“We’re gonna fight,” Haldin said. “If it’s too late to make sure they never come here in the first place, we’re gonna fight the things that give the raknoth nightmares, and we’re gonna win.”
The lingering pallor in his cheeks and forehead weren’t exactly confidence inspiring, but the Enochian at least managed to make it sound like he believed such a thing was possible.
“Well I’m glad someone has a plan, at least,” Jarek said.
Haldin gave him a tired, forced smile.
“But for those of us who are more detail-oriented,” Lea said, “how do we stop something the raknoth are afraid of when we’re barely holding our own against the raknoth themselves?”
“The only way—” Alton said.
“—is to present a united front against them,” Haldin finished.
“Raknoth and human,” Alton said. “All of Earth standing together and ready when the rakul arrive.”
Lea looked skeptical at best. Alaric looked like someone had just told him his only option for survival was to copulate with a goat.
“That’s gonna be a tough sell for pretty much every human on the planet,” Jarek said, “what with the Catastrophe and all. Maybe even tougher for your people. I don’t know anything about raknoth culture, but it didn’t look like the Overlord—or Zar’Golga or whatever—was trying to give you a hug back there.”
“Zar’Golga is a problem,” Alton agreed. “He is likely beyond convincing. And there are many other problems ahead of us, but the only option is to try. All other paths lead to destruction.”
“What about Enochia?” Jarek glanced back at Haldin. “Do the rakul know about your planet too?”
“We’re not sure,” Haldin said. “It’s possible they don’t, but making sure of that is part of why we decided to come here.”
“So, what?” Jarek said. “Five Enochians and a raknoth were all your planet could spare to help out your brothers from Earth?”
“There are more than five of us,” Elise said from the holo.
“And we’re, like, totally badass if that part wasn’t clear,” Johnny added, wincing at the effort of speaking past his injuries.
“I feel better already,” Rachel muttered.
“We should get back to HQ,” Lea said. “They need to hear all of this.”
She was probably right about that. As much as Jarek didn’t look forward to sharing any of this to Nelken’s stone-faced stare or Sloan’s openly derisive sneer, it was starting to sound like they’d be foolish not to start rallying the troops while they could.
The Resistance might not have been his first choice for allies, but it was the only serious manpower they were going to find that wasn’t under direct raknoth control.
“We could probably stand to have another chat with Stumpy too,” Jarek thought out loud. “See if he has anything to add to all of this.”
“Stumpy?” Haldin asked.
“The raknoth we captured a few days ago,” Rachel said. “The one who calls himself the Red King. Jarek started calling him Stumpy after he cut off an arm and a hand.”
“Sweet Alpha,” Elise whispered.
“Hey!” Jarek jabbed up a finger for pause. “While he was trying to kill me. Let’s not leave that part out.”
“Well that’s a great start to human-raknoth relations,” Haldin said quietly.
“Where should we pick you guys up?” Elise asked.
Jarek wasn’t sure whether Johnny was gifted like Haldin or not, but he didn’t need extra senses to identify the look that passed between the two Enochians. It was the look of two dudes who’d been through enough together to know exactly what one another were thinking.
“I was actually thinking we should stay with these guys and go have a talk with this Resistance,” Haldin said.
“Hal …” Elise said, concern evident in the lines of her pretty face.
Haldin patted the comm on his wrist. “We’ll only be a call away. And it’s better this way. Something tells me things wouldn’t go so smoothly if all of us came marching out of our alien ship at once and walked into the anti-raknoth base with our raknoth friend.”
“He’s right,” Alton said. “Our presence would only cause friction, if not an outright battle, and we need to move quickly if the rakul could already be on their way.” He frowned at them through the holo. “In a perfect world, I would have sent Franco along instead of Johnny—”
“Hey!” Johnny said.
“—but we’ll just have to work with what we have.”
“I could grow a mustache and act all sophisticated too if I wanted,” Johnny mumbled.
