by Richard Fox
“You have a good name.” She smiled slightly.
Ely’s heart skipped a beat. “I can’t say it anymore.”
“That’s all right. You know who you are. Will you pray with me?”
“To who? For…why?” Ely looked at the emptiness on the altar. His skin began to burn where the lattice had struck, and the buzzing in his ears became worse. The woman reached over and put one hand over his. Her touch was gentle, and the pain faded away.
“It’s going to be hard.” She looked him in the eyes and Ely choked up. “But we need you. You have to be strong.”
“I’m not.” He shook his head. “I just want to go home.”
She put a hand to his cheek and he felt like he was a little boy again, his mother there to comfort him after a nightmare. “You have to be strong…and we are with you.”
She raised her chin, her eyes widening. She pressed his palms together, her hands wrapped around his. She spoke, but Ely couldn’t hear her as the buzzing in his skull grew into a roar.
****
“Oh, Mr. Hale,” said a singsong voice, waking Ely.
Shannon leaned over him, a plastic smile on her face. “How are you feeling?” She cocked her head slightly from side to side. “You’ve been down for a bit. Hungry?”
“Wha…” Ely sat up from a hospital bed. “I’m…Phoenix?”
“Of course!” Shannon held up a cup of ice chips. “Where else would you be? Thirsty?” She gave the cup a shake then brandished a spoon.
“I’m still here.” Ely sank back into the bed.
“Not for long. We found an expert who’s certain she can get that bit of nastiness out of your head. Won’t that be nice?”
Ely looked at her and a sense of dread grew in his chest. “Where am I going? For some kind of surgery?”
“It’s a special place.” Shannon’s eyes glittered. “High over Alaska. We don’t let many people go there. It’s quite an honor.”
“If you say so.” Ely took the cup and brought it to his mouth. Tiny red dots bobbed on the surface. He pushed it away, ignoring the thirst cracking in the back of his throat.
“It’s just some medicine.” Shannon scrunched her face into faux humor.
“I feel fine. Really.”
“Quick trip. You don’t even need to pack.”
Chapter 8
The plastic bag containing Hoffman’s dinner of fish tacos and churros bumped against his thigh as he walked down the street. Sunset was little more than an hour off, along with curfew. He glanced at the rear window of a car and spotted a surveillance drone floating behind him. The drones weren’t unusual, as the Commissariat kept a watch on sanctioned employees of the occupation after work hours.
Hoffman made the long walk to a mariscos at least once a week to establish a pattern for the file on him—everyone in Phoenix had a file—so his extra-long walk to that particular mariscos would pass the smell test for any Commissariat mushroom questioning why he was in this part of the city.
Analysts, he’d been taught, were like any other person working a dull job; they would ignore anything that looked normal.
He ducked into an alleyway and stopped behind a dumpster. On the bottom of the rusted metal was a rune written in chalk. Dagaz. The meeting was still on.
A whine whirred overhead as the drone hovered in the street behind him. Hoffman fought the temptation to look back at it—that might imply he was worried about being watched—and unzipped his fly. He urinated on the chalk rune to wash it off and the sound of the drone faded away.
Whoever was controlling the drone obviously wasn’t much of a voyeur, for which he was thankful. He zipped up, went down two doors, and knocked a quick code.
The door flung open and Hoffman stared into the barrel of a gun.
“You green?” came the challenge.
“My Irish eyes are smiling.” Hoffman held his hands out to his sides, answering the challenge with the code that he wasn’t followed or under any threat or coercion.
The barrel snapped up and Hoffman stepped into the building.
“You’re late, jarhead.” A dark-skinned man shut the door and slammed down a heavy metal crossbar.
“I’m two minutes off, Barnes, and you know how far we are from my assigned sector. Speaking of, daylight’s burning and even I can’t bust curfew. So are the rest here or not?” Hoffman asked.
“Yeah, whole team’s here, and some special guests.” Barnes stuffed his pistol into his waistband and canted his head toward a door down the hallway.
