Shadows of Empyriad (The Empyriad Series Book 1)

by Josi Russell

  When they were out of sight, she finally turned from the window, casting her gaze around the crawler. The driver was a human, and there were at least twenty human soldiers from the Consolidated Terrene Leadership standing alertly at the front and back of the passenger area. An uneasy quiet rested over them. The rest of the group was Stracahn. There were about fifty of them. Mostly children and women. Two sets of Avowed sat stoically on the hard benches, one set on the first row and one set on the last. Zyn’dri saw that their hands were moving slightly. They were drawing tay’ren on their palms. Zyn’dri wished she were close enough to them to ask about the tay’ren, but there were four rows of Stracahn between her and the Avowed. Instead, she rested her forehead on the cold window.

  There was a steely light touching the sky. Low gray clouds hung over Yellowstone, cutting the mountains down to half their usual size. Zyn’dri could just make out a pair of trumpeter swans gliding between the snowy banks of the Madison River. How, on a day like this, could they be so serene?

  It was cold in the crawler, and she was glad for the thick Megalopolis Industries coat that blocked the chill for her. Most of the other Stracahn were wrapped in ragged quilts and worn clothes donated, Zyn’dri knew, by humans.

  Though Zyn’dri knew that the soldiers were there to protect her, she still felt a slash of fear when she looked at them.

  It was washed away by real terror when the crawler arrived at the big West gate, and she saw the chaos surrounding it.

  Floodlights washed away the soft dawn and left both sides of the fence bathed in garish white light and sooty shadows. Inside the park, Rangers stood in full armor, their faceplates lowered and their weapons drawn. On the other side of the gate, humans of all descriptions stood on filthy snow that was packed solid from their feet.

  Some of them held signs written in the human language or sloppy attempts at Stracahn:

  Stop the Integration!

  Alien Integration=Alien Invasion

  Today our Sympathy, Tomorrow our Masters

  There were soldiers outside the gate, too, in spiders and crawlers and standing with their weapons drawn. They were dressed differently than the Leadership soldiers inside the crawler. Those outside had gray uniforms with green pine trees stitched on them. Zyn’dri heard one of the Leadership soldiers refer to the ground troops as Cascadians. She remembered that the West gate opened into Cascadia.

  A tiny group of humans stood off to the right edge of the teeming crowd. They held signs that said:

  Welcome Stracahn

  Stracahn are not Strangers

  and

  Save the Stracahn

  Zyn’dri loved them immediately.

  As the crawler approached, the air filled with noise. The humans were shouting, screaming, waving their arms to show they didn’t want it to come out. The crawler didn’t pause as it reached the gates. Instead, the gates opened fluidly, just enough for the crawler to slide through. Still, Zyn’dri saw other humans watching the gates, who tried to slip through as they opened. The Rangers inside drove them back. Zyn’dri pictured herself as one of them, trying to get back into the park, and saw that it was impossible.

  Fear set in as the crawler echoed with the sounds of shots. Projectiles striking its sides made deafening, hollow booms against its sides. Some humans hit it with their fists or their signs, and some climbed on the rounded surfaces of the legs. Zyn’dri saw one man get his leg caught in the scissor-like forward crawl of the leg beneath her window. She looked away as the crawler moved again and the scissors opened, revealing an ugly red wound. She lost sight of him as he fell among the crowd. The Leadership soldiers stood still and firm, completely unresponsive to the tumult.

  Liquid ran down Zyn’dri’s window, and flames streaked down after it, inches from her face. The people were throwing flaming bottles filled with liquid that exploded and ignited as they hit the crawler. Though the rest of the Stracahn huddled on the floor, Zyn’dri couldn’t tear herself away from the window. The Cascadian soldiers outside jogged next to the crawler and sprayed the crowd with a strange kind of gunfire.

  She had seen, had even fired, the twister projectile guns that the Rangers used. But these were different. The Cascadian guns fired tiny beads which flashed on impact. The humans who were hit by them or who were near when they landed jerked and writhed in pain, clawing at their eyes and their mouths. Something in those beads brought them severe pain.

