The first good news in an hour. But Urzueth did not seem encouraged. “What distresses you?”
“On this day, what does not? But just this moment, I was reflecting that even if your countermand of the Final Directive reaches our ships, their masters may not elect to follow the orders of an unknown Delegate.”
Darzhee Kut bobbed once. “Yes, but at least they cannot scuttle their ships immediately. Not until they restore full computer control.”
“Darzhee Kut, why do you place this importance upon their computers?”
“Because the instructed means of scuttling is to sabotage the antimatter or fusion containment fields.”
Urzueth Ragh angled to look at him sideways. “Rock-sibling, Shipmasters have other means at their disposal.”
Darzhee Kut felt his intestine twitch. “What do you mean?”
“Darzhee Kut, surely you have not forgotten that the humans are not the only ones who possess nuclear ordnance—”
Mobile Command Center “Trojan Ghost One,”
over southern Java, Earth
“Oh, Christ—Mr. Downing!”
The bump of the VTOL’s hasty landing coincided with a panicked, almost electric pulse that jumped so hard through Downing that he felt pain at the rear of his skull. But there was relief, too. The bad news had finally arrived. “What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Sir—the Arat Kur are destroying their ships.”
So. Not as harmless as they seemed. “How many?”
“I don’t know, sir. It’s going on right now—six, seven, eight.”
“How?”
“Nukes, sir.”
“And our boarding teams?”
The lieutenant turned very pale very quickly. “Our—?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. What about our boarding teams?”
Flagship USS Lincoln, Sierra Echelon, RTF 1, cislunar space
Ruth Altasso turned to Ira. Lateral lines, straight and stacked like the slats of a washboard, stretched across her forehead. “Admiral, Commander Dugan on tac comm one. Urgent.”
Damned straight it’s urgent. His teams are on those hulls. “Put him through. What’s the count, Ruth?”
“Nine scuttled so far, sir. Dugan is online.”
“Lincoln actual. Go.”
“Admiral—”
“I know what’s happening, Tom. Don’t waste time with a sitrep.”
“Okay.” A long pause. When Tom Dugan spoke again, he sounded more like a green second looey than a seventeen-year veteran with the Teams. “Ira, what do I do?”
Good God, now SEALs are asking me what to do? “Secure the prisoners. Isolate them from all systems.”
“Impossible, Admiral. On most hulls, I’ve only got two squads of boarders. That’s twenty-two troops for hulls that are often more than two hundred thousand kiloliters in volume. And my men don’t have intel on floor plans, standard complement, or command circuitry. My guys are working blind, and from what I can tell, they can’t figure out how the Arat Kur are blowing their ships. I was in contact with Joe DeBolt when the smallish hull he took went up. His squads had corralled all the Roach bastards. Nobody threw a self-destruct switch or anything like that.” Dugan stopped for a moment, then resumed. “Orders?”
Ira clenched his molars. I know what you want me to say. And, God forgive me, you’re right, because we just don’t know how they’re doing it. Hell, if they set this up as a worst-case contingency, they might not even need access to their ships’ systems—
Ira discovered that Altasso was looking at him. “Skipper, for all we know, the Arat Kur could have implanted themselves with remote triggers.”
Ira closed his eyes. Great God, does she read minds, too?
“Sir.” It was Dugan again, tense. “Orders?”
“Are your men still buttoned up?”
“All suits are still sealed, sir.”
“Do they have control over internal systems? Such as bulkhead doors?”
“In most cases, yes sir.”
Eyes still closed, Ira felt himself creating generations of hatred and mistrust as he allowed the next order to ride out of his mouth on the crest of one long sigh. “Remove the Arat Kur from their ships. Immediately.”
Silence. “‘Remove’? Sir, don’t you mean—?”
“Commander, I know what I mean and what I said. Have your teams secure themselves to interior fixtures with lanyards. Then open the airlocks. Then open the bulkhead doors. All of them.”
Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Earth
Darzhee Kut noticed the small human soldiers guarding the ruined headquarters crouch cautiously, then snap upward into a respectful, oddly erect and rigid stance. A superior approaching? Riordan, perhaps?
Larger humans with long, wicked-looking rifles swarmed through the door, followed by Trevor Corcoran.
Who had changed. Darzhee Kut had his claw half raised in greeting, but brought it down: he was suddenly fearful, more fearful than he had ever been around the Hkh’Rkh. He did not know humans well, but everything he had learned told him that there was death in Trevor Corcoran’s eye. Not hatred, not outraged pride, not fury. Just cold, passionless, implacable death. Death for Darzhee Kut, for Arat Kur, for all exos—maybe for anyone. Darzhee shivered back into his carapace. That was Trevor Corcoran’s face, but that was no longer Trevor Corcoran.
But arriving behind Corcoran was Riordan, his head turning, seeking, insistent, pushing past the human warriors into the room, over the body of the Hkh’Rkh that had guarded and then attacked him, still seeking—and stopped, staring in the direction opposite Darzhee Kut. His head and eyes were aimed straight at the silent, faintly fuming tank of Apt-Counsel-of-Lenses. Riordan’s eager, ready expression bled away. For a moment—just a moment—Darzhee Kut thought his eyes were going to match Trevor’s own.
“Caine Riordan!” As Riordan turned his head in the direction of Darzhee Kut’s call, some measure of engagement came back to his eyes. “Caine Riordan, we need—”
“Radios. Yes, we’ve heard about the ships. And your soldiers, are they also—?”
“Yes. It is a perverse contingency plan discussed by some of our leaders,” Darzhee Kut lied. “But I believe we can stop my forces from following them—many of them, at least. But I have no way to reach them. I need radios—”
But Caine was already turning away, shouting to the other humans—
* * *
Caine faced Trevor. “Darzhee Kut is now in charge here and trying to ensure that the rest of Arat Kur surrender goes smoothly. He needs a long-range radio in order to communicate with his people, and tell them it’s safe to cooperate with us.” Caine saw Elena enter the room, felt a flash of misgiving at having her here, shouted over Darzhee Kut’s continuing, and somewhat shrill, entreaties. “And we’ll need to patch him through to his ships if he’s going to stop them from being scuttled.”
Trevor nodded to one of the SEALs with him, who promptly unshouldered a radio and moved toward Darzhee Kut. Darzhee Kut bobbed appreciatively, glanced up, but then the focus of his eyes seemed to go past Caine, as though he had seen something just behind—
Caine’s back flared, felt like it was splitting, shattering, with flame gushing in and up along the fracture lines. He staggered forward, heard a soundless roaring in his ears, and then shouting all around him:
“JesusChristCaineShootthatmuthafuckingBelaythatHelphimOhGodnoCaine.”
Caine felt himself sway, caught his balance with a sidestep that half turned him. Apt-Counsel’s tank was only two meters behind him, beaded with condensation, wisps of vapor wreathing it in white curlicues, a broad, smoking tube where one of the external manipulator arms had been mounted only a moment before. Caine reached behind, felt wet metal protruding from the right side of his back, felt his balance going again as people rushed in at him from every direction. He took another half step, confident he’d straighten up properly this time . . .
And found himself falling forward, turning, seeing a whirl of faces: Elena, Trevor, Darzhe
e Kut, Opal—Opal? No, not here—and not now. Strange how slowly things move when you fall, when you can’t help yourself, when you feel yourself slipping away into unmarked time once again. Since this morning, he had been reunited with a lover and lost her, learned of the infant growing in her and lost it, rediscovered a lover he had forgotten and child he had never known and now was losing those, too. Because, unfortunately, at this cusp of victory, he had been killed.
As Caine fell forward—faces looming, hands rushing in—he smiled at the banality of his final thought:
Such a busy day.
