“Good. Keep me informed. I’m at the secondary comp-cave now.” Balidor raised a hand to his earpiece. “Signing off. I’ll be back there as soon as I can.”
Without closing the channel altogether, he clicked off the sound on his end as he walked through the opening into the cave, still scowling.
Smaller and much more brightly lit, the cave Dalejem and his team staked out for their work was practically emptied of seers and humans.
Most of the comp-team was working in the central comp room now, Balidor realized.
Thinking about that, Balidor felt his scowl deepen.
“Why in the gods are you still in here?” he barked at Dalejem’s back, the instant he identified his broad shoulders and long, streaked hair. “Move all of this into central ops, brother Dalejem… now. I can’t go wandering the i'thir li'dare corridors every time you need to show me something on a non-networked machine.”
Dalejem looked up from a horseshoe ring of unrolled organic consoles. They shone with small lights that turned his face a pale blue from below. He frowned slightly, but otherwise seemed unaffected by Balidor’s words, or by his tone.
“Come here, brother,” he said, jerking his chin towards his machine. “Please.”
His mouth and voice were gruff, distracted.
Falling silent at the look on the other’s face, as well as his tone of voice, Balidor frowned, walking over to the right end of the horseshoe where Dalejem stood. Once he was there, Dalejem hit through a series of touch-keys, nodding towards the screen below.
“There. I just connected it to your headset, to compensate for the interference. You should be picking it up now. This is from the north corridor.”
“What am I looking at?” Balidor said, frowning when all he could see was the cave, Dalejem and the console in front of him.
“Not looking, brother,” Dalejem said. “Listening.”
Balidor gave a silent command to turn up the volume for the audio in his headset.
As he did, he could gradually hear it over the noise of the corridor behind him.
It was a low buzzing sound.
He turned up the volume more, cocking his head to listen.
“What the hell is that?” Balidor said, turning to frown at Dalejem.
The other male gave him a hard look, his pale green and violet eyes reflecting light from the console and the nearby yisso torches.
“What does it sound like to you?” he said.
“A bee hive.” Thinking about his own words, Balidor felt the blood drain from his face. “Gaos. They’re inside, aren’t they? Can we block off that passageway?”
“I’ve done as much as I can possibly do remotely. There was a low-level force field near the point of origin, which appears to be a ventilation shaft. I’ve got an OBE activated as backup now, but I don’t know how long it will hold. We’re damned lucky one of the motion sensors picked it up before they broke through. Once enough of them were clustered in the ventilation shaft, trying to get past the force field, it set off an alarm.”
He gave Balidor a grim look.
“They’re at the OBE now. That’s what you heard, is them clustering around the power source, where there’s a second surveillance beacon. I’m worried about sending anyone over there, given the number of them the machine is picking up.”
Frowning back down at the console, he added, “I sent out a coded warning to have the civilian leaders move everyone south. You probably saw some of that in the corridors.”
Balidor scowled. “A head’s up would have been nice.”
“There was no time.” Pressing his lips together, Dalejem shook his head, once. “I needed every second. I had to get them out before I could engage the OBE, and I wasn’t sure how long the regular force field would hold. I called the human leaders to get them to evacuate the area. I waited as long as I could––”
But Balidor had just put together something else.
“Gaos d’ jurekil’a di’lalente.” He stared at the green-eyed seer. “That was you? You were those goddamned explosions that went off just now? You left people in there?”
Dalejem gave him a harder stare.
“I had no choice, brother. I kept the OBE down as long as I could, believe me, but the smaller field was failing. We would have been fucking overrun if I hadn’t done what I did. I called you the instant I had a second to spare, brother.”
Realizing he was right, Balidor exhaled, hands on his hips.
“I’m assuming the OBE won’t hold them forever?” He frowned down at Jem’s console, fighting to think. “Can the stingers dig through the tunnels around it?”
Jem frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t know. They managed to destroy the contact points for the original force-field, so I assume they might try the same with the OBE. If they can’t, they’ll likely look for a way around it.”
“Fine. Okay. Suggestions?”
“Drones,” Dalejem said at once. “Get them to collapse the corridor just beyond the OBE. It should be enough to buy us a few hours. They’ll likely go around and look for a new ventilation shaft. Could take them a while, with all the work we’ve been doing on those.”
Clicking under his breath, the green-eyed seer combed his fingers through his long hair, leaning on the front of the console with his palms.
“It’s going to be difficult, though,” he admitted. “Based on our audio analysis, and the scans I’ve done at the northern shaft, they’re really damned small. The drones will have to collapse a fair bit of the tunnel to make sure there aren’t spaces they can squeeze through.”
“How small?”
Dalejem held up his fingers, making a tiny circle with his forefinger and his thumb. “Small. Housefly small. Small enough our motion detectors are missing them about sixty percent of the time, if my estimates are right.”
Balidor cursed a few more times in Prexci.
Pacing in front of the horseshoe console, he fought to think.
“Drones aren’t going to work,” he said finally.
“What then, brother?” Jem said. “More OBEs? Or are you thinking we build a door of some kind to keep them out?”
