Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  With a casualness that completely belies the intensity of the moment, Van Heusen puts a hand to the ground and pushes himself to his feet, leaving a bloody handprint behind. I step forward a pace, ready to jump into the fray if needed. Four of us and four of them, but we can get to their weapons almost as fast as they can in such close proximity.

  Van Heusen is enough of a soldier to realize this. Wiping the back of his hand across his top lip and smearing the cold-thickened blood across his cheek, he promises, “See you soon, scavs.”

  Karl opens his mouth and I grip his arm to try and stop him from speaking, but he says anyway, “Looking forward to it.”

  * * *

  “Goddammit, does she look like she needs a knight in shining armor?” Vitruzzi hurls the words at Karl as soon as we’re inside. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  I don’t need anyone to speak for me, but keep quiet on this. No need to add fuel to the fire. And speaking of fire, Vitruzzi’s anger is a good sign. Like she lanced a boil back at the satlink room and has new freedom from her self-induced burden of guilt. Let’s hope it lasts. We’re going to need everyone operating at full capacity in the coming storm.

  “What am I thinking? Where were you, V? They’re blackmailing us and holding us hostage. This is bullshit! Patrick is getting ready to walk into a trap, and Medina has turned into a primitive warlord that’s about to put her enemy’s heads on pikes. We have to make plans, to figure out…”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, brother,” Desto says. “We need to bust the hell out of this rat hole and get back to KL before something happens.”

  “Jesus, people!” Mason snaps. “Did you forget about them?” His hand waves toward our four fugee kids, who sit as a group on his bunk, their eyes eating up the scene with the same avidity with which the kids had eaten every morsel of food they’d been given since we’d found them.

  Vitruzzi’s anger evaporates instantly, and she goes over to them and crouches. “It’s going to be okay. We’re just trying to discuss what to do next while we’re staying in Bogotan. Everyone all right?”

  “Dr. V, we don’t want any more bad things to happen,” Cassandra says, taking the hand of the youngest boy, sitting next to her on a bunk.

  “I know, kids. Neither do we,” Vitruzzi says simply.

  “You want to tell us what the hell’s going on?” David says. “Medina’s here?”

  The four of us spend the next fifteen minutes filling David, Hoogs, and Ryan in: we’d (well, I’d) made a deal with Whitmore to give up the soil compound, we’d contacted Brady to deliver it, Medina turned up and threatened our colony with death or worse, and we’re all pretty much fucked if we don’t dance to her tune. I’d be the world’s best con artist if I could convince anyone that they take it well.

  “Can we get Venus to launch an attack from the Orika?” David’s proposal is the first on the table.

  “Maybe, if we could get in touch with her,” Karl says. “At least we know she’s still tucked safely away.”

  “Yeah, but for how long?” I ask. “She doesn’t know what’s going on. She might get some ideas of her own. The longer she’s in the dark, the twitchier she’ll get. I know I would be.”

  Karl responds, “But she had to have heard your and Whitmore’s conversation on the Orika. She’d have turned on the com as soon as she opened the door for David. As far as she knows, right now we’re all working together. That should keep her from doing anything too, I don’t know, too Venus.”

  Somber nods from the group, more hopeful than certain.

  Before the conversation continues, the door opens and we all spin to see what’s coming. Korine enters, pushing the same cart from earlier, piled with food, plates, and a couple of carafes, presumably our dinner, followed by four more armed guards: two men, two women. They already have their weapons hot.

  Korine pushes the cart to within a couple of meters of us, then says in a voice that barely rises above a whisper, “I’m going to need to ask that those children come with me.” She doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

  “What? Why?” Mason says.

  One of the guards, a thick-framed meat bag with a face like a hyena, takes a pace forward and says, “You can ask Commander Medina about that.” Casually, he taps the side of his pistol’s trigger guard.

  Korine looks like someone just told her her mother died. “I promise you, they’ll be well cared for. It’s just until we…you…the situation gets settled. I’m not going to let anything happen to them, okay. They’ll be safer if they’re not with…not here. Please, you understand?”

