The Rift Coda

by Amy S. Foster

Navaa is in the air. Henry has opted to stay behind to identify and separate the dead. Fallen members of the United Free Army and the human Citadels will be buried here or taken to their own Earths. Nonhuman Citadels will be thrown into a Rift going to the Microwave Earth where their skin will melt off and all that will remain of them will be a pile of yellow bones.

  The Faida have offered to carry the original Roones. They are efficient enough soldiers but are unable to run as fast as we can. I am grateful for this because I don’t want to waste any time waiting for them to catch up. Once we’ve collected ourselves, we head straight for Camp Bonneville. The drones will accompany us, too, but given our speed, I doubt they will get there before us. The forest is a blur. I remember setting off, but by the time we arrive, I don’t recall the actual journey. I wonder briefly if it will always be like this or if it’s just a kind of hangover, from the war, from grief. I lead us around back to the ancient escape hatch. I expect it to be closed and locked, but it is wide open. I take out my gun—now reloaded with ammo that Levi provided. I move a single foot to step inside and then set my foot back down again.

  “What are you waiting for?” Varesh demands. “They are here! Move!”

  I whip my head around and give him a look that silences him. After today, I really don’t know what my face is capable of.

  “Morning,” I say softly.

  “Yes, Ryn?”

  “Are the drones picking up any life-forms here at all?” Morning looks blankly at the open hatch. “Morning, you have to be faster with these answers, okay? We aren’t on your Earth. Ten seconds could be life or death.”

  “Understood,” she tells me plainly, “I was just double-checking the data.”

  “And . . .” I fish.

  “There is no one here. The base is empty.”

  All around me there is murmuring. The Akshaji are furious. The Faida are bewildered, but Iathan and I catch each other’s eyes.

  “We weren’t monitoring the sound blockade during the battle, were we?” I ask out loud to everyone, to no one.

  “We were,” Morning insists. “It did fluctuate, but we assumed it was our doing. That we had weakened the defenses with our coding.”

  I holster my gun and begin to pace. “Obviously that’s not what happened,” I tell them all with a sigh. “That’s probably what they wanted us to think, but they used this. It was a win-win.”

  “Elaborate,” Varesh demands.

  “All this . . . All this terror and death was about the experiment. The only thing the altered Roones cared about was gauging the human Kir-Abisat gift. Could it override a sound blockade? That’s all they really wanted to know and I proved it to them when I got the Akshaji. We have to assume they were monitoring it, either from here or the Akshaj Earth.”

  “How is that a ‘win-win’ as you say?” Navaa asks, shaking her head. “They lost over a hundred thousand of their own troops. How could that be perceived as any kind of victory?”

  I laugh and I’m sure I sound half-mad, but I don’t care. “Navaa,” I say, not bothering to hide my disappointment in the way that I address her. “Don’t be naive. They are indifferent. One dead Citadel is the same as a thousand or ten thousand. All of you are inferior now, can’t you see that? Now that the altered Roones know our potential, they can start again, with humans on another Earth, and this time, all of them will get the Kir-Abisat gene. You think they care about creating really good soldiers? Ha!” I spit. “I can open a door to the Multiverse, on my own, without a machine or a conduit, using only my throat. That achievement is all that matters to them now. The rest of you? You’re obsolete. You might as well die.”

  I can see the look of shock and horror spread among the group. They know I’m right and they also know, as I do, that we have been played. We slaughtered thousands. We did their dirty work for them by eliminating their inferior subjects. We thought this was about liberation. For the altered Roones it was only about data and a clean slate.

  Mostly.

  The win-win part is why we’re looking at an empty bunker.

  “They want to go home,” Iathan spits. He knows exactly what I’m talking about because, after all, he’s a Roone, too. “This wasn’t just about tying up loose ends. It was a distraction. We left precious few behind,” he whispers frantically. “I warned you that this could happen!” His words are sharp, threatening even. I don’t look away. Instead, I narrow my eyes with a threat of my own. He knew the risks. We all did. I’m not about to give him an apology, and I pray he’s not dumb enough to ask for one.