“You’re welcome to try,” came a smooth voice from somewhere off camera.
Elise’s lips twitched, but her expression sobered as she focused back on Haldin. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“C’mon. When have I ever not been?”
Elise arched a dark eyebrow at him. “I love you.”
“And I you,” Haldin said. “We’ll talk soon.”
With that, the Enochians ended the call.
“Nice.” Jarek turned and offered a closed fist to Haldin.
Rachel rolled her eyes.
Haldin eyed the fist dubiously and finally reached out to give it a tentative shake. “Uh, thanks?”
Johnny shook his head. “Dude, you’re such an Enochian.”
“Whatever,” Haldin said, a slight flush creeping into his cheeks. “Shouldn’t we get moving?”
“That we should.” Jarek sank into the pilot’s chair beside Rachel and shot her a wink as he powered up the ship’s motors. “Time to go save the world from the big scary monsters, right?”
The troubled look she gave him left him wondering if it was a blessing or a curse he hadn’t been there to see just how monstrous those big scary monsters were. Not that it really mattered.
One way or another, he had a bad feeling he might be finding out in person soon enough.
Seventeen
“I think you’re going to have to run all of that by us one more time,” Commander Nelken said. To his right, Sloan was staring at them like they’d all escaped a psych ward, and on the other side of the council room table, Commander Daniels’ eyes radiated grave concern.
Jarek shifted in his chair, more out of impatience than discomfort. He couldn’t really blame them, he supposed. It was a lot of crazy to try to process at once. He still wasn’t entirely sure he believed it all himself, but he at least trusted that Rachel had seen something terrible in Haldin’s little flashback cinema, and that was enough for now.
Beside Jarek, Pryce looked more rigorously pensive than Jarek had ever seen, which was really saying something when it came to Pryce. Given the controversial—not to mention mind-blowing—nature of the information they’d brought back, the commanders had agreed to meet immediately and without the full council in attendance.
Judging from their faces, that last part had been a good call.
Lea looked down their line hopefully. “Anyone else want to chime in?”
No one seemed to be overly surprised when Jarek leaned forward to speak—go figure.
“What’s there to be hung up on?” he asked. “We found that strange ship, and it just happened to be manned by some humans from another planet who came here to cure the raknoth of their human blood addiction and let them move on before their rakul overlords come calling. Fight the power. Isn’t that kinda your guys’ thing? C’mon.”
Sloan rolled his eyes. “Every bit of this story is ridiculous. Humans from another planet? Evil space-faring conquerors coming to bring hell on Earth?”
Jarek bobbed his head. “You’re right. It’s almost as ridiculous as scaly green vampires running around with glowing red eyes, sucking blood and shirking off bullets like Nerf darts, right?”
Sloan turned his wide-eyed gaze down the table to Nelken and Daniels. “You two don’t seriously believe any of this, do you?”
Nelken looked like he was having a serious internal debate on that mat
ter.
Daniels met Sloan’s gaze with steely ice in her eyes. “I trust my daughter, and you should too. When’s the last time you left this base, Richard? How would you even know what’s happening out there?”
Sloan visibly clenched his jaw and sat back to cross his arms and pout.
“I understand how hard this all must be to process,” Haldin said from over beside Lea, “but it’s crucial we begin preparations as soon as possible. I’ve only seen scattered glimpses of the rakul, but it’s enough to convince me it’s going to take everything on this planet fighting together to stand a chance. My planet—”
Sloan gave an obnoxiously loud snort. Nelken frowned at him. Pryce just kept watching Haldin like a dog waiting for another scrap of food to fall.
“—was slow to admit to even the threat of the raknoth, and it almost cost us everything. From what I’ve seen of Earth, it cost your world much more. But what’s coming now is far worse.”
“We appreciate your candor, Mr. Raish,” Nelken said, “but it is, as you say, quite hard to process. Not to be rude, but how can we responsibly believe any of this? Do you have any way of proving, for instance, that you are indeed from this … Enochia?”
