VOR 02 The Payback War

by Smedman, Lisa

  And if Tatyana was alive . . .

  Alexi glanced behind him at the tetrahedron. In that moment, he knew there was something worth dying for: his sister. But Raheek didn’t seem to know how to prevent the time bomb from going off. And if an alien with mystic powers didn’t know, how could Alexi? No, he was going to die. As was Tatyana—and the rest of the world. Alexi stared at the trampled snow beneath his boots, wanting to sink down into it and sleep forever in its cold embrace.

  That’s right, grandson. You are going to die. But don’t worry. You’ll live again.

  Alexi’s head jerked up when he heard the woman’s voice. The ghostly image of his father was gone. In its place was a swirling wall of mist. With a face looking out at him from the center—the wrinkled face of a woman with a peasant’s scarf over her long gray hair. Somehow, Alexi could feel that there were centuries separating them. Yet by her pale blue eyes and the set of her lips—and the silent communication that passed between them—he knew her: his long-dead ancestor. The fortune-teller.

  The cross that hung around her neck—the same one Alexi’s tense white fingers gripped—confirmed it. She’d had the cross made to provide a Christian disguise for the “lucky stone” that was set into its center, a gem that she said enhanced her ability to part the mists of time. The cross had been passed down through the family for generations, always to the eldest child—down to his great-grandfather, his grandmother, his mother, and at last to Alexi himself. Alexi had worn it faithfully into every battle—and was convinced that its luck had saved his life on more than one occasion.

  He let go of the cross and reached out with his hand, as if to touch the ghost that stood before him.

  “What . . .” He could barely speak. Somehow the words whispered from his lips. “What do you mean, I’m going to die?”

  By dying, you can give life to a world. By throwing yourself into the void, you can become a shield for your sister—a shield that will also protect countless unborn generations.

  It sounded like a prophecy. Something about the way she’d worded it reminded Alexi of a conversation he’d had a few days ago with Nevsky. They’d been talking about throwing themselves on unexploded grenades or stepping in front of other squad members to take a bullet, talking about who they would die to protect. Back in Novosibirsk, Alexi’s answer had been simple: No one.

  He stared at the ghostly face. “You want me to throw myself on the bomb,” he concluded. Then he frowned. “But what good could that possibly do? So what if I’m sitting on top of the pyramid when the thing goes off and time and space tears itself apart. What difference will it make?”

  The fortune-teller laughed—a rich, full laugh that wasn’t at all the cackle Alexi would have expected.

  Silly boy. The answer is on the inside.

  “What do you mean?”

  Raheek grunted. Alexi glanced at the alien and saw what he assumed were lines of strain creasing its forehead. Raheek’s blue hands were sagging as if drawn down by an invisible weight. The alien’s knees trembled, and its breathing was labored.

  “Tell me!” Alexi urged the ghost-woman. “Tell me what you mean! I don’t understand!”

  With a final grunt, Raheek let its hands fall to its sides. The swirling mist from which the ghostly face had spoken spiraled in on itself and disappeared with a soft sucking noise. Dropping his weapon, Alexi stumbled forward through the snow, arms outstretched. But his bare hands waved helplessly through empty air.

  Raheek’s eyes opened. “What did you learn?” the alien asked.

  Alexi shook his head. What could he say? Advice of the fortune-teller notwithstanding, he was as puzzled by all of this as he’d ever been. His eyes fell on Juliana’s corpse.

  “I need time to think,” he told the alien. He pointed at the decapitated body. “I’m going to bury her. When I’m done, I’ll tell you what I learned. And not a moment before.”

  Raheek stared impassively at him. Whether the alien was angered by his defiance, Alexi couldn’t tell.

  “We have some time,” it said. “We have this moment. And the one after that. And perhaps even the one after that. But our nows are precious and few. If you want your sister—and your planet—to survive, you had better not waste them.”

  28

  Alexi smacked the palm of his hand against the smooth surface of the crystal. “She said the answer lay on the inside. But I don’t see any way in. This thing looks like a solid block of stone.”

  “That is so.” Raheek nodded slowly.

