“Yeah. The Siccies have a reputation as obsessive-compulsive sadists, but they’re damned thorough.”
“They spotted that there’d been a medical procedure for a Zhoogene male just before we occupied the region. The records had been carefully excised, but an orderly remembered a Zhoogene with shrapnel wounds to the torso that matched the dates. Hey, you seem interested in these jacks,” he said. “You thinking of joining the Legion?”
“I’m interested in the one who got away,” she said. “I’m only here because I’m looking for a green man.”
Jing deflated.
He took a long glug of his beer, but it didn’t quench his disappointment.
“Sorry I don’t come up to scratch,” he told her sourly. “Oh, what the hell? You’re hardly the first woman I’ve met who wanted to go green. Well, no hard feelings. I know there’s Trikton in C Squad who’s chalked up half the Humans in the company. He’s strictly one night only, but I’ve heard no complaints. Unlike the Zhoogenes I’ve heard about in 2nd Company. They can play pretty rough. Mind you, a couple of them are girls if that’s…your…thing.”
He dried up when he realized Yuin wasn’t listening. She’d fished a device out of her jacket and placed it on the bar top.
It was some kind of tech gear. Signals’ equipment, he supposed.
“Thank you for your information,” she told him. There was a finality to her words he didn’t like.
Her finger was dancing between the two buttons on the device. She chose one and pressed.
Clamps tightened on the inside of his throat. Panicked, he pulled air into his lungs, but the rasps he could manage barely inflated them.
He tried to scream at her, but his mouth wouldn’t move, and when he tried to draw his pistol, he just tumbled slowly off his barstool and…into Yuin’s waiting arms.
“Let’s get you propped up somewhere nice and cozy,” she told him.
He allowed himself to be led across the floor to one of the empty side booths.
A couple of Littorane patrons looked up at the antics of their Human liberators but chose to ignore them.
He was going to die.
Summoning his full strength, he tried to push free.
All he managed was a squirm, which she held with ease.
She pushed him down into a cushioned booth seat and leaned back against the wall.
“I spiked your drink with two drugs, Jing. One would kill you instantly, but the one I chose will merely disable you for a while. Don’t give me a reason to activate the other drug.”
She brushed his cheek tenderly.
This woman—whoever she was—she was insane.
“It would be such a waste to kill you when I’m trying to establish a name for myself. Well,” she smirked, “several names. The one I want you to remember is Kanha Wei. Can you remember that for me, Corporal Jing? Kanha Wei.”
Jing blinked in response.
“One more thing.” She brought her face in front of his and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the blue color was gone, replaced by the deep lilac and indigo of a goddamned freaking mutant.
Her lips hovered millimeters from his.
“My kind will be our salvation,” she told him, “not your ridiculous performative ideology, nor the mega-corporations, the Militia, or even the Legion. It will be people who look like me.”
She kissed his lips.
Despite everything, he wished he could have tasted her, but his lips were totally numb.
The joke was on the mutant spy, though. Maybe she would catch up with that Zhoogene, but when she did, she would find he’d changed.
He didn’t know why the zombies took people, but he’d seen some of the results.
They weren’t pretty.
* * * * *
Chapter Thirteen: Urdizine
Bresca-Brevae Spaceport, Rho-Torkis
“You will die, filth.”
Captain d’Anje leered as he grabbed the bars separating Urdizine’s cage from his.
One of the Littoranes locked up with Urdizine flicked his tail at the Human’s fingers. The impact against the bars sent a metallic rattle that echoed through the ship’s hold, but there were no Human cries of pain. The arrogant Worldie stepped back to avoid having his hands broken, then he calmly snaked them around the bars once more.
“I don’t know whether your death will be today,” the man sneered, “or tonight, when you sleep. Maybe when they unlock the cages and move us out. But know this. Your days are numbered, Zhoogene.”
