But before he can fire, a flash of fur knocks his arm to the side, sending the shot astray. It takes me a second to realize that this lifesaver isn’t Dru—she’s still busy crushing her original prey, seemingly oblivious to the scorched wounds on her side. No, instead there are two dogs attached to my former assailant, and even in the commotion I recognize them as Thunder and Boatswain, Byron’s pet pooches. They’ve got their jaws locked on the guy’s forearm and crotch, respectively.
And the third Jin’Kai? Well, he has maybe a nanosecond to process the When Animals Attack! special unfolding in front of him before something smashes him in the back of the head and he drops to the ground, out cold.
Now, I spent a lot of boring days in Mrs. Kwan’s English Lit class, daydreaming up elaborate scenarios in which Charles Dickens ran a cat orphanage, and D. H. Lawrence teamed up with Samuel Pepys in a traveling aerial burlesque act. (I was not, for the record, Mrs. Kwan’s favorite student.) But I never, not even in my wildest imagination, pictured the poet Lord Byron and his menagerie of furry critters performing kung fu in the snow.
Where is my phone when I need to vidcap something?
Byron leaps into the air and sails over my head in what looks like a flying double roundhouse kick from Jetman, then punts the dog-entangled baddie square in the chest, sending the dude flying backward into the snow. The dogs fall back, perfectly content to let their master do the heavy lifting. They bark vociferously as Byron engages the Jin’Kai in mano a mano combat. It’s a ballet of fists and knees and headbutts, complete with Byron’s cocky carefree quips as they tussle.
“Have at thee, Mankin! Ha-ha-ha!” Byron spits.
Whatever it is Byron is talking about is totally lost on me—although I suspect it might make Mrs. Kwan chuckle.
The Jin’Kai retreats a step and reaches behind his back. But as he brings the weapon to bear (har, har), Drusilla’s massive jaws clamp down on his arm, causing him to shriek. So the Jin’Kai might be superhuman alien killing machines, but it’s nice to know that a good bear-chomping will still give them pause. The dude flops around like a rag doll as Drusilla whips him back and forth over her head, then finally flings him several meters through the air into a tree. When he lands, Byron is on him with several well-placed socks to the jaw.
“The great object of life,” Byron tells the dude as he Hulk-smashes him, “is sensation.” Smash, smash, punchity-punchity, smash. “To feel that we exist, even though in pain.” He finishes off the dazed Jin’Kai with a spinning kick that forces the dude’s head quite literally into the tree trunk, so that his suddenly limp body dangles from his anchored noggin.
“Feel that?” Byron asks.
There is no reply. All three Jin’Kai are out of commission, one with some pretty permanent reminders to never wrestle a bear.
“Hello, young Elvie!” Byron exclaims. “You look well.”
“Uh, hey, Gramps,” I reply. “By the by . . . what the hell is going on?”
Instead of answering me, Byron gives me a surprise shove down into the snow, which I appreciate in retrospect as a ray gun blast sizzles into the tree in front of me. I flip over onto my back to look down the hill, where I spy what appears to an entire platoon of Jin’Kai running straight for us, firing at will. Byron draws two firearms of his own from behind his back.
“This, sweet child? Why, this is the counteroffensive! Death and glory!”
As his dual-wielded blasters put an exclamation point on his battle cry, from over my head I hear several large electrical claps in response. At first when I look up, I’m not quite sure what it is I’m looking at. It just looks like moonlit sky, but somehow more . . . shimmery. I can make out the sparks from heavy weapon fire appearing from out of nowhere, raining down laser-y death on the Jin’Kai, who dive for whatever cover they can find. The shimmering effect above suddenly becomes more agitated, and the sky disappears and it’s not the moon above me but a hovering ship.
A ship with a stealth cloak.
“Elvie!” Ducky cries from overhead. “I’m in a spaceship!”
“I can see that, Duck!” I scream back, super-relieved that he’s still alive.
A cable lowers, dangling from a round porthole in the underbelly of the ship about half a meter in circumference.
