Alone

by Scott Sigler

  She hits the floor. She doesn’t move.

  I rush to her. I slice the ropes from her wrists, then sheathe my knife. I feel her face: it’s cool to the touch.

  I press my ear to her chest: no heartbeat.

  I lay her flat on her back, put my hands on her sternum and drive them down, once, twice, three times, just like Smith showed us to do. I press my mouth to Bello’s and breathe out hard.

  She doesn’t respond.

  I do chest compressions again, again push air into her lungs.

  She doesn’t respond.

  Over and over I do this, feeling the rage building inside me, sensing my soul eroding, flaking away—how could my best friend beat a woman to death?

  Hands on my shoulders. A man’s hands.

  “Let me try,” Aramovsky says.

  Spingate let him out.

  I fall to my butt, get out of his way.

  Aramovsky’s chest compressions are stronger, his larger lungs force in more air than mine ever could. He is methodical, pumping away, desperate to save Bello.

  Still she doesn’t respond.

  A sheen of sweat breaks out on Aramovsky’s dark skin. Of course it does—it’s hot in this cell, and he’s working so hard.

  She’s not moving.

  I start to crawl backward, wanting to get away from the body….

  My hand comes down on something round—the rod.

  “Come on,” Aramovsky hisses as he keeps pumping. “Come on, Bello, fight!”

  I hear crying, and for a moment my heart surges with hope, because that’s what Bello does, cry, until I realize it’s not her—it’s Spingate.

  She’s standing in the open cell doorway. Tears streak her blood-flecked face. Her lower lip quivers.

  Really? Now she feels bad?

  I pick up the rod.

  Aramovsky sits back, wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “It’s no use,” he says. “Bello is dead.”

  I feel myself nodding as I stand.

  “Of course she is,” I say. “Because this godsdamned gear killed her.”

  I step toward Spingate. She stares at me, shakes her head.

  “Em, I…I didn’t mean…”

  “Yes, you did, you bitch,” I say, then I jam the rod tip into her neck.

  Spingate’s body convulses. She makes a strange gurgling sound.

  “Yes, you did,” I say, and I pull the rod away.

  She collapses backward into the space between the rows of cells, her arms wrapped protectively around her round belly.

  “Yes, you did.” I step out of the cell, touch the rod to her cheek. She convulses anew, that strange sound coming from deep in her throat. Her face wrinkles tight in agony. Her splayed fingers stretch out, half-curled, grabbing at nothing.

  I’m going to kill this bitch. Her and her unborn baby, which will probably turn out just as evil as she is. Spingate tortures circles? She murders my kind? I’ll show her. I press the rod harder against her face, use it to pin her head against the stone floor.

  A blur of motion: the rod is ripped from my grasp.

  I turn to face Aramovsky. Sheened in sweat, he holds the rod in his right hand.

  “The God of Blood has you,” he says. “Fight it.”

  I draw my knife. The images on the Observatory walls, of double-rings torturing people, burning them, skinning them. Aramovsky, who started a war, who sent me out to die. He should have killed me when he had the chance.

  “Fight it, Em,” he says, snarling out the words. “You are the strongest of us, don’t let it control you.”

  I drop into a fighting stance, looking for a way past the rod he holds.

  Aramovsky tosses the rod into the cell.

  He puts his hands to his sides. He closes his eyes.

  “Kill me if you must,” he says. “But if you do, the God of Blood will own you forever.”

  I see the veins in his neck pulsing beneath his skin.

  One slash of my blade will open up those veins. Aramovsky’s blood will spray everywhere.

  Just like the pig’s did.

  It will flow and puddle.

  Just like Yong’s did.

  The God of Blood has you….

  I blink. I hear nothing. All I see is a defenseless man standing before me.

  My knife clatters against the stone floor.

  I glance at Spingate. She’s curled up on the floor, shaking, drooling blood.

  I glance at Bello. Naked. Lifeless. Dead.

  Aramovsky opens his eyes.

  “Now you know, Em” he says. “Now you know what it’s like.”

