Soldiers in very different body armor pushed through the opening into the corridor, firing as they went. They only managed to pick off a few of the Owl soldiers before getting perforated with bullets themselves. The scarred man flipped himself around to face Sierra and her handlers.
“Get her out of here!” he shouted. “Now!”
They clutched Sierra and pushed away from the locker wall, against the flow of the other Owl soldiers. The gunfire didn’t stop. Sierra’s heart hammered in her chest. Everything seemed to be happening so fast—blurringly fast.
Another strong crash put out the lights and sent them flying against the wall again—this time the opposite wall. Sierra didn’t have anyone to buffer her collision and smacked her head against a metal locker door. Pain flared through her skull and made reality lighter and hazier. The lights flicked back on, and the enemy soldiers were inside the corridor. Tiny orange lightning bolts ricocheted off the walls and sunk into body armor. Blood misted out the bullets’ entry points.
Sierra narrowed her eyes at one of the other side’s soldiers down the corridor and saw a small, squiggly symbol printed at the thigh. She recognized it, but it took a second to register. It was a Ringstone, the symbol of the True Religion. The attackers were Carinian! Her people!
“Breach in aft-port! Breach in aft-port!”
A gloved hand yanked her up and against an Owl soldier’s body. He held her tightly behind his extended cuff shield. More Owl soldiers gathered on both sides, putting their cuff shields together as a contiguous defense. Several joined together behind Sierra to shield her from that side as well. They waited, weapons up, as the gunfight raged down the corridor toward the front of the ship.
To the side, one of the unshielded Owl soldiers cried out, “Flashba—!”
An eardrum-splitting burst, accompanied by a bright flash, cut him off. Sierra’s ears instantly rang, muting all sounds around her to almost complete silence. Then a black canister flipped through the air and burst above their heads, creating a flash so shockingly bright it blinded Sierra entirely.
No sound. No sight. Only pain pulsing in her skull and eardrums and burning in her eyes. Muffled rumbling reverberated all around her. Sierra felt as helpless as an unborn child, thrashing about in total darkness, trembling with the fear of a stray bullet piercing her skin.
#
Sierra gasped awake in a cold, cave-like place. She was hyperventilating, still twitching at every sound and movement, mind wavering between the chaos of the Owl spaceship and this concrete cavern. Again, she found herself connected via plastic tubes to a hanging IV bag on one arm and some strange machine on the other, piping a creamy liquid under her skin. Plastic prongs poked into her nostrils from a tube stretched across her cheeks.
She only managed to paw at it a few seconds before two unfamiliar faces appeared over her—a man and a woman. The man, square-jawed and solidly built, looked vaguely amused by her frenzied terror. He captured her hands in his and pulled them away from the oxygen tube.
“Shh, it’s okay, Sierra,” he said in a mild voice. “You’re alright. Calm down. You’re alright.”
The other face, the woman, stared down at her with cool and unsympathetic indifference, as if Sierra was a sample under a microscope.
“What happened, sweetheart?” the man asked.
Sierra looked up at him silently, calming herself, breathing, thinking, re-centering. It felt like strands of herself had been whipping in the wind and now settled and drew together. Her memories were still a jumbled mess, but a story gradually came into focus in her mind.
“What happened, Sierra?” the man repeated. “What do you remember?”
The hardpings of bullets ricocheting off metallic walls still rang in her head. Shouts volleyed through the corridor. Alarm klaxons wailed long and deep.
“Owl,” Sierra pushed out. “I was on an Owl ship.”
The woman shot a sidelong glance at the man, but he kept his unblinking gaze on Sierra.
“That’s good. What happened to you? How did you get on the Owl ship?”
Sierra thought. Remembering was like trudging through thick, knee-deep mud.
“My yacht . . . was attacked,” she said. “They . . . they put me in a preserve bag. I woke up . . .” She had to swallow to moisten her dry throat. “I woke up on the Owl ship.”
The man seemed happy about something she said. “That’s good, Sierra. That’s very, very good. Do you remember what happened on the Owl ship?”
