D'Arc

by Robert Repino

  “This is a bad idea,” someone said. A dog grunted in agreement.

  The smaller fish-head pointed her tentacle right at D’Arc. The tentacle had been severed, a mere stump, with a fresh wound that still needed time to heal.

  Big Boy made a choking sound. “You did,” he said to D’Arc. With all the officers watching her, D’Arc descended into full puppy dog mode, with sinking head and sad eyes.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The smaller fish-head said something to her companion. It came out in a series of clicks and moans. “She says you come,” Big Boy said. D’Arc hesitated. “Yes!” the creature insisted. D’Arc climbed the barricade. Nervously, she glanced at the bewildered officers. Several of them shook their heads in disbelief.

  With Wawa in the lead, the officers followed the fish-heads as they backed their way to the end of the pier. The Sarcops stopped at the edge, ready to jump over the barrier at the first sign of trouble. “That’s close enough,” Wawa said. With that, the human and the three dogs formed a line, facing the Sarcops—the first summit of its kind in Hosanna.

  Big Boy lifted his claw. “Taalik. The First of Us. Of Cold Trench.” He pointed to the other one. “Orak. My Prime.”

  Wawa gave her name. “Chief of Tranquility,” she added. “I help to protect this city.” She introduced the others. Then she asked what the Sarcops wanted.

  “Peace,” Taalik said. “And help.”

  “Peace and help? You attacked us. Unprovoked. Many of our people are dead.”

  “You attack. Before.”

  No one knew what Taalik meant. Orak began to click and chirp. Taalik responded in their alien language, in a tone suggesting that she keep quiet and let him handle this.

  “You kill us,” Taalik said. “In the high grounds.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “One of us. Walks on land. Builds a nest. I hear her crying.”

  “He might mean the class two,” Fang said. “The arachnid.”

  “Up the river?” Wawa said to Taalik. “In the mountains?” She moved her arms like a spider crawling.

  “Yes!” Taalik said.

  “She killed our people. We had no choice.”

  “You steal our people. Place them in . . . Tubes. In cages. On the floating island.”

  “Floating island?” Fang didn’t know what this meant. Falkirk shrugged. Before they could start arguing, Wawa waved her hands to silence them. “We have attacked each other, it’s true,” she said. “We do not wish to attack again. We do not wish to be attacked. What is it that you want?”

  “We come from the ice. At the top. My people trapped. Surrounded. Hunted. Dying.”

  Taalik made the choking sound. Orak clicked something that he seemed to ignore.

  “The Queen, she speaks,” he said. “She shows me . . . light. She shows me the sun, coming down. Breaking the ice. Setting my people free.”

  “Your people are trapped up north,” Wawa said. “In the ice. In a . . . glacier.”

  “Yes!”

  “But the sun can come down—”

  “And free them! Yes!”

  Wawa shook her head. “I don’t know what he means.”

  “You have the sun!” Taalik said. “You push it up. You pull it down.”

  “We do not control the sun. It comes up and goes down on its own.”

  “You must bring it down. Break through the ice.”

  Orak started in with her chirping again. Taalik argued with her.

  “Chief,” Falkirk said.

  “Quiet.”

  Taalik moved closer, his claws extended, pleading for her to understand. Everyone lifted their guns higher, aiming right between his glassy eyes. “You know,” he said. “Speak to me true. Or we will return with a thousand more.”

  They looked to Wawa. The pit bull grinded her teeth. “We have a device,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The Rama satellite, in the sky. It can reflect the sunlight. It can aim it.”

  “Yes!” Taalik said. “Break through the ice. Set the people free.”

  “Break through the ice,” Wawa repeated.

  “Wait,” Fang said. “How large of an area are we talking?”

  “Here,” Taalik said. Then he gestured to the skyscrapers, half a mile away. “To there.”

  “The satellite wasn’t meant to be used like that—”

  “You must try! Or my people, dead.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Wawa said. “We can’t operate the satellite. No one knows how.”

