by Valerie Parv
Even so, trying to hate Lena hadn’t worked either. She blamed him and his father for her blighted childhood, and Garrett wasn’t proud of his father for disowning her because she’d been born deaf. Lena had dragged herself up by using her listener skills as a substitute for her lack of human hearing. As a result, her alien skills had remained under-developed. Thanks to his father, both of them had been given a rough deal.
Garrett stowed his guests’ possessions in a spare bedroom; they’d taken most of their stuff with them so there wasn’t a lot. As he worked, he realized the penthouse felt more like a hotel suite than a home.
He returned to the living room to find Amelia still transfixed by the view. “Would you like a drink?”
She nodded. “Martini?” Then she said, “Nervous?”
He mixed a martini for her and a Virgin Mary for himself. “A bit.” He knew what she meant. Another thing the penthouse gave them was a bird’s eye view of the setting sun, the Kelek captain’s deadline.
On the helicopter ride to the city, he’d listened in on Shana long enough to know she hadn’t wavered from her determination not to hand the beacons over to the Kelek. That meant only one thing: Akia Zael would have to make good on her threat.
He’d been tempted to have Amelia set him down at the rendezvous at Black Tree, but he’d been afraid she would insist on staying with him, putting herself at risk. And whether one beacon would be enough to satisfy Zael, he didn’t know. Besides, Elaine was right. Giving themselves up wouldn’t guarantee safety for the cities Zael had identified as targets.
The thought made him chafe with the need to do something.
Amelia sipped her martini and smiled. “If you ever gave up writing, you’d make a pretty fair bartender.”
“One of my many early careers,” he admitted. Tending bar had paid his way before he went into the air force.
Remembering his reason for coming here, he put his drink down and went into his bedroom. He hadn’t put the dampening device in the personal safe but had stowed it in the bathroom, in a packet of condoms. It was still there, looking as innocuous as a credit card. Elaine’s vision had revealed how it worked. Designed to isolate the beacons when they wanted to communicate securely between themselves, it had been appropriated by ESIN to stop Elaine finding him at their hideout.
Now he had another use in mind.
He slid his middle finger over the top edge of the card until he came to a slight roughness two-thirds the way along. He pressed twice, then moved his finger to the next point and pressed once.
The only sign of any change was a faint vibration in the card. When he’d tried it out with Elaine, Adam had stayed outside the field to monitor progress. As long as Garrett held the card and stood within a meter or so of Elaine, they could talk without anyone overhearing.
He repeated the steps to deactivate the device, and tuned his hearing to Elaine. Her mother had carried a similar device that had been damaged in the escape from their ship. Adam had tried to duplicate the one in Garrett’s hand. Unable to risk permanently damaging the card, he’d relied on Elaine’s vision for guidance, producing a rudimentary copy. Testing showed it worked, although they had no idea how long it might last.
Tuning his hearing to Elaine, he said, “I’m at the penthouse. It’s almost sunset.”
He heard the throb of a plane’s engines in the background. “Do you have the field generator?”
He opened the hand holding the card, knowing she would see it. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“I have the copy. I’ll be fine.”
His preternatural hearing picked up the tremor she couldn’t quite suppress. “It’s what Zael will do to show she means business that worries me.”
“Shana insists she’s not negotiating for us, no matter what.”
“I hope she knows what she’s doing.”
He looked up to find Amelia in the doorway.
“The sunset is starting. I thought you might want to watch it with me.”
The card thrummed under his fingers as he turned it back on.
The living room had darkened slightly with the fading sun. At any other time the beauty would have appealed to his writer’s sensitivity. Not tonight. All he could do was brace himself for whatever came next.
He didn’t have long to wait.
Chapter 12
“What are you doing?”
Akia heard the alarm in Kam’s voice, but focused on her boards. “Delivering on my promise.”
“You can’t mean to destroy one of their cities?”
“I can’t let the deadline pass without acting, if the humans are to be brought under control.”
Kam stalked around the console, forcing himself into her line of sight. “They’re not exactly falling over themselves to meet your demands.”
“Don’t overstep yourself,” she snapped. “As captain, this is my decision alone.”
“Won’t you consider the innocents?”
Her gaze blistered over him. “What about our innocents? The generations who lived and died in struggle and torment, banished from the homeworld? They should matter more to you than these people.”
“Of course they do.”
The pain in his voice reached her. Her job as commander of this vessel demanded she take action, but that wasn’t Kam’s fault. Still, he needed to acknowledge her authority or there was no future for them. She let her eyes and posture send the message.
He reeled back. Knowing how much he would want to say, it was a measure of his respect that he stayed silent. She relented briefly. Not from the task ahead, but from treating him as merely another member of her crew.
“They are surprisingly stubborn,” she agreed in a conciliatory tone, the only concession she could give him. “That’s why I need to show them I mean business.”
One of her screens revealed a view of the city where she’d directed the tsunami. Mostly deserted, it wouldn’t serve her purpose a second time.
She called up more views until she found the building sheltering the human governor and her staff, the surroundings familiar from the communication they’d exchanged. Yes, a perfect target.