Off Lada Bay, Sunda Strait, Earth
The young ocean sunfish circled the fluttering object warily, vaguely recognizing in its downward progress the undulations of a jellyfish: preferred prey. But ultimately, the ocean sunfish flinched away, discerning that this was not a food source after all.
The tattered sleeve of Michael Schrage’s uniform, made a colorful motley by service and unit patches, continued its slow-motion descent toward the sandy bottom where the mouth of Lada Bay kissed the Sunda Strait. It was the last piece of wreckage or debris from Elektronische Kriegsgruppe Zwei to come to rest. All the others had reached the bottom, and, like this, were too small to ever be of significance to historian-divers or curiosity seekers. None of the VTOLs’ flight recorders survived the catastrophic hits by Arat Kur orbital lasers; no member of the flight survived to tell their tale. The few cells that remained of Schrage’s body carried no encoding that marked them as the remains of one of the thousands of humans who had, on that day, courted and were embraced by certain death in the performance of selfless acts against invaders. In Schrage’s case, it had involved placing his ship over Dortmund’s and Thandla’s to give them the extra seconds they needed to ensure that the submarines could safely complete their decisive ascent. That this act was arguably the fulcrum upon which the balance of the battle had tipped made it no greater a sacrifice than the thousands of other sacrifices which had been offered up in the streets, airspaces, or waters around the island of Java.
As the tattered uniform sleeve neared the bottom, a sand shark, attracted by a faint scent of blood, snatched away a shred of skin which clung, scorched and fused, to the partial sleeve. Then, with a swirl of fabric, the sleeve met and flattened long and slow against the muddy sand. The shark swam testily off, disappointed at the meager pickings.
For no greater nourishment or savor resided in the unmissed flesh of unsung heroes.
COUNTERATTACK
Part Two
June 12–14, 2120
Chapter Fifty-Four
Far Orbit, Sigma Draconis Two
Caine awakened into a gasp before he was aware of the pain, and that it was peaking: a searing stab that started a few inches under and behind his right floating rib and shot straight up to his scapula. As he exhaled the slowly diminishing pain out of his body, Caine felt a residual ache curl up—sullen and persistent—in the place the stabbing sensation was vacating.
Well, it wasn’t like the Ktor nicked me with a pen knife. He remembered a doctor reading off a list of his injuries as he faded in and out of what seemed like postsurgical anesthesia: “. . . deep dorsal penetration resulting in transfixing laceration of the latissimus dorsi, splintering fracture of T5, highly localized pulmonary laceration, and multiple lacerations of the liver. Extensive peripheral trauma is observed throughout the right thoracic . . .”
He remembered losing focus then, sinking back into the black, and wondering: Where is Elena? Where is everyone?
He swam back up out of the lightless depths some time later and remembered hearing himself ask. “How long?”
Both the answering voice and the room’s ambient sound were markedly different. “You mean, before you’re ambulatory?”
“No. How long have I been unconscious?”
“Well, strictly speaking, you haven’t been fully unconscious since—”
Suddenly, Elena was there in place of the doctor or orderly or whoever. She took his right hand in one of hers, laid the other smooth and firm along his cheek, as though she were poised to hold him harder, to keep him awake, in this world, with her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For worrying you. And for being such an easy target.”
She smiled and cried without blinking or making a sound.
And was gone.
And now he was here, without her. Wherever here was. He vaguely remembered being strapped in for shift, a surgical nurse beside him, just in case the shock of transition made him flinch, reopened his wounds.
But that was all he remembered, other than occasionally awakening and trying to separate the conflicting feelings that seemed to clutch his heart, paralyze his tears, shackle his joy: mourning for Opal, longing for Elena, and recurrent guilt at the way the first emotion was so easily overridden by the second.
But as if avenging her rapid passing from his heart, he could feel Opal haunting everything he saw, every breath he drew. For all he knew, he might not be breathing at all had she not drawn the fire that would certainly have been unleashed against Caine, Trevor, and the others who had cowered in that shed in Jakarta.