  “So they are on the Roone Earth? All of them? The one where this all started?” Varesh asks.

  “Yes . . . and that’s where we’re going. Right now,” I say to them all.

  “Uhhh,” Levi begins. “Yeah, maybe we call for reinforcements?”

  “We don’t need them,” I say confidently. “In fact, the SenMach contingent won’t be coming. We can’t risk the altered Roones getting access to their tech.”

  “That would leave you with only four hundred twenty troops,” Morning chimes in quicker than I’ve ever heard a SenMach speak. “I advise against this. There could be thousands there. You may be vastly outnumbered.”

  I shake my head vehemently. “No. Our first mistake, our biggest mistake, was thinking like soldiers. They don’t think like soldiers, they think like scientists. They observed, they recorded, and then they took advantage of a chaotic situation.”

  “You honestly believe they won’t have thousands of Citadels with them?” Navaa asks doubtfully.

  “Well, maybe a thousand, but we can deal with that. We go in fast and dirty—surprise them. I doubt they’ll be expecting us this soon.”

  “Yes, we should go, right now,” Iathan says rather frantically.

  “Look,” I warn. “You have to be calm now. Precise. Clever. I’m sure the altered Roones have plans within plans within a propaganda brainwash plan. They’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. They must have sympathizers that remained behind and as president, you’re bound to have opposition. We cannot let them address the public. Hopefully, they’re taking some time to put their strategies in place, but if they have started to implement them . . . well . . . it’s vital that you act presidential. That you act like their claims are not only illegitimate, but laughable. Now, I don’t think they will have a significant presence there. Not yet. If they do, we take our very significant presence back tomorrow when the troops have rested. Your Earth will not fall into their hands as long as you project total and absolute confidence, which, given how you generally come across, shouldn’t be much of a stretch.”

  I thought the comment might win one of Iathan’s playfully condescending laughs, but I get nothing. His face is grim. “These are my people, Ryn. An entire planet at the mercy of those monsters . . .” Iathan trails off.

  I take a deep breath in and look at our bedraggled crew. Navaa has an angry cut running down the right side of her entire face. Varesh’s skin is more red than purple, tinted scarlet from his enemies’ blood. Levi has eggplant-colored bruises around his throat. Iathan himself has half of his beard missing, along with a sizable chunk of his hair sliced or lasered off. I don’t even want to think about what I must look like.

  “Iathan,” I tell him as gently as I can. “We’re all monsters. But let’s go save the world anyway.”

  Chapter 25

  We use the Kir-Abisat to Rift onto the Roone Earth. My voice commingles with a dozen others and the Rift tears into the air in front of us as easily as a loose seam being ripped apart. The upside is that we will get past any sort of blockade the altered Roones may have put up. The downside is that the Kir-Abisat is not as precise as the QOINS system so we end up Rifting onto the Roone Earth about a mile out of town. There is no way to mask this opening from Roone scanners. They know we have arrived the moment we step onto the sandy ground. But I have thought of this contingency, too. We release our drones and Doe works quickly to hack into their mainframe, uploading our own Fai
da-programmed sound blockade, bolstered by the SenMachs’ firewalls. They might be able to hack this eventually, but for now, we have them trapped.

  I have only been here once, under heavy escort. I got to see almost nothing but the city itself and, even then, I was surrounded by Karekin guards who blocked any view I might have gotten. I am surprised that the Roone capital is basically in the middle of what looks to be a desert—not Saharan or anything, as there is some vegetation, but a place that reminds me a lot of the Joshua Tree National Park that my parents drove us through one painfully hot summer on our way to Disneyland. Dad was ecstatic and I . . . was thirteen.

  We’re a long way from all that.

  From here, Iathan takes point. He knows exactly where we are and the fastest way to get to where he figures the altered Roones are at—his bunker inside the capital. I send out the SenMach drones. Obviously, I would have preferred to not take any of their tech with us, but Morning assured me that it would self-destruct (most spectacularly, she added) if it fell into enemy hands. The drones go up and we start to run.

