Overhead, a line of blinking green lights caught her eye. From the glow of the city, she made out criss-crossing bars forming long, arcing structures over the Temple Mount. It looked like scaffolding in the pale light.
“Sierra,” Lydia said in a quiet but firm voice. “You can study the Bastion later.”
Ahead lay the reason for their visit, the final destination of their pilgrimage to the Sacred Planet’s holy sites. The journey took them to the Shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel with those breathtaking views, to the verdant gardens and gold-tipped iron gates around the Shrine of Baha’u’llah, to the stunning vastness of Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and the quiet reverence of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. That journey ended here, in this well-trodden square on a hill in Jerusalem. Ahead, lit by powerful lights from below, rose a majestic, tile-covered structure, white at the bottom and blue above, capped by a proud, golden dome.
“Dome of the Rock,” Lydia whispered from behind. “Once the site of the Jewish temple.”
“That isn’t their temple?” Sierra asked, feeling very young.
“No, their temple was destroyed by the Romans in seventy AD as punishment for a rebellion.”
“How long did the Romans stay in this region?”
Lydia took in a breath, thinking. “Hundreds of years.”
“How long has the Terran Confederacy controlled it?”
“Almost eighty years now.”
A few generations, Sierra noted to herself.
The Carinian party reached the end of the crowd at the beginning of some stairs leading up to the dome’s courtyard. More Terran Confederacy guards clutching bulky rifles lined the steps. The monochromatic crowd fell in behind them, everyone proceeding to the bizarrely beautiful structure ahead for prayer.
“It looks Byzantine,” Sierra said, remembering pictures from her studies. “Is it Christian?”
“It was built in that era,” Lydia replied. “But no, the Muslims built it after they swept through this entire—”
“All glory to Gaaahd!” the shrieking voice pierced the soft murmurings of the crowd. Barely a second passed before—
BOOM!
A deep explosion split the tiled ground and blasted fire and shrapnel from bushes beside the stairs. The blast shredded a few guards into bloody messes and engulfed others in a rush of smoke and dust. Sierra was thrust away by its sheer force, landing hard on the edge of a step and sliding. Her ribs throbbed instantly. The air all around turned dark and thick. Her legs rested on top of a motionless Carinian man in white, lying on his stomach with blood streaking down his forehead, one arm contorted awkwardly, the other a ragged and gory muddle ending somewhere above the elbow.
Sierra’s mind lagged in registering everything.
Feet scuffed the ground around her. Voices shouted, a hundred at once, blending together into a chaotic jumble. Men and women in flowy white, holding stark, black handguns, scuttled into a circle around Sierra and her parents for protection, electric eyes scouring the mayhem. Her father helped up her mother, who held her shoulder with a pained grimace. Sierra looked around for Lydia. She was nowhere. A scattering of bodies stayed on the ground, not moving. Crimson circles spread through pure white garments. Sierra shut her eyes.
The bodyguards got them up, surrounded them in a tight cluster, and moved back the way they had come. The courtyard had cleared for the most part, now swarming with guards in Confed uniforms.
A scraggy man in a long coat dashed out from the throng around the exit, zigzagging between guards. The Carinians stopped as Confed guards chased him down, ripping his coat off one shoulder. A flashing, lumpy vest clung to his waist like a cummerbund.
As the Confed guards gathered and seized him, he let out a cry in rough Universal: “All glory to God!”
BOOM!
The clump of guards disappeared in a flurry of fire and smoke. The bodyguards closed in around Sierra and her parents, pressing their bodies together. Hands pressed over Sierra’s head.
“Where’s Lydia?” Sierra asked, then raised her voice. “Lydia!”
Before anyone could answer, a woman’s voice penetrated the ruckus: “All glory to God!”
But one of the Carinian bodyguards snapped up his gun and fired. Nearby, the woman’s body fell, and the Confed guards ran away from it. No explosion came, but the Carinians avoided her all the same.
They rushed down the ramp they had so joyously ascended just a few minutes earlier. Confed guards rushed past them, dozens of them, toward the hilltop.