“Plural?” Hoffman’s brow furrowed.
“This is the real deal,” Barnes said. “Big Boss might be nervous after Cable’s cell got whacked.”
“Big Boss doesn’t get nervous,” Hoffman said. “He doesn’t have any nerves.”
“Try and keep your normal lovers’ quarrel to a minimum.” Barnes bumped his hand low on the door twice. “Like you said. Daylight’s burning.”
Inside were a tired-looking woman in nurse’s scrubs and a stocky man with an eyepatch over a wide swath of scars on the left side of his face. A hologram of Masha flickered in the center of the room. She sat Indian style, floating next to a wooden box with a blank Ubi slate on it.
“You’re late,” Masha said, brushing platinum-blonde hair away from her face.
“Not everyone can remote in.” Hoffman swung the bag of food up to the scarred man and he snatched it away, burying his face in the bag and sniffing deeply. “Enjoy, Par. Those tacos are on point.”
“Not that I don’t love getting to see everyone again,” the nurse said, “but I had to process all the dead from the Commissars’ hit down in Chandler. Can we get down to brass tacks before the bastards manage a back trace on Masha’s signal?”
“Don’t worry, Grace. If the Geist could do that, we would’ve died years ago,” Masha said. “Big Boss has back doors into all the occupation’s systems. They don’t know about me. Or you. Or the trap door. Speaking of, we’ve got our mission.”
Masha took a small pill holder from her pocket and dry swallowed something black with a red stripe around the edge.
A holo of Ely Hale from a school yearbook materialized beside her.
“This is old, but he still looks the same. The Commissars are about to move him to the Juneau mother ship and we all know what happens to anyone that goes to that ship.” Masha’s teeth began to chatter and she clenched her jaw tight. “They don’t come back,” she mumbled.
“The Hale kid’s not in my system,” Hoffman said. “I can’t track his movements. Grace?”
The nurse shifted in her seat then crossed her arms tight over her chest. “Top three floors of the hospital are off-limits,” she said. “They’re only letting the pod people up there, one Shannon in particular.”
“Thought we killed her back during the last uprising,” the scarred man said, looking up from the paper containers of tacos.
“Killing Shannon is temporary,” Masha said. “We all know that.”
“We don’t have the manpower to bust the kid out of the hospital. Too many guns. Too many poddy security teams on alert,” Grace said.
“Why’s this kid so important?” Par asked. “We’re here for a VIP rescue and extraction, and other than his last name, he’s not exactly fitting my definition of a VIP.”
Hoffman looked at Masha and raised an eyebrow.
“Boss?” She looked to one side and tapped on a screen on her holo Hoffman couldn’t see.
The slate on the box lit up and an engineering schematic scrolled from left to right. Hoffman leaned over to look at it, then turned his palms up.
“Plans for a ship engine,” Masha said. “One that can send a ship into faster-than-light travel. The Commissars have been working like mad to figure them out, but the design calls for a fuel source that…doesn’t seem to exist. I know you all are the boots on the ground, blood-and-guts combat types, but an FTL engine would be a—what did the Big Boss call it—revolution in military affairs. A big fucking deal. We get the
plans to the Crusade and it could be just what they need to turn the tide.”
“How much faster than light?” Grace asked. “So what if it can go a couple times faster? The systems where we’re fighting are dozens—if not hundreds—of light-years apart. I may be a sawbones, but I can do simple division, Masha.”
“The only reason the Crusade’s held out this long is because we have the Keystone gates. The mobile Crucibles give us the option to hit Geist-held worlds, to cut them off from the Crucible network. Imagine if a fleet jumps into the outer edge of a system then hits the FTL drive…”
“They could hit the Geist before they even knew we were there,” Hoffman said. “Jump in a couple dozen AUs from the system primary. Hit the warp drives. Geist early-warning scanners can’t go any faster than the speed of light.”
“You stop dragging your knuckles on the floor and just look how much smarter you become,” Masha smiled.
Hoffman rubbed the bridge of his nose with his middle finger.
