by Jody Wallace
“How long have you been planning this, Niko?” Gregori said.
“Two and a half weeks.”
“By the void, why didn’t you include me?” Together, they could have been so much more effective, so much smarter. And he’d never have met Adelita. “She could already be dead because you didn’t include me.”
“I should have told you. I didn’t. Had my reasons. Now we move on.” Niko’s headset lit up. “Have faith, Gregori.”
“In what? Her god or our code? Or am I supposed to hope the Shipborn cavalry is coming?” They were so far out of the realm of code here, if they survived this, they wouldn’t be imprisoned. Sent dirtside somewhere miserable.
Ship might actually have them put down as a danger to itself, themselves, and all others.
“Have faith in Adelita,” Niko said with a wry smile. “I’ve learned not to underestimate what Terrans are capable of. More importantly, Terrans whom Ship didn’t choose for us.”
“What are you saying?” Gregori asked.
Niko looked as though he wanted to talk, but instead he shook his head. “Later. We have to go. More daemons reached the women.” He adjusted the straps suspending Tracy. “Come with us.”
While the women did deserve protection, there was no guessing how many daemons and shades surrounded Adelita. “No. I’m getting her out of there.”
Niko flew closer to Gregori, the camaraderie they used to share burning in his eyes. “Direct your efforts where they’ll do some good. There’s no way you can rescue her. Even if you find her without getting eaten, she has to plant that bomb.”
“I should be the one transporting the bomb.”
“The risk is too high. You can’t enter the kill zone, and trying to hit the nexus with the bomb from a distance…it’s impossible. Adelita is the better candidate.”
“I can do it.” And he would—if he could find her in time.
He arched his wings to fly off, but Niko’s enraged yell stopped him. “Don’t be a fool! Adelita’s death won’t wake the leviathan, but yours will.”
“We have no proof one will be woken after the nexus is sealed,” Gregori said. He could accept his fate, but he could not accept deserting Adelita to hers. “I won’t fail to close it.”
“As many entities as there are on this planet? A leviathan’s a guarantee,” Niko spat.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe this. If you go, we’re dead.”
“You’d know about death, wouldn’t you?” Niko had sent Adelita to her death, and there was no guarantee it would benefit anyone, much less the planet. She was neither trained nor prepared for such a mission. Granted, she was a better candidate than a sharpshooting Terran on crutches or a team of pregnant shade magnets, but it was still an inconceivable gamble.
Gregori’s internal chronometer ticked off the seconds while he argued. It had now been approximately thirty-seven minutes since Adelita had been abandoned in the shade zone. If she were still on track, at any moment, the bomb could explode and suck the life from all of them.
At any moment.
This was his decision. If he and Adelita couldn’t escape, the bomb would take them together.
“Good-bye, Nikolas.” Gregori saluted his former lieutenant. “Get those poor women out of here.”
“Poor women,” Tracy scoffed. “Should I shoot him?”
“It won’t do any good,” Niko answered bitterly. “He’s shielded and we can’t waste time fighting him. We’ve got to switch to plan C.”
The last thing Gregori heard was Tracy’s cursing, almost as inventively as her sister Claire.
…
Adelita made it to the garage mound, but gaining the top had been another matter. First she’d killed three begetters. They were easy targets, sitting there like giant rotten eggs, though their shrieking had deafened her. Everything sounded fuzzy and full of echoes. And then, halfway up the slope, a daemon had dive-bombed her, and she’d had to kill it, too, which had delayed her further. Now the shades were oozing up the rubbish heap after her.
She kept ahead of them by not being picky what she grabbed and where she scrambled. She stabbed several holes in her hands on sharp metal. One finger was bleeding so much it nauseated her. Red drips decorated her progress up the scrap heap. She was afraid if she looked too closely, she’d realize the finger was, well, missing.
Shades had claimed the edges of the rubble and parts of the sides. Unstoppable. Who knew how far they’d risen through cracks in the rubble beneath her? She couldn’t dally.