“Elvie!” Byron shouts. “Connect me!”
Frantically I snatch the cable and search Byron for some kind of latch. I find it on his back, lock the catch into place, and then tug on the cable for good measure.
“Now grab hold, darling girl!”
I do as I’m told, wrapping myself around Byron in a big hug, with my arms placed securely under his so as not to obstruct the ass-whoopery he’s still doling out. All at once the cable jolts, and we’re flying up toward the porthole, which is sliding closed even as we hurtle its way. The Jin’Kai scatter in the face of suddenly uneven odds.
“Remember the Poconos!” Byron shouts as we pass into the ship. The porthole seals under our feet, and we land on the metallic surface with a thunk. Byron punches an intercom on the wall. “We’re aboard. Now gather the animals and make haste!”
“We’ve got them, sir!” comes the response. I can feel the ship shift course.
“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” Byron says, looking down at me.
Slowly I release my death grip on Byron’s chest. Looking around, I spy Ducky, Marnie, Dad, and Cole, each one with a bigger grin on their face than the last. “So I take it you’re the cavalry?” I ask after finally taking a breath.
“This quaint little carriage?” Byron replies, unlatching himself from the cable. “No, dear.” He accesses a vidscreen next to the intercom and brings up an image that I assume is a replica of the ship’s main view screen. We are speeding away from the ground, already nearly a kilometer above the surface. The view is wavering with the now familiar shimmer of the Almiri stealth. Out of thin air an entire squadron of spaceships appears, a large command ship at the center of the formation.
“There is your cavalry.”
• • •
“You’ve been building a fleet?” I ask, incredulous.
“‘Fleet’ implies a scale we have not attained,” Byron says as he leads us through the hallways of the command ship toward the bridge. “We began construction a few years ago after the realization that the Jin’Kai might pose a serious threat. Our efforts had to be carried out in secret, of course. Mankind might have become a wee bit paranoid if advanced starcraft had suddenly appeared in the skies above them.”
“You mean like in the way they did just now?” Ducky points out.
“Well, the situation has changed, hasn’t it?” Byron explains. “The Jin’Kai have escalated things to another level altogether. They didn’t just hit us, Elvie. Hundreds of humans, maybe more, died down there in the Poconos when they struck.”
“It was Marsden,” I say as we pass through a second hallway.
“We cannae ken such a thing fer sure, Elvie,” Marnie chimes in.
“I do ken,” I tell her. “Er, know. I know it. The computers at HQ were wiped. Not just destroyed. Wiped. And Marsden left one terminal operational for me to find. He’s trying to tell me that I won’t be able to find them.”
“Yer sounding a wee paranoid, Elvie,” Marnie says.
We come to a sealed door, and Byron flashes a card across the wall sensor.
“Access granted, Commander Byron.” The door slides open onto a large command bridge. The room is a hive of activity, with Almiri officers buzzing about intently at work stations and running around to who-knows-where.
But the only person I see is Captain Oates.
“You didn’t think a little gunfire could stop me now, did you?” he says as he absorbs the full brunt of my face-first bear hug.
“Of course not,” I say, trying to suck the tears back into my eyes before anyone else sees them. “What about the others?”
&
nbsp; “Clark is fine. A few others you probably don’t know. We lost eight in all. Including Rupert.”
Byron takes his place in the command chair at the center of the bridge and taps aimlessly at his arm console. “I’m sorry for your loss, old friend,” he tells Oates earnestly. “I wish we had arrived sooner.”
“That you arrived at all is the only reason any of us still draw breath, Commander,” Oates says. He says it without a hint of malice—just a simple statement of truth.
“Elvie,” Byron says to me. “You said Marsden was trying to send you a message? You personally? Why would he do that?”
“They have Olivia. My daughter. Your great-granddaughter. Marsden took her, with my mom.”
“Your mother?” Byron says. He stops tapping and gapes at me. “Zee? She’s alive?”
“Oh, right, yeah.” I give Gramps the quickest version of “Previously: On Elvie’s Shit Life” I can muster. “My mom faked her death after she gave birth to me and is actually one hundred percent alive. Hurray.”