She closed her eyes to concentrate. So many images, sounds, feelings flurried in the vacuum of her mind like snowflakes in a storm. A new face came into view and stuck in her mind’s eye, slowly coming into focus. For a brief moment, Sierra found herself back in an Orionite clipper ship’s locker room, standing face to face with a boyishly handsome scavenger, older than her by five years or so. Her fingers touched his bristly cheek. Her gaze lingered on his caring eyes. She felt so close to him in that moment. Some amorphous force in her yearned for something she couldn’t quite comprehend, something lightyears beyond her grasp.
“Davin,” she whispered.
“What’s that?” the man asked.
Sierra opened her eyes. “Is Davin alright?” A building ache in her chest threatened tears. “Is he okay?”
The man looked confused. He turned to the woman. “Who the hell’s Davin?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “He’s the Orionite,” she whispered. “Captain of the vessel that picked her up.”
The man hung his head and let out a long sigh. “Oh, Sierra.” He looked up at her for a minute, frowning in obvious disappointment. “You gotta let him go, sweetheart.”
Sierra’s chest began to collapse in on itself. She felt so alone, so helpless in this place. Where was Davin? Where was her father? Or her mother? Tears welled from the bottom of her eyes.
“I don’t wanna give him up,” Sierra said in a small, frail voice.
“Any way we can speed this up?” the man asked the woman quietly. “Just force the memories in there? Replay ‘em over and over ‘til they stick?”
The woman shook her head subtly, preparing a syringe and bottle of some clear liquid. “You can’t just implant a memory. The brain will recognize it as foreign and reject it as soon as the subject wakes up, like forgetting a dream. She has to connect the dots herself, create those neural pathways in the brain. That’s the only way to make it stick.”
The man glanced at Sierra. “She gonna remember this?”
“No,” the woman said. “I’m keeping her brain in a languid state. She’ll forget this as soon as she falls asleep.”
The man glanced dismissively at Sierra one more time and then pushed away from her bed. She followed him as he walked across an artificially lit, windowless room to a touchscreen desk. He tapped at a digital keyboard for a minute. On the other side of the bed, in the corner of her eye, Sierra saw the woman puncture her IV tube with the syringe and inject something into it. It didn’t take long for fatigue to set in, followed by a strong drowsy feeling. But she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to know where she was. She wanted to know who these people were. She wanted to know if Davin was alright.
“Record video message for the Minister of Arms,” the man said as he straightened in front of a camera extended above the desk.
Even in her fading, semi-conscious state, Sierra realized the significance of those words. A distant, subdued urgency made her blink and move her fingers—anything she could do to stay awake.
“Listen, Ulrich, we’re doing our best over here,” the man said into the camera. “But . . .”
He shrugged defensively, and Sierra felt her eyelids getting impossibly heavy.
“I don’t think we can have her ready in nine days.” The man’s voice floated across the rippling waves of her consciousness, waning into the distance.
She struggled to hang on, to push her eyelids back up, to stay awake.
But she struggled in vain. A tranquil silence and stil
lness enveloped her as sleep absorbed her back into its never-ending folds of nothingness.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sagittarius Arm, on the planet Triumph . . .
Cristiana stormed out of the office wing of the Eagle embassy, narrowly avoiding a white-gloved servant carrying a tray of glasses and a crystalline bottle of water. The servant swerved to avoid her and shot her a nasty look as she passed. Cristiana didn’t care. She barreled onward through the immaculate hallway, adorned on either side by screens shifting between images of various prominent Eagle landmarks and lords—only lords, no matriarchs.
Stiff-backed guards with blazer spears flanked the interior doors at the front entrance. They eyed Cristiana as she paced feverishly around the spacious, marbled lobby, avoiding the plants and sitting areas and stone fountains.
His Lordship has no assignment for you at this time.
The words of the embassy’s deputy stuck in Cristiana like the sting of a blade. How dispassionate and dismissive they were! Like brushing off a servant who asked too many questions.