Urdizine stood strong and regarded the man calmly, not giving him the satisfaction of revealing his fear. “One of the reasons no one likes you Cora’s World buffoons is you make no sense. I’m locked up here with scores of Littoranes, but only I offend your Human purity madness.”
“Littoranes? I already told you. Look at them! They’re beasts. But you’re humanoid. A perversion of Humanity. Abomination. Filth. The Littoranes could be put to good use, but your only value is to be broken down into your constituent materials and put into the dirt as soil improver.”
“Hey, come on, man!” One of the regular PHPA rebels in the officer’s cage took to her feet. “That individual was born a Zhoogene. So fucking what? The accident of his birth should be cause for neither privilege nor disadvantage.”
D’Anje rounded on the Panhandler woman. “Spare me the drivel of your unawakened philosophy.”
“My philosophy is a damned sight more progressive than yours, Worldie freak. You people took the wrong path a long ways ago. You’re freaks, the lot of you. Utter freaks.”
Someone whispered Urdizine’s name.
He wanted to enjoy the fight brewing in the next cage, but he wanted to know who’d whispered more. Between the angry factional split simmering between the rebels, and the starship hum in the echoey hold, he couldn’t pinpoint the speaker.
Back to the argument next door. The Panhandler was standing at the front of a group of her fellow rebels, facing off against the Worldies. “…for the wrong reasons,” she was telling their officer. “I mean, kill him because he was working with insurgents. He should be put to death for his problematic views, not because his skin’s green.”
“Well said,” Urdizine told the woman.
She looked at him, perplexed, the fire sudden extinguished from her eyes. D’Anje gave him a sour glare.
Urdizine ignored him. The woman had gained a little respect in his eyes. Maybe these Panhandlers weren’t so bad after all. She wanted him dead, too, but her reasons weren’t as crazy.
“Urdizine!”
That whispered voice again.
Who was it?
They were locked in livestock cages bolted to the floor of a starship freighter in Bresca-Brevae starport. It wasn’t as if anyone who fancied a chat could just walk in here.
“Urdizine.”
“What?” he snapped.
The whisperer didn’t reveal themselves.
It was a Human female. He was sure of that much.
A patrol of zombie guards was tromping past. It couldn’t be them. There were no Humans in his cell. So who was it?
It must be one of the alien haters in the next cage playing mind tricks.
The guards walked on, all except one who stayed behind. A Human female.
He called out to her. “Hey, you. Zombie girl. Are you talking to me?”
She came over to his cage.
Urdizine stepped back in revulsion. Insects crawled through her dead hair, and her eyes were veined like half-rotted leaves. Her skin held the dusty complexion of an air filter that should have been replaced years ago, and she reeked of infection.
“I might be,” she said, and he knew she was.
His pulse picked up the pace to hear the boundless energy in her voice. It was the opposite of the way the zombies spoke, not that most of them ever uttered a word.
“State rank and unit,” she demanded.
He had no idea who she was, but he wasn’t exactly bursting with options. “Sappe
r of the Legion Kosuda Urdizine, 27th Field Squadron.”
Her rotted eyes slow blinked and…transformed into a vibrant purple.
A mutant! Before he’d been wounded, the sergeant had been leading them on a mission to contact a mutant in Bresca-Brevae. They must have made it.
“One correction,” the woman said. “Your new unit is Chimera Company. It’s time to stop playing with your Rho-Torkis friends and rejoin your unit.”
“Stryker, Bronze, Zavage, and Sergeant Sybutu. They’re alive?”
“Let’s get you out first.” She considered the lock to his cage. “Reunions later.”
She lit a cutting tool. “Stand back!”
“There are good people here,” Urdizine said. “Civilians and resistance fighters among them.”
“I’ve an exfil option for one person only. I’m sorry, it can’t be helped.”
“We can’t leave them.”
The melted lock clanged onto the deck. The cage opened.
His rescuer marched in. “I said it can’t be helped, SOTL.”
