by J. S. Bailey
“Pip-pip! Yes, and I’m sorry, but we need to keep moving.”
Her colleague cursed, and the two of them proceeded to dart from building to building with weapons drawn, peering around corners and spotting a few humans peeking out from behind their curtains. They were the least of her worries. They would burn along with everyone else.
Ashi’ii poked her head around the corner of another building and nearly dropped her weapon. She was far more suited to a desk than to this, and her nerves showed it.
“Pip-pip! What is it?” Kedd hissed.
“Pip-pip! The enemy, of course!”
“Pip-pip! Which one?”
“Which one do you think?”
Kedd gaped at her, and she realized she’d forgotten to pip-pip. Hanging out with humans overnight had evidently rubbed off on her.
“Pip-pip! You should apologize for that,” Kedd growled.
“I don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this! Just look.”
Kedd glared at her but acquiesced.
They stared around the corner together, carefully.
They’d reached the northern edge of town. All four Verdant ships were in view, and about twenty-five dozen of their “eco-warriors” mingled outside, wearing armor instead of veils and toting guns big enough to kill a pod of whalebeasts.
“Pip-pip! This is not their ordinary method,” Kedd said, ducking back out of sight behind the adobe building. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“The Greens are in town,” Ashi’ii said, receiving another reproachful glare from her subordinate. “The Verdants won’t burn the town if it kills the natives.”
“That’s absurd!” Kedd exclaimed, then clapped a hand over his mouth in horror.
Ashi’ii nearly levitated out of her shoes when Dalton’s voice boomed out of a pole-mounted speaker across the street from them, announcing something about a Sick Highlander. She didn’t know what a highlander was, or why Dalton would need to tell everyone they’d been taken ill, but her thoughts were interrupted by some cryptic, amplified whispering, which was then followed by a blast of what could only be music.
“Pip-pip! What is that?” Kedd breathed, staring up at the speaker.
Ashi’ii never had the chance to answer. There came a shout, and the sound of a blast, and the next thing she knew, Kedd lay at her feet, his veil blown off his face and blood seeping out of a wound on his chest.
Two Verdants strode toward her without fear.
She couldn’t stay and help Kedd. If she did, she would not survive. Maybe she wouldn’t survive anyway, but she could try.
She fired off two shots of her own weapon and darted around a corner into an alleyway between two three-story flats. The music blasting out of the speakers made it impossible to think straight, and maybe that was the point.
Several doors lined the alleyway, and cans of waste sat beside them. Ashi’ii tried one of the doors at random, smiled a sort of malicious glee when it opened without resistance, and hurried inside what appeared to be the flat’s laundry room, if she were to guess from the rows of low machinery and the smell of soap.
She turned the locking mechanism on the handle and shoved a cardboard box full of detergent over to block the door for good measure, then raced to think of her next steps.
The Verdants had seen her. She could ditch her clothing and pretend to be human by stealing some unattended garments, but the Verdants would want to kill the humans, too, so it would be pointless to change clothes.
She wedged herself into a corner and sent a call through to Melyip, who managed the copper mine thirty kushkims from Nydo Base. “Pip-pip! Kedd is down. The Verdants got him.”
“Pip-pip! That is unfortunate to hear. What is our next step?”
“Pip-pip! Send half our people around behind the Verdant ships. You’ll find them on the northern edge of town in close formation. The noise all the humans are making should distract them from noticing us if we are careful.”
“Pip-pip! Acknowledged. Sending backup your way right now.”
Chumley did not enjoy being a hamster, per se. The minute size of his animal form made him prone to many accidents, such as being stepped on by humans and being eaten for dinner by cats. He could shift back into human form at a moment’s notice in order to save his life, but that would only result in indecency and awkward explanations.
Being tiny did have its advantages. Nobody would be expecting a rodent to sneak onboard a ship.
After Dalton left him by the quad dealership, Chumley made a beeline for the ship from Nydo Base, without making it look like a beeline. A rodent with a purpose could not be trusted.
He skirted a few of the quads and had to hide in the shade of a potted palm tree for at least half an hour to avoid the scrutiny of the gathered Haa’la, who appeared to be discussing tactics in their own language. Every time he prepared to rush toward the metal ramp leading into the open hatch, one or two of the Haa’la would either step in front of it or turn his direction as they scanned what was visible of Richport from their location.
If he’d been human, Chumley would have been sweating bullets. This was taking too long! He didn’t know what this lot was waiting for. Most of the Haa’la had gone off on some errand, so maybe the ones left here were simply guarding their ship?
Dalton’s voice boomed over the town, loud and clear. Chumley huddled closer to the pot as he tried to make sense of the sheriff’s words. A concert? Why in the world was he announcing a concert?
A cacophony of sound followed some deafening whispering, and when Chumley realized it was music, he noticed the Haa’la guarding the ship had stepped away from it and were staring perplexedly at a pole-mounted speaker a block away from them.
Not daring to miss his chance, Chumley hurried up the metal ramp and into the cool interior of the ship.
