by Scott Sigler
He’s defenseless.
He surrendered.
And I was going to murder him, because of that thing with the wet metallic skin, the disgusting blob wriggling beneath the dirt, the abomination that wants us to hate.
I lower the spear.
Spingate’s eyes brim with tears.
“You did it,” she says. “You did what I couldn’t.”
She wishes she’d been stronger. I see it in her, see her desperate desire to take it all back.
But she can’t.
Spin stepped in front of me knowing exactly what could have happened. I look around, realize that no one else did a damn thing. Even Bishop stayed quiet, didn’t yell at me to stop—only Theresa acted.
My best friend risked her life to save my soul.
I drop my spear. I grab Spingate, hug her as tight as I can.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”
I let her go, kneel next to Victor.
His eyes still blinking madly and watering from sand, he looks at me with a clear mix of admiration and disbelief.
“You defeated me.”
“I had to.”
His voice drops to a whisper.
“When you said…said that you…”
Even as beat up as he is, there is hope in his voice, hope that I meant those three magic words: I love you.
“I lied,” I say. “I had to get you off guard.”
That admission hurts him far worse than the physical damage. He can’t hide his need for me, not anymore, but he recovers almost instantly. Victor somehow finds the strength to make his blood-smeared lips smile.
“We’re at war,” he says. “Winning matters. How you win does not. I’m yours, Em. Where you lead, I will follow.”
Then Kenzie is there, gently pushing me aside.
Okereke and other circles bring stretchers, take Victor and Bishop away.
I look at my people. I slowly turn in place to take in those who gleefully watched us fight like mad beasts.
It shouldn’t have happened like this, but it did. I will not let this moment go to waste.
“Anyone else question my right to lead?”
Hundreds of heads slowly shake from side to side.
“Good. Let’s get to work.”
I hold our strategy meeting in the Ximbal’s pilothouse. The walls appear clear, showing us the Observatory and people rushing about the plaza in the reddish glow of the rising sun.
With me are Bishop, Maria, Gaston, Zubiri, Barkah, Lahfah and, yes, Spingate. We’ve all worked through the night, preparing for the upcoming battle. They look as exhausted as I feel.
Bishop wears only shorts. He’s on crutches. Bandages are wrapped around his shoulder and thigh. Kenzie says he needs another hour in the med-chamber. He won’t be at a hundred percent, but he’ll be ready to fight.
We stand around a waist-high, glowing disc of a map. On it, Uchmal is no bigger than a button, and Schechak, just to the north, is but a pin. Both sit within an area the size of a dinner plate that represents the jungle ruins of the ancient Springer city. Beyond the ruins, a huge area of land that includes the valley where I saw the Wasp army. Small words float above shaded areas marking the Springer tribes: Malbinti, Khochin, Galanak, Podakra.
Eleven columns of smoke dot the Galanak territory, making a zigzag line that points roughly toward Uchmal and Schechak. At the end of that line, a red dot flashes—the location of the Wasp army, just confirmed by Malbinti scouts.
Gaston points to one of the smoke columns.
“That’s the village D’souza’s Demons found. Some of the other fires were reported by the second hurukan unit, and the rest are close enough that we can see them from the top of the Observatory.”
The second unit found villages that looked just like the one Lahfah, Maria and I saw.
“Galanak, nahnaw,” Barkah says.
The destruction has upset him, shaken him so much he doesn’t bother with English. He speaks quickly to Maria. She listens, solemnly nods, then translates.
“Barkah says the Wasps destroyed most of the large Galanak towns. Combined with the routing of the Galanak army, he thinks that tribe is almost completely wiped out. The word he uses for all this best translates to apocalypse.”
The Wasps are clearly coming for us, but they’re slaughtering any Springers they find along the way. This isn’t war—this is extermination.
“How long until the Wasps reach us?” I ask.
Maria studies the map. She chews at her lower lip.
