Neptune's War

by Nick Webb

“No, no, no—”

  Not Jack. She knew, now, why she hadn’t wanted to survive: she’d wanted him to survive. She had hoped against all hope that he would find a way to save Earth.

  And instead, she was the one who was left.

  She couldn’t wrap her mind around this. Not this. Alarms blared and lights flashed, and Walker struggled uselessly against the straps that held her in place.

  Not Jack. She couldn’t live with that. Not Jack, too.

  She turned her head, and had one last glimpse of green-on-green-on-green rushing up to meet the ship as flames from the engines trying to slow them flared.

  The ship hit the tiny island she’d seen growing larger in the window, and the impact ripped her seat away from the wall.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Earth, Lower Atmosphere

  EFS Intrepid

  Bridge

  He had only just reached the girl, each of them yelling and pointing in opposite directions, when the alert sounded to brace for impact. Pike tried to drag her bodily toward the bridge—there were crash seats there, he knew—but the ship’s spinning was still too fast and too disorienting. His progress was too slow.

  There wasn’t any better choice. He dragged himself along the corridor, eyes fixed on the door. At his side, he could hear the girl retching.

  The spinning slowed, or else he got used to it—he wasn’t sure which. They were making quicker progress now. He managed to stagger to his feet, lost his lunch on the metal grating, and lurched the last few yards with the girl’s hand sweaty in his.

  There was so much chaos on the bridge that no one even noticed them. Pike shoved the girl into one of the seats and buckled her in. She was limp, too sick to protest as he slid in next to her. Somewhere, he thought he heard Walker shouting someone’s name.

  He had only just gotten the straps settled when the ship hit the ground, and then there was an almighty tearing in the deck beneath them and the metal above them. Sunlight burst through as the ship tore cleanly apart. Wind whistled and the scent of burning greenery against carbon-scorched metal stung his nostrils….

  How much later he woke up, he did not know. The girl was being carried away over the burning rubble and a stabbing pain along his shoulder told him that his collarbone had been wrenched out of place. Hands were dragging him free of the harness and he heard his own screams.

  Too much. The pain was too much.

  They laid him down on grass and heather, on the slope of a hill above the crash, and he thought he saw Walker’s eyes peering down into his before the pain overtook him and his vision went dark again.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Earth

  Wales

  Hills Near Brecon

  He woke to night, and the crackling of a fire. His shoulder ached fiercely, and the girl was sitting beside him keeping watch. He could see her shape, fuzzily. He reached for her hand.

  Then she turned her head, and it was not the girl at all, but Walker.

  He pulled his hand back.

  She didn’t even notice. Her nose and eyes and lips were all swollen with tears. He vaguely remembered waking, in great pain, to the sound of sobs, and wondered vaguely what she had been crying about.

  “You’re awake,” she managed. She swallowed and cleared her throat awkwardly. “They got your shoulder back in place. It won’t be comfortable, but….” Her voice trailed away.

  It didn’t matter, after all.

  “We’re alive,” he said before looking around, then added, “most of us, anyway.” It wasn’t what he had intended to say, but then again, he wasn’t quite sure what he had intended to say. He’d just opened his mouth and the thought fell out.

  He looked around for the ship and rather wished he hadn’t. It lay below them now, cradled in what would normally be a pretty little valley, still smoldering on the slopes. It dwarfed the gentle swells of the hills if one looked closely, and was in turn dwarfed by the land if one looked beyond the hills to the vast expanse of the surrounding country. Either way, it was out of place. This land was green and softened by age, and the rusty hulk of the ship had torn long furrows in the ground when it crashed, only to be broken open by the force.

  “Where are the rest?” Pike asked finally. The pain was getting worse. “Where’re the Telestines? Where are we?” He was listening unconsciously for the drone of an approaching patrol.

  She skipped his first question. “Wales. That’s what the map says, anyway. And the Telestines are patrolling nearby. The Dawning … Dawn … has us hidden from them. They crawled all over the ship, but they haven’t looked around otherwise.” Her face was troubled. “There are signs of natives in the area—the surviving crew should be able to hide with them in the hills until we can be rescued. It’ll be a long, long walk for us to get to London. And….” Her face had entirely closed off as she looked away, and when she spoke, her voice was distant. “And Jack is gone.”

  That explained the tears. Pike pushed himself up on one elbow and gave a cry of pain. He struggled the rest of the way up as stars burst along his vision. “They found his body?” And, awkwardly, because the first thing had been entirely the wrong thing to say: “I’m sorry.”

  “They won’t find his body.” She wouldn’t look at him. “The engine compartment … tore off in the upper atmosphere. Everything in that section is gone now.” Inconsequentially, she added, “She’ll never fly again. He’d hate that.”

  Jack Delaney…. He shook his head. What would Walker do without him?

  Walker’s eyes were shut. “I told him what I was planning to do and he still … chose me over him.”

  Cold settled in the hollow of Pike’s chest.

  “He agreed with you?” Oddly, he felt betrayed. Of all the things Delaney was—gruff, grumpy, eternally suspicious—Pike had never suspected he would support her indefensible plan.