  The Roone soldiers are pushing it as fast as they can. For the rest of us, it is a mild jog. When we approach the city proper, Iathan directs us to a power station. The building is white, a little on the art deco side, and surprisingly intact. Since much of the city was ruined during their civil war, I have to assume this would be one of the priorities to rebuild. A soldier kicks down the metal door and Iathan wonders out loud if the SenMach tech can infiltrate the entire grid and power it down if necessary. I have my laptop again and so I’m thinking that yeah? Probably? It would be a great advantage tactically if we could shut the altered Roones out of their systems.

  I ask Doe and he wants me to put the laptop down on the ground, in front of one of the station monitoring systems. I don’t bother to ask why I haven’t seen a single employee here. It seems weird, but then again, these are the Roones. They probably think that such a job would be beneath them—much better to have an automated computerized system.

  Big mistake there.

  Once the laptop is down, white glowing tendrils crawl out of the keyboard like that terrifying long-haired girl from all the Ring movies. We all wait anxiously to see if Doe can accomplish the task.

  “I have entered the system undetected, though your presence has been noted. Additional troops have been sent to the perimeter of the capitol building. They also know about the sound blockade and are working to override it.” Doe’s voice rings out clearly in the nearly empty room save for a few pipes and levers.

  “How many are they? Do you know?”

  “I do not. It was a verbal command, but noted in their logs,” Doe answers without affectation.

  “And our drones, in stealth,” I wonder out loud, “will they be detected by the altered Roones?”

  “There is a ninety-seven point six percent chance they will not be,” Doe answers quickly. The SenMachs are all getting used to the idea now that they can’t wait seconds to answer vital questions, even the ones that don’t have an actual body.

  “Let’s get an accurate count from the drones,” Levi cuts in. “We wait here, see how many we’re dealing with and go from there. If there are too many, Ryn, if we’re outnumbered to the point of recklessness, then we have to come back with more troops of our own.”

  “Agreed,” I say as I give the command. We walk outside again, to where the rest of our troops are positioned and wait. It doesn’t take long.

  “There are 417 sentries outside the capitol building. Our scans have picked up an additional 1,128 heat signatures inside,” Doe reports.

  “That’s good news,” I say to the group. “I don’t know how many altered Roones there are. I’m guessing not very many. Iathan, any intel on the actual numbers of your rogue faction?”

  “There were only six hundred twenty created here on this Earth. I cannot say if they made more in the years following their banishment,” he tells us thoughtfully. I wonder in that moment what his thoughts are. Six hundred twenty responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It’s almost inconceivable.

  Almost, but not quite.

  There weren’t very many Betas, either, and look how much we did.

  Vi.

  I clear my throat. I cannot think about that. About her. Not yet.

  “I doubt very much they created more,” Navaa chimes in and thankfully breaks my train of thought. “They presume that they are chosen. They consider themselves to be gods. And while they think nothing of enhancing a species’s strength or mental acuity to gauge the results, ultimately, they believe they are far superior. Too superior to ever re-create their own genesis.”

  We all nod our heads in agreement with that assessment. “Is there any kind of back door to the bunker?” I ask Iathan.

  “There is only one way in, through the front entrance,” he tells me while stroking what’s left of his beard. I think he must get in that moment that it is only half there as his eyes widen in surprise. He takes a knife from his utility belt and begins to hack away at what’s left of it. “We considered an emergency escape route, but concluded that it would leave us too exposed. Spies. When we were fighting our war, they were everywhere. We couldn’t risk that kind of weakness in our last line of defense.”

  I bristle a little because that seems like an epically stupid tactical assumption. There should always be more than one way to get in and out of your foxhole, but I don’t bother to say it out loud. It doesn’t matter now.

  “Let’s use that to our advantage then,” I tell the other leaders. “We take out the 417 outside. We use Doe to jam the comms and cut the power. They won’t be able to go anywhere.”