  “The Queen knows,” Taalik said. “People who speak to her, they know.”

  “People who speak to her . . .”

  “People who used the translator,” D’Arc said. In a satisfying moment, they all turned their heads to her. They knew she was right.

  “Is that why you went after Michael?” Wawa said. “The boy? You thought he knew how to operate the satellite?”

  “The Queen remembers his voice,” Taalik said. “We found him silent. He cannot help.”

  “People who have used the translator have been turning up dead lately,” Wawa said. “You want me to hand them over to you? How do I know you’re not hunting them?”

  “No hunt. We need.”

  Falkirk growled. “So you have nothing to do with people being murdered?”

  Orak hissed at him.

  “No,” Taalik said. “We will not kill again. But you must help.”

  “You don’t understand,” Wawa said. “The people who spoke to the Queen—they don’t always remember what she said. Their minds can’t hold all of that information. They . . . They . . .”

  “They forget,” Fang said.

  “Exactly.”

  “No,” Taalik said. “The Queen’s voice stays. It sleeps. In here.” He reached out to Wawa and clicked the pincers. “I take. I take the voice. Yes?”

  Wawa did not seem to understand, and so the creature repeated the motion of plucking the memory from her mind and placing it into his own.

  “There is a place,” Taalik said. “The humans dug a cave. There, they move the sun. I make the listener remember.”

  “What if we don’t have any users left?”

  “I know he is here,” Taalik said. “He speaks. I hear him. I speak. He hears me. All of us, connected.” The creature made this point by wrapping his tentacles into a cord.

  “I’m not handing anyone over to you. You forfeited that kind of trust. There must be another way.”

  “No. We take the user to the cave. There, he will remember.”

  Wawa looked at the ground as she contemplated her next move. Everyone knew who the user would have to be.

  “Chief,” Falkirk said. “You’re not going through with this, are you?”

  She ignored him. Her lips parted in a smile that revealed her fangs, stretching the pink scar along her jaw. “What if we brought him there? Would that be acceptable?”

  Taalik said yes. Orak clicked twice in what sounded like an agreement.

  “So we bring the user to the bunker. And you make him remember so you can use the satellite to free your people. Then what?”

  “We make peace. We go away from you.”

  “And what if we say no?”

  “Then we make war. We go where you go.”

  Falkirk looked ready to interrupt again. But the chief’s grin told him to keep quiet.

  “After the darkness passes three times, we go to the cave,” Taalik said. “Three days. We wait for you there.”

  “What if we try and it doesn’t work?”

  “Try so that it does work.”

  He edged toward the railing. But Orak stayed, her eyes fixed on the hilt of D’Arc’s sword. The two Sarcops clicked at each other again.

  “She wants to see,” Taalik said
.

  D’Arc unsheathed the sword and held it at arm’s length. Orak’s three good tentacles closed in on it and hovered. Each took a turn tapping the point. When she finished, Orak returned the weapon and slipped over the railing, her entire body shifting from solid to liquid.

  “Three days,” Taalik said. Then he was gone.

  The officers of Tranquility stood quietly for a while. One at a time, they each turned to D’Arc.

  “D’Arc,” Wawa said. “I think we have to—”

  “I know,” D’Arc said. “I know.”

  They gave her a few seconds to calm down. She picked out a spot in the river, far downstream, and tried to focus on it until her heart stopped pounding.

  At headquarters, Wawa assembled what remained of her senior staff. This included Fang as well as Falkirk and Carl Jackson, head of the patrol units. Jackson wore dreadlocks and a graying goatee. He insisted on growing and chewing his own tobacco. During the meeting, he spat brown fluid into a steel cup. When the silent cat Grissom arrived to pour the tea, he took one look at Jackson and moved on to the next person at the table, unfazed.

  The officers let D’Arc attend the meeting. She knew why. At some point, the chief would ask her nicely to persuade Mort(e) to get himself killed.