  Glancing at Vitruzzi, I can’t read anything in her expression. Her face is as blank and shrouded as the surface of the ocean. After a second, she crouches again near the cluster of kids and says, “It’s okay. These folks are going to get you out of here and into someplace a little warmer and cozier. We’re going to pick you up in a couple of days, after more of our friends arrive.”

  Cassandra speaks again. “No, we don’t want to go with strangers. We want to stay with you and Mr. Mason!” She jumps off the bunk, nimbly avoiding Vitruzzi’s hand as she reaches for her, and wraps her arms around Mason’s waist as tightly as if he were a raft and she were about to go over a waterfall.

  Mason’s nutmeg-brown eyes squint in an expression that might be pain or might be hate, it’s hard to tell which. But when he pulls the girl’s arms away from him, he does it with a gentleness that’s nearly reverence. Squatting, he looks into her face. “Don’t worry,” he says, “a lot of good folks are going to be looking out for you while we sort things out. Okay? Come on.”

  He stands up and holds out a hand to either side, waiting for the kids to grab them. The oldest boy does, and after a second, Cassandra does too. Vitruzzi walks over and takes the hands of the remaining two. The littlest girl starts to cry when she tries to let go of her hand and pass her over to Korine. Eventually, the four are led out, and the door is closed with finality.

  “We’re going to make that bitch pay,” Mason says, talking about Medina.

  The eight of us pick at our food silently, like it’s our last supper.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Don’t make the mistake of believing the war is over, Aly,” Quantum had said to me, back on Eruo Pium. And apparently he’d been right.

  I lie in my bunk thinking over the past few hours, mostly pondering one simple thought: this is what it feels like to be between a rock, a hard place, and a shit sandwich. Around me, everyone else does the same. I doubt any of them are asleep. We’d discussed as quietly as possible the idea of trying to fight our way out of this holding cell together when the Bogotanites switched guard, but the question had been: Then what? Even if we get the Orika off the ground, without La Mer to hack Bogotan’s satellite, we can’t send a message to Brady in time to stop him from launching from KL and delivering the soil compound as planned. Plus, this settlement has their own armed ships, and none of us are naive enough to think the only things they’re capable of firing are engine disablers. And finally, we have to assume whatever remains of Medina’s attack forces is stationed aboard the Celestial, which can’t be too far out. It hadn’t taken long for us to decide, reluctantly and with extreme prejudice, to lock down our instincts and sit tight until Brady gets here.

  But there’s still Venus. After I’d mentioned the numbers she’d left on the universal clock in my bunk to the crew, we’d realized they are a secure transmission frequency. David confirmed this, having noticed she’d done the same in the main berth. If we can get a radio or our VDUs, we’ll be able to communicate with her again. Knowing Venus, she feels safest and most in her comfort zone staying aboard the Orika, and we know she’s keeping it buttoned up tightly. But without the ability to contact her, whatever intel she may be able to glean from the landing field and whatever news we could share with her are useless.

  Just like the Admin’s tactic in the war, Whitmore and Medina recognize that strictly controlling communication effectively con
trols just about everything else. I wonder, though, if they get it: the Admin still lost.

  * * *

  It takes four days for anything to happen. And when it does, the sucker punch to the gut is like nothing any of us has ever felt.

  Zabriskie, flanked by several guards—the usual situation lately—opens up the gymnasium door sometime in the midmorning, as far as I can tell. “Your crew has arrived.”

  The flood of relief we all feel, though immense, is so intermixed with anger and fear, it’s hard to know if the news is good or bad. It’s good they weren’t taken captive and then executed, something no one would put past Medina at this point, but bad because now they’re as stuck in this web as we are.

