Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  What other explanation fit all the pieces?

  “Could the broadcast not just as easily have come from one of the raknoth?” Pryce asked.

  “I can think of at least four that are hungry for our asses,” Jarek said. “Maybe they’re trying to shake you guys up.”

  “I think I would have felt the difference,” Haldin said, “but I guess we can’t be sure what Michael just experienced until we can ask him. Unless …” He turned a questioning look to Rachel.

  She shook her head. “I’d rather not burn his glyphs just so we can try to meddle in there. For all I know, it could make things worse for him.”

  Haldin held back whatever it was he seemed to want to say. “Then I guess we wait.”

  Rachel rested her hand over Michael’s and was settling in to do just that when the base’s orange alarm lights pulsed to life—thankfully without the obnoxious buzzing sounds she’d heard them make in the past.

  Maybe they weren’t going to have to wait that long after all.

  They all shared a concerned look. Nelken and Daniels both looked entirely too surprised for her liking.

  “Sloan.” Nelken said the word like a curse.

  It was only then Rachel realized Sloan hadn’t followed his fellow commanders here.

  Daniels strode briskly over to the intercom. Before she touched the small box, it went live with a crackle and what sounded like a microphone being jostled or handed off.

  There was a brief silence, and then Sloan’s voice sounded from the speakers, steady but urgent.

  “Attention: we’ve received reports that Newark and Jersey City have fallen under bombing runs by Overlord forces. The commanders ask that you proceed to the main commons for an emergency briefing. Please do not panic. So far, reports indicate that these attacks appear to be minor. Briefing begins in five minutes. That is all.”

  The box gave a sharp click and went silent, leaving them all staring at each other in quiet shock.

  “Is it just me,” Jarek said, “or did Dick just go rogue?”

  Nineteen

  Even without the annoying alarm lights and the panicked Resistance agents scampering to and fro as Jarek and the others emerged from medical, Jarek would have known something was wrong solely by the tension in the guards’ stances outside of the Red King’s cell down the hall.

  He gave them a courteous nod as he neared the cells with Rachel and the others on his tail. The guards were too preoccupied to notice, chattering as they were about why a disheveled Nelken and Daniels had stormed out of medical a minute after Sloan had made a critical announcement speaking for them.

  It all smelled a bit like the beginnings of disorder in the ranks.

  “You got anything, Al?” Jarek murmured.

  “Scanning what local chatter there is,” Al said in his earpiece. “It doesn’t sound good, sir.”

  Jarek stepped aside to let a few desperate looking scramblers claw past him in the narrow hallway and took the moment to check on the others behind him.

  The Enochians were calm, ready. Neither Haldin nor Johnny could’ve been much older than twenty, but they’d clearly seen their share of tense situations. Pryce looked considerably more fidgety, but that wasn’t so unusual for him. Rachel, on the other hand, looked like she was moments away from either catatonia or a violent explosion, which was understandable enough.

  She didn’t need this right now, not while Michael was still in the woods. Then again, if Sloan’s message had been any indication, they might all be finding themselves right back in those woods alongside Michael shortly.

  The traffic cleared, and Jarek squeezed between the guards only to nearly run into Alaric as the old Resistance fighter lumbered out of the cell two doors down from the Red King.

  Alaric wasn’t exactly a spring chicken on the best of days, but he looked a couple decades past his normal surly stoicism as he turned his back to the wall and slumped down to his haunches.

  It wasn’t a great leap to figure why. That cell must’ve been where they were keeping Mosen, the epitome of wayward sons (if by “wayward” you meant homicidal maniac).

  Jarek pulled to a halt beside Alaric. “You guys go on. I’ll catch up.”

  Haldin continued on without complaint, Johnny and Pryce on his tail. Rachel met his eyes and hesitated. He wanted to say something witty or comforting, but she dropped his gaze and moved on before he could think of a single useful word.

  Jarek turned back to Alaric, who resolutely avoided looking his way.

  “You coming to the team meeting, old timer?”

  Alaric gave a disinterested grunt.

