by Sara King
“How the hell did you…?” the Baga said. Then he hesitated, focusing his faceted, gemlike eyes on Daviin. “How long’s he been sitting there?”
“Long enough to challenge you to a game of cards after we finish this hunt,” Daviin said. “I can always use another twenty thousand credits.”
The Baga’s faceted red eyes glittered and Daviin was sure the insane little creature was smiling. “You’re on, Jreet.”
“They’re sure taking a long time,” Galek said, just in time for the doors to open and the Human and the Huouyt to step aboard.
Jer’ait entered the ship with barely a glance at Daviin, then moved to take a seat. The Human, however, stopped in the entrance to the shuttle, forcing the doors to stay open. He locked gazes with Daviin. “Get out.”
Daviin did not move. “What?”
The Human narrowed its eyes. “You told me you got chipped. Get out.”
Daviin stiffened. “I never said that.”
The Human’s brown eyes were icy. “Did you get chipped, Daviin?”
Faced with a direct question, Daviin constricted. “Jreet don’t get chipped.”
“Neither do Va’gan Huouyt,” Jer’ait said, his eyes focused impassively on Daviin.
“All that trouble to get Jer’ait under the knife and you never so much as made a peep about it,” Joe said. He looked enraged. “I knew it was a bad idea to let you back on the team. Get out. You’re not coming with us until you can learn to obey orders.”
“Jreet don’t get chipped.” Daviin said, desperate. That’s—” Humiliating. Unmanning. Worse than being Sentinel to a slave. Lifting his head, Daviin said, “I’ll obey any order you give me but that one. I give you my word.”
The Human’s face cleared instantly. “Very well. Then stay right here.” He stepped inside and sat down, levering his black Congie rifle onto his lap, relaxing completely.
Daviin had a sinking feeling he knew what the Human meant. He ducked his head in silence, knowing he’d lost the fight. He sat out the rest of the flight, listening carefully, but adding nothing as the group discussed the elements of their plan. They were landing in an uninhabited area and were going to make a ground incursion into enemy territory. They’d picked a collapsed tunnel near a stream, so the Huouyt had free access to water in case he needed to negate his patterns. The Grekkon would get them past the blockade. From there, the Huouyt and the Baga would infiltrate the tunnels and determine exactly what they were dealing with while the Human and the Ooreiki guarded the digger.
Daviin, he noticed, with a constriction of shame, was not given a part in the plan.
When the shuttle came to a stop, Daviin lifted his head slightly as the Human stood up, but Joe stepped off the ship without even glancing in Daviin’s direction. The rest of the group followed, leaving Daviin coiled in his corner. Daviin watched the door shut, fighting the urge to follow them anyway. They were all going to die without him. He knew it like he knew the five of them would be the ones to get him to the Vahlin.
But he had given his word.
The Human had played an underhanded game, but if Daviin got off the shuttle, he would lose every ounce of respect he sought to gain.
His duties as a Sentinel warred with his duties as a grounder, which warred with his status as a Voran warrior. If he let the Human go without him, Daviin would not be able to protect him. The Human’s death would solve many problems, but it was the coward’s way out. Yet, if he followed, Joe would never trust him again.
And through it all, he had the nagging reminder he was bound to a slave. He was agonizing over the respect of a slave.
The very idea baffled and angered him. Had he grown so soft he actually cared what this slave thought of him?
The simple answer was yes.
Whatever the Human was before, he was a warrior now. Daviin wanted to earn the Human’s respect, and he couldn’t do that by disobeying yet another order. Though it pained him, Daviin lowered his head back to his coil and closed his eyes.
The Ayhi protect them.
The shuttle’s engines rumbled to life and the ship jerked. Daviin ached inside, knowing he was leaving his five companions to die. He felt the shuttle roar back into the sky. Felt the jiggle as it lifted through atmosphere…
The door suddenly opened and Galek stood there, sudah fluttering with anxiety in his neck. “He says you can come out now,” the Ooreiki said.