“The FTL technology can turn the tide. That’s why young Mr. Hale is our Trap Door target,” Masha said. “The kid arrived with two fragments of a Qa’Resh probe grafted onto his brain stem. The Geist’s pet Dotari doctor—”
Grace shivered.
“—extracted the smaller piece. Big Boss believes the foundry code for the fuel is in the piece still in the kid’s head. That’s why they’re moving him to Juneau. The Geist there must think she can remove it without triggering the fragment’s fail-safes.”
“But there’s more to it,” Hoffman said. “This is Ken Hale’s son. That means Terra Nova is real. The colony survived. If they sent the kid back, then maybe there can be another Crucible gate to wherever the colony is. They could help us fight the Geist.”
The FTL engine schematics on the slate snapped off, replaced by a blinking cursor.
“Gate Command’s been running codes and gravitic assessments ever since Hale came through,” Masha said. “It looks like Terra Nova had to thread the needle just to send one life pod back. There won’t be another stable connection for years, if even then. But Ken Hale screwed up when he sent his son here for help.”
“The Geist know about Terra Nova,” Par said. “A whole planet full of true-born humans.”
“And let’s face it. The Crusade doesn’t have years left to fight,” Masha said. “Geist took the Larnaca system. The whole Gemini subsector is cut off from Ibarra space.”
“Shit.” Grace leaned back and whacked the back of her head against the wall. “My sister and her family are on Caledonia. That’d be the next planet to fall.”
“The Geist are already there,” Masha said.
Grace pressed her hand to her mouth and looked away.
“Terra Nova just put a big ol’ ‘kick me’ sign on their back for the Geist,” Hoffman said. “There any way to warn them? Tell them to keep their Crucible closed?”
“No. We’re already under orders to jam the connection open if it comes back,” Masha said. “Terra Nova’s not our immediate problem. Getting the kid off Earth is.”
“But we’re not sure he’s got the foundry plans for the engine,” Hoffman said. “We’re going to risk everything because we hope he has the missing piece of the puzzle? And there’s no guarantee we could even get it out.”
Text popped up on the slate screen.
SHE CAN DO IT.
“Boss,” Hoffman said, walking over to the slate. “Boss, you know we’ve only got one shot at this. We extract the kid, we’re all burned—and not just us. They’ll go after everyone we know here on the off chance they might be working with us.”
“Fine by me,” Par said. “Everyone I work with is a collaborating asshole. I microwave fish for lunch every chance I get.”
“Our cell’s mission was to extract a key member of the Crusade that would slip into the refugee crowd,” Hoffman said to the screen. “That came with a high degree of certainty that expending all the resources and assets—assets you spent years getting into place—weren’t wasted. Now we’re going to shoot our silver bullet for a maybe? A lot of maybes?”
SAVE HIM.
“Ahh,” Hoffman groaned and tossed his hands up.
“There’s a lot of risk,” Masha said. “But the reward is…the reward might be exactly what we need to win the war. Now let me remind you of something. Who’s the only member of this team without an exit option?”
“Masha, you can’t be—”
“I am dead!” Masha leaned forward, her eyes flashing. “This works and I am dead. We fail miserably and I am dead. All of you have the chance to live. Not me. I made peace with that when the Big Boss brought me into the fold. So when I tell you that I am all for getting Hale off Earth—knowing full well what will happen to me—who are you to object, Hoffman?”
“We’ve all gotta die.” Par sucked sauce off one side of his thumb. “I’ll do it for Hale’s son, and the Crusade.”
“For the Lady,” Grace said and crossed herself.
Hoffman put his hands on his waist then glanced down at the slate.
PLEASE
“For the Lady,” Hoffman said. “For us all.”
Chapter 9
Ely and Shannon stood on the roof of Banner Hospital. A dry wind tugged at Ely’s hair as he gazed out over the city. The bare desert past the walls was a stark contrast to the tightly packed hab blocks and towers. He turned around and squinted at rows—endless rows—of X’s beyond the walls and to the south.
