by M. J. Kelley
In an oblong lift, they traveled up the many levels to the top deck, where he directed her to the commander’s room. “I’ll take the cabin just below.”
Alta grabbed his shoulder before he could leave. “Will they follow us here?”
“Yes. We don’t have much time. Maybe a night to rest.” Kene hesitated for a moment. “She knows everything I know about this place and this vessel. I can’t stop her from finding it. I can’t prevent her from entering.”
“So what do we do?”
Kene’s eyes closed. He couldn’t answer her now. His limbs pulled him down with fatigue, the weight of processing the remembrance still bearing on him.
Alta took his arm and walked him to his cabin.
They bathed separately. Then Alta rejoined him, and they ate preserved foods. Kene’s body shook with chills when he finally lay down. His brow was moist and feverish. Alta soaked a cloth and wiped away the sweat. She stayed with him during the night, falling asleep next to him on the suspended bed.
In the morning, Alta seemed deep in thought. “You can’t fly this can you?”
“No.”
“With all your memories, you still can’t do it.”
“I remember how. But I don’t have the practice. I don’t have the reflexes. The memories don’t give me skills and abilities, only the information and the sensation of the experience.” He turned his head toward her. “But I’ll show you how.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t fly this. I have no idea how.”
Kene turned away from her. “You can fly it. You have to. Or we’ll soon be dead and so will Naven.”
That afternoon, Kene, feeling better, sat outside on one of the rocks marking the hanger’s entrance. He breathed in the fresh air and bathed his face in the sun’s warmth. Gazing out over the mountains, he noticed movement. Kene jolted upright. A thin black line of figures marched up the slope, followed by wheeled vehicles. Dread rattled through his body, vanquishing his prior sense of healing.
The Fugue had brought an army.
He rushed back into the hanger and hobbled, still weak, to the Essariah. He found Alta inside her cabin.
“They’re coming for us,” Kene said.
“What now?”
“We launch.”
“I told you. I can’t fly this thing.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
Kene led her to the cockpit and showed her the pilot’s seat. Long tentacle-like vines curled around the seat, hooking into the air above its inside back.
He gestured for her to sit.
“I don’t know how to fly this. I don’t even know what these are.”
“Wait a moment.”
A circular panel rose from the floor, and Kene slid his fingers through the air above it. The pilot’s seat morphed like clay sculpted by invisible hands. Troughs formed for her legs, reminiscent of those on her hovercraft. She placed her legs inside and the material tightened around them, revealing her muscles. Forearm sleeves rose from the floor in front of the seat and adjusted themselves to Alta’s position as the hooked vines disappeared into the seat’s base.
“Something you’re more used to?”
Alta grinned.
“You pilot it the same way, with your body. The panels in front of you indicate pitch, roll, yaw, and your surroundings, just like on your craft.” Kene turned away from her and moved his fingers over another panel. “I’ll open the hanger’s dome. Get ready to launch us.”
“No.” Alta lifted her legs, and the troughs released them.
She stepped down from the pilot’s seat.
“What are you doing? We don’t have time.”
“Not before you promise me something.”
Kene flicked his fingers over the panel, and the hangar’s dome cracked open, an expanding crescent of brilliant sun flooding the bay. The light entered the cockpit through the large bubble window in front of them.
Alta stepped closer to him. “Palor’s work. It wasn’t just for peace. He was saving us. Our defenses, our weapons, they don’t work anymore. We’re bluffing.” Her eyes teared. “We have no more materials. No more iron and rubber. If I help you save this ship, someday, when the time comes, you must help me save Naven.”
Kene stared at her for a moment, thinking of Palor. The memories around Naven were varied and complex. He could not sort through them now. But if he still believed Naven was the key to peace. “You trust me? An inlari? An alien?” He smiled. “I will help.”
Alta jumped back into the troughs, which again tightened around her legs. She kicked down and the Essariah shook with ignition. The ship ascended, passing between the bay doors above. Kene strapped himself into the nearest seat as the cockpit hummed with increasing vibration. When the vessel cleared the underground hanger, Alta leaned to her side and pushed her arms forward, navigating the ship around in a forty-five degree turn. Then she punched with her fists, and they blasted away from the mountain. As they accelerated, the bubble window shifted, narrowing to a point. The cockpit changed too, the walls and ceiling bending inward. Panels disappeared and lights dimmed. Kene’s seat slid closer to Alta’s.
She pushed down with her feet and pulled her arms back to her chest, the pilot seat molding to her extended form. The ship lurched upward, sky and clouds filling the window.
“What are you doing?” Kene yelled above the ship’s screeches and rumbles.
“Ever wonder what Earth looks like from space?”
The force increased against his body, pressing him back into his seat. The pressure rippled over his skin as he dug his fingers into the cushion. Pulsing tremors throbbed through him until they occurred so quickly they became one force, one singular sensation.
The vessel shot upward, forcing its way through the atmosphere, cutting through clouds and the planet’s upper hemispheres. The blue sky dissolved to black, and millions of stars greeted them as the Essariah trembled, rocketing them away from Earth, away from Naven, away from humans and inlaris.