The sound of the engines roaring through the door left Daviin momentarily confused, knowing they should be in deep atmo by now. It wasn’t until he saw the foliage in the background that he realized that the shuttle hadn’t lifted off at all. The engines were blasting in neutral, aimed nowhere. It had been a ruse.
Daviin’s mouth fell open.
“Can you turn those off!” Galek shouted at the tiny Ueshi pilots inside the cockpit. The engines died, leaving the world in a muted silence. Tentatively, the Ooreiki said, “Are you coming, Daviin?”
Hope flared with suspicion in Daviin’s mind. Was following the Ooreiki’s word considered taking orders from the Human? “I want to hear it from Joe,” Daviin said, wary of a trick.
From behind the Ooreiki, the Human shouted, “Get your ass out here, Jreet! You have Dhasha to kill.”
Daviin slid out of his coil, trying to hide his embarrassment. Galek scrunched his face in a shy, wrinkled Ooreiki smile, then jogged away from the shuttle. Daviin followed him, and when his eyes met the Human’s, he realized he’d passed some sort of test.
And he was proud of it.
Ayhi save me, Daviin thought, stunned as he stared at the Human’s soft, squishy face, but this bastard has the soul of a Jreet.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Joe went on. “Daviin, I want you in inviso-mode the whole time. Since you’re not chipped, Flea’s wings will guide you. No echolocation. Dhasha can hear it.”
The Human wanted him to enter the tunnels blind and deaf, but Daviin merely nodded and complied. The Baga hovered somewhere near his eye-level and Daviin followed the sound of his flight. He found, to his surprise, that the high-frequency vibrations of the Baga’s wings that he had found so annoying in the barracks gave him a decent picture of his surroundings, if he could keep up.
“Galek, you’ve got the eyes in this operation. Take point. They’ve got Takki combing these woods all the time. Flea, stay behind Scarab. I want the Jreet at his back. Jer’ait, go do your thing.”
The Huouyt dropped down to all fours—from the outline the Baga’s wings showed him, Daviin assumed he’d taken the pattern of some sort of native creature—and disappeared into the foliage. The band began moving, and Daviin heard Joe drop back to walk beside him. They walked in silence for a moment, then the Human said, “Were you really gonna stay on that shuttle?”
“Yes.”
The Human moved away, saying nothing else.
They found the first Takki body a few tics later. The Baga paused a moment, hovering over it curiously, so Daviin heard a clear picture of the Takki’s throat ripped open. They had never heard a sound.
“Here we go,” Joe whispered. “Daviin, you burning furg, you’re getting a chip as soon as we get back.”
“I know.”
“Stay close.” Then, like a wraith, the Human followed the Huouyt into the brush.
Up ahead, something screamed.
#
“Abandoned, my ass,” Joe said, eying the twelve Takki corpses lining the ground. Two still oozed blue slime from plasma wounds—the Huouyt and the Jreet had gotten the rest. “Scarab, get us underground before the Dhasha come looking for them.” Fighting Dhasha in tunnels, where the huge scaled creatures had no room to maneuver, was one thing—fighting them on the surface was suicide.
The Grekkon backed up to the site they had chosen to bypass the blocked entrance, then hesitated. As Joe watched, the skin of the creature’s bulbous head—or butt, considering it had a set of eyes at each end of its body—began to excrete a pitch black substance that seemed to eat the light
itself. Everyone near the Grekkon took a nervous step away from it.
The Grekkon lowered its rear into the ground.
Not onto the ground, not atop the ground, but into the ground. The back end sank into the dirt as fast as the front legs could push it, leaving a perfect, circular tube of earth wide enough for a man to walk through if he bent over. The Grekkon disappeared at an angle parallel to the main shaft, at an easy slope for them to follow. He was gone from sight in less than three seconds.
Everyone stared down at the hole with a mixture of unease and respect.
Through the headcom chip, the Baga voiced what they were all thinking. “So what happens if he accidentally brushes up against one of us with that stuff?”
“You make up a will yet?” Joe asked, falling back into the familiar routine of silent, chip-to-chip communication.
“I’m serious,” Flea insisted.
“So am I.”
The Baga stared at the hole in silence. Finally, it said, “I bet Congress would just love to get that in ammo form.”