A glimmer of something flashes across Byron’s face. Something like sadness? Regret, maybe? It’s hard to tell with him, seeing as he’s so melodramatic all the time regardless.
“This Marsden took her and your daughter?”
I almost don’t have the heart to tell him.
“No,” I say. “Zee’s . . . with him. She sold out the Almiri at Cape Crozier, stole Olivia from me, and took off with Marsden to wherever it is evil douche bags go after daring aerial escapes.”
Byron takes a moment to let the news of his estranged daughter’s betrayal sink in. His eyes close and he tilts his head back, letting out a long sigh.
“Anyway,” I say. I can feel a poem coming on, and I’d like to nip that in the bud if at all possible. I don’t have time for self-pity from a guy who loves to hear himself talk. Not right at the moment, at any rate. “We came back to the ski lodge hoping you could help us track them down. Which is when we found the whole town barbecued.”
“I warned them,” Byron says, his head hanging. “But they weren’t inclined to listen to me at that point.”
“How’d ye ever make the slip out from such a hackit mess?” Marnie asks.
“I was not at the lodge for some time before the attack occurred.”
At that, Cole chimes in for the first time. “Sir?” he asks. “Why not?”
“The Council has . . . seen fit to relieve me of my duties as commander.”
Color me stunned. “You mean you’re not the Head Almiri in Charge anymore?”
“My lenience with regards to the Enosi—and certain individuals within that larger group—caused me to fall out of favor,” Byron tells us. “Rather quickly, by our standards. The Council allowed me to retain my rank, but my voice on policy matters has been somewhat muted for the time being.” He looks at me, a wistful look in his eye. “My opponents had me stripped of power within a week of my shuttling you away to safety. Or what I thought was safety. My comrades aboard these vessels are the remaining few who still follow my orders.”
Suddenly he pounds his armchair and jumps up with the theatrical flair you’d expect to find in a community production of Shakespeare in the Park.
“Curse my stunted vision! This is all my fault. Your mother. The base. All of it. I should have listened to you, Titus, from the start, and worked harder to reconcile the Almiri and their Enosi offspring. But no, I was the consummate politician, wasn’t I? Compromising my morals into a vapor. Talking when I should have acted! The exact antithesis of the great Titus Oates! And now my own daughter, siding with the enemy, because of my failings. ‘The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted. They have torn me, and I bleed.’”
Please, please don’t let this dovetail into twenty minutes of iambic pentameter or something. I think I’d rather fight the Jin’Kai again.
“We all find our conscience,” Oates says. “You did what you thought was right. As you always have.”
Dad steps in too. I guess it’s not every day that you get to console your alien father-in-law. “We must live in the present, not the past,” Dad tells him. He’s using the voice he used to with me when I would sulk over a bad test grade. “It was quite fortuitous that you happened across us back on the mountain.”
“Fortunate? Yes. But not a coincidence,” Byron says.
I cock an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
Byron reaches to the outer right side of his command chair and taps a sensor, which opens a small compartment. Several electronic devices rest inside. (I half-expected it to be a beer mini-fridge, but maybe that’s on the other side.) Byron pulls out a long, flat device that looks almost like a bent Ping-Pong paddle, with an angled grip attached to an LED screen. It is beeping at a fairly rapid rate.
“What is that?”
Byron approaches me, and as he does, the beeping grows even faster. He hands me the device, and I look at the display. The majority of the screen is a faint blue, warbling around the edges with a slight purple distortion. But dead center is a bright flashing yellow dot, and in the bottom right-hand corner is a series of numbers. No, not just numbers.
Coordinates.
“Elvie?” Cole says, looking over my shoulder. “What is it?”
“This is me!” I gasp. “You’ve been . . . tracking me?”
Byron nods. “Since I sent you to Titus.”
“How? Why?”
“I knew I needed to get you as far away from the Council as I could, at least until I could figure out a better course of action. I figured a remote, little-known location would be ideal, with Titus being the perfect guardian. I still wanted to be able to keep tabs on you, however, just in case. So I placed a tracer in you.”
