Ever known to have been assembled, Tolvern corrected herself. Who knew what the Adjudicators had amassed deep within Drake’s so-called red carrot.
Less than an hour later, Wang found the alien device. It was smaller than the one discovered in Fortaleza, and farther away from the jump point, too, some fifty-two thousand miles distant. But it hadn’t needed to hide the jump altogether, only confuse the perturbations it caused in the system’s gravity. Make the jump look unstable and dangerous.
Void Queen was closer, and Vargus sent her falcons out. They made an attempt to snare the device, but couldn’t get it trapped in a containment field. No more time to waste; Tolvern gave orders to blast it. Pulse fire soon destroyed it and revealed the jump point’s true nature.
Blue, naturally. Ninety-nine point three percent stable. They didn’t come more solid than that. This jump point had been here for tens of thousands of years, and would be here for tens of thousands more.
On the other side lay a system that had been hidden to humans since they’d taken to the stars, even as countless ships had passed back and forth from Old Earth across the spacelanes to and from her colonies.
During the long hours of waiting, Tolvern had spent plenty of time working out a jump order to get them through, and these orders were already in the hands of her fellow captains and commanders. Within minutes of the discovery, pilots across the fleet were charting courses to take them through in sequence.
Vargus called Tolvern. “You’re sure about this? All of us through?”
“Drake wanted you in Lenin because we thought we’d have three or four more jumps until we got inside that red carrot.”
“We still might.”
Vargus sounded hesitant, but wore a bright, eager expression on her face. More playing devil’s advocate, Tolvern thought, forcing the two captains to think through the ramifications and make sure they weren’t missing something obvious. Something obvious like jumping into the corona of a star or stumbling into the Adjudicator’s home system to find twenty star fortresses and a hundred dragoons waiting to pounce.
There was no way to know.
“I don’t think so,” Tolvern said. “I think whatever is on the other side is something the Adjudicators don’t want us to see. Either it’s their base of operations or it’s the jump point that takes us there.”
“Or something else. Something we haven’t guessed at.”
“Or that,” Tolvern agreed. “But we know it’s going to be something important, or else they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to hide it.”
Vargus hesitated a long moment, staring back through the viewscreen as if trying to suss out Tolvern’s motives in pushing them all through at once. Or maybe just to see if Tolvern had the nerve to go through with it. Vargus was confident and accomplished, and would have no qualms assuming command if Tolvern were unable to proceed.
“All right, Captain Tolvern. Lead on and I will follow.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was still too hot to move quickly, and the conspirators remained dehydrated, but they had the advantage that the rest of the work camp was incapable of great effort. Most of the devotees were bathing or slinking back to their tarp-covered dirt barracks to sleep. Some of the more devout—mainly Cavlee, but also several dozen humans—kept working on the dig, but at a sluggish pace. A trio of Hroom mechanics took apart the engine of an excavator to extract the parts ruined by heat.
These few workers were easy enough to avoid as Nils Oolmena and Lum Gee made their way to the camp perimeter. Lum Gee shut down the breakers that controlled the force field, tripping switches one after another. When she’d collapsed the entire west side of the barrier, they approached, holding their breaths, half-expecting to be delivered a crippling jolt of energy when they touched the force field.
There was nothing, and they passed through to the other side.
The air smelled different out here. Even with the ground scorched, and the huge clumps of grass withered and brittle, it smelled like a living planet, rather than the sterile, purified zone above the Dweller, where they’d been working all of these weeks. A warm breeze bathed their skins.
Lum Gee widened her nose slits and took a deep breath. A low hum started in her throat and worked up to her mouth.
“The air smells clean. Holy and sacred—this is why the Lords of—” She caught herself and made a dismayed sound. “I am losing my will. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to help you.”
He touched her implant with his long fingers and traced where it emerged from her skull. It oozed, imperfectly placed through her cranium, not by Adjudicators, but by Hroom slaves who’d been taught the rudimentary surgery. If only he knew how to damage it, like his, so she would retain her will. Most likely, his attempts would kill her.
She stared at him with her big, liquid eyes. There was anguish there.
“Pull it out. Let me die.”
“No. Not yet.”
A low keen. “Please.”
“We can save our people. Save the empire and the empress and the sacred shrines.”
He reached into his pocket and removed a sugar packet. He’d been saving it for a moment of desperate need, and maybe this was the moment. Lum Gee reached for it with trembling fingers, but stopped short. To his surprise, she withdrew her hand and tilted her head in negation.
“This is my moment of strength,” she said. “The moment when I assert my will and say that I will not submit. Not for sugar, not to the enemy.”
She shook all over, and foam bubbled at the corners of her mouth. He hummed his admiration and gestured for her to follow.
The trumpeters made a terrific noise ahead, rolling and spraying and blowing. As the two small figures crept up to watch, two old males began to fight over something. They rammed their heads together with a crash of bone on bone. They withdrew, snorted, stomped at the ground until it shook, and charged again.
