by Fonda Lee
“We’re taking back the Towers,” Thad said. “Tomorrow.”
The briefing was held in the hospital’s largest meeting room. Donovan realized how famished he was when he saw the tables along the wall laden with plates of sandwiches, bowls of chips, and flats of armor juice. Having his mouth full of food prevented him from needing to make much conversation with the other stripes who nodded to him and clapped him on the back. Once everyone’s hunger was sated, the remaining food and empty plates were cleared away.
Soldier Werth and Commander Tate arrived and walked them through the plan, rotating and zooming in on projections displaying cut-in views of the Towers. The room was so crowded Donovan could barely move but people were silent. Utilizing the full capacity of available Nurses, hospital space, and equipment, Therrid and his peers were removing the exocel hobble on three hundred and twenty combat-rated soldiers-in-erze in Round Three. Nurses in the other four occupied Rounds had gotten a slightly later start and were aiming for at least two hundred and seventy battle-ready stripes in each location. With more time, they could have more people, or move officers around to optimize the numbers across the Rounds, but further delay was too great a risk. The Hunters would notice if the evacuation plans of the Mur colonists were not moving apace.
The counterattack would be coordinated among all five Rii-occupied locations. In Round Three, the mission would launch from the hospital parking lot. An unusual staging area, but “the Rii have no reason to pay attention to a large gathering of humans around this building,” Tate explained. “No doubt they’ve already figured out it’s a medical facility and they don’t consider us a serious threat.”
“They’ll be far more interested in the three hundred Soldiers that will leave the field encampment and veer off course from the shipyards to launch an eastern assault on the Towers.” Soldier Werth mapped out the approach the Soldiers would take. “Once the Hunters scramble to defend their position, a disguised human attack through the western sector will meet with reduced resistance.”
“Work your way in and up,” Commander Tate explained, drawing lines through the projected image of the Towers. “The Hunters will do their best to keep us contained to lower levels. Once they realize we’ve broken the negotiated agreement, they’ll have nothing to lose. We need to seize control of the main communications centers before they can take control of our orbital weaponry and set off retaliatory attacks on the Rounds and other human cities.”
Tate and Werth gave the appearance of working in tandem as always, but Donovan noticed they stood at a distance from each other in the room and some of their usual nonverbal signals—a questioning glance from Tate, a subtle fin movement from Werth—were missing. As committed as they both were to this joint mission, the friction of lost faith lingered between them. Theirs was as long a partnership as had ever existed between zhree and human; Donovan wondered whether, after the events of the past several months, it could be repaired.
At a gesture of permission from Werth, two other Soldiers who’d been hovering in the background stepped forward. One of them Donovan recognized from his distinctively notched fins as Wiv, the other he didn’t know. “This is what the Hunters will be carrying: a Myx/Yovian-assembled compact Grade 7 Er combat pulse weapon with armor-corroding ammunition,” said Wiv, hefting the enemy firearm with enthusiasm. Donovan smiled; Wiv reminded him of a typical gun nerd. “If the rounds fail to tear through your exocel, they fragment, dispelling damaging chemicals that burn and weaken panotin.”
“In short, these are a lot worse than what the sapes shoot at us,” Commander Tate said. “Don’t go in thinking you can take half a dozen of these and come out just fine after a few days in the tank. Our best guess is that a seventh- or eighth-generation human exocel can handle three, maybe four, shots before further impact starts being fatal.”
“That’s if you attend to wounds right away,” Wiv added.
Cass muttered behind Donovan, “Bottom line, don’t get shot.”
In the translation delay of Wiv’s words, Donovan overheard someone else whispering in amazement, “This is really going to happen. Scorch me, we’re actually going to fight those monsters.”
The Soldier that Donovan didn’t recognize pulled up an image of a Rii Hunter. “Spore team Hunters don’t retreat or surrender. The only way to take the Towers back is to eliminate them. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have time for more preparation, but here’s what you need to know: Shots to the eyes and the center of the underbelly are the most lethal. Fin injuries aren’t fatal, but they’re extremely painful and disorienting.”