“Looks like they’ve sped up,” she says. “A lot. At their current pace, I’m afraid they’ll be here a couple of hours before sunset.”
Gaston crosses his arms, shakes his head. “Way too soon. Ximbal won’t be fully fueled for at least three hours after that.”
And here I didn’t think things could get any worse. We’ll be too late. Unless…
“Maybe we don’t need a full tank,” I say. “How long to load just enough to get us to the Xolotl?”
Gaston stares at me like I just said the dumbest thing anyone has ever spoken.
“Um, that’s a really, really bad idea, all right? That doesn’t account for any contingencies, or if we can’t actually board the Xolotl and have to come back down. We need a full tank.”
Maria points to the red dot on the map.
“I hate to ruin the story for you, Gaston, but here’s how it ends—the Wasps take over Uchmal. Period. We can’t beat them. If we don’t evacuate before they get here, you, Spingate, your baby and everyone you know will be chopped up into little pieces. Coming back is the least of our worries.”
Gaston sneers at her. He looks at the gathered faces, perhaps expecting someone to back him up. No one does. Not even Spingate.
“We’re out of options,” she says to him. She speaks softly, patiently. “If we produce the minimum fuel needed to reach the Xolotl, how long will that take?”
He rubs at his face. I’m sure there are all kinds of worst-case scenarios rolling through his head, but Spin summed it up perfectly—we’re out of options.
“Sunset, at the earliest,” Gaston says. “And that’s not me being difficult, that’s physics. We can only convert the fuel at a fixed rate. The process can’t be rushed.”
I bang my spear butt lightly on the floor, twice, to make sure I have everyone’s attention.
“I know that isn’t what any of us wanted to hear,” I say. “But we spent all night planning a delaying strategy. That strategy will work. It has to. We need to make sure the Wasps don’t reach Uchmal until after the sun sets. We have to slow them down, and leave enough time for us to get back to the shuttle. Got it?”
Everyone nods. Everyone except the Springer king. He stares at the map.
“Barkah,” I say, “they’re going to do to Schechak what they did to the Galanak villages. You need to evacuate everyone.”
Maria starts to translate, Barkah waves her off. He understood what I said.
We stay quiet, give him time to think.
He turns to Lahfah, rattles off a fast, sharp sentence in Springer. I recognize a few words—he’s asking his queen if she agrees with Maria and me that the approaching army is truly unbeatable.
Lahfah doesn’t hesitate. She speaks softly, quickly. No laughter in her voice now.
Barkah again stares at the map.
Finally, he looks at me.
“Malbinti march south,” he says. “Abandon Schechak, immediately.”
If all goes well, my people will be gone from this planet in a few hours. We can’t help the Malbinti against the Wasps. I wish them well.
Bishop takes over. He maps out our plan to use our spiders as fast attackers, to position our soldiers in small ambush groups to pick away at the incoming troops from multiple directions. Maria’s hurukans will serve as fast-moving decoys—if all goes well, the Wasps will think there are two dozen of them, not just the six we have. Borjigin’s machines will quickly ferry troops around the jungle to flank the Wasps,
something Bishop calls a “force multiplier.” Barkah points to the areas on the map where he can bring his larger numbers to bear.
They cover many angles, but the map itself draws my focus away from the conversation.
The valley…how the Wasps moved through it…how they spread out when the Springers attacked, but before that they were in a more concentrated formation…
“The Goff Spear,” I say, blurting out the words so loud everyone stares at me. “Zubiri, is there any way to aim the Goff Spear at the Wasp army?”
If she holds any animosity toward me for her troubles with Victor, she doesn’t show it.
“The Goff Spear is built to fire at orbital craft,” she says. “We can’t aim at a ground target. Besides, these are very particular weapons, designed to penetrate the extremely thick armor of the Basilisk or the Xolotl, but the part that goes boom is a nuclear warhead—we definitely don’t want them going off down here.”
My frustration flares. We have a weapon that can destroy massive spaceships, but we can’t use it to win this battle?