“Lydia!” Sierra called out. “Lydia . . .”
With a bodyguard’s hand on one shoulder and her father’s hand on the other, she couldn’t stop, could barely even glance back.
“Lydia!”
They surged on like a train, all running as one, so close she could hear the hard breathing of her father and mother and the men whose job it was to protect them. The blare of sirens flooded the evening sky. Then, faintly from behind, Sierra heard a sound so familiar she recognized it even in the commotion.
“Sierra! I’m alright. Keep going.” The voice of her teacher, her mentor.
A cascade of relief swept through Sierra’s chest and into her tingling limbs and jittery fingers, even as her head swam with a single question: Why? Why? Why?
* * *
It was a blur, the speedy shuttle flight over the old city of Jerusalem to the spaceport. Nervous glances and speechless looks flitted between them as medics patched their wounds. Lydia barely let out a whimper as they wrapped her broken forearm. Sierra squeezed her other hand in silence, not knowing what to say. Too numb to think, brain stalling from shock. Everyone hugged, free from the formality that normally restrained them. Even Sierra’s father stepped past his aides and held her for a minute, setting off mixed and unexplainable emotions. Her father so rarely showed such vulnerability or care. It felt good to put her arms around him, to have his arms around her. But it felt long overdue, and fleeting, and slightly uncomfortable.
The bodyguards loaded everyone in open-air jeeps and hurried them back to the spaceplane. Once aboard, it took only a few minutes to take off. The plane’s powerful vertical engines thrust them straight up, then tilted as they curved into the cloudy night sky, reflecting orange and tan light from the city below.
More engines kicked on at the rear of the plane and squished Sierra back into her seat. Out the window, the clouds disappeared, the roar of passing air quieted, the shaking of her seat stilled. Gravity vanished. Stars appeared—an endless field of them. Sierra felt her shoulders relax. Tension faded. Thoughts of death receded.
At the front of the cabin, her father and mother and some political aides discussed reports from the Confed. She heard the name “Defenders of Glory” tossed around a handful of times. She ignored them, sinking into a deep silence. It amazed and terrified her that anyone could choose to end their life like that—vaporized by an explosion that began a centimeter from their skin. Suddenly, her own life seemed so fragile. The air in her lungs could be emptied so easily. The endless beating of her heart could be stopped. Just a few shreds of shrapnel was all it would take . . .
In a few hours, they and their entourage of gunships had reached the spacebend gate just inside the system’s asteroid belt. Sierra went up to the cockpit to watch two gunships pick up speed, widen the gap between each other, and disappear one at a time through the massive mechanical ring. One moment, light reflected off the silver metal of a gunship. The next moment, it blinked out and was gone.
Then her family’s plane approached the giant ring, closer and closer until it swallowed them. When they passed through it, there was no flash, no noise, no sensation. Only a quick blurring of the stars, then pricks of light zipping by in arced lines.
The magnitude of the universe shrank to a spattering of beams blazing across the windshield.
* * *
When Sierra woke up, they were back in Carina. A journey across hundreds of lightyears would normally take weeks or months, but travelli
ng through the TransCarina Highway took only days with the gates at each nexus bunched so close together. In a few more days, they’d be back home, on Baha’runa. Life would go back to normal—at least, that’s what Sierra hoped.
For some reason, when she thought of her normal life—sipping holly on the lawn or going to parties with her friends in the capital—she felt sick, and her heart beat faster. Why did the thought of a normal life seem so strange now? So wrong?
She didn’t know. But she knew it was wrong. Something about it was wrong.
Competing voices spoke louder and louder in the silence of her brain. Her legs trembled restlessly. Her heart beat faster, faster, faster . . .
Until she realized what she needed to do.
The Scavenger
Chapter Fifty-Two
Davin, Strange, and Jai hovered over Sierra as she writhed under her restraints, eyes still closed and jaw working as if trying to speak. Strands of damp hair matted to her forehead and snaked down her cheek. Davin used a finger to push them away from her lips.