Balidor frowned, still thinking.
“We more or less need to liquify the rock, to make it a solid plate,” he said after a pause. “I don’t think even an OBE will buy us enough time.” He gave Dalejem a grim look. “We need the telekinetics on this. Contact Nenzi. Get him or Maygar up to that corridor right away. They’re probably the only ones who could survive these fucking things, anyway––”
“They’re also the only ones we absolutely can’t fucking spare!” Dalejem snapped, jaw hard. “Revik would never send his son alone, are you kidding me? Not for something like this. We don’t even know if Maygar could do something like this on his own, given where his training’s been focused. And we absolutely can’t risk Revik’s life. Not for something like this. Are you insane?”
“Do you know anyone else who can melt rock and organic metal with their mind, brother?” Balidor returned mildly. “Did you suppose one of us could manage it with a few blow torches? A campfire, perhaps?”
“What about one of the clones?”
Balidor shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. From what Nenzi says, they work as a unit, not as individuals. I don’t think he could trust them with something like this.”
“Then have him do it at a distance, goddamn it!” Jem snapped. “Use image recorders and GPS, and have Revik do it remotely. Send the fucking engineers.”
Balidor shook his head, clicking.
“We have all of the engineers deployed,” he said. “They’re at each of the digger sites already, and the diggers pose even more of a risk than these micro-flyers. We’ve also got them reinforcing ventilation shafts around the door itself. We need them where they are.”
Still thinking, he added,
“We don’t have the north corridor mapped sufficiently to do it purely remotely. Even if we did, I don’t think even the Sword could do something requir
ing that much light without being in visual range. He’d need to be there.”
“So send someone else.”
“Who?” Balidor said pointedly. “I’m telling you, the engineers are deployed right now, brother. We’re damned low on them anyway, and we’re going to need the ones we have before this is finished.” Balidor frowned, thinking. “Could he use a flyer, I wonder? Just for targeting, I mean. Would that be enough for Revik to do it remotely?”
“Better to have a person,” Dalejem said. “A seer, so he can use their eyes and light. Send Jorag. Or Stanley. Or Raddi. Hell, send me. I was about to go anyway, and try and set up our last OBE to slow them down––”
“We might need that OBE,” Balidor snapped, turning. “You’ve already used one of our last OBEs in that north passage. We should try and retrieve that one as it is––”
“We can’t save all of our resources for later, brother,” Dalejem growled. “There won’t be a later, if we do. This is all for nothing if a swarm of stingers get in. You know damned well anything they send will be looking for her.”
“We can’t use up all our resources, either,” Balidor said, clicking sharply. “We have no idea how long it will take her to open the door. That doesn’t even take into account how long it will take to evacuate everyone. She’s already said we’ll likely need hours still, between those two things. She still hasn’t figured out how to stabilize the portal. We’re not at a point yet where we can squander resources, not when we have no idea––”
“I’ll go,” a voice said, quiet.
Balidor froze as he recognized the voice.
Taking a breath, he turned his head slowly.
He’d more or less forgotten he and Jem weren’t alone.
He’d barely registered the big human, Sasquatch, being in the room with them when he walked in, or the human female, Gina, or Crieg, one of the tech seers from London. Now he saw all three of them watching him and Dalejem argue. Their pale, blue-tinted faces shone from the other side of the horseshoe console, their expressions tense.
His eyes slid past them, though, focusing on the person who’d actually spoken.
Chandre watched them too, her jaw firm.
Sitting on a rock outcropping, her dark red eyes bored into his. She frowned as he watched, her sculpted lips tilting downward as she assessed Balidor’s expression.
“Send a guard with me, if you don’t trust me,” she said, motioning in a seer gesture of dismissal. “Or send a flyer, and detonate the collar I wear, if I do anything you don’t like. I know it’s got an explosive charge on it.” She gave Dalejem a flat look, then her eyes shifted back to Balidor. “But you can trust me with this. I think even you know that.”
Balidor stared at her.
A sick feeling crawled into his chest and gut.
Staring at her, he weighed the look in her eyes, what Tarsi and Allie had told him about her light, what he felt in her now. Nerves slid through him, but his gut on it felt solid, so he didn’t let his misgivings stop him.
They were out of time.
He turned to Dalejem. “Give her a headset. You have an extra flyer you can give her?”
Dalejem scowled. “Brother––”
“We don’t have time to argue about this!” Balidor snapped. “She volunteered. For this, I’ll take any volunteer not in a mission-critical position, and she’s just sitting here, doing nothing as far as I can tell. Give her a fucking headset, and raw organic. And give her Nenzi’s channel, and ours. I’ll call ahead to the Sword and Maygar.”
Dalejem’s jaw hardened more, but after a long beat, he nodded.
Giving Chandre a hard stare, he nodded again.
Once he had, he moved fast.
Yanking his own headset off his ear, he walked rapidly to her. Handing her the organic, he scowled down at her, hands on his hips.