She dragged herself to the highest point, a steel girder of some sort, and inspected the eastern slope where debris shivered, dropping into some kind of opening. Had to be the nexus. She couldn’t see the eyeball-sucking antimatter Nikolas had described, but there were no shades. A cloud of dust created by the constant crumble of masonry hazed the air. She needed to get as close as possible for her best chance of corking up the hellhole.
Careful not to look at her finger, she slipped off the backpack and withdrew the bomb.
The bomb that would save Earth was a silver cube a foot in diameter, simple, elegant, and unremarkable except for its high gloss and the tiny computer on the side. It wasn’t heavy, but it didn’t matter.
Her knees weakened. She nearly dropped it.
The sun bounced off its mirrored surface. Niko said it could take any kind of beating without exploding, but balancing it in her hands, this device with more power than Earth’s atomic weapons, she felt like the slightest breath would detonate it before she got to the nexus.
She inched down the slope, toward the debris tumbling into the nexus in a slow, ominous cascade. There wasn’t an inch of her that didn’t hurt, throb, or threaten to give out from under her…except her courage.
That, she’d abandoned when the shades had nearly eaten her. She was running on pure bullheadedness now.
Suddenly, the ground all around gave a jolt and rumble, as if a bulldozer the size of a city block were driving past. The debris heap shuddered. The ocean of shades covering the kill zone and beyond undulated, up and down.
Adelita stared around in shock. An earthquake? Well, since the big one hadn’t separated California from the rest of the continent as predicted, she supposed San Francisco was due.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if a natural disaster kept her from preventing the end of the world?
Couldn’t let that happen. She punched the code into the bomb, even though she hadn’t reached the nexus to hurl it in, and tried not to vomit when she accidentally glanced at her right hand.
You don’t care if I have nine fingers instead of ten, do You? she asked the Lord. I can still come see You in about five minutes?
He didn’t answer.
The tremor increased. Everything rumbled. She reached the edge of the nexus, not too close, since her footing was uncertain. A bottomless pit of dust and nothing yawned before her.
Taking careful aim, she pitched the cube into the swirling depths.
Nothing happened. The earthquake continued to grumble, causing buildings to sway and entities to scream.
My God. He had helped her. She’d done what she came here to do.
It was decidedly anticlimactic. Even with an earthquake. Adelita squatted down to wait, bracing herself against the shifting ground. She’d never had a chance to confess her sins to a priest, so she’d be taking her journey to heaven encumbered.
Dammit.
…
Niko’s fancy new wings were fast. Faster than Gregori dreamed. He outpaced the daemons who gave chase without so much as blinking.
He reached the nexus in under a minute and cranked up his vision.
The San Francisco area seemed to be enduring an earthquake. His sensors read it at 7.2. Now that he was stationary, he could hear the earth grumbling, could see fissures opening and buildings reduced to further debris.
And he could see Adelita. There. She was in the kill zone, atop a mountain of rubble. The nexus was fifteen feet away, s
ucking and churning. She didn’t seem to have the bomb. Dust clouded the air around her. Shades thronged up the rubbish heap toward her like a rising sea of death, and she just slumped there, head on her knees.
He considered what he should do. Zip into the kill zone? Risk waking a leviathan with the nexus intact? Except…he didn’t read a full contingent of begetters. His sensors revealed that the kill zone had inconsistent shielding, erratic wavelengths. The effects of the quake as the earth’s crust shifted and the missing begetters seemed to be interrupting the power flow among the remaining drones.
Maybe, just maybe…
Taking a deep breath, he dove.
…
Adelita glanced up when a shadow passed between her and the sun. Another daemon?
No, it was…Gregori.
Gregori! She tried to get up, but her body had nothing more to give.
“I guess I’m dead.” Her voice echoed strangely in her head, and she rubbed her eyes. “Wow, that didn’t hurt at all.”
