by Greg Keyes
“I know,” he said, brushing her hair with his palm. “I know.”
“I shot you!” she cried. “Oh my god, Amar—I shot you.”
“Lena,” he said. “Listen. I’ll be okay. You have to focus. The kill switches. I have to watch the stairwell. It’s okay.”
It wasn’t, of course. His gut was burning now, and his body felt unreal. He knew he was on the verge of blacking out.
“You can do it,” he said. “You have to do it.”
She pulled back from him. Her face was streaked with tears, but he recognized the look of determination on it.
“Okay,” she said. She started down the corridor.
“I’ll watch your back,” he said.
“Probably better if you watch the stairs,” she said. It took him a few beats to realize she was trying to make a joke.
She went a few meters and then crouched down. “Crap,” she said.
“What?” he grunted.
“It’s Sam,” she called back. “He’s dead.”
Of course he was. Amar was trying to picture what had happened. The Sectoids had unobtrusively moved up from below, taken control of DeLao and Sam, and probably some of the others. They had quietly killed everyone else, dragged them into the control room….
He heard something coming up the stairs; he drew a bead on the next landing and waited.
“The kill switches,” Lena said. “They’ve been disabled.”
Of course they had.
It came quicker than he thought it would. All limbs and horror, the Chryssalid almost seemed to fly up the stairs. He started firing as soon as he saw it, but it nearly made it all the way to him before finally succumbing. He watched it thrash back down toward the bottom.
“Chief,” Nishimura said. “They’re coming from everywhere. Swarming. Palepoi is down.”
“Fall back,” he said. “Defend engineering.”
“But Chief—”
“Go,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for us alone. I’m in a defensible position.”
A streak of green plasma seared past his head, and down on the landing he saw another Sectoid scrambling toward him. It was smaller than the one he’d just killed and much smaller than the one in New Kochi.
It died more easily, too, but there were plenty more behind it.
He ducked back behind the wall to reload. Lena was right there.
“Give me your pistol,” she said. “So I can help.”
“I’ve got this,” he said. “You need to figure out how to re-enable the kill switches.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “But there’s another option, if you have a grenade left.”
“You mean we can just blow it up?” he asked, then fired at the next monster as it started up toward them, forcing it back down.
“Sure,” she said. “This is where the AI gets its power. The kill switches were designed to do that without, you know, destroying the whole area. But we don’t have the luxury of being neat anymore.”
“So we just toss the grenade down there?”
“I’d better place it,” she said. “Can it be set for a delay?”
“Up to twenty seconds,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Stand up.”
“I’m not sure I can,” he said.
“You have to,” she said. “Once I set the grenade, we’re going to have to run like hell. We don’t want to be up here when the power conduits rupture.”
“That puts us running down into them,” he said, taking another shot.
“Yep,” she said. “So stand up and give me your pistol.”
He wasn’t sure where he found the strength, but using the wall as support, he managed to get back on his feet. She took his handgun and grenade and went back down the corridor.
And that was when the spider tried to get back into his skull.
He tried to focus on the pain, to beat it back. He staggered down a step, to find it, kill it before it could take control of him.
His legs betrayed him, and he stumbled and went crashing down the stairs. He hit the landing, agony digging in his every nerve as he fired blindly, and the spider walked out, but it wasn’t dead—he could feel it, waiting. His vision was blurring; he made out vague shapes scrambling up toward him.
Lena was suddenly at his side. She pulled out his sidearm and fired across him, down the stairwell. Another one of the things gibbered in pain.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to go down there.”
“We can’t,” he said.
“We have about six seconds,” she said. She put her arm under him and heaved, and once more he gathered his feet under him.
Another one of the little monsters stuck its head around the next landing, and Lena put a hole in it. They managed to stumble down another flight.
Then everything went white, and something slapped him in the back, hard.
The next thing he saw was Lena in front of him, legs braced, firing his pistol at something he couldn’t see. He started to rise up and saw three plasma bursts sleet through her unarmored body. She took a step forward, and they shot her again.
She fell back next to him. She looked at him and tried to say something, but his ears were ringing, and he couldn’t make out the words.
He rolled off of his rifle and shot at the first thing he saw move, but everything was blurring now, and he couldn’t find a target. Or move his hand or, finally, see at all.
But he could still hear, and what he heard sounded like gunfire, far off in the distance.
CHAPTER 23
IT SEEMED TO Amar that it had been dark for a long time, dark and deeply silent. If it was night, it was starless and long, as if the world had stopped turning.
Maybe, he thought, morning would never come again.
Part of him hoped it wouldn’t.