“There’s probably hundreds of ways we could determine that,” Pryce said.
It was the first time he’d spoken, and it earned him frowns from Sloan and Nelken.
“But since most of Pryce’s methods will probably go straight over our heads,” Jarek said, “why don’t you just go check out the guns your people so rudely asked my man Johnny to leave at the door then come back here and tell me those things are from Earth.”
Pryce looked like he wanted to argue but then tilted his head in concession.
Nelken wordlessly flipped a switch on the intercom in front of him.
“Armory,” came a gruff response.
“Rodgers,” Nelken said quietly, “please bring the weapons we’re holding for our new guests to the council chamber.”
“Uh, yes, Commander. Right away.”
Nelken gave a thanks, clicked off the intercom, and tilted his head toward Jarek.
Jarek gave a hesitant nod in response. That was twice Nelken had surprised him by being … well, not a dick. It was a little disorienting.
“This is bullshit,” Sloan mumbled in Nelken’s ear. “Who gives a crap if they have fancy guns?”
It was quiet enough that no one else should have heard, but Jarek had Fela’s sensors on his side.
“It’s far from perfect,” Nelken muttered back, less quietly, “but it’s something.” He turned back to Lea and Haldin. “In the meantime, let’s continue hypothetically. If these rakul were really coming to Earth, what would we do about it? As Mr. Slater would gladly tell you, we’re limited in our ability to handle the raknoth. What do you propose we do against something stronger?”
Jarek joined the others in looking to Lea, who’d been the first and loudest to voice the obvious: the Resistance—the rag-tag organization formed with the sole intent of breaking raknoth control on their planet—was not going to like their answer to that question.
Hell, they didn’t even like it.
After the day’s events, Alaric had been too pissed or frustrated or whatever boiling stew of instability he currently was to even come to this meeting. Rachel was only a hair better, sitting next to him in a dark, gloomy haze.
Still, if they were even going to think about it, it had to be said, and Lea was the only one who had even a scrap of a chance at being taken seriously.
“If it’s all true,” Lea said, “then we might need to start thinking about an alliance.”
Pryce audibly swallowed, but his head bobbed in agreement. He understood.
Commander Daniels’ expression grew more troubled.
Nelken raised his eyebrows half an inch. “With?”
Lea chewed on the thing she so clearly didn’t want to say. Finally, quietly, “With the raknoth, sir.”
Sloan gave a yelp of laughter.
Nelken looked like he might rebuke Sloan, but before he could, Lea spoke in a firm voice.
“I don’t want to be telling you this any more than you want to be hearing it. You sent us out to find the facts. This is what we found.” She glanced at the Enochians and back to the commanders. “I want solid proof as much as you, but in the meanwhile, we need to at least be having the conversation.”
Nelken and Daniels shared a somber look, both of them ignoring Sloan’s indignant shuffling and huffing. Together the two commanders turned back to Lea and gave slow nods.
Sloan’s eyes went wide. “You can’t be serious.”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I willingly align with the raknoth,” Nelken said, turning a sober look on Sloan. “But if we turn up solid evidence that a cold day in hell is indeed what’s coming, we’d be fools not to consider our options.”
“Well said, Commander,” Pryce said.
Commander Daniels nodded her agreement.
Sloan stared at them all for a handful of seconds, mouth agape, then he recrossed his arms and went back to sulking.
“This conversation stays in this room,” Daniels said, looking at each of them in turn. “What we’re talking about here is an apocalypse scenario. It could tear this place apart.”
Jarek figured that went without saying.
Much as pre-Catastrophe society had tried to convince itself it had moved beyond bigotry and into a free-range field of sunshine and open minds, he was pretty sure it hadn’t. At least not to the extent that the men and women of the Resistance would be open to making peace with the raknoth after the whole worldwide nuking thing.