  Alexi watched as the muddy handprint he’d left on the side of the tetrahedron slid down its flawless surface, like oil on polished metal. He turned his hands over and looked at his palms. They were grimy with earth.

  A short distance from the tetrahedron was a fresh grave. Juliana’s grave. Alexi wondered how he had managed to bury her—the ground was frozen under the snow. Then he noticed that the trees closest to the grave had gouges in the bark and broken branches. The faint smell of exploded ordnance hung in the air. He must have used his frag grenades to blow a hole in the ground and loosen the earth. But he had no memory of doing it.

  He wiped his hands on his trousers. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a faint droning noise.

  “What else did your ancestor say?” Raheek asked.

  Alexi sighed. “Something about shielding my sister, and giving life, and being thrown into the void . . .”

  “Stop.” Raheek laid a hand on Alexi’s chest. “The void is something that only a trained mystic can walk through. We attune our auras to it, darkness to darkness, and pass from one shadow to the next. It requires a lifetime of training and study. I cannot teach you this in the short time we have left before the crystal activates.”

  “Are you talking about the disappearing act you sometimes do?” Alexi asked. “It’s a form of teleportation, right? I’m not sure I’d want to learn that. What happens if your coordinates are off and you materialize inside a solid object by mistake?”

  The alien dismissed the question with a wave of its long-fingered hand. “It is not possible. A physical body cannot occupy the same space as a material object. The two are incompatible.”

  “So what happens, then?” Alexi continued. “If you aim for a spot that’s already occupied by an object, do you get stuck somewhere in the middle and fail to materialize at all?”

  “In that case the body would simply disappear. We do not know where it goes. Some mystics believe its atoms are simply annihilated, others think the body is expelled into another universe. But all agree on one thing: The soul survives. It emerges from the void into the shadow the mystic was trying to walk to for a brief moment, then goes to join those who have died before it in the Otherwhen.”

  An idea occurred to Alexi then—an idea that seemed to resonate with the moment, as if it had always been. “So if the soul survives, no matter what . . .” Suddenly there was a lump in his throat as he remembered the ghostly image of his father. He swallowed hard. “And if a soul can exist within a solid object . . .”

  He stared up at the inverted pyramid that loomed over head. “Could a soul be sent by a mystic into the crystal?”

  He was close—he could feel it. His hands were trembling and his heart was racing. Déjà vu had wrapped itself around him like a sparkling shroud.

  “Impossible,” Raheek said. “A soul is attached to the body. The two must travel together.”

  Alexi glanced at the freshly made grave. He forced himself to say the words. “But if the body were dead, the soul would be free to walk into the void, da?”

  Raheek saw where Alexi was looking. “I cannot teach a dead human to void-walk.”

  “Not her,” Alexi said. “Me.”

  “I cannot teach a living human, either.”

  “You might not be able to teach me to void-walk. But perhaps you could give my soul a shove in the right direction.” Alexi jerked a thumb at the crystal. “Right into the heart of the bomb.”

  “It is possible,” Raheek said sl
owly. “In times of need, I have shaped and directed souls. I could send your soul through the void into the crystal. I am not convinced that it would have any effect. But I am willing to try.”

  Alexi suddenly realized what he had suggested: his own death. Now that the moment of inspiration had passed, he was starting to have second thoughts. Did he really want to kill himself? What if Tatyana wasn’t alive—who would he be making this possibly futile gesture for? He couldn’t think of a single person in the world that he cared enough about to die for. Was this all just a ploy by the alien, who had tricked him into saying the right words, into talking himself into this mad experiment?

  Alexi shivered. He was suddenly very cold. He decided then that he’d been going in the wrong direction, all along. It wasn’t he who was to throw himself on the bomb and save the Earth. Raheek could do it.

  The thought warmed him considerably. Even the feeling of déjà vu disappeared.

  “Tell you what,” Alexi said. “Since you’ve got the ability to void-walk, why don’t you try it? That way, you don’t have to teach anyone anything. You can get inside the bomb yourself, and figure out a way to disarm it. And then—”

  “And then I will be dead, and my mission will be a failure. I came here to learn about the bomb, not to throw my life away in an ill-thought experiment.”