On past missions, Akia had learned the value of hitting the centers of power hard and fast. Few things demoralized a people as effectively as seeing their leaders brought to their knees. The loss of life would be tolerable and she didn’t allow it to bother her, but was relieved for Kam’s sake. As an adept, he felt the pain and terror of other beings. She saw no need to inflict it on him indiscriminately.
“Will you warn them?” he asked, sounding shaky.
“I told them there would be no further communication. Are the beacons waiting at the designated coordinates?”
He turned his focus inward briefly, then resurfaced and shook his head.
She returned to her controls, knowing what she had to do. A fire devil – what the humans called a fire tornado – was the ideal weapon of terror. Easy to localize, spectacularly showy, and enormously dangerous.
Kam moved as if to say something, then thought better of it and stepped back, his face a picture of desolation.
With work to do, she wouldn’t let herself be influenced. He’d already received all the consideration she could afford to give him. He was too sensitive for his own good, and needed to understand the importance of subduing the humans.
Nothing else would serve.
Her fingers skimmed over the touchpads, bringing to life the program she’d put in place an hour before. Somehow she’d known the human governor wouldn’t give the beacons up without a fight. It was fitting she be the one to feel Akia’s wrath.
*
Shana drummed her fingers on the desk. The sun had begun to set minutes before. “Why doesn’t she contact me? We need to talk.”
From her perch on the corner of Shana’s desk, June frowned. “She did say she wasn’t going to talk any more.”
To her credit, the security chief hadn’t asked who or what the beacons were, trusting her boss t
o know what she was doing. Shana wished she had the same confidence in herself. Earlier, she’d sent the majority of her staff back to their offices in Reve, where they were already handling the clean-up, keeping only her aide and security team on site.
Shana planned to return to the city in the morning, preferring to wait out the Kelek captain’s deadline where she knew she could be reached. She kept the fear out of her face and posture. The bolstering effect on herself was as crucial as on the people around her.
The screens showed news broadcasts from the city and foreshore. She’d had June adjust one screen to pick up the feed from the security cameras outside. Now she wished she hadn’t.
“Do you hear that?”
June tilted her head, listening. “It sounds like a fighter jet.”
“We have nothing scrambled.” All available aircraft were overflying the city and Black Tree Beach as part of the relief effort. The skies above Shana’s temporary headquarters should be clear.
The roaring sound continued until it was all Shana could do not to clamp her hands over her ears. She realized what she was hearing, and jumped to her feet. “We have to get out of here.”
A heartbeat of alertness behind her, the security chief dived for the carafe of water on Shana’s desk. A soaked linen napkin was pressed into her hand.
“Cover your mouth with this.”
With barely time to grab anything but her purse, she saw June snatch up the official briefcase then shove her boss ahead of her out the room. Shana didn’t need prompting. The wide hallway was rapidly filling with tawny smoke thickening to black in places. Nothing was on fire in here yet. The smoke was seeping in from outside, around the front of the house.
“We’ll have to go the back way.”
Holding the saturated cloth over her mouth, Shana took shallow breaths to keep as much smoke as possible out of her lungs, and followed June.
They burst out the back door onto a tiled patio, scene of many a barbecue for official visitors and Shana when she’d vacationed here. Smoke was everywhere and she couldn’t locate the source.
Through the haze, she saw her aide and two members of June’s team assembled at the cars on the level below the house, as fire drills kicked in.
“Over here,” June called. “Get the governor to her car.”
Before anyone could move, there was a cracking sound like a rifle shot and a tree shading the patio snapped off close to the ground, the heavy branches toppling across their path in a perfect barricade.
“June!” The trunk, as big around as a dining table, had pinned the other woman to the tiles.
June’s face contorted with pain, and she made a sweeping gesture with her free arm. “Get to the cars, governor. Harrison and DeLeo will get me out.”
The security people were on the other side of the giant trunk, their way blocked. Shana looped the strap of her purse across her body and reached for June. “I’m not leaving you.”
The woman’s torso heaved as she struggled to free herself. “I’m not asking you to. My people will help me.”
Shana hooked her arms under June’s shoulders and pulled. “They can’t get to us.”
Nor could she free the woman by force. Letting go of her, Shana set herself to lifting the tree trunk off the security chief’s legs. She might as well have tried to move the building.
She wasn’t giving up, although she’d lost her breathing cloth when the tree fell and felt a cough threatening to strangle her. There had to be something she could use as a lever. “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world,” Archimedes had said. The ancient Greek physicist had used fire as a weapon at the Siege of Syracuse, too. Odd what trivia came back to you in a crisis.
June was yelling at her to go. Common sense would agree but Shana wasn’t going anywhere. Her frantic hunt settled on a decorative metal spear taller than herself and as big around as her forearm. A replica of a museum piece, or perhaps an original from her people’s past. No time to admire, only to wrench it free of its bracket and rush back to her friend and bodyguard.
“With respect, governor, you’re an idiot,” June snarled.
Hefting the spear to find its center of balance, Shana forced a smile. “I’ll take complaints later. I’m not leaving without you.”