“You stuck something inside me without my knowledge or permission?” I ask. “You Almiri, man, you have some real issues.”
“I didn’t do anything so quaint,” Byron says. “I wanted to be able to track you, but I also wanted to be the only one with such capabilities. A physical tag could be spotted too easily. A mutation, however . . .”
“This isn’t going to end anywhere good, is it?” I say. I already feel sick to my stomach.
“To be blunt, my dear,” Byron replies, “I altered your DNA.”
“You did what?” I shriek. “What did you do?” I begin frantically searching my arms, like I’m going to, I don’t know, spot a new mutated tracer mole or something. “Wasn’t I hybrid enough for you before?”
“It wasn’t anything serious. I promise. I simply gave you a little tweak to assign you a specific membrane potential—an electrical signature on a cellular level—that I would be able to detect even from great distances using the device you’re holding.”
“So leaving aside the great invasion to my rights as an individual and my serious disgust at the intrusion for just a second,” I begin, and Byron nods, “you’re saying that you picked up this signature of mine and knew I was headed to the Poconos . . .”
“And we doubled back, yes,” Byron finishes for me. “We would have been here sooner, had we not first followed the other signal out into orbit.”
“Other signal? What other signal?” My eyes go wide, and I can feel my ears do that weird thing where they move backward on my head without my having to touch them. “You put this genetic tracer mutation in Olivia too, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Byron says. “The device tracks both frequencies on separate channels. When Olivia’s signal began to move independently, I grew concerned. We lost the signal out in the Rust Belt. We would have continued the pursuit, but then I saw you headed for the Poconos, and into the Jin’Kai’s waiting arms, so we doubled back.”
My body turns to ice. “What do you mean, you lost the signal?” I say. “You couldn’t track it anymore or . . .” I can’t even bear to finish the sentence. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Cole. I shrug him off.
“The signal dissipated,” Byron tells me. “We believed that to be due to interference in the belt, although of course we can’t know for sure. That’s why, when we saw your signal, we—”
“You left her,” I finish for him. “You left her with them.” Half of me wants to punch my grandfather in the kisser—for turning away when Olivia needed him most, for violating both of us for our own protection (because one must never forget that the high and mighty Almiri always know what’s best for everyone). But honestly the other half of me wants to give him a big old kiss on the mouth—this horrible violation might be my only fighting chance at finding my daughter. I shake my head free of confusion. Focus on what’s important. “What are we waiting for?” I ask him, pointing to the tracker in his hand. Hold on, Olivia. “Why aren’t we heading back there this second? Let’s go find her!”
“The fact remains that we have no point of trajectory to use as a locus for a search,” Byron says, dousing my hope with a bladder full of buzzkill. “A full-scale sweep of the entire sector would be necessary.”
“Well, then that’s exactly what we’re going to do!” I tell him. “Let’s put all this flipping advanced alien tech to use for a change, for something other than your own selfish purposes!”
Byron looks at me with a stern expression. It’s not quite angry, but we’ve entered into no-nonsense territory. It’s like I can feel him winding up the hammer, ready to bring it down on all my remaining conviction.
“We simply don’t have the manpower for that, Elvie, given our current situation. The Almiri—nay, the world, is under direct assault. The enemy has dealt the first blow, and we must regroup. My modest strike force alone cannot hope to repel the invaders. We must rally the forces of men and Almiri alike for the coming—”
“I want my daughter back, you son of a bitch!” I scream, flying at him. He doesn’t flinch as I fall on him, slapping at his face and clawing at his shirt. Some of the crewmen on the bridge move to grab me, but Byron waves them off. It’s Oates who puts his strong hands on my shoulders. He doesn’t pull me, or wrap me up. He just holds me until I calm down. The tears are racing down my cheeks and dribbling off the edge of my nose. I’m sure I’m quite the sight, but I don’t care. That’s kinda the point.
The World Forgot Page 5
