Heretics (Stars Edge: Nel Bently Book 4)

by V. S. Holmes

  “What?”

  “He thought Samsara was caused by IDH. He thought they were covering something up. Investigating to hide their involvement.”

  Lin’s pacing stilled, her eyes blown wide. She spun, hand rising with a roar of fury. Light and sound exploded through the train. Screaming aluminum and the stink of vaporized plastic filled the air. When the tracers cleared from Nel’s eyes, Lin stood, panting, staring at the smoking, gaping hole where their cabin door once stood.

  Nel’s body shuddered with warning. “Lin, I—”

  “Letnan Nalawangsa.” Settling dust revealed Dr. Ndebele in the train’s corridor, arms crossed.

  The fight left Lin’s body, shoulders slumping. A dry sob ripped the defiance from her chest. Wordlessly, she turned to follow her officer.

  “Should I—” Nel began, but Dr. Ndebele shook her head. Instead, Nel watched Lin drift, defeated, up the train.

  Exhausted, Nel slumped onto the bed with a sigh. Cold reached a narrow place deep in her chest, a place she forgot blood still flowed. Down deep she knew this had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with anything beyond Lin’s terror that Nel, too, might betray her. But anger squashed the tiny voice.

  “Trouble in paradise, Bently?”

  She couldn’t even bring herself to smile at Emilio’s gentle jab. “Everything I touch turns on me, Emilio.”

  He eyed the smoking edges of their doorframe. “This was your doing?”

  “Not really. But I don’t think I helped.” She heaved a sigh. “I suggested Dar wasn’t on the same side as IDH anymore.”

  “Ah.” The man’s face softened. “It’s hard when we think our blood doesn’t share our beliefs.”

  The tenderness in his voice, the regret, gave her pause. She glanced up with a frown. “You said you lost your brother to them. Killed?”

  “No. But it’s easier to think so. Death is easier than betrayal.”

  “Is it?” The howling void in Nel’s chest left by Mikey’s laughter didn’t feel easy. Surely, there was nothing worse than a wound you couldn’t ever hope to heal, no matter what tore the flesh in the first place. She swallowed hard and drew a long breath. “Dar kidnapped Alexandria’s senti-comp a few weeks ago. Ripped her right out of her tank and popped her in a cooler like a spare kidney. I don’t know him well, but something tells me he knows something we don’t.”

  Emilio stared at her, warm eyes unreadable, as if excavating everything he knew about her. “Dr. Bently, would you take a walk with us?”

  Energy flooded her limbs at the weight behind the words. “With who?”

  “A few of the others are going into the city. Our tech team is analyzing some of the signals and we thought we’d give them space.”

  She glanced at the ruined room. There was little she could do to repair it, and it was clear Lin wouldn’t be in a talking mood for some time. “Sure. This place gives me a headache anyway.”

  He nodded. “It’s the LRADs shielding the place. Affects some people, if they’re sensitive to it.”

  “Me? Sensitive?” Nel snorted, falling into step beside him as they cut back down toward the caboose. Emilio didn’t take the bait, however, and it wasn’t until they were walking across the courtyard that he spoke again.

  “Did you tell Munashi Gamal?”

  Nel shook her head. “I was hoping to wait until I had more to tell.”

  Whatever his response was, it was cut off by a shout from the guard above for them to turn around. “Got some radicals outside,” he called down.

  Nel raised her badge, knowing it was too far for him to actually see it. “I’ve got clearance. There’s been a development and we need a contact.”

  The man glanced to the other side of the wall. “Keep to the main streets.”

  Nel flashed her double finger-guns and leaned over the keypad, typing in Lin’s credentials. A second later the gate beeped and ground open. When she beckoned for Emilio to follow her, she caught his wry smile.

  “You’re no letnan.”

  “Shut up before they realize it too,” she muttered. “This better be worth it, eh?”

  “I just promised a walk.”

  “With a really pointed undertone.” Nel shoved her hands in her pockets, wondering if she should have grabbed her field kit. “I’m not oblivious, I just like to pretend sometimes.”

  They rounded the corner of the base walls to see the gathered crowd. There were a few dozen, but more gathered at the edges out of curiosity or excitement, perhaps. More than a few held signs, lettered in Arabic. Whatever they were protesting, it seemed centered on the base itself and not the beautiful stone government buildings closer to the city center. Several wore uniforms of the ENP.