“What about the rounds themselves?” Spingate asks. “Can they be rigged to explode on their own?”
Zubiri huffs. “Didn’t I just tell you it fires nukes?”
“Answer Spingate’s question,” I say. “Can you rig them?”
The one-armed girl glares at me, but she nods.
“It would take me about eight hours, I think, to modify it. Let me show you why this is a horrible idea. Ximbal, show damage radius of a Goff round detonation, centered on the estimated position of where the Wasp army will be in eight hours.”
The flashing red dot moves much closer to Uchmal, becomes the center of an orange circle, which itself is surrounded by a larger gray circle.
Schechak is at the edge of the orange circle.
Uchmal is inside the gray.
“The explosion would produce a massive fireball,” Zubiri says. “Every living thing inside the orange circle would be burned alive. The gray area represents what’s called a shock wave. The walls of Uchmal would likely crumble. All but the biggest buildings would collapse. And then there’s the fallout, which, depending on wind direction and speed, would poison a thousand-kilometer-long, two-hundred-kilometer-wide swath of jungle for decades to come. Any creature inside that area in the first few hours after detonation would likely die within weeks from radiation.”
She puts her hand on her hip, glares at all of us. “Any questions?”
There are none. My friends look at the map, stunned by the destructive power at our hands.
But I’m not stunned; I feel pieces fall into place.
The Basilisk’s assault, ignoring the area around the Observatory…
My false father, saying the Grub could defend itself but not against all attacks…
He meant attacks like this.
“A nuke could have wiped the Springer city off the map, but Matilda didn’t use nukes,” I say. “If the Basilisk used nukes, they could have taken us out easily. They didn’t. The Echo’s signal, it must include some kind of absolute command to not use big bombs that could hurt the Grub.”
Has Matilda known about the Grub all along, or did she obey the call’s commands the same way the Basilisk’s crew did?
I made a promise to myself, that I would kill the God of Blood. The nuke would do that. But it doesn’t matter. We clearly can’t use a weapon that would kill us, too. Unless…
“A timer,” I say. “The Grub is drawing the Wasps to Uchmal. If we could set some kind of timer, we could have the nuke go off after we leave—we could wipe out the Grub and the Wasps at the same time.”
Zubiri shakes her head. “With that weird electrical interference going on around here, there is no way I would trust a timer. The thing could go off before we leave, or not at all. Same thing with any kind of remote detonation—we can’t risk it.”
It feels like an answer is so close. Frustration creeping in, filling me up.
Gaston smacks his fist into his hand, so loud it startles everyone.
“Impact,” he says. “Our shuttle takes off vertically. What if we make some kind of simple bomb rack, rig the nuke to detonate on impact. We go straight up, way up, so when we drop it we have enough time to get clear. Then, bang—dead Wasps, dead Grub.” He glances at Zubiri. “Could you engineer it to detonate on impact?”
Everyone stares at the young woman who has already lost an arm to war. She seems to shrink under our combined gaze.
“I could,” she says in a voice almost too quiet to hear. “But there’s no time to engineer any kind of guidance system. All we could do is drop it, let it fall on its own. For the shuttle to have enough time to get clear, we’d have to drop from a high altitude. Even a slight wind could push the nuke off-target. I’m pretty sure that if the Grub is within the orange zone, we’ll kill it, but the shockwave zone? I don’t think so, it’s too far underground.”
Bishop nods with excitement. “But if it does work, we destroy the Wasps and the Grub, then we land somewhere else on the planet. We start over.”
“No,” Spingate says before I can respond. “Without the Goff Spear, we can’t stop future races from landing. Even if we kill the Grub, the call has already been sent—at least one additional ship is coming. Maybe more. It’s not like those ships will just turn around and go home. For all we know, the next race will scour the planet to wipe out competition, a larger version of what the Wasps are doing now.”
She’s right. Killing the Grub won’t make this planet safe. Our only real chance for survival is to leave Omeyocan behind.