There was a faint knock at the door. Thank God. I don’t care who it is, just . . . “Come in!”
Downing entered.
Oh. Great. The Lying Bastard himself.
“Awake at last, I see. How are you feeling?”
“Well enough, I suppose.” And thanks for nearly getting me killed again. Asshole.
Downing drew up a chair. “I’m glad to see you’re alert and ready to move about.”
Caine knew the tone. “Okay, how much have I missed?”
“So, you know you were in cold sleep, again?”
“It seemed a good guess. I just don’t know how long.”
Downing looked sheepish. “Caine, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“Coming up out of the postsurgical anesthesia, I think. No, wait. I remember someone else, an orderly—” Downing was looking at the floor, a study in discomfort. Caine sighed, wanted to keep hating him but also knew that Richard had been following orders and doing his job. “Okay, how much time have I lost now?”
“Caine, I suspect the first thing you remember is the preoperative review at the time of your second surgery.”
“Second surgery?”
“Yes. We did what we could right after you were hit in Indonesia, but we lost you on the table.”
Caine thought he might vomit. “I was dead?”
“In another few minutes, they would have called the clock and pulled up the sheet. So we had to put you in a cryocell until we could get a different medical team to join us. They were far more advanced, and performed the second surgery.”
“Stateside?”
“Er . . . no, spaceside.”
“What?”
“Caine, do understand. Not only did we have to rendezvous with the second surgical team as swiftly as possible, but the entirety of the World Confederation Council insisted that you be sent with the invasion fleet to Sigma Draconis. Your unique relationships with so many of the—”
“Whoa, hold on. Sigma Draconis? Invasion fleet? Where the hell am I?”
Downing sighed. “You are in far orbit around the Arat Kur homeworld. We arrived a few days ago.”
“And just where on the calendar are we?”
“It’s June 12, 2120. You’ve been unconscious almost constantly for the last five months. The second surgical team did not reach us until late April. We were well underway to bring the war to the Arat Kurs’ doorstep, and so they had to catch up. Your recovery was dicey and you were kept in postsurgical cryogenic reduction. Not full cryosleep, but the safest way to monitor an uncertain recovery.”
Caine could hardly think through what felt like the hailstorm of mental blows he’d just received. “Then why—why the hell am I even here? Why didn’t you leave me on Earth, with Elena, with Connor, with—?”
“I told you. T
he Consuls insisted you accompany us. Besides, you couldn’t stay on Earth, Caine. The surgical team arranged to meet us on the way to Sigma Draconis. And frankly, you’d still be in cryogenic reduction, recovering, if our mission here hadn’t hit—well, a snag.”
“So I guess I’m going to have a working recovery before I get to go back home.”
“I’m afraid so, Caine. I’ve brought you this”—Downing held up a datastik—“to help you catch up on what’s been going on over the last five months. Can I get you anything else?”
“No—yes! Is Elena here, too?”
“I’m sorry, Caine, but no. This fleet is only carrying essential personnel. Only you were deemed an indispensable asset, if our interactions with the Arat Kur became—problematic.”
“Yeah, well, if I’m so indispensable, why couldn’t the second surgical team have operated on me before we left Earth, rather than chasing us across umpteen light-years to—?”
But Downing was shaking his head. “No, Caine, you don’t understand. The second surgical team was not on Earth. In fact, it would have taken them longer to get there than meet us on the way.”
Caine felt something cold moving in the general area of his incision, told himself—somewhat desperately—that it was just his imagination. “The surgical team wasn’t on Earth.” He knew the answer to his next question before he asked it. “So it was the Dornaani?”
Downing nodded. “They sent a small diplomatic packet to join our fleet on the way to Sigma Draconis Two. It was also carrying their surgeons and equipment. To whom I am quite sure you owe your life.”
Seems I owe lots of people my life: first Opal, now the Dornaani. Meaning I’ve got twice as many debts as I can reasonably repay. I’ve only got the one life, after all.
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