  Wawa leaned forward on her elbows. “I know you think this is crazy. Under normal circumstances, I would have consulted all of you. These circumstances were not normal.”

  “We’re making a mistake going along with this,” Falkirk said.

  “I agree,” Jackson said, wiping the spittle from his beard. “They said they needed a translator user. And someone’s killing the users. Something’s not right here.”

  “They’re negotiating from a position of weakness,” Wawa said. “They could have attacked again, but they asked for help instead.”

  “Okay, maybe. But it’s dangerous to give them control of the satellite. We don’t even know what that thing can do.”

  Wawa turned to Fang. “Tell him.”

  “The Rama project is a failure,” Fang said. “It’s true that we could not establish contact. But we also found all the old files. And we know this: the device is defective. Maybe at full strength it could crack the ice, but it would probably burn out before it even got to that point.”

  “The Sarcops don’t seem to know that,” Wawa said. “Which gives us the advantage.”

  “You never told anyone about the satellite,” Falkirk said.

  “Yes, we did. The strators didn’t believe us. And besides, it was more convenient for them to blame Tranquility. God forbid the humans ever got something wrong during their golden age.”

  Jackson stroked his beard. “What happens when the Sarcops figure this out?”

  Wawa smiled, pinched the St. Jude medal on her chest. “It’ll be too late.”

  She laid it out for them, speaking in a cold voice, like a human. An elite unit would escort the user to the bunker. They would wear full body armor, with gas masks. And at the right moment—presumably when the fish-heads entered the chamber—the soldiers would fire canisters of nerve gas at the enemy, the same kind used on the ants in the war.

  “I couldn’t risk trying to kill them on the pier,” she said. “I’ve seen them survive a bullet wound. This way, we can be sure. Take out their leaders, and maybe the rest run away.”

  “This isn’t like you,” Jackson said. “It’s a huge risk.”

  “Not really. If it doesn’t work, we’re back to where we started. Nothing changes.”

  Jackson and Falkirk did not seem convinced.

  “Look,” she said, “this is something I learned in the Red Sphinx. It’s the art of war. The Sarcops just told us when and where they’ll be. When the enemy hands you an opportunity to wipe him out, you take it.”

  Grissom brought in a map of the area and unrolled it on the chief’s desk. As he smoothed it out, Wawa waited for the husky and the human to object. But their silence amounted to consent. And no one was about to suggest that perhaps the Sarcops were telling the truth. A heavy weight sank into the pit of D’Arc’s stomach. The chief was a different person now, hardened by this long war, and D’Arc knew then that she would not be able to stop this madness.

  “Let’s continue,” Wawa said. “The bunker that the humans built is . . .” Grissom, standing behind her, pointed to a location on the map. “It’s here, right. A little over a hundred miles away.”

  Fang slumped in her chair. “That’s wolf country. The last envoy barely made it out of there alive. And he was a wolf.”

  “I know, I know. But we can take motorboats as far north as Bushkill. It’s a short hike from there.”

  “No, no, no. That’s crazy.”

  “No way,” Jackson said.

  They talked over one another. Wawa reminded them that Tranquility had infiltrated wolf territory before. Jackson and Fang called it suicide. Even Grissom seemed dubious.

  “Why don’t we fly in?” Falkirk said.

  “We need the Upheaval for reconnaissance,” Jackson said. “Hell, for all we know, this whole thing could be a ploy to get the warship out of here. So the fish-heads can attack again without warning.” Jackson turned to Wawa to plead his case. Taking away the Upheaval would leave the city defenseless. The chief agreed.

  “I’m talking about Vesuvius,” Falkirk said.

  “The captain and most of his officers are dead,” Fang said. “We don’t have anyone who’s qualified to command an airship.”

  “Yes we do.”

  Wawa reminded him that the communications network was still inoperable, ever since the strators disabled the tower. The Vesuvius would be out of range as soon as it entered the wilderness. Besides, flying a ship over wolf territory would only cause more problems with the tribes, maybe trigger another attack.

