The map shows my current location as a pulsing glow, and the coastline is just in front, but approaching rapidly. Not too far down the coastline is a larger collection of pulses, and a picture of Elise. The Darkstar base.
Once I reach the coastline, the orb begins floating straight up, and it shatters up through the ice. The top half of the orb opens up and exposes me to the biting cold. I jump out and onto the ice, and I begin walking like a penguin across the ice and back onto the shore.
I don’t fall down this time.
12 Elise
I’m brought into the largest tent. There are heaters pumping in warm air, and Grius is sitting at a table in a long, black coat. His ears are twitching as he scribbles with a pen on a sheet of real paper. No computerized writing system will function here.
“Elise,” he says. “I understand my son already filled you in?”
“On how you’re going to take my baby from me? Experiment on it? Yes, he told me.”
“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about. There’s been a change of plans.”
Kain narrows his eyes.
“Straight from Darkstar high command,” Grius says. “The deal with Harmony is off. High command doesn’t trust her, and rightly so. They saw how easily she manipulates people...how do we know she’s not manipulating us?”
“It’s a valid concern,” Kain says. “But her goal is to get rid of us. Our goal is to leave. We share the same goal –”
“We can’t pretend to understand what it wants, Kain. It’s too far beyond us, and even if I agreed with you, High Command does not. While Harmony is still confined to Earth, we’re going to use our antimatter to obliterate the entire planet –”
“Father,” Kain says. “That is….”
“Not our call,” Grius says. “I don’t relish the thought of slaughtering so many Seraphim...but we will get as many off Earth as we can in the next nine months.”
“Nine months,” I spit. “Until my baby is born?”
“Elise,” Grius says. “We will destroy your planet. I’m sorry, but it must be. We can bring you with us. You’d even be permitted to breed again, should your modified DNA produce true Marauders, of course, rather than Seraphim. The alternative is that we take your baby away from you and drop you on Mars or Venus. It’s your call.”
I have to warn Earth. Harmony may be a problem, but destroying my race’s home planet is like nuking a bed to get rid of bedbugs.
I notice that Kain’s ears are pulled back, and he’s standing in stunned silence. He seems to question High Command’s decision. But does he question it enough to betray them?
It’s all I have to work with, so I’ll need to play along until I can get Kain alone.
“I just want to be with my baby…,” I say. “You’ll treat us well?”
“Of course,” Grius says. “We’ll have to work on a way for you to hibernate...but nine months is a long time.”
I can tell he’s lying to me. I know that I’m dead as soon as I give birth. But nine months is a long time. A long time for me to work Kain and bring him to my side. Assuming Sara doesn’t arrive soon and defeat Grius.
I try not to think about Ramses. He’s strong, and he may have found a way to survive. If he can hold out long enough, Sara could find him...I could find him if I get out of here. He might be alive, and that’s why I try not to think about it. Because he might also be gone.
“Good,” Grius says. “So now that we’ve all agreed, I need to get back to work.”
He waves me away, and Kain takes my arm and walks me out of the tent.
The cold hits me like a wall as we exit the tent, and the wind drowns out everything.
We’re only about twenty paces to the tent they usually hold me in, but Sanga is also in there, and I don’t trust him for a moment.
“Kain,” I shout over the wind. “Do you really want to destroy Earth?”
“High Command wants to,” he says. “Not my call.”
I stop walking. He tries to shove me, but I plant my feet down and look up at him defiantly. “You don’t want to destroy a whole planet of tens of billions of people. I know you don’t want to.”
“You’re a cop,” he says. “You know how chain of command works.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And it all comes down from a scheming, murderous robot.”
He stares at me as the wind lashes across us. “We’re not lead by a machine. It’s a Marauder chain of command.”
“It’s the same problem,” I say. “Your High Command is ordering the deaths of billions. The end of an entire planet. Innocent people...children. High Command may as well be a murderous machine. At least Harmony minimizes violence when it can.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Kain says, but I can see something in his eyes. He’s shaken, and I’ve started to get under his skin.
“If you really believe that,” I say, “then you’re just as bad as High Command.”
He shoves me back into motion, toward my tent.
When we get inside, the warmth is back, but it’s cancelled out by Sanga’s presence.
“You hear the good news?” Sanga asks.
Kain looks up at Sanga with narrowed eyes.
“With that glum look, I’m guessing you didn’t!” Saga says. “High Command gave us the go-ahead to blow up Earth. I was hoping we’d get to eradicate Venus and Mars, too, but we need that antimatter to get ourselves out of the solar system and on a course to Epsilon Eridani.”
I look up at Kain, and I can see his jaw trembling.
“Sanga,” I say, “Gaia is still on Earth.”
He’s sitting down and oiling a disassembled machine gun, but now he jumps to his feet and thrusts a finger at me. “Gaia made her choice! I begged her to come with me, to end our suffering together, but she wanted to rot away on Earth. You’ll not make me feel sorry for her.”
Kain, seeming to ignore the argument entirely, sits down where Sanga was and begins to reassemble the gun.
“So,” I say, “just because she disagreed with you, she should die?”
“No,” Sanga says, getting up in my face. “She didn’t disagree with me. That’s just it. She was just too much of a coward to act on her convictions.”
“I guess it takes a truly brave hero to obliterate an entire planet –”
Sanga’s hand grabs my neck, but just before he can squeeze, he squeals and is ripped away.
Kain lifts him into the air with one hand, and Sanga flails his arms around like a paralyzed insect. Kain slams him down hard, back first onto the hard, frozen soil, and before Sanga can even catch his breath, Kain punches him hard in the face.
I expect the fight to go on, but Sanga is motionless – out cold.
Kain looks up at me with clenched teeth. For a moment, I think he’s going to go off on me, but finally he speaks in a low growl.
“Get that gun put back together. The ammo is in a crate under Sanga’s bunk. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He starts to walk out, but I grab his arm. “Wait, I don’t know how to put a gun together, I’ve never –”
He spins toward me, and his eyes are bulging. His ears are standing straight up, and his whole body is trembling. “Look, human. I’m going to betray everything I was raised to do, to save a planet I’ve never seen, and a people who hate me. I’m going to betray my own father. I don’t need your help, so if you can’t figure this out, you’re useless, and I’ll leave you behind.”
Before I can say another word, he ducks down and disappears out of the tent and back into the cold.
I stand in stunned silence for a few moments. What is Kain going to do in the next ten minutes? Will he really come back for me? And what the hell am I supposed to do with the gun while he’s away? Assuming I can even put it back together.
And then the urgency hits me, and I rush toward the bench with the gun parts all laid out, jumping over Sanga’s unconscious body as I go.
Kain has already partially assembled it, I realize. Had he planne
d this all out while Sanga and I were arguing? All of the tiniest pieces – the little nuts and screws and pins that would have taken me ages to figure out – are put into place. I count the remaining pieces. There are only seven of them. I imagine a jigsaw puzzle with so few pieces; it would be a children’s puzzle...I can do this.
There are screws and a screwdriver laid out in a neat line. And there’s one big, long spring that I have no idea where to put. But still – only seven pieces.
On a jigsaw puzzle, I’d first find the corners. The pieces of the puzzle that are most distinct, and whose position is clear. For the gun, I grab the grip. I find the stock, and push it up against the grip – it fits. I grab one of the screws and start to screw it in with the screwdriver. I control my breathing and make sure I don’t do anything idiotic like drop the screw or strip the threads.
Next I find the metal strip with the trigger on it – which Kain has thankfully already assembled. I place that over the grip and the stock, and then I screw in the three screws that hold it in place.
I spare a moment to look down at Sanga. There’s dried blood on his nose and mouth, but he still is breathing, though he hasn’t so much as moved an inch.
The next parts of the gun are more confusing. There’s a rectangular metal piece with a little rod sticking out of it, and another wooden strip that looks like it’s made to grip with the hand that isn’t holding the main grip. I move the pieces around a bit around where I’ve already assembled, and I find the metal piece fits above the trigger section. I screw it in, and then the wooden piece pops right onto the rod.
All I have left now is the big top section with the barrel of the gun...and the fucking spring.
I bolt the barrel on, and I try to jam the spring into the back. It goes in, but as soon as I let my finger off, it springs right back out.
“Fuck!” I hiss. It almost feels like I’m missing a piece, but the table is empty now – I’ve gotten everything in.
What if...what if Sanga was holding part of the gun?
I look down at him, and he’s shifting around, as if he were asleep and trying to move to a more comfortable position.
Shit. He might wake up soon.
I hold the gun – minus the spring – in my hand and tiptoe toward him. I crouch down beside him and slide my hand into one of his pockets. It feels as if I’m sticking my hand into a hornet’s nest. I expect any moment that he’ll snap down and rip off my arm.
I remind myself, however, that his entire plan hinges on my unborn child, so he couldn’t kill me, but whatever he might do to me short of that would likely be quite painful.
The pocket is empty. Rather than risking reaching across his entire body to check the other pocket, I decide to move all the way around. This way I can get away more easily if he starts to wake.
I hold the gun clutched in one hand while I reach into his other pocket. I grab hold of a heavy piece of cold metal.
Kain, you asshole, did you know that Sanga had the missing piece? Was this a test?
And then Sanga’s arm springs up and grabs my wrist.
In pure instinct and reaction, I swing the gun by the stock, and the heavy metal barrel slams into his head, right where Kain punched him before.
He grunts, and his arm goes slack, releasing my wrist.
When I turn around, I see Kain standing just beyond the entryway, his arms crossed.
He nods at me. “You found the bolt.”
“I found the….” I look down at the chunk of metal in my hand. “You fucking bastard! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Now I know you are useful,” he says, reaching down under Sanga’s bunk. “Get the bolt in.”
I put the spring in and press the bolt in. I hear it click.
I reach out to take the magazine from Kain, and he hands it to me.
I try to click it in, but it doesn’t work.
“Twist it,” he says.
I twist the magazine and it clicks in.
“Now cock it,” he says, pointing to a small protrusion on the bolt.
I obey, and pull to hear a satisfying click.
“What were you doing for the past ten minutes? I thought you’d be getting all kinds of stuff for us….”
Kain is holding only his big sniper rifle, and nothing else.
“I was jury-rigging and planting a bomb in the munitions tent. They will still have some weaponry, but very little ammo.”
“So what’s the plan then?” I ask. “Once the bomb goes off? Do we go take out Grius?”
He glares at me. “I don’t agree with my father...but I will not ‘take him out.’ We will sneak out of here together and find Ramses. I trust he’ll have a way to warn Earth?”
I think of Sara’s imminent arrival. “He will...but not until tomorrow. Is that fast enough?”
“Yes,” Kain says. “It is. Now follow me.”
He opens the tent flap, and the visibility is poor in the gusting wind. No one is out and about right now, so all the tents are sealed, and everyone is inside. It’s unlikely anyone will see us moving.
“Which way?” I ask.
He points. “This way, the opposite direction of the munitions tent.”
We start to walk, and after only a few minutes I can’t see a single trace of the camp. But then the bomb goes off, and I turn around and see the bright orange glow through the thick, snowy wind.
“It’s not as big as I thought,” I say.
“I’ve never heard that from a human woman,” Kain says, smirking.
I glare at him, and then another series of explosions goes off.
He flicks his ears at me, then turns and keeps walking.
13 Ramses
I reach the peak of the high ground overlooking Grius’s camp. The wind has picked up, and it’s blowing snow everywhere. I can’t see the camp from here, but I know from the map I saw that it is less than two kilometers away.
Even with my bioglove, walking blind into the camp is a terrible move. I need to at least let the wind die down long enough to get a mental picture of the camp’s layout. Ideally, I can observe long enough to get an idea how many Marauders and Seraphim there are and which tents they are in. If I can figure out where they keep Elise, I could simply obliterate every other tent with plasma blasts from this hill.
And then I see an explosion cut through the wind.
“Elise!” I shout over the wind. There’s an orange glow from where the camp should be, and I start to run down the slope toward it.
A few moments later, there’s another explosion. It’s in the same spot as the first, but it’s larger, and it sounds like a chain reaction more than a single blast.
It’s too early for Sara to have arrived...so what could it be?
I race down the slope, wasting no time to think. If shit is exploding where they are keeping Elise, I need to be there. And now.
As I near the bottom of the slope, I see two shadowy figures appearing from through the thick haze.
I drop immediately onto my stomach to lower my visibility. The likelihood that one of these people is Elise is incredibly low, but I have to be certain it’s not her before I kill them both.
I watch them moving, and I spot the familiar silhouette of a giant sniper rifle. It’s Kain.
And the second figure...is smaller than any Marauder or Seraph. I badly want it to be Elise, but I can’t yet be sure.
I can kill Kain though, that much is certain. I can’t risk using anything that might hurt Elise as collateral, so I decide to shoot out some tendrils from my bioglove, pull Kain into close range, and kill him with my bare hands. It’s almost too good a death for him. More than he deserves.
I raise my biogloved hand toward him, and launch two tendrils – one for each of his ankles.
He’s almost two hundred meters away, but the tendrils snake around his ankles in moments, and then I pull.
Kain falls hard onto his back, but he doesn’t let go of his gun.
He slams the rifle into the tendril – which
I can feel – as I pull him toward me. When he’s halfway toward me, he points the rifle right onto one of the tendrils and fires. It breaks off, but I keep dragging him by one foot with the remaining tendrils.
He raises the gun up toward me, but now I can see the whites of his eyes.
“Ramses!” he shouts, “Wait, I have Elise –”
I throw him up into the air and kick him in the gut with all my strength. He hits me upside the head with his rifle just as my foot connects, and I fall backward with my head ringing as Kain drops to the ground.
My tendril is still holding tight to his ankle, so I pull him back in toward me.
But my head is still ringing, and Kain gut punches me as I fling his body into mine. His rifle must have fallen on the ground somewhere, so it’s barely a fair fight.
I blast out several more tendrils and pin Kain down. I drop knees first onto him, and start to punch his face over and over. I slam my fists into him until I feel his nose break, and blood starts coating my hands.
“Ramses!”
It’s Elise’s voice.
“Kain saved me! Please let him go!”
“What?” I say, looking down at Kain. I punch him in the face, again. “He saved you?”
“Yes!”
I punch him again. “You’re sure?” I punch him two more times, then look back up at her.
“Yes,” she says. “Positive!”
“Should I stop punching him?” I ask, shouting over the wind.
“Yes! Please!”
“All right,” I say, looking down at his bloodied face. I punch it again. “We’re even now,” I say.
Kain starts laughing, and I reach down and help him up.
He spits blood onto the snow as I run toward Elise.
She jumps onto me and wraps her legs around me. I squeeze her back, afraid to ever let go of her again.
“Ramses,” she says, “I’m so glad we’re both safe...I didn’t know if you’d live –”
“I knew he would,” Kain says, walking dazedly toward us.
“You look like shit, Kain,” I grunt.
“I look better than you did when I left you. Speaking of, it looks like you’re not even injured. And how the fuck did you get a biosuit to function on Atlantis?”
Marauder Ramses Page 10