  Radicals? Nel had been to her fair share of protests and marches. This one didn’t have the flavor of fanatics. “You read Arabic?” she asked Emilio.

  “No. But I know that word.” His point was surreptitious, but Nel saw that half the signs bore a similar word. “Alzanadiqa. Heretics.”

  Nel stared at him. “Heraje. Carved on the tree by Los Cerros Esperando VII. By you.” She glanced back at the protest, but Emilio towed her down a side street.

  “It wasn’t me. But yes. Los Pobladores do have some more accusatory names for IDH.”

  “Are those Founders? I saw cops,” she asked, ducking under a broken awning and turning sideways to follow him down what must have been a shortcut into the Souq District. “Where are we going? The guard said main streets.”

  “I think the city realized the base reopened. We took the tunnels in for a reason. IDH might have saved us from a virus, but they’ve done little since then. Saving millions of lives is all well and good,” he assured, “but the mess in your wake—weird signals included—is still very much here. You can claim the scary virus didn’t come from space with you lot, but it doesn’t look like that down here. Sweeping in when someone needs you most feels less like altruism and more like taking advantage when you don’t step down once you’re no longer needed.”

  Nel’s ears popped now that they were clear of the base itself, and she felt bile crawl up her throat. “I’m not one of them, you know.”

  He stopped in a crossroad. Nel recalled the tight weave of Sharia Faransa’s market stalls to the west from the map. “Would you say that to Lin?”

  “Shit like this is never perfect, never simple.” She shrugged. Her skin seemed to hum in the wake of the low-frequency signals, and the contagious energy of the protest drew her nerves taught. “Where are we going?”

  Emilio tilted his head toward the market alley. “Just down here. I was hoping you’d help with something.” Anticipation sharpened his gentle voice.

  “Emilio, I—” Perhaps it was the hint of aviation fuel on the air or the sudden lull in the market cacophony. Warning clenched down on the nape of her neck. Then her world exploded with sound. Screaming notes warred with deep guttural scrapes, the cry of some digital, eldritch god. “Motherfucker!”

  The pressure behind her ears burrowed deeper and pushed down the nape of her neck. Across the alley, Emilio was on his knees, jaw working. Acrid sweetness told her someone nearby had vomited. Nel hissed breath through her clenched teeth and pressed against the cold stone.

  The market crowd shifted as one seething mass, squeezing toward the growing group of protesters. Gunfire tapped through the screeching in her ears. Emilio’s eyes were rolling in his head, his face pale under his tan.

  “It’s like two frequencies—” The rest of her words dissolved into a scream. Every nerve fired white hot. Her deeper self was aware, from the searing lines across her forearm, that bullets still rained.

  A deeper boom shook the ground and the pain dropped a few notches. Blinking tears from her eyes, Nel scrambled to her knees and reached for Emilio. He was already on his feet. His hand clasped hers and hauled her up, racing for the shelter of a nearby warehouse.

  The door swung open and they stumbled inside. The thick stone
walls lessened the sound further and Nel’s muscles trembled in the wake of pain. The building smelled as if someone had lost control of more than just their stomach.

  “What the fuck was that?” Nel rasped. Blinking tears from her stinging eyes, she saw several figures bustling around a hulking shape behind several canvas curtains. A medic raced by and Nel saw a familiar puff of black hair and light brown skin. Jem?

  “Sonic weapons. You saw the devices on the base walls.”

  “I thought those were for shielding. Massive noise cancellation.”

  “Like most tools, they can just as easily be used for violence as defense. IDH doesn’t have the supercomputer they need, the next spot on their itinerary is hundreds of klicks away. It seems Alexandria has had enough of their meddling. This is what it looks like when corporate superpowers panic.”

  Nel shuddered, as much from dread as physical exhaustion. “They’re going to run. I gotta get back.”

  Passengers swarmed aboard and a tall figure brushed passed her.

  “Zachariah?”

  He turned, walking backward, bag slung easily over his shoulder. He lowered his head in a nod and pressed a hand to his chest. “Allah hafiz, Nel.”

