She spun away, and the others followed her through the same dark doorway they had taken Minerva through. Sarrin paused, pulling Uruhu knives from hidden pockets, letting them clatter to the ground.
“Jesus,” Kieran laughed, waiting as she started unwinding a narrow vine. “I missed you.”
* * *
Gal tried not to let his frustration show as the rebel’s chief technician peered at an old 2D monitor, and slowly pounded out a command on the analog keyboard. He glanced at Rayne, not sure what he was expecting, but if Aaron were here, they would have rolled their eyes at the rebels' so-called best hacker.
“I need to try to break through the firewall,” the tech said, as though sensing Gal’s restlessness. “Obviously, it’s some of the best defensive programming under the stars, so it’s going to take some time.”
“Through?” Gal moaned, rubbing his face. “No, you don’t go through.”
The tech turned to glare at him, his wide eyes shining in the dark. Gal stepped back, and the tech returned to work, but after a few more painstaking keystrokes, Gal yelped, no longer able to contain himself. “We’ve been here an hour. You don’t go through the Speakers’ firewall, you go around it. You’ve got the General’s daughter right here, you fool.” He pushed the tech out of the way, reaching for the antique computer. “Here. Let me.”
He had promised himself he wouldn’t. He’d left that life behind. And John P was dead. There was no use in going to the past. This was now, and these were the rebels they had today. But the tech was just so slow.
His fingers floated over the keys, the harsh clacking fading into the background as he focussed on the lines of code scrolling in front of him.
Rayne leaned down beside him. “What are you doing?” Her voice was warm and a surge of joy flooded through him, immediately followed by fear and the horrible incongruity of what he was doing deep in this old rebel compound, so like the hackers lair he and Aaron had first fallen into a lifetime ago.
But he was almost there. He looked up at her guiltily. “I went through your communications log. Did you know your dad keeps all of your messages?”
“He does?” She straightened, suddenly distant.
“There.” Gal hit the last key with a flourish. “We’re in.”
“Really?” She leaned over him again. “How did you learn to do that?”
He stared at the screen so he wouldn’t have to meet her gaze. “Just here and there. You said you had the password for his computer, right?”
She nodded, and he shifted out of the chair so she could sit. A moment later, General Nairu’s private interface appeared on the screen. A few taps later, and they were staring at lines and lines of Augment files. She opened the folder marked 005478F. Sarrin's file.
Gal stared at the pictures. “Dear Gods,” he murmured. “That’s why they hunted us across the stars.”
Rayne nodded. “Her file was the most extensive I saw. But there are hundreds of files, thousands of experiments.” She opened another file, and another. Hundreds of notes, images of bruises and suture lines, vids, too much to take in, flashed by on the screen. The dates told him some of it was old, some of it was recent. The experiments had never stopped.
A sudden pit opened in Gal’s belly, and he grabbed the back of the chair for support. He shouldn’t have gone. He shouldn’t have pretended to be dead all those years. The kids; they’d known it was bad, but he never would have guessed as bad as all that. He thought it had ended with the war.
“Gal, are you all right?” Rayne peered up at him. “You’re moaning.”
“I didn’t think it would get that bad,” he croaked.
She smiled sadly. “None of us knew.”
No, he wanted to tell her, he had known. Maybe not all of it. But he’d been the one, the guy who should have stopped it all. He’d known where the virus came from. Why the kids had gotten sick. And he’d made a promise to Aaron. He’d made a promise to himself. “Rayne, I—.”
“This is incredible!” The tech pushed in, leaning over Rayne as he stared at the little 2D screen. “Is this everything?”
Rayne shrugged. “Everything on the general’s computer.”
“I have to take this to Morana. With this type of intel, we can’t fail. The folk are already spread, but if they see these pictures of children—children!—they’ll tear the Speakers to pieces. Their reign will be over by suns-down tomorrow.”
Gal sat back as the tech pressed a quick command, the data downloading onto a chip he held in his hand. Then they followed him down the dingy hallway, into a room cramped with people. In the centre of the room, the leader, Morana, gestured through a 3D holographic display.