  I catch a glimpse of one of the other guards; Blondie, the mind-like-an-amoeba ringleader of my locker-room-buddy fugees—the ones who’d stared at me like I’d been giving them their own personal striptease after the cannibal camp escape—stands among the security detail. Medina must be actively recruiting more bodies to help discharge and enforce her rule. Her selection leaves a lot to be desired. The scav carries an unholstered Sinbad pistol and wears a basic Corps uniform kit: tactical equipment vest with ammo pouches, lightweight upper body armor, kneepads. It’s as if he’s expecting to assault an enclave of dissidents, not a group of salvagers who’d saved his ass from being someone else’s lunch, literally. The remaining detail, six total, are similarly attired, making it clear that they are fully prepared for us to be, well, a little miffed.

  Karl seethes. “I see you’ve brought along your kennel mates, Zabriskie.”

  Zabriskie remains detached, but I forget about him a second later as Patrick Brady, Zeta Abrams, and Jeremy La Mer rush through the door. The gym instantly fills with cries of joy as we swarm each other, hugging with the lack of restraint only the desperate can feel.

  Our security detail keeps its distance as we all mingle together, letting us reunite on our terms. It doesn’t appear our arriving crew have been mistreated, yet they don’t seem at ease. After the initial flurry of welcome, I look at La Mer and my stomach immediately drops into my feet. I rush toward him and embrace him as if our entire lives have led to this moment.

  “Keep cool,” I whisper into his ear. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, but Venus is safe. She’s hiding on the Orika, and they don’t know about her. We have to keep it that way.”

  I pull away from him and stare hard into his eyes, making sure he’d heard me and understands what I’m saying. We hadn’t discussed what to tell Brady and the crew about Venus, never expecting that they’d be allowed to reach Bogotan so quietly and easily. But La Mer’s reaction surprises me. “I know,” he says.

  “Did—?” I stop myself before blurting out anything that would jeopardize Venus’s anonymity. He’s nodding at me, confirming what I want to know—she must have been able to get a transmission to them, probably as they’d landed at the airfield.

  His cold hand is still wrapped around my wrist. I feel his fingers slip inside the hem of my sleeve, and something even colder is pushed against my arm. It feels small, no bigger or heavier than a bolt nut. La Mer’s green eyes stay fixed on mine, waiting for a show of understanding. I nod just enough for him to see. It’s either a diminutive explosive or a com device; either way, it’s a method of creating organization, or organized chaos.

  “Baby, you shouldn’t have come,” Desto croons to Zeta nearby. “I don’t want you putting yourself into danger. Not for me.”

  He holds her so close their two bodies are nearly fused, making me wonder if she can breathe. But from my vantage it looks like her arms are clamped around him just as tightly. Brady and Vitruzzi stand together, arms laced around each other’s waists and their foreheads touching as they share an overwhelmed moment of relief.

  This is as all right as it’s ever going to get. The thought seeps through my mind, leaving me feeling like a sack that’s been filled with lead. Heavy, dull, immobile. I reach over to Karl and grasp one of his hands. Behind us, the gym door closes and we’re left alone.

  * * *

  “We were detained the instant we landed. Medina and her jackboots took over the Nebula and started moving everything out and onto a Corps ISPS.” Brady and the crew stand and sit in a cluster around the bunks as he fills us in on what they know. “They told us you were safe and, in short, that you’d all agreed to relocate the entire settlement here.”

  I snort loudly, unable to contain my disgust.

  Brady’s expression tells me he couldn’t agree more. “Yeah. I could tell things were fucked here, more or less, the minute Zeta got to KL and explained what had happened on Eruo Pium, and Whitmore’s envoy explained his proposal for bringing the compound and data here. When we finally got your transmission”—he squeezes Vitruzzi’s hand, which he hasn’t let go of since arriving, tightly—“we started planning.”

  “Planning?” Desto asks. “Planning how and for what?”

  “For any contingency. We rigged the soil compound with about twenty kilos of explosives camouflaged inside three extra drums that they don’t know are dummies. There’s one remote detonator on the Nebula and…” He turns his head to see if anyone is watching through the window in the door, but it’s all clear. Waving to everyone, he draws us closer, then pulls a small device, like the one La Mer had given me, from its hiding place in his armpit. “Most of you should have one of these transmitter pods now. Their effective range is up to about two klicks, though we haven’t been able to test them completely.”