The air was thick with smoke and flying embers. A couple landed on Shana’s forearm and the fine hairs sizzled. She brushed the offenders off along with a stab of pain and applied herself to testing Archimedes’ theory.
She might not be able to move the world, but the tree agreed with the physicist. With the pointed end of the spear shoved under the main part of the trunk, and Shana putting all her weight on the other end, she was rewarded with a slight movement.
A figure plowed out of the leaves and branches. DeLeo. He jumped on her end of the spear, adding his weight until they both saw the trunk shift. Not much, but enough. Grunting with pain and effort, June hauled her legs free. Shana rushed to her, DeLeo breathing down her neck. At least they were breathing, although for how long was moot if they didn’t get out of here soon.
Between them they got June on her feet. The stubborn woman had hauled the briefcase out with her and Shana She made a mental note to speak to Prince Lorne about a medal for her.
First they had to survive.
DeLeo draped June’s arm around his shoulder, Harrison replacing Shana on the other side. They supported June as the governor looked for a way through the confusion of tree. She found the way the men had tunneled through and dived, ignoring the twigs lacerating her skin. Between ember burns and scrapes, she’d be a mess by the time they got out. She refused to consider they might not.
When DeLeo and Harrison emerged with June, Shana saw the other woman’s face graying but she waved Shana on.
“I’m fine. Go.”
This time Shana didn’t need telling twice. Seeing her, Jules, her aide, rushed forward to hustle her into the car. She saw DeLeo get June into the other car while Harrison took the driver’s seat in Shana’s. Moments later the two-car convoy was crawling downhill through a pall of smoke.
“What in the devil is that?”
“A fire tornado.” From the first jet-engine roar, Shana had suspected what was happening. And she had a good idea who’d bred the fearsome thing. Anyone who could generate her own tsunami would have little trouble producing this monster. The callousness of it took Shana’s breath away.
Jules looked stunned. “A what? I mean – ma’am?”
The lapse in protocol was understandable and even amusing, Shana thought, seeing the man’s color darken with embarrassment. “It’s about as rare as weather phenomena get. And one of the most dangerous. As a child, I saw a fire tornado spring up on the flanks of Mount Ekin. I never forgot how scary it looked or how loud it sounded.”
She’d never thought she would experience another. But there it was, a huge whirling flame twenty meters away, the hundred-meter-tall vortex roaring as it flung embers and ash across the hillside. The clear evening sky turned dark where it was feathered by leather-colored smoke.
“A tornado composed entirely of fire?” Jules’s voice reflected his awe.
Curious even as a child, Shana had researched the phenomenon. “All you need is a patch of hot ground and some leaf litter for fuel. Once the fire starts, a light wind curving off a hillside is enough to set the column spinning and sucking the fire up.”
“But it’s moving so fast.” Like a dancer pulling her limbs in to gather speed, the vortex accelerated its rotation, uprooting trees bigger than the one that had pinned June. Any fuel not consumed was ejected from the plume as flaming debris.
Around them, the evening was cooling and Shana recalled another trick this particular monster specialized in. “Once the sun is gone, the air near the ground will cool faster than the air higher up, creating a night-time inversion layer.”
“I remember that from school,” Jules said. “You think the cold air will smother that thing?”
“The fire tornado will
spend the night eating the oxygen trapped under the inversion layer and heating up the fuel trapped with it.” She didn’t like dashing his hopes, but facts were facts.
His eyes turned bleak. “When the morning sun reheats the air, the inversion later will break up and the fire tornado will get fresh oxygen for breakfast.”
She nodded. “And the fire will explode again. That’s what makes these things so dangerous.”
He shook visibly before getting himself under control. “It’s like a living thing.”
“But it isn’t, no matter how it looks. It’s just a trick of nature and as soon as we can get a fire crew up here, it’ll be dealt with.”
They both knew that wouldn’t happen any time soon. The tsunami had ignited spot fires as it chewed through power lines and gas mains, keeping their firefighters busy closer to the city and along the coast.
Neither could they count on rain putting the fire tornado out. As the hot, smoking air rose, it would cause moisture in the atmosphere to condense around the ash and smoke particles. The droplets would eventually grow fat enough to fall as rain out of an otherwise clear sky, but the air current from the plume would push the rainfall away from the fire.
One problem at a time, she ordered herself. They’d all escaped more or less in one piece, although her burned arm throbbed.
Behind the car, the roar of the fire tornado increased until Shana’s world spiraled down into smoke, ash, heat and that jet-engine howl. She hunched into herself then uncoiled with an effort. Now, more than ever, she needed to radiate assurance.
Not sure she was fooling her people, certainly not herself, she pressed her shoulders back against the car’s leather upholstery. No point trying to talk over the fire’s animal roar, but she could show with her posture that they weren’t beaten yet.
The thought came that maybe she was and didn’t have the sense to know it. Well, to hell with that. Last time, the odds against humanity’s survival had been stacked so high she’d been unable to see over them. Yet the Kelek had lost to her and the beacons.