Then the pressure released his body, and the tremors ceased.
Alta extended one arm forward while pulling back with the other, and the ship swung around. The window before them filled with navy seas and swirling clouds, a stark shadow basking the surface on the left. Earth did not look decimated from here, did not look radiated or vaporized, only still and tranquil, apart from time, like a memory.
Underground Intelligence
Elaine Chao
108 years AFC
She sat alone in the predawn light, sheltered by the large rock formation. This was her safe spot, exposed as it was to the rest of the manicured slave park in the eastern part of Wellington. It faced the ocean, and even though Ān-tíng couldn’t hear the waves from where she was, she could at least see the gray-green waters of the Pacific Ocean.
“Hey.” Nate’s husky baritone rumbled quietly, soft in the morning stillness. This was their ritual. Almost every morning, she navigated through the dark warren of underground tunnels that riddled the underside of the city like the roots of a large tree. When she neared the park, she slipped on a white tunic and clipped the deactivated slave collar around her neck, then stepped out from the large drain and into the pre-dawn light. Even this early, she was far from the first human abroad, as slaves headed to early morning work shifts in households across the city. Ān-tíng then clambered up the steps on the back side of the rock and worked her way to the eastern face, where a small indentation—more a shallow cavern than a ledge—allowed her some shelter from the elements.
Nate handed her a mug and poured his beverage of choice from the thermos he had filled at headquarters. The rich, sharp smell of coffee overwhelmed her senses for a moment, and she accepted it without comment, even though her own preference for these tête-à-têtes was hot chocolate.
“Thanks,” she acknowledged. Their morning ritual had taken on a comfortable cadence after so many years. At first, he had followed her as a love-addled adolescent newly rec
ruited for the Ànchù, all scrawny arms and legs, his narrow nose and startling blue-green eyes dominating a thin face. And after months of telling him that a woman eight years his senior wasn’t interested in a boy of sixteen, they had settled into a friendship that was as warm and comfortable as a winter blanket.
They sat in silence, watching the sky get brighter as the minutes passed by.
“You ever wonder what it would be like to live at peace?” Nate asked, his voice velvety soft.
“We’re at war,” Ān-tíng reminded him, taking a sip of the coffee to hide her irritation. It was bitter and dark, the way that Nate preferred. She had gotten used to it.
“The Great War was long before our lifetimes, Ting.” He almost managed the accent on her name correctly, but she had forgiven him that slight years ago.
“Despite what they’re still doing to our people?” she replied resentfully. “And, I might add, what they did to our families.”
She knew it was a low blow to bring up their families. Everyone in the Ànchù had similar stories: their slave families had smuggled them out at birth to safety. These children, the few that survived, were raised by the Ànchù to understand the inlaris as no one else could. From birth, they had watched hours upon hours of inlari media on a daily basis, learning to speak the inlari language, Anshahar, as natives. Many, like she and Nate, often spoke Anshaglish—a natural mixture of Anshahar and English.
Ān-tíng had been one of the lucky ones; her family had been local, their inlari master absent for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. Her parents and grandparents had visited frequently, speaking to her in the dying Mandarin language as often as they could. She knew just enough to hold conversations with her family, but her thoughts, more often than not, sang out in Anshahar. The inlaris had a certain symmetry to their music and language, something she could viscerally understand, even more than the tones of the driving bhangra or flamenco or the ambient trance that floated through the lab whenever someone had their speakers blaring.
Inlari music comforted her, offering her a solace that she couldn’t quite verbalize. She had learned to describe the different musical styles that played in inlari homes and shops, from the driving, insistent polyrhythms of the classic dances to the more floating modern pieces that reflected the long inlari exodus from their homeworld to Ān-tíng’s. To Earth.
Nate’s voice was silken, placating. “I know what they’ve done, Ting. I just wonder sometimes what it might be like to live at peace instead of war.”
“There is no peace while there are human slaves, Nate. No matter how much they wanted it to be a good thing, our people are suffering underneath slavery.” Ān-tíng narrowed her eyes. It was an old debate between the two of them, one that only served to remind her that Nate was not the type of man for her. “Besides, we’re hēi-kè. According to the inlaris, we’re somewhere between spies and terrorists. They would never accept us as equals.” The next sip of coffee seemed even more bitter.
“I can’t help but hope.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
He sighed, looking at her from the corner of his eye, as his mouth twisted in reluctant acceptance of her pronouncement. Ān-tíng suspected he still harbored feelings for her, much to the chagrin of some of the younger ladies in the Ànchù. If she could trust what she overheard in the women’s locker room, Nate had broken more than his share of hearts. She had to admit that he had turned out nicely, his scrawny frame filling out into a leanly muscled warrior. His face had filled out a little as well, changing from boy to man over the past five years, his jawline now showing more a perpetual five o’clock shadow than juvenile fuzz.
He interrupted the silence. “The winds are changing, you know. I can feel it.”
Ān-tíng finished the last of her coffee. “You know I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“I heard rumors there’s a big op being planned. Might be announced today.”