  Bishop and I can do nothing but stand and watch. One of us usually leads, but right now the fate of our people relies on Giles Borjigin.

  We’re atop a wall tower. A thick stone battlement runs along the outside edge of the circular floor. The battlement is taller than I am, but there are notches cut into it so people can look out. To the north, I see the river snaking off through the jungle ruins, slicing between the canyon of trees rising up on either side. To the south, I can see all of Uchmal—blackened, burned, coated in ash.

  Opkick is up here, with us, as are five filthy circles awaiting their next task. Two of the circles, Elisa Hinog and Kurt Armbruster, have been trained to fire the cannon and will make sure it’s working properly.

  We can’t spare circle-stars to crew the wall cannons, as we need them in the city streets, battling with rifle and spear and spider. Halves, gears and circle-crosses have important jobs to do when the fighting begins; we can’t spare them, either.

  What we can spare—as always—are circles.

  The circles up here are filthy because they’ve spent all morning raising a five-meter-high dirt ramp against the city side of the tower.

  Up that ramp walks a metal giant.

  Borjigin is inside, piloting the massive, two-legged, fifteen-meter-tall construction machine that we found in the Spider Nest, the same giant that he turned into a war machine at Aramovsky’s command. In that battle, I ordered Spingate to fire shuttle missiles at the giant, which caused the death of the four people inside.

  I remember their names: Abrantes, Cadotte, Aeschelman, Cody.

  They burned alive. Because of me.

  I feel Bishop’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing, reassuring.

  “Are you thinking about when we stopped Aramovsky?”

  I nod.

  “You did what you had to do,” he says quietly. “It was war.”

  Using the word war frames my decisions, but it doesn’t justify them.

  We watch the giant machine continue up the ramp.

  “I don’t think that’s an excuse,” I say. “Spingate did what she thought she had to do—she’s a murderer because of it, not a hero.”

  Bishop shakes his head. “Whatever Spingate is, her mind is too valuable to waste away in prison. You need to let her out and put her back to work.”

  “She tortured a human being to death,” I say. “She’ll stay where I put her.”

  Which is in a cell, right next to Aramovsky’s.

  Aramovsky claims something took Theresa over, fanned the flames of her deepest fears, somehow forced one of the smartest people I know to listen to her most primitive, hateful instincts.

  She killed Bello. Spingate will be punished—she is responsible for her actions.

  But you felt it, didn’t you? You felt the God of Blood. You could have killed Spingate just as easily as Spingate killed Bello, killed Spingate and her unborn baby…

  No, there’s a difference. I didn’t kill. But is that only because Aramovsky was there to interfere?

  I glance at Bishop. He went into a rage and almost killed Victor. If Victor had died, would I have put Bishop in a cell?

  If I’d been holding a real spear instead of a practice one, Bawden would be dead—would I have put myself in jail? Would I have let someone else put me in there?

  “You’re being stupid,” Bishop says. “This isn’t the time
for your morals if those morals get in the way of our survival. Spingate is special. Her mind is irreplaceable. What’s more important—the accidental death of an enemy, or the deaths of our people that might occur because she’s locked up instead of being in the Control Room where she belongs?”

  I don’t know the right answer to his question.

  Spingate has always been among the most reliable of the Birthday Children. Smart, self-sacrificing, dedicated. Honorable. The fact that she, of all people, did what she did? It intensifies the sense of anger and dismay spreading through our people.

  Spingate. Bishop. Me. The fight on the training ground. The Belligerents. Barkah and his prisoner.

  Is something really making us all do evil things?

  Or are we all just evil to begin with?

  “Here we go,” Bishop says, nodding toward the giant. “We better get clear.”

  We press our backs against the curved battlement wall, making space for Opkick and the circles to work.

  Borjigin spent months rebuilding his giant, using tubes, wires and other parts I don’t understand from the hundreds of dead machines rusting away in the Spider Nest. He even painted over the giant’s scorched metal frame, turning it from fire-smudge black to a light blue dotted with bright bits of steel. Cables and cords of green and black snake through the framework. The left arm ends in a bright blue, three-fingered pincer. The right ends in a scoop shovel big enough for five people to stand in comfortably. Right now, though, it holds today’s prize—a long wall cannon, silvery metal blazing reddish in the afternoon sun.

