by Cam Baity
“The louses are burrowing in deep,” a third said.
Goodwin was waist-deep in a dozen problems with a hundred more demanding his attention, one of which pinged on the Scrollbar device in his hands.
The message read, “Negative, sir. No sign of the children yet.”
The Chairman wanted to chuck his device out of the Rangecart. When the transport had rescued him from the Hatchery, Goodwin was outraged and humiliated beyond belief. He had sworn the patrol to secrecy, sending all but one of the Aero-copters to retrieve the kids and keeping the remaining aircraft for his return. As potentially invaluable as Phoebe and her discovery were, he could not afford to waste any more time on them. The Foundry needed him. Meridian needed him.
“Blast the Covenant out,” Goodwin growled.
The military executives frowned in disapproval.
“I don’t care what it costs. We must free ourselves to focus on the imminent threat in Ahm’ral,” the Chairman said. “You have all the firepower you need. Use it.”
His tone left no room for further discussion.
The Rangecart passed another security checkpoint and screeched to a stop in front of Hangar C. Goodwin hopped out and made his way toward the huge bay door, with his entourage in tow. He led the way down a stairwell that ran underground to a reinforced steel vault. There, a group of soldiers saluted him, along with a distressed-looking commissioner with an aluminum briefcase.
“Sir,” the commissioner said, then popped open his container to reveal a portable Computator within. He typed in an encrypted password, then extended it to Goodwin.
He took a deep breath, already regretting what he was about to do. It was everything he stood against, everything he had worked to change. But what he had seen—whatever that thing was in the mehkans’ sacred city—left him with no alternative. The Chairman entered his code.
The steel vault behind them opened with a thunk.
Goodwin caught a glint of fear in the commissioner’s eye and shared the sentiment. History was doomed to repeat. Such was the fate of the Foundry. Such was the fate of James Goodwin, Chairman for over thirty years, who had condemned Creighton Albright for the very thing he himself was setting into motion.
All those present gazed silently at the contents of the storage room—rows of bulky black cylinders lined with aerodynamic fins.
CHAR bombs.
“Arm the warheads,” Goodwin said.
A bright chirp from the Com-Pak attached to Goodwin’s lapel got his attention. He left the assembled team to the task at hand and ascended the steps to receive the call.
“Goodwin here.”
“Sir. Weapon Systems Supervisor Merrick for you.”
“Patch him,” the Chairman said as he emerged from the busy hangar and stepped out into the sickly dawn. After a brief, crackling delay, a hurried voice cut in.
“Mr. Goodwin, sir. What can I do for you?”
“You oversee the entire Air Brigade arsenal, correct?”
“Yes, sir. If this is about the CHAR stockpile, I already sent orders to—”
“No,” Goodwin interrupted. “I am interested in Bloodtalons.”
There was a pause.
“Sir?” the supervisor inquired.
“F-20 Bloodtalons. Are they all accounted for?”
“Of course, sir. Yes…Yes, of course.”
Goodwin stopped in his tracks as if held by an anchor.
“Nothing at all unusual to report?” the Chairman asked.
“No, sir. You would be the first to know.” The supervisor cleared his throat nervously. “May I ask what this is about?”
“No. That is all, Merrick.”
He turned off his Com-Pak with a click.
It didn’t add up—none of it did. Too many pieces on the chessboard, too many pawns in play. It was a game that Goodwin had played to win throughout his entire career, but now an unsettling new feeling weighed him down.
A flicker of movement caught his eye.
Off to the left of the bustling airfield was an avenue of shipping crates stacked twenty feet high, still drenched in shadow from the lazy dawn.
It was nothing.
The Chairman reined in his sleep-deprived mind as his entourage rejoined him and filed back into the Rangecart. But still he couldn’t shake off this new, nagging sense—the growing possibility that this was a game without a winner.
Phoebe felt Micah’s eyes on her as she stared out the Gyrojet window at dawn, light peeking over the silver sea. She knew what he was thinking but feared his questions.