  “You and me both,” Alexi muttered.

  That was when he noticed that the droning noise had gotten much louder. He recognized it now: a plane. And practically overhead. Undoubtedly military, up here in the middle of nowhere. The plane was probably on a reconnaissance mission. And the tetrahedron would be its objective. But was it Neo-Soviet or Union? It didn’t much matter. The taiga stretched in all directions; there wasn’t a clearing in which to land for kilometers. Alexi wouldn’t be rescued or taken prisoner anytime soon. But help—or capture—would eventually come.

  Alexi ran out from under the overhang of the inverted pyramid and looked up. The plane was a black cross against the cloud-white sky; Alexi didn’t know enough about silhouettes to identify it as friend or foe. But he did recognize the circular white snowflakes floating gently down from the sky: parachutes—half a dozen of them. As the chutes drifted lower, Alexi spotted the by now familiar sight of therm suits. These paratroopers were Union special ops forces. Just as Juliana had been.

  His soldier’s instincts took over. He ran for the cover of the trees, a defensible position. He was careful not to go too deep. The ring of drones the Union had placed around the tetrahedron earlier was an invisible curtain of death, hidden somewhere in the forest. He chose instead to hunker down behind a fallen tree. He squatted in the snow, panting, his AK-51 in hand as the paratroopers descended into the forest around him.

  Suddenly Alexi realized his mistake: the trail of footsteps he’d left in the snow would show them exactly where he was hiding. With six-to-one odds and his assault rifle low on ammunition, there was no way he’d win if it came to a fight. The best he could hope for was to throw down his weapon and speak two of the handful of English words he’d ever bothered to learn: I surrender.

  Alexi glanced back at the inverted pyramid and saw Raheek standing under it. The alien’s bald head was tipped back and its strangely articulated arms were raised, lavender palms up as if in greeting. One of the paratroopers who had been about to land on the inverted base of the pyramid spilled air from his chute, sending himself sliding down toward the forest. He landed gracefully, sinking to his knees in the snow. Then he pointed a Pitbull assault rifle at the alien and shouted something in English.

  For a heartbeat or two, human and alien locked eyes. Then Raheek’s hands tilted slightly. Alexi saw the Union soldier tense, then two screaming lines of neon blue energy erupted from Raheek’s palms. They slammed into the chest of the paratrooper, throwing his body back like a man who had just been kicked by a horse. He crashed into a tree, hung there, then slid in a limp heap to the ground, the front of his therm suit smoking.

  Gunfire erupted all around the tetrahedron as the other paratroopers, all but one of whom were on the ground now, opened up on Raheek. In defiance of all battlefield logic, the alien stood utterly still as bullets chuffed into the snow all around it—a perfect target. A swirling curtain of energy began to form around Raheek, partially obscuring the blue-skinned alien from view, and for a second time an intensely bright beam of energy streaked out toward the paratrooper who was still descending. But this attack missed, hitting the chute instead. The parachute burst into crackling blue-white flame and the soldier beneath it plummeted the last few meters to the ground, landing in a sprawled heap.

  One of the Union soldiers—the officer, Alexi guessed—was shouting, trying to make himself heard above the rifle fire. He had landed just inside the trees and was running toward Raheek, weapon held to the side and his free hand gesturing frantically. Alexi guessed, from his urgent tone, that he was telling the others to cease fire. And small wonder. This might very well be the first contact between the Zykhee and the Union forces. Raheek was worth more to them alive than dead. They’d want to capture him. . . .

  Unless they already had a Zykhee captive. Which meant that the crystal was their goal, and Raheek was merely something that stood in their way.

  Alexi ground his teeth. What was the alien doing, fighting the paratroopers? Why didn’t Raheek just void-walk out of here and let them take their objective? The alien had already said there was nothing that could physically harm the crystal. What did it care if the soldiers held it for a while?