“All this information and the full use of our exocels would’ve been awfully handy last week, wouldn’t it?” Sebastian grumbled darkly under his breath.
Several people around him muttered agreement. The Rii invasion had cost SecPac a lot of lives. The survivors wouldn’t soon forget that their zhree allies—the ones they would be going into battle alongside tomorrow—still shared the blame for the deaths of their fellow stripes.
After the large group briefing, Thad called together Donovan, Jet, Cass, and Zach, as well as three other exos: Angelina Tucker, MacAllister Pierce, and Sergio Martinez. SecPac had always operated on the basis of small, flexible teams and it had seemed best to preserve that, even in a large assault like this one. Their eight-person squad would be among the first into the Towers. Thad walked through every detail of the planned attack in his typical straightforward manner, but there was a darkness now, a grim set to his face that Donovan had not seen before.
Afterward, there was no point in hanging around the hospital, so they went home. Donovan felt as if he hadn’t been back to the house in ages. He, Jet, and Cass threw cushions and blankets onto the floor and spent the night camped out together in the living room. There wasn’t much talking. They just didn’t want to be alone, nor to go upstairs and pass Leon’s room.
Cass fell asleep eventually. Donovan couldn’t do the same. He knew he ought to get as much rest as possible, but now that all there was to do was wait, he couldn’t shut his brain down. He checked his comm unit surreptitiously. Coded well wishes and nervous dread and excitement stretched from Round to Round through the small screen in his hand: Good luck all. Kick some shroom ass. 198 Alpha forever. Donovan wrote: Matias, Amrita, and Leon—wish you were here.
Donovan heard Jet turn restlessly. “I can’t sleep,” Jet whispered.
“Me neither.” It was two o’clock in the morning.
Silence from the shadowy lump on the sofa that was his partner. “I just want it to happen already. I want to scorch those red-eyed shrooms.” Jet rolled over to stare at the ceiling. “I’m not afraid. I don’t care what happens to me anymore.”
The pain in his partner’s voice made Donovan’s stomach clench. I care. He’d done everything in his power to give exos the chance to fight for their planet, but now that it was actually about to happen, he was terrified. Not for his own life—he’d come close to death enough times lately that he couldn’t muster up much more fear for himself—but his friends were going into battle when they could’ve been safely aboard a Quasar-class transport ship.
On top of everything else, the possibility of losing Jet made Donovan’s mind want to shut down. He couldn’t face what might come the next day knowing there were open wounds between them. Lying in the dark, he tried to think of what to say, but before he could find the right words, Jet spoke.
“You were right,” Jet said. “About how being in erze doesn’t make you a good person.” A long exhalation. Quietly, “I’ve tried to live my whole life in erze and I haven’t figured it out.”
Donovan was so startled and confused by this admission that he had no immediate reply. Not a good person? Donovan could think of many times he’d wished he was more like Jet. His partner was one of the best soldiers-in-erze there was, and a better friend than Donovan knew he deserved.
Jet kept talking. “Last winter, I knew there were things eating at you—things you weren’t telling me.” Jet
glanced in Donovan’s direction but kept speaking to the ceiling in a voice just above a whisper. “I’m not going to lie; it was pretty frustrating. I thought I was doing everything I could to help you, but you still didn’t trust me enough to tell me what was going on. I figured there was nothing else I could do; you just needed time, the same way Vic said she needed time when we talked about moving in together. But that wasn’t really it, with either of you.”
“Jet.”
“You knew I’d judge you. The way I judged you for falling for a squishy. Or got mad that Vic refused her evacuation spot. You knew I’d take it badly, and I did. I called you a squishy-brained nutjob.”
“Head case,” Donovan corrected.
“Right. Well, sometimes it takes a crazy person to hold up the truth.” Jet shifted onto his side, though his face was barely visible in the dark. “You were right about the evacuation, about taking a stand, about what erze duty really is.”