“It’s the seed, isn’t it?” he asked in a hesitant voice.
She nodded ever so slightly.
“Lemme see,” he said.
Reluctantly, she exposed her throat to him. She worried there was something wrong with it, and that his expression would confirm her fears.
“Looks fine,” he said at last.
She kept staring out the window, not wanting him to see just how relieved she was.
“It needs the Shroud,” she said. “I can feel it. I first felt it when we left Rust Risen.”
She looked back at Micah, but his expression had clouded.
“It’s getting worse,” Phoebe whispered.
“So…what do we do?”
“Keep going” was her answer. “We’re going home to stop Her. Somehow.”
“But what if you…How long can you…”
“I don’t know.” A burst of laughter from the cockpit interrupted them.
“Can you cogitate it?” Mr. Pynch chortled, pointing to a curious Fritz. “This ramshackle contraption comprehentimates Rattletrap! The wee beastie in this scrap’s dome really be runnin’ the proverbial show!”
Fritz looked back at the kids. The transparent faceplate of his helmet was hinged open, giving them a good look at his eerie sculpted mask of a face. Was that a delighted gleam in his optical sensors, or was it just the flicker of damaged wiring?
Mr. Pynch broke into a jolly stream of Rattletrap, and Fritz nodded eagerly, returning to his job of flying the Gyrojet while trying to suppress a hiccup of sparks.
“We’re crazy to trust him, aren’t we?” Phoebe whispered. “Both of them, really.”
“Yep. But I ain’t exactly the best judge of crazy anymore.” Micah sighed. He slumped onto the floor and rubbed his temples. “Sorry I flipped on you.”
She didn’t look at him and chose not to say anything. Silence stretched between them while he searched for the words.
“I’m better, I think. I mean, yes, I’m better. I better be better.” He clenched his teeth and tried again. “I just…When I lost you I…I never felt…”
He shook his head, unable to make the words come out as he wanted them to. “I wanted to die. But the Uaxtu brought you back and—”
“You brought me back.” Phoebe looked at him and smiled. He was scratched and scabbed, with a nasty brown bruise blotching one eye. She could only imagine how disheveled she looked. They deserved each other.
“You saved me,” she said.
“No.” Micah looked away. “When Goodwin showed up, I knew I could never save you. I knew you were gonna die again, and there was nothing I could do about it.” His voice was so fragile that it could have blown away in the wind. “So I snapped.”
“But now you’re back,” she offered. “Right?”
His lip quivered as he wiped away tears, but his voice was steady. “I’m with you.”
Outside, the rising suns raked across the coast as the Gyrojet left the Mirroring Sea behind. The arid landscape below was sculpted into angled mesas and rutted canyons. They were flying low enough to make out herds of giant mehkans grazing on the wiry brush. The creatures had broad black bodies striped in lustrous bronze with powerful legs and elegantly curved shoulders.
“Auto-mobiles,” Phoebe said darkly.
“Looks like a traffic jam.”
“Meridian has no idea what’s coming.”
“They will soon enough,” Micah mumbled,
then chuffed an ironic laugh. “Guess I’m gettin’ to defend my country after all, and I never even set foot in the Military Institute.”
The Auto-mobile creatures raised their heads, alerted to the soaring aircraft overhead. The herd broke into a gallop, racing across the vast plains like wild horses.
Phoebe had given her life to find the Occulyth because she had believed it would save Mehk from humans. Now, even though they didn’t have the slightest inkling of a plan, she was willing to give her life again, but this time it was to save Meridian from the mehkans. Everything was backward and twisted, upside down and back to front.
Nothing true is black or white, her father had told her, back in the cell they shared in the Citadel. Now she was finally beginning to understand what he meant.
“I been thinkin’…” Micah said, drumming his fingers on one of the crates scattered inside the Gyrojet’s cabin.
“Well, there’s a change of pace.”
“Cute, Plumm,” he grumbled, but couldn’t hide his smirk. “Anyway, won’t be long till we’re at the Depot.”