  Jarek looked at the door beside them. “Is he awake?”

  Another grunt, possibly one of confirmation. Then, “Is Michael?”

  “He was. It wasn’t pretty, but he’s tranqued for now. You got a plan for Seth?”

  Alaric finally met his eyes with a hard, tired stare.

  It went on silently for several seconds before Jarek finally looked away. “Right …”

  He tried a few times to add to the statement but couldn’t find the right words.

  What was there to say? Sorry Zar’Golga the Overlord twisted your son into a total psychopath until he was willing to kill his mom—your wife. Maybe he’ll be super happy you stole him from his evil master and you two can be best friends forever now.

  Yeah. Right.

  Jarek wasn’t sure why he felt the need to say anything at all. Sure, he didn’t like to see Alaric suffering, but since when had he been the one to help people with problems that didn’t involve marauders in need of a cold sword through the heart? If anyone in their ragtag band was qualified to be dolling out psychological aid, it sure as hell wasn’t him.

  But here he was, and something told him that before the day was over, they might be needing Alaric the Father of the Resistance instead of Alaric the slumping sulk. He was about to say something to that effect when Alaric spoke up.

  “Guess I won’t be making it back to Deadwood after all.”

  He suppressed a reflexive Well not with that attitude, you won’t! as well as the following urge to tell Alaric that maybe he would make it and who knew?

  Now wasn’t the time to coddle. Alaric Weston didn’t need coddling.

  “Look, you heard what Sloan said. I think the shit’s about to hit, and I think it’s gonna paint the walls in here just as shitty as the ones out there.”

  Alaric’s brow crinkled, and his lip might have even twitched. “Your point?”

  “Let’s try caution this time, sir,” Al said quietly in Jarek’s ear.

  Jarek dropped on his haunches beside Alaric to speak more quietly.

  “You missed out on today’s lesson with the class, so I’ll give you the highlights. You’ve already heard how dangerous these rakul are. You won’t be surprised to hear the commanders are a bit skeptical and more than a bit upset at the idea of joining hands with the raknoth to fight an enemy they have no real reason to believe even exists.”

  “And we do?” Alaric asked.

  It was a fair question, but also one Jarek had asked himself more than enough times in the past hours to know his answer.

  “I trust Rachel. And what you don’t know is that Michael just had some kind of telepathic episode and told us that ‘they’ are coming. Three guesses on who ‘they’ are, but hell if Sloan is gonna listen. Whatever’s happening out there, things are about to get a whole lot tenser around here, and I’m pretty sure he has zero intention of not Dicking up any attempt to prepare for what he figures are fairy tale monsters.”

  Alaric was watching him closely now. “Your point?”

  Jarek spread his hands. “My point is that you’re Alaric Fucking Weston, man. You’re the last guy in this rat maze anyone would expect to even think about buddying up with the raknoth, and you’re probably the only guy they’ll be willing to even consider hearing it from.” He pointed in the direction of the common room where the troops would be marshalling now. “I know this is a shitty t
ime, but those people are going to need someone to rally around when the cat gets out. They’re gonna need Alaric Fucking Weston, and the sooner the better. So what do you say? Let’s go see what the fuss is out there.”

  Alaric’s gaze had shifted to Mosen’s cell door as Jarek spoke, and now he refused to meet Jarek’s eye. He said nothing, but something had changed in his expression. Good or bad, Jarek wasn’t quite sure, but Alaric had clearly heard what he’d had to say at least.

  Jarek rose from his haunches. “You do what you gotta do, old timer.”

  Alaric said nothing, and Jarek didn’t wait around to see if that would change.

  “Surprisingly tactful, sir,” Al said as Jarek turned down a now mostly empty hallway toward the common room.

  And yet unsuccessful.

  He got it—Alaric was going through some heavy shit—but that was exactly why Jarek was hoping the old cowboy would giddyup and take control of his life. He needed the Resistance, and the Resistance needed him. Couldn’t Alaric see that?

  “You tried, sir,” Al said as if reading his mind.