His heart surged in his chest, fueling his slack body through the exhaustion. His muscles and knuckles ached. His brain labored sluggishly, trying to think of what to do. There was nothing. They kept her hydrated with the IV, but they didn’t have the drugs to pull her out of it. At times, her unconscious stirring seemed as if she might be on the verge of waking up, but she never did. Even when they shook her or shouted her name. Even when Davin held her hand and talked to her when no one else was in the room.
Sometimes her thrashing and squirming petered out to stillness, like final, weak death throes. But she didn’t die either. It was as if she’d been trapped in a twilight zone between life and death.
Davin wondered why he felt such inner turmoil over this, like waves crashing back and forth in his chest. She was just a girl, one of a hundred billion in the galaxy. But she was more than just a girl. She could stop a massive war, save millions of lives from brutal deaths. There was more to it than that, yes. Davin felt it—that shot of panic in his heart when something happened. But he wouldn’t think about it. No point.
Sierra’s legs kicked, and her arms twitched, her head rolling around. The kicking became harder, her knees smacking into the the wall. Jai tightened the strap pinning her down at the thighs. Strange held Sierra’s head so her neck would stay straight. The twitching in her arms turned into steady shakes, like shivering. Her breathing picked up. It grew into gasps, big gulps of air every few seconds.
This was it. The numbness gripped Davin too strong to speak or move. Sierra was about to go. He knew it. Strange’s big, panicked eyes sliced up at Davin as if to ask what to do. Davin wanted to give a command, to calm their nerves, but his own nerves were frozen solid.
Then it stopped. All Sierra’s movement ceased. She visibly relaxed. Her breathing quieted. Her hands floated upward, free from the restraints. Davin watched and waited, staring until his dry eyes forced him to blink.
Then a strong shiver cascaded down Sierra from the back of her neck to her legs. Her eyes burst open. She let out a long, deep breath as if she’d been holding it for ages. Her hands shot down to her restraints. Davin saw the confusion on her face, the panic. She had no idea where she was.
He grabbed her hands and held them tight. “You’re alright! You’re alright!” A measured flow of relief washed through him, like a dam letting only a steady stream through.
Sierra calmed, still breathing heavily. Her wild eyes tamed and turned to Davin. They probed him as if searching the deepest core of his being. It looked as if she had traveled lightyears and lifetimes and swung back like a boomerang to her body.
“Earth,” she sighed through ragged breaths. “We need to go to Earth.”
The Minister of Arms
Chapter Fifty-Three
Carina Arm, on the planet Baha’runa . . .
Morvan descended the steps of the murky, circular, theater-style Strategic Command room. Jarus Vyne, his chief organizer, and Payson Reeger, lead researcher for the Ministry of Arms, stepped inside after him and flanked either side of the main entrance. A handful of analysts and officers stood around workstations at various levels overlooking the impressive holographic display in the center of the room. Two engineers stood under a slowly rotating holo of a troop carrier spacecraft—one of the newer models—pointing at some piece and discussing it. Quiet murmuring scattered through the cavernous, windowless space and blended together.
“Give me the room,” Morvan declared in full voice.
Voices paused, and faces looked up. The engineers, eyes covered by DigiView goggles, turned their heads. It was as if they hadn’t understood their superior.
“I said I need the room,” Morvan repeated. The news about Tanger’s message eliminated his usual preference for tact. “Please vacate and continue your work elsewhere.”
The various staffers and officers in the room swiped their projects onto data tabs, got up, and glided toward the exit. Quiet, inquisitive glances flittered between them, but no one dared vocalize their curiosity. Once the last straggling assistant stepped out, Vyne and Reeger closed the main doors and headed down to join Morvan on the holo deck.
“Tanger contacting us like this . . .” Reeger muttered and shook his head. “Must be pretty damn important.”
“Especially risking a video message,” Vyne replied.
“Let’s find out,” Morvan said, silencing them.
The minister tapped a few buttons, and the hovering display of the spacecraft blinked out. In seconds, a new image replaced it: calm eyes, an officer’s mustache, upraised collar around a sinewy neck, black shoulder straps with silver lining. Tanger’s huge face loomed above them, calm yet urgent.