She paused as the tech pushed through the rebels to hand her the chip. Taking it in her hand, she thanked him and slipped it into a pocket on her coat.
Gal glanced at Rayne. Surely the rebel leader would look at the files. Even the idiot tech had known how powerful that information was. He clenched his fist to steady himself.
Morana returned to the holographic display. Her voice fading to the rush of blood in Gal’s ears as he watched her gesture through a simulation of the city.
“Are you going to look at the files?” he shouted suddenly. He realized he was shaking.
Morana paused, the entire room turning to stare at him, and he took an involuntary step back. Across the room, Kieran peered at him. Sarrin, by his side, raised a single eyebrow as she watched. “We’re discussing our extraction plan for the Poet,” Morana said bluntly, dismissing him.
“Sorry.” Gal held up his hands, trying to fade into the background. What was he doing? Seeing the pictures of Evangecore, remembering it, it had unsettled him. That was all. He was no longer the rebel leader. That was someone else’s job; Morana's job. He was just a pawn, just a soldier like the rest of them. Morana was the leader. He should let her lead.
“What’s on those files will change everything,” he found himself saying instead. “Proof we need to shut the Speakers down for good.”
Morana glared, folding her hands neatly in front of her. “Thank you, Mister Idim.” She turned away from him, and back to her display, now showing the Speakers’ compound. “As I was saying, our informant on the inside….”
“You know it’s not enough.” Aaron was suddenly beside him, bending down to whisper in his ear. “An informant? Gods, Gal, how easy were they to kill? You saw what happened in the street. The Speakers… Hap is out of control, with what happened in the square, you know he’s unhinged.” His wide eyes penetrated Gal, right down to his rapidly beating heart.
“He still controls the Central Army, Gal, a force that’s bigger than the people it polices. If this isn’t done right… who knows how far he can be pushed before his temper gets the best of him. It’s worse than his fathers, you know that. A blow like extracting the Poet from his compound, if they can pull it off, will send him into madness. And if he still controls the Army after his compound is breached, he will decimate the city. He’d rather no folk than lose control of the folk. You know this as well as I do.”
Gal’s entire body shook. He was aware of Rayne murmuring something beside him, but couldn’t make out what she said.
“It has to be one fell swoop, Gal. All of it at once. This is the big showdown we’ve been waiting for. We have everything we need: irrefutable proof, and her.” He pointed to Sarrin, who was still watching Gal with open curiosity.
Gal shook his head. “No. I can’t.“
“You are the only one who can,” Aaron shouted at him in exasperation. “You have to unite the folk, ignite them, everyone at once. Folk, Central Army, everyone. John P can do that. You can do that.”
“No,” he gasped.
“What happens if you don’t?”
Around him, the rebels turned into ugly grey demons, hair falling from their rotting flesh. One by one, they started to fall. A cascade of bodies drew their last breath and fell to the floor, rushing in a wave around the circle.
His eyes
caught on the demon-Rayne standing beside him. Her honey-brown eyes flicked to meet his as the wave of dying demons raced up to her. “Stop!” He held out his hand before she could fall, saving her. He had to save her.
Aaron was right. The rebels plan would see the planet dead by sunsdown tomorrow. He’d spent too much time with Hap not to know it.
“It’s now or never, Johnny.” Aaron pushed his shoulder, sending Gal stumbling into the middle of the room.
Sarrin watched him curiously, tilting her head, one corner of her mouth quirking up as she nodded. Heart pounding, an image, a memory, superimposed itself over where she stood. He’d seen her before, in the burning wreckage, a teenage girl pulling herself from the rubble, her eyes meeting his across the battlefield with the same knowing stare.