  She may not have known the words’ meaning, but she recognized a goodbye when she saw one. Where are you going?

  “Come with us,” Emilio insisted. He dragged himself upright and tugged one of the canvas sheets aside.

  A massive helicopter crouched in the warehouse. Another yank pulled a second sheet from the gaping hole in the warehouse roof. Engines rumbled to life. Mechanics bustled under its belly, clearing away tools and hoses. Nel’s heart sank. “Harris was right.”

  “He’s not a stupid man,” Emilio agreed. “But neither is he a kind one. I’ll explain everything once we’re clear of the city.” His hand was outstretched.

  Nel backed up as the blades began to spin. She didn’t trust IDH. She didn’t trust Harris. She didn’t trust Emilio, not fully, though right now he seemed the most rational of all of them.

  The sound of the rioting crowd clamored even over the roar of the helicopter. Nel put a hand to her chest, searching for her bolo before remembering it was on the table in her cabin. With Mikey’s ashes and her father’s. And Lin. If IDH was as monstrous as Nel thought, as Dar seemingly thought, how could she leave Lin to its mercy, reeling without the rudder of her brother? Like Nel without Mikey. She sagged back against the warehouse wall. “I’m sorry.”

  Emilio’s face locked in rigid disappointment. He shoved a set of headphones at her, then he was gone, Founders’ red disappearing in the darkness of the cockpit. And Nel was left to the mercy of the riot on Alexandria’s streets.

  Shoving the headphones on, she staggered through the doorway. Bullets still pinged, but the fire seemed random. She dodged across the narrow streets, heading for the glint of razor wire atop the towering base walls. For once, she was grateful for the tight weave of electromesh encasing her skin. What would have been deep bullet grazes were scratches.

  The protest had grown, more than a few sporting headphones of their own. Armored cars approached from deeper in the city. As she scuttled from building to building, however, the telltale fabric of her suit caught the attention of some protestors on the fringe.

  Fuck. She didn’t bother with her usual argument that she wasn’t technically IDH. It didn’t matter. Now she was just as much a heretic. Gripping her last spurt of adrenaline, she bolted for the gates.

  “Dr. Bently!” The gate swung open and Harris’s rough hand caught hers, hauling her from the chaos of the streets to the muffled shelter of the courtyard. “Where are the rest? We’re missing half our medic team.”

  “Gone,” she choked out. “Reapers.” It wasn’t a lie, but wasn’t what she wanted to say, wasn’t the accusation she wished she had the guts to sling. The thud of fists on the gates only broke her heart further.

  “I know this is complicated.”

  “Nothing you say will make this easier,” she rasped. Her brain still flickered with residual flashes of sheer pain, but now at least she knew they would end. “And right now, my brain is the equivalent of a malfunctioning taser.”

  The grip on her jacket tightened, drawing her upright. “That man is a terrorist. I don’t know if our team will survive their ordeal out there, but I wish ardently, for their sakes, that they did not. You’ve seen what whispers of Reaper tech can do. People like him are why saving the world is so damn hard.”

  But all they asked for was help. The ground shuddered again, and stone dust exploded at the courtyard’s corner. Shouts grew louder now, and bullets splattered through the new hole in the base wall.

  “Make for the landing pads!” Harris broke from the crowd, voice booming over the sound. He shoved her toward the hulking Ospreys waiting by the hangars. Then he was sprinting back toward the base.

  Already two of the massive choppers shuddered into the sky, bellies full of swarming officers and tech. Nel thought she saw a long black braid, but it disappeared in the writhing crowd. Beams of light pierced through the smoke. Flames licked the edges of the base, billowing black and acrid. She broke into a run, arm held against the smoke and sparks, as if her flesh and sinew might stop shrapnel.

  “Here!” A rough hand hauled her into a chopper’s cargo bay.

  Nel collapsed against the webbing draping the sides, squinting against the smoke at the figure sagging beside her.

  Andy grinned, blood staining her face and teeth. “Cutting it close, Bent.”

  “Why aren’t we taking off?” Nel shouted against the chaos.

  “Maybe waiting for the skies to clear—”

  A boom shook the ground and a rocket shrieked from just beyond the walls, colliding with the airborne chopper’s belly with a shriek of rending metal.