  “The wolves already hate us, Chief. Are you sure that’s your reason?”

  Wawa folded her hands. “You haven’t flown in a long time, Lieutenant.”

  “You just gave us that art of war speech. When the enemy hands you an opportunity to wipe him out, you take it, right?”

  Wawa squinted at him.

  “I can do it,” he said.

  D’Arc detected a slight growl in his voice. His lips could barely contain his fangs.

  “Inspect the crew,” Wawa said. “But if they’re not ready, we go with my plan.”

  Falkirk exhaled. D’Arc could not tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

  “But first, we need to get Mort(e) on board,” Wawa said. She swiveled her chair toward D’Arc, who squirmed in her seat. The Old Man said that something like this would happen. Hosanna would lure them in only to tear them apart. He never predicted that it might be her fault. But he must have known.

  “If you’re going to kill the Sarcops, then why bring Mort(e)?” D’Arc said.

  “Because they’re connected. Psychically. Mort(e) said so himself.”

  “So you’re going to use him as bait.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  One by one, the other people in the room lowered their heads.

  “What if I can’t get him to do it?” D’Arc asked.

  “You can tell him we’ll pardon him if he goes.”

  Everyone shifted in their seats.

  “We’ll say the Sons of Adam killed Michael,” Wawa added.

  “Chief, we cannot do that,” Fang said.

  “Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? That boy died ages ago. They just forgot to bury him.”

  “He might still say no,” D’Arc said. “Will you force him to do it?”

  “You might be the only one who can convince him.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Fine. The answer is yes.”

  D’Arc’s throat clutched. A rage at her own weakness boiled in her stomach.

  “I
’m loyal to Mort(e), same as you,” Wawa said. “Despite all the things he’s done. But none of that matters. We have to protect this city.”

  “Even if it means sacrificing someone.”

  “At this point, yes. Besides, Mort(e) sacrificed the Prophet, didn’t he?”

  D’Arc bared her teeth at that.

  “He’s the only user left,” Wawa said. “Would you rather he goes with us, or do you want the Sarcops to find him a few months from now?”

  D’Arc rose from her seat, scraping the feet of the chair. The sound of it made Grissom cover his ears.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  Before anyone else could speak, D’Arc exited the stuffy office and stepped into the main hall. Falkirk got out of his seat, but a quick glance from D’Arc made him stay.

  Even with fewer officers, Tranquility almost seemed normal again. But she noticed a lull in the noise as people stopped their conversations. She marched between the new desks with her sword rattling in its scabbard, daring anyone to whisper a single word about her.

  CHAPTER 21

  Skydog

  The elevator ascended through the innards of the ruined skyscraper. Under a flickering lightbulb, Falkirk buttoned his ill-fitting jacket. Originally designed for a human, the jacket had the sleeves cut off so that Falkirk’s arms could breathe. The epaulets on the shoulders and captain’s star on the right breast indicated his new rank, gaudy reminders of the promotion that he did not exactly deserve.

  The doors opened to reveal the thirty-third floor, where the building had been cut in two by missile strikes. Only part of the ceiling remained. Near the elevator shaft, a booth with a large window housed the control tower. Three humans sat inside, speaking into headsets, their faces illuminated by computer screens. The rest of the floor had been converted into a flight deck, with a new concrete surface. Near the edge, the Vesuvius hovered with its port side facing the deck. The reflective surface created a fun-house image of the tower. Mooring lines tethered the ship to the floor, and a portable staircase led to an open door on the gondola. The officers stood in a neat row, all wearing their aquamarine jumpsuits with gold piping on the sleeves and pants. Falkirk counted three humans, a wolflike dog with black and golden fur, and an odd creature with bright reddish hair. As he got closer he recognized the animal as an orangutan, a species he had never encountered before. The primate must have escaped from a zoo. Or a lab.