His hamster nose twitched. He hated when it did that. While the genetic splicing that had given him this ability had been altered enough to let him keep his mind and his eyesight while in animal form, it did not eliminate animal instincts. In this form, he constantly had to resist sudden urges to gnaw on wood and stuff his cheeks full of seeds.
Faint voices carried toward him from deeper in the ship. Chumley raised himself on his hind legs and sniffed the air. Three Haa’la were still onboard—he could detect their unique alien scent.
Please don’t notice me, he thought as he scurried close to the nearest wall and kept his rodent eyes peeled for any instrument panels he might prise open.
The sound of heavy footsteps thudded through the floor beneath him, and he instinctively wedged himself as deeply into the corner where the wall met the floor as he could. Three sets of thick, white boots the size of houses strode past him without stopping.
Thanks, he thought weakly before moving onward. Dalton had no doubt caused the distraction for a reason.
He scurried here and there, stopping every few seconds to sniff the air again. He could smell where the Haa’la had been, but nothing indicated to him which way the engines might be. His diminutive height made it impossible to navigate, because he was too damned short to see where he should be going.
Taking an immense gamble, he shifted back into human form, to hell with indecency.
Now at his normal height again, Chumley turned in a full circle to evaluate his surroundings. A thick, metal door stood ajar ahead of him. Something hummed inside, so he hurried through the doorway and closed the door behind him.
Machinery towered over him—the ceiling in here was double the height of the one out in the corridor. Lights blinked and screens showed dots and lines that didn’t mean a whole lot to Chumley but probably meant something vital to the functioning of the ship.
He rubbed his hands together and stepped forward.
The most important part of destroying machinery was to do it in a way that would not result in
one’s immediate incineration. Chumley felt a burst of adrenaline as he flipped open an instrument panel and stared at a tangle of orange and violet wires.
A noble person intent on defeating the enemy would gladly sacrifice their own life for the cause. Aside from the fact that disabling this ship would make hardly a dent in the present crisis, Chumley wasn’t all that noble. He’d swindled people out of their money, for goodness sake! What kind of hero did that make him? Maybe sacrificing himself would be better in the end, because he wouldn’t have to keep living with the guilt.
Maybe he could blow up the ship. He wondered if dying hurt. He wondered if there was even anything afterward—probably a lake of hellfire for him, which would be just his sort of luck.
Still, he had to do something. Destroying this ship might cause only a ripple, but ripples could become tidal waves. Or so he’d read somewhere.
He had to hurry, though. He’d been inside the ship too long already.
He drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and reached for a wire to yank out of the wall.
As his fingers closed around it, he thought of Dalton, and paused.
Dalton may have been all gruff on the outside, but he’d saved Chumley’s life the day the mob attacked him. Not many people had saved Chumley’s life before other than his gran, who’d whisked him away from England, never to return, the week after Chumley’s father had had enough of Chumley’s mother and stabbed her six times in the chest with a kitchen knife.
Dalton had offered Chumley a new start, just like Gran. It would be nice to get to know Dalton a little better and pay him back for his kindness.
Chumley eyed an orange wire, gripped it in one hand, closed his eyes again, and gave it a tremendous tug.
The wire snapped easier than he’d expected, and he landed hard on his bare arse. Blinking tears out of his eyes, he looked up at the panel and smiled at the sparks spitting from it. He may have only disabled the bathroom exhaust fan for all he knew, but it was a start.
He went from panel to panel, yanking out two wires here, three wires there, and wincing as some of the sparks stung his fingers. Then he noticed a cabinet in one corner and flung it open, rejoicing when he realized it was a storage place for tools, including a giant spanner the length of his arm.
He picked up the spanner and tested its weight in its hands. Could probably do a bloody lot of damage if he used it wrong. He held it like a bat and was about to swing it into one of the screens showing the flashing lights when a white-gloved hand grabbed him by the arm and spun him around.
The veiled Haa’la stood a foot taller than him. He didn’t think it was Ashi’ii, so he clubbed the alien in the head and watched, transfixed, as they released his other arm and slumped to the floor.
Wasting no time, he bashed the screen in.
The lights flickered, and an alarm began to whoop somewhere deeper in the ship.
He knew that sound. A system had gone critical, which was good because that’s what Chumley had come here to do, but it was also bad, because Chumley was still inside the ship.
He broke into a run, still gripping the spanner. A second Haa’la stepped into his path, and he swung the spanner at them but missed as the alien dodged out of the way. The Haa’la lifted up some kind of blaster weapon—
—and Chumley was speeding along the floor in hamster form with no memory of having shifted.
Shots rang around him. The lights went out, but he could see the glow of daylight through the open hatch. He put on an even greater burst of speed—
And the world exploded into flame.
Chapter 24
Carolyn and her group had been edging around the western side of town, crawling on their stomachs in the dry bed of the Rosa River so nobody would see them. Dalton’s insane concert had entered its third song, and maybe it was working because so far, the Verdants hadn’t shown up to annihilate them.
When she judged that they had reached the approximate vicinity of the quad dealership, Carolyn poked her head up to get a visual, flamethrower still strapped to her back.
