by Mike Sheriff
Bhavya adjusted her bulky tunic. “We should be able to find some good observation points close to the Assembly.”
Cang checked the chronoglyph on her wrist. “Sunrise is only three hours away. We’ll need to find one before then.”
Yongrui slung a stubby sonic rifle on his shoulder. While identical in function to the Jireni rifle, the mongrel version featured a shorter barrel and stock. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “So we’ll have to cover over fifteen miles in less than three hours?”
“Is that a problem for you, Jiren?” Cang asked.
“This wretched bianfu is the problem,” he said, tugging at his crotch. “The over-trousers are a little snug.”
Bhavya snorted. “Not a sensation you’re used to in that region, I’d wager.”
Yongrui shot her a dark look. Cang cut off his inevitable retort. “Keep your eyes open and mouths closed as we proceed. Assume everyone is a threat until proven otherwise.”
“Actions on contact?” Yongrui asked, still fidgeting with his over-trousers.
“No one engages unless I give the command. And remember—we’re dressed as the enemy, so the risk of attracting friendly fire is high.”
“Wonderful,” Bhavya said. “I was growing tired of just the mongrels trying to cull us.”
JULINIAN CHECKED THE sonic rifle’s charge level and plunked into the chair behind the transparent desk.
It had been a long day and even longer night—and sunrise was still three hours away. The heady thrill of occupying the Unum’s chamber had waned over the hours. Cloying fatigue now gripped her body, making her eyes itch and her knees ache.
The blood streaks staining the crystalline floor had dried and dulled since Hai’s departure. The snatch teams had so far delivered thirty-two of the fifty district commanders to her chamber. Only three more had succumbed to sonic rounds. The rest had pledged their fealty—and their Jireni forces—to the triumvirate.
She leaned back in the chair and propped her feet on the desk. The outcome was better than she’d anticipated.
In planning the operation, she’d expected the majority of the commanders to choose death before dishonoring their pledge to Daoren. Their loyalties turned out to be more pliable when facing a sonic rifle’s muzzle.
Despite the uplifting result, Massum remained mired in a brooding funk. He stood before the flexglass barrier on the far side of the chamber, gaze tacked on the open square below. He hadn’t moved in ten minutes.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked, seeking distraction rather than insight.
“The future of my people,” Massum said after a sullen moment. “We know we can’t sustain the colonies with our current feeding methods.”
She shuddered—the mongrel feeding methods had long revolted her. “You’ve recognized the immorality of culling infants?”
“They can no longer meet our nutritional needs.” He turned from the barrier. A deep-seated weariness depleted his expression—something well beyond mere fatigue. “We’ve plotted the feeding curves and examined them from every angle. Even with optimized production and the harshest rationing, the cycle of feast and famine will render my people extinct within four generations.”
“My people would welcome that outcome.”
Massum’s jaw slackened. His widening mouth conveyed genuine shock.
Julinian cursed herself for uttering the callous comment aloud—she must be more tired than she realized.
Yes, it reflected her honest opinion. Yes, it reflected the feeling she carried in her heart. But the last thing the leader of the mongrel faction needed to hear was the truth. “I do not share their view,” she said, hoping her forced conviction could offset the slight. “You must believe me.”
Massum closed his mouth, but his eyes reflected an emotion she knew intimately.
“What can I do to alleviate your concern?” she asked.
“You can promise that my people will have a place in the city-state’s future.”
“Of course they will. I’ll always be indebted to the role they played in—”
“I mean a physical place.”
She blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m asking you to help me carve out a Cheng for the mongrels.”
A guttural rasplaugh burst from her mouth before she could stop it. “You want to create a mongrel district inside of Daqin Guojin?”
“If you agree to the edict, it would have two thirds of the triumvirate’s support.”