The realization forced him to take a breath, and he started: “My name is Captain Galiant John Peroneus Idim. John P.” He looked around the room at the group of very real, very human rebels, suddenly watching on his every word. “I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. The world got very hard for me, for a very long time. But we have a chance now that have never had before, and we will never have again.” His eyes caught on Rayne. “John P never died, much as I wanted him to, because this, this moment, and what happens tomorrow is what I lived my life for, and what I could never forget. In our day, the rebels nearly unseated the Speakers. We hacked the newsfeeds, we infiltrated the compounds, and we bombed Evangecore.” He watched Rayne press her lips together, but she didn’t turn away. Not like she should. But it didn’t matter anymore, this was important, this was bigger than him and the woman he would sacrifice almost anything more. “And, if you’ll let me, I think I have a plan that will end it all.”
Truthfully, it had come to him while he was speaking, his brain working out the details as though he had never left and spent all those years running freight.
He glanced at Morana, guiltily expecting her to kick him out of the room for interrupting a third time. Instead she stared him directly in the eye for a long minute. "I did think you borebore an uncanny resemblance to the rebel." To his surprise, she stepped aside, inviting him to take over the 3D display. "Let's see what you've got."
He flicked across the hologram of the city, taking a deep breath. Across the room Aaron caught his eye. He smiled once, and faded into the background, leaving for the last time.
NINETEEN
SARRIN STARED ACROSS THE SEA of buildings, dark now with only the deep purple of full night behind them. With her legs pulled up to her chest, she only half listened to the buzz of security drones, currently far away, and contemplated the tall tower in front of her.
“Thought I might find ya up here.”
She turned at the sudden intrusion. Her heart did a strange flip flop as she turned to watch Kieran climb the last rungs of the ladder behind her.
“It was too close in the lair,” she said as he sat beside her, turning back to the cityscape. She still felt the compressed, sticky heat on her skin of the cramped bunker and heard the click-clack of laz-rifles being disassembled and serviced. It had been nearly enough to send her into a trance until she'd found her way out here.
He sat close, heat radiating off his skin. Normally the proximity would have set alarms off in her mind, the monster flexing it's outcome power, but not with Kieran. Never with Kieran.
He had been growing redder in the last few hours, and even in the near-dark she could see — or maybe feel — the tension lines creasing his face. “You’re in pain.”
He nodded, hanging his head, seeming, almost, to deflate. “Yeah. All this running around, and it’s dry here.”
She closed the distance, wrapping a hand around his arm and pushing soothing energy through the connection, the same as she had done in gel tank when he was healing on Cordelia. The tension in his face instantly eased. “Thank you,” he breathed.
She said nothing. She shouldn’t be touching him at all, but it was a small comfort she allowed herself. If a monster could have comfort.
Gal’s words echoed in her head: “We need to send a message. Show them that we’ll fight back. Which is why Sarrin will be the one to destroy the Speakers.” Gal was no fool. He had seen her file, knew exactly how she had been trained and what she was capable of. He knew she was a monster, and had found the perfect plan to showcase it. For good. For the death of the Speakers who had caused such irreparable harm. If she could destroy them and buy freedom in the process, then so be it.
Kieran wrapped his hand around her wrist, high enough that would could feel him where the nerves hadn't been stripped from her flesh. He smiled at her, a smile she didn’t deserve, but she smiled back all the same. “Halud will be okay,” he said.
She blinked. She hadn’t even thought about Halud. But it was his freedom she was buying, wasn’t it? He was always the good one, the Poet Laureate who spoke the words of the Gods.
“Morana says their operative on the inside is good, has been there for years, and shouldn’t have any trouble getting him out once the fighting starts.”
Sarrin nodded.
He squeezed her arm. “I was worried, I thought you might have gone to find him by yourself.”
She blinked. Going after Halud herself had only been a fleeting thought. But — that’s what she was doing on the roof, wasn’t it? Surveying the Speakers’ Tower, keeping an eye on Halud, looking for weaknesses, for opportunity.
The monster flared, whispering a calculated set of instructions. “I could, you know,” she told Kieran, interrupting the monster. “I’ve completed more complex missions. I could infiltrate the tower and Halud and I could be far away before suns-rise.”
Maybe that would be better.