  “I feel it prudent to remind you that if they have with them a human who possesses the Kir-Abisat gift, the blockade will be useless,” Doe warns. “They could escape.”

  “I don’t think they do,” I say thoughtfully. “They didn’t give it to the adult soldiers Seelye made them alter and I was kind of their test subject, right? But, either way, we just get in there as fast as we can. Varesh and Navaa, your troops will take care of the guards outside the building. The rest of us will rush the place. If possible, those of us taking the bunker will avoid combat entirely to preserve our energy until we’re inside the facility. Agreed?”

  Everyone backs the plan and we go. It’s about twenty blocks to the Capitol and although there is no secret entrance to the building, there is a way to get there underground, through the tunnels that run the fiber optics. We take left and right turns seemingly at random. I’m sure that we are going to get lost in this maze, but Iathan and his soldiers know exactly where we are going.

  We end up in another government building directly across from the Capitol. I assign a team of twenty to act as snipers. The Faida can do this from the air as well. The Roones that are working at their desks and inside their offices scatter and duck. Iathan reassures them to remain calm. I pay no attention to them or their frantic, nervous energy. I stick to the mission. I race out of the door as fast as my legs can carry me. Bullets whiz by me, but I am vaulting and leaping up the steps in a fashion that is too unpredictable for any of the guards to get a lock on me. I don’t focus on where the shots are coming from or even who is doing the shooting. I have one mission—to get inside as quickly as possible—and I must have faith in the troops I have ordered to give us cover to handle the job.

  I ignore the carnage of the Citadels going down around me. The Akshaji are making quick and vicious work of their targets, shielding themselves from bullets and lasers with a flurry of arms while the others punch and stab and slice the enemy. Every instinct I have tells me that it is wrong to run, that I should be standing my ground here, and supporting my allies. I also know that we might only have a few minutes before the altered Roones find some wily way to evade us once again.

  The power is out in the Capitol, a large white columned building with lapis lazuli tile, the same color as Iathan’s skin. I remember all this from before, but I don’t really care ab
out the architecture. I care about getting down to the bunker, where I know our true enemies are. There are two elevators and we cram as many bodies inside as we can. When the elevators are jam-packed, I leap up and punch my way through the hatch at the top so that I can ride it down with an additional ten members of the UFA on top. Doe allows power to these two elevators alone. The rest of the bunker will be dark. And silent.

  I crouch down, holding on to a piece of metal as the elevator descends deep underground. The speed creates a sort of vacuum. I can’t hear much and my ears pop as we go down. It sort of feels like an amusement park ride actually—if there was such a ride that started out in a free fall but ended up in certain violence. I can’t imagine there would be too many people lining up for that one.

  When the elevator finally stops, the strange innocuous ding tells us we’ve arrived. The doors open and the Citadel guards—mostly human, but some Spiradael that are posted here—immediately open fire. They must have heard the elevator make its way up or down and were lying in wait. Not that it matters. The UFA begin to do their thing and the Citadels don’t stand much of a chance.

  The eleven of us who rode down atop the elevator burst through ten seconds later, surprising those few troops left in the narrow hallway. I take advantage of its dimensions by springing from one concrete wall to the other. I am relieved that it’s not completely dark down here—there is a red strip of emergency lights that give an otherworldly feel to what is already a majorly alien situation.

  My boots leap to the right and I use both palms to get me to the next wall where I can jump again, above the fray. I finally land on one of the special-ops fake-ass Citadels. I have enough momentum now that I kick him so hard in the face I hear his neck snap.

  I take a bullet to the shoulder. It misses my head only because I keep moving. I pull my guns out and just start picking them off. Sorry, Christopher Slimy Pants Seelye. Your wannabe Citadels aren’t nearly as fast as me. They might have years more experience, but that hardly matters at the end of a gun. You got played by Edo. Ha. I mean, I hate Edo, but I kind of love that she and the altered Roones pulled this one off.