Julinian let her feet drop to the floor and sat upright. She ached to tell him that her people would sooner see their heads on spikes than yield one square-inch of ground to the mongrels. She ached to tell him that no self-respecting Guojinian would share the city-state’s pediwalks with his people. She swallowed those desires and lied through her teeth. “I could do that . . .”
“I sense a but coming.”
“It would have to be introduced with extreme caution,” she said. “Trium Hai will require delicate handling, but it may be possible . . . in good time.”
“How long?”
She shrugged and plucked a number from the air. “Ten years, perhaps?”
Massum glowered before turning to the flexglass barrier. He didn’t turn back.
She knew she’d offended him, but couldn’t summon the energy to salve his sensitivities or discuss the matter further. The only subject that interested her was the whereabouts of Daoren the Usurper and his glinty wife.
She stretched her legs and idly wondered whether Hai and his brothers had made any progress in locating the fugitives.
HAI HALTED ON the floor of the grooll mill and gazed up at the surrounding platforms. Min and Gan halted next to him and did the same. If their silence was any indication, they were equally stunned by what they saw.
The structural engineers assigned to dismantling the complex structure had progressed much faster than he’d anticipated. All the ovoid processing pods have been removed. A quarter of the mill’s two hundred platforms have been taken down. Of the one hundred-fifty still standing, half were missing the miles of convoluted piping that conveyed slurried prospects into the floor’s mixing tanks.
“Sapient Sha,” Min whispered. “They’ve gutted it.”
“It’s a setback,” Hai said, putting on a brave face for his brothers.
“A setback? It will take months to make it fully operational!”
“Stay calm, brother. This isn’t the end of the world.”
Cylindrical cabinets still stretched for hundreds of feet along the floor’s southernmost quadrant. The cabinets were used to irradiate and extrude the grooll precursor into its classic torus shape before cooling and slicing. Had they been deactivated and removed, it would have taken many more weeks to recalibrate the process.
“We can bring the mill back online at a reduced capacity.” Hai gestured to the platforms still bearing the mazes of glass piping. “We simply need to reinstall the processing pods on those platforms.”
“That will give us a production capacity of less than fifty percent,” Min said.
“Better than nothing.”
“It won’t be enough to feed the entire population if we can’t locate the grooll reserves. We’d have to keep using the alternative food crops.”
“Why?” Hai asked.
“Because millions would starve to death if we didn’t!”
“The Asianoids wouldn’t,” he said. “We can use the grooll produced here to feed our people. The other lineages can . . .”
“Can what?”
“Waste away.”
Min blinked. He lifted his gaze to the intact platforms and eked out a stunted nod. Beside him, Gan didn’t offer an opinion of any kind—he seemed a thousand miles away.
“Are you with us, Gan?” Hai asked.
He offered a noncommittal nod, eyes reddened and dull.
“What in Sha’s name is weighing on you today?”
Gan’s eyes pooled. He averted his gaze. “I’m thinking of F
an.”
Hai tilted his head back. Of course. The date had slipped his mind. Fan had been harvested five years ago this month. Like Gan, he should have passed the S.A.T. with relative ease. He would have passed were it not for a bout of laryngitis that obfuscated his answer confirmations. Gan had been seated in the adjacent row during the test and bore witness to his twin’s demise. If that weren’t distressing enough, the wretched event had since grown into a cautionary tale, one retold innumerable times by parents and prospects throughout the city-state.
He grasped his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “Would you like to pay your respects?”
Gan sniffed and ran a finger under his nose. “I think that may help.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.” He tugged a quantum tile from his tunic and raised it to his mouth. “We’re coming up. Have a levideck and an escort ready to meet us on the surface near the loading shafts.”
Yaochin’s thin voice leached from the tile. “At once, Trium Hai. Where would you like to go to now?”
“The Hollows.”
16
The Battle of the Hollows
DAOREN GRIPPED HEQET’S shoulder and escorted her through the dim archway. He felt her body stiffen beneath his grasp. She let out a low whimper—the third in less than five minutes. “We’re almost there,” he whispered. “You’ll be able to rest soon.”