  “It’s a detonator?” Ryan asks.

  Brady and La Mer look at him curiously, and I realize they have no idea who he is. Zeta breaks in, “We picked the kid up on Eruo Pium; he was one of the fugees.” She looks at him. “Glad to see you on the crew.”

  Ryan nods shyly.

  Brady continues, “That’s exactly what they are. Of course, we didn’t know Medina was a factor in this—”

  “None of us did,” David adds.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured. But as soon as she met us in the landing field and sent troops on board the Nebula without so much as a ‘would you mind?,’ my gut told me whatever’s going on here, you’ve been under coercion since the beginning and she’s behind this whole game. I thought about blowing her to hell as soon as we landed, but…I don’t know what the game is yet, exactly.”

  “It’s pretty easy to explain,” Karl says. “She wants to turn back civilization’s clock to the Roman Empire.”

  “And we get to be the Christians she throws to the lions,” Hoogs adds.

  After a second to take this in, Brady says smoothly, “About what we thought. This is the reason we left the Celestial in the first place. Too bad we didn’t just kill her then…”

  But no one had ever really believed things would go this far. I suppose this is what metaphysicists refer to as the wheel. What goes around, comes around.

  Karl responds, “As I see it, the question is, how are we going to link up with Venus and get the hell out of here? We can blow Medina’s ship with the compound you rigged on our way off this rock if we can just get to the airfield.”

  “What if she’s not in it, though? She’ll just mobilize the Celestial and come after us. And Keum Libre,” David says. “Not to mention, if that compound is as deadly as it seems, it could kill everyone in Bogotan if it’s spread. An explosion might not render all of it inert.”

  No one has a response to that. It’s a fact.

  He looks around. “I don’t know about all of you, but I’m not prepared to kill a bunch of bystanders. Enough of that happened in the war. I’m done with it.”

  Something from Rob Cross’s final message, a recording he’d left for me to watch after he was dead, whispers in my head. It’s just the way of the worlds. It’s a fucking mess and the best we can do is try to survive. It had made sense to me at the time, but not anymore. Survival at the expense of so many lives, maybe innocent lives, isn’t survival. It’s lunacy.

  As if reading my thoughts, Dav
id continues, “Besides, we don’t even know if these people are all on board with Medina’s plans, or just as caught up in it as we are. Like those kids from Eruo Pium. Whatever we do, we have to get that compound away from here. For good.”

  The silence that follows his declaration this time is reluctant, almost grudging. But the faces of my crew show agreement, unanimously.

  Finally Brady says, “If we have a chance, we have to try.” His statement goes without question. “We have to stop both her and Whitmore, and I propose—”

  Karl jumps in. “I really don’t think Whitmore is the issue. I don’t think he knew about her intentions.”

  I look at him, surprised. “Whitmore was standing right there when she told us she was going to wipe us out if we didn’t serve ourselves to her on a platter.”

  “Did you see the surprise on his face, though? The way she shut him down when he tried to get her attention?” He’s speaking to me, but he looks around at Desto and Vitruzzi, too. “He looked to me like a prisoner under a spotlight, dazed. He didn’t know she was going to take it this far. I’m sure of it.”

  Brady rubs a hand along the gray sandpaper of his chin and meets my blue eyes with his hazel ones, waiting for Karl and me to suss this out.

  I take a second for a breath. “Maybe, Karl. But here’s where I agree with Medina—in this situation, whoever isn’t an asset is a liability. If he’s running this colony, he’s going to have to fight for it. Our only goal is to protect our own. If he and his people get in the way, that’s not going to slow us down. I’m not ready to wipe out the entire city of Bogotan”—I nod to David, showing him I agree with his determination—“but I’m also not going to stand aside if any one of us is threatened.”

  Our eyes hold for a moment, and I hope he can read my thoughts in my expression. When he says, “I’m with you. We just don’t want to put anyone in harm’s way who doesn’t need to be. All of us are going to have to make an effort to leave the noncombatants out of this,” I know he has.