  The soldiers sprayed the beads across the crowd at a constant rate. The crawler inched forward as the crowd began to fall back. Many of them ran back toward the gates, seeking refuge from the searing beads.

  As they moved away from the screaming crowd, an eerie silence filled the crawler. Stracahn tentatively reclaimed their places on the benches, and the soldiers remained still. Though Karson had said that the Leadership felt it was time, and the Rangers had been overwhelmingly in support of the integration, one thing was very clear: the rest of humanity did not want the Stracahn to leave the park.

  49

  The Milguard was at the ready. They were hidden all along the road that came down from Cascadia, across the border, and through the woods to South Edge.

  Nobody was comfortable. Though the winter sun was up now, they had been in position, huddled in the snow throughout the freezing woods, since before dawn. The Stracahn coming through was, by itself, enough to make them jumpy. But the vast encampment of Cascadian soldiers at Robinson Creek had grown to epic proportions, and the long-feared Cascadian invasion seemed closer than it ever had.

  Sol’s convulsion gun was heavy and cold in his hands as he crouched between Tavish and Juice. They were hiding in a huge pipe that ran under the road. It was more than eight feet in diameter, and his whole unit would have fit inside if they weren’t spread out along the road and into the woods around them.

  They had just finished a quick breakfast of ready to eat calorie bars, and all three of them were silent. Uneven ruts of frozen mud beneath Sol’s boots left him feeling off balance and unsure.

  Mezina came on the radio to tell them that the Stracahn crawler was approaching their position.

  Uncle Carl had promised Damen that the Milguard would stay out of the woods. He had promised that they would only have a presence within two miles of the center of South Edge and that even then the Milguard would not be fully armed. But they hadn’t kept those promises. Though Sol’s unit was the first unit along the route, there were eight more units spread along the length of road from here to South Edge and beyond the town. Uncle Carl called it the “better safe than sorry strategy.”

  Ideally, the Stracahn would pass through without ever knowing the Milguard was there. They were supposed to lay low, to allow the Stracahn to travel without alerting them to the Milguard's presence. But the Stracahn crawler was supposed to proceed without stopping straight through Liberty, to the disputed zone south of them. Instead, the steady pop, pop, hum of its legs slowed and then ceased somewhere on the road directly above Sol’s head.

  Tavish perked up, listening. “What’s going on?” someone asked, and he silenced them with a raised hand. There was a long, penetrating quiet. A door seal hissed, and metal creaked.

  “Is that the hatch?” Sol whispered.

  Tavish shifted his gaze to Sol, focused on him, and then, speaking quietly, said, “Brooks. Go up there and see what’s happening. Stay low. Report back in no more than five minutes.”

  Sol hit the timer built into his new wristguard. He adjusted the cords so he could reach the button. As it began counting down, he wished he hadn’t been the closest to Tavish. He was sure that he got the job because he was close enough to receive the whispered order.

  The hill beside the pipe was steep and slick with powdery snow atop fallen pine needles. The morning light was gray and cold. Sol dug his elbows and toes into the soft ground and moved up the hill on his belly as quietly as he could.

  The road stretched before him, and he froze as he saw a dozen Leadership soldiers exiting the rusty crawler
. Their red uniforms were striking against the white snow and the green pines. They walked around the crawler, scanning the woods. Sol pressed his stomach to the ground. He stopped breathing.

  “Okay. We’re alone.” He heard one of them call. Another gestured up into the crawler, and there was movement at the hatch.

  Sol couldn’t take his eyes away. Down the steep staircase, moving hesitantly, came a rainbow of Stracahn. They spilled out, an explosion of color, into the bleak landscape. There were four Avowed, and maybe twenty other adults, but most of them were children. They looked disoriented, confused. It reminded Sol of the first time he had seen Stracahn stepping off the transport on his first day in Yellowstone.

  The Stracahn were followed out of the crawler by several more soldiers, who moved to surround their charges. The Stracahn, standing in the middle of the road, mingled inside the ring of soldiers. The aliens were pacing, bouncing their babies, and glancing furtively at the dark shapes the trees made beneath the steely clouds.