I make my decision.
“Zubiri, get to work on converting the rounds as bombs. Give Gaston the information he needs so he can have the bomb rack built.”
“Hem, no.” It’s Barkah. He’s still staring at the map, at the massive zone of destruction if we detonate the nuke. “My people will die.”
“Then you better tell them to march south as fast as they can go,” I say. “The Wasps have already slaughtered thousands of Springers. Once we leave, they’re going to keep coming after you. As horrible as this bomb is, it might kill enough of them and their equipment that your survivors have a chance to go on, instead of being hunted down and slaughtered.”
He looks from the map to me. I wait for him to answer, although it doesn’t really matter what he says. I will do what must be done.
Finally, sadly, he nods. “Kill them,” he says. “Kill them all.”
We are unified. I take a deep breath, hold it, let it out slow.
“We have our mission,” I say. “Now let’s slow these bastards down.”
It’s late morning. We have only a few hours left. I walk around the plaza, shouting encouragement to my people. They place their backpacks on a scale, one at a time under Tina Schuster’s watchful eye, then stack them in neat piles. She’s carefully tracking the weight allowance Gaston has given her.
At the Ximbal’s rear is a half-rusted tanker truck. A black hose leads from it into an open door in the Ximbal’s underside. Louise Bariso and Noam Peura are in charge of loading the fuel.
“How much longer?” I ask them.
Peura checks something on a messageboard.
“Five hours,” he says.
Five hours. Can we give him that much time? Maria and her hurukans are scouting the jungle, trying to find the invading army.
Across the plaza are the two captured troopships. Through their cockpit windows, I see Cathcart in one, Nevins in the other, preparing for the flight. Thirteen-year-old boys, each responsible for the lives of a thousand Springers.
Throngs of Springers are gathered around the troopships, panicked crowds jostling for their place, pushing at burly Springer soldiers who are trying, desperately, to keep the boarding process orderly. Scattered piles of belongings litter the ground—things the refugees wanted to bring with them, but there simply isn’t room for anything other than the clothes on their backs. Red children, purple teens, blue adults. I notice that none o
f the refugees have the deep-blue skin of elders. I suppose that makes sense. This could be the future of Barkah’s entire race—he won’t send those that would live only a few more years. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for him to choose the scant few of his kind that will leave Omeyocan behind.
Barkah is among them, shouting in his native tongue, directing traffic. Maybe this is only a fraction of his people, but two thousand panicked Springers makes for a grand swirl of chaos.
I jog to him. He has on yet another new coat, this one emerald green and trimmed with polished bits of steel. It covers him from thick neck down to his big feet.
“Hem. How long?”
How long until the shuttle is ready to depart. “Five hours.”
He glances at the troopships, at his panic-stricken people, then back at me.
“That is enough.”
“If their fighters don’t attack before then, sure. Are your units in position?”
He nods. His battalions are already in the jungle. Those soldiers will not be coming with us—they will fight until we retreat for the evacuation, then head south to join the rest of the refugees fleeing Schechak.
Our forces are ready: twenty-four hundred Malbinti warriors, seven spiders, all twenty-seven remaining circle-stars, a hundred young circles, and one big surprise.
I hear something, to the north…
Faint, distant, but undeniable—the far-off, echoing scream of Wasp fighter craft.
“Hem, they come,” Barkah says.
I shout to Schuster, tell her it’s time to deploy our forces. She barks orders in turn. In seconds, I hear the deep thrum of a truck’s engine.
I turn to Barkah. “Are you ready?”
He shouts something I don’t understand. Three of his biggest bodyguards hop out of the crowd of Springers, accompanied by a young red female carrying an embroidered pillow. Barkah takes off his necklace, the symbol of his office, and sets it on the pillow.
Barkah slides out of his emerald-green coat. His arms and chest are tied up in the yellow, blue and green rags of Springer jungle camouflage. The female takes his coat, bows and hops away.