She smiled and nodded, but it conveyed neither reassurance nor relief.
Six Jireni guards surrounded them—three up front and three to the rear. After another twenty paces, they reached the archway’s terminus. Daoren glanced skyward as they stepped into the open air.
A half-moon loomed overhead, its hoary hemisphere dimmed by a thin layer of clouds. Stars speckled the murk.
He lowered his gaze and took in the Hollow’s sobering expanse, five hundred feet to the front.
Millions of shimmering gray-glass tubes sprouted from the cloister’s gray-ceramic slabs. They stood five-feet tall, arrayed in dense rows reminiscent of the grains growing in the crop circles beyond the wall. The tubes issued no haunting moans; the night’s stillness evoked no acoustic resonance. Three miles to the north, the Center’s domed roof traced a white arc amid a glut of darkened administrative structures, its outline mimicking the moon.
Daoren shivered, the response triggered more by the Center’s shock-fused roof than the cool air. Ten feet away, Su and Hyro stood with Aesic and Taan. Ten more Jireni and the six denizens from the outpost were already dispersed in a defensive semi-circle. All twenty members of the ad-hoc force clutched sonic rifles. They’d liberated the weapons from the outpost in Nansilafu Cheng before heading south.
Daoren led Heqet and the personal guard over to join them. Su swung his rifle muzzle toward a line of east-west structures, three hundred feet south of the cloister. “We can pick up another sheltered route from there. It will take us to within a half-mile of the Librarium’s northern entrance.”
“Good,” Daoren said. “The less time we spend outdoors, the better.”
So far, Su had selected a route that did just that. It favored the interior passageways of interlinked structures and a series of underground spillways. He’d committed the location of hundreds of optical and acoustic sensors to memory, steering them clear of the devices.
For areas in which he had less familiarity, Commander Hyro had used the plasmonic map on her tactical tile and her knowledge of the sensors’ placements in Riben Cheng to make intelligent guesses. So far, their luck had held. With Sha’s help, the last few miles to the Librarium would be as uneventful.
“And how do you propose we enter the Librarium once we get there?” Heqet asked, using the same prickly tone she’d adopted since they’d crossed beneath the cull zone.
Daoren glanced at her, seeing the same austere countenance she’d displayed since evacuating the battlement. She wouldn’t say what was vexing her—and he’d stopped asking.
Her exhaustion was self-evident, but he wagered the fatigue stemmed from more than the horrors they’d experienced atop the wall or their constant movement since leaving the battlement. The mongrel invasion placed Mako’s future in grave doubt. He would have given anything to stop for an hour—if only to reassure her that he’d do everything in his power to protect his family—but he couldn’t stop. He had to know if his mother was still alive.
“One problem at a time,” he said. “For now, we need to get twenty-eight people across the cloister without being detected.”
Su’s rifle muzzle shifted sideways and traced the cloister’s eastern boundary. “If we stick close to the memorial tubes, we’ll avoid the sensors deployed along the cloister’s western edge. There’s a null near the plinth on the southern perimeter. Once we reach it, we can head toward the structures.”
Daoren scanned the suggested route.
The dense rows of glass tubes covered one square-mile of the cloister. They served as a graphic reminder of the countless prospects who’d lost their lives during two centuries of harvesting. Less evident from the vantage point was the location of the optical and acoustic sensors.
“You’re sure about the null?”
Su grinned. “I wouldn’t have survived long as a dissenter if I didn’t know the Jireni’s data-collection network better than the Jireni.”
Daoren looked to Hyro for confirmation.
She shrugged. “You’ll have to take Su’s word for it. I’m not as familiar with Zhongguo Cheng’s network as the one in Riben Cheng.”
Taan drew a ceramic dagger from his shenyi. “Don’t worry, Unum. I’ll protect the Zhenggong . . . and you.”