  “Yeah. The diplomat. That’s me.”

  “Alaric may yet come around, sir. And it’s going to take more than diplomacy to get these people on board with an alliance,” Al said. “If this is Zar’Golga’s work, he couldn’t have picked a worse time. Or better, depending on your perspective.”

  That was for damn sure.

  Al hadn’t found anything meaningful in his scan of local broadcasts, but Jarek thought the message was clear enough: Come out and let us kill you, or we’ll just reboot the Catastrophe and finish killing everyone else instead. Do what we want or we’ll hurt people: the operational foundation for any bully or dictator worth their salt. How could anyone say no to that?

  But why now?

  If Zar’Golga wanted to flush the Resistance out, why hadn’t he resorted to these measures in the past? As far as Jarek had seen, the raknoth had treated the Resistance with all the caution one gave an irritating fly—swatting it away and forgetting it existed until it bothered them again.

  Maybe it wasn’t the Resistance Zar’Golga was after at all. A pang of guilt down his throat, into his chest. What if it was him and the others Zar’Golga was after? What if this was his retaliation for their slipping through his fingers back in Philly that morning? Or maybe it had something to do with Alton confronting Zar’Golga about the rakul.

  It didn’t matter. They’d survived, and if the crazy bastard wanted blood for it, all they could do now was try to stop him.

  Ahead, the common room was a dull buzz of voices. When he entered, the space was teeming with enough activity to give even someone who’d spent his life in a skintight exosuit a twinge of claustrophobia.

  It didn’t take long to spot Rachel, Pryce, Lea, and the two Enochians in the far corner, padded from the rest of the crowd by a few feet of space and a liberal handful of wary stares. And there was Sloan, standing at the open center of the crowd like a shepherd gathering his flock.

  Nelken and Daniels were at his flanks, speaking to him with tense expressions. There were too many voices in the room for Fela’s sensors to pick out what they were saying, but Sloan resolutely avoided their eyes and looked ahead at the gathering crowd, his expression smug and supreme.

  “Looks like things are off to a great start,” Jarek mumbled as he began scooting, shuffling, and—here and there—pushing his way through the dense crowd toward the reject corner, doing his best to ignore the several dozen open stares and murmurs that followed him along the way.

  “No Alaric,” Pryce said when Jarek joined their corner huddle.

  “We’ll see.” Jarek reached over to pat Rachel’s back.

  She looked anemic, and when he touched her, she jumped as if she hadn’t quite noticed him there.

  He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

  It had been a long, long few days for all of them.

  Sloan seemed content to wait as Daniels and Nelken continued their whispered one-way conference with him, which either meant that the attacks had paused for now or that Sloan was more concerned with this little game of his than he was with the innocent civilians dying out there for no reason.

  The gathered Resistance members waited, anxiety eroding their obedience until it felt like the room would detonate at one wrong word.

  Was that what Sloan wanted?

  Finally, Nelken ceased talking to Sloan and held up a hand for silence, which fell almost immediately.

  “As Commander Sloan has already informed you,” he said in his best commander’s voice, “there have been multiple bombings reported in our nearby cities. Overlord forces appear to be working together with the Reds to systematically cover Newark and Jersey City.”

  “What’re we gonna do?” came a voice from the crowd.

  “What can we do?” another voice cried.

  Daniels and Nelken traded a glance that said they were wondering the same thing. Sloan only waited.

  “The attack has paused at the moment,” Nelken said, “but it seems likely they’ll return. So far, it’s been limited to low-potency IEDs dropped from passing ships. Assuming they aren’t holding anything more lethal in store, it will take them a long while to cover a large enough area to threaten widespread casualties.”

  “We’ll start by deploying more scouts to better establish the enemy’s trajectory,” Daniels said. “From there, we’ll decide where we can most effectively deploy our forces to intercept. You all know as well as we do that we have limited means to deal with aerial attacks, but we’ll use what we have to the best of our ability. More importantly, we’ll do anything and everything we can to help our people out there.”