  “No. He believed—” she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand “—I’d change my mind.” She shot him a furious glare. “He was wrong,” she said fiercely.

  Pike didn’t say anything. He lay back down, conscious of her stare, and looked at the fire as it leapt and danced across the logs.

  “All Earth does is take,” Walker told him. “Everyone says it’s abundant, but all it does is take people, blind them, and turn them into fools. Now Jack is dead. He didn’t need to be. Earth took him too.”

  Pike didn’t answer her. He was too weary.

  She tried to wait him out, but failed. “You should rest. We have to get Dawn to London as soon as we can.”

  London. With the giant inverted tear-drop-shaped Telestine London hanging overhead, as if all the tears of the city had collected together and, as one, flown upward to the sky.

  London. Yes, they had to get to London. For the libraries and the fight against Ka’sagra, and the FTL … the final piece that would enable her delusional plan. Of course, having Dawn in London was Nhean’s plan, too. He didn’t know what to do with that. Good Lord, his head hurt. He let his eyes drift closed. He was so tired….

  “I’m making the right choice,” she told him. Her voice wasn’t certain anymore, but he didn’t have any hope that she’d abandon her plan. “You’ll see it one day. I’m saving us, Pike.” She touched his shoulder. “I need to go check on the rest of the crew. Some were critically injured. Get some sleep—when you wake up, we’ll need to get moving.”

  He said nothing, and eventually she left him there in the dark and went away across the rocks and the grass and the moss, and he was left alone to fall asleep by the fire.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Earth

  Wales

  Hills Near Brecon

  The admiral was little more than a shadow in the early-morning dark—difficult to see even with Dawn’s eyes. “Can you move?” were her only words, and Pike grunted an affirmative.

  “Admiral, the last of them are off,” said a young man, his face still smudged with black from the crash landing. His arm hung in a sling. Dawn wondered what a br
oken arm felt like, then almost laughed to herself—she’d been in worse shape. She’d already been dead, apparently. “They’ll be hiding in a nearby forest with the natives until we can extract them. Ewen—the leader of the natives here, marked it on the map for us,” he presented the piece of paper to Walker.

  Walker held the map and eyed it, shaking her head. “To think,” she said quietly to herself, as if unaware that she had an audience of people around her, “that these people live down here, scratching out an existence on the run for decades, always hiding from the Telestines, never knowing when you’ll be caught and … disposed of.” She tapped the map where the crew would be hiding in the forest amongst the natives. “This man, Ewen. Is he the leader of just the group of natives in these hills here?”

  The young man shook his head. “Actually ma’am, he claims to be the leader of all the natives in Wales. From what he was saying, our crew of a few hundred would be just a drop in the bucket of his people. Tens of thousands, I gathered.”

  She stared off into the distance, her eyes cold, as if searching the brightening horizon for … something.

  “Thank you, Ensign. Now go catch up to them. I’ll send shuttles down as soon as we get up into orbit. Plan on a rendezvous in one week. Your orders: keep everyone alive until then.”

  The young man paused. “Good luck, Admiral.” He looked around himself, surveying the darkened green hills surrounding them. Sunrise was just minutes away, and the light was revealing colors that Pike remembered fondly but which were probably a shock to the young man. “I honestly never thought it was going to happen. But here we are.” He looked back at her. “You’re really going to get our Earth back. It’s … really going to happen. Back on Mimas my pastor always was so sure it would happen; told us to never lose faith. He never lived to see it, but ….” He suddenly stiffened his back, hardened his face where before his eyes had gone misty, and snapped a smart salute with his good arm. “Admiral.”

  He left. Pike glanced up at her with a knowing look.

  She ignored him.

  The shuttle ride to London didn’t take long, and the clouds were only now beginning to catch the sun’s direct rays. It was enough to see by—barely. That didn’t stop the admiral from pacing in the rear of the shuttle. “I found a few Telestine weapons in the locker back here. I think if we can circle around a few times and let Dawn work her magic and find the archives in her mind, she can drop us down on the roof or something and we can cut our way in and make it safe for—”

  From the pilot’s seat, Dawn interrupted her. “You’re not coming.”

  Walker stopped pacing and stared at her. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m dropping you off down in old London. There’s an army of human drones down there, like in every other city, slowly disassembling all the buildings and removing any trace of human habitation.”

  “And that makes it safe for us to go there because….”

  Dawn glanced up at her. “You’re forgetting what I am.”

  Walker resumed her pacing. “That’s funny, my dear. I was just beginning to think of you as a who, and not a what.”

  “I was made not only to control Telestine technology, but also to control drones remotely.” Dawn bit her lip. “All of them. All at once. That’s my destiny. Or, one of them, at least.”

  Walker paced right up to the back of the pilot’s chair. “You can control … all of them?”

  “I’m … getting there,” Dawn replied, uncertainly. “But down in central London there’s only a few thousand drones. I can redirect them away from you two in a pinch.”