“I hope I get to go.” Ān-tíng knew she was at the top of her game, one of the primary hēi-kè. She, like many of the other hēi-kè, was well-versed in inlari technology and could make her way through the typical security system in minutes. Of course, the Ànchù had many different types of specialists, some in combat, some in infiltration, and others in information gathering. But the hēi-kè were the most coveted of the lot, as they both deconstructed technologies and reconstructed them for both the Ànchù and the greater Resistance.
“I hope you don’t.”
She glanced over at Nate’s face. His eyebrows furrowed together in fierce concern, and it touched her heart. “You’re a good friend, Nate.”
He squeezed her hand and leaned against her, shoulder to shoulder, both of them staring toward where the sun barely peeked over the horizon, the streaky clouds overhead turning orange and pink. She felt his solidity through her slave robe and leaned right back into him, resting her head briefly on his shoulder. He really was a dear friend.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s almost time to report.”
“It’s time.”
Yéh’s voice resonated through the Bunker’s common room, which was large enough to double as the gym for the sixty-odd members of the Ànchù. They stood in formation at parade rest, each of them wearing the form-fitting black uniforms and subtle insignia of their secret military branch. His flat statement, steely with determination, had permeated the near-silence.
“Today, we initiate the next phase of our plan to liberate humans from the inlari occupation. This is the moment we have been working toward: our resources and knowledge of inlari technology and culture have been invaluable in leading us to this mission.”
Yéh was a grizzled veteran in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close and a burly frame proclaiming his background as a hand-to-hand combat expert. He was not the first Yéh in the Ànchù’s history; the titles of Yéh and Nái had passed from the original elderly couple that had, in a prescient moment, built the underground bunker in Wellington as a human refuge in the case of a war with the inlaris. During the Great War, they had wisely kept a veritable village carefully hidden, passed the titles of “grandparents” to two young leaders, and retired to the relative safety of Australia.
Yéh’s kind brown eyes scanned the formation of his warriors, the motley crew of teenagers and young adults that comprised the Ànchù. Ān-tíng had learned from the history books that humans had historically been divided among racial and religious lines. It struck her as bizarre that anything as minor as different skin tone would divide a people, but since the Great War, the humans that were once divided against themselves had instead joined against one common enemy: the inlaris. They, from the darkest to the palest, had intermixed in the generations following the Great War, until many didn’t even know their own racial makeup. They were simply humans.
Ān-tíng stood next to Nate in formation, a feeling of satisfaction creeping over her. Finally, there would be justice served, and the Ànchù was going to strike once more against the inlaris. Perhaps it would remind the inlaris that humans weren’t domesticated beasts.
“As all of you know, General Adam Holden has been in captivity for the past twenty years, serving time for leading the slave revolt in his youth. Our mission today is to liberate him from the grips of the inlaris. His freedom is our freedom.”
A tendril of fear and excitement spiraled through Ān-tíng. Never, even in her wildest dreams, did she think that the Ànchù would be audacious enough to attempt a rescue of General Holden. During her fifteen-year tenure with the organization, Ān-tíng had seen him repeatedly in the inlari news feeds she filtered for information. He had been in his mid-thirties when she first noted his appearance, his hair dark and his frame still robust after five years in captivity. In the intervening years, he had slowly become more frail, moving as if he were arthritic far before his time, the gray spreading from his temples across his scalp, as if the man himself were fading away.
But he was a symbol, and Valnia Altieri, Madeer of Lakarta, wanted
nothing more than the greatest symbol of human freedom locked in chains, trotted out like an exotic pet every time the inlaris wanted to celebrate their complete dominion over the humans in New Zealand.
For a long moment, the Ànchù breathed as one organism, wrapping their minds around the enormity of their task. To break Holden out of his cell was beyond reckless.
“Half of you will be going on this mission,” Yéh said in the stillness. “Half of you will be risking your lives for the future of the human world, while the other half will be continuing our work in case of failure. Those of you who are left behind are just as important as those who go, for if this mission fails, you will be the seed from which the Ànchù grows.”
Ān-tíng counted under her breath as name after name was called. Nate’s name was called early. After counting past thirty, Ān-tíng had to admit that she had been left out.
“Check in with your commanders for your squad assignments.” Yéh paused, gazing over them all with a look of pained compassion. “Dismissed.”
Ān-tíng turned to talk to Nate, but he had already walked away to the small crowd of people around the two team commanders that had been named to the Holden mission. When she finally caught his eye, he looked profoundly thankful that she hadn’t been recruited.
Hours later, she stood with a lump in her throat as her teammates suited up for an excursion that could very well end their lives. They all understood the risk and had accepted it as a part of their service to the Ànchù. Sacrifice was the norm, and Holden was important enough to risk half of their forces.
And there was Nate, towering over his teammates by half a head, joking with those around him with that easy, goofy smile. But when he saw Ān-tíng, the smile vanished, revealing a tension in his careworn face. She suddenly realized that somehow, they were all older than their years. Despite the constancy of his rapid-fire jokes and laughter, Nate had matured, his soul deepened with years of losing teammates on missions and the strain that human slavery had impressed upon them all. He was no longer the little kid, but was instead fully an adult. The revelation stunned her.