“At least give them a fighting chance. Open the other cages, too.”
“No. That’s outside mission parameters.”
Urdizine folded his arms and backpedaled deeper into his cage.
Some of the Littoranes stood with him. Most bolted for the open door.
Hrish-Ek took the cutter out of the Human’s hands. “You go, Urdizine. I will free the others.”
The deep whine of a heavy blaster bolt screamed through the hold and erupted in fire against the woman’s back.
Her eyes lit up; literally glowed with horror. Then she slumped forward, her clothing on fire, and her flesh melted away. The whiteness of her spine and the back of her rib cage poked through her charred meat.
“Back into your cages!” roared a creature out of one of the Five Hells. It had been a Zhoogene once. Now it was a demon, swollen with malevolence into an eight-foot-high monster with a necrotic scent. An extra pair of crane-like grasping limbs rose from its shoulders. In its normal arms, it held a heavy blaster.
The briefly escaped Littoranes cantered back to his cage, followed by a squad of regular zombies with blasters ready.
“Mutants!” D’Anje spat through the bars into Urdizine’s cage. “They’re the worst abomination of all. I wouldn’t even use them for fertilizer. The only way to purge a mutant is through fire.”
At Urdizine’s feet, the woman’s corpse was still smoldering. Tears ran from his eyes, blurring the ugliness of her wounds, but doing nothing to ease the shock of her ending and the death of Urdizine’s hopes.
He would pray for her soul. It wouldn’t be easy. He’d never learned her name.
* * * * *
Chapter Fourteen: Urdizine
“You have earned this honor, my friend.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I disagree.”
He looked from one to the other of the Littoranes flanking him: Lael Hrish-Ek, who had been his squad leader in Raemy-Ela, and Lael Kayshen-Oeyl, who’d led the whole resistance show. One was as bad as the other.
“They see you as a hero,” Kayshen-Oeyl said. “A talisman of hope.”
Urdizine looked behind at the crowd gathered under the shade of the Sforza trees that flourished in the shadows of the wall. Mostly Littorane, there were other species, too, courtesy of the Panhandler alliance who’d occupied parts of Rho-Torkis.
The Cora’s World soldiers among them were all Human. Naturally.
What was it their leader, Captain d’Anje, had said to him? He wouldn’t use Urdizine for slave labor. He was only good to chop up and put into the ground.
Not in this place. There was no need for soil improver here.
“I’ll never be a hero to them,” Urdizine said.
“Modesty is not a virtue,” Hrish-Ek said, missing his point entirely. She found the Worldies’ racial purity obsession so ridiculous that she didn’t grasp the evil power it could hold over otherwise sane people.
“To hell with modesty,” he told her. “You’re asking me to scamper up a 40-foot wall. I’m about as limber as a dry twig, and, in any case, I won’t actually be the first to the top. Just saying, that’s all.”
“So you will do it?”
“Hoorah!” he yelled in reply.
The wall’s surface was coated in a network of suckers cultivated from the vines that grew within their little world. Twine loops had been stitched into the suckers and vine ropes threaded through the loops. The result was a vertical highway of green, whose leaves fluttered in the gentle breeze.
As a Zhoogene, Urdizine approved.
His ascent was fast. Although the vine rope cut painfully into his hands, it held his weight with ease, which was all that mattered.
On the cusp of cresting the wall, he took advantage of the higher viewpoint and surveyed his position.
He was level with three platforms built atop tripod legs. In each were two Littoranes and a pile of stones selected for their tail slings.
Urdizine was not the first to ascend the wall. That honor had gone to a Human named Cranchester. He’d watched her waving in triumph from the top, and he’d never forget the moment her arm went limp, and her face had fallen when she’d sensed something was wrong.
It had been the wall’s defenses stirring, the drones that killed poor Cranchester.
But her sacrifice was not in vain, because this time it would be drone-mounted chemical weapons versus slingshots.