  Murmurs.

  Nelken stepped forward to take the lead. “Whether or not we’re able to counter these attacks, it falls to us to support those affected however we can. At nightfall, we’ll send out teams to help survivors and potential targets alike find shelter, and—”

  “Shelter where?” someone called. “Where’s left to hide?”

  Several more questions and protests followed on the back of that one, blurring together into a jumbled mess of voices as the tangible, frantic energy slithering its way through the crowd grew, strengthening its hold on the room.

  Nelken and Daniels called for quiet. Behind them, Sloan was still silent. The little weasel looked like he was thinking about doing something stupid or underhanded. Probably both.

  “The situation is dire,” Nelken said, nearly shouting now to be heard over the persistent murmurs and whispers, “but we will keep our heads and get through it. We’re Resistance, remember? We’re here to fight the hard fights, to stand up to those no one else will stand up to.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” Sloan asked, his nasally voice not as strong as Nelken’s or Daniels’ but loud enough to be heard through the room nonetheless.

  Nelken and Daniels looked back at their counterpart. Nelken’s back was to Jarek, but the look on Daniels’ face was that of someone who’d just realized the pet snake perched behind them was in fact a venomous viper that had no qualms whatsoever with striking them dead.

  “Sloan—”

  “Because earlier,” Sloan said, “it sounded an awful lot to me like you were thinking about standing beside those alien bastards, not against them.”

  More whispers rippled through the crowd, pressure building like a sealed pot of boiling water.

  Sloan watched his fellow commanders smugly. The slimy Dick had finally found a spine. Too bad it’d had to happen right when it was liable to cause a riot.

  “Richard,” Nelken said, his voice low enough that most of the crowd wouldn’t hear and that Jarek would have missed it if not for Fela’s sensors. “Now is not the time for—”

  “That’s right,” Sloan called out to the crowd that was suddenly about a light breeze away from a collective conniption. “You’ve probably all been wondering what we were meeting about in private this afternoon.” He strolled around N
elken and Daniels as he spoke, putting himself between them and the crowd.

  Nelken looked to be very seriously considering closing Sloan’s mouth with his clenched fists. He must’ve realized doing so would only worsen the situation, though, because he, along with Daniels, only glared at the back of Sloan’s head as the rogue commander pointed a finger toward Jarek and the others.

  “We were hearing from them. From the two freaks who wrecked our base just three days ago and their newest batch of alien freak friends.”

  “Whoa!” Jarek cried. “Who knew you were such a closet bigot, Dick?”

  Rachel kicked his leg in what was presumably a signal for him to shut the hell up, but too many heads had already turned.

  Sloan just sneered at him. The man wasn’t a complete idiot. He knew the damage was already done.

  Jarek looked from the mass of heads watching him to Nelken and Daniels, who looked as unsure as he was about how to catch the live impact grenade Sloan had just lobbed them.

  Nothing to do now but eat it.

  “Look,” he said, turning to face the bulk of the crowd, “we’ve seen a lot of shit today. The kind of shit that two-thirds of your commanders thought might be worth thinking about and”—he waved a hand—“I don’t know, verifying before we decided to induce a base-wide stroke epidemic.”

  “What’s he talking about?” voices asked the commanders.

  “Who are those two kids?” others called. “What are they doing here?”

  “As Mr. Slater so eloquently put it,” Daniels called over the crowd, “we’ve learned a good deal of new information about the raknoth threat this afternoon. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve learned that, after the incident with the nest device three days ago, the raknoth themselves may no longer be the greatest threat this planet faces.”

  “Yes,” Sloan said, a kind of frantic fervor burning in his eyes now. “The rakul! The conveniently absent monsters that a pair of aliens”—he pointed at Haldin and Johnny—“learned about from their own raknoth friend. What’s not to trust?”

  Dozens of suspicious eyes turned to study Haldin and Johnny.

  Shit. Jarek needed to say something, anything to disrupt the manic idiot. But there was too much. Too much to explain, and too little patience left in those accusatory stares.