But Kieran sighed. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “I’m sure you could do it; go in and rescue Halud, mow down an entire platoon of soldiers, raze the entire building, whatever you had to do.”
The monster set about a familiar thrumming in her core, a rush of adrenalin as the violent image of it flooded her.
“But it would still be a trap. Gal’s right, I think, the First Speaker is trying to lure you in. You’d be playing right into his hands, and I don’t like that idea at all.”
Sarrin pressed her lips together. He was right. Hap Lansford had set a trap, the same as he -- through Guitteriez--had set a trap for Halud and hunted her across the stars. Only the last few weeks, she was fairly certain, had been her own. Hap Lansford wouldn’t have planned on them finding Cordelia or meeting the Uruhu. That part of her life, at least, must have been hers.
Tomorrow would be hers too, as she destroyed the Speakers. That would be something they would never have planned, surely. And her freedom would be just on the other side of it.
Beside her, Kieran shifted. “The baby in the square, was it really an Augment?”
She jerked her head. She’d nearly forgotten with everything else. “Yes,” she answered. “The Speakers are making more.”
She felt an emotion surge through the spot where his hand wrapped around hers: anger.
“What right do they have?” Kieran spat. “The Speakers don’t have a clue what they’re dealing with.” He rubbed a hand across his mouth, his agitation pouring over her.
The sensation shocked her, the monster flaring to life. An image of her ripping the meaty head from Hap Lansford’s body filled her mind. She shook off his hand and grabbed the rooftop to steady herself.
“What I don’t understand is why,” said Kieran.
As the black clouds cleared from her vision, she looked at him. He was usually so quick, but then he had been on the ship while she was with the Uruhu. “They want to destroy the Uruhu, the same as they destroyed Cornelius and tried to destroy Cordelia.”
“That’s why they trained the Augments?”
She shook her head. “That’s why they made the Augments. Roelle told me, we’re part Uruhu. The Red Fever, the retrovirus, carried Uruhu genes so that we would be as strong as they are. The humans weren’t strong enough to do it on their
own.”
“Huh.” Kieran clasped his hands under his chin. "I can't…" He frowned, training off.
She scratched her arm in the silence that followed. “There’s something I don’t understand. The Gods, they protect the Humans, but not the others? I was made to destroy the Uruhu, that was my Path. But why wouldn’t the Gods protect the Uruhu and Cordelia and Cornelius?”
He leaned forward, one eyebrow raised as he stared directly into her face. “You’re joking.”
“What?” she gasped, startled.
“I thought you had figured it out. The Speakers aren’t Gods.”
She squirmed. It was true the Augments didn’t believe in the Speakers, but they still believed in Strength, Fortitude, Knowledge, Prudence, and Faith. They still believed the stories. “The Gods descended and helped humanity in the beginning. They were good to us. Do they know something more than we do? What if it is my Path to destroy the Uruhu?”
“No god would tell you to destroy something.” He shook his head, letting out a long breath. “I shouldn't tell you this. The ‘Gods,’ the ones that saved humanity in the beginning, were just people. They were Observers.”
A cold sweat broke out on her back.
“Humanity lost its planet — the one before the last one. Actually, mankind has managed to destroy several planets over the millennia. The Observers left from Earth once its climate became uninhabitable, and we’ve been watching ever since.
“This time was worse than the others. For three generations humanity lived in starships that failed to travel even close to the speed of light before they reached a planet that was even remotely habitable. In that time a lot of knowledge was lost — basic things like how to seed crops, build shelters, even how to move and travel on foot. A group of Observers came down to help, for fear humanity would be lost all together.
“They were just people. People who could be strong, who could be leaders in dire times. But they underestimated how much the people would lean on them, and how much they would come to lean on the people. They stayed. They had families. Eventually the truth was lost and the legends took over. ‘Gods descended from the heavens to lead humanity.’ And the myth was fed and fed over the years, until thousands of years later, there is no real connection with the Observers and the Speakers are just men. The same as everyone else." He frowned again. "Do you understand?”
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