These soldiers wouldn’t care when they learned that the raknoth had been victims themselves in a way, or that not all of them were involved in or even in support of the actions that had led to the Catastrophe. It wouldn’t matter.
Jarek wasn’t sure he cared so much either, but he’d seen enough people doing enough atrocious things to one another in his life to be sure about a couple things.
Thing one: people—human or raknoth—didn’t do bad shit because they were evil. They did it because they had desires, dreams, and more often than not, a long history of trying circumstances that had chipped their concepts of right and wrong down to the ground.
Thing two: humans were every bit as vicious and shitty as the raknoth. Maybe more so. They were just less well-equipped to exert those savage wills.
It wasn’t that Jarek wasn’t upset about the raknoth blowing the world’s ass off, or that he didn’t share the others’ profound discomfort at the thought of working with the scaly bastards. It was mostly just that he wasn’t too far up his own ass to see that both sides had pulled some cheap shots and that these indignant humans might have done the same damn thing to the raknoth had their positions been reversed.
And if this fresh hell was ready to descend on them, he certainly wasn’t about to shit on humanity’s only decent hope of survival out of pride or principle. Because that’s what this was about, right? Survival? That’s what he’d been telling himself all along.
But whose survival? If he was really so far above it all, why worry about whether all these petty a-holes pulled through? Why not take Pryce and Al and go find themselves a nice quiet rock to hide under until the world stopped burning for a second time?
He hadn’t registered he was staring at Rachel until she turned to meet his gaze with lovely hazel eyes and an expression that said Dude, what the hell are you staring at?
He couldn’t help but smile at her unspoken snark. When she saw it, Rachel’s expression softened and turned more genuinely curious, and the look between them deepened until the sounds of Nelken’s and Daniels’ voices receded to nothing but dull background buzz, and Jarek forgot where he was and what they were doing there and why anything even really mattered beyond those golden locks and—
The hard knock on the wooden doors at the back of the room hit him like a splash of cold water straight to the giblets.
Jarek rocked back in his seat and composed himself as Nelken called out for the ill-timed knocker to enter.
So what? Maybe Jarek wasn’t humanity’s biggest fan. And maybe he wasn’t some paragon of selfless service.
But this connection he felt sometimes when he looked at Rachel … The rest of the Rachels and Pryces—and maybe even Als—who might be in danger out there …
If those things weren’t worth fighting for, Jarek wasn’t so sure there was a reason to keep rolling out of his cot every morning.
The double doors parted, and a stout man with a buzz cut—Rodgers, presumably—entered the room carting a tray laden with Johnny’s odd-looking guns. A pang of guilt shot through Jarek as he recognized Rodgers’ bulldog face as the same one that had been on duty when Michael had busted him into the armory a few days ago to reclaim Fela.
Rodgers carted the tray forward, perfectly business-like until he caught sight of Jarek and gave one of the darker, angrier scowls Jarek could recall having ever received.
Jarek scrunched his face in his best oops expression and waved.
For some reason, Rodgers didn’t wave back. He only gave the commanders a curt nod to acknowledge their thanks, shot Jarek one more hard glare, and turned to leave.
The commanders rose and came to inspect the Enochian hardware along with everyone else.
At their core, the weapons all looked to follow the basic point-and-shoot design of Earth’s own firearms—some manner of grip or butt with a barrel that pointed toward the things you wanted to kill. Beyond that, though, details like feeding and firing mechanisms, magazine placement, and pretty much everything else varied, some slightly, others radically.
One thing was clear: none of them—aside from Johnny and Haldin, of course—had ever seen firearms like them. Actually, looking at the series of tiny coils along the barrel of one handgun, Jarek wasn’t even sure they could all be properly designated as firearms.
After a minute’s inspection, Nelken finally looked up at Johnny. “Why were you carrying this many weapons?”
Johnny squinted at Nelken. “Is that a rhetorical question? Or …”
Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series Page 16