  Perhaps, Sol thought, the soldiers were letting them have a break to stretch their legs during the long journey. The soldiers were moving in a taut and measured way, and their guns were drawn.

  Their guns. They were not the standard Leadership issue. Instead, they looked just like the one slung across Sol’s back. Sol squinted to be sure. How had they gotten their hands on Libertyite convulsion guns? Would the Commanders have supplied them with those? Why?

  His wristguard vibrated, signaling that his five minutes were up, but instead of returning, Sol inched up the bank a bit more to peer at the Stracahn. There was something odd about the way they were moving. He had seen it on the ranch, when the cattle drew together, almost unconsciously, in the seconds before a threat was detected. It was as if they sensed danger.

  Sol was on his feet a second too late. Before he could rise, the soldiers had opened fire and cries of agony knifed through the air. The Stracahn began to fall, recoiling from the convulsion blasts. The lucky ones lay immediately motionless on the ground, while many more writhed for aching seconds before their thrashing limbs grew still.

  Above the sound of their cries, Sol heard his own voice, screaming, and Tavish barking orders at him through the speakers in his helmet. He ignored them, running directly toward the nearest soldier, somehow firing his gun and taking a bitter satisfaction as the red-clad figure fell.

  Other Leadership soldiers turned to him, and Sol felt the heat as his suit took their fire. He shot again, and then swung the butt of his gun and caught a third soldier in the chest, knocking him backward. As the soldier struggled to stand, Sol turned the dial on his gun up to ten and shot the man.

  Only a small group of Stracahn still stood, and as Sol glanced up, he saw in the center a girl with shining turquoise hair. She leaned down and snatched a baby carrier from the arms of a dead woman, then shouted at the children around her, who were wailing. Two adults crouched in the center of the circle, covering their heads. The girl, hair streaming behind her, shouted a single word at them. Sol didn’t need to know Stracahn to know what it meant: run.

  As his unit poured over the other edge of the road, engaging the soldiers on the far side of the circle, Sol stepped aside to let the girl and the straggling Stracahn run past him and down the bank, away from the monsters in red who continued to fire at them.

  When the last one had disappeared over the bank, Sol finally heard the chaos of voices in his helmet. He heard only one thing: “Cascadians!”

  Sure enough, as Sol looked up, a low-flying strafer peppered the road with burstbeads, Cascadian ammunition that was filled with a burning poison. He felt his eyes begin to sting, and he fumbled for the mask switch on his faceplate. Within seconds, his faceplate sealed around his face and cool oxygen flowed into the mask, clearing his vision.

  Finally, all the Leadership soldiers were down. Death lay heavy in the morning light, bodies scattered on the cold, flat surface of the road. Sol heard Tavish’s voice, “Retreat! Spread out! Company, now!”

  More strafers were streaking overhead, and the growl of crawlers filled the woods. In the midst of this horror, this massacre, the Cascadian invasion was beginning.

  Sol started back for the safety of the pipe, sucking the cool oxygen. Mezina’s voice rattled in his helmet. She was on the radio, calling for backup, alerting the rest of the Milguard that the Cascadians were here.

  50

  Walt stood staring at the barren meadow out the window. Midmorning and the somber clouds still hadn’t lifted. The apartment was quiet. The emptiness was worse—so much worse—than it had been before Zyn’dri. Sylvia lay lethargic in their bed, and though she tried to manage a smile when Walt entered, her eyes were vacant caverns, as they had been after Sean.

  Neither of them had the energy to speak of going to meet her, or to paint the dream of their cabin in the Rockies. Even the weight of each other’s company was too much, so Walt had retreated to the living room, closing the door to Zyn’dri’s room as he passed it.

  Walt’s radio crackled on the counter, and he vaguely registered that someone was speaking his name. He turned and listened.

  “Walt, can you read me?” The words were broken by a sharp ping every three seconds. Someone was using the emergency band, the secret backchannel that the park administration didn’t know about. Walt crossed to the counter and snatched up the radio.