But then, very faintly, the line of the horizon appeared, dividing first gray and black, then coral and indigo, saffron and azure, until finally—like the eye of a god opening—the edge of the sun appeared.
Again he wondered at how quickly it rose, how beautiful it was. He watched in awe as the golden path appeared on the waters and stretched out to his feet.
He wondered if he walked that path, where it would go, what things he would see. But before he set foot on it, he saw something coming toward him—small with distance, but growing larger by the moment.
A breeze lifted, and very faintly he heard something—not quite music, but a cadence.
And words.
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The words continued, and the tiger stopped in front of him. For a very long moment, it held his gaze. He saw the faint reflection of himself in the golden spheres of its eyes. He felt its hot breath on his face.
Then it went around him and continued on across the water.
Amar awoke on his back, staring at the ceiling. When he turned, he saw that he was in the infirmary of the Avenger. He had an IV drip in his arm.
Chitto was sitting in a chair next to him. She was just closing a book.
“Hey, Chief,” she said. “Glad you’re back.”
“Yeah,” he said.
He remembered. At the end it was messy, but he remembered. Yet he still had to ask.
Chitto told him what he needed to hear, and he nodded.
“Any other questions, Chief?”
“No,” he said. “Not right now.”
“That’s okay, then,” she said. “I was just going anyway.”
He nodded at her book. “What’s that you’re reading?” he asked.
“Oh, this?” she said. “It’s just some poems by a guy named Blake.”
“Where did you get a book all the way out here?”
She shrugged. “I’ve had it all along,” she said. “Brought it with me from home.”
Then she left.
* * *
Lily Shen came to see him later, but how much later he wasn’t sure.
“I heard you were awake,” she said.
“For what it’s worth,” Amar replied.
“It’s worth a lot,” Lily said. “To all of us. If it hadn’t been for you—”
“That’s … I don’t want to hear that,” Amar said. “Tell me what happened. Obviously we’re still alive.”
“The aliens were in cryosleep,” Lily said. “The AI woke them up. They seem to have deployed the robots first, as a ruse, while the Sectoids infiltrated the bridge area. They took control of DeLao and one of his men, and they killed the other two. We found them on the bridge, along with my father.”
“Your father …” he began.
“They didn’t kill him,” she said. “But they interrogated him.” Her voice dropped. “It was too much for him,” she said. “I don’t think he will recover.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Amar said.
“We’ve all lost loved ones,” she said. But he could see on her face and hear in her voice that she wasn’t ready to lose him.
He closed his eyes. “So the grenade worked, I guess.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “The damage was pretty terrific; it will set us back a bit. But we survived. The mission survives. As does hope. Thanks to you and Lena, the AI is completely defanged.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Amar said.
She shook her head in the negative. “We got it right this time.”
He hoped that was true. He had no interest in a do-over.
“And then Chitto,” she said. “More than half of the soldiers were dead, but she somehow pulled together what was left and brought them up to support you. Killed the last of the aliens, rescued you and my father.”
He felt an unexpected pulse of pride.
“Chitto?” he said. “She did that?”
“Yes, she did,” Lily said.
“Did Nishimura survive?”
“Yes, she made it,” Lily said. “She’s off on a recruiting mission at the moment.”
“How long have I been out of it?”
“Two weeks,” she said. “They had to do some pretty complicated surgery on you, and they still weren’t sure you were coming out of it—until you did.” She smiled her distracted little smile, and he could tell her attention was no longer on him. She had things to do. He was surprised she had spent this long with him. She stood up. “Do you need anything?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
Lily took a few steps and then turned back.
“She’s a hero, KB,” she said. “She saved us all. Even with the aliens dead, we would still have suffocated.”
“I know,” Amar said.
* * *
He was in bed for another week before he could slowly, painfully, move around. Lily told him he should take some time off, but he knew that wouldn’t do him any good—that he would just think about Lena, about all the time he had wasted before finally bending to his heart.
So he went back to work. There was plenty to do—recruits were flowing in from everywhere. They needed training, and assignments, and a little perspective.
By the time Nishimura returned, he was strong enough to have a beer with her. She was the last living member of his original squad. They toasted their fallen and told a few funny stories about each. It didn’t feel good, exactly, but it did feel right.
“I brought up the new guy,” she told him.
“Who is that?” He wanted to know.
“The new head of research, Tygan. Pretty sharp guy. He used to work in the gene therapy labs with ADVENT, but he got religion and defected to us.”
“He must have been pretty convincing,” Amar said. “The security risk involved in bringing somebody like that in …”
“We checked him out pretty good,” she said. “Anyway, you know as well as I do that there are good people in the cities. They only need to know the truth. Some find it for themselves, and some have to be shown it.”