  Opkick shouts instructions to Borjigin. The scoop rises above the battlements. The three-fingered pincer gently lifts the cannon from the scoop and sets it down in the center of the tower. Opkick barks commands to the circles, who scramble to fasten the cannon to bolts mounted in the stone.

  “That’s the last one,” Bishop says. “I hope they’re enough.”

  The wall surrounding Uchmal has sixty-four towers. Once upon a time, Borjigin tells me, every tower had a cannon. Out of all of those, he and the other halves were able to cobble together enough parts to make six working weapons. He’s spaced these evenly around the wall. If the city was a clock face and due north was twelve o’clock, we have cannons at 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. We’re standing in the one o’clock tower. The three o’clock tower is the one above the East Gate, and so on.

  “Use the signal flags,” I say. “Tell the Observatory the cannon is in place.”

  Bishop pulls an orange handheld flag from inside his coveralls: he steps to the tower’s south edge and moves the flags in a simple pattern.

  Twenty blocks away, someone atop a four-story ziggurat waves a much larger orange flag, mimicking Bishop’s pattern. Moments later, I can just make out a third orange flag, another twenty blocks closer to the city center.

  “It works,” Bishop says. “Good. Between the flags and the horns, we’ll be fine.”

  We’ve given up on the communication jewels. They don’t work at all now, not even close to the Observatory. Borjigin still doesn’t know what’s causing the interference, and he doesn’t have time to figure it out.

  If the aliens land and we have a ground war, our combat units need to communicate with each other. Bawden came up with the idea of using signal flags to relay messages through the city. Lahfah brought us more war horns—we’ll also use those to coordinate troop movements, just like the Springers do in the jungle.

  Centuries ago, this city had a huge arsenal with which to defend itself, but time is the great destroyer. Machines and weapons went untended. Rust ate metal. Delicate parts corroded. Synthetic materials broke down.

  Other than bracelets, rifles, spears, knives and farm tools, we don’t have much: the Observatory’s automated defense, six tower cannons, seven spiders, four heavy trucks converted from hauling dirt to hauling infantry, the Big Pig and some small unarmored vehicles.

  And, of course, the Goff Spear and its three remaining rounds.

  We have four platoons of human soldiers. I lead one platoon. Bishop, Farrar and young Darzi lead the others. A platoon consists of three spiders—each with a crew of three—and twelve infantry.

  Infantry. That’s a funny word. It’s supposed to mean trained soldiers. We have circle-stars, yes, who have programmed memories and fighting skills, but most of them are physically only thirteen years old. They are children with guns. And we don’t even have enough of them, so each platoon is rounded out with a handful of circles. Shuttle kids, mostly, also physically thirteen years old, but any combat training they’ve received has come in the last six months.

  We have help from Barkah. Four companies of his Malbinti warriors are hidden throughout the city. Two hundred soldiers in each company, armed with rifles and muskets. Inside our own walls, armed Springers now outnumber us over three to one. A risk, yes, but if Bishop is right and the aliens land ground troops, it’s a risk worth taking.

  There are more of Barkah’s forces out in the jungle ruins, ready to defend Schechak. Eight companies organized into two battalions, sixteen hundred warriors ready to fight whatever comes their way. Assisting them are the hurukan squads: D’souza’s Demons and Lahfah’s Creepers. The snake-wolves are best suited for jungle warfare, so that’s where they are stationed unless things really get out of hand here in Uchmal.

  If our new enemy lands among the trees, they are in for a serious fight.

  A long wail, rising and falling, reaches across the city—the emergency warning siren.

  Did the people in the Control Room detect incoming ships?

  Everyone atop the tower looks to the sky, searching this way and that. My heart races. We’ve prepared as best we can, but we’re not ready.