Daoren nodded his appreciation. During the ninety-minute journey from Nansilafu Cheng, the boy had developed an obsessive fixation on Heqet’s personal safety. Wherever possible, they’d used high-speed pediwalks and pedassist devices to speed their progress through the myriad structures and spillways. Taan had never strayed more than a few feet from her side.
“Put the dagger away, boy,” Aesic said. “Stealth is our best protection.”
“And speed,” Daoren said. “We shouldn’t linger too long in the open.”
They headed toward the cloister’s eastern boundary, guided by Su’s dead-reckoning. Each step proved more difficult for Heqet. Her breathing grew more rapid and shallower. By the time they reached the tubes, Daoren and Taan had each taken an arm, all but dragging her forward.
It took ten minutes to reach the cloister’s southern boundary, and another twenty to reach the crystal plinth midway across its length. The inscription on its angled face gleamed in the ambient light.
For Those Who Gave Their Lives That We Might Live.
Su pointed at the structures, three hundred feet south of their position. At least a dozen archways fronted its extended façade. “If we hold a straight line between here and the central archway, we’ll avoid the optical sensors. And if we stay quiet, we’ll avoid acoustic detection.”
Daoren grimaced. The ground between the plinth and the archway might as well be a cull zone. If an enemy patrol lingered along the cloister’s western boundary, they’d be trapped out in the open. “We need to check the far side for patrols before we go anywhere.”
“I’ll send three Jireni,” Hyro said.
“I want to go, too,” Taan said, the words rushing from his mouth in a breathless smear.
“I’d prefer you stay here to protect the Zhenggong.”
Taan’s eyes pleaded. “Please, Unum. I want to go.”
Daoren glanced at Aesic.
Aesic sighed. “He’ll only keep asking until you say yes.”
“Very well,” Daoren said to the boy. “But stay low and stay quiet. Take a quick look and come right back.”
Taan beamed. He advanced behind the three Jireni, back hunched to avoid exposing his head and torso above the tubes. They made it two hundred feet before jerking to a stop and dropping to their knees.
Beyond them, three armored levidecks rounded the cloister’s southwest corner. Three figure
s clad in purple shenyi stood upon the first conveyance. The other two carried three Jireni each. Crystalline weapons glinted in their hands as they whisked closer.
Daoren’s heart trip-hammered in his throat. One of the purple-clad figures stood head-and-shoulders above the other two. It had to be Hai al Kong and his brothers.
Su raised his rifle and peered through its optical sight. “That’s Hai and his brothers!” he whispered, confirming Daoren’s suspicion. “We need to get—”
The distant levidecks accelerated, the shriek of their varinozzles shattering the stillness. The riders hoisted their weapons.
The three Jireni with Taan mirrored their opponents. Taan drew his dagger and charged at the advancing levidecks.
“Taan!” Aesic shouted. “Get—”
Percussive reports blotted out his warning. A swarm of glass darts spun Taan off his feet. He thudded onto his back and slid to a stop.
Aesic released an anguished cry and leveled his sonic rifle. Daoren snatched Heqet’s tunic and hauled her sideways. His body slammed against the thicket of memorial tubes, forcing them apart. “Covering fire!”
Hyro, Su, and the other members of the ad-hoc force opened fire. A riot of sonic impulses hammered Daoren’s ears as he hauled Heqet down to the ground.
A volley of counter-fire tore through the cloister. Sonic rounds and glass darts shattered the surrounding tubes.
Daoren cradled Heqet, shielding her with his body. She stiffened and screamed.
“Are you hit?”
Her face contorted. Her mouth twisted as she bared her teeth.
“Are you hit?”
“No!” She sucked a whistling breath. “I . . . I think the baby is coming!”
Another volley of projectiles carved through the tubes, spraying glass in every direction. Hyro dashed through the maelstrom and crouched beside Daoren. “Is she okay?”