Cristiana felt silly now in nanoflex armor. Silly and stupid. She’d put on full battle dress to display her readiness, her willingness to go and serve Eagle. She was built to fight. Sitting here in the posh luxury of the embassy, she would rust faster than iron in salt water.
With one more gaze down the palatial main hallway, she decided it wasn’t worth fighting anymore and headed for the exit. Warm, Triumph air washed against her face when she stepped out the second set of glass doors and onto the terrace above the obsidian street. A few embassy personnel ate their midday meal at a stone table overlooking the hovertrams that hummed up and down the wide avenue. Cristiana made her way to the stone balustrade to watch the speedy hovercars weave around the plodding trams. She took deep breaths to slow her pulse and think about what to do.
Would this be her life now? Reduced to an idle tool in the utility cabinet, only used a handful of times before a newer, more improved version takes her place? It was a dreadful thought, made even more dreadful by the likelihood that the high point of her life—the Royal Tournament—had already passed her by.
The familiar clacking of armored boots against stone approached from behind her. She considered turning to look, but it would only be an embassy guard out for some air on a ten-minute break. Not for her.Of course not for her.
Then, lo and behold, a familiar, pretty-boy face stopped beside her—Larkin of Fox, Champion of Triumph, sporting the same shit-eating grin as he did during the Royal Showcase. He was dressed in a much more modest uniform than she figured he would be, only the golden pin of the Archer on his collar to signify his status as champion. He leaned an elbow on the balustrade, facing Cristiana.
“Just the Eagle I was looking for.”
Cristiana shifted to face him and crossed her arms. “Have you come to gloat?”
He put on a wounded expression. “Of course not. That’s the second time you’ve misjudged me.”
She shrugged. “I have a certain expectation of champions, I suppose.”
“Considering it was almost you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You shouldn’t,” Cristiana countered. “I hate myself.”
Larkin let out a raucous laugh. “I doubt that.” He eyed her up and down, then shoved away from the balustrade. “Come with me.”
“Go with you?” she repeated. “Go with you where?”
He strode—almost strutted—across the terrace and turned his head to shout back to her: “The Diamond Castle. Where else? The Grand Lumis has summoned us.”
Cristiana instinctively straightened, her pulse bouncing at the sound of those words. “The Grand Lumis?” She lifted the comm cuff on her forearm. “Why didn’t you hail me?”
Larkin wheeled around and walked backwards as he spoke. “Wanted to see how you’d healed up. Pretty well, it seems. Well enough to get back to work?”
“Hell yes,” she muttered and started after him with a bounce in her step.
#
In a surprisingly austere private study at the top of the central Diamond Castle spire, Cristiana stood with three others around the Grand Lumis’s desk, projecting a holo field into the air above it.
There had scarcely been any introduction. When the servant escorted the young warriors in, the holo field already glowed and flashed with the Grand Lumis and a grim-faced aide looking on. Cristiana’s heart fluttered anxiously with the proximity to Zantorian. But the Grand Lumis, arms crossed tightly over his chest, hadn’t seemed to grow any less dissatisfied since the Royal Showcase.
Cristiana sneakily wiped her moist palms against her pants and tried to concentrate her thoughts on the holodisplay. It showed a three-dimensional rendering of the Earthen city called Jerusalem—a large swathe of it, anyway. The voice of the Grand Strategos issued from the desk speakers, describing the situation on the ground.
“It changes every hour,” uttered the grizzled man’s voice from the desk. “Every time we update our map, something has shifted. So these positions and control borders are fluid.”
It clicked in Cristiana’s brain that he was talking about the blue- and orange-highlighted areas shading the three-dimensional city. Most of the places where the blue touched the orange were shaded with alternating blue and orange lines—the contested zones, Cristiana imagined.
“But as you can see,” the Grand Strategos continued in his grainy voice, “the rebels have now completely encircled the center of the city. They’ve surprised the Terrans with their numbers as well as their tenacity.”
The holo field shifted to a holovid from a rooftop looking down on a long horde of civilians carrying small arms and streaming down both sides of a street littered with burning autos. Hundreds of them. It shifted again to a hovercam’s view down on a number of rooftops near the downtown area where more armed, non-uniformed fighters had gathered in circles to burn the Terran Confederacy flag. It shifted again to fisheye-lensed security footage from inside the sparkling lobby of a fancy hotel. People crouched behind furniture and covered their heads as a swarm of masked fighters burst through the front doors and exchanged fire with suited guards across the open space.
When the holodisplay switched back to the map of the city, Cristiana wondered what this had anything to do with her. Why would the Grand Lumis summon her to this?
“But the situation is not as dire for the Terrans as it looks,” the Grand Strategos said. “Many of their security drones have been destroyed by ground-based rockets, but they still have air lanes into the center of the city for reinforcement and resupply runs. Their defenses all around the Old City are solid, designed for a ground assault precisely like this one. The rebels’ success will halt soon enough.”
“That’s what we thought yesterday,” Zantorian said in his rich, golden voice.
It was the first time Cristiana had heard him speak in person. A marrow-deep awe paralyzed her for a moment. She felt electrified but resolved not to show it.
“Yes, indeed, my lord,” the Grand Strategos replied. “But yesterday we didn’t know the numbers they boast. Our estimate from this morning sat at forty-five thousand, which is forty thousand more than anyone—including the Terrans—initially thought.”
“What is the Confed’s active troop count in Jerusalem?” Zantorian asked.
“Eighteen thousand,” the Grand Strategos answered. “Their losses are unknown, but they’ve been heavy. We estimate at least nine thousand.”
“But they’ve received ample reinforcements, yes?” the Grand Lumis’s aide asked.
“Yes, Master Aermo,” the Grand Strategos replied. “But it’s done little more than slow the rebels. They have too much opposition and too much ground to cover. The rebels can lose four times the number of fighters and still have enough to push forward.”
Larkin stepped forward to insert himself into the conversation. “What about ground-based combat vehicles?” he asked, looking at his tablet. “Our database indicates they should have hundreds of
UGVs in Jerusalem. Why aren’t they using them?”
“The first thing the rebels did was set up a massive perimeter of roadblocks around the urban center of Jerusalem. They hide behind the roadblocks and use armor-piercing rockets to fend off the UGVs.”
The holodisplay showed a video feed from outside one of the roadblocks—autos, tires, scrap metal, and sandbags piled up ten or fifteen feet. Rebel snipers poked their heads over the top for a few brief seconds at a time to fire a round, then ducked back behind cover. A heavily armored, six-wheeled vehicle rolled down the street toward it, but a pair of rockets zipped out of the smoky haze and created an ugly explosion blowing up the front nose of it.
“Have the Terrans considered orbital strikes yet?” Larkin asked.
“Not yet, from what our sources tell us,” the Grand Strategos said. “Tens of thousands of civilians remain inside the rebels’ perimeter. The Terrans will sacrifice them if they feel it’s necessary, but they haven’t arrived at that conclusion as of now.”
“In your opinion, Athanasi,” the Grand Lumis said to the Grand Strategos, “could the rebels have gotten this far of their own skill and abilities?”
“Eh, I assume you mean ‘without outside aid,’” the Grand Strategos said. “We have no evidence of foreign elements working with the rebels. But despite their lack of uniforms, they aren’t behaving like a mob of bomb-throwers. They work quickly. They move assets shrewdly. They use resources efficiently. They act like a professional fighting force. I would be shocked if theyaren’t being aided by some outside military or paramilitary.”
“Thank you, Athanasi,” Zantorian said. “That is all for now.”
“My lord,” the Grand Strategos replied with deference.
The holodisplay disappeared. The Grand Lumis looked up at Larkin, and then at Cristiana, letting the room remain in tense silence for a time.
“Cristiana of Eagle,” the Grand Lumis said. “I hope your tenure as warrior is more successful than the previous Eaglespawn who served me.”
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 17