“Minister.” Tanger’s voice resonated in the mostly empty space, the special ops leader measuring his words carefully. “The vessel we’ve been tracking has changed course. Look at this.”
The holo shifted to a field of stars. Some glowed purple, indicating spacegated systems. A light blue line beginning near the Pelican Nebula zigzagged upward toward Sagittarian space.
“This was their projected gate path as of a few days ago,” Tanger said in a professionally even voice. “But their course has changed.”
Another line, this one bright blue, appeared beside the lighter one, snaking up a different direction.
“It isn’t just a one- or two-gate diversion,” Tanger said. “They’ve gone four nexus gates on this new path. They’ve shifted course.”
Morvan stepped back to take in the full array, struggling to recall the minutiae of Orionite geography. The new direction gave him pause. It looked like . . .
“A few more gates and they’ll be in Confed territory,” Tanger said, finishing Morvan’s thought. “I can’t be certain about their new destination, but if they were headed to Earth, they would follow exactly the gate path they’re on now.”
The realization came instantly. Morvan knew what they were doing. Veins bulged in his temple. Teeth ground in his mouth. “The TransCarina Highway,” he whispered. Falco’s girl was cleverer than she looked. She knew the one way to fast-track herself back into Carina, the one way to get in without being noticed.
Vyne and Reeger glanced at him but said nothing. Tanger’s face returned in the holo display.
“I will continue to pursue the targeted vessel and inform you of any major developments. If the target is headed for Earth . . . Please advise.”
The recorded message blinked out.
Morvan crossed his arms. His mind raced, but he tamed it. No need to panic. Any weakness could be remedied, any move met with a countermove.
“Vyne,” he said in a staccato note. “Get a message to Tanger. If Sierra’s headed to Earth, tell him to apprehend her there. Alive. Kill the Orionites. Tell him to contact me the moment both of these are accomplished.” He looked at Reeger. “I need you to find out who else knows Sierra is alive. I trust you know what to do with them.”
Reeger pursed his already thin lips and nodd
ed in sober recognition.
Morvan strode back up the aisle toward the exit, jaw tight. “We need to finish what we started, gentlemen,” he said. “Sierra Falco has evaded us long enough.”
The Transapien
Chapter Fifty-Four
Sagittarius Arm, on the planet Upraad . . .
The two transapien commanders, Maxwell and Rumaya, stood at the edge of the palace landing platform, looking down on the city encrusted against the rocky canyon and the river below. Maxwell’s hands perched on his hips, less for comfort than out of lifelong habit. Old habits died hard, even when he was no longer made of flesh and blood.
Across the chasm, his troops set up the low-altitude aerial defense perimeter, while a few of his engineers walked around the inside of the huge, upside-down-mushroom-shaped firing dishes of the high-altitude laser array. Inspecting. Checking. Double-checking. Testing. Six firing dishes had been planted around the palace and center of Canyon City, where most of Upraad’s sparse population had already gathered.
“Commoners,” the Sagittarians called them. In Carina, they called such people “laborers.” Grimy hands and homemade, handed-down clothing. Crude, greasy guns held on the shoulders of the boys and the elderly by strands of old leather or rope tied to both ends. Able-bodied men and women carried glossy, powerful foreign assault rifles—a terrible mismatch. They set up machine gun posts on ledges and stacked gravel bags against windows inside their burrowed homes. Vain efforts, if they knew the fight that was coming to them. A fight Maxwell had to lead with two hundred of the galaxy’s finest soldiers, plus a few thousand quarry-hardened but untrained fighters, ten thousand other useless weapon carriers, and an incalculable mass of frightened civilians.
Behind the palace, a coarse mountain range sprawled for dozens of kilometers. A land assault would not come from that way. And his Skyshield guns would prevent landers from coming down on top of them, at least as long as they remained functional. That meant the land assault would come from across the canyon, a relatively flat stretch as far as the eye could see.
Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series Page 28