He knew she was talking about Lena, but he wasn’t ready to talk about her. He might never be.
When Nishimura saw that he wasn’t going to bite, she changed tack.
“What do you think our next mission will be?” she asked.
“No telling,” he said.
But he was thinking something else—that maybe he didn’t have another mission in him. That he had done his part, given all he could. That maybe it was time for him to go home, see if any of his cousins were alive, help them survive.
* * *
“We’ve done good work here,” Dr. Shen said, a few days later. “I hope you all know that. I hope you take it to heart.”
There wasn’t much left of Doctor Raymond Shen. He was shockingly thin and dissipated. His arms quivered uncontrollably, and his speech was slurred.
He was sitting up in his bed, but it looked like he might topple over at any moment. Lily and a nurse stood on either side of him, ready to catch him if he did.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it doesn’t appear likely that I will be here to see this ship fully operational, much less the end of what is going to be a long and wearying war. So I would like to discuss what comes next.
“My daughter is more than fit to replace me in engineering. We have our new head of research, so we need not worry about that. But for XCOM to move forward, it needs structure. It needs someone in charge.”
He was silent for a moment; it looked as if just that much speaking had worn him out.
“There is a possibility,” he said. “It is not yet confirmed. But if it is true, I can die knowing that I left all of this in good hands, that the human race has a fighting chance.”
“What possibility, sir?” Amar asked.
“There is quite a bit you need to know,” Dr. Shen said. “Things I’ve kept mostly to myself or shared only with Lily. But time’s arrow has found me, and I can’t be the sole repository of so much that is so critical.”
He seemed to be having difficulty breathing, and for several long moments he tried to get more words out, without success.
“Dad—” Lily began, but he waved her off.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was able to continue, in a wheezing, raspy ghost of a voice.
“The … setback … was unfortunate. I know the word is too mild,” he said, looking apologetically at Amar. “We all lost so much. But you must promise me you will carry on.”
In that moment, Amar’s doubts dropped away. Lena had once told him he liked to make the easier choices when it came to his feelings. Staying with XCOM was going to be hard. He would be reminded of her every day. He would grow close to comrades and then lose them, too.
But he didn’t want to forget her, and if his presence brought one more rookie out of the field alive, it would be worth it.
“I promise,” he said.
Dr. Shen died three days later. They buried him in the cloud forest with Lena, DeLao, and all of the rest of the Avenger’s dead. Like them, his grave wasn’t marked, but its position was recorded to the millimeter.
Because one day they would all have markers, and their names would be known, and history would remember how and when humanity turned the corner and began the fight to take back their planet—and their destiny.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
–JOHN MCC
RAE
EPILOGUE
THE BOY LOOKED even younger dead, he thought. What was his name? Ivan?
Ivan. He and the rest had tried to sabotage a gene therapy clinic, as he heard it. Only two of them got out and made it to the settlement, and one was Ivan.
But the kid had taken a round and died a day later. He had learned about it when he went in for supplies.
He found the surviving kid digging Ivan’s grave. The boy watched him as he arrived. He didn’t look any older than sixteen. He had wide, expressive eyes that he should have been used to woo girls rather than to look through a rifle sight.
“What do you want?” the boy asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just came to pay my respects.”
“Oh,” the boy said. “You knew him?”
“Not much,” he replied. “But if you want some advice—forget burying him. Get the hell out of here before a patrol finds you.”
“He deserves a burial,” the boy said.
“I bet he’d rather you stayed alive, if he had any say in the matter.”
The boy straightened, and his eyes narrowed.
“You’re him, aren’t you? The guy Ivan came to see.”
He just shrugged.
“Yes, it’s you,” the boy said. “Ivan kept going on about what a great man you were, how you could turn everything around, that all he had to do was talk to you. And what did you do? Showed him your back. Great man, my ass. So I’ve no use for you, pendejo—or your advice.”
He spat and then went back to digging.
“That’s fine with me, kid,” he said.
He got his supplies and went back to his hidey hole. He turned on the radio and took a seat, setting a bottle of whiskey in front of him on his “table.”
He hadn’t listened to the radio for a long time—it was too depressing. But in the last few weeks—well, it seemed like something was starting to happen. Somebody was recruiting, and on a pretty decent scale. Battles were being won. Small victories, true, but victories nonetheless. But more than that, there was a sudden surge of what he could only call hope—and what’s more, that hope seemed to have a name.
Avenger.
He unscrewed the cap of the whiskey bottle, thinking about Ivan, about the boy digging his grave who probably wouldn’t make it to sundown.