On the other side of Donovan, Cass moved, then settled. The sudden silence seemed deafening before Jet spoke again. “I said that if I went out of erze I wouldn’t know who I was anymore. But you aren’t like that—you went so far out of erze you fell off the erze map and did a full slingshot in orbit and landed back here, somehow miraculously not dead.”
Donovan swallowed. “I admit I don’t quite believe it myself.”
Jet rolled onto his back again, and his voice turned rough and accusing. “I think being your partner is going to kill me. I feel like it already nearly has, about half a dozen times.”
“Hey,” Donovan protested, “you were the one threatening to throttle me.” He tried to sound light, but Jet’s words cut him badly.
“An act of self-preservation.” Jet flung an arm over his face so his voice was slightly muffled. “God, if you knew how—”
“Oath and erze,” Donovan broke in. “I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t cut it, but I am.” He’d lied to Jet, had taken him for granted, had broken the cardinal rule drilled into them since they were trainees—never, ever leave your erze mate. All for reasons that had made sense at the time but were terrible when he considered what he’d put his partner through; no one took erze oaths more seriously than Jet.
“I never told you this,” Donovan said, “but when we were kids I wanted to be a stripe because of you. The times I’ve gone out of erze, I felt like I had no choice—but I thought I might be stripped of my marks or worse. I never wanted to go behind your back, but I didn’t want to pull you down with me either.” Donovan rubbed at his eyes and was glad he couldn’t see Jet’s face. “I know it made me a bad partner and a terrible friend. I can’t blame you if you don’t trust me anymore. I just wish I could … earn it back somehow.” He stopped. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“Say that these markings still mean something,” Jet said hoarsely. “Everything I ever believed in has been flipped upside down and I don’t know what to think anymore. Say that we’re still erze. You and me, even if nothing else in the world is the same.”
Donovan propped himself up onto his elbows, enough so that his eyes were level with his partner’s. “You’re my brother, Jet. You could take away my uniform, my stripes, even the erze, and that wouldn’t change.” He slumped back to the floor and closed his eyes, letting the pillow muffle his words. “Heck, before everything fell apart, I would’ve left Earth with you.”
Jet did not reply for some time. Donovan heard an ambulance siren off in the distance, and the clunking sound of the ice maker in their fridge. At last, Jet said, in a thick voice that he tried to make sound normal, “It’s kind of a bummer, come to think of it. I always thought it would be fun to go into space.”
Donovan smiled to himself in the dark. “Yeah. We used to collect those model ships, remember? I wanted to pilot a low-orbit fighter. I remember I was so disappointed when my dad said humans couldn’t fly them.”
“Your old man sure didn’t believe in encouraging childhood ambitions.”
“Crusher of dreams, my dad. I think I was about seven years old at the time too.”
Jet said quietly, “You know what, I lied. I am afraid of what’ll happen tomorrow.”
“Me too. I’m scared out of my gourd.” Then he snorted. “Wouldn’t it be funny if Cass were awake this whole time, listening to us have this manly heart-to-heart?”
“Nah, if she was awake, she’d tell us to pull ourselves together and stop being such wet blankets.” Jet raised his whisper by an octave in a passable imitation of Cass’s voice: “Shut up and go to sleep, you two! We’ve got shrooms to send to hell tomorrow!”
They chuckled quietly so as not to disturb Cass. Jet rolled over and a few minutes later, Donovan heard his friend’s breathing even out into soft snores. Donovan stayed awake, listening and taking comfort in the sound for a while longer.
At precisely sixteen hundred hours the following day, convoys of unmarked transport vehicles sped through the Round toward the Towers. Crouched inside one of them, Donovan patted the pockets of his tactical vest, checking that everything was in place. Four magazines for his E81 electripulse carbine, two flash grenades, flares, panotin replenishment gel pack, chemical burn spray, secured comm unit and earbud tuned to the mission-team frequency.
There was no talking inside the vehicle; so far this was the quietest mission Donovan had ever been on. Everyone understood the significance of what they were being sent to do. This was unlike any task SecPac had ever been called upon to perform.