If it had been Humans on those platforms, Urdizine would have considered this contest crazy, but the Littorane tail was a naturally evolved missile launch system.
He waved at the crowd far below. They cheered back. The Littoranes did, anyway.
“Just enjoying the view,” he shouted down to them.
The cheering increased. Hrish-Ek was right. The Littoranes had put a lot of faith in their crazy Zhoogene talisman, though he had no idea why.
He took one last look at the number displayed on the wall just a little lower to his right, next to the locked gateway.
343.
The numeral was written in Human, Zhoogene, and, bizarrely, in Muryani Common.
“What number are you on the other side?” he asked the evening air.
He was about to find out.
* * *
Urdizine crawled over the rough top of the wall, which was about 10 feet deep.
Halfway across, he rolled to one side and saluted Cranchester’s corpse.
It was the Legion salute, but he hoped the rebel would have appreciated the gesture.
Cranchester’s killers emerged from the top of the wall, about 30 feet away. Urdizine threw himself flat and watched the drones coming for him.
The Littoranes on their high platforms let loose with their slingshots.
Drones jerked in protest as the stones impacted. They paused in the air as if overcome with indecision, despite rapidly shedding broken parts of their carcasses. The survivors made their choice and flew out from the wall to attack the Littorane slingers. None of them got that far.
With the drones destroyed, Urdizine raised his head and sought out more threats. In the distance, he could see similar drone flights docked in hangars every few hundred feet along the wall. All were inactive. For now, at least.
He crawled farther until he could see the secrets of what lay beyond the wall.
The answer was…nothing.
The starship had lifted off from Bresca-Brevae with 1,000 captives the zombies had taken from Rho-Torkis. They were young, and mostly from three species: Littorane, Human, and a much smaller number of Zhoogenes. They’d been dumped into a hexagonal world with each side around 11 klicks long. The ground was fertile and well irrigated, and there’d been basic stores of equipment and feedstocks, enough to initiate an agricultural community.
To a few of the forced settlers, this protected, rural idyll was a better life than they’d ever hoped for, but zombies had picked the wrong people for this hexagon. The Littoranes conside
red this blasphemy, the Worldies thought something pretty similar, and the regular Panhandlers had the same attitude as Urdizine—if the zombies wanted them to settle here, they’d do the opposite on principle.
Besides, he’d racked up plenty of Legion backpay, and no feathered zombies or four-armed monsters were going to stop him from blowing it.
Taking a deep breath, Urdizine stood tall to get a better perspective on what he was seeing.
They were in a nest of regular hexagons. In some of the neighbors, he could see trees, farmland, and a ribbon of water that flowed in the same pattern as his own little boxed world of 343. The hex below where he stood was different. It was barren.
Dead. Utterly lifeless.
He saw a dry river channel in the exact same shape as those in the living hexes. Gates connected the dead hex with its neighbors. Were they also locked?
The hexes were like cells in an insect colony, like the bees the Humans had brought with them from the Orion Spur. The zombies were using their captives as…what? Eggs? A honey store? He wasn’t familiar enough with bees. Perhaps he should ask one of the Humans to explore the analogy.
He sank to his belly and crawled back to the 343 side of the wall.
“It’s safe,” he called down to the crowd waiting far below. “It’s empty. Totally empty. Tell the scout team to join me. I’m going over.”
He couldn’t help but smile at the cheers and waves from below. The reaction of the crowd filled a hole in his heart he hadn’t realized was there. He missed his friends, missed having a purpose that made sense.
The challenge before his captive 343 family was simple, live or die, and that was something he could work with.
Urdizine returned to the far side of the wall and stuck down dozens of the sucker attachments he’d carried with him on a belt around his chest. While he waited for them to stick fast, he looped his rope through.
When he was satisfied the suckers were as secure as they were going to get, he walked over the edge and abseiled 40 feet into barren emptiness.
Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Page 9