said, running her fingers along the metal of the hull. “The force of its crash must have been terrific, and yet there’s hardly a scratch.”
“Everything could be jelly inside,” Sam said. “The fact that it’s been here so long, undiscovered, speaks to the probability that the crew must not have survived.”
“Yes,” Mitchum said. “But they didn’t all die in the ship. Look.”
Amar hurried over to where he stood, near the perimeter of the crash site. The empty eyes of a skull looked up at him, but it wasn’t human. It had a smallish hole in its forehead and a much larger one in the back.
“Looks like a Sectoid,” Sam said. “The old kind.”
Amar felt a tremor at the name, remembering the monster that had turned Nishimura against them.
They did a careful sweep around the area and found dismembered bones from both humans and aliens, but no intact bodies. Tigers and other beasts were probably responsible for that. But from their wounds, they all seemed to have been killed in a firefight.
“We’re sure these guys were XCOM?” Amar asked.
“There are no records that a squad ever made it here,” Sam said. “The location came from satellite data, not reconnaissance.”
“People lived in this area back then,” Valodi pointed out. “I believe there was a military outpost not terribly far from here. I can imagine it wasn’t hard to miss this thing coming down.”
“Secure a perimeter,” Amar told his squad. “Doc, what next?”
“Well, we’ll want to get inside,” she said.
That didn’t prove terribly difficult; whosever bones now lay scattered about the ship had left a hatch open in the back of the craft. Mitchum cleared back the vines and saplings, and then Amar peeked inside.
Something jumped. He had a brief impression of a figure that was somewhat humanoid, but which wasn’t human—it was too small, its limbs were too long, it had a tiny head …
His finger eased off the trigger as the frightened macaque leapt from the interior of the craft and vanished into the trees.
Amar had seen any number of ADVENT transports and even the occasional gunship like the one they had encountered in the Atlantic. It was possible he’d seen some of their long-range craft in the distance. But this was something new to him.
ADVENT technology had been designed to set humans at their ease, to seem at least a little familiar, even if what lay under the hood wasn’t recognizable at all. Here, that layer of familiarity wasn’t present at all. He could stare at some of this stuff for years and never be able to guess what it was.
In other words, it was alien.
And dead. No lights flickered on consoles; no panels glowed with pale light. Aside from the cones cast by their torches, the ship was dark. And a tomb. Things had died here, too, and the tigers hadn’t fooled with them. He didn’t blame them. The whole place gave him the shivers.
Lily didn’t say much, but she took a lot of notes. Amar stayed with her; the fact that the first thing to jump out at them had been harmless (well, close to it—macaques could give you a pretty nasty bite) didn’t set him at all at ease. Not all of the aliens had been flesh and blood. He remembered they had robots and drones as well.
But after several hours, nothing had coming whirring to life to try and end him.
Lily didn’t stop when the sun went down but instead worked long into the night. Amar split up the squad into thirds so they could watch her, keep watch outside, and get some rest.
He awoke the next morning with someone prodding his ribs. It was cool, and misty, and for a moment he was disoriented. Then he saw it was Lily.
“It’s time to go get my father,” she said.
Part III
The Avenger
“We have paid a heavy price,
but our efforts have not been in vain.”
–DR. VAHLEN, XCOM CHIEF RESEARCH SCIENTIST
CHAPTER 16
AMAR WATCHED THE trucks arrive with more than a little trepidation. Valodi didn’t like these guys, and Valodi dealt with some pretty horrifying people. He supposed they couldn’t be picky, not at this stage of the game. Anyway, it was Sam’s call.
They were several kilometers from the location of the alien ship, just off the main road in a field surrounded by forested hills. It had rained in the night, and the cool lingered, although by
midday it would probably feel like a steam bath.
Amar didn’t glance around to make sure everyone was in place. He didn’t want to give anyone away.
The doors opened, and a rough-looking crew stepped out. The leader was a short, thick man wearing an old flak jacket that was too big for him and a helmet that wouldn’t have looked out of place in World War II. He also had a knife the size of a cutlass and a submachine gun.
“So,” he said, “we’re here to talk.”
“We appreciate you coming,” Sam said. “And so promptly on time.”
He was being sarcastic, although he didn’t show it in his tone. They were four hours late.
The man shrugged. “We encountered ADVENT patrol.”
“Where?” Amar asked.
“No worry, they did not see us,” he replied.
He sounded pretty sure of himself, but that meant exactly nothing in Amar’s book.
“Are you Kasparov?” Sam asked.
“Call me Caspar,” he replied. “You know, Caspar?”
Sam looked at him blankly for a moment, then shrugged. “Caspar,” he said. “I’m told you’re good at getting things.”
“Sure. What you want? Liquor? Chocolate? Woman, maybe?”
“No,” Sam replied. “For starters, I need cuprate-perovskite ceramic. I need a cryogenic still, a variety of rare earths, diamond lasers … Well, here, why don’t you just take the list.”
Caspar took the paper and looked at it incredulously. “This is all very difficult,” he said. “Dangerous things to get.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “And we’ll pay you for that. And for your discretion.”
“Some will have to be ‘liberated’ from ADVENT Administration.”
“I’m aware of that also,” Sam said. “The price will be fair.”
Unless he was lying, Sam didn’t know who their financial benefactors were any more than Amar did; only the Shens had that knowledge, and they were guarding it, at least for now. When Sam was being candid—which usually involved a glass or two of the stuff they were distilling from coconuts—he speculated that there was a network of donors, some of them possibly even inside of the collaborationist governments.