  “Make it quick!” Nel snapped at no one in particular. She couldn’t think about whether Lin had been aboard the Osprey now rendered into nothing more than oil-splattered bodies and snarled metal.

  Then the base doors flew open. Harris and half a dozen others hauling a heavy case from the building. They raced across the airstrip, dragging it when the wheels began to sink into the softening tarmac. In a second, an hour, and they were dragging the cart up the cargo rollers and the chopper lurched into the air.

  The moment they were clear, the base erupted in flames, a third, larger blast obliterating everything below.

  “RDCUD.” The journalist’s mouth was a thin line, face white and eyes screwed shut.

  “A rouge what now?” Nel called.

  “RDCUD,” Andy enunciated. “Remote Detonation Clean Up Device.”

  Clean up. Nel blanched and looked back at the column of smoke and fire spiraling from what was once beautiful stonework. “If it’s remote then someone—”

  Andy’s head shake was almost imperceptible, but Nel saw it. She faltered into silence. Someone waited for them to get out. And detonated with all those people still down there. Reality lurched under Nel’s feet. Not for the first time she wondered which side of history she would be on when the technological dust settled. On which side did IDH belong? She forced herself to look away from the pressing crowd, the hands reaching through the fire and stone to beg her or condemn her.

  Nel’s fingers looped through the canvas webbing. When she was young and angry—angrier, at least—she wanted the apocalypse. She reveled in the fuck-you freedom that came from everything you ever knew dying. Adrenaline faded into dragging fatigue and heartache. This isn’t the apocalypse I wanted.

  The helicopter leveled, blades dropping to a more reasonable RPM as they pulled clear of the blast radius. If she excavated this in a hundred years, she knew what she’d think of them. Of her. Her gut clenched and another lurch of the helicopter sent her breakfast splattering somewhere far below.

  SEVENTEEN

  The churning gray waters of the Atlantic replaced the turquoise Mediterranean and swirling sands of the Sahara. Sullen waves
underscored the numb turmoil in Nel’s chest as the remaining helicopters touched down on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. It was a colossus of a ship, stretching out into the open ocean. They had left the coast of Morocco behind hours before, in the dim light of dawn.

  Nel dragged her aching body upright with a groan. Andy was asleep a few feet away, and Nel had spent much of the night peering at the battered, smoke-stained faces around them trying to find someone, anyone she knew. Would she ever know who was lost when the base blew or who left with the Reapers? Founders, she reminded herself. Harris might be convinced Emilio Sepulveda was a terrorist, but the hollow feeling in Nel’s chest told her the truth. Surely by now Egypt’s government was condemning IDH. They’d be right.

  Lines scored the flickering screen of her comm. Whatever sonic weapon hit her in Alexandria seemingly affected the device too. She scanned the new itinerary with disinterest. There was no going on to The Hague or the U.S. or anywhere else. It didn’t matter what caused the attack in the first place or whether the Founders had actually wanted help. All that mattered now was that they stop the onslaught.

  The other passengers stirred as the Osprey settled onto the sprawling deck of the carrier. The other chopper settled a minute later as Nel stumbled down the ramp. There was no bag to grab, no belongings to pull from storage. Her fleeting thought about the cremains back in her cabin sent an ache through her heart, an echo of the bone-deep longing for Lin’s hand.

  A cluster of officers disembarked from the other craft, and Nel caught the gleam of Dr. Ndebele’s collar. She faltered, peering through the press of bodies as airmen shouted orders over the screaming rotors. Wind whipped sea salt onto Nel’s already stinging cheeks. Then a tall figure stepped from the Osprey’s cargo bay, black hair a tangle, dark eyes ringed in red as much as shadows this time. Lin searched the crowd, face softening with a smile when they lit on the other woman.

  “Lin!” Nel’s limping steps broke into a run. Her heart threatened to leap from her throat and flop its way to Lin on its own. They collided between the two thundering helicopters. Lin crushed Nel to her, lean arms wrapping the archaeologist’s muscled shoulders like bands of iron. She dropped kisses across her forehead and temple. Nel gripped her back, letting the warmth and familiar scent of electricity and sweat envelop her. When she pulled away a moment later, Lin’s face was wet, and her breaths were shuddering. Her hands refused to let Nel’s go. “I thought—”