  Dawn could see Walker’s lips mouth the words only a few thousand, and the next moment the admiral held both hands up above her head in frustration. “No, this is ludicrous. We’re coming with you. End of conversation. Now we just need to figure out a plan of action. I think if Pike—”

  Dawn swiveled around to face her. The shuttle continued on its course, occasionally banking to stay in the cloud cover, piloted now not with her hands but with her mind. Her mind, which was larger now than it was a few minutes ago. And a few minutes before that. “Laura. Listen to me. You’ll be useless up there. Less than useless. You’ll be a liability. I need you and William to stay hidden, and safe, and … out of the way.” She spoke so firmly it was as if through gritted teeth.

  It was clear that Walker was not used to being talked to like that. The last person to give her orders she disagreed with hadn’t fared so well, Dawn mused. But it was enough. She couldn’t do her job and worry about them at the same time.

  “Now you listen here—” Walker began again, adopting her command voice and drawing herself up to her full height. Dawn interrupted again.

  “No. I am not one of your officers. I am not your crew. And this is not your ship.

  The shuttle shook a bit with the landing. During their argument, she’d found them a park right next to a river. Half-deconstructed buildings soared high nearby like grim skeletons, the early morning sunlight exposing their inner beams and supports. Dawn wondered why the Telestines were deconstructing them in the first place, but shook the thought—now was not the time for that mystery. She had work to do.

  And she pointed to the door.

  Walker’s face reddened and she wheeled upon Pike. “Do something. Make her listen.”

  Pike looked at Dawn, searching her eyes. His gaze felt like … almost like how a Telestine could talk to you with his mind, but … different. This felt infinitely better. Like a … father? A friend?

  His eyes said, be safe. Come back to us.

  His mouth said, “come on Laura.”

  Walker paused one last time to stare at her, but then allowed herself to be led out the hatch. When they were gone, Dawn immediately launched the shuttle into the sky as soon as they were clear. Time was running short. She could almost feel Ka’sagra out there, somewhere. And her plans, the ascension, the nova—no, the supernova, were imminent.

  It felt good to be alone, no other minds to half-hear, no thoughts to distract her. She looked around herself one last time before bringing the shuttle up to fly directly along the length of a skyscraper—an amusing term, now that the sky was almost entirely blotted out by the bulk of the Telestine city. Now that the sun was climbing higher, the old city once again fell into cold darkness.

  She could sense patrol ships in the distance, but none came under the city and none seemed to see her. Even at this distance, she could feel that they were all Tel’rabim’s ships. What that meant, she wasn’t sure, but she was beginning to feel, as instinctively as she did with the other military ships, the ways into their programming.

  Leave, she whispered quietly to them. You’re needed somewhere else.

  And they did leave. She let the shuttle hover and watched in satisfaction as the patrols took her whispered suggestion and banked to the west, seeking other prey. When the ships had come to the crash site of the Intrepid, she had thrown everything she had into protecting the humans who were fleeing into the hills.

  But she had not been sure whether her success was skill … or luck.

  Make me more, she had told Nhean. Complete me.

  And she had become more—more than even Tel’rabim had thought she could be.

  She could not afford to waste time here. She let the shuttle carry her up into the base of the floating city. Even this was elegant, support struts held together with an antigravity array that made her hair rise up around her face as the shuttle passed through it.

  Like everything here, it was a work of beauty. The Telestines had technology beyond—

  She tilted her head. There was something here, someone here. Drones. They weren’t just below, in human London itself, they were here. In the Telestine city.

  As if in a dream, she navigated the shuttle through the support structure underneath the city. There was something … off. Something different about these drones that she was feeling, and it took all of her focus both to find the trail and follow it.

  When she set the
shuttle down at last, it was deep in the base of the city, near to where the tear drop shape at the center started to swoop downward. It seemed the Telestines didn’t routinely venture down here to the darkened underbelly of the floating city. Most likely just the occasional mechanic. Otherwise, Telestines hated solitude, and so most would stay up in the city proper. In the sun. In view of the sky.

  She opened the door and made her way carefully along struts that had not been designed as walkways. If she fell, she would catch herself. She could not afford to think otherwise. She had to know what the drones were doing here. They were very near. She could feel it.

  Up one strut, down another. She caught herself at the end of a walkway where the railing was loose, and, thankfully, she didn’t plummet two kilometers to her death in old London below. On a whim, she studied the cityscape underneath her. Near the river, the remains of what once must have been a magnificent building. A palace. She searched in the artificial memory banks she’d instructed Nhean to implant in her … what was its name … Buckingham? Another building nearby, a tower, still had a clock on it. No, at least two clocks. Her memory banks presented another name … Big Ben?

  Must keep moving….

  The drones were just ahead of her. She could feel the steady rhythm and pulse of their minds, but, something indeed was … off about them.

  She rounded another rickety walkway and came to a hatch, which she ripped open with a quick impulse and command from her mind.

  Behind the hatch, a small room.

  In the room, three people. Drones.

  They were strapped to a central pylon in the confined space. Rank body odor washed over her and she lifted her shirt up to breathe through it. Their arms, legs, head, torsos, were all firmly strapped onto the pylon so they couldn’t move even if they wanted to.

  And their skulls. Good God, their skulls—or what was left of them.