“You don’t get a gun,” he said, blunt. “Someone’s liable to shoot you if they see you holding one anyway. And I don’t have a flyer you can use, so you’ll have to use the scanners in the headset. Nenzi’s on channel 61.2.”
Jaw firm, he pointed at a storage crate by the rock wall.
“The spare parts storage is in that crate. There should be a few chunks of raw organic in there. If not, grab anything you see with enough green. Nothing in there is mission-critical.”
She was already fitting the organic in her ear, rising to her feet.
Dalejem fit a new headset around his ear, hitting a few keys on the console below him. His voice turned gruff when he added,
“North corridor, like I said. The map’s on file… I’m giving you a route now.”
Glancing at him, she nodded, once, acknowledging she’d gotten it.
“Take some armor. In case they make it through the OBE. It may not save you, but it might slow them down. The good stuff is there,” he said, pointing at the rock shelf where they’d piled up supplies. “We’ll talk to the Sword before you get there, and ultimately he’ll direct you, but see if you can get close enough to the OBE to have him collapse the cave north of the junction. Revik might be able to destroy a good chunk of those fuckers that way, and if we could retrieve the OBE, it would be better.”
She nodded again, already shouldering on one of the armored vests.
Buckling it swiftly up the front, she yanked open a canvas knapsack she found on the cave floor. Flipping open the crate under the shelves, she stared down at the contents for a few seconds, then pulled out two chunks of dark green organic.
After a bare hesitation, she took out two more, and a few broken pieces of machinery that were dark green from raw organic.
Hefting on the backpack, which looked heavy now, she looked about to run out of the room, when Balidor called out,
“Hey! Check the headset. Make sure our channels are linked.”
She glanced at him, frowning faintly, then nodded.
She must have switched to sub-vocals, because Balidor saw her lips move but only heard her voice inside his head.
“Testing. Check. Check––”
“Got it,” Balidor said, using sub-vocals himself. “Go with the gods, sister. Come directly to the operations center when you finish.”
Nodding once, she turned on her heel.
Then she vanished into the still-crowded corridor.
55
THE FIRST WAVE
CHANDRE TRIED NOT to think about the way Balidor looked at her in the seconds before he decided to give her this job. She tried not to think about the frown on Dalejem’s lips, or how the Sword himself might react to news of who he’d be coordinating with in the north passage.
She definitely didn’t want to know the Bridge’s reaction.
Pushing all of her old friends from her mind, she focused instead on crossing the length of the complex as fast as she could.
The corridors were jam-packed now, filled with humans mostly, but also a fair-few seers who appeared to be primarily refugees moving from one civilian area to another. She couldn’t help but stare when she saw a whole line of seer children, not a single one of them reaching past her waist in height. They ran barefoot over the packed earth, wearing identical uniforms like they’d just come from school.
Behind them, four muscular seers with Adhipan markers in their light followed, all of them heavily armed.
She knew this couldn’t all be from Dalejem’s alert about the northern tunnel.
Seers and humans were being moved away from the diggers, most likely––and being forced into smaller areas by the engineering team and Wreg’s guards as they tried to block off as many ways into the caverns as possible.
Chandre knew they’d all be traveling deeper soon.
Once they’d secured this level, they’d secure the next, then the next.
They’d keep doing it until they’d gotten everyone as close to the underground hotspot as they possibly could. Of course, that would also mean they’d be easy to gas, suffocate or burn out, if Allie wasn’t successful in opening the door.
Th
ey had no choice, though.
Even beyond increasing the refugees’ proximity to the Barrier door, they had to minimize the amount of space they needed to protect for when the Mythers broke in for real––which they inevitably would.
At the thought, her mind flickered involuntarily to the clock running down in the corner of the virtual screen projected by the headset Dalejem gave her. She already knew what the countdown was for. Dalejem must have set it for himself, to keep an eye on the proximity of the Myther army, but her anxiety spiked every time she glanced at it.
Pushing all of that from her mind as best she could, she sped up her pace, focusing on covering ground. She’d already messed with the map Dalejem provided her, looking for ways to shave time off her trip to the north passage.
She didn’t find any––Jem had done a thorough job assessing routes.
He’d even given her a number of detours to compensate for increased traffic in the bigger corridors, so he was clearly aware of what was going on in other parts of the complex.
She jog-ran around a bend in the corridor when screams broke out all around her.
Humans and seers, and even more children––what looked like a group of both seer and human children that time––broke into a run, aiming right in Chandre’s direction.
Cursing, she shifted sideways, pressed briefly into the rock wall as they shoved their way by, terror in their pale faces.
Frowning, she tried to go up into her aleimi to infuse calm into the construct, and gasped when an electric jolt blinded her. Touching her neck, she let out a short cry, gripping the sight-restraint collar with her fingers.
She’d forgotten the damned thing.
She was about to hit the call key on her headset, when the screaming got louder and she peered around the corridor instead.
A giant lizard made of light was crawling and scrabbling through the stone corridor, nearly filling it. Its claws dug into the walls on either side, its black, bird-like eyes flickering to and fro as he ran after the fleeing refugees.
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