“What are those?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Shannon glanced back and waved a dismissive hand at him. “Just solar panels.”
“Shouldn’t they be…facing east?” A tremor rose in Ely’s hands. The tingle spread up his arms and a dull pain radiated from the scars on the back of his head.
“Oh dear, you’re not supposed to have a dose just yet.” Shannon pressed a hypo to his neck and a sting ran down his spine.
Ely’s right eye spasmed for a moment, then returned to normal.
“That’s not good at all.” Shannon clicked her tongue. “Your condition’s deteriorating faster than we’d anticipated. Good thing you’re going to the next level of care.” She smiled at him.
“I…appreciate it. I guess.”
“Juneau is a magical place.” Shannon handed him the injector and a case with several vials in it. “Just in case you need more during your trip.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“No, no. I have my duties here. But don’t worry. You’ll be well taken care of…here comes your shuttle.” She raised a hand to shade her eyes and pointed into the distance. An air car approached, the gravitic engines thrumming, and an all-too-familiar queasiness hit Ely’s stomach.
“The fluctuations get you too?” Shannon giggled and tapped his shoulder several times. “I kind of like it, but I’m not like everyone else.”
The air car—heavily armored but displaying several bullet holes to the chassis—sported a dorsal turret that scanned the sky as it landed. It bore no outer markings but the black diamond and slashed circle that matched Shannon’s Commissariat pin. A door slid to one side and a pair of heavily armored men jumped out, gauss carbines held across their chests at the ready.
“Am I in trouble?” Ely took a step back, but Shannon caught him by the elbow.
“Not at all, dear. They’re here for your protection.”
“Why do I need—”
“Time to go!” Shannon stepped forward and turned back to look at him when he didn’t follow. “Time. To go. Mr. Hale.” Her mouth twitched and an uncomfortable look passed over her eyes.
“Right…right…” Ely walked to the air car. “Just never had an escort like this before. Even after that time my brother and I borrowed Admiral Valdar’s command slate. We sent some real funny messages to President Garret. At least we thought they were funny. Dad…not so much.”
“Have a nice flight.” Shannon slapped him on the back and left him with the two brutes.
Ely stepped onto a rail
running below the passenger compartment and froze. The floor inside was stained with an ugly copper color.
Blood.
He pulled back, but a meaty hand grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him forward. A brute inside pushed him into a chair and pinned him back. Ely’s feet moved against chains and he found himself face-to-face with an uncaring man with bruises and old cuts healing around his mouth and jawline.
“Hook him up?” one of the other guards asked as the two outside crammed into the compartment.
“Low-risk transport,” the one looking at Ely grunted. He snapped a seat belt across Ely’s chest then over his lap.
Ely—his injection kit clenched in one hand—tried to smile. He looked at each of the three guards, who were identical. Each had a different set of scars and damage to the soft tissue on their face, but the head shape, jawline, and eyes all matched perfectly.
The air car lifted off and a swarm of butterflies assaulted Ely’s stomach. He couldn’t see much out the air car’s windows, but he saw the sun’s glare and estimated they were flying northwest.
None of the guards said another word.
Chapter 10
A sudden rumble of turbulence snapped Ely from a doze. Early sunset cast bands of orange to the air car’s port side. The three guards snapped bullet-shaped helmets over their heads and Ely heard one speaking, but couldn’t make out his words.
“Everything OK?” Ely asked.
A gloved finger pointed square between his eyes and Ely abandoned the question as his safety restraints tightened. A pair of pads shot out from either side of his headrest, tightening against his head, forming a brace.
“Someone mind telling me what’s—”
The air car bucked like it had been kicked and tilted to one side. Smoke roiled up into the passenger compartment and shouting from the guards grew louder and more urgent as the car banked hard and into a spiral that pressed Ely firmly against his restraints. There was a crack of breaking wood and the air car’s gravitic engines malfunctioned. He felt like a pea rattling in a jar before the car slammed down onto one side.