“They tried. Can’t figure the stuff out. Kinda like the Dhasha’s scales and the Jreet’s invisibility.”
“And my abbas.”
“And your glue, yeah. Help me get these out of sight,” Joe said. He grabbed a dead Takki by the wrists and began dragging it into the tunnel. Moving their dense, static bodies—probably two, two hundred fifty lobes each—was a struggle even with the aid of his biosuit. Joe tried not to wince as Galek and Daviin both grabbed a Takki in each fist and began casually throwing them into the tunnel as if they weighed no more than pillows. Jer’ait and Flea had already followed the Grekkon into the tunnel.
Joe had the Jreet slide deeper into the shaft while he and Galek disguised the entrance with a hologram of the spot as it had been before the Grekkon had disturbed it. Then Daviin and Galek stood back as Joe triggered a minor collapse, sealing the tunnel behind them to trap the smell of dead Takki inside, where it wouldn’t attract attention from the surface.
“Let’s go,” Joe said mentally over his head-com, breaking into a bent-over trot. “Air is short.”
Though the Jreet did not pick up the thought, Joe heard him slither along behind them, moving a pebble here, a clod of dirt there as he followed them. Here, bent over as they were, the Jreet actually had an advantage. Where Joe and Galek could outrun him in an instant on the surface, here the Jreet could keep up, if not pass them entirely.
Once again, Joe wondered if changing his mind about the Jreet had been a bad idea. Without communications, the Jreet wasn’t going to do them any good as a scout. He’d have to stay with Joe at all times.
Probably exactly what he wanted, Joe realized, disgusted he hadn’t seen it earlier.
Jer’ait’s call broke him from his thoughts. “The Grekkon broke through a downward shaft. The Baga and I investigate.”
Joe hurried his step.
They found Scarab backed into a side shaft it had created, poised like a trapdoor spider in its lair, its two spearlike arms pointed outward. Looking at it, Joe realized that the Grekkon probably didn’t need much protection. It could impale a Takki, and a Dhasha wouldn’t be able to dig fast enough to catch it.
As Joe and Galek took up positions on either side of the Grekkon’s hole, the Jreet slid out into the rough, Takki-dug tunnel and waited.
A young Ooreiki voice broke the silence in Joe’s headcom. “First and Second Battalions, this is Groundteam Two, Squad 43 of Third Battalion. We’ve reached the entrance to the main shaft. No enemies encountered. Haven’t heard a peep from anyone in our Battalion. Is everything all right out there?”
Joe frowned. There were six battalions assigned to the deep den. Five and a half thousand people should have had something to say before this.
“Can anyone hear me?” the request came again.
No one responded.
Though PlanOps teams were not governed by the same ranking rules as normal groundteams, Joe determined this was a good time to take control. To Second Battalion only, he said, “This is Prime Commander Zero. Someone open your burning mouth and say something.”
Silence.
Joe’s skin began to feel clammy. He switched channels to all six battalions and repeated his call.
“Praise the ghosts, we’re glad to hear you, Commander,” the young Ooreiki said. “We can’t get ahold of anybody. Think we mighta got some faulty com equipment.”
“It’s working fine,” Joe replied. “Keep your eyes open. We hit seven Takki before we reached our shaft site.”
“So where is everybody?” the unknown squad leader insisted.
No one answered.
Joe did a quick mental calculation. One hundred and fifty groundteams per Battalion. Six battalions assigned to this deep den. That meant there should’ve been nine hundred groundteams out there responding to him.
“Listen,” Joe said, “I want you to get into the tunnels as soon as you can.”
“We’ve got to blast a way in. They’ve sealed everything, even the slave tunnels.”
“And you didn’t see anybody coming in?”
“Affirmative, the place is abandoned.”
Joe felt a coldness seeping under his biosuit. On the local channel, he said, “Unless somebody back at headquarters is screwing with us, everyone else in this attack is dead. We’re not gonna get any help on the prince.”
“But I just heard a team on the com,” Galek said.
“They’re dead,” Jer’ait said. “Dhasha are closing in on them as we speak.”