“Soldiers have begun the assault at the eastern entrance of the Towers. Enemy has been engaged.” Commander Tate’s voice in their earbuds. “SecPac red group, two minutes out.”
Donovan counted the long seconds in his head, pacing out his breaths. Cass caught his eye and winked. For the first time since Leon’s death, she looked like herself. Her cropped hair was tied back under a green bandana. On the black protective sleeve she wore over her right arm, she’d written in curly script with silver marker: Hunt the Hunters.
The truck came to a stop. The back of it flung open. Donovan gave Jet a smack on the shoulder. Go! I’m behind you. And then their boots were on the ground and they were running.
The Hunters guarding the western side of the Towers must’ve been bewildered by the sudden appearance of so many humans. At first they reacted with more surprise and curiosity than alarm, chittering to one another and pointing. The exos at the very front of the line came to a smooth halt a hundred meters from the entrance and opened fire.
Directly in front of him, Donovan saw Jet and Thad standing shoulder to shoulder as they aimed and fired in unison. The air whined with electripulse rifle blasts. Well-placed bullets tore through orange-red eyes and a handful of Hunters went down in the initial attack. Several more let out whistles of pain and surprise, retreating into the entryway of the Towers as gunfire peppered their armored bodies and limbs.
The advancing exos flowed immediately into the opening. Donovan ran past on Jet’s left, his heart thundering in his ears, Cass and Sergio on his heels. He didn’t expect to get far before the Hunters recovered from their initial surprise. With less than fifteen yards between him and the Towers, a dozen Hunters swarmed out of the entryway like a scene from a nightmare, a wave of bristling armor and mottled hulls, innumerable fiery eyes blazing. With an eruption of chirping rage, they spun out in a blur, pointed their weapons into the onrush of attacking humans, and let fly with a deafening onslaught of return fire.
From a dead sprint, Donovan threw himself stomach-down as the volley tore up asphalt, nearby parked vehicles, the sides of buildings, trees and shrubbery. He heard human screams go up behind him, but all he could see were the serrated, armored legs of the Hunters nearby as they went sailing over and around the spot where he lay. Donovan rolled onto his back, braced his E81 awkwardly, and pulled on the trigger, violently rattling his own ribs but sending several rounds of ammunition into the vulnerable undersides of the two Hunters nearest him. One of them collapsed at once; the other jerked and twisted like a
marionette, glistening liquid spattering the ground below it. It staggered about with its fins taut in a silent scream before its limbs folded and Angelina ran up and placed a shot directly through one of its eyes.
Donovan scrambled to his feet and kept moving. Adrenaline poured into his veins, but in terrified elation instead of the helpless panic he’d felt when they’d first faced the Hunters. This time they were the attackers. This was their Round, their home, and even though Donovan still expected he might die at any moment, his mind was clear and focused. His exocel rebalanced itself, stabilizing his calves and ankles and strengthening his gait as he rushed inside.
His teammates ran with him and broke right and left, covering their neighbors and keeping clear of one another’s fields of fire with the automaticity instilled from years of drilling in searches and raids. What met them inside was not anything like a Sapience ambush, however. Donovan had almost no time to put his back against a wall before Hunters flew at them like armored whirling dervishes. As uncommonly large as they were, they moved as fast—faster—than any zhree Donovan had ever seen. A Hunter appeared in his rifle sights. He unleashed a spurt of gunfire and felt a jolt of satisfaction as the alien was flung back under the hail of metal.
Pain exploded in Donovan’s stomach.
He’d been shot before. This was different. The impact slammed him into the wall as if he’d been hit by a truck. Donovan’s weapon slid from his grip as he struck the ground, torso on fire. The smell of his own burning panotin pervaded his nostrils and he nearly gagged. Sucking air as if through a straw, he tried to claw back his scattered wits. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay. The mantra cleared his head. As much as it hurt, this wasn’t going to kill him. An abdominal shot distributed impact through the exocel evenly and none of his bones were broken.
All around him, the blast of weapons fire was still going on, punctuated by human and alien shouting. Cass stood over him, emptying her weapon, screaming. “Not. Anyone. Else!”