Phoebe sighed. “And we need to get back to the tunnel.”
“Which ain’t gonna happen,” Micah mused. His eyes drifted to Fritz, who was listening to a guffawing Mr. Pynch ramble on in Rattletrap. “Unless we find someone who can blend in…”
“VICTORY!”
Margaret read the headline of the discarded newspaper in the break room as she nibbled at a flavorless fruit salad. She froze at a photo of the devastation that Meridian had wreaked upon Vellaroux. The capital of Trelaine had been leveled, and the remains were drowning in water from the obliterated Rodeau dam.
Her own handiwork.
“You hear Admiral Imaro is trying to surrender now?” said a nearby Foundry officer to his coworker as he poured sweetener into his self-stirring silver coffee mug.
“All it takes is a couple kilotons of explosives to get an apology out of these clowns,” muttered the other.
The first officer cracked a smile.
“I said it before, and I’ll say it again,” the second man went on, “we should have done this a long time ago.”
“Sure would have nipped this whole Quorum thing in the bud,” the first one agreed as he made for the exit. “Well, old man Imaro is in for a little surprise.”
“At”—the other officer checked his watch as he left the break room—“oh-seven-hundred, when the Kijyo Republic goes…poof!”
The two men chuckled as they left.
Margie threw away her fruit salad—her appetite was gone.
“Tanner,” said a deep voice behind her. She turned to find hard-eyed General Freemont.
Immediately, she snapped to attention.
“At ease, Officer,” Freemont said, scanning the steel trays of food. “You’d think with the Foundry’s deep pockets that we’d get meals that were a little less…”
“Gray, sir?”
“Precisely.” The general’s countenance lightened as he grabbed a box of cereal instead. “How are you holding up?”
“Good, sir,” Margie said unconvincingly. “Coping.”
He assessed her with a quick glance.
“This is the job, Tanner—our duty. No one is enjoying it.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, looking in the direction where the two smug men went. “I know we’re only doing what must be done.”
“For the good of Meridian,” Freemont said. “For the world.”
“Of course,” she said, now more confidently.
“Keep up the good work, Tanner,” the general said as he tore open the box of dry cereal. “This’ll be over before you know it.”
“Sir?”
Freemont munched a handful as he took his leave.
“Five nations down, eight to go.”
At approximately 8:12 a.m., the Depot’s NET system opened to allow Gyrojet number AE3-S214, battered and smoking, to touch down on a landing pad. The aircraft had been missing for thirty-six hours, but because all the necessary protocols were followed and the correct Control Core security codes were submitted, its arrival raised no alarms.
There was only one crew member, a Watchman soldier unit that had survived the destruction of Hatchery E-08. This too did not seem unusual, since the automatons were programmed to salvage and return tech whenever possible. As the ground crew surrounded the damaged vehicle, the Watchman marched down the ramp from the jet’s cargo hold, secured a motorized Boostdolly, and used it to remove a large ammunition crate from the aircraft. Because the unit appeared to have a designated task and did not trigger any warning signals, the other Watchmen and Foundry personnel paid it no mind.
No one noticed the black electrical tape covering a deep gash on the Watchman’s head and binding its loose shock prong fingers.
Doing his best to focus on the mission at hand, Fritz fell in lockstep with a stream of Watchmen guiding Boostdollys like his. The other units wore the blue jumpsuit and hard hat uniform of freight workers, making Fritz stand out in his military garb. He kept his focus, though, and proceeded to an adjacent shipping hub where a chain of cargo trucks were being loaded, bound for an Albright City Cargoliner.
Yet before he could hide his crate among the others on the back of a cargo truck, the vehicle’s segmented shell slammed shut, and it rumbled away. The rest of the Watchmen instantly froze in place, waiting like statues for the next convoy. Fritz braved a glance at the non-sentient automatons and shifted nervously. This was a delay he could not afford.
He spied a row of Mini-lifts parked beside columns of carefully stacked iron pallets. As robotically as he could, Fritz marched over to one of the compact movers, transferred his sensitive burden from the Boostdolly, and zipped off.