After several minutes of struggle, the larger of the two beasts forced his opponent to submit, and the smaller male backed away, shaking his head and trumpeting in rage. To Nils Oolmena’s surprise, the object of their fight was a dead trumpeter. It was the old bull with the broken horn he’d spotted earlier. It was only half-buried in the ground, unable to get itself fully covered before succumbing to the heat.
The winning trumpeter opened its mouth and revealed boar-like teeth. It bit at the hide of the dead animal while others gathered around, bellowing anxiously for their turn. The huge creatures had only been seen grazing the fields of grass, but the heat and the dead plains seemed to have turned them temporarily into carnivores and scavengers.
One of the waiting animals lifted its short trunk to the sky and sniffed loudly through glistening nose holes. Smelling. Had it caught the scent of Hroom? They’d be a quick mouthful if it found them, and it could overtake them in about five steps.
Nils Oolmena pulled on the shoulder of his companion, and they backed away. Moving around the giant herd, they came upon other creatures emerging from holes: leathery birds, giant lizards with six legs, beetles the size of their heads. Some of these looked like dangerous predators in and of themselves, but most were too weakened and exhausted to pay them any attention.
Once they were a few hundred meters beyond the trumpeters, with the herd between them and the now defenseless camp, they placed their explosives one by one into the thickest clumps of dried grass they could find. Small devices, each one no bigger than a fist, they were designed to break through boulders that the Dweller had tossed onto its back when burrowing into the ground, those too big to be easily moved by the excavators.
When the Hroom had a half-moon of explosives stretched around the herd, they moved back and began to light their fires. The grass took quickly, so quickly in fact, that after the third fire they had to abandon their plan to light a line of fires behind the explosives, and run away. Fortunately, the wind was blowing toward camp, not away from it, or they’d have been roasted alive.
Some creatures duck
ed back into their holes. Others, exposed for the first time after baking in oven-like temperatures, now found themselves fleeing on foot, belly, and wing from a raging grass fire.
Just as the trumpeters began to sound the warning, the fire hit the first of the explosives, and it went off with a sharp, concussive boom. Another exploded seconds later.
The herd was in motion, fear giving way to panic. They didn’t gather, but stampeded in a general direction away from the fire. Unfortunately, the rapid spread of flames had forced the two Hroom to fall back before completing the semicircle of flame meant to ring in and force the animals toward the Adjudicator camp, and several of the beasts broke north, instead of east. Concussive explosions drove them farther away from their companions.
The main herd hit the perimeter of the camp, and the lead animals slowed, wary of the posts marking the invisible barrier that had tormented every animal who tested its limits. But the ones at the rear were pushing too hard and forced the first through. And then they were all through the gaps, and into the dead zone that had been isolated from the rest of the planet all these centuries.
Nils Oolmena couldn’t see what was happening through the flames and smoke and dust kicked up by the animals. He couldn’t hear either, over the roar, the shaking ground, and the continued explosions. But he could imagine the chaos as the creatures lumbered toward the massive pit at the center of the camp, with the barracks and the Adjudicator landing zone between them.
“We’ve done it,” he said. “Contaminated the site. The aliens will have no choice but to bury the Dweller and sterilize the zone. Their own beliefs—”
“Watch out!” Lum Gee cried.
A young trumpeter had outraced the fire to one side and circled to look for the rest of the herd. Perhaps it was calling for its mother, though he didn’t see how a creature that was five meters tall at the shoulder could be timid of anything, juvenile or not. And now, with the wind shifting north, the trumpeter faced another wall of flame.
It thundered southwest, which carried it back toward the origins of the fire, already dying as quickly as it had started, its fuel consumed. Other creatures, those fortunate enough to survive both the killing heat from the heavens and the fire on the burning grassland, now fled before the terrified young trumpeter.
The two Hroom joined the flight. Nils Oolmena spotted an opening in the flame to his left, big enough for the Hroom, but not so large that the trumpeter would go toward it. He turned to shout at his companion and tell her to follow, and he saw that she’d stumbled to her knees.
Foam flecked Lum Gee’s lips. Her arms trembled as they pushed her up from the ground. Between the sugar, the heat, and the endless work demanded by their masters, she didn’t have enough strength to regain her feet.
He turned to run to her side, but the trumpeter thundered forward and would reach her first. Lum Gee made a final attempt to reach her feet. The creature lowered its head, hooked her with the shovel-like horn on top of its head, and threw her twenty meters into the air with a casual flick. It bore down on Nils Oolmena, who hurled himself to one side. The ground shook, and then the creature was gone, its bellows sounding from the wall of smoke.
Nils Oolmena found Lum Gee on her back, moaning and gasping for air. One of her legs was crumpled beneath her, and the implant was mashed where it had struck the ground. She turned her gaze toward him as he cradled her in his arms, and managed a weak hum of greeting. Her fingers touched the damaged implant.
“It’s gone,” she said softly. “Finally, truly gone. I am free.”
“And the sugar?”
A weak, wheezing hum of amusement. “No, I still want that.”
He felt still, rigid with fear and grief, but somehow managed to speak. “You’ll be free soon.”
“In the Endless Dreamland.”
“I am so sorry, Lum Gee. So very sorry.”