  Except that it wouldn’t be just a while. These paratroopers would be just the toehold. The Union wasn’t about to let an alien artifact go, and would invade this area in force. Nor were they likely to be convinced to let Raheek try to figure out how to disarm the crystal. They’d pack the alien off ASAP for interrogation. The time bomb would go off—and Raheek would have failed in its mission.

  Raheek had figured this out long before Alexi did. The alien continued to summon up magic and hurl jagged streaks of energy at the paratroopers. The blue and green lines of force shot toward the Union soldiers in a screaming rush, streaking through the air like rockets. A second paratrooper died, her head exploding in a hot shower of blood and bone as a bright blue beam of light lanced through it.

  Now the odds were four to one—or three to one, since the officer was still holding his fire and shouting. Or three to two, if Alexi joined in the firefight. Undecided, he half rose to a crouch from behind the fallen tree, his AK-51 at the ready. Even if the therm suit provided the same protection as armor, Alexi still had a clear shot at the Union officer’s unprotected head. . . .

  What the hell. The bomb was going to go off anyhow. Alexi was already a dead man. It was only a matter of time.

  Grimacing at the irony of his thought, Alexi squeezed off a shot. The bullets from his AK-51 found their mark, tearing off the top of the Union officer’s head. The corpse crumpled to the ground. . . .

  In that same instant, Raheek went down.

  Two of the remaining paratroopers turned and fired at the fresh target: Alexi. The third looked wildly around, unable to tell where the attack that had taken out the officer had come from. Bullets chunked into the trees next to Alexi, sending chips of bark flying. Cursing, praying that Raheek was still alive, praying that the few bullets he had left in his AK-51 would find their mark, Alexi returned the paratrooper’s fire in short bursts. But the trees provided a thick screen between him and his targets.

  One of the Union soldiers went down, but the paratrooper who had been able to locate Alexi earlier was moving into position. In that instant, Alexi recognized the weapon he carried as a sniper rifle. The Union soldier found a clear line of sight . . .

  Alexi was going to die.

  The paratrooper lifted the sniper rifle to his shoulder and aimed through the scope . . .

  Alexi flung aside his AK-51 and threw his hands in the air. “Friend!” he screamed in English. “Surrender!”

  The sniper squeezed the trigger
.

  Something hot punched through Alexi’s forehead.

  Alexi found himself floating in the air, looking down on his own body. A neat hole in the center of his forehead was just starting to seep blood. As he rose gently up through the trees, he saw one of the Union officers flipping over Raheek’s body. The other paratrooper wound his way cautiously through the woods, toward Alexi’s corpse.

  Alexi was dead.

  But his soul . . .

  His soul was free to . . .

  The crystal had unwittingly given him the power to . . .

  Go!

  29

  Juliana jumped as Alexi shook her shoulder. Her hand jerked to the side, and the growler saliva that she had been collecting in the vodka bottle splashed onto her fingers. She dropped the bottle into the snow and whirled on Alexi, cursing.

  “Why did you sneak up on me like that?” she spat angrily at him. Tears welled in her eyes. As the acid ate into her hand, the flesh began to redden and sizzle. Bright red burns blistered through the skin. Groaning, she plunged her hand into the snow, trying to wipe the acid from it.

  “Prastitye pazhalsta,” Alexi said. But he wasn’t sorry. Not at all. Compelled by an urge he didn’t understand, he had deliberately shaken the Union officer’s shoulder so that her hand would be covered in acid. Now she wouldn’t be able to use her pistol, or to . . .

  Alexi used the toe of his boot to dig the vodka bottle out of the snow. Already the hydrofluoric acid was beginning to opaque the glass. The bottle held only a centimeter or two of growler saliva. Not enough to . . .

  To what?

  Alexi brought his heel down on the bottle, breaking it. As the acid sizzled out into the snow he dropped his pack in the snow and fished the first-aid kit from it. There was little inside that would help, but at least he could cover the burns to Juliana’s hand with a little gauze.

  “What were you doing?” Alexi asked.

  Juliana’s face was pale with pain. “The crystal,” she gritted through clenched teeth. “It’s silicon. Hydrofluoric acid will eat through it. If we shear off part of its hardware, maybe its programming will . . .”