“How do you know?”
Instead of replying, Jer’ait said, “Downward shaft clear. Connects to a larger tunnel about six hundred rods past the Grekkon’s puncture.”
“Flea, how’s the way up?”
“We’re good. No other connecting shafts for a long way.”
“How much of a way?” the Huouyt asked, sounding irritated.
Flea hesitated. “Maybe sixty ferlii lengths? A good long way.”
“Sixty lengths?” the Huouyt cried. “You’ve only been down there twenty seconds!”
“I said it was a good way,” the Baga snapped.
“Give us a number, pest,” Jer’ait snarled. “There’s no way you went sixty lengths.”
“No?” Flea retorted. “Then come down here and find out yourself, you wet-eyed worm-tree,” Flea retorted.
“Perhaps I will,” Jer’ait said smoothly, “And end your useless existence in the process.”
Joe interrupted, “Baga have no sense of numbers, Jer’ait. Anything beyond six or seven and they’re lost.”
There was a very long pause. “You jest,” Jer’ait finally said.
Immediately, the Baga said, “Is that something you do with yourself in the shade of the miga tree?”
“What is the pest talking about?” Jer’ait demanded.
Joe had no idea. “It’s an insult of some sort.”
“Well, obviously,” Jer’ait growled. “What good is the little monster if his primitive brain cannot comprehend numbers?”
Joe winced, hoping that the Baga didn’t take it upon himself to stick Jer’ait next time he saw him. “Can it, Jer’ait. Everyone else, let’s go.”
Joe led the others from the Grekkon’s tunnel and took out another hologram to mask the entrance. He took an image of the wall beside it and then set that same image over the opening to the tunnel. He eyed his handiwork a moment before nodding. To see it, one had to know where to look. He leaned down to mark the floor in front of the entrance, but the Ooreiki caught his arm. Joe looked up, irritated.
“I can find it,” Galek said.
Joe shook his head. “It’ll be different in six hours, when we’re running for our lives.”
“No. I can find it.” Galek’s sticky young eyes pleaded for trust.
Joe glanced back at the unmarked floor, then at the entrance itself. He’d disguised it well. Without a marking, he would never find it again.
He sighed and straightened, leaving the
floor unmarked. “Our lives are in your hands, Galek. Stay alive. Flea, get back down here.”
The Baga complied, and in seconds they heard the high-pitched hum of the Baga’s wings. He was moving fast, at least forty lengths an hour. He passed by them without stopping and soon was gone down the tunnel following the Huouyt.
Joe nodded toward the others and began moving deeper into the tunnel.
Behind him, the Ooreiki was all but oozing pride.
Ghosts, what I wouldn’t give to be young again, he thought. God I hope Galek doesn’t die down here.
CHAPTER 15: The First Prince
“I was told there would be five thousand three hundred and ninety-four. Six battalions minus one team that destroyed itself in a fight as they were boarding their shuttle. Why are six Congies unaccounted for?”
Tevval’s lieutenants looked away, trying to do anything but catch his attention. Their iridescent, rainbow scales glittered in the light of the lamps that Takki had installed in niches along the walls, their blocky bodies perfect but for a few missing scales from minor dominance scuffles. Not one of them had the balls to ka-par.
Cowards, Tevval thought.
It had been six turns since one of them had even physically challenged him. That fool still carried his shame in his mangled jaw, the multiple rows of triangular black teeth twisting in on themselves where Tevval had sliced apart his face.
Tevval growled and began to pace. “Why have we only seen five thousand three hundred and eighty-eight Congies? That is precisely the right number to constitute an extra groundteam crawling through our tunnels as we speak.”
“Perhaps they held another team back, my lord,” one of his oldest heirs said, his hard, egg-shaped green eyes glittering hatred in the lamps. Aside from the one with the broken jaw, he was the largest. His left horn was a deformed black mass where Tevval had disciplined him as a child. Tevval decided it would probably be this one to try his luck next. The heir continued on, oblivious of his appraisal. “Maybe it destroyed itself like the first one. The experimental species combinations are extremely volatile. It could have been a last-tic change.”