Steering the new contraption proved more difficult than he had anticipated, especially with one taped-up hand. Fritz managed to maneuver through the Depot in a herky-jerky fashion and began to make his way toward the tunnel looming in the distance. He navigated around teams of workers prepping armored vehicles for combat, through a swarming storage zone, and past marching columns of Watchman soldiers, trying not to glance at any of the commotion, lest it break his concentration.
Without warning, Fritz was overtaken by a seizure of sparks. He flopped around and lost control of the Mini-lift. Twitching, he stabilized the vehicle before the crate slipped out of the mover’s grip. Fritz looked around to ensure no one had noticed his spasm. He was passing a security cordon where personnel were being addressed by a Rangecart packed with white-haired officials. And their eyes were on him.
At first, Fritz was pleased to recognize the big man in the back—evidently that fellow had recovered from the unintended electric shock. Then Fritz realized that seeing the man here was probably not a good thing. As nonchalantly as a Watchman possibly could, Fritz continued to drive down the lane as if nothing had occurred. He merged onto a major thoroughfare and checked his side mirror.
The Rangecart carrying the big man was following him.
Fritz accelerated to wind around more platoons in formation as he entered a construction site. Workers with glowing wands stepped into view, helping an Over-crane traverse the wide avenue. Traffic slowed to a stop.
But not Fritz. His Mini-lift burred past the obstruction, coming within a few feet of the massive Over-crane as it was backing up. The thoroughfare behind him was blocked—the Rangecart was nowhere to be seen.
He took another series of turns in his effort to seek out the less-traveled lanes of the Depot and wound up puttering through the alleys between silent warehouses. At the end of a narrow passage lined with cubical trash bins, past a chain-link fence, Fritz saw an area that was unattended and packed with heaps of debris from the ongoing battle—a disposal site.
To Fritz, it looked like a fascinating wonderland.
To the trespassers hidden inside the crate, the surrounding calm and quiet was a welcome relief. The turbulence they had endured over the past half hour had jangled their nerves (and their bodies) to the breaking point
.
“Swear I will flagellate that scrap,” the balvoor grunted.
Phoebe, Micah, and Mr. Pynch were crammed into the ammunition crate so tightly that it felt like they had been vacuum-packed. Micah was twisted into a preposterous knot, with his knees up by his ears, and Mr. Pynch was compressed like a parachute straining to unfurl. His quill nubs were jabbing Phoebe’s side, making it even harder for her to breathe.
They came to a sudden stop. The trio strained their ears. There wasn’t a single sound. No indication of a threat, nor any sign that the coast was clear. Had Fritz gotten them to the tunnel? Or had he been caught?
With a huff, the balvoor expanded his inflatable body ever so slightly, raising the heavy lid just enough for him to press his nozzle to the crack and sniff the air outside.
The way he grumbled made Phoebe uneasy.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Too many unfamiliarous traces. Can’t olfactorate precisely.”
She considered it a moment.
“We have to check it out,” Phoebe whispered.
Micah made a constrained motion that might have been a nod. Together, they heaved the lid up another few inches, allowing the three of them to peek out.
Their crate was suspended a few feet off the ground by the long arms of the Mini-lift. Hills of rubble and refuse rose all around them, with hints of mehkan corpses and Foundry wreckage tossed among the filth. They were in some sort of garbage dump, and it was vacant except for Fritz’s lone figure.
He stood stone-still before a shiny Dynapak waste disposal unit. Phoebe was worried that the damaged Watchman had powered down for good until he bent his knees and squatted. Fritz rose onto his tippy-toes, then tilted his head at the Dynapak and waved to it. The curious Watchman was inspecting his own distorted reflection, staring back at him from the convex chrome surface of the disposal unit.
Micah snorted in amused disbelief, but Mr. Pynch was steaming with indignation.
“Of all the cockamamy…How could you…” he hissed. “What be all this preposterrant dumbfoolery?!”