  I hear it before I see it; the distant roar of a rocket echoing across the jungle canopy. Something about that sound is oddly familiar. Is it one of those “fighters” from the Dragon? Or, worse, a swarm of them?

  Bishop points north. “There!”

  Far out at the horizon, I see a black dot.

  Bishop shouts at the circles installing the silver cannon.

  “Get that weapon online! Right now!”

  Other wall cannons might have an angle, but it’s flying straight at us—our tower will have the best shot.

  It comes in low, skimming the yellow treetops. The noisy ship trails a thick, roiling cloud of black.

  Wait, the sound of that rocket…how do I know that sound?

  “Cannon is online,” Opkick shouts.

  Bishop points at Elisa and Kurt.

  “Man your weapon!”

  They’re shuttle kids. Barely thirteen years old. They looked shocked. They have trained and trained, but this isn’t a drill. This is real.

  Elisa sits in a metal chair mounted on the cannon’s right side. She pulls a targeting rig close to her face, starts working the controls. Kurt steps to the weapon’s left side, where he’ll monitor a dozen different settings.

  The enemy ship is coming in low, fast and loud.

  The white crystal atop the silver cannon begins to glow.

  A blazing white beam fires from our left, coming from the eleven o’clock tower. It misses the incoming ship, leaves a shimmering reverse-image streamer dancing across my vision. I see a small fireball rise up from the jungle, where the beam touched down.

  Now I realize why the ship is flying at tree level—it’s below the top of the city wall, meaning most of our cannons can’t get a line of sight on it.

  Just one ship…why just one?

  “Weapon charged,” Kurt shouts. His voice breaks on charged. He’s so young he’s still in puberty. He sounds as scared as he looks.

  “Targeting,” Elisa says. She’s shaking.

  Icons flash on her display: an image of the ship, a crosshairs lined up on it. That ship…it’s larger in the targeting display, I can make out details I can’t with my naked eye.

  It’s not sleek, as I expected…it’s black, and it’s…

  …it’s lumpy.


  It’s the same ship that brought Bello down a year ago, that took Matilda and Old Gaston back up to the Xolotl.

  “Stop,” I scream as I rush at Elisa, yank her hands away from the controls. I turn to Bishop. “That ship is ours! Signal all batteries to cease fire!”

  He doesn’t second-guess me, even for an instant. He faces south, starts making sharp signals with his flag.

  A beam of light lashes out from the southeast, from the three o’clock tower. This beam grazes the lumpy ship’s back, lashing up a splattering wave of molten metal. The ship starts to tremble. It dips down into the trees, vanishes for a second, then arcs back up above the canopy in an eruption of leaves and vines.

  The shuddering ship struggles to rise—it’s not going to make it over the vine-covered wall.

  I grip the slot in the battlements, pouring my will into that ship.

  Climb. Climb, dammit!

  It’s going to smash into the wall just to our right. It climbs. I wince as it reaches the wall—the ship’s belly grinds against the stone edge and bounces over, trailing a cloud of pulverized stone, spinning vine leaves and billowing smoke.

  The lumpy ship tilts hard right and drops toward the wide, north/south street that is Latu Way. It whizzes by blackened stone buildings on either side. Cones of fire shoot out from all over the lumpy ship, fluttering and flickering in an effort to keep it level. It slows dramatically as the already-ruined undercarriage slams into the street with an ear-splitting spray of sparks. Metal grinds against stone.

  The ship slides to a stop some twenty-five blocks south of our position.

  A massive shadow above my head makes me duck. The huge scoop-shovel of Borjigin’s giant touches down on the battlement’s floor with barely a clank. In the giant’s “head,” through light blue bars and a slot cut into metal plating, I see Borjigin’s face.

  “Em, get in,” he shouts. “Let’s go!”

  Bishop and I scramble into the scoop. Borjigin lifts it clear. The giant machine turns. Long strides take it down the earthen ramp and onto Latu Way. Each thundering step makes the big machine tremble, rattling us in the scoop. Bishop and I hold on tight as big legs chew up the distance.