The dealership and the Nydo Base ship parked there lay roughly half a kilometer in front of them. Only a handful of Haa’la lingered in front of it, the rest hopefully having gone off to face the Verdants under Ashi’ii’s guidance.
She wondered if communicating with the Greens would give her precognition like it had given Gwendolyn. Precognition would greatly help in these circumstances, but right now the only thing she perceived from the Greens in her group was that they thought this furtiveness was pointless.
We don’t want to kill these Haa’la, she thought back at them. They might be on our side.
“What’s our next move?” asked a man who’d been tagging along at Carolyn’s elbow for the past ten minutes. He squatted on his haunches beside her, covered in dust.
“We keep an eye on this lot.” She nodded at the Haa’la. “We don’t make any moves until they do. Understood?”
“I say we rush them and blow them all to kingdom come.”
“They’re supposed to be cooperating with us. Remember?”
“A bloody alien is a bloody alien. We blow them up, half our problem’s solved.”
“Do you have any military experience?” she asked him.
“No. And neither do you, Mayor.”
She clenched her jaw. “We will attack only if they begin attacking our other citizens. That’s a final order.”
There came some more muttering among other members of their group. The Greens among them sat on the ground like a bunch of giant, misplaced houseplants.
Two of them had put hands to the sides of their heads, as if covering their ears.
“What—” she started to say, when a rumbling sound issued from the Haa’la ship and smoke and fire billowed from its open hatch in an acrid cloud. Several of the Haa’la who remained there dropped to the ground while the rest lifted their blasters at full attention.
“I think their engines just went critical,” said the man beside her, a boomstone clenched in his grimy fist.
“Yes,” said Carolyn.
“Gives us one less thing to worry about.”
She smiled grimly, but then frowned. Ashi’ii would not be happy about this, and angry people tended to act, well, angrily.
She wondered where their supposed ally was right now, and how much longer that supposed alliance would last.
Ashi’ii had not been brought up to be a warrior, and like most non-warriors in the middle of a combat zone, she opted to hide.
Luckily for her, a laundry room had plenty of crannies in which she could squirrel herself away. She counted off two rows of six washing machines, and squeezed herself into the second one from the end. The lid just barely closed over her bulk.
She waited for the Verdants to break in and find her.
Her comm spat out a hiss of static. “Pip-pip! The Verdants are in sight.” It was Melyip, sounding exhilarated.
“Pip-pip! Now wipe them off the face of this planet,” she whispered. “I don’t care how you do it. I just want them dead.”
“Pip-pip! Yes, ma’am.”
A low, muffled whumpf shook the washing machine, as if something deep within the bowels of Molorthia Six had come awake. An explosion?
“Pip-pip! Bad news, ma’am.” This time, it was Ondrow, who had been left behind to guard their ship. “It appears our ship’s cooling system overheated. Um . . . it blew up, ma’am. And we believe that Jumaah and Klikket were still inside.”
Ashi’ii felt dazed. Klikket was her cousin, and one of her closest confidantes. Steeling her emotions, she cleared her throat and said, “I thought you all were instructed to guard the ship.”
There came a long pause. “Pip-pip! We are guarding it, ma’am. Or were. There’s no more ship to guard. I mean, there’s pieces of it left . . . ”
“You must no
t have been guarding it very well, then!”
“Pip-pip! We saw no intruders. Jumaah and Klikket thought they heard something and went back inside to investigate, but they must have heard the system about to blow. It might just be an unfortunate accident, ma’am. It’s been a long time since we had the ship in for servicing.”
But Ashi’ii knew it was no accident. In the darkness of the washing machine, she saw red. She would mourn for her fallen people later, Kedd included, but for now, she would have to fight. “Pip. Pip,” she spat. “This is war.”
A door burst open, probably body-slammed from outside. Ashi’ii held her breath as heavy footsteps crossed the floor. She thumbed the power button on her comm so Ondrow wouldn’t unintentionally give away her position.
Low voices spoke not in Haa’anu, but Hindi—another human language with which she had extensive knowledge due to its prevalence. She strained to hear them through the metal washing machine lid.
“We should leave that one and get back to the others.”
“I thought we were instructed to eliminate everyone except for the natives.”
“We’re wasting time if we’re going to hunt them down one by one. I see none of the native life forms in this sector, so we can ignite the whole block.”
“But what if the fire spreads and harms the natives?”
There came a spell of silence during which Ashi’ii contemplated the fact that these Verdants were speaking a human tongue. Haa’la did not converse with each other in human tongues, which meant that these two were not Haa’la at all.
“This entire settlement will have to be razed to the ground sooner or later,” the first human said. “And when this one is gone, we move on to the other settlements and deal with them.”
“Even if natives die in the process? This isn’t what I signed up for.”
“You’re going to learn that sometimes there are casualties no matter how careful we are. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have been happier if we were allowed to bomb the mines right off the bat, but the boss says there’s a high concentration of miners here in this town, so this is what we have to do. Let’s rejoin the others and see what they want us to do next.”