If she was dead, heaven looked and smelled an awful lot like San Francisco after the entity invasion. Felt like it, too, from the blood crusted on her hands to the ground jittering with an earthquake. At least she couldn’t hear the shades hissing anymore.
Gregori helped her stand. His hands felt real. Earthly. They trembled in a way that felt earthly. His eyes glittered in a way that looked earthly. It felt earthly when he clutched her to his chest hard enough to squeeze an “eek” out of her.
She wasn’t dead? Then it wouldn’t be long. She’d tossed the bomb into the nexus 183 Mississippis ago.
He said something that involved a lot of intense staring and lip movement, but it was impossible to decipher with her fuzzy ears.
“What?” Her knees, at long last, gave out. He caught her before she hit the rubble.
She concentrated on his mouth. He was asking about Mom. No, bomb.
“I dropped the bomb in there.” She waved vaguely at the nexus. “Five-minute timer. Hey, that means I saved the world. Maybe.”
Gregori snatched her up and catapulted into the air, knocking the breath out of her. His handsome face became a grim mask. His mouth moved with words she couldn’t hear.
She glanced down, but the mountain of rubble, the shades, and the nexus were already out of sight.
“Were you supposed to come into the kill zone?” She could hear herself if she yelled.
“No.” That was easy to enough to lip-read.
“Did you wake a leviathan?” If he’d sacrificed his Ship or the planet to get her out of there, she had to admit it wasn’t a fair trade.
What would a leviathan look like? Giant daemon? Black blob the size of the moon? She squinted back the way they’d come.
Her eyes watered with Gregori’s speed until she could distinguish very little. The sky blurred. Gregori’s shield fluttered on and off around them, and wind shoved her against him with the pressure of way too much gravity.
She didn’t think she could feel more pain, but this hurt.
Gregori didn’t speak. His jaw even blurred. Her body felt like it was blurring.
Could they escape before the bomb went off? Nikolas had been elusive about the blast radius, but she gathered it was extensive.
She wanted to ask where they were going, but the weight of the Gs trapped her words in her throat. The pressure increased until she felt like a nail being hammered. Her human body couldn’t possibly survive this for long.
A throbbing roar of sound overcame her fuzzy hearing and deafened her the rest of the way.
Brilliant light flashed everywhere. Gregori’s arms tightened, which she could feel even beyond the pressure.
Then they were tumbling. Upside down. Free-falling. Through a whiteness she didn’t think was clouds. Or heaven.
Chapter Seventeen
Adelita woke to that same whiteness. Her body was weightless, with no points of contact. She fluttered her eyelashes and could feel that, but nothing was touching her.
Heaven this time?
Experimentally, she clenched her fists. The one that had been missing a finger lanced pain up her arm.
Next she tried to sit up. Failed. Tried to roll over. Failed. Tried to lift her head.
Failed.
Dammit. This wasn’t heaven. She was laid out like a mostly paralyzed buffet wherever she and Gregori had crash-landed.
“Hello? Gregori?” Her larynx tickled, but her voice didn’t echo in her head or out of it. She squeezed her eyes shut, reopened them, and still saw nothing but white.
Mostly paralyzed…and blind and deaf.
When she screamed, she could hear it, faintly. So she did it louder.
A cool touch on her face. She knew what that was. A shade!
She was probably still wearing the blasters. Maybe she could unlatch it before it ate her. She clenched her fists, one of the few movements she could manage, and thought angry, furious thoughts.
Nothing happened. No heat in her arms, but she did notice a sting at her neck. She yelled more, hoping to scare the monsters off.
It seemed to work. The coolness on her cheek disappeared, along with the sting. Nobody had told her shades were vulnerable to sonic weapons. Adelita ran out of breath and huffed, ready to go again at the slightest whiff of icy death.
As she lay there, tense and unmoving, sensations returned slowly to her body. The temperature wasn’t too hot, wasn’t too cold. The smell was unremarkable, with no trace of entities. No trace of anything identifiable. She lay on a flat surface, somewhat cushioned and rather comfortable. Hmm.
Streaks of color infused her vision, chasing away the white. She blinked rapidly, and a face came into focus above her.
A woman, not a monster. Thank the Lord. She had blond hair, blue eyes, and golden skin. She reminded Adelita of something, but her brain was dull and she couldn’t think what. A halo nestled in the woman’s short hair, and she wore a cream-colored lab coat that did her no favors. Beyond the woman were white and silver machines, a white ceiling, white floors. Lots of white. Hard to clean.
“I was warned about the screaming,” the woman said, her voice sounding surprised. “Not that I believed it at the time, or anything he tells me, but I digress.”
“Where am I?” Adelita croaked. “Who are you?”
The woman smiled. “Adelita Louisa Eleanor Martinez, I’m Dr. CallenJoseph. My full name is Sarah 1001 CallenJoseph-daughter. You’re aboard Ship in our medtech bay, and I’m happy to inform you that your planet and everyone on it still exists because of you.”
But Adelita had no eyes for this woman. Another blond, the person in the universe she most wanted to see, appeared at Sarah’s shoulder.
“Excuse me.” Gregori nudged past the doctor and gathered Adelita into his arms almost as tightly as when they’d outflown the bomb. Hot tears tickled her face.
They weren’t hers.
She patted his hair, his damp cheeks, his shoulders, his back, everything she could reach. “We’re not dead, right?”
“It was close,” he said gravely. “Particularly for you.”
He squeezed her harder, and she coughed. It almost hurt, but she never wanted him to let go. And they had important things to discuss, like… “What happened to my finger?”
She still wasn’t brave enough to look.
“We were unable to regenerate them,” the doctor offered from somewhere behind Gregori. “I’m sorry.”
Them? Mierda. Now she really wasn’t brave enough to look. Suddenly her hand ached as though someone was stepping on it.
Gregori stroked her hair, bent his head, and kissed her lightly.
It wasn’t enough to distract her. She deepened the kiss, and his tongue stroked hers until her injuries were forgotten. Mostly. It helped when his hands slid down her back and cupped her ass, or what he could grip of it with her sitting on the exam table.
Flutters of sexual heat reassured her that everything else about her body was intact. As for how she’d gotten to the medtech bay
and what would happen next, not even kissing an angel could eradicate those concerns.
Dr. CallenJoseph cleared her throat. “My patient should not be overstimulated.”
Adelita pulled away, her face flushed. Gregori released her, adjusted his off-white trousers, and clasped his hands behind his back.
The expression on his face promised they would continue this later.
“So how much trouble are we in?” she asked.
“For public display of affection?” The doctor blinked rapidly, and Adelita recognized the expression of somebody reading a sensor array. “Not much, though I do recommend keeping it in your private quarters in the future, since code states—”
“It’s all right, sis.” Gregori patted the doctor’s shoulder. “We’ll be out of your space soon.”
So that was why the doctor looked so familiar. “You’re related?”
“Same egg—that is, maternal parent,” Gregori said. “Different seed parents.”
“We didn’t grow up together,” the doctor said. “Siblings and families on Ships don’t always function like humans on Terra.”
“Okay.” An awkward silence fell, making Adelita wonder why Gregori and his sister seemed hesitant to tell her anything beyond basic facts about her health and planet.
Or should she wonder? They were on Ship, after all, which hopefully couldn’t read her mind, considering what had just occurred to her.
“Are we still in my solar system or have you kidnapped me?” she asked. “Because if you have kidnapped me to be a breeder, I don’t like children and—”
Gregori’s blue eyes flickered to the ceiling and back to her face. She couldn’t tell if it was a secret message or an eye-roll and decided on secret message, since she didn’t want to have to punch Gregori in front of his sister.
“Relax,” he told her. “We’re in orbit over Terra.”
“Good,” she said. “I realize you can hear me, Ship. For your information, I’m onto you and…” She trailed off when she noticed the doctor’s face pale and Gregori’s lips tighten.
“What is she talking about?” Sarah whispered.