  Carefully, he dialed into the same band.

  “This is Walt.”

  “Walt,” a breathless voice scratched through the speaker, “It’s Tillie. Something’s gone wrong with the Integration.”

  Walt’s blood roared in his ears. He could barely hear her as she went on. “I don’t know what happened, but there’s an aerial photograph online of the crawler stopped somewhere in the woods, and there’s—” the ping cut her off.

  “What?” Walt could hear his voice, high and sharp. “What, Tillie?”

  Her voice was small when she spoke again. “There’s bodies all around it, Walt.”

  Walt seized his screen from the table and switched it on. His knees gave out as the feed brought up a picture of carnage. He sat heavily in the chair. The photo was blurred and grainy. There was no identifying anyone in particular, but an attack had been made, and the soldiers and Stracahn were dead.

  And somewhere, in the middle of it, was his little girl.

  Walt had called to Sylvia before he even realized it. Had filled the apartment with a strangled plea that was her name.

  She clawed at the screen, and Walt didn’t know what she was doing until she returned it to him with the coordinates shown in the picture.

  Without a word, they ran downstairs to the spider. Walt pushed aside the knowledge that he should never have sent the child alone. Just like he should never have let Sean go huckleberry picking by the river alone. But what good were his regrets about either one now?

  Walt had never seen such a heavy contingent of Rangers guarding the gate. He drove the spider directly toward them.

  Syd stepped from the ranks and stood in front of the spider, waving his arms.

  “Stop! Stop, Walt!”

  Walt spraddled the spider and popped the window open. “We’ve got to go through, Syd. We’ve got to go get Zyn’dri.”

  Syd shook his head. “Sorry, Walt, you can’t. Cascadia has invaded Liberty. There’s a war going on out there and we are not allowed to open these gates.”

  “You have to let me out!” Walt cried.

  “I can’t. Look at all those scared people. If we open these gates, they will pour in here.”

  Walt looked at the protesters. Huddled together, they were covered in blisters. They had dropped their signs and kept glancing back over their shoulders toward the line of Cascadian soldiers that were standing firm behind them, weapons drawn. Their anger was gone, and the protesters were now begging for entrance.

  “Then let them in,” Walt said. “They just want a safe place to be.”

  Syd looked at him for a long moment. He looked back at t
he crowd of people pushing and jostling to get as close as possible to the gate without activating the electrical charge. He looked like he might respond, but Karson was suddenly beside him.

  Karson aimed a handheld Twister directly at Walt. “Get this spider out of here.” He said. “Those gates aren’t opening again today.”

  Walt looked down the barrel of the twister. He shifted so that his own chest lay between it and Sylvia, but he knew that at this close range that wouldn’t matter. It would tear through them both.

  Karson looked scared and angry. Walt didn’t know if he was fully in control or not. He couldn’t take the chance. He nodded curtly and maneuvered the spider in a slow, backward crawl away from the gate and the miserable crowd beyond it.

  51

  Zyn’dri felt the earth shuddering as she crouched beside the Ponderosa pine, clutching the Stracahn baby in his hupta to her chest. She breathed in the vanilla scent of the tree’s bark and tried to pretend that she was home with Walt and Sylvia.

  Pyrsha and her parents, along with eight other children and the baby, were all that were left of the Stracahn integration group. They had run until the other children began to fall from exhaustion, and then they had crouched here, in the forest, to rest so they could continue. Zyn’dri had to get them back to the only safe place she knew on this planet: the Park.

  The winter sun was a vibrant spot behind the clouds above them. Zyn’dri realized it was almost mid-day. The clouds and the frozen ground encompassed them with a chill that even Zyn’dri’s thick coat didn’t stop.

  The baby in Zyn’dri’s arms squirmed, and she realized how tightly she was holding him. Even through his traditional carrier, the hupta, he must have felt her desperate grip. She loosened her hold and ran a gentle finger over his cheek. She didn’t even know his name, and his mother was dead