Her nose slits opened. “At least I smelled the free air one last time. Before the smoke and . . .”
She didn’t finish, only gave a final, wheezing whistle that sounded like the beginning of a prayer, and she died.
#
Nils Oolmena carried her body back to camp. The fire had surrounded the compound, only stopping when it reached the dead zone inside, where nothing had ever grown, and there was no easy fuel to be found.
There the trumpeters had rampaged back and forth across the camp while hundreds of devotees tried to keep them clear of the excavation pit. One of the huge animals had fallen on top of the Dweller and broken its legs in the fall. As big as it was, it wasn’t large enough to trouble the sleeping monster beneath it.
The other animals fought a battle against the dehydrated devotees, who, lacking strength and weapons, had organized as only sentient races could. They’d alternately attacked and defended with tools at hand, until finally, with the demise of the quick-burning grass fires, the trumpeters grew frustrated by the sting of so many gnats and fled. They blasted through the perimeter and thundered across the plains.
It was over by the time Nils Oolmena arrived. He set Lum Gee’s body among the dead, of which there were hundreds. Hroom, a jumble of broken bones like so many twisted branches. Humans, their fragile bodies torn and trampled. Cavlee, squashed flat beneath stomping feet. Insectoids, looking like so many crushed bugs.
You are responsible for all of this.
Yes, he was, he thought stubbornly. But since they were all dead on this world anyway, at least he had accomplished something. Trumpeters had knocked over the perimeter poles. The excavators were wrecked, one smashed by the falling trumpeter, the rest tossed about by its angry companions, who’d come down the ramp to look after it and obliterate the people trying to kill the injured thing before it caused more damage to the excavation.
The barracks were ruined. Blood was everywhere. The surrounding countryside had burned, and creatures were already finding their way inside. Once it rained, he guessed that grass and other seeds would take root.
Unless the Adjudicators reestablished the perimeter. Sterilized everything anew. They might, but he thought the enemy might take one look at the dead trumpeter and recoil from this planet in horror. Not even the Dweller would be enough for them to violate their sacred beliefs.
Just before dawn, a bright light filled the sky overhead and cast aside the twisting lights of the still-active auroras. Nils Oolmena and the rest of the fearful survivors looked skyward and took in the Adjudicator shuttle as it burned a path to the landing pad.
The Lord of Life and Keeper of the Holy Dwellers had returned.
Chapter Fourteen
Blackbeard was the last to jump. Tolvern came to on the far side not knowing what she would find. During those last, hair-raising moments, when the other ships had all vanished from Lenin and she was gripping her chair, white-knuckled, as they hurtled toward the jump point, she couldn’t let go of her doubts.
What if the alien device had been a trick on top of a trick? What if there were two devices, the first meant to be discovered, and the second to make a red jump look blue once the first had been destroyed? She might have sent them through based on bad information.
Some of her ships might end up on the other side of the galaxy. Others might have half their ship sent in one direction and the other half in another. Other ships might simply lose a random twenty percent of their mass. A gutted derelict filled with withered corpses would appear on the other side.
She hadn’t jumped completely blind of course; a war junk went through first, and sent back a subspace confirmation. The jump was real. But doubts, once awakened, were hard to put to sleep until she’d confirmed with her own eyes.
The jump was smooth, and the jump concussion short and mild. When she came to, she found Void Queen and Olafsen’s First Wolves forming a protective outer ring, while Svensen’s Fourth Wolves organized after the jump. Wang’s trio of war junks scanned with active sensors. Destroyers had thrown down a minefield, but were now collecting the mines as the arrival of warships eliminated their
necessity.
The initial entry of allied ships into the system hadn’t been without incident. Several hours had passed since Void Queen made the jump, and the reports indicated hostile fire. Vargus’s battle cruiser had come under attack by a trio of dragoons. Void Queen returned fire with cannons, detached her brawler, and held them at bay while star wolves came through to join the fight.
One of the enemy ships died in a fiery explosion. The other two fled toward the inner system.
The system itself presented a view Tolvern had never witnessed. A star was in the process of being chewed apart by a small, dense neutron star, which pulled it into orbit around itself. The neutron star must have been wandering through the area when it became entangled in the system.
The neutron star tore off gasses from its neighbor, and had already consumed the inner worlds of the system—or at least, there were no rocky planets in close orbit that scans could detect.
The fourth planet out, however, had an atmosphere and oceans. A living world, if it could be called that, with a death sentence hanging over it. It was here that the war junks and the rest of the fleet focused their search. The dying star had recently bled a huge mass of gasses, and they were having a hard time seeing clearly through the resulting solar radiation.
“Get me Wang,” Tolvern ordered.
Lieutenant Capp made the request, but she didn’t look overly pleased at what they’d discovered, and when there was a delay getting the Singaporean commander, couldn’t hold her tongue.
“We missed the whole thing!”
“What whole thing? We’re barely taking a look at the neighborhood. Who knows what’s out there? Could be anything.”
“Come on, Cap’n, you know what I mean. Vargus got into a fight and had a nice little win. We